New Jersey UFO's and a Medieval monastery in Offaly

New Jersey UFO's and a Medieval monastery in Offaly Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Embrace the gander at the balcony, you jangly Anthony's. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. You're very welcome if you're a new listener. Consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. It's almost Christmas time, you glorious Yuletide cunts. Around this time, when I was a small child, in the week leading up to Christmas, maybe eight years of age, my ma would bring me up to bed, and then she'd leave, and I'd pretend that I was asleep. And the reason that I'd pretend that I was asleep is, really what I was doing is, I'd open the curtains,

• 2:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  and I'd look out the window and stare up into the night sky at all the December stars. And what I was looking for was Santa Claus going across the sky in his sleigh. Now, if you happen to be listening to this podcast with a child, some people do, I don't know why, but if you are listening to this with a child, maybe fast forward a little bit. But when I was like eight, when I was eight and, and I believed in Santa Claus, that's what I'd do around this time of year. I'd go to the window at night time and I'd look up into the night sky. I'd look up at the stars and what I was scanning for were a series of lights,

• 2:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  a series of lights like beads going across the sky. I was looking for Santa and his reindeers. I used to love resting my face against the glass of the window and seeing the condensation of my breath and just the peacefulness, the peacefulness of looking up at that sky and truly believing, truly believing, Santa Claus is up there somewhere because he's getting ready for next week when he's bringing presents to everybody. But I also remember how, how calming and meditative it was to look up at the night sky, just to stare at all the different stars, to look at the moon, to notice how large the universe is and how small I was.

• 3:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  And to experience, I suppose, the first thoughts about my own existence, to, to think existentially

• 3:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  as best a little child can do, to be aware that, you know, I am me, I am alive, I exist. I'm gonna die. The people that I love are gonna die. I'm alive, I'm a person, I exist in reality and the universe is huge. I'm looking up for Santa, but the majesty of the night sky did that wonderful thing that it does. It made me consider my insignificance.

• 4:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  The night sky, it, it felt peaceful and it felt safe and it felt okay to look up at. And then all of that got ruined because of a fucking TV show called Unsolved Mysteries.

• 4:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  So when I was like eight, there was this American TV show on Sky One called Unsolved Mysteries. And it had this theme music that was just chilling, genuinely frightening music. And the man who presented it had a very frightening voice. And it was a TV show about scary things. It was a TV show about uncertainty, anxiety, mysteries, people who disappeared, murders. And the one that really fucked me up at eight years of age, there was an Unsolved Mysteries episode about alien abductions. Now, I'm eight, I've never thought about aliens.

• 5:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  I didn't really know what aliens were. What I certainly wasn't prepared for was a TV show where adult Yanks, adult Americans with complete straight faces are speaking about when aliens flowed their spacecraft outside their bedroom window and then shone a beam in the window and abducted them and then did experiments on them. So when I was fucking eight years of age, it was around Christmas time, the adverts came on for this TV show Unsolved Mysteries and the alien abduction episode. Terrifying music, terrifying presenter.

• 5:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then just these recreations of UFOs, these spinning discs with lights on them

• 6:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  that can shine a light into your bedroom when you're asleep at night. The place that I felt safe, my bed, there's a programme on television telling me that aliens can fly outside my bedroom window, shine a light in the window. And then my body floats out the window and they do experiments on me. And then they showed a drawing, a drawing of an alien that a Yank had described. And seeing that image, seeing that drawing of an alien with the big, huge black eyes and the big, large, white head and the tiny mouth. Seeing that drawing on the advert for Unsolved Mysteries when I was eight years of age.

• 6:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  One of the most terrifying things that ever happened to me in my life. My first experiences of panic, of terror. My first experiences of childhood depression. I went from being a really happy little child to experiencing really great lonely feelings of doom. I vividly remember the bit at the end of the advert where they finally showed the drawing. They show a drawing of what the alien looks like. This large white head, two big black eyes and a tiny little nose and a tiny mouth. And I believe wearing like a black dressing gown. It hit me like a hammer.

• 7:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  I remember my breath leaving my body and my legs feeling so weak that I could faint. And I lost the ability to speak for like two hours afterwards. I just couldn't get that image of the alien out of my fucking head. And to be perfectly honest, right now, as a middle aged man, I could probably go online and find that exact drawing. Or find that exact Unsolved Mysteries episode. And I genuinely kind of don't want to. I'm still a bit scared. I'm still a bit frightened, even now as an adult, just to go and find that. Like I'd do it. I won't do it right now. I'm not doing it right now.

• 8:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  But if I was to do it, I'd need to prepare for it. And that's not good. I need to prepare myself for a drawing of an alien with the scary fucking Unsolved Mysteries music over it. That's a little bit of trauma there. So that experience, that completely, that was the end. That was the end of looking out my bedroom window at nighttime to search for Santa Claus in the stars. That was the fucking end of it. I started sleeping with the light on. It didn't matter how much my parents explained to me that alien abductions weren't real. Cause I'm going, they are real. There's a documentary on television. There's a documentary on television called Unsolved Mysteries. And there's people talking about they were abducted by aliens.

