The Basement: Diana Pasulka | Angels, Vatican Archives, and a Government Email

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Speaker 00

  Beauty today.

• 0:46AJ Gentile?

  Today I'm talking with Diana Walsh-Pasulka. She's a Religious Studies professor who spent years in archives most people never see, including the Vatican's, reading sworn testimony about saints who levitate in front of entire towns. Then the government noticed her research, and she ended up blindfolded in the New Mexico desert digging for debris at an alleged UFO crash site.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Blindfolded and driven out to the desert with a shovel? Ah, sometimes I miss the old Vegas.

• 1:12AJ Gentile?

  By the way, this is a woman who won't set foot in a haunted house. The blindfold was fine, apparently. Today we're covering the flying saints, the recruitment, and why she believes a new religion is forming around UFOs, with somebody already writing its Bible. Her new book, The Others, just hit the New York Times Bestseller list.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  The Times list is rigged, you know, and controlled by big publishing. Unless she's on it, then it's a very prestigious honor. Congratulations, Professor.

• 1:37AJ Gentile?

  And her leading candidate for the Antichrist? I didn't see that one coming.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  It's a cat, isn't it?

• 1:42AJ Gentile?

  It's not a cat.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  That's exactly what a cat would want you to think.

• 1:46AJ Gentile?

  Stick around after the episode. I'll pop back in and untangle the conversation. Let's go down to the basement.

• 1:58AJ Gentile?

  Did you start your career in death? I know that you teach at the Museum of Death and Dying sometimes in Brooklyn?

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05AJ Gentile?

  Okay, so what was it that drew you to death?

• 2:09Speaker 03

  To death.

• 2:09AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  I know. Okay, so I've been studying religion my whole life, and I'm in Religious Studies, so I just have to explain what that is. Because a lot of people don't know. They think that if you're studying religion, you're like a minister or theologian. And I definitely, I went to school with priests in formation, people who were going to be priests and nuns and so forth. So I have that background. But I took an academic track, so I was interested in religion from a perspective of, I just didn't think I was good enough, frankly, to be a theologian. Like, in order to be a theologian, you have to, like, kind of walk the walk, right? And I was like, oh, I'm not, you know, I'm probably not that good, but I'm really interested in religion, so.

• 2:54AJ Gentile?

  Well, what's the difference between a theologian and clergy?

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're the same.

• 2:59AJ Gentile?

  They're the same, okay.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  So in order to be a clergy, you have to have a theology degree. And so I had the same background as a person who has a theology degree, but I went extra and got a PhD in an academic field. And I'm super happy I did. So I'm in this field called Religious Studies, which looks at religion. I mean, most of the world are religious practitioners. It's really an important thing to know about. And so I study, but not from a belief perspective. So I'm not advocating for any belief. I'm not advocating for belief in Christianity. I'm not advocating for belief in Buddhism. And I don't advocate for people to believe in UFOs. But, you know, that was the second part of my career, was studying UFO belief.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  And so how did I get into death and things like that? So it wasn't really a choice. It just kind of happened. So I was looking at the ways in which, my field is looking at technology and religious belief and the interactions that technology has on how people practice their beliefs and, you know, what they believe in. But I was really interested in extraordinary events and how people describe them. So what would that be? That would be like looking at angel contact events in the historical record for Christians. What did they believe?

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Or Jewish people. So I started to look at that. That invariably crossed over into people having near-death experiences and things like that, because a lot of people who have extraordinary events also have brushes with death or something like that. And so that's how it happened. It was very on accident, kind of. And one of my first publications, in the first publications when I was a young assistant professor, was looking, and by the way, I also spent a lot of time in archives. And archives are old libraries. So this is for young people out there. Believe it or not, there is non-digitalized information.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Information that is not on the internet. Information that is, you know, not on your phone, that GPT doesn't know about. And this is all contained in archives. So I spent a lot of time, like years and years, in archives, old archives, Vatican archives, archives all over the place. And these, you know, we're talking about like manuscripts and books and even stones that have pictogram... Wait.

• 5:37AJ Gentile?

  Like petroglyphs?

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah. Pictograms, petroglyphs, right. So I've seen Aztec petroglyphs, yeah. And.

• 5:47AJ Gentile?

  So it's comparative religion? It's everybody?

