#166 Diana Pasulka - Religious History, UFO Phenomena and the Ancient Mysteries of Purgatory

Diana Walsh Pasulka is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who specializes in Catholic history and the intersection of religion, technology, and UFO beliefs. Pasulka's research focuses on how belief in UFOs and extraterrestrial life has influenced traditional religions and modern culture. Her notable works include "Heaven Can Wait," "American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology," and "Encounters: Experiences with Non-Human Intelligences". She holds a B. A. from the University of California, Davis, an M. A. from Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, and a Ph. D. from Syracuse University. Pasulka's ongoing research explores the religious aspects of UFO phenomena and non-human intelligence encounters. She has collaborated with prestigious publishing houses, appeared on high profile media platforms, and consulted for films about religious supernatural themes. Pasulka is currently leading a translation project of Saint Joseph of Copertino's canonization records in cooperation with the Vatican Apostolic Archive. Her work continues to bridge the gap between academic religious studies and contemporary beliefs in extraterrestrial phenomena, solidifying her position as a leading expert in this unique field of study. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: http://patriotmobile.com/srs http://cozyearth.com/srs https://betterhelp.com/srs https://amac.us/srs https://shopify.com/srs http://hillsdale.edu/srs https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/SRS This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self Diana Pasulka Links: Website - https://dwpasulka.com/ X - https://x.com/dwpasulka Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dwpasulka/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dwpasulka/ “American Cosmic” - https://www.amazon.com/American-Cosmic-UFOs-Religion-Technology/dp/019069288X Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:28Speaker 01

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• 1:06Shawn Ryan?

  Diana Pasulka, welcome to the show.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:09Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, it's an honor to have you here. I've been trying to get you here for quite a while now, and had a... Man, I just got in here... I don't even remember the first person that introduced me to, to kind of what you're doing, but it's been... I've been getting hit from all angles.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Wow, really?

• 1:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, definitely, definitely. And I'm... I've been really looking forward to this interview. You know, I grew up Catholic, I'm into UFOs, I want to... I can't wait to dive in here. So, I've been looking forward to this for a long time. So I just want to say thank you for making the time and...

• 1:49Speaker 03

  Oh, it's my pleasure, absolutely.

• 1:51Shawn Ryan?

  So, but let me give you a quick introduction here.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:58Shawn Ryan?

  You're a writer, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. You have offered a series of books, including "American Cosmic UFOs, Religion and Technology", "Heaven Can Wait", "Purgatory in Catholic Devotional Culture", and "Encounters: Experiences with Non-Human Intelligences". You've been a guest on several prominent podcasts such as the Joe Rogan Experience and the Lex Friedman Podcast, and you've served as consulting producer on the Emmy Award-winning Netflix series "Encounters". You are also the religion consultant on The Conjuring and was featured in the J.J. Abrams docu-series "UFO".

• 2:41Shawn Ryan?

  You spent your career teaching and writing about American religious history and Catholic history, including studying at the Vatican Archive. Sounds fascinating. Your research connects religion, technology, and now the enigmatic realm of the UFO phenomenon. Now you find yourself working with scientists and military personnel on the topic, something you never thought you'd be doing when you began your career. And you're a Christian believer and a mother, probably the most important things, right?

• 3:16Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, yeah.

• 3:17Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Thank you, thank you.

• 3:20Shawn Ryan?

  So, everybody starts off with a gift.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Oh, right. Wow, thank you.

• 3:28Shawn Ryan?

  Something for the ride home?

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you for giving me two, because I have a lot of kids, so...

• 3:37Shawn Ryan?

  We'll give you some more.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  They'll love this. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I think my son wanted me to have a gun, but I don't know about that.

• 3:45Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want a gun?

• 3:46Speaker 03

  No, I'm just joking.

• 3:47Shawn Ryan?

  All right. Well, Diana... We were just having a conversation, uh, right before we started recording and, uh, I was gonna start this interview in the year of 2012.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:00Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, it sounds like you had an experience as an 11-year-old girl.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  That's right, yes.

• 4:05Shawn Ryan?

  So, let's, let's start right there.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Okay, sure. Yeah, so it was when I was 11 that I decided to do what I'm doing now, which is looking at religion, but most specifically then, I wanted to read the Bible, um, which I did. So I had an experience. So, um, in my upbringing, my parents were secular, right, Christian, right? So, um, that means that we didn't have a Bible in the house. We celebrated Christmas, you know, and that type of thing. So I had never read a, I had never read the Bible and, um, I had, I didn't actually know the story of Jesus. I knew, of course, Jesus Christ, everybody does, but I actually didn't know the story.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  So it was on an Easter and, um, I was, you know, doing Easter eggs at the table and the TV was on and, uh, Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth was on the TV. So I was somewhat watching it, but not really paying attention and I was, you know, doing the Easter eggs. And at some point, um, there was the scene where the mob is just about to kill this woman. So there's this mob of men and it's this woman who's an adulterer and they're going to stone her to death. And of course it's super dramatic and I'm, you know, doing the, the Easter egg and I look at that and Jesus is writing something in the sand and I'm like, well, he's gotta stop this, you know, what's, this is terrible.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  And so he looks up and he says, "Those among you with sin cast the first stone." And that, that converted me somehow. Somehow to me, that was something that reversed the law because it was the law that she be stoned. But he reversed it. And I thought, I was a pretty serious kid and I knew that... You know, people did bad things and, you know, there was bad in the world. So to me, this could be something I thought this was hopeful. This was like a person who provided some type of hope. So I decided that I'd watch the show because it started on Friday, and I believe that was probably Friday night,

• 6:18Speaker 03

  and kept going on Saturday and then ended on Sunday, Easter Sunday. And so I kept watching, and my parents thought it was strange because I never really cared about that stuff before. But every day I woke up and I was like, I'm gonna watch this show tonight. And now this sounds ridiculous, but it's actually true. I didn't know that he was crucified at the very end. So at the very end, he gets crucified. And to me, it was devastating because, you know, I couldn't believe it. I was like, wow, he actually, you know, provided some hope to these people, and now he's being crucified. So my mom was observing this and thought it was really strange. I had tears. So the next day, I made my mother take me to a Bible store to buy the Bible.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  She didn't know what to get, you know? So we asked the clerk, you know, this is my first Bible. In fact, it's our only Bible. You know, what should we get? So we got this red-letter edition of the King James Version of the Bible. And the red-letter edition, for people who don't know, it's the edition that has Jesus's words all in red. And to me, that was exactly what I wanted. So we got the red-letter edition. I brought it home, started reading it right away from beginning, right? Now, you have to understand that my grandparents were Catholic, right? So they had Bibles, but my parents were just agnostic. They were not, they didn't go to church, right? So I started to read the Bible.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  And immediately, I could tell that it was, it wasn't an easy read. Okay, it's not an easy read. For anybody who just cracks it and decides, okay, what does this book really say? It's hard to read. So some parts were easy to read, like the red letters, right? Easy to read. But like the Old Testament, Hebrew Bible, Genesis, that kind of thing, I could tell that it was an ancient text. And so I made it my goal then, I became Christian. So I decided I'm a Christian. I don't know what my parents are, but I am now. And, um, you know, I asked my parents to take me to different churches, whatever church was a Christian church, you know, I was 11.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  So it was a full-on religious conversion that I had that I didn't recognize until later. Um, and I said, I want to grow up and I want to go to school or whatever needs to happen so that I can read this book in its original language because I could tell it had been translated. And so, um, I finally got that. I did it. So that's what I did. It was a rocky kind of trip there, but I finally I went to the, uh, I went to a Catholic school, which is where at that point nuns were running the school. So it was a really good school. Um, I graduated really early when I was 16. Um, I did go to college and then I went to the Jesuit School of Theology,

• 9:08Speaker 03

  which is a school where you can do an academic degree with priests. So priests were my peers. So I went to school with priests in formation to be priests. So I got an education that priests get. And then after that I got my PhD and I've been doing this ever since. So.

• 9:25Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. So you literally started at age 11?

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I still have the same Bible too.

• 9:32Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's crazy. That's, that's awesome. I mean, it's pretty profound for an 11-year-old to, uh,

• 9:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it did freak my parents out, to tell you the truth. They thought it was odd, but my, my father was more okay with it. He's passed away. Um, but my mother, she, I felt like she, she was worried about me, you know, she was, you know, she thought maybe I'd, she thought I'd become a nun. And I actually know nuns and they're good people and I keep thinking that's not such, that's not the worst case scenario, you know?

• 10:05Shawn Ryan?

  Worse career paths than being a nun.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:07Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Wow. Well, I know that, um, so as I mentioned, I grew up Catholic.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 10:15Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, and, uh, still go back every now and then. I've got a lot of questions, but, um, You started studying purgatory in 2012. And so, could you describe purgatory for the audience, for the people that don't know?

• 10:35Speaker 03

  You bet, sure. So, I started it earlier than that. So, it was something that I started as soon as I became an assistant professor. And this was in 2002, 2003. And in order to keep that job, you have to publish, which is normal for a professor. So, I was interested in, you know, ideas of the afterlife and the soul. These things interested me. And in the Catholic tradition, which is what I was trained in, there's this thing called purgatory. And this is also Eastern Orthodox. So, most Christians that are not Protestant believe in this thing, this thing called purgatory. And it's like a waystation for souls that aren't good enough to go to heaven. Okay?

• 11:20Speaker 03

  So, if you are a normal person, not the best person, but not the worst person, you're not going to hell. Right? So, you go to this place called purgatory where it's supposed to be a place of purgation, where you work off your sins and then that soul goes to heaven. Well, this was a doctrine of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. And it somehow went away. So, it's still a doctrine, but Catholics don't know about it and they don't pray for souls that are in purgatory anymore. It used to be a huge devotion. And I wanted to know why it disappeared. So, I started to do archival research.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  So, archives are libraries of old manuscripts and books from ancient times to the present. And there's some really great archives in the United States and, of course, at the Vatican. So, I started to look in these archives for what Catholics in 1200, in 1300, you know, throughout time, thought of. Purgatory, basically. And as I was doing that work, I was looking, you know, I was writing a book, like a survey of purgatory. Well, it turns out purgatory was actually a place in Ireland. So there's actually a place, it's still there. It's, it's on a plate, on an island called Loch Durgh, which is Red Lake, the Red Lake in Ireland. And it was a place where people thought that they could go to a cave.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  And if they withstood it for 24 hours, their souls would be cleansed after that. And they did this in the late medieval time period till about 1200. Um, so.

• 12:53Shawn Ryan?

  So they thought that if they could, if they could handle being in a cave for 24 hours? Is there anything substantial about this particular cave?

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this cave would have demons and things like that in it. So you have to, you have to, uh, survive being assaulted by beings of the afterlife in this cave. Like this, so for the medieval mind, they don't separate out like uh, demons and angels and stuff, those were part of their reality. So this cave was the place where they could go to an underground area where they could have these battles. And if they survived those battles, their sins would be forgiven. And that's not the only purgatory cave, there was one in Italy as well. So this was where the doctrine kind of like emerged from.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  And then it became an actual doctrine. And then as time went on, people started to think of it not as a place, but as a state of being. So that's how purgatory changed. And I wrote that book, so. So I wrote that book, but during the study of that book, I came upon aerial phenomena. So Catholics from 1200 up to 1800 saw things in the sky that they couldn't identify. If they did identify, usually you could see it right in the reports too, they're like, we saw this orb. We don't know what it is, but we think it's a soul from purgatory. So we're gonna pray it back to where it should go. And so I started to collect these.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Sometimes they saw things and they interpreted them as like flying houses, things in the sky. Sometimes they saw things and they thought they were angels. And so I had a lot of these. And I didn't understand what they were, so I kind of put them aside. And I wrote my book on purgatory. And I got that all done, right? And so I had all of these things. And I was on to my next book, by the way, about a Catholic bishop. So I wasn't really gonna write about those things. But I still thought that they were weird enough. And there were so many of them. The patterns were the same. So I showed a friend of mine. And he looked at them and he said, "These look like Steven Spielberg films. They look like UFOs."

• 15:12Speaker 03

  And honestly, I thought he was crazy. And I was like, "No way. Those are not UFOs." But a UFO conference was happening in my town that week. So we went to that. And that's where I met people who had sightings of UFOs. And it looked like a pattern match. So when I heard them talk about this, and I was like, "This looks exactly like the Catholic reports." That's when I began to do this study into UFOs. That happened in 2012.

• 15:44Shawn Ryan?

  Before we go into the UFO stuff, I'm actually very interested in the purgatory stuff. So what do you think? So the purgatory originated as a cave?

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Well, that was one of its... That was one of its practices. So if you look at the Catholic, like, history of purgatory, the kind of like official idea, it will, it basically says, "Catholics, we don't know." The Pope would say, "We don't know what it is."

• 16:20Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  They tend to try to say it's not a physical place where these souls end up, right?

• 17:33Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  But they don't know what it is. Is it a spiritual place? They tend to say it's a state of mind or a state of being. So I would look at it like a state of being for the soul.

• 17:45Shawn Ryan?

  So it's a realm?

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, like a realm, like another dimension, or something like that. We would call it, like when you and I talk, I'd say, Shaun, it's another dimension. You know, it's another dimension. My soul, hopefully, will go there. You know? I'm not saying I'm good enough to get into heaven, right? But I'm hoping for purgatory, kind of thing. Like, that's what... Because I believe in the soul. I also want to say this, that... I should have said this earlier, that the things that I'm going to say are my own opinion, based on what I've studied and how I've lived, and they don't reflect my university. So my university is a state university. It's not going to be, you know... I won't be publishing a peer-reviewed paper talking about the reality of the soul.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  But I believe in it. So I'm a believer, absolutely.

• 18:36Shawn Ryan?

  So you believe in purgatory?