• 8:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think one night my parents had to literally just go, look, we're gonna stay up with you. And all of us are gonna watch Unsolved Mysteries together. I think it was the Bigfoot episode. And the problem was with Unsolved Mysteries. You'd have like, they'd do like three or four unsolved mysteries in episode. So maybe two of them were legitimate murders that had happened or disappearances. Actual crimes that have occurred in real life in America that haven't been solved. Unsolved mysteries would choose one case and recreate it. And then at the end of the episode, if you had any information for the unsolved mystery,

• 9:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  for the person who was murdered, the disappearance, you could contact the show and tell them. So you'd have that and then immediately afterwards, a story about a ghost or a story about Bigfoot. And that was, that's what was so frightening for me at eight years of age. I'm trying to navigate the concrete reality of being alive and fantasy. Eight years of age was probably, probably the last year that I'm going to be believing in Santa Claus. You know, my parents aren't going to keep that up after eight years of age. But one of the most frightening things about this TV show Unsolved Mysteries was they would present real things and fantasy alongside each other with the exact same scary music and seriousness, and it was all presented as real.

• 10:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I remember the night of sitting down, watching it with my parents, because this was driving them insane as well. I wasn't fucking sleeping. And my parents sitting down, watching it with me and my ma saying things like if, if someone was murdered on screen, my ma's there going, that's red sauce, that's not blood, that's red sauce. And then my dad going, fucking Yanks, Yanks, Yanks, fucking Yanks. Cause my dad hated Americans and he hated America. He was a communist. He hated America. And he hated that there was a society that existed where this was presented as entertainment and that you had grown adults talking about aliens and ghosts.

• 11:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  So my dad becomes very frustrated by the, the absolute silliness of this TV show Unsolved Mysteries. And he's screaming, they're all lunatics, they're all mad, which didn't help the situation to be honest, but I became deathly afraid of. Alien abductions, terrified of being abducted by aliens. Couldn't get the image of that drawing of the alien out of my head. I refused to look out windows at night time. There was no way. The night sky went from being a wonderful, safe, curious place where I used to daydream, nightdream, to being something I simply wouldn't look at.

• 11:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Instead of searching with curiosity for Santa Claus's reindeers, I refused to look up in case I saw a UFO and then it came down and beamed me up. And even now as a grown adult, it's the one thing that will kind of test me. It'll test if I'm, if I'm in bed at night and I'm doing some reading or I'm on a little Wikipedia hall with my laptop out, if I start going down a UFO rabbit hole, I might just leave the light on, I might just leave the light on when I sleep. But something I do, something I, I try to examine is seeing the UFOs and the aliens and unsolved mysteries.

• 12:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  It wasn't just a scary thing I saw on TV that spooked me. It was a significant event that triggered childhood mental health issues that lasted more than a year. And I now realise that like the UFOs and, and aliens, they were a way for me to, to understand deeper anxiety and terror. Like the summer before, when I was seven, I'd had an operation, I had a hernia. So when I was seven, I went onto an operating table and I went underneath anaesthetic. And I remember the feeling at seven years of age of being under anaesthetic, staring

• 13:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  up at a light above me and the surgeons' heads blocking out the light and going all wobbly because I'm going under anaesthetic. And that exact image was present a few months later on the alien abduction episode of Unsolved Mysteries. When the American was describing being abducted by aliens and being brought into the spaceship, they were put down on an operating table and experiments were conducted on them. And on the TV they showed the point of view of the person looking up at the light and the aliens' heads coming over them, doing the experiments on their body on operating table. So that definitely triggered a memory of my operation.

• 13:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what also used to terrify me about about alien abductions when I was a little kid.

• 13:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  It was a sense of loneliness, a sense of I'm in my bed by myself and these aliens can just fly this UFO outside the window, shine in a light and beam me out. And there's nothing my parents can do to save me. I feel so alone, there's nothing, my ma can't stop it, my dad can't stop it. This feels so lonely and frightening, I feel abandoned. And that that was the sad feeling I used to feel in bed. When I was thinking about being abducted by aliens as a child, it was that sadness of there's nothing my parents can do. But when I was seven, getting an operation for my hernia, I wasn't really scared of the operation. I wasn't even scared that they were cutting me open.

• 14:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  But what I didn't like, what did upset me was when I went into the operating theatre and they said to my ma, you can't come in. And my ma had to say to me, I can't come in with you now. I'm not allowed in here. You're gonna have to go with the surgeon here and they're gonna take you in. And at seven years of age, that concept was alien to me. What do you mean someone can tell my ma what to do? My ma minds me, she protects me, that's what she does. What do you mean she's not allowed in to the operating theatre when I get my operation? You mean my ma's not gonna be here with me when someone cuts me open? And up to that point, I'd been calm. But when that happened, then I started to cry.