• 5:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, it is. It's comparative religion. And so the first publication that I wrote was about near-death experiences of children from the 1800s. And there was, believe it or not, there was a whole genre of writing about children who died and came back and said what they saw, or just before they died, they were in a state where they could see people who had been dead and then tell their friends, so-and-so is okay, or, you know, I saw so-and-so, and this is what they want to say to you, and so forth. And so I thought this was really interesting. So that's what really got me into looking at death and why, actually, I became, I'm part of the American Academy of Religion,

• 6:35Speaker 03

  which is an international group, or mostly American, but international, of people like me who study religion. And I co-chaired the death session of that for like 10 years. And now it's co-chaired by a former student who's now a professor.

• 6:56AJ Gentile?

  So children, near-death experiences is interesting because they're not, they don't have enough time on the earth to be primed for what to see.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:04AJ Gentile?

  And yet they're seeing the same things that kind of everybody sees?

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So near-death experiences are interesting. One of the first recorded near-death experiences happened, well, was recorded about 2,500 years ago. And that's with Plato, actually. So in his book, The Republic, he talks about a soldier who dies on the field, you know, I guess the front. And everybody thinks he's dead. And then he comes back to life, and he says, wow, look what I saw when I was dead. And it's really interesting. And so they've been around for a long time. And they look similar. The patterns are similar.

• 7:46AJ Gentile?

  Are you seeing the same patterns in other cultures and religions as well?

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Yes, you do. You see the same patterns. There are inflections, cultural inflections that are different. But for the most part, it looks pretty consistent. So what you see when, I know it sounds strange, when a person dies and they come back and talk about it, and.

• 8:11AJ Gentile?

  It's not strange in this room.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Okay, good, good, all right. So often what happens is they have like what is called a life review. And in ancient Egypt, there's the same thing. There's this god, Osiris, who's looking at, you know, if your soul is not, he weighs your soul.

• 8:29AJ Gentile?

  Against a feather.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And if it's not, if it's heavy, there's a demon that, you know, so there's always a sense of judgment that you get after a really kind of okay experience of meeting a guide, right? And the guide can be like a luminous being, or it could be, if you're Christian, Jesus, or, you know, so there's always that cultural inflection that helps you frame what you see. And then if the person, well, the person has to come back to explain that they went through this. But this was a whole genre of literature for Catholics of the medieval era and the, you know, European, basically the European

• 9:13Speaker 03

  continent, right? Where these people are having these experiences, and then monks are writing about it, and they're called other-world journeys. And so I got into the other-world journeys. And that was, my first book was about purgatory, which is a dogma of the Catholic Church that describes when souls are not good enough to go to heaven, where do they go? It's this place called purgatory. And so purgatory was, I spent a lot of time in archives to write that book. So that was my first book.

• 9:45AJ Gentile?

  Why did Catholicism kind of abandon the idea of purgatory?

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Well, okay, so they haven't technically abandoned purgatory. So that's still a dogma of the Church. What happened was that there was a big, like, almost like an internal reformation for Catholics in the 1960s, between 1961 and 65. And this is called Vatican II. And what they did was they determined that.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  A lot of people were falling away from the Catholic Church. Why, right? And they thought it was this emphasis on, well, you know, we tell them when they're when they're die, their soul will go to hell or purgatory. It looks pretty bad, right? And that's not a good look, right? So they reformed how they taught their priests and they taught their priests in seminary to downplay this this idea of purgatory. And so, so in that sense, so when churches in in, you know, pre Vatican II churches were built with a place where people would pray for the souls in purgatory, that's not done now. That devotion is still done by believing Catholics, right?

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Many Catholics don't know about it, though.

• 10:58AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  No, no, young Catholics aren't. I mean, if they're traditionalist Catholics, by the way, this this is a source of contention. Every time I talk about it, Catholics email me and they're very upset. And they say, no, we know about this, Diana. What are you talking about? And I'm like, well, you know about it, but like the Catholics that come into my class, those young people, they don't know about purgatory. So it is a thing that they downplayed that for those Catholics. But there's a comeback right now happening in Catholicism. And those ideas that were downplayed in Vatican II are now being embraced by young Catholics.

• 11:35AJ Gentile?

  That's funny. So whether it's Vatican II or 367 or Carthage or the Council of Trent, it's all about marketing.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Yes, it is. Yes, yeah, yeah.

• 11:43AJ Gentile?