• 18:38Speaker 03

  Probably not like it's described by the Catholic Church. I believe that the soul continues. And I believe that what, and by the way, this is based on not just what I see in Catholicism. I do comparative religious studies. So what I've read stuff from ancient Egypt and I've read stuff from Hinduism, you know, and Buddhism, things like that. What, almost everything I read about within these religions and people too, that I've spoken with, so, you know, I have a lot of friends who have PhDs in various fields. And I ask them, you know, about what they know about this. It appears that, this even goes back to Plato, by the way, and Socrates.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  This is the Greek tradition, the philosophical tradition. What happens to a soul after it die, you know, after the body dies, is determined largely by what one does in one's life. So I take that very seriously.

• 19:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, me too, me too. Does, does the Bible, is purgatory anywhere in the Bible? Is there anywhere?

• 19:48Speaker 03

  No, no, the word purgatory is nowhere in the Bible. It, it actually wasn't even codified until the 1200s. So that's late. So Jesus dies in 30, well heck, that's like a long time after Jesus is. But there are references to praying for souls that presumably are in another, like another place in the Bible. So there are references to that, but it's not called purgatory.

• 20:20Shawn Ryan?

  What is that called?

• 20:21Speaker 03

  So there's, in the book of Daniel, there's references to prayers said for souls that have passed on. And there are also, I'm trying to remember in the New Testament where this is. I will have to give that to you because for some reason, I used to know it, but I

• 20:43Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Not, but yeah, but no, in the Bible, there's nothing that references purgatory.

• 20:49Shawn Ryan?

  So I got, I got another question for you. If it's not in the Bible, should we be paying attention to it at all?

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Okay, so if it's not in the Bible, should we be paying attention?

• 21:01Shawn Ryan?

  Because there's a lot of like, and I can't really think of anything like off the top of my head. This is all kind of new to me.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, of course.

• 21:08Shawn Ryan?

  You know, like you, like you said at the beginning, I can't even remember if this is on or off camera, but you were, most Catholics don't even know their own religion.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know, it's true, it's kind of sad.

• 21:19Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, that's a lot of us, but, um, but, uh, which is kind of why, you know, part of the reason why I stepped away and started looking for other sources. But, um, you know, my, I've been talking to a lot of people, uh, about God, Jesus, the Bible. Um, and, you know, it seems to be there's, there's a lot of little things that different religions believe in that have absolutely no reference in the Bible.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Okay, so I will tell you what I think, Sean. You may not like it, okay? There are things that are not in the Bible that we should pay attention to, okay? And I'm going to talk about that. So remember when we talked about how purgatory was codified in the 1200s? The Bible wasn't even codified until the 4th century. So this is going to be 300 years, to be more conservative, this is going to be 200 years after Jesus dies. So the early Christians, they did not have a Bible, okay?

• 22:30Speaker 03

  They didn't have what you and I have, what I was so interested in when I was 11. And when you start to do biblical scholarship, like really get into, and I want to preface this too, in religious studies, uh, we don't have an agenda. So we don't, we're not advocating a religion for any religion, we, we study it. And this was as clean as I could get when I decided to do this because I was like, I just want to know, like, I'm interested in this guy, Jesus, and I want to know what life was like for him and his followers. And so that entailed doing biblical scholarship.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  And in the, the way that I went to school, which is this place called the Graduate Theological Union, which is the divinity school of UC Berkeley, uh, there are... Every kind of Christian denomination is there almost. So you've got, you know, Episcopal, you've got Catholics, you've got every kind of Catholic, Dominican, Franciscans. And you also have people affiliated with UC Berkeley. So you take classes there if you go there, too. And so in this environment where priests are taking courses and people who are going to be ministers in the Anglican Church and, you know, they're all taking courses, Presbyterians, and they're all taking what's called New Testament. And in New Testament, you learn how the Bible was put together.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  And I remember taking this class, and there were lots of people in it, like 35 people. Every single one of those people was going to be some type of theologian minister. I think I was the only one who was going to be an academic. Every single one of those people went through trauma taking that. Because once, you know, because you're brought up to believe a certain story about Christianity. And when that story gets deconstructed in such a way where the teachers using the language of the Bible, which was Greek, you know, the New Testament is Greek, written in Greek, and basically showing you how it was put together, what we have and what we don't have, what other books were out there being used by Christians.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  This destroyed a lot of people's faith. And I know people whose faith was destroyed. Some of them went on to be scholars of religion because they had that much training. They're like, well, I got to put this degree to use, even though I'm no longer a believer. I met priests whose faith was destroyed, you know, priests in formation. My faith was strengthened. My faith was strengthened because God is a God of truth. And I was like, I am not afraid to know what is the truth. It's not going to make people happy. But I will, I will learn it. And if it's wrong, I'll learn that it's wrong. So when I learned these things, I wanted to know more. I wanted to, so I actually extended my education beyond my PhD.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  So when I got my PhD, I wanted to study with John Dominic Crossan, who is, was at that time, the foremost scholar on Jesus in the world. And he was teaching at Berkeley. And so I asked the chair of my department if I could take courses with him. And he was like, yes, absolutely. So I got to take courses with him and learn more. And again, it just made me a strong, like stronger in my faith, stronger Christian, a better teacher, you know, for students. And I have had students who've come through and they've been what are called biblical literalists. So a biblical literalist is a person who takes the Bible literally.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Like, you know, it's hard to take it literally because there are discrepancies in it, which is what I knew when I was 11. I was like, hmm, this doesn't seem that God would create something that had discrepancies in it. This must be translated wrong or something like that. That's what I thought. So I've had students who went on to be ministers of very conservative Christian faith, but we're still great friends. And we would have like the conversation about Jesus, you know, with the demon and Legion. You know, that story where Jesus comes to a town and there's a demon possessed man? And the demon speaks to Jesus and says, get away, you know? My judgment isn't here yet.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  And Jesus gets the demon and makes it go into these pigs, right? And thus saving this man of being possessed. And so I would read this in a certain way and my student would read it absolutely literally. And we would have a disagreement about it. And then we were still good friends and he would go on. And I would say, that's fine, as long as you know that I'm teaching it this way. And, you know, if you know that I'm okay with you having your opinion about it, as long as you know that this is how scholars view it at this point. So we would disagree, but he would go on to be a minister. Now, what's funny is I've come to his perception of that.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  After 10 years and going through the UFO thing, I'm like, I think he's right. And if he's watching this. I believe you now.

• 27:42Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:43Shawn Ryan?

  What are some of the things that aren't in the Bible that we should be paying attention to? Are you talking about like maybe that, what's that? Is it the Book of Enoch?

• 27:54Speaker 03

  So, okay, so there are things that haven't been written down. Okay, but we know about them through material culture. So, we know a lot about Christianity by what they decided to put, like, okay, see these beautiful paintings that you have in here? Well, I know a lot about you by looking at those paintings, right? I know that your friend painted them. I honestly thought that they were photos. Like, that's some artistic talent right there.

• 28:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  But what that means is that what is most important to us, we tend to make images of. And so, the early Christians, not all of them could read or write. So, they had material culture. And you see these in like the catacombs. And so, this is where they buried their dead. And they hid out because they were being persecuted by Rome. And so, they had a lot of these

• 28:48Speaker 03

  these things that are basically called frescoes. And if you look at their frescoes, you could see what was important to them and also how they worshipped. So, you see that they were diverse. So, women worshipped with men, okay? So, there wasn't like this this strict, you know, kind of gender separation. That didn't appear. There are some written things that we should pay attention to. And some of those things we found only in the 20th century. Because we still do archaeology. So, we found the Dead Sea Scrolls, which tell us a lot about the early Jewish community that became Christian. Because Jesus is Jewish. So, he's in a a Christian, he's not Christian, he's Jewish.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  So, his community, then, we have to understand it in its context, in terms of what he said and, you know, the message that he brings down. He also talks a lot about the Holy Spirit. What did he mean by that? He meant the presence of God. And I think that is super important. And that's something, by the way, that I believe still is alive. And you could feel the presence of Jesus in certain communities that profess their devotion to him and profess to do what he asked us to do, love one another, you know, those kinds of things. So that's not in the Bible, right? Although it can be, we could use the Bible to help us, you know, create this community of believers.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  He also instituted a community of people to carry on what he was doing.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  That community had some books that we've just found out about in the 1940s. And one of the, so, you know, let's understand too, in the first century, the early Christian church was almost decimated by Rome. Okay, so, you know, it's a church that had been, you know, bad things were happening to Christians and to Jewish people. Their temple was destroyed by Rome in 70. So that group dispersed and tried to survive. So that's how they started to write things down, because they couldn't keep an oral tradition alive. So they started to keep it going like, you know, this.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  So they wrote things, and some of those things we just found. They utilized, and this is really important too, they utilized The Plato's Republic. So the early Christians used Plato's Republic too, which is a really amazing book. And if you haven't read it, you should, well, it's a hard book to read. It's, again, it's very much like the Bible, because it's ancient. But it tells a very important truth. And so it seems like Socrates and Plato were also on to this one god, right, of justice and truth. And that was somehow separate from their government. Their government was not just and truthful. And so they wrote a book about it called Plato's Republic.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  When I say they, Plato wrote it, but Socrates didn't write anything. So Plato wrote it. But that was being used by the early Christians. You know, so what was important for them is important for me to know. So I want to know. I'm not trying to tell anybody what to think. I am not the minister of a church, I'm not trying to advocate. But the way I do my, you know, and, listen, I'm Catholic, but... That doesn't mean that, you know, the Catholic Church, if I'm not a representative of the Catholic Church. And I know a lot of people who are Catholic. And I look at to see what people do, right? What do they do? And if I think what they're doing seemed really good and righteous to me, I like that. And I, I listen to them.

• 32:37Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 32:44Shawn Ryan?

  I had to ask a lot of people about Ezekiel.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:50Shawn Ryan?

  And it sounds like you have an explanation I'm looking for.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 32:55Shawn Ryan?

  Can you, can you go into that?

• 32:57Speaker 03

  I can.

• 32:57Shawn Ryan?

  Please?

• 32:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:58Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you're talking about Ezekiel's wheel, right? So Ezekiel's wheel is today, okay, so I'm going to tell you what I know about it from a Christian perspective. So it's in the Book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel's a prophet, okay? So the Bible, this is the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. It is written in Hebrew. And this is the beginning of the Israelite community, okay? So there's Genesis, that describes the story of God kind of having a covenant with, um, with these men, all right? To create his people, okay? And that's the Book of Genesis. And there's some angel accounts in that too, I think, that are really interesting, we could talk about.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  So we get to the history of the Jewish people and you get to the prophets. So you know about Egypt. So they're in Egypt and they have to leave and Moses gets them out of Egypt. And so terrible things happened to them in Egypt and so they need to leave. So they do. And then they get, you get to a certain part of the Bible, it's like a history of the, the Old Testament's like a history, okay? Of God's people. And so then they get to, uh, the prophets, okay? So the prophets, Ezekiel is one of the prophets. And again, there's a government, there's a, you know, Babylon, who's, who's basically trying to control the Jewish people. And it's not good for them.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  So Ezekiel offers hope and as a prophet of God. And what happens to him is that he has this, what some would call a vision, but it could very well, because this is what happens when people have... encounters today, say with UAP, or what they consider to be angels or something like that. They can't tell if, and you see this also with Paul in the New Testament. When he sees Jesus, he says, "I don't know if it was like a dream or if it was real. I cannot tell." So it's a very confusing thing that happens to Ezekiel, but it's called Ezekiel's vision. Okay, but I'm sure he thought it was real. And it seems real.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Okay, so he has a waking dream, maybe, or a vision that appears real. And it's of these beings that look odd. They have wings and they also have wheels associated with them. Okay, and this is in chapter one. So it's at the very beginning. And he has this. And what it does is it gives him the realization that God's people will continue, even though they're being pretty much decimated by the Babylonians. Okay, so the Babylonians are putting them in exile and they're kind of breaking them up. And he has this vision of these beings who impart this knowledge to him. Now, that is part of a mystical tradition

• 35:53Speaker 03

  within Judaism that I've talked, you know, when you're in my field, you get to have friends who have PhDs in areas that you don't. So that's basically one of the best things about what I do, in my opinion. I like it. I get to go talk to friends who are expert at New Testament and say, "Is this tradition in the New Testament?" And yes, apparently it is. Now, these people won't say this publicly. So I'm going to say it. But it's called this, Sean. Ezekiel saw what's most likely a seraphim.

• 36:29Shawn Ryan?

  A what?

• 36:30Speaker 03

  A seraphim.

• 36:31Shawn Ryan?

  A seraphim?

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a seraph. So seraphim is like the plural of seraph. It's an angel, it's a type of angel. And you've seen it before this. It's like the eye with the wings around it. Okay, and sometimes it's shown with wheels. And so Ezekiel interpreted this and other Jewish people interpreted this to be the throne of God, right? The very throne of God. Like, these were the beings at the throne of God. And this tradition is called the mercoba tradition. And mercoba is literally chariot. So it's a tradition of sightings that of these beings that are God's angels.

• 37:14Speaker 03

  And they're, and by the way, so this happens to Ezekiel. And so it, it then begins this new era for Jews, who at this time are in exile, hope that things are gonna get better. Okay, so hope that things are gonna get better. Before that, there was an interesting angel encounter that Jacob had. So Jacob is one of the people who is a son of the, one of the patriarchs of the, you know, of the covenant in Genesis. And he has this encounter. He's going to meet his brother. And it's probably not gonna be a good meeting because they have a rivalry.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  The night before, he has an encounter with what's in, there's different interpretations of it, but it looks like it's an angel. It comes down, sometimes people interpret it like God or a messenger of God. It is an angel. And it fights with him. It literally fights with him all night. So he has this battle with this angel all night long. It dislocates his hip, but he refuses to give up. He wants a blessing from this thing. And in the end, he gets it. He gets this blessing. And he, he changes his name from Jacob to Israel. And again, what it does is it foretells a new era for God's people, for God's people.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  So me, you know, looking at these kinds of events, they're very epic, these kinds of things that happen when people have these sightings of these, you know, messengers of God.