• 15:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then I started to call out for my ma, but there was nothing she could do because I'm being taken into the operating theatre. And I start to feel very frightened because someone's taking power away from my ma. And then suddenly there's a gas mask on my face and I'm going under, looking up at that light with the blurry black heads above me. So looking back, that's what my alien abduction fear was. I was eight years of age, I didn't have the

• 15:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Emotional intelligence or language,

• 15:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  or intrapersonal intelligence to to understand the trauma of the operation. And then a couple of months later, this TV show Unsolved Mysteries comes on TV and there's these aliens that can abduct you from your bed and they put you down on an operating table and do experiments on you. And the aliens looked really scary. So alien abductions, that was my brain's way of making sense and trying to understand the terror of abandonment, the terror of these these men who I don't know can tell my ma to stay outside, stay outside the room while they put a gas mask on me and cut me open. And and then I wake up in a completely different room in a daze

• 16:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  and I'm really sore and all my legs are covered in blood. That was another theme on the Unsolved Mysteries UFO episode was this concept of missing time, that when you're abducted, you don't remember any of it and you just you arrive in a in a different location and several days have passed. And that's what it felt like when I got my operation. I remember going under, don't remember anything in between. And all of a sudden, I'm somewhere else hours later with this great sense of confusion. Aliens and UFOs had become a perfect avatar for me to project my fears onto, a simple story to make sense of what I can't understand. One of the biggest stories in the news this week

• 17:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  is coming from New Jersey over in America. For the past two weeks, people living in New Jersey are really panicking because they're looking up into the sky and they're seeing UFOs or they're seeing drones.

• 17:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're seeing objects that they can't identify. There's hundreds of videos online, all over TikTok, of people in New Jersey pointing their cameras up to the sky. And there's strange lights floating around. The military are investigating, the FBI are investigating. The people in New Jersey are ringing the police, and they can't get a concrete answer. When the people of New Jersey look up to the sky, they experience terror. What are these strange objects in the sky? Are they aliens? Are they UFOs? A local New Jersey politician spoke out. His name was Jeff Van Drew. And Jeff Van Drew told the people of New Jersey

• 18:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  that he heard from a very authoritative source, that there's a giant Iranian mothership just off the coast, the east coast of America. And this gigantic mothership has unleashed thousands of small Iranian drones. And they're flying all over New Jersey. And now people in New Jersey are shooting guns up at the drones. And still, nobody has an answer. Looking up at the sky is a frightening thing for the people of New Jersey. Because New Jersey is right across the way from New York. And a lot of people in New Jersey around 2001,

• 19:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  when the, when those planes hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, the people in New Jersey, they witnessed it from a distance. They saw the towers on fire with the smoke going up. So the sky of New Jersey, there's a, there's a folk memory of terror in that sky. And also, something I find fascinating about New Jersey in particular is they have, they have a folk monster called the Jersey Devil. From the late 1800s all through the 20th century, people in New Jersey reported looking up into the sky and seeing this absolutely terrifying creature flying around called the Jersey Devil. It had giant wings like a bat.

• 19:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  And this strange, long, slender, horse-like body, legs like a bird with claws.

• 20:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then a very evil head, a bit like a goat's head. And it's this really frightening creature that flies through the sky at nighttime and screams and attacks people. By nineteen sixty, so many people were seeing the Jersey Devil flying through the sky. There was a ten thousand dollar reward for anybody that could shoot the Jersey Devil or capture it. So people took this really fucking seriously in New Jersey. This modern American city just across the way from New York. Is there actually a fucking?

• 20:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  A horse, a winged horse monster with the head of a goat flying around New Jersey for the entirety of the twentieth century, scaring the shit out of people? A lot of people say there is. Of course, I know about the Jersey Devil because of the fucking Unsolved Mysteries episode when I was a child. But if you look closer at the story of the Jersey Devil in New Jersey, there's an area of forest called the Pine Barrens. And during the American Revolutionary War, which would be the late seventeen hundreds. And this is when the colonies of of America, which is mostly the East Coast, the area around New York and Boston.

• 21:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  This was a British colony and then Boston Tea Party, George Washington, all them cunts. They fought the British and America got its independence. A very short statement there on the American Revolution. But anyway, not all Americans wanted revolution. There were Americans who supported the Brits, who were loyalists, who wanted America to stay a colony of Britain. So when America got independence, those loyalists, they're stuck in America, but they've just lost the war. They weren't very popular. So what did they do? A lot of them fucked off into the forests of New Jersey, into the Pine Barrens.