  How does the the idea of purgatory in Catholicism track with with Dante's work? By 3:00 PM, I'm usually four coffees deep. My heart's doing that weird flutter thing. I'm jittery and somehow I'm still tired. Then an hour later, I crash. And of course, all that caffeine means my sleep at night is garbage. That was basically my routine for years. Caffeine, spike, crash, sleep terribly, wake up tired and start the whole thing over again. So that's when I decided to swap that fourth coffee for an Ultra pouch. I just tuck one in at my desk and keep working. No jitters, no racing heart, no weird anxious energy. And about 20 minutes later, I'm just focused, steady, not wired or buzzing, just clear. What's great about Ultra pouches is there's no nicotine or caffeine.

• 12:27AJ Gentile?

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• 13:12AJ Gentile?

  Tell them the basement.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Okay, so Dante's describing, so Dante Alighieri, right? So he's in the 1200s, writes the Divine Comedy, which is basically about his journey, his soul, you know? He's in love with this woman named Beatrice. And so, and he's had a pretty terrible life, right? So he's been ostracized and, you know, so he's, he's, he's upset. But he writes this beautiful epic poem about his journey that his soul takes through the various levels of the afterlife.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  So there's the purgatorio, there's heaven, and then there's hell.

• 14:00AJ Gentile?

  I think everyone knows the Inferno, but they don't know purgatorio or Paradiso.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  That's right, they don't. That's, that's right. And so what happens, though, during this is he's, he has a guide. So, you know, it's a classic kind of near-death journey, but like upgraded, right?

• 14:16AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  So it's not a couple pages. And it's also beautiful. But he also describes in depth the punishments of the people in the various places, like in hell, the Inferno.

• 14:26AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  And it looks brutal, right? And in some people that did him wrong in life, you see them there in in the poem. So, but it's really beautiful when he gets to, so Virgil, by the way, is his first guide and is a, what he calls a good pagan, right? So a pagan being a non-Christian. And he's not allowed to go into heaven. So he has to stop at some point. And then of all people, Beatrice becomes his guide. And when she ascends, it's quite beautiful, actually. And I recommend it as excellent reading.

• 15:04AJ Gentile?

  It is.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:05AJ Gentile?

  And the political commentary is entertaining in it.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  It is, it is, yeah. So, but your question was, does he get it right, right?

• 15:12AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  So, I mean, that's the thing is, we don't know, right? We don't know. But I think that he, you know, he follows the template of the medieval other world journey. And he has all the elements there, right? So, and he, you know, I don't know if he gets it right, but I kind of, there's a part of me that that thinks, especially when you get to how he describes the heavens, which bring in like the imagery of the stars in the imagery of space. And I mean, that's pretty cool. And, you know, he's writing like so long ago. How could he know those things, like the Imperium and so forth?

• 15:55Speaker 03

  He's talking about a center of the universe in space where God, you know, attracts. And pretty amazing.

• 16:03AJ Gentile?

  It's almost like he read the Book of Enoch before he wrote that. So we know that Plato influenced Catholicism. Was there influence? What about Osiris and the Duat? Is there influence there as well?

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Gosh, that's a good question. I can't say authoritatively. I don't know.

• 16:22AJ Gentile?

  Only one guy knows.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right, right. Yeah, no, I do not know that.

• 16:26AJ Gentile?

  I'm asking more academically, if you see, if you see that.

• 16:31AJ Gentile?

  Because I see the connections between when they go from polytheism into Akhenaten and monotheism, and then it dovetails very nicely into the story of Moses and Exodus. There's a through line there that I think you can follow through history. I was just curious if early Catholics were aware of of the Duat and how all that worked? Because you see some of it.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  I would, I would assume so. I would assume so. But I can't, see, my position is if I don't know it specifically and can give you the evidence for it, but I can tell you off record.

• 17:04AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, off record, I think so. Like, I think so. So, but, you know, let's just say that that's not my academic self saying that, because I don't know authoritatively.

• 17:18AJ Gentile?

  So everything you're saying today, are you speaking for UNC? You're the spokesperson out today? No?

• 17:23Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 17:24AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  No, I'm speaking as a private individual.

• 17:27AJ Gentile?

  Fair enough.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Okay. Yeah, but I hear, I do agree that, you know, when I went to seminary and, you know, did that, that training, we didn't learn about Socrates and Plato and their influence. So although it's truly there.

• 17:45AJ Gentile?

  You didn't?