• 38:55Shawn Ryan?

  You know, some of this sounds like what some people would call a psychedelic download.

• 39:04Shawn Ryan?

  Have you ever heard of that?

• 39:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:07Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about that?

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Okay, so I know a lot about that, actually. And even within the, in religious studies, we have a whole group of people who do look into, you know, it's entheogens, which are psychedelics and religions and religiosity type of things that come out of that. So indigenous people from the United States, like, you know, America,

• 39:39Speaker 03

  there's the Church of Native Americans, the Native American Church. They use peyote, right? And so they utilize plant medicine in order to, you know, in a very structured religious way. And they have experiences like this. So most likely, there's a link there. You know, there perhaps what Ezekiel sees is a, is something that maybe, you know, I'm, I'm not trying to, I'm very happy to say that, you know, in this environment, like a controlled kind of respectful way of doing, you know, psychedelics,

• 40:25Speaker 03

  this is, this is legitimate, what they're doing, you know? If one's doing it recreationally, I've seen some pretty terrible things to happen with people who aren't respecting that this, you can open something up. You can open up, let's, for, you know, let's just say it's a dimension, because we don't know what it is, but it appears to be another realm that people can access, either through psychedelics or through a religious protocol.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  It seems like it happens.

• 41:00Shawn Ryan?

  Have you done psychedelics?

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Uh, yes. When I was younger, I did, yes. And, uh, again, I felt like it was something that was okay for me to do because, well, I'll tell you, I did it innocently. So I was a sixteen-year-old and, uh, my friend had some. Her parents were grateful dead people, so they... I know. So they had...

• 41:27Shawn Ryan?

  They had the good stuff, huh?

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Well, they had mushrooms, and my friend got some. And I already knew at this point, I don't know how, but I already knew that it needed to be done in reverence. It needed to be done... So we actually prayed to God before we did it. And we said, "If this is wrong, God, please let us know, but we're gonna do this." And it was, uh, a really beautiful experience that was, uh... I mean, honestly, it was, it was good. Um, but I, I don't do it now, um, and...

• 42:00Shawn Ryan?

  Why not?

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Well, because I think that I was lucky and innocent when I did it, Sean. Um, I know, I mean, I know that it's helpful for people. I've, I've known people to be, specifically psilocybin has helped people I know recover from things, like, uh, you know, say they were on the front and, you know, in various tours of duty, and they've been helped by treatment. So I guess what, I guess my position is, and I don't guess this, this is my position, is that when done with the correct intention, I think it's good and all right. Without that intention, it's dangerous, and for this reason, that it perhaps will open

• 42:45Speaker 03

  something up, um, and it could be that you do meet something, like another being of some sort, you know, that we've been talking about. And that being could be good, or it could be bad. Uh, both exist, in my opinion, so...

• 43:00Shawn Ryan?

  So you think these realms... I've done psychedelic works, psychedelic treat therapies, and, and, uh, and it did, it stemmed from, um, mental ill, ill injuries from...

• 43:17Shawn Ryan?

  Service, but where I'm, I'm not, I'm not, I don't want to get into the all the good, whatever. That's a whole nother conversation. What I'm interested in talking to you about is the realm that you go to.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, the realm is really real.

• 43:31Shawn Ryan?

  Realm, is it, is it a, do you believe it's a real realm? Or is it, is it, is it developed in your imagination?

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Right, so, um, I, yeah, my, okay, so I believe it's a real realm.

• 43:49Speaker 00

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• 44:54Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  And I don't think, the reason I believe that is because if you do what's called field research and talk to people either who access this realm without psychedelics, and then those who access it with psychedelics, a lot of times they're talking about similar types of things that happen in those realms, like certain experiences, certain things that they meet, like entities and things like that. And so that would indicate to me that that is a real realm. And how we access it, it has, I don't know. I do know, though, that if we, I know we're not talking UAP right now, but when I met people who were in the government who were studying UAP, who are studying UAP, they're very interested

• 46:13Speaker 03

  in this realm. They're interested in this as, like, consciousness is an access point.

• 46:17Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean by that?

• 46:20Speaker 03

  So, our consciousness can access, and things can access us through, I would call, you know, through something that we have in our consciousness. I think that we're at the very beginning of understanding it, and I think we should be really careful.

• 46:38Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think we should be careful?

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Um, okay.

• 46:42Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have specific examples?

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Well, um, yes. Okay. So this gets really scary, though, because it could be that there are, like, I've met people who have been doing ayahuasca, right? And they do it fairly consistently, I guess, right? And, um, and they've been, and I've had, they've told me that they've been, what they call, and I'm not putting words in their mouth, they've been possessed. Okay? And what they described to me is something that I've heard within the Christian tradition of being possessed. Or even in, like, it

• 47:26Speaker 03

  happens in most religious traditions, by the way. It doesn't just happen in the Christian tradition. Possession by something that is bad and is harmful. And so it could be that something like that could happen if one's not Prepared to to deal with the realm. There is a reason in the Jewish tradition that people. And by the way, you also get this in the Greek tradition. So when I say I'm looking at this from a meta perspective, not just from each tradition. So I feel blessed, actually, to be able to have studied this from multiple different religious traditions and secular traditions and philosophical traditions.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  And so when a person goes through life, preparing themselves to access these, what we'll just call in this conversation, these other dimensions, right? This realm, they've been prepared. Like, they've been prepared. They have a group of people to help them, like in the Merkaba tradition. You don't do it until you're in your 40s. You know, you have to actually have gone through maturation. You have to prepare your brain. The Greek tradition, in the Greek tradition, the Socratic tradition, you prepared your brain by doing math. You were an athlete. A lot of them were, they were kind of like MMA fighters, right? They were wrestlers and stuff, so they trained their bodies.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  So, you know, most people are not like that. Most people are not, they're just going through life and they're doing their job. And then they want to do this thing, you know? They want to go down and do ayahuasca. And maybe five times it works well for them, but on their sixth time, it's the worst thing that has ever happened to them in their life. And it has PTSD repercussions for them. You know, that's what I'm saying. That type of thing, I have, I know people that have had that happen to them. So that's why I'm on the conservative side of of that.

• 49:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. When you're talking about other people that are reaching the same dimension or realm, or whatever we want to call it, that that are getting their.

• 49:37Shawn Ryan?

  Without psychedelics?

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:39Shawn Ryan?

  How are they, is this through meditation? How was this?

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Okay, so in almost every major religious tradition, you have a tradition of this. And they're usually called monastic communities, communities of monks and nuns. Or like, they're called in Hinduism, sanyasins, you know, renunciates.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  But, and even you have this in, like I talked about Socrates and Plato in the Greek philosophical tradition. You have a group of people who go off, live together, and help each other. In Buddhism, it's called the sangha, right? It's a community of people helping each other become ready to access realms that provide knowledge, wisdom, truth, things like that. And these realms, I'm what's called a moral realist. That's a philosophical position that believes that things like truth and justice, these are real things. And if humans died, they would still exist. Truth and justice would still exist. I believe that.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  And that only comes from living my life for as long as I've lived and going through the training that I've gone through. There are lots of people that aren't moral realists. Most people are not, I would say. But once a person has a taste that this realm exists and that truth and beauty exists and that, that you feel it, and it's something amazing, right? Like, I feel like Jimi Hendrix knew about this, you know, through his experiences with psychedelics, you know? Are you experienced? He was experienced. And he says, "Not just stone, but beautiful." Well, I understood that, you know? And I understood that not from the, you know, he was dead, by the way, when I was exposed to his work.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  But, um, but yeah, so once a person recognizes that that stuff is worthwhile, then one wants to go through those training, get through that protocol, do those, you know, go through those communities.

• 51:43Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think?

• 51:45Speaker 03

  And by the way, this is also what helps people deal if there is something that one encounters that's not truth and beauty. And there are those things, obviously.

• 51:55Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I just, you know, I think, I think we have a lot to learn in those realms.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  I do, yeah, I do too.

• 52:03Shawn Ryan?

  And, and I've never actually had this conversation with anybody before, but, you know, I think a lot of people go back because there's so much positivity coming out of psychedelics. I mean, that's why I went back. But, you know, and, but I, man, I have so many thoughts going through my head. You know, the, the, the dimension or realm that it takes me to always scares the hell out of me. It's not necessarily a bad experience. I have a lot of anticipation type anxiety when, if I'm going to do it because I know I'm going there. Majority of the experience

• 52:45Shawn Ryan?

  has been overwhelmingly positive. I always learn a lot. It's always a very intuitive type experience. And, you know, it's funny, you mentioned, you know, truth and justice and things like that because you'll feel, you might feel justice about certain events that have happened in your life that you didn't feel that you got justice from. You might get that coming out of those type of experiences. And then, you know, with the truth, I mean,

• 53:20Shawn Ryan?

  I've had so many intuitive experiences about my family, my own life, my business, my, it's just lots of, lots, it's almost like a download of information or a, hey, I need a, I need a new roadmap to my life. Let me strap in here real quick and, and figure this out. And...

• 53:47Shawn Ryan?

  There's just so many positive things coming out of it, but I I almost feel like some of the things that you're talking about live in that realm. And so should we be exploring that realm somehow, some way, more effectively than than than the way we are?

• 54:10Speaker 03

  Emphatically, yes. So, in my opinion, I just spoke to a young man here on your team. He told me, he's 25, he told me about his experience of school, which was horrible. Horrible experience, when I know, right?

• 54:28Speaker 03

  We don't teach kids this. Our culture is completely evacuated of the reality of this, that it's real. And there might be means of accessing, you know, these amazing things.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if you took, even even when we do teach it, we teach it as if, like I did, sadly, for a while, you know, teaching it like it it wasn't actually real. You know, when we taught like Plato's Republic and, you know, the kinds of things that he would talk about in his dialogues, you know, but they're real. And what if I, you know, and I teach them now, like this, they really believe these guys, you know? Like, wow, do they exist? And I go, I believe they exist, but I'm not saying that you should believe they exist. I personally do. And so that makes an impact on a young person. So what I'm saying is that they crave this, like, don't you? Like you say, you keep going back, you know? This is something that we need as human beings. It's something that we've been deprived of.

• 55:32Shawn Ryan?

  It's really weird. It's it's, I crave it. I don't know if craving is the right word, but I've, I don't know any other way to put it. I feel like, I feel like psychedelics make you smarter. I really honestly believe that psychedelics make you smarter. Smarter at accessing memories, smarter at navigating your life. You get, I, it just clears. It just clears all the shit up and gives you clear direction and where to go. And, and news, new perspectives on past events and in current events and, and, and relationships.

• 56:12Shawn Ryan?

  And, and, um, so, you know, but at, at the same time, I really, I have a lot of respect uh, for the, for the medicine itself. And so it's not, you're not gonna see me at a party eating a bag of mushrooms.

• 56:28Speaker 03

  I was just gonna ask you that. I was gonna say, okay, it sounds like Sean is doing this in the kind of environment where there's reverence and respect.

• 56:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. If I, if I do it, calendar's blocked off, it's, it's no kids, like, it's, it's a very, I take it very seriously. I don't, I don't mess around. I don't just do it on a whim. Uh, I put a lot of thought into why I'm doing it, what I'm gonna do it, how I'm gonna do it, preparation for afterwards. You know, I don't, I'm not just gonna come back to work the next day. Um, so, I mean, I'm, if I'm gonna do it, then I'm gonna set it up to where I'm gonna get the most out of the, out of the, out of the experience.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:09Shawn Ryan?

  But, but, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's just interesting to talk to somebody like you about, about that. So, I wanted to ask you about the, have you, you've studied the Dead Sea Scrolls?

• 57:27Speaker 03

  No, those are in Hebrew, in the type of Hebrew I'm not, in fact, even probably, oh gosh, what, they're not the language that I would be able to crack the code of them. But I do know about that community. And I have friends who study them. So, that's how I have knowledge of them. So, within the field of religious studies, there's so many things, you can't know everything and knowing that type, even if you know the language, you have to know that specific, you know, language from that time period.

• 57:57Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Well, let's move into what, like, how did the interest in the UFO stuff even happen?

• 58:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, um, I'm the last person, by the way, who would be talking about UFOs, uh, if you talk to me, you know. Fourteen years ago. And nobody would say that I would be talking about UFOs. Anybody you talk to who knows me, Diana's talking about UFOs. So this happened because of the Purgatory Book. So I had created that log of aerial phenomena, historical aerial phenomena. And I thought it was weird. And so I showed my friend, and we went to this conference where I met people who had these experiences, and they were telling me things that looked like a pattern match to what I was studying.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  So I thought, I'll go ahead and look at this a little bit further, but I didn't tell anybody. I was just kind of like doing an analysis. And then I thought, you know, this is interesting. It's basically a modern day ascent narrative, you know, the ascent of the soul, right? So if you see images of like people being abducted, or cows being abducted, you'll see the cow rising into, you know, ascending into the spaceships, you know, the people, the farmer being ascended. Well, you see the same thing with images of purgatory. You see like that, maybe not cows, of course, but you know, European Catholics will be ascending into, like, you know, their souls ascending, but it shows them ascending. So I thought, this is like a modern day ascent narrative. I could use my methods for studying this, no problem.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  This is, I won't, it won't discredit me to study this, right? So I started to do this study, and it was really interesting. And then what happened was I started to get emails and phone calls from aerospace engineers, people from known aerospace corporations and institutions. And they wanted to talk to me about my research that I was doing. I was like, what, wait, I think you got the wrong person. No. So, and this kept happening. And I decided, okay, they wanted to meet with me, a couple of them wanted to meet with me. So I thought, okay, I'll meet with them, because why do they want to know about this angel event that happened in the 1800s?