• 21:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Outcast ex-soldiers who had to hide, they had to hide away in the forests of New Jersey. But they made the forests a very terrifying and dangerous place to travel through. They became outlaw gangs that would violently rob people who traveled through these forests. So the people of New Jersey became terrified, terrified of traveling through this area of forest known as the Pine Barrens. And it's around that same time. That sightings of the Jersey Devil first start to appear. The people in New Jersey, they'd just witnessed gigantic fucking war with the British,

• 22:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  revolution, they might have seen massacres, they're a traumatised population. And now when they go through the forests, they can be violently robbed at any time by an enemy that they can't see and they don't even know if it's there. So this weird folk monster starts to appear, the Jersey Devil. A horse with the wings of a bat and the head of a goat that screams through the night. Fuck that. And now nearly 200 years later, you're looking at the news and the people in New Jersey are firing guns into the air because there's all these unexplained drones and UFOs flying around and they're all looking up and they're all seeing them. Some people are saying it's aliens, other people are saying it's, it's an Iranian mothership

• 23:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  from Iran, full of these Iranian drones. There are things floating around, you can see them on video, there's strange objects in the sky. And then finally today, an official answer was given by the FBI. And the answer from the FBI is, yeah, there is stuff in the air over New Jersey. There's airplanes, there's lots and lots of, of commercial drones, unmanned drones, and there's satellites up in the sky. But what's happening is that for some reason, the people of New Jersey are collectively panicking. They're noticing things in the sky that are always there.

• 24:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're pointing up and they're looking at airplanes and everyone's frightened and everyone's riding themselves up and they're, they're looking at airplanes and pointing and the airplanes are now UFOs. And there's drones up there, there's hundreds of drones all the time that people just don't notice and now they're noticing them in the way that, I don't know, if you buy a fucking Ford Fiesta, all of a sudden you notice every single Ford Fiesta on the road and you think there's loads of Ford Fiestas, you're just noticing them. So the people in New Jersey, for some rea-, they're freaking out, they're freaking out and they're all looking up into the air, they're freaking each other out and they're all seeing UFOs.

• 24:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I think, I think the source of anxiety is, America's just going through a great change right now. But first off, it's New Jersey. So like I mentioned, you know, they saw the Twin Towers blowing up from a distance. There's a culture of seeing unidentified flying objects that are terrifying in the sky. That's part of folk culture in New Jersey. And as well, Donald Trump is about to be president in a fucking month, and he's doing mad shit. He's appointing Elon Musk to a high government position. He's appointing, Robert Kennedy wants to get rid of the polio vaccine. Vince McMahon's wife from the WWF is going to be

• 25:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  running the education department. America right now is facing massive uncertain change. Elon Musk says he wants a recession. Elon Musk says he's going, he's going to deliberately do a recession. America sees how much of its weapons and how much help it's given Israel. And American people have phones the same as me and you. They're watching butchered Palestinian toddlers. It's a very overwhelming, frightening, confusing period of change. So of course, the people in New Jersey think that there's an Iranian mothership floating off the coast of New York, ready to unleash thousands of drones that are floating around their head.

• 26:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  What a simple, what a lovely, simple story that lets you take out your gun and fire it up into the air to give you a sense of control. Just like 200 years ago, newly independent country just after a war can't go into the woods or you get robbed by bands of outlaws that you don't know whether they exist or not. So you invent the flying horse goat. America has farmed for this shit. The greatest example, of course, is nine 11. So, America, the strange thing with nine 11 is that

• 26:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  The American collective consciousness willed nine eleven into existence. Now, I'll explain what I mean by that. America had defined itself in the, in the, in the second part of the 20th century as being one of two superpowers. It was America, capitalism versus the Soviet Union, communism. So, America was good versus evil, one of two superpowers. Then in 1989, the fucking Berlin Wall falls and America is left as the only global superpower. America doesn't have an enemy anymore. It effectively won. And then the millennium is 10 years away. Everybody was afraid of the millennium. It was just kind of freaky.

• 27:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  No one felt good about the year 2000 happening. There was a queasy feeling that the world was gonna end. It's just like, I don't wanna be entering a new fucking millennium. 2000 years after the birth of Christ, why do I have to be that generation? Surely something's gonna happen. And then the early 90s, people start talking about the millennium bug. I remember the millennium bug. This was a huge fucking deal in the fucking 90s. Computer scientists came out and said, the computers that were designed, the internal clocks, the calendars in these computers, they don't go to the year 2000. So, when the clock strikes 12 and it turns into the year 2000s, all the computers might

• 28:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  stop working and planes will fall from the sky. Planes are gonna fall from the sky when the millennium bug kicks in at that, when the clock strikes fucking 12. And this was discourse. People believed planes were gonna fall from the fucking sky. Life support machines were gonna stop working. Electricity was gonna stop working. The entire world would be descended into disaster, chaos and Armageddon as soon as that clock strikes 12 on the millennium because we've relied on computers too much. And this was in the fucking news for years. Billions were spent trying to stop the millennium bug. Of course, nothing happened at all. But America in particular. Found itself by nineteen ninety as the only superpower.