• 17:46Speaker 03

  No. And that's what I think is so amazing, was that, in a sense, I had one of the best educations you can have in that field, but so many things I learned on my own by reading, you know, theologians that did have that training. So that training kind of got cut off. And thank goodness for, I mean, this is the good part of technology, you know, you can learn a lot, right?

• 18:12AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Just doing your own stuff, right? What would you call it, like armchair PhD or something like that? You can definitely do that. And also another thing, though, which I like about the work I do is that I have a lot of friends who know a lot about different things. So if I don't know the answers, like Hebrew Bible information or something like that, I could just go to them and say, what does this say in the Hebrew, right? And we can work it out. And that's, that's part of the reason I went to school, by the way, is so that I could have a extended network of people who, because you can't know everything.

• 18:48AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  But you and your friends can know a lot.

• 18:52AJ Gentile?

  So when you read Plato, when you read The Republic and he talked about the immortal spirit, you were just like, wait, wait a minute.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Well, you see, I was exposed to that as an undergraduate and even as a high school kid, right?

• 19:05AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  And so I just read it like they taught me, which was sadly kind of boring, like the boring version of Plato, which by the way is really hard to do because it's so fascinating.

• 19:14AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  And so I read it and didn't take a lot away from it, actually just thought it was political.

• 19:21AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  And it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't until after graduate school, actually, that I started to go back. And even after doing UFO research, I started to go back and think, what? Like, he was, he was talking about the simulation theory.

• 19:37AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  You know, he was talking about the bad guys, you know, he was talking about so many things that are relevant today. And wow, he was even talking about externalized memory.

• 19:48AJ Gentile?

  Externalized memory, where did he talk about that?

• 19:51Speaker 03

  In Phaedrus. So in Phaedrus, Socrates is having a conversation with Phaedrus and Phaedrus is like these, he's a young guy from Athens who's like into the newest technology, which is writing. And he's all about it and he's like, this is gonna be cool. This is gonna take over, you know, kind of like AI guys today, right? So that's Phaedrus. And so Socrates is like, eh, let's talk about this. And he goes, what are the repercussions of you losing your memory to this technology? That's what he says. I mean, doesn't use that language, but he's talking about memory, he uses that language. And so he's talking about the externalization of memory and how it's going to change you. It's gonna change how you access knowledge and you're gonna lose the capacity to do

• 20:36Speaker 03

  that. Somebody just asked me recently if Socrates would, in fact, it was a student, it was a graduate student, and she said, I'm asking everybody this question, I want to ask you. And I was like, okay. And she said, what would Socrates think about AI today? And I was like, oh, he would like, he would just die, right? Bring him back to life, show him AI, he'd probably die. And she was like, oh, are you sure? And she was kind of disappointed. And I said, yes, because he warned about if we, you know, think about it, culture was oral, you know, orally transmitted knowledge. And many cultures today still, like indigenous cultures, no way, they're not gonna do the

• 21:19Speaker 03

  writing thing, they're not gonna externalize their memory because they have a lot of knowledge. They don't want to mess that up, okay? So that's gonna be something that probably a lot of your viewers won't understand, but I'm gonna try to explain it. And that is that, you know, in Phaedrus, what's going on is that Socrates, the reason why he knows so much is because he doesn't know anything. And that's what he said, he says, I don't know anything. But then how does he know things? He knows math, he knows things that we just figured out using technology today, these things called the solids, the platonic solids, they're real, right? But they're not in our dimension.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  And we're using, you know, professors at UC Berkeley are now figuring out how to identify these things and what they are. And like the tetrahedron and so forth. Well, how did he know that, right? How did he know that? He was using his brain and his body in a different way and he said, writing's gonna mess this up, we don't really want to do this. And he called it anamnesis, so it's a form of retrieval, like memory retrieval knowledge.

• 22:27AJ Gentile?

  What's the problem with writing? Cause I, cause it would be corrupted, the oral tradition would corrupted as well, you would have your own, sort of your own leanings would leak into that.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  So this is, so he did have the hope that there was a form of writing which could be helpful, okay? There was a form of technology which could be helpful. This would only be though, for people who were already in contact with the ability to retrieve knowledge in this, this way that he's talking about. And there aren't very many people that could do that.

• 23:02AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Because he had to train them, right? They, they had to be trained. And yeah, so, you know, so my grad student, here, there you go, you know, he's not gonna be happy about AI.

• 23:12AJ Gentile?

  Don't we see it with every technology, whether it's video games or comic books, any kind of new way of communicating is always, you know, what are the repercussions of this?