• 1:00:08Shawn Ryan?

  How did they get wind of you? Were you writing papers?

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  I started to do, I started to do conferences with my, the people that I know, who are other professors of religion. And for us, it was like, oh yeah, modern day ascent narrative, you know, easy to understand. But they would then somehow were scouring, like the internet, of any academic who is doing, you know, the word UFO, or anything like that. And that's how they found me. And once I was found, a lot of them reached out to me. And at first, I was a little bit put off, because I thought...

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  This is kinda odd. It kinda freaked me out, to tell you the truth. But I did start to talk to them. And one of them, um, I actually put him off for like a year and a half. I mean, I know it sounds weird, but I had five young kids and I was busy, right? So I was, didn't make this connection. I thought it was weird. But when I started to talk to them, I recognized that they weren't looking at it like I was looking at it. They were looking at it like it actually happened. Whereas I was looking at it more like a metaphor. Like, you know, this is something, this is their interpretation of something they saw in the sky. They wanted to know what they saw in the sky. They also wanted to know what kinds of things happened to these people. Like, were they injured?

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  And a lot of times, they were. And so that started to get me to like re-look at what I was doing. And I started to look at it from their perspective. And I was like, oh my gosh, you know, I think that these things are probably real. And that was shocking. So I was shocked for a whole year. Um, what I did was, thankfully, I had a friend, Jeff Kreipel, at Rice University. And I shared all my stuff with him, and he was shocked too, by the way.

• 1:01:52Shawn Ryan?

  What was it, what was the turning point for you that, that made you think that this isn't metaphorical anymore?

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Okay, so the turning point was when I met a person who I have to call Tyler, um, because he's anonymous. Um, one of these people that, when I look back now, I recognize worked for one of these SAPs, most likely. I can't prove it, but it looks like it. So he worked for...

• 1:02:25Shawn Ryan?

  Can you describe SAP for the audience, please?

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So this is a, it's called a special access program in the military. And he worked for an unacknowledged SAP. Um, and he described his work as a hobby. This was in 2013. He described his work as a hobby. Uh, he had lots of clearances from different agencies. Um, Department of Defense and like NASA, like a lot.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  And he worked as a mission controller and he also worked as this, he was like a space shuttle. He worked in the space shuttle program for his duration until it ended. He was always at a launch of the space shuttle. He also did scientific stuff. So he was this character that I didn't quite understand when I first met him. And he really wanted to know the data. So he wanted to know, he really was interested in any work that I would do at the Vatican. And he was also interested in any work that I did that had to do with consciousness. Because he said that in his field, he said, consciousness is the next step. That's where we are studying. And that's why we're interested in your work.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  And so, again, I was really slow to work with him because I was concerned. You know, I was like concerned about what it would mean for my life. It might change my life, you know? And it did. It did change my life. So, so that's what changed is that I started to look at the Catholic tradition again from a new lens. So I had looked at like Teresa of Avila, this nun who lived in the 1500s. And she, she had an experience with this, one of these seraphs, like, or an angel, right? But she didn't, she didn't call it an angel at first.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  So I went back and I looked at these experiences that these people had that we now, when we look at them, we see the nice prayer cards and it looks really like a sweet kind of encounter that they had. But really, the encounter, when you read the primary source material that you see in the archives, it looks really different than how it's represented. And that was shocking to me because-

• 1:04:47Shawn Ryan?

  Which archives?

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Okay, so there are sort of two main archives that hold, there's lots of different archives. But the ones that hold lots of information about this, first is the Vatican archive. And the Vatican, it used to be called the Vatican's secret archive. Uh, but it's called the Apostolic Archive and it's the Pope's archive. And you have to, you can't just go to that. You have to actually have certain credentials to get into it. And so I have those credentials, so I was able to go there. And I was able to look at the primary source material for some of the saints in the Catholic and Christian tradition that looked like, that were, had angel events or levitated and had anomalous activity.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  And I was able to, to look at that and assess the primary source data on my own, which is really

• 1:05:34Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:05:35Speaker 03

  Fascinating, yeah. So I did that work and um

• 1:05:38Shawn Ryan?

  Can you name one of the saints or maybe a couple?

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, all of the saints. So once you start to look at the saints, you see that what is said about what was said in the very, there are, uh, there are what are called primary source material. This would be some of the first material that comes out about that experience that that saint had. Teresa of Avila wrote her own experience. That's what makes it so important, is that she wrote about it. It was later what's called redacted. It was changed by the church. Uh, she said she saw this angel and it wasn't a vision, it was in reality. Like, you know, and she said that it was short and it was shiny. And she was confused because it didn't look like an angel. And she goes, well, it must be a cherub, right? So she had confusion about it.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  And it had a, it had a dart. And she said this dart, it took and it basically put it in me, right? Uh, so this looks like modern day UFO abduction reports. And so once you start to see those connections, you cannot unsee them. And you're like, okay, got it. This is, this is different than how it's represented in the prayer card, right? Where it's beautiful. And I hope that I'm not offending the Catholics that are looking at this and, you know, because it's their childhood, they were brought up with these images.

• 1:06:54Shawn Ryan?

  How do, how do you know it was redacted?

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  Oh, because we have the redactions.

• 1:06:59Shawn Ryan?

  So do you have the original transcripts as well?

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, we have, I have those.

• 1:07:04Shawn Ryan?

  Why would they redact it?

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  It didn't conform to their theology.

• 1:07:10Shawn Ryan?

  So.

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  It happens all the time. It even happens today.

• 1:07:13Shawn Ryan?

  I know it happens in government all the time.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. The standard, yeah.

• 1:07:18Shawn Ryan?

  So, so the, are you saying that the Catholic Church just took a firsthand account and said, no, this doesn't align with what we think, so we're just gonna change it?

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 1:07:27Shawn Ryan?

  And then left the original transcripts in?

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, the, yes, because people didn't read as much as they read now, and they weren't betting on us. You know, going back and looking at it, and it doesn't matter to them now. They're okay with it. Like, literally, they're okay with it. They're like, yeah, we did that.

• 1:07:46Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  Because that, you know, they didn't do it today. They weren't the ones that did it, but the Catholics, after Teresa had her experience and told the priests that were her quote-unquote confessors, those were like, the, kinda like a therapist, you know, you know, they were priests.

• 1:08:04Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's just interesting, because then it's just, it's...

• 1:08:10Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what else did the Catholics just change?

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  I think it happens in every religion, to tell you the truth.

• 1:08:16Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sure it does.

• 1:08:17Speaker 03

  So, you know, we can get angry at the Catholics, but in every religion, a person has an event, that's a legitimate event, that is profound for them. And then they tell that event, and it changes people's lives, and then that religion is like, that didn't happen, kind of thing. You know, they redact it. It's happening now with the UFO topic.

• 1:08:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, it happens in all subjects, and it's just... It's just weird that they're okay with it.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, they're okay with it.

• 1:08:51Shawn Ryan?

  You know, yeah, we changed. But I'm sorry, sorry about that little rabbit hole there.

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Yes, it's shocking what you like. This is why people had their faith challenged in that class I told you about. You know, their faith, boom, gone.

• 1:09:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:09Shawn Ryan?

  All right, sorry, sorry to interrupt.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  No, no, no, you're not. All of that is good information because your viewers are gonna have the same questions. They're gonna wanna know too, right?

• 1:09:18Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  So, yeah, so that happened. So, I decided to go back through the Catholic tradition and look at as many as I could. And lo and behold, it's like almost every one of them looked like that. And that's when I started to become...

• 1:09:31Shawn Ryan?

  Like a little cherub?

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, they looked, they looked different. They didn't look like what the angels we accept are. And a lot of times, they were disturbing, like Joan of Arc's experiences, super disturbing. Um, but...

• 1:09:47Shawn Ryan?

  How were they?

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  Okay, so she saw, Joan of Arc, we all know who she is, right? Okay, so she's a warrior, a girl warrior, um, who was told by God to, uh, fight for the French, right? Um, against the English, okay? And who told her this? So I'm like, who told Joan of Arc this? God? But, you know, did God come down and say this? No. It was, first she didn't recognize what it was, just like in Teresa of Avila. And I'll, and remind me to tell you about that, this lack of recognition, this confusion. So it's a, it's a being of light, and it appears in her father's garden.

• 1:10:32Speaker 03

  And it appears to her and says, Joan, Joan, you know, you're going to be doing this. And this is, and she's like, what is this? So she doesn't take it seriously until it shows up again. And then she recognizes that it's Saint Michael. And then it acknowledges that it's Saint Michael. And that it's gonna ask her to be a warrior, and that this is what she's gonna do. And so it says, go tell this person. And she goes, and they're, they listen to her because she has knowledge that she shouldn't have. She has like precognitive knowledge of stuff. And of course, when people do that to you and you're not suspecting it, you believe them because you're like, they do have special knowledge, right? And so then, you know, she does all these things. She eventually gets burned at the stake. So that's why I wanna say it's disturbing.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  Because, you know, it, she does, she, she does... Does take these troops into battle. She is victorious. It does give her military acumen. You know, it does help her. But she also ends up being burned at the stake. So the question is to me is like, would I want that for my daughter? No, I wouldn't like. So when an angel, you know, do you want an angel to appear to you? Maybe, maybe not, you know? So that's what I'm trying to say is like it's it's a lot more complicated when you start to get into it. Um, that doesn't mean that it should kill your faith. I mean, if you're if you're a person who of a faith, that faith should withstand looking into it. You know, looking into it.

• 1:12:00Speaker 03

  So so, yes, that's that's what I did.

• 1:12:03Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  That's how that's how I got into the UAP thing is that it the these guys were looking at it. But from the perspective that it's real, because they believe that it was happening. And they want to know what's going on. They want his they want as much data as they could get. So that's what I was doing then. I was providing them with this data. In the midst of providing them with this data, I started to work with one of the guys. And at the time, this is this is between two thousand thirteen and two thousand eighteen. Special access programs, reversion engineering programs. I didn't have that language. Nobody did that I knew, right? They weren't in Congress. There wasn't talk about this. The New York Times stories didn't break yet.

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  So I was working with a person who was doing this, who was who wanted to know how to utilize these debris that we, you know, that were being found, um, you know? And and I went to New Mexico to a crash site, alleged crash site, um, with Gary Nolan, by the way. And and we found debris.

• 1:13:12Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of debris?

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  We we did. So it was me, Tyler and Gary. And Tyler had known of this for years, like his whole life. And he was in his sixties then. So, you know, for forty years, he knew about this. It wasn't Roswell, and I have a feeling it wasn't Roswell because it was the real place. So Roswell is probably like the camouflage place. And then, I mean, I'm going to be creating a lot of like.

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  A lot of people are gonna be interested in this to- this topic, obviously, but um. But yeah, so this is my experience. So we went to-

• 1:13:49Shawn Ryan?

  What, what did the debris look like?

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  Right, so um, the debris looked like metallic frog skin.

• 1:13:56Shawn Ryan?

  Metallic frog-

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it looked like frog skin, but metallic.

• 1:14:00Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have any pictures?

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  Uh, no, we couldn't take pictures of it.

• 1:14:04Shawn Ryan?

  How did you get access to this place?

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  Okay, so Tyler, having amazing access, he's a guy who could get through an airport, like, didn't have to go through TSA. Um, he was a guy who the IRS never audited. So he seemed to be above the law. So I, I described him in American Cosmic. I was amazed by this person. I was very impacted because I'd never met a person, I didn't even know they existed. Um, but he, part of what he did was he troubleshooted, I remember during a SpaceX launch that was crashed, and I think this was in 2018 or 17, it was crashed.

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  His phone was going off, and astronauts, like, all these people were like, what, you know, what, how do we fix this? He was like a guy who fixed crashed stuff. So he was, you know, the Challenger crashed. He was on the team to figure out why it crashed. And by the way, Judy Resnick was his friend. So he had-

• 1:15:07Shawn Ryan?

  Who's the-

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  Judy Resnick, she was the astronaut who perished during the Challenger-

• 1:15:12Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  Crash.

• 1:15:13Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  So, anyway, so this, this is the person who I worked closely with. I brought him even to my university. He talked to my students.

• 1:15:26Shawn Ryan?

  So, so Tyler, just, just so, Tyler's a code name?

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:15:33Shawn Ryan?

  Obviously, some type of government official, right?

• 1:15:39Speaker 03

  Uh.

• 1:15:39Shawn Ryan?

  Or working for.

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  Most likely, yeah, and I believe still lives.

• 1:15:44Shawn Ryan?

  Are you still tied in with him?

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  Um, I know about him, but I, we're, we cannot talk.

• 1:15:51Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  Because of everything that's happened.

• 1:15:53Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so what else was at this site?

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  Okay, so, um, he asked me to go to the site because he said that I didn't believe in UFOs. And he's right, I didn't. And he said, "You are a person who thinks that they're somehow imaginary or in another realm." He goes, "But they're in this realm, they're physical." And I couldn't really believe that, because why, unless I have evidence for it? And so he said, "You should go to a place I know of, and you'll be convinced." And he, he asked me to go, and it took about a year for me to say yes. And when I said yes, I said, "I need to bring someone with me, I need to have one of my colleagues come with me, because I don't want to go by myself." And he said, "Maybe."