• 28:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then this general feeling in the ether of the world is gonna end, something's gonna happen in the year two thousand. So what you begin to see in American culture in the nineties, disaster movies. There's a fucking insane amount of disaster movies from about nineteen ninety four onwards. And also computer graphics started to get really good, special effects started to get really good in the nineties. So you have films like Independence Day, Will Smith, one of the biggest films of the nineties. And it's, it's a film about America, it's America, and then aliens come down and they blow up American skyscrapers and famous buildings and monuments.

• 29:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a terrifying visual spectacle of American skyscrapers being blown to bits and people falling from buildings. You die hard with a vengeance about blowing up a tower, fucking Armageddon, another film, cities being blown to bits. You had Godzilla nineteen ninety eight, a big lizard kicking the shit out of New York City, Deep Impact, another film about a meteor falling from the sky, crossing, crushing the shit out of New York City. The Siege. The Siege is a film that's so fucking accurate, no one even talks about it. The Siege is Bruce Willis and Denzel Washington, nineteen ninety eight. And it's, it's literally a film about New York and a bunch of Islamic terrorists blow

• 30:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  shit up. And then the, the army come in and they put all the Muslim people into camps. And this was nineteen ninety eight, predicting Guantanamo Bay. And it was so accurate, they just stopped showing it and no one talks about the siege anymore. Six months before nine eleven happened, the biggest film in the cinema was Pearl Harbor, directed by Michael Bay. A fucking film about the only other time that America was attacked from the air. Pearl Harbor happens six months before nine eleven. Now, am I teasing at some absolutely batshit mental conspiracy theory? Saying that they knew nine eleven was gonna happen in advance and they were warning us through films?

• 31:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, what I am saying is that the Cold War ended, America found itself. In a state of anxiety, because it didn't have an enemy, it defeated the Soviet Union. It started to get paranoid. Who's gonna come next? Like, wh- when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, what it meant was, for America, nobody's gonna nuclear bomb us now. The only power with the capability to destroy us with nuclear missiles is the Soviet Union, and now that's gone. And America had spent, since about nineteen fucking fifty, terrified of nuclear bombs.

• 31:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now that's gone. There was a strange comfort in knowing that's what the threat was. What's next? Is it gonna be an asteroid? Is it gonna be Islamic terrorists? Is it gonna be Godzilla? Is it gonna be aliens? Is it gonna be the millennium bug? It has to be someone. The entire, the collective consciousness, the culture of America, which had been built around the Soviet Union are the enemies, and they're just as strong as we are. As soon as that went away, America was left with a sense of anxiety. What do we do now? Who are we supposed to fight now? To take it back to the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil, America won the revolution. Britain was gone, Britain left. Now there's no more war.

• 32:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  So the Americans who were walking the forest in New Jersey, they're terrified of terrorists, effectively. The loyalist soldiers that had lost, they had to disappear to the forests and they effectively became terrorists, hit-and-run terrorists. The people lost the comfort of the big, bad, British enemy, and now they didn't know where their enemy was. So they start to invent the Jersey Devil. But in the nineties, America started to express its irrational fears through disaster movies. Loads and loads and loads of disaster movies. So when nine eleven happens... And you have this massive spectacle, this spectacle of two jumbo jets crashing into

• 33:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  the iconic twin towers and other ones heading for the Pentagon and other ones that were heading for the White House, this event that takes place on television. I remember it happening, it felt like Independence Day, it felt like Godzilla, it felt like Deep Impact, it felt like all the films we'd been watching for the past five fucking years. It felt so much like those films, it didn't feel real at all. There's a quote at the time from the director, Robert Altman, filmmaker, and he said, "Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie. We created this atmosphere and taught them how to do it." That's what I mean by America willing 9/11 into existence.

• 33:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, that was Bin Laden's second time attacking the World Trade Center. He attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 with a car bomb, didn't do much damage, but Bin Laden was smart. You know, when they killed him, they went through his hard drive, he studied Western culture. 9/11 wasn't just a terrorist attack to kill people, it was a deliberate visual spectacle to put terror into the heart of America in the visual language that it understood. If you literally spend the past 10 years and all your biggest films contain gigantic CGI

• 34:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  scenes of the fucking White House being blown up by a UFO, or scenes of downtown Manhattan getting blown to bits, skyscrapers getting blown to bits by fucking meteors, then you're letting your enemies know exactly, exactly the thing that frightens you most.

• 35:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  9/11 terrorists, the texts, utilized the language of entertainment. And I don't mean that in a disrespectful way. But American entertainment in 2001, with giant skyscrapers getting blown up and cities being torn to bits, that was American entertainment. So that's what 9/11 was. The goal of terrorism is to strike terror into the hearts of a civilian population. The reason it seems like, it might seem a bit far-fetched to suggest that Bin Laden put that much, or that Al Qaeda put that much thinking into the attacks, is because after those attacks, we were led to believe that these are mindless animals. These are raged, crazy lunatics.