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's absolutely true. I do, I do think though, that he's right, that we can have it, but we just have to have it in a way that's helpful. And I always present to my students when I give this talk to them, because you know, right now, what I find is that young people know what's happening, they're not like, they're also upset, they're like, oh, how could you have given us a world like this, you know? And I'm like, oh, sorry.

• 23:50AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  You know, how, like, what, what do we do now? I, I lost the train of thought that I was going down.

• 23:57AJ Gentile?

  That's okay, we'll pick up the train at some point.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  Okay, okay.

• 24:00AJ Gentile?

  That's the boomer generation, Gen X is fixing it, we're fixing it.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:05AJ Gentile?

  We're, I don't know if it's compatible in ancient Egyptian, but where, what about reincarnation? How does that work with Catholicism? Is it compatible?

• 24:12Speaker 03

  No.

• 24:13AJ Gentile?

  It's not compatible?

• 24:14Speaker 03

  No. Even though there are references in, you can see Hebrew Bible references and so forth, and even in the New Testament, there are things that are like, what, what does that mean, you know? But for, for, no, it's not gonna be compatible though. With Catholicism is, is it an interpretation of the Bible and, you know, the extra biblical texts and so forth that went into influencing the early church. So it's not the only Christian religion. There are Christian denominations in which reincarnation is compatible, but those are different interpretations. But for Catholicism, it's not.

• 24:54AJ Gentile?

  Well, how do you feel personally in your, in comparative studies?

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Okay, so that's, yeah, so as an academic looking at that, you know, there are a lot of things that the denominations hold as tradition and dogma that when you look at, this is why it's important to make this distinction to students, especially when they come in and they have their tradition, they're Jewish or they're Christian, you know, you want to, you don't want to upset their ideas. But you want to present the, you know, what we have over here is religious studies, we're looking at it historically. You know, some of the things that we get from the Hebrew Bible is that it looks like, you know, it's not monotheistic in the beginning, right? And that, you know, there's an idea of other gods and so forth. But that doesn't have to challenge their faith's interpretation, they just have to

• 25:39Speaker 03

  go back and figure it out, like, what does their faith say about this, right? And I think that's why I was interested in religious studies, because I thought, all those challenges, you can't then, for me, it's not okay, like, God gave me a brain, right? I'm supposed to use it. So I'm not gonna say, oh, that, that's not compatible, I'm gonna put it over here and not even think about it. But every once in a while, it creeps in, right?

• 26:01AJ Gentile?

  Sure does.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  What does that mean? And so, yeah, so religious studies allows you to think about those things and, you know, deeply. And what I find is that Catholics in the, you know, a lot of Catholics think about those things.

• 26:13AJ Gentile?

  Of course they do.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:15AJ Gentile?

  I mean, when you read some of the stories about, about children who come back or children who are remembering past lives, I think most of it is bunk, but some of the stories are really compelling. Have you ever read about like James Laniger and some of those other stories?

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I've read so many near-death experience stories, yeah.

• 26:33AJ Gentile?

  And as a Catholic, how do you, do you dismiss it?

• 26:36Speaker 03

  No, no, no, I believe that people have near-death experiences. I have students, you know, throughout the.

• 26:43AJ Gentile?

  What about past life experiences, though?

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so I'm not, I don't know. It seems amazingly compelling, like you say, that, you know, when young children, you know, talk about, you know, their lives and you can corroborate that, there's that Virginia, University of Virginia archive, right? That is there, I forgot the name of the archive, so pardon me for the folks who do, who do that work, there's a bunch of people there who do that work. You should have them on, by the way, that would be really interesting. Yeah, and they could talk about their archive and all the near-death, children's near-death experiences that they have in that archive and that work that they've done.

• 27:25AJ Gentile?

  So there's room in your belief structure to allow for that?

• 27:28Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure, yeah. Yeah, so the thing about me is, you know, if it, if it's data that you can't explain, it's data you can't explain, right? So I'm not going to dismiss it, especially if people are having these experiences.

• 27:43AJ Gentile?

  Of course, especially, and since they're so similar. I mean, I don't consider myself very religious, although I'm, I'm moving more that way, I think a lot of people are. But I've said very often that, you know, after I die, if Jesus is there, the first thing I'll tell him is, thank God.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:58AJ Gentile?

  Right?

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:00AJ Gentile?

  So I'm, I'm open to it.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 28:02AJ Gentile?