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  So he said, because apparently it was a place, it was under a no-fly zone. And it was a place that was secret. And, but he'd been going there, and he'd, I think it was a crash retrieval site, frankly. Um, so now, what I'm learning about, by the way, I keep going back to my book, American Cosmic, because I wrote a lot in that book, and I wrote it all truthfully. So that means that there's data in there that, at the time, I did not understand. Now, when I go back and read it, I learn from my own book. I'm like, "Whoa, that happened." And I have a lot of stuff from him, like a lot of presentations and papers and everything, that notes, that I still go back to, and now I understand.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  Like, at the time, I didn't, because I didn't believe in them, and I didn't know it was happening. I didn't know that this was going on, I didn't believe in it. So, okay, so he invites me to New Mexico, to this place. He says, "It's going to be a place where UFO crashed in the 1940s, but it's not Roswell." And I was like, "Ha ha," you know? I was the chair of my department at the time, by the way, and already had won research awards for my work in Catholic history. Nobody knew that I was really doing work in UFOs, only a couple of friends. So it's nothing I advertised. So, so I said, I'll invite Jeff Kreipel to go with me, the guy at Rice, colleague, good friend. And he said, Diana, that's just way too out of my comfort zone to do that. I was like, it is kind of weird.

• 1:18:06Speaker 03

  We had to wear blindfolds to go. So I said, okay, I'll ask. I had just been introduced to Gary Nolan. He's a professor at Stanford. He's now well known. Um, and I asked him if he'd go with me and he said, yes, of course, I'll go with you. And he had all the laboratory equipment to like, figure it out anyway. So I told Tyler, I said, Gary Nolan, and he looked him up. And it took him a couple of days and he came back and he said, okay. And I was like, cool, we're in, so we're gonna go. So it was me and Gary and Tyler was taking us. So we went to New Mexico, we stayed at place. And then the next day, we're going to the crash retrieval place. Uh, we had, uh, special metal detectors that Tyler had configured and brought.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  And we, uh, got in the car and we went, we didn't wear blindfolds yet until we got to a cattle great place, you know? And then Tyler said, put the blindfolds on, you know? So we put the blindfolds on and we went another forty minutes. And then when we got out, we got out and we took the blindfolds off and, um, and I, I looked around and Tyler said, this is such a funny part. He said, do you recognize this place? I was like, no, of course I don't. And he goes, this, this was the, this is like one of the episodes on the X-Files. And I was like, oh, okay. Uh, he said they had an insider on their team. And I thought that was so, honestly, it was really, you have to understand, I still didn't believe.

• 1:19:37Speaker 03

  I was like, I wanted to know why these guys believed, because they both were believers, complete believers. Uh, we spent all day there. Uh, we did get parts, we did get this stuff. And, um, it was hard to get, by the way, it wasn't easy. So it couldn't have just been planted there. Um. There was rubble everywhere and it was rubble. I didn't quite understand why it was there. My editor wanted me to take it out, but it was disintegrated aluminum cans, I guess from the 1950s. So Tyler said that they put that out there so people couldn't find the debris. So we took the debris back. Tyler predicted what would happen. He said, "Do you want to take it back to the airport, Diana?" "No, no, I don't want the debris. I don't want anything to do with it."

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  Gary was gonna take it. So we get back to the airport and he said that Gary was gonna get stopped. It was in his backpack. And that exactly happened. He said exactly what was gonna happen, happened. So I get through. Tyler doesn't have to go through TSA. He's already at the end. He's, you know, cool, collected, sitting there watching us. And I come through and I sit down and Gary... So Tyler had said to us, "Don't be afraid, Gary. This is what's gonna happen." "It'll go off. They're gonna check your backpack. They're gonna look everywhere." "It doesn't matter. Somebody in DC or some is gonna know." "But you have nothing, nothing. You're gonna be let pass." He doesn't have anything in the backpack.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  And Gary's like, "Okay." But Gary was sweating the whole time. It happened exactly like Tyler said. He was sweating when it happened and I was afraid for him. So I was afraid. Tyler was just cool, calm and collected, drinking a glass of water. Gary came out. We kind of like got over that and then we went back to our homes.

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  Gary later looked at it through his microscopes and things, that he has laser microscopes and things like that. And he said it was anomalous.

• 1:21:44Shawn Ryan?

  That's it?

• 1:21:46Shawn Ryan?

  Anything else?

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  I mean, whatever else happened. There's a lot. Yeah, a lot happened. But I can't say what happened after that.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  And I know everybody's gonna hate that, but...

• 1:22:00Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Let's take a quick break.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

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• 1:22:46Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Diana, we're back from the break. We just kind of went over your work with Tyler and Gary Nolan at the at the crash site. And I just, how was that kind of briefed to you? I mean...

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  It sounded weird.

• 1:23:04Shawn Ryan?

  It just sounds like, you know, like, hey, we're going to take you to this site where a UFO crashed.

• 1:23:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:23:09Speaker 03

  I know, that's exactly how it reacted. So it was in the context of when the aerospace engineers reached out to me. And, you know, I started to talk with them. And I corresponded with Tyler. And then I met him. And then, you know, we shared information about these things. And then he said, you're not a believer, like, you're still not a believer. And I'm really open. And I said, you're right, I'm not a believer. And he said, well, I think I could show you something that would make you a believer. You need to have physical proof. You don't think this is physical, you think it's imagination. And, um, and I said, yes, I don't believe in it.

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

  And so that's when he said, I could take you to this place. And like I said, it took me about a year to say yes, that I'd go to this place because it was weird, right? So, um, especially at that time. Like today, because people talk about crash retrieval sites and stuff, you'd go, oh, a crash retrievals place. You may not believe in it, but at least you know what it is. I didn't even know what he was talking about. I hadn't read The Day After Roswell by Colonel Corso, right? I didn't know any of that. I did afterwards, of course, you know, I had to do that in order to... Understand what was going on, um, but that's how it was briefed to me.

• 1:24:33Shawn Ryan?

  So you've been, you've, uh, I read that you went to the Vatican with a, was it a NASA scientist?

• 1:24:44Speaker 03

  It was Tyler.

• 1:24:45Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  So he had affiliations with, with that too, with NASA also.

• 1:24:50Shawn Ryan?

  What happened?

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  Okay, so this was a really interesting trip, um.

• 1:24:54Shawn Ryan?

  What prompted the trip? Let me start there. What prompted?

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  Okay, so the trip had nothing to do with UFOs in the beginning. It was purely about my scholarship, right? So I do Catholic history and I know people at the Vatican. I was invited to go by Brother Guy Consolmagno. He is the director of the Vatican Observatory, which is the observatory of the Vatican. It's been around since the 1800s. And he's a Jesuit. He went to the school I went to and, um, he's a monk. And so we were talking and I was interested in UFO stuff. So I asked him about the Vatican, if they had anything that had to do with space. And he said, yes, uh, we have a whole observatory archive. Everything that has to do with space at the Vatican comes to our archive.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  And so I was like, hmm, I'd like to look at that. And he said, you're welcome to come and stay. We have a scholar's residence. You can stay as long as you want. So I said, okay, I'll do that. So I knew that I could go and stay there, um, but I hadn't yet decided to go to the archive of the Vatican. Um, but the opportunity arose for me to do that. And it was to examine the levitation records of the, what we call the canonization records, the, you know, canonization is a process where people become saints. And so there are big records. You just don't say this person's a saint, you know, you have to prove it. So they have these records at the Vatican.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  And this was for Joseph of Copertino, who's a saint who said to have levitated. And I was supposed to go and look at those, uh, records. By the way, I have those records in a strange, uh, Strange series of events, so those records are now in my possession. Signed an agreement with the Vatican about it and I didn't intend for that to happen, nor did I even want those records, but I do have them. And I keep them in a safe place. So, and they're translated too. So I have these records, they were in like 17th century Latin and Italian. So that's something I can't translate, so I had to find a team of translators. So, in any case, I'm supposed to go to the Vatican and so Tyler says, "I'd like to go

• 1:27:10Speaker 03

  and look at those records too." And I thought, hmm, that actually might be really an interesting thing. I'll see what he thinks about these levitation records and also the space observatory stuff because he's a space guy, he's been in the space program his whole life. So it would be really interesting for me to see his reactions to this data. So I thought it would be good for him to go. But this really had nothing to do with, in my opinion, the UFO thing. But it actually did, but I didn't know it. So, so we ended up going and let me describe how he got in because he shouldn't by rights get into the secret archive because he doesn't have those credentials. So, we thought about that.

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  Now it takes a while, you can't just go there and say, "I want to see these books or these old manuscripts." You actually, because there's, there's like 53 miles of shelving at the Vatican. So they need to know what you need to, they need time in order to find it for you. So I, like a year in advance, I was in touch with the Vatican and said, "I need to find these, you know, do you have these and these, these, all the records." And so they said, "Yes, okay." So, uh, he got, he was, we had to fly there, he was on a different plane than me and he got to the Vatican before I did. And we had anticipated that he wouldn't be able to get into the Vatican archive. So, we, we did the best we could.

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  We got like a friend of his who was a department chair and said, you know, he's, I vouch for his character, he's doing research in this area and stuff. But he couldn't get in. So I was on the plane, he was texting me and he was like, "I can't get in, they're not letting me in." He said, "I think I should show my ID." Now-

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

  I didn't really want anybody at the Vatican to know that I was there with someone who's a space researcher, because I didn't want them to know that we were looking for anything that had to do with UFOs, because in the one sense, I wasn't, but in the other sense, I just wanted the best impression when I got there. So I didn't want him to do that. And I honestly didn't think it would work. Okay, so I didn't think he'd be able to get in. But after like an hour or two, I'm on the plane, I feel bad for him, and he finally says, can you please, just, I'm gonna do this, alright? And I said, okay, just go ahead. So one of his IDs, I don't know which one, he shows to the guy who's

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  the security at the secret archive. And he said he dropped his wallet, and he went down to pick it up. And when he looked up, he saw his face on the screen of the guy's computer. And he was in. And as soon as he got in, he met a priest who was an American, and we got access. So that's when I, again, what, he changed my, my idea of Catholic history, he also changed my idea of the Vatican. So when we got to the Vatican, I couldn't believe it. I was like, what, you know, how come this guy has way more access than me? How did he get that access? So it was a mystery to me. But he also pointed out

• 1:30:15Speaker 03

  a couple of things, too. So there's some really, really scary guards in the Vatican itself, that don't look like the Swiss Guards. Like, they look like militia guys. They have these, like, I'm not well versed in guns, but they look like they have like machine guns, right? And you can't go anywhere. Like, I was holding on to Father Kelty, who was showing us around, you know, in the Vatican and helping us out. Like, if I was away from him, I had, I was fearful of my life, because these guys were mean, you know, they're like, why are you here? Kind of thing. So, um, so Vatican has some incredible security. Um, also, Tyler pointed some things out to me. So, we were at the Vatican Observatory,

• 1:30:58Speaker 03

  and in the gardens, they have a beautiful garden there, the Papal Gardens, in fact. And there were these gardeners. And he said,

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  See the gardeners? And, yes? And he said, "Are they gardening?" And I looked at them and no, they were not gardening. And what were they doing? So he was pointing out to me the intelligence, at, you know, like, Secret Service-type people at the Vatican. He could spot them. And when he would show them to me, it was like my eyes, like, like I didn't see it before. To me, I just, in my mind, registered gardener. And that was it. I didn't even bother looking at them. But no, they weren't gardening. And if they were, they should be fired. Because they were bad, right? They weren't gardening. They were posing as gardeners. So that was all over. I saw that. And so I saw the Vatican in a completely different light when I was there.

• 1:31:51Speaker 03

  And we did, we did find interesting information that basically made it into the last chapter of American Cosmic. So that book had been done in my mind before I went to the Vatican. After I was at the Vatican, I wrote to my editor. I said, "This has to be the last chapter of the book." And she agreed. So we, so I incorporated a lot of the data.

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  Tyler had a conversion experience. So he became, he was a Southern Baptist. But he was one of those Southern Baptists that, you know, like, like I was a Catholic, like, you know, in name only. Like, you know, we, we'd maybe go to church and stuff, but we were not true believers. But after his experiences there, also seeing the, the documents that he saw, recognizing that the kind of thing that he was looking at, which is UAP stuff, looked to be exactly like angel contact events. Uh, he became very religious after that.

• 1:32:50Shawn Ryan?

  Why, why?

• 1:32:54Shawn Ryan?

  I've heard that the Vatican has, what, the, the largest observatory? Or the biggest telescope?

• 1:33:00Speaker 03

  Okay, so it's, yeah. No, it's not the biggest telescope. They have telescopes that are large. They may have just purchased one. They have two observatories, one in Arizona and one in Castle Gandolfo, which is in Rome, near Rome. Not in Rome, but near Rome.

• 1:33:16Speaker 03

  They may have, but, why? Well, I mean, they had it before we did, right? So they've had, they've been studying, they've been scientists before Americans were scientists.

• 1:33:25Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:25Speaker 03

  So it's not, once you start to understand it, it doesn't, it's not weird. It's like, I know it sounds weird because you're not used to thinking about the Vatican has these telescopes. What are they doing? But, you know, think about it, Descartes, all those guys, scientists and Catholics, so European Catholics. So, um, once you understand that Catholicism has been, you know, around for many, many years, you know, um, you start to recognize that most of the scientists in the Western tradition have been Catholic, you know, or on the outs with Catholics. So Catholics have been around, they've been doing science. So Brother Guy Consolmagno is the director of this thing called the Vatican Observatory, and they do, they still do science.

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  Um, so they're, they're scientists and Catholics.

• 1:34:13Shawn Ryan?

  So what do you, I mean, what do you, what?

• 1:34:17Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know where you're at. You, we, we, we're talking about, we're talking about Ezekiel, angels. First I thought maybe we're going with,

• 1:34:29Shawn Ryan?

  we, I mean you, um, UFOs are spiritual entities. Then you're at a crash site and you pick up a chunk of metal. And now, and we're at the Vatican. So what, what, what do, what, what are you thinking? What is this? What is all of this?

• 1:34:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:49Shawn Ryan?

  Is it two separate things? Is there a spiritual entity in a nuts and bolts thing? Or?

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  I think so. Yeah, I think so. I think so. I don't know.

• 1:35:01Shawn Ryan?

  You have to think about this all the time.