• 35:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, they're not. Some of them are military strategists that know exactly what they're doing. I mean, the IRA, the IRA in the 1970s, the IRA would plant a bomb in a car in London, and they'd put a timer on the bomb. And then they'd ring the police and they'd say, there's a bomb in this car on this street, and it's gonna go off in one hour. And then the police would cordon off the area, try and get everyone away. Then the BBC would show up with the cameras, and the car would explode on camera, and then that would be in the news later on that evening. And sometimes, nobody was killed with the car bomb. But what mattered for the IRA is that it's on television. It's on television, and the British public can see this.

• 36:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  And there might have been someone there. And then after the BBC started showing IRA bombs, like literally going off on the television, then the IRA used to start, they used to throw barrels of petrol into the back of cars that they were blowing up, just so the fireball would look massive on the television. So that there, that's using acts of terrorism as entertainment. It's using the language of entertainment, it's understanding the visual medium of television. And 9/11 was that, it was visual spectacle.

• 37:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  The terrorists had learned that the Americans' fears through the disaster movies. And whoever wants to freak out the Yanks next, they've just got to use drones. Look at what's happening in New Jersey. People are shooting guns into the air, shooting guns at airplanes. They're shooting guns at airplanes because they think there's either UFOs or an Iranian mothership in the sky. But just like me, when I was eight years of age and I had that operation and I wasn't able to verbalise that fear and that anxiety. So I became terrified of alien abductions. This is what we do as humans and sometimes we do it collectively. We agree upon it. We amplify each other's fears until we all see what isn't there.

• 37:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  The people in New Jersey are seeing what isn't there. They're all sitting around together pointing up into the sky at an aeroplane and they're all agreeing that it's a drone, agreeing so much that people are taking out guns and shooting airplanes. And we did this in Ireland too. In the seventh century, the seventh century in Ireland. There's multiple reports of UFOs written in the Irish annals, written in the annals. There's multiple reports of UFOs in the seventh century around the monastery of Clan McNice. There's so many reports of UFOs in Ireland in the seventh century that there's evidence of this in Viking mythology at the time.

• 38:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  The Vikings spoke about how the Irish were seeing UFOs in the seventh century. So Clan McNice was a very, very important monastery in Ireland in the seventh century. Books were being written there. Ireland was a very, very important site of Christianity in the world. And the monks of Clan McNice, written down in several sources, they were plagued by UFOs in the seventh century. But their UFOs, they used to see ships in the sky. The monks would go outside and they would see, see ships like fucking ships, but they're up in the clouds. And sometimes all the monks would go outside.

• 39:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they'd see men jumping from the ships, so they're looking up into the air and they see these ships floating in the clouds. And men would jump out from the ships and appear to swim down to the ground, to the monks. But the men were drowning in the air and the monks were terrified. There's these men drowning in the air in front of them. And this used to scare the living fuck out of the monks. But what you have to realise about the anxieties of the time is this. Christianity, Christianity had arrived in Ireland. By the 700s, Christianity was in Ireland only 200 years. And Christianity is an eschatological religion, which means that it's very much concerned with the end times.

• 40:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  When Christianity reached Ireland with Saint Patrick, the Roman Empire was collapsing. Right, so the known world was completely collapsing. And what that looked like is that the Roman administration, which had kept like towns and fucking roads and kept shit together, that collapses. So you end up with warlordism. So Europe becomes frightening and destabilised and violent and unsafe. It felt as if the world was ending. But within Christianity, this is what's predicted, the world is supposed to end and then Jesus Christ comes. Also within Christianity, the world ends when Christianity reaches the farthest part of the world.

• 40:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  And in the 500s, Ireland was the westernmost part of the known world. When Christianity reached the monks in Ireland, they truly believed, we're at the edge of the world here. There's nothing beyond the Atlantic. So now that we have Christianity, we're here to usher in the apocalypse. The end times are fucking coming and we're here to usher this in, we're just waiting for it. The strange thing with the, the ships in the air in the 700s in Clam McNeigh's. It's a weird little mix of Christian belief and then indigenous Irish folklore. So Christianity believed in the firmament, that basically up above the sky, God had put a second sea.

• 41:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  So if you were to sail too far off the edge of the world, beyond the coast of Ireland, you might find yourself up in the sky. But within Irish pre-Christian belief.

• 41:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  We had, we didn't have heaven and hell or end times. We had the other world. We had a parallel existence. There's a parallel world where the fairies live and you can enter this through the mist. But in the Irish monks' writings about these ships floating through the sky and the, the lads drowning in midair in front, in front of their own eyes, there's a fellow drowning in front of me. So basically for the lads in the ship and for the man drowning, he's literally underneath the ocean. But for the monks, they're in this world. So what you're seeing there, it's a blurring of the two parallel dimensions. Like when the fairies present themselves as animals.