  You know, I just like, I like, I like data.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right, that's right, me too.

• 28:06AJ Gentile?

  But as you get, as you get older, you start to become a little more open-minded about what comes next.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  It does happen, yeah.

• 28:12AJ Gentile?

  And how do you feel about that? Do you, you worry about your mortality?

• 28:17Speaker 03

  I don't worry about it, but I do feel this way about it. I feel that, first of all, I'm, I kind of feel like Socrates. That, you know, this is what he's, well, he sadly had to kill himself. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that.

• 28:29AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  But, you know, Athens wanted him to take hemlock.

• 28:33AJ Gentile?

  Right, and he chose it.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  He did, because he didn't have to.

• 28:36AJ Gentile?

  He didn't have to.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, but he, this is what he said to his friends who were upset with him. Um, he said, "Look, I've led a life that I examined and I, I feel good about. So if I die and there's an afterlife, I'll be hanging out with people I like." Right? And he goes, "I'll have great conversations with them. If I don't, if there's nothing, then it'll be like the best sleep I've ever had."

• 29:00AJ Gentile?

  You're not gonna care.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So like, wife read about it. Um, but I, what I do feel is that I am happy that I am alive so that I can do things I think I should do. Like, the things I think I should do, I have kids, I'm gonna make sure that they're set up all right, you know, that's my, I feel that I need to do that. I have students, I feel like I have an obligation to my students to do the best I can for them and to help them learn the things they need to know. And even to help the ones that I'm in direct contact with do well, you know, outside when they're done, right, kind of postgraduate. So I have these things that I feel like I'm, I should do. And, um, I'm glad I'm alive so I could do that.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  And, um, you know, maybe I want to be able to, if I'm, if I know when I'm gonna die, you know, if I'm like really old and I say, "Okay, it's gonna happen any day now." And I feel okay about that, like Socrates, right?

• 29:57AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I, I don't feel that way yet. So I feel like I, I, I'm not, seriously, so, you know, being transparent.

• 30:05AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Um, I would like to have more time to do, to do as much as I can to, like, to get to the point, and I'm not in any way that I like selfish, like I want to feel good about what I've done in my life. I mean, that's not really that selfish. Uh, the things I want to do aren't like, you know, make a mil, a million dollars, make a billion dollars or whatever, you know? That's great for the people who want to do that, but I, I guess I'm people oriented.

• 30:30AJ Gentile?

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• 31:14AJ Gentile?

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• 31:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, amazing. I can't believe that.

• 31:56AJ Gentile?

  It hasn't been two weeks yet.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  No, it hasn't. Yeah, I feel really shocked.

• 32:01AJ Gentile?

  Do your students know how, how like famous you are?

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Um, I don't think so. I mean, some of them do, but so, I'm not famous, okay? But they're, but when they like, you know, some of them are really happy about what I do. Some of them send me notes and say, "Wow, cool, I saw you on this podcast." They're gonna say that after this podcast. Um, so my kids love this podcast. And, uh, yeah, so that's kind of cool. I do like that.

• 32:29AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, and being well-known doesn't have to be a bad thing, because these are ideas that more people should hear, even if you don't agree with them.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I believe that. Yeah.

• 32:41AJ Gentile?

  So you're on an assignment translating Latin and Hollywood calls, and it's The Conjuring.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah.

• 32:49AJ Gentile?

  What happened there?

• 32:50Speaker 03

  That was so, that was great. I loved that. Okay, so this happened in 2011. And I'm doing all my normal work, right? Just kind of like doing the professor stuff. And, um, and I get a phone call. And we, by the way, Wilmington, North Carolina, we have movies. It's called like Hollywood East. So we have like big movie studios and so forth. A lot of things get filmed there. And so I get a, a phone call and, uh, one of the people, they, they got a phone call and they said, "We need someone who does Latin." And, and I was like, "Latin?" I'm like, "My Latin's horrible." I go, "But, uh, most likely it's gonna be an exorcism movie, a movie about exorcism."

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Because why else are they gonna want some, somebody helping with their Latin? So I said, "Well, I'll go." Well, oh no, actually what I said was, "We do have a person who's, who does Latin." And I said, "You should talk to her first." She didn't want anything to do with it. She said, "No, I'm not interested. I'm way too busy." And I was like, "Okay, I'll do it." So I go out to the studio and it's, um,

• 33:53AJ Gentile?