• 1:35:03Speaker 03

  Well, of course, I'm, this is what I'm doing right now. So yes, I do. But that doesn't mean that I have an answer. So I do know this. I do know that.

• 1:35:16Speaker 03

  When people who are part of these programs, or not anymore, of course, because the programs are under scrutiny, when aerospace people reach out to me, they're looking at this, they don't know either. They don't know. They want to know. So it's an area of exploration. And to me, there's something that I think some of them are missing. And it's something that Tyler did not miss. It's that there's a spiritual component to this. And if you don't get with the spiritual component, you're not going to have access to the information. That's what I believe. Only because that's how I've

• 1:35:59Speaker 03

  seen it in the last 12 years. So since I've been doing this, the people who, there are a lot of people, governments, people who represent governments, our government, who are scrambling to figure this technology out, safeguard this technology, or, you know, do something with technology for either weapons, or to better humanity, you know, all of these things. But the people who I've met, who seem to have the most access to this, they don't have those intentions. Those intentions are not their intentions. So to me, there seems to be, just like when you said you, you know, did psychedelics, your intention

• 1:36:41Speaker 03

  was, allowed you to have a positive experience. That's my interpretation. Like, because, why do I think that? I'm not randomly just thinking that. I'm thinking that because I'm going back to the history of these protocols that allow people to access these realms. And when you are reverent and respectful, it seems there's a better outcome. Well, maybe that's the case here. I don't know. But that's so far my conclusion. So what I do know, though, is that it appears that there's a

• 1:37:17Shawn Ryan?

  So you, let me, help me understand. So you're saying that your intentions for research might trigger a specific outcome?

• 1:37:31Speaker 03

  Um, let's see, that sounds very quantum, but, um,

• 1:37:38Speaker 03

  I think that your character might determine access to information or knowledge. So Tyler had a certain character. And I don't see that in the people who are scrambling to be the first UFO genius scientist.

• 1:37:57Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  Completely different characters, right there.

• 1:38:01Shawn Ryan?

  So how do you differentiate the... I asked you if you believe there's a spiritual component and a kind of nuts and bolts type component. How do you differentiate the two? I mean, are they two... Are they... Do they have any relation to each other?

• 1:38:20Speaker 03

  Um...

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  I don't know. So this is something that I think people are trying to figure out. Um, let's put it this way, okay? If you think about something that we think to be subjective in our minds, completely, like, you could even call it spirituality in the sense that it's spirit, it's not matter. That would be our thoughts, right?

• 1:38:42Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  We tend to think of thoughts as completely non-physical, non-material. Would you not agree?

• 1:38:51Shawn Ryan?

  I don't believe that anymore.

• 1:38:53Speaker 03

  I know you don't believe it anymore, okay. Why don't you believe that anymore? And I agree with you.

• 1:39:00Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, why don't I... Through some of my own experiences and I...

• 1:39:08Shawn Ryan?

  interviews and I just...

• 1:39:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's impossible for me to articulate this, but I'll try.

• 1:39:18Shawn Ryan?

  I...

• 1:39:21Shawn Ryan?

  I think that you can, you can believe or manifest or whatever you want to call it, uh, realities into existence. I honestly believe, I think I've done it. I think other people that I know have done this. I think that we know very little about consciousness. And, and...

• 1:39:50Shawn Ryan?

  I think, I, I think that we may have the abilities to

• 1:39:57Shawn Ryan?

  create our own realities.

• 1:40:01Shawn Ryan?

  But we don't have the knowledge on how to do that. I think we get little snippets on how that could be done. But as far as like a full scope, I don't think anybody has a... Does that make any sense at all?

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  Of course, no, it makes perfect sense.

• 1:40:21Shawn Ryan?

  But...

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  So, but you did go through a period of not believing that thoughts could be things, right, that could be measurable.

• 1:40:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  Okay, so I would suggest this. So, and this has something to do with the question you asked me about the parts being spiritual or material. We're at a point in time, and this is part of what is fascinating to me, so I've been documenting it. So I wrote some articles, by the way, my articles are free on academia.edu. And I wrote an article where, this was about 2017, 2016, where I was documenting the human brain, I mean, the computer brain interface that's happening, you know, that's really taking off right now. And then, there were two studies, one was at, I think it was University of Washington,

• 1:41:15Speaker 03

  where people had, and this is now common, where they were using brain imaging, but they were able to identify what a person was thinking about. So a person was thinking about a dog, and the image of a dog would become something that could be seen on a computer screen. So, they had technology that was able to read brainwaves. So therefore, thoughts, which we used to think were completely subjective things that were internal and private, were no longer that, and we were seeing the beginning of that process.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  And I think that the beginning of this process is going to be exponential at this point because of what Elon Musk is doing and other scientists.

• 1:42:05Shawn Ryan?

  With Neuralink?

• 1:42:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, with, you know, all of these types of things that are happening. I also think that the government has been in on this in terms of its remote viewing programs, you know, utilizing... Consciousness. Uh huh. You know, in order to obtain information. So, so I would suggest that UAP is like this, is very similar. So in terms of the combination, we're gonna be, we're gonna be able to identify. You know, when people report UAP events, a lot of what happens is that they report experiences of what you call downloads, like experiences of information that they're getting from whatever it is at our UAP.

• 1:42:51Speaker 03

  And that's been consistent in the historical record, like Joan of Arc, right? This light appears to her and then it says, do this, do this. And at first she resists because she's like, what are you? You know, and then she goes, oh, you're Saint Michael. I can trust you. And then she gets the downloads of military information that she actually utilizes. Like she's a kid, by the way, when this happens. I think she's 15. Wow. Yeah, so how are Catholics in that day and age? She's, she decides to dress like a boy. You know, I mean, like, how does a young girl in that day and age convince older men, you know, that this is a good thing and they're convinced? So I, so what I'm saying is that, um, it's something like that.

• 1:43:39Speaker 03

  By the way, I do think that people should not accept the download as, as easily as they do. I've met too many people who are tortured by this process. So now that I've been doing this, I've met many people in the thousands who tell me about their experiences. And a lot of them are brilliant people who are super successful and they believe that their success is because of the download experience that they have. But that download experience also causes them to receive so much information that they believe they should tell people about. Like, oh, I received this information, I really should tell this person. And they, they get tortured by these experiences. In the very beginning of the publishing of my book,

• 1:44:24Speaker 03

  I would get correspondents and outright people talking to me and coming to me and saying, "You'll have this experience, but you have to accept it first. You have to say yes." And I would always say no, because I don't trust it. So I think that that was smart on my part. So, you know, if you get something and it's like this thing that says, "Okay, you have to accept this in order to get this download. Do you accept it?" Why accept it? Like, why? So people, in our time, we don't have the language. We've lost religion for the most part, right? So we are, even you admit, "I'm Catholic, but I don't know my tradition. I never learned the Bible or anything like that."

• 1:45:06Speaker 03

  So we've effectively lost our connection to these wisdom traditions. And I'm not saying we should keep all of what they say. A lot of those things I don't keep. But I'll tell you what I do keep. And that's the reticence to allow my mind to be hijacked. So I call it cognitive sovereignty. So I think we should identify that we do have, you know, sovereignty if, you know, we're quickly losing it because of the technologies that are happening. But we've got to, at least where this is concerned, where UAP is concerned, I think we should be careful and not just say yes to that.

• 1:45:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, so you're a skeptic. You, you, you, did you think that UAP, sorry, I'm off on my timeline. Did you think that UAP activity, when you went to the crash site, was, was complete bullshit? Or did you think it was some type of a spiritual entity? Have you dove in and, like, had you looked into the Vatican stuff before you went to?

• 1:46:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I already knew the tradition of, you know, contact events with angels and, you know, that kind of thing.

• 1:46:27Shawn Ryan?

  Did you believe it at that time? Did you believe that it was?

• 1:46:30Speaker 03

  I believe that people had experiences.

• 1:46:32Shawn Ryan?

  So when you went to the crash site and you saw an actual chunk of metal that you believe came off of some type of a...

• 1:46:40Speaker 03

  I'm still not sure I believe that. I don't know what it came off of. I just know that it was a real, physical object.

• 1:46:46Shawn Ryan?

  So it didn't necessarily turn you into... It did not turn you into a believer?

• 1:46:50Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 1:46:51Shawn Ryan?

  Did it... I mean, it had to have brought up some type of... It had to have brought up thoughts.

• 1:46:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:57Shawn Ryan?

  You know, if this is real, is it two separate... Is it two completely separate things? Because then I don't think a chunk of metal is gonna fall off of an angel.

• 1:47:07Speaker 03

  It's hard to say.

• 1:47:08Shawn Ryan?

  Or a spiritual entity.

• 1:47:11Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  So when people...

• 1:47:14Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about, you know, guys like...

• 1:47:16Speaker 03

  Okay, let's put it this way, I heard...

• 1:47:17Shawn Ryan?

  Like Ryan Graves or, um, I forgot, is it John Faver?

• 1:47:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, John Faver and Ryan Graves, fighter pilots.

• 1:47:25Shawn Ryan?

  What, what... I mean, what do you think about accounts, firsthand accounts like these guys?

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  Yep, totally anomalous UAP is what I think. It could be, I mean, they don't know, they, they think... I mean, I've, I've heard Ryan Graves talk. I was in a talk that he gave to scientists and he was explaining his experience in more detail than normal.

• 1:47:51Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:51Speaker 03

  And it was interesting because he said that through different types of technologies like, you know, infrared goggles and things like that, but other types of things, you could see a whole array of different types of things. So, and I know that already. So that even comes from, if you look at the ufology of John Keel, he talks about this thing called the super spectrum. And he's basically saying that some people, you know how humans only see certain visual, you know, light? And dogs and cats see other things, right? So it could be that these objects are not, we cannot see them with the kind of... But some of us might be able to. Like, some of us might be...

• 1:48:34Speaker 03

  The unlucky few that can see these kinds of things because uh, oh, this also occurs in massive events like Medjugorje, like Virgin Mary apparition sites where only the visionaries can see the Virgin Mary, but no one else can. But they've been tested and their eyes are tracking something absolutely, and they're all tracking the same thing. So they're seeing something. So, I mean, it's not just UAP stuff that's anomalous and weird. It's with, it's religious stuff too. So I think that we are coming into a space, and UAP is helping us do that,

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  where the religious stuff is actually becoming much more real to us, at least for me. Like when I started to see UAP as real for these scientists, I started to think, this religious stuff that I've been looking at is real too. I mean, I actually believed in it, but I didn't believe in it as viscerally. I didn't believe in it as, you know, crying out for God to help me if, you know, through this because it's real. That's the kind of-

• 1:49:43Shawn Ryan?

  Have you talked to any of the higher-ups or leadership or

• 1:49:50Shawn Ryan?

  clergy or whatever they call it at the Vatican?

• 1:49:53Speaker 03

  The Magisterium?

• 1:49:54Shawn Ryan?

  What, what, what do they say about this type of thing?

• 1:49:57Speaker 03

  Um, some of them are horrified that people are even going to the Vatican and talking about the Vatican with respect to UFOs. Um, and I understand why. They don't, I don't think that they're inclined to view it as UFOs. I think that they're inclined to view it as, um, we live in a universe where God's created many things and these could be angels that people are seeing or demons. I think that a lot of people in the Vatican will look at it from a spiritual perspective. That's how they looked at it before. And I don't, I think that they're waiting for secular people to kind of get up to speed.

• 1:50:36Shawn Ryan?

  I really want to know what you think. Do you think they come from space?

• 1:50:40Speaker 03

  Uh, the ones that we're seeing now, okay, so, um-

• 1:50:45Speaker 03

  I have a particular perspective. It might change, but this is what my perspective is now. And it's purely my own, based on, and I'm not advising anyone to believe what I believe. So that said, okay. And of course, this is nothing that can be put in a paper and peer reviewed and published. This is just my perspective on talking to Sean and telling you and people who listen to you.

• 1:51:10Speaker 03

  To me, this looks pretty weird and I'm not liking it. Okay, so I get a feeling from it. And I feel that, and especially what happened to me after American Cosmic was published. I had people surrounding me. So I had, first I was, you know, I had a collegial friendship with Tyler and Gary. And we were studying this, these objects and things like that. And Tyler became a Catholic and or, you know, just much more Christian. Let's put it that way, a believer, that what he was studying were like angels.

• 1:51:55Speaker 03

  And that changed his life. Okay. And then I felt, wow, what I'm studying is real. And that changed my life. Okay, so I was changed. Directly after that, I was targeted by what my friend Tim Gallaudet would call counterintelligence. And they weren't, they had the same idea, by the way. They did not view these things as extraterrestrial. And they thought that they were bad. And so this group was, I got a distinct feeling that there's something really bad happening. There's something really bad. And I started to talk to people who now we call whistleblowers.

• 1:52:39Speaker 03

  So they would talk to me and they would say the same thing. They were afraid, they would be afraid. And by the way, none of those whistleblowers are at the congressional hearings, none of them. And they don't want to be. If, and in fact, most of the information that's getting taken from them is being taken in ways that are not Public and not like what I would call nice, okay? It's uncomfortable. So I believe that if we were to call these things anything, they would be in the realm of like the angelic and the demonic.

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  That's how I feel about them personally right now. My mind might change in two years with more data. But and I feel that because of the the types of responses I've had from people who are associated with our government. And they shouldn't, in my opinion, they shouldn't be. That's how I feel, my experiences.

• 1:53:43Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting.

• 1:53:46Shawn Ryan?

  You talk a lot about, thank you for sharing that, by the way.

• 1:53:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, I think this is the first time I've actually shared it, to tell you the truth. I mean, I'm an academic and that's, you know, and I've been talking as an academic. I've been going to universities to talk. I've now, I'm now talking publicly. And this is the first time I've actually said that.