• 42:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  You think you're looking at a deer, but what you're seeing, it's, it's really a fairy. And that's how the fairy must present itself in this reality. Or the belief that, that a sacred well, that at the bottom of, of a sacred well was the mirror to the other reality. Or the mist, the morning mist was the blurry line where you could cross between dimensions. And this, this is Irish indigenous folklore, pre-Christian belief. But there's a beautiful story. I think it's written down in the book of invasions. But there's one story about the monks of Clan MacNais seeing these UFOs, these ships. And, and it contextualizes it a bit.

• 43:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's a beautiful example of the, the inventiveness of Irish storytelling when it takes in the, the batshit world of pre-Christian mythology. So the story goes is that there's a group of monks and they're on a ship and they're sailing to Rome. So these monks, they're on a fucking ship. They're on the sea, they know what they're doing, they're going to Rome. But then a storm hits, a bad storm. So the monks on the ship say, fuck that. So they throw the anchor over the side. So then the storm passes, everything's okay. And the monks go, right, let's go on our way now to Rome. Let's pull the, pull the anchor back up.

• 43:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  But as the monks on the ship pull the anchor back up, it's stuck on something. They can't pull the anchor back up. So they get one of the monks, the youngest fella, and they say, jump overboard there and swim down to the bottom and get the anchor and pull it out of whatever the fuck it's stuck in. So he jumps down and swims down, follows the chain and goes to the bottom of the anchor. But he discovers an underwater monastery and he sees that the anchor of the fucking ship is stuck in the bell tower of an underwater monastery. And all the monks are underwater too, and they're pointing at him, they're pointing at him, but they don't seem to be behaving like they're underwater, they're not swimming,

• 44:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  they're underwater, but they're on solid land. Now the story flips to the perspective of the monks in Clan Mac Nais. And now it's the monks in Clan Mac Nais and they're there in fucking Offaly and they're looking up and they see an anchor in their bell tower and there's a man in the sky swimming, drowning. So they climb to the top of the bell tower and they rescue the monk who's drowning and bring him to their land. Meanwhile, back in the ocean on the way to Rome, the monks that are in the boat are like, ah, fuck it, he's dead, he's after dying. And they take their ship and they fuck off to Rome, having lost a crew member.

• 45:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Meanwhile, your man, he's actually in the parallel reality of Clan Mac Nais and now he's living with the order of monks that he swam down to. And he spends the year learning the rules of their order, their prayers, their artwork. One year passes and now the lads who are in Rome, they sail back to Ireland. And exactly on the spot where your man had died a year ago, they now see him at the surface asking to be rescued. So they bring him back on the ship and they can't understand, it's like you drowned a year ago, what's happening? And he tells them all about the underwater monastery that he visited and teaches the lads on the boat, the prayers and the artwork and everything.

• 46:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then the lads on the boat go, fuck all that shit we learned in Rome, that's bullshit. We're gonna take on the rules of this new underwater monastery. So that's a story there from the 11th century. That's an Irish story from the 11th century, like unbelievably inventive.

• 46:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Dealing with parallel realities and universes. It's a Christian story that isn't tied down by the constraints of linear time. Instead, it has weird Irish paralleled circular time that you find in pre-Christian mythology. That's otherworld fairy shit. But that story written in the 11th century, it was the monks in the 11th century trying to figure out why the fuck were the monks in the 7th century? Why were, why were the lads in Clan MacNais writing all these stories about UFOs, about ships floating in the air? And then you have to look at the, the world, the world that they lived in.

• 46:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  The monks of Clan MacNais in the, in the 7th century, the Viking raids hadn't started yet. The monasteries in Britain and Ireland, come the 8th century, I think, the Vikings used to raid and pillage the monasteries. They'd kill people and steal everything. The 7th century monks in Clan MacNais, they were aware, there's this huge threat out there on the oceans. We haven't seen it yet, we've heard about it, but ships of foreign men are gonna come up that fucking river and one day they're gonna kill us all. So, just like the people in New Jersey. Of course, those monks in 7th century Ireland are gonna look up to the sky and someone's

• 47:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  gonna point at a cloud and go, does that cloud look like a ship? The fear and the uncertainty is gonna be so great that they'll collectively hallucinate. They'll hallucinate fucking ships in the sky. Let's have a little Ocarina pause now. I'm gonna play an Ocarina and you're gonna hear an advert. I've got my, my ceramic otter this week.

• 48:10Speaker 03

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• 48:51Speaker 04

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• 49:16Speaker 05

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• 50:02Speaker 04

  Every restaurant wants to be busy. Most restaurants aren't ready for it. I'm Chef Mike from Detroit 75 and Toast helps us stay ready when the lunch rush hits. We prepare for lunch like we're preparing for battle. Orders are flying, tickets are stacking, and the guests should never feel the chaos. Toast keeps our team organized so we can serve more people, stay consistent, and keep growing. Visit toastapp.com to learn more. Pay testimonial from an actual Toast customer.