• 1:54:07Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I think. Not that I've done a, even a smidgen of the research that you have, but, but that's, I mean,

• 1:54:21Shawn Ryan?

  it seems to be the only thing that could not leave a trace. And, and when I brought up, you know, kind of what I think about, you know, other realms and manifesting or praying into, or whatever you want to say. I think that the human mind, I think we've been indoctrinated to think that we have a lot of limitations that are not really there. And,

• 1:54:52Shawn Ryan?

  and

• 1:54:54Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know how we're gonna break that. But, but you talk a lot about technologies. What kind of technologies are you speaking about?

• 1:55:05Speaker 03

  Okay, so are we talking about the UAP affiliated type of technologies? Or the AI that's happening right now?

• 1:55:11Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go with both.

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  Okay, okay. Um, so, let's see. Um, well, obviously, we have some issues coming up with, with respect to AI. And especially with things like Neuralink, right? Not to say it's bad, right? I'm just saying that we've got things to deal with as, as it's becoming much more, um, rolled out to the public. Uh, so, the cognitive sovereignty type of thing. I mean, I think there's a point, there's, if you look at the Bible, the Bible does say this, that at some point, all the things that are hidden will be exposed. Okay?

• 1:55:58Speaker 03

  And I was talking to, this sounds weird, but a Game of Thrones producer, one of the producers for that show. And he was asking me what I thought would be kind of like if the apocalypse happened, how I thought it would roll out. Cause I think he's thinking of making a show about it or something. And I said, okay. And this made him nervous too, which I thought was pretty funny. I said, all those thoughts that you have, you know, they're all gonna be known. He was like, that's horrible.

• 1:56:28Speaker 03

  He's like, that's terrible. And I said, but actually, that's literally what it says. So, all the things that were hidden, you know, um, will be known. And what does that mean? I think part of it is what we're seeing with, uh, with AI, you know? That, that we, our thoughts, what if our thoughts were known? Like, how would that, how would that change us? You know?

• 1:56:53Shawn Ryan?

  How would that change us? I guess that would be the ultimate truth.

• 1:56:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:59Shawn Ryan?

  Right?

• 1:57:00Speaker 03

  I think so, but what if we, I mean, that's something to think about. But again, I said, look, I didn't make that up. That's actually there in the Bible. You can look it up.

• 1:57:13Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, if you can see and read somebody's thoughts, then you know their true character.

• 1:57:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that, of course, you know, I heard your discussion with The Exorcist. I forgot his name.

• 1:57:29Shawn Ryan?

  Father Dan Rehill.

• 1:57:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it was fascinating, where, you know, he talked about this and you did too, about the reading of the minds, right? So this you see in the Catholic historical record, and you also see it in almost all religious traditions, right? Where when a person has done, even people without doing a lot of the protocols or a lot of, you know, prayer or meditation, they have this ability, it's called the discernment of souls, to actually know a person's character or read their minds, right? And so, yeah, so I have that in that record I told you about, the Joseph of Copertino. Apparently, he had that ability to know that kind of thing.

• 1:58:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's probably just something that is possible, obviously is possible.

• 1:58:18Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh, uh huh. What are you, what are you talking about with AI? What else?

• 1:58:24Speaker 03

  Okay, so there is a talk that I give occasionally when I'm asked to do that, and that's to talk to teachers about the use of AI for college students and high school students. And, and it's not just AI, it's technology in general. And part of it is basically what happens to our brains when we're in certain developmental stages, like we're 11 up to 19. So certain developmental stages happen in the brain. And when, I don't want to call any social media out in particular, but some of them are created to shift the brain.

• 1:59:03Speaker 03

  Now, whether that's an intentional weaponization, which can damage the brains of young people, or whether it is something that...

• 1:59:14Speaker 03

  Coders did purposely to create a product that was addictive for monetary purposes. It's not doing us any favors because it's creating a generation now of people who have to fix that because their brain has been trained on it. So, you know, my work, my greater work, even beyond UAP and Catholicism, was looking at how technology and belief work together. I think you have Sean Webb on here.

• 1:59:48Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know Sean Webb?

• 1:59:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:50Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know Sean Webb?

• 1:59:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I don't know him in person. We've only corresponded, but I know his work. And he's, yeah, so he's doing this too. He's trying to ameliorate, right? This issue that we're having. And I do know coders and people who are working in AI who understand this. And then my friend Jose, who's the former Marine, who was my student as well. He's working on a program also. He works directly with high school students. And what he's trying to do too is to help adjudicate to, to stop this happening because it's, it's happening. And he says that it's, it's a weapon, that we're all now targets.

• 2:00:33Speaker 03

  Whereas wars were fought before with certain, you know, certain people and targets. Now we're all the target because the weapons are now, we carry them around, right? And we subscribe to them and so forth. And it's a very real, it's a real thing. So, you know, people at the university are slow to understand this. People in the high schools, the teachers see it, but they can't stop it. The parents can't stop it. The parents don't even, the parents are probably addicted themselves. So, so, yeah, so this is the talk I give that I'm most happy about when I'm asked to give a talk. Because teachers come up to me and they're, they're in tears. They want to help their students.

• 2:01:18Speaker 03

  I have teenagers, you know, I, and I have students. All my students are between the ages of 18 and like 24. This is what calls us. We, you know, this is a group, this is a problem that needs to be addressed now.

• 2:01:35Speaker 03

  We can't really put it off. So this is something that is more important to me than studying UAP or studying Catholic history. I'm more concerned about this.

• 2:01:44Shawn Ryan?

  About social media?

• 2:01:47Speaker 03

  And what it's doing to us.

• 2:01:48Shawn Ryan?

  And the technology behind it.

• 2:01:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:51Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think people can do?

• 2:01:54Speaker 03

  I mean, when I tell them this, there's really no incentive for them to do this. So I understand that. But we've got to not raise our kids on it. We have to let our kids go outside.

• 2:02:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:05Speaker 03

  Uh, we have to go outside because we could easily become addicted to. Most of my work is now online and it shouldn't be. I'm a teacher. I should be like with my students. We should be talking to one another.

• 2:02:21Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:21Speaker 03

  Um, so universities have to stop this, this process, which I believe is intentionally put, is, is part of like, you know, s- stopping the, uh, the flourishing of Americans and humans.

• 2:02:36Shawn Ryan?

  You know, when, is a, sounds like devout Catholic woman who's very well-versed in, uh, all, all of this. What, what do you think about spiritual warfare?

• 2:02:53Shawn Ryan?

  Is that what all this is? All the stuff we're seeing?

• 2:02:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, if we call it spiritual warfare, uh, there's also real warfare, right? So there's, I think they're both real. And I think that it's happening. We're having, so when I say we're in, we're targets, right? Um, because of what's happening. That sounds like a conspiracy theory, right? And so people would call, I know people at my university would say, "Diana, don't say that, you know, that's, that makes it so bad and evil." But the things that are happening, I, I go back to RFK's speech, you know, when he said he was gonna be behind Trump? And he gave this speech. And he said, "If we could just love our children more than we hate each other."

• 2:03:40Speaker 03

  And he talked about the injuries that children have, you know, because of certain things that are happening now. I mean, that, I thought that was truth right there. You know, and I thought that, that was something that I wish people in the school systems would take to heart because they're, the kids that were charged with, you know, teaching.

• 2:04:02Speaker 03

  What are we doing, you know? We shouldn't be teaching them through the medium of the iPhone or the phone, you know?

• 2:04:10Shawn Ryan?

  I guess what I'm asking is how is this happening? Are people under some type of a demonic influence? And that's how this is happening? You know, with?

• 2:04:20Speaker 03

  Um, if that's, I don't know. But if it is the case, we could easily get out of it. We could choose not to be under that influence. That's a, that's, we have human freedom. We have freedom to make a choice.

• 2:04:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't, I kind of feel like most people don't realize they are under that influence.

• 2:04:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. What do you think? You tell me and I'll talk to you more about it. You give up to me and I'll talk to you.

• 2:04:51Shawn Ryan?

  What do I think? I'm just trying to explore that, all of this stuff. But I think it's, I don't know. I'm at, I'm at the, I'm at the beginning of this and, and kind of cracking this open in my own way. But, I mean, it, it's always been good versus evil, right? But it, it's, it just, the lines are becoming very blurred. And, you know, the thing is now that just, nothing really makes sense to me that's going on. Some of the, you know, the stuff that's going on with kids and, I don't know where it is coming from. Or, I mean, it's, do you know what I mean?

• 2:05:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I definitely know what you mean.

• 2:05:35Shawn Ryan?

  Some of these agendas just don't make sense. I don't know how many, I don't understand how many people, how so many people can get behind some of these just absurd agendas that are only, are only even possible through technologies. And, and like sex change. It's, it's such a foreign, like, how did that happen? You know? And, um, stuff like that, you know, within kids, you know, and, and.

• 2:06:13Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's kind of where I'm at.

• 2:06:16Speaker 03

  I, I understand that. Um, I get it. So

• 2:06:23Speaker 03

  I'll tell you a little bit about my struggle with that. And it was during the writing for Encounters. And that's when, I already knew that, that the government wasn't on the up and up with a lot of things. Okay, no problem. I get that. I've known that for a long time, since I was in, since I was young, okay? But when it becomes so real to you, like for me, it was the UAP thing and I was like, okay, this is really... Then I began to ask this question, and then Jose influences me a lot by explaining warfare today, right? This is how warfare is fought today. Um, your kids are targeted.

• 2:07:06Speaker 03

  And I can, and by the way, I actually homeschooled my kids for a while. Uh, until I couldn't, you know, they exceeded my ability in, in certain areas. And, um, and so I could see, once they transitioned to like school, right? How that would then impact them. And it was frightening to watch. And so I then was, you know, as a mom, but also as a professor who's been through this, this UAP kind of realization and recognition of, you know, uh, the suppression of knowledge. Um, it brings it home to you when it's your kids.

• 2:07:48Speaker 03

  And so I was, um, depressed. Okay, I was depressed. And I was depressed for about a year, maybe longer. And so I thought,

• 2:08:02Speaker 03

  who has talked about this before? And so for me, going to books is like what I do. So I, I looked back and I saw that, again, Plato's Republic. It talks about the cave, the allegory of the cave is like where, you know, you're in this cave and people are creating a fictional world. It's basically The Matrix. So if you haven't read Plato's Republic, The Matrix is about it. And then you've got Brave New World was Plato's, an update of Plato's Republic. And then 1984 was also an update of the allegory of the cave. So this is the idea that there's something that's being hidden from us.

• 2:08:44Speaker 03

  And there are characters who are hiding it from us. And like in 1984, they want, they're, they're terrible, right? They're going to try, there's a never ending war, right? In 1984. And so people have been through this depression, Sean, and have like talked about it. And it made me more depressed because I was like, damn, it looks structural. It looks like this is just the structure of the world. Who else has said this? Well, Jesus did. Jesus said this. Jesus said, "You must live in the world, but not be of it." Jesus also spoke in parables, which was code. He was speaking to his own audience.

• 2:09:27Speaker 03

  Okay, he was speaking to the audience who had ears to hear. Okay, so that's when I was like, ah, now I finally understand. Like, it takes me a while to really get something. So it had to, I had to go through those experiences in order to truly understand that not everybody's gonna get it. And yeah, they're gonna look like they're, you call it demonic. I might call it they're in The Matrix. Like, there's different words to describe it, but they're not awakened to something that you and I feel like they should be awakened to. And in fact, they're hurting themselves. Okay? See, so it's, it's like something that's, that's maybe the way it is.

• 2:10:11Shawn Ryan?

  When you talk about, you know, some of this being structural and it sounds like over generations and generations.

• 2:10:18Speaker 03

  It seems like it. I mean, if Socrates is talking about it and then, you know, through Plato and then Jesus is talking about it and then it gets re, you know, it gets redone in every generation, Brave New World, 1984, The Matrix in the 1990s, like, we, it's the same kind of recognition. Has anything been become, like, what does this mean? This, I, I mean, I think it has a message for us. And so you and me, we're American, we want to save the world. We're like, we have it in bred that we can make it better, this can be better, right? But this kind of thing suggests that it's, it's structural, just posing it.

• 2:11:03Shawn Ryan?

  So, so you think that there may be families or, or, what, I mean, who holds the key?

• 2:11:14Speaker 03

  Okay, so you're asking who are the puppet masters?

• 2:11:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. That's what I asked too. So when we're taught in college or high school, we're taught the Plato's Republic thing, the allegory of the cave, and, you know, if you pay attention, you note that these people are in a cave and the, these puppet masters are making puppets on the wall and people think that that's reality. And then one lucky person gets out and goes up out of the cave and says, wow, you know, there's a whole reality out here. I have an obligation to go back and tell these people that they're in a cave. They go back to tell the person they're in the cave, and this is how Socrates talks about it, says,

• 2:12:00Speaker 03

  They'll kill you because they think you're crazy. And in fact, they think that person is crazy. Okay, so, all right. So that's kind of the setup. My question has always been, you know, and then you talk about it as a metaphor in college and stuff and your professor talks about it. But my question was this, was, and my daughter, by the way, took a college class and it was on that. And so I said, who do you think those puppet masters are? And she said, Mama, that's just an allegory. There are no real puppet masters. And I was like, no, I think there are. I think there are. Think about it again, go read it again. And so then I'd ask friends of mine who, you know, had read it and should know.

• 2:12:43Speaker 03

  And they were like, dang, I never thought about that. Finally, I found a philosopher who reached out to me, actually, saw me on a podcast and said, I, these puppet masters, I agree with you. They're a real thing, like Plato just doesn't put something in there. So, um, so who are these puppet masters? I think that's where George Orwell identifies it. And you know who agrees is Aldous Huxley. Aldous Huxley. So he has, all your viewers, everyone should watch Aldous Huxley's, I think it's 1958 talk, maybe it's in the 60s, but I don't think so, at UC Berkeley, where he basically talks about the puppet masters. And it's his group.