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• 51:11Speaker 00

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• 51:25Speaker 05

  Hey guys, it is Pablo Torre from Pablo Torre Finds Out. And as a journalist, I like to think I have the answers. But every holiday season, gifting makes me think otherwise. Getting it right feels impossible and can get quite stressful. But thankfully, Sephora takes a lot of the pressure off. Whether you're shopping for a beauty expert, a skincare lover, or someone who is just hard to shop for, Sephora's got it all. The big assist comes from Sephora's expert beauty advisors, who remove the guesswork with personalized recommendations so you can find something thoughtful and useful for the people on your list. Beauty is a gift anyone can give. So this holiday season, shop gifts at Sephora and give something beautiful.

• 52:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Unroll the fucking ceramic otter of the blind to his tail.

• 52:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  While I thumb his rectum.

• 52:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  You'd have heard an advert there for some fucking bullshit. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you entertainment, distraction, mirth, relaxation, whatever this podcast brings you, please consider paying me for the work that I do, because this is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. It's how I rent out my office. It's how I pay all my bills. It's how I have the time to put the research and writing into delivering this podcast each week. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee, once a month. That's it. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You can

• 53:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  listen for free. You can listen for free, because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everyone gets a podcast, the exact same podcast, and I get to earn a living. Wonderful model. Patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. And please, if you're becoming a new patron, don't sign up via the iPhone, Apple Patreon app or Patreon app, because Apple are greedy bastards and they take 30%, right? So if you're becoming a patron, whip open your desktop or your laptop and go to patreon.com/theblindbypodcast and become a paid subscriber, please.

• 53:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  It keeps this podcast independent, too. It means I'm not beholden to any advertisers. I'm gonna go through my 2025 gigs now, because I'm conscious that some of you want to get tickets as Christmas presents. January the 27th, I'm in Vickers Street in Dublin. That's very nearly sold out now, right? My Dublin Vickers Street gigs are wonderful and fantastic. This is a lovely, quiet, Monday night gig. Then in February, I'm up in Galway in Leisure Land. I've got a great guest for that gig. That's on the 9th of February. Then, on the 21st of February, I'm up in Drogheda, in the Crescent Hall. 28th, I'm in Belfast Waterfront Theatre.

• 54:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  March, I'm in the Aineck, there down in Killarney. And then Cork Opera House on the 13th of March. Australia and New Zealand in April, that's sold out. And then on the 23rd of April, my biggest ever gig in Limerick. My biggest ever gig in my home city of Limerick, in the fucking University of Limerick Concert Hall. And then what have we got? Big giant tour there of England and Scotland in June. And this one is set in no quick now because of Christmas tickets, right? So if you do want, I know you might think June is fucking ages away. And it is ages away, like June is fucking six months away or something like that.

• 55:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  But while you're thinking that, someone's buying the ticket as a Christmas present. So these are setting out fast. So if you definitely want to come to one of these UK shows, don't wait until June, basically. And I'm in Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, York, London, Edinburgh, East Sussex, Norwich. Go to fain.co.uk forward slash blindboy to see all those gigs. I hope I mentioned them all there. Hope you enjoyed this podcast. I didn't want to interrupt that hot take with the Ocarina pause.

• 56:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I just went straight, straight long hot take. And then the Ocarina pause at the end, which is a slightly different structure. But I hate fucking, sometimes I don't like splitting the hot take in two, you know? But I wanted to explore anxiety. I wanted to explore collective anxiety this week and how it can induce mass hysteria and mass panic. It's just a part of the human condition. Whether it's in New Jersey right now, seeing drones in the sky. Or Ireland in the seventh century, seeing ships in the sky. The same shit, we're still human beings. I most likely will be back next week.

• 56:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Next week is Christmas Day, next week is Christmas Day. And the temptation is to not put a podcast out next week, you know, to take the time off. But at the same time, this is seven years of the podcast. And I'm just very grateful that this podcast is still here after seven years, that it's still going strong, still with a fuckload of listeners. So I think I will put out a Christmas Day podcast. I'm doing it because I know there's a load ye that Christmas isn't crack for everybody. You might want to get out of the house, you might want to go for a walk, you might want to treat it as just a Wednesday. So I'm gonna try and do a podcast for those people. I might do something a bit festive-y.

• 57:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  This was not a festive-y podcast. As you can tell, my voice is fucked again this week, by the way. I've had my third, my third cold of the season, so my throat is a bit cunty. I'll catch you next week on Christmas Day, you glorious pricks. In the meantime, Robert Dag, genuflector Robin. Tug at the pubic, tug at the pubic hair of Santa Claus. Dag bless.

• 58:07Speaker 05

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• 58:44Speaker 06

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• 59:26Speaker 06

  That's G A B B dot com forward slash get gab. Gab: Tech in Steps. Independence for them, peace of mind for parents.