• 2:13:28Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Does he talk about how? I mean, so to, to pass on, to be? So what are they born into the puppet mastery?

• 2:13:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, he says it's the oligarchy. He goes, it's always existed and presumably always will. That's how he opens his speech. It's a horrifying, enlightening talk. Everyone should watch it. It's free on, just, just internet, search it, duck, duck, go it or whatnot. It'll come up. And he's a super articulate elite. And he writes Brave New World. And he tells us how it's gonna happen. And it's gonna, we're gonna like our servitude because we'll be taking drugs. That's pretty much it.

• 2:14:12Shawn Ryan?

  How does this get passed on from generation to generation over thousands of years without ever being?

• 2:14:17Speaker 03

  Okay, so this answer was provided to me, actually. I don't know if it's true, though, but by the counterintelligence group. So, basically, there was a person who had been connected to a family that had been around since traces are reached back to like 1200. And this family was the... They weren't the kings, but they were the people... I forgot their name, but they have a specific name. But it's the person who takes care of the bedpan of the king. Do you know that person? So there was a specific job. The bedpan, of course, is the bathroom, like the toilet, for the king. And this person has to change it for the king so that it's always nice and clean.

• 2:15:00Speaker 03

  Now, this person has access to the most private parts of what the king knows. And this later becomes, this is what this person says, "intelligence communities." Goes into, like, you know, the Vatican. And these people become the people who gather the intelligence, associated with the king, the royalty, the dynasty. I don't know if this is true, but this was what this person said. And this person, by the way, had some evidence. It's not like I'm just saying I'm accepting a made-up story.

• 2:15:39Speaker 03

  Like, I saw this person's family, like, historical photos.

• 2:15:46Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. And so what? Does that person manipulate the king into some type of a agenda?

• 2:15:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this would be the oligarchy that Alex Huxley is talking about.

• 2:16:01Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Interesting. Very interesting.

• 2:16:08Shawn Ryan?

  I know you've worked a lot with NASA or people inside NASA.

• 2:16:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I haven't actually worked with NASA and NASA would be horrified to say that I did.

• 2:16:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't mean to say you've worked for NASA.

• 2:16:23Speaker 03

  People affiliated with NASA, yes, I have worked with, yes.

• 2:16:25Shawn Ryan?

  Excuse me, thank you for the correction.

• 2:16:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:27Shawn Ryan?

  What, what are some of the, there's a lot of conspiracies around NASA. Is, is any of that ring true to you? What, what, what's your experience been?

• 2:16:45Speaker 03

  Well, when I first started to do the work on, you know, looking at UAP and so forth, in 2012 and 13, I decided to look back to our space program, basically. I thought, you know, surely there's information there. So, um, the Air Force has an archive and, uh, and there's a lot of information. And what I found was interesting. So I looked not only at our space program, but the Russian space program, because both of these programs got us off Earth into space. And the Russian space program did first. So, um, so both of them were interesting to me. So, and most likely if people are up in space, maybe they're seeing something up there. You know, maybe stuff has been reported. A couple of things happened.

• 2:17:29Speaker 03

  First was that I did have friends who were NASA affiliated and they looked into it for me to see if they could get me into the archive. And at first it was like, no problem, she can come, what is she studying? And then they said, well, she studied the history of like UFOs and they were like, absolutely not, you know? So I was not, I could not go. Uh, and I was like, oh, that's interesting. So that was of interest to me. But also I learned about the history of our space program and, you know, one of my colleagues was always going to JPL, right? So, you know, Jet propulsion laboratories. And I found out that it had been created by Jack Parsons. So it's Jack Parsons Laboratory.

• 2:18:14Speaker 03

  And but nobody knew that. So a lot of people I talked to who were NASA employees, they didn't know about Jack Parsons. In fact, the person Tyler, he did not know either about Jack Parsons. So Jack Parsons was one of the early founders of our rocket technology program.

• 2:18:30Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:18:31Speaker 03

  And but he's not talked about. And the reason he's not talked about is, and I understand why, is because he believed he was getting the inspiration for his rocket technologies through doing rituals. And he worked with Aleister Crowley and um

• 2:18:52Speaker 03

  the guy who found Scientology. Oh, why can't I remember his name? Uh, L. Ron Hubbard.

• 2:18:57Shawn Ryan?

  L. Ron Hubbard.

• 2:18:58Speaker 03

  L. Ron Hubbard. And so Parsons is believing that he is contacting non-human intelligences that are they for his interpretation of them is that they're like deities, right? They're deities. Um, and he's he even manifested one, right? And then married her. And um, so but he believed that they were allowing him to create the rocket technology. Now, that's that's what he was that's his belief. And he was doing rituals to that effect. On the Russian side, you have the uh, Konstantin Yakovsky, okay?

• 2:19:39Speaker 03

  So earlier than Jack Parsons, but also creating rocket technology, also believed in non-human intelligence, but was Christian. So he believed that these intelligences were angelic and that he was, um, if you're in contact with that realm, that if you're specifically genius enough, you know, that you'd be able to Interpret their information and create what he created, which he was the rock, he was like Jack Parsons, but for the Russian side. So each of those kind of what we call them fathers of our space program were involved in something that was pretty similar,

• 2:20:21Speaker 03

  but one thought it was angelic and the other just thought, thought it was, um, I mean, he was working with Aleister Crowley.

• 2:20:28Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:20:29Speaker 03

  So, so, yeah.

• 2:20:30Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's interesting.

• 2:20:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was really interesting. And what I found was that this our space program today even has some really interesting rituals associated with it when it does certain launches at Cape Canaveral. Maybe not all of them, but the one that Tyler was involved with, uh, they had images of Roman gods and goddesses put on the rockets. They would use Latin, um, on their patches, you know, their mission patches. And they would also have specific rituals that they would do, sometimes involving US presidents. They would position the presidents at a certain point where astronomical events, uh, you know, would happen. And this, so Tyler had-

• 2:21:14Shawn Ryan?

  Like the president of the United States?

• 2:21:16Speaker 03

  Yes, the president of the United States. They didn't know what they were doing. They were just being positioned there. So, you know, they're like, stand here, Mr. Obama or President Obama. And he would stand there with his wife and look this direction. It was part of the whole thing. And there were photos, he has photos of all of that.

• 2:21:31Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, can he be a little more specific? What, why would they stand him in a, in a certain-

• 2:21:37Speaker 03

  Well, see, okay, so this is obviously some type of ritual. And I don't know why they're doing it. I just know that, I know, I mean, I'm a scholar of religion. I know a ritual and I see one. He didn't even understand it. So he was, he was, I noticed that they were using Latin. And I noticed it wasn't medieval Latin. I was like, this is a particular form of Latin. It, it seems like it's Roman theology. So, you know, they're using the images of Roman gods. And I would ask him, I said, why are you using the images of Roman gods? Why are you putting them on your mission patches? And also utilizing Latin phrases from that time period? I mean, you're sending it up into space. Is, who up in space is going to read Latin? And his answer was, our sponsors.

• 2:22:21Speaker 03

  So, I mean, that's what he said. And so, he also had all of-

• 2:22:25Shawn Ryan?

  Which Roman gods, do you know?

• 2:22:27Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah. So, there would be, obviously Apollo, right? So, all the missions, if you think of all the missions, they're all those gods and goddesses.

• 2:22:39Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 2:22:41Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have any ideas of where this stemmed from?

• 2:22:45Speaker 03

  Um, it could, okay, so I do. Um, it's just a theory, though. So, and I could be completely wrong. But it seems to me that there might be an element within our government that maintains this theological tradition, this Roman theology. Um, could it be a form of Freemasonry? It could be. I don't know. But I just know that that's what it looks like.

• 2:23:12Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 2:23:14Shawn Ryan?

  Why would they carry on these traditions?

• 2:23:16Speaker 03

  I think at some level, there's belief in those traditions. I don't think that they would do it just because. Do you?

• 2:23:24Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. I mean, could have played devil's advocate here a little bit, but I mean, you know, I was a SEAL. I was the agency. I was in, we had developed our own traditions. And, for example, my, in one of my platoons, we had a patch and had a Spartan helmet on it. And we, we, underneath the Spartan helmet, we put a, we put a saying that the Greeks used to, the Spartans used to say, that said, "Come home with your shield or on it." Put that in Greek underneath. And so, you know, somebody could probably look at that and go, "Why do the, why do these Americans have Greek writing under a Spartan helmet?"

• 2:24:09Shawn Ryan?

  Because we, because Spartans were all badass warriors that we aspire to be. And, and so, we kind of, you know, adopted some of their traditions, sayings, whatever you, whatever you want to call it. It's, it's really more of a morality type, like a morale type thing, uh, to keep us going than, than really anything else.

• 2:24:38Speaker 03

  So that's what I think, because if you asked anybody like Tyler, me asking him those questions, "Why are you doing this?", he did not know.

• 2:24:45Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:24:46Speaker 03

  So, in a sense, and I even wonder about, like, you know, the use, I mean, I understand that the Spartans were badass warriors, right?

• 2:24:54Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:24:55Speaker 03

  So, of course. But, I mean, the very specific positioning of the presidents and, you know, the attention to detail seemed pretty, I honestly, that's all I have for that, I don't know, I don't-

• 2:25:09Shawn Ryan?

  I'm with you, I just, you know, I try to, I also, you know-

• 2:25:12Speaker 03

  Of course, we have to be that way, we have to, like, you know-

• 2:25:17Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, Indians, you know, I mean, a lot of, like, there are, there's a team over at SEAL Team Six, you know, and, and it's, it's a, it's a, probably not an Indian, I don't know, but it's, you know, they all have feathers, you know, and, and, and they, you know, it's, it's a tradition at that unit now. Uh, or, you know, a lot of people in that space gravitate towards, uh, you know, Vikings and have Viking sayings, and there are Latin sayings too, so, it, I don't know, you know,

• 2:25:56Shawn Ryan?

  could be, probably not if you're positioning a president in a, in a certain manner, but, but, you know, it's, it's, could be something harmless.

• 2:26:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, it could also be that the Romans ruled the world, right? First century Rome was an empire.

• 2:26:19Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:26:20Speaker 03

  And maybe that's what they're signaling. "We are the empire." And if anybody else is in space, "We are the empire."

• 2:26:28Shawn Ryan?

  That could be that too.

• 2:26:29Speaker 03

  You know, so, it could, it'd be as simple as that.

• 2:26:32Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:26:35Shawn Ryan?

  Well Diana, is there, is there anything you wanna talk about today that, uh, that we haven't discussed yet?

• 2:26:41Speaker 03

  I think we discussed a lot of things today, so I think we're probably good.

• 2:26:45Shawn Ryan?

  Would you come back?

• 2:26:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Wait, wait, I have a question. Do I get a gun next time?

• 2:26:51Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want a gun?

• 2:26:52Speaker 03

  I'm just joking.

• 2:26:55Speaker 03

  I had to ask for my son.

• 2:26:57Shawn Ryan?

  We can do that. Um...

• 2:27:01Shawn Ryan?

  Can you give me three people that you think would be, that you would like to see on the show?

• 2:27:06Speaker 03

  Three people that I'd like to see on this show. I'd like to see Dr. Eya Whitley. So she is a pilot and a space, uh, she helps train astronauts. And she was at University College London, and she's really interesting, so I'd like to see her.

• 2:27:27Speaker 03

  If you could get Tyler D. on the show, I'd like to see Tyler D. on the show.

• 2:27:32Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I know somebody that could probably make that connection.

• 2:27:34Speaker 03

  Okay, okay.

• 2:27:38Shawn Ryan?

  Sitting right across from me, but, uh...

• 2:27:43Speaker 03

  And, uh, let's see, who else would I like to see?

• 2:27:49Speaker 03

  Do you have plans to get Elon Musk on the show?

• 2:27:52Shawn Ryan?

  I would love to get Elon Musk on the show.

• 2:27:55Speaker 03

  Okay, that would be a good one, too.

• 2:27:56Shawn Ryan?

  All right, perfect. Well Diana, I just, uh, once again, I wanna say, what a fascinating conversation. I love talking to you. And, uh, I hope to see you again. I can't wait to see what's next. What is next for you, before we do end this, I'm sorry?

• 2:28:12Speaker 03

  Oh, no, that's okay. Yeah, so, um, I'm doing another book on, it's called The Uncanny Frontier, about the, probably my last book on UFOs, I'm thinking. Um, and I also teach a class, uh, actually it's a class that... I teach classes on UAP, not affiliated with the university, by the way. Um, so I do that, and, um, and I teach a class on those books that we were talking about, uh... The, the class is called, uh, The Original Red Pill. And it's basically about Plato's Republic and then Jesus's Gospels, and that, how those went into, uh, 1984 and Brave New World.

• 2:28:53Speaker 03

  So it's basically a class on, you know, what do we do now that we're confronted with the world we live in?

• 2:28:59Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. When does the book come out?

• 2:29:01Speaker 03

  So the book comes out, uh, this coming fall.

• 2:29:05Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:29:06Speaker 03

  Or maybe winter. It's supposed to be done in the summer, so...

• 2:29:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so next year?

• 2:29:11Speaker 03

  Next year, yeah.

• 2:29:12Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. Well, maybe we'll have you back on then if you're, uh...

• 2:29:15Speaker 03

  I'd love to come on. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Sean.

• 2:29:18Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure. One last question.

• 2:29:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:29:21Shawn Ryan?

  Are we living in a cave?

• 2:29:24Speaker 03

  Um, some of us.

• 2:29:27Shawn Ryan?

  All right, perfect. It's a realm, isn't it? All right. Well, Diana, thank you very much.

• 2:29:34Speaker 03

  Thank you, thank you.

• 2:29:35Shawn Ryan?

  I really appreciate it and I did enjoy the...

• 2:29:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, me too, me too. Thanks, Sean. I appreciate it. Yeah.