  Up to LA?

• 33:54Speaker 03

  No, it's actually in Wilmington.

• 33:55AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  They're filming in Wilmington. And they let me in and I meet Chad Hayes and Kerry Hayes. And they're these, the screenwriters. And they bring me back and I see James Wan on set. And the note, the reason I know about him is because my husband really likes his movies. And so I'm like, "James Wan?" You know, like, "I don't see him." You know, kind of like, and then I see some of the famous people that are on set, and Vera Farmiga and so forth. And I was like, "Okay, this is gonna be a cool movie." And they tell me what it's about. And, um, I could help them because they were trans, they were, they were translating the Latin rite, which is an exorcism prayer, which is the exorcism prayer. And, but they were translating the, the instructions.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  They weren't actually translating, yeah, so I said, "At least I know this much." Like, my Latin's terrible, but at least I know that much. And, uh, so, so they brought me on to help them. And I had a really fun time doing that. And I still know those guys and I still work with them.

• 34:55AJ Gentile?

  That's funny. Did, did you consult on any of their movies?

• 34:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I consulted on a bunch of movies.

• 35:01AJ Gentile?

  And Netflix?

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did a, a series that was nominated for an Emmy. Um, and it's an ambulance series, which, uh, is great. And it's about encounters, which is strangely the name of my book. Um, that was an accident. But my book comes out and then their, their documentary comes out and it's about UFOs. And so, um, that was fun to work on. Yeah, so I've been doing that. I'm doing that now. I can't say what I'm doing.

• 35:27AJ Gentile?

  Oh, you can't?

• 35:28Speaker 03

  No, but, um, but when, when it does happen, I'll tell you about it.

• 35:33AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  But it's really exciting.

• 35:35AJ Gentile?

  I bet it is. All right, more about death. I want to know about cosmism and, and Fedorov.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Fedorov, right, okay.

• 35:43AJ Gentile?

  That's, that sounded like a wild theory to me.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so, um, you're talking about a, a movement in Russia that is called the Russian Cosmist Movement. And the Cosmos Movement was a movement started by Nikolai Fedorov, uh, but also Konstantin Chikovsky was part of it. So he's the guy who did the rocket technology for Russia, right? So Fedorov was this guy who was a librarian and, uh, you know, really just totally into what he was, like his books and thinking about, like, writing science fiction and thinking about getting, you know, hu, like the next iteration of human beings.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  They were gonna be close to being like angels, basically. They were gonna take the place of fallen angels. Because fallen angels, this is his idea, these are his ideas. And he inspired, uh, all of the, uh, the next generation of rocket technologists, actually. And so it was a, this belief system that incorporated Christianity. Because part of the, the task, so they had a task, a mission, okay? And so he thought, you know, that the next iteration of humanity, what we needed to do is not only become spacefaring, but we also needed to resurrect all the dead.

• 37:10AJ Gentile?

  That, all?

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, all the dead. That would be the good thing to do. That would be, if we could do that, we must do that. And so it became like a moral imperative. And there are, now, there are Russian billionaires who are set on 2040 being the, the time when we'll, we'll be able to do that. When human beings, kind of like, um, the singularity, right? When human beings will be immortal. So this was, so Russian, that's Russian cosmism. And it happened between 1880 to the early 20th century.

• 37:43AJ Gentile?

  Well, how did Fedorov think that that was gonna happen? What would the technology be?

• 37:48Speaker 03

  Well, he didn't know, actually.

• 37:49AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  Or else he would have done it.

• 37:51AJ Gentile?

  He would have done it.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Oh, 100%. He was bent on doing this.

• 37:55AJ Gentile?

  How do you resurrect someone who's been dead for a thousand years or 2,000?

• 37:59Speaker 03

  I mean, how do, think about it though, AJ, like, how do we make it into space? You know, so those kinds of things that we think are like back in the day, they thought the space travel was for nutty people back in the day.

• 38:14AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  You know, people thought that they were crazy. And, um, but now we're doing it, right? Even airplanes, like they're like, even electricity, you know, all of these things. Now we can do these things. So he thought, and by the way, this is a, this is a really interesting idea that if we can think it, we can do it. Okay. And I realized that a lot of the history of our country and Russia has these people in them who are like thinking on the very edge and, and they don't doubt that we are going to do this. Okay. And it's kind of interesting because then it looks like it's happening. This is happening, that's happening. Right? Obviously resurrecting the dead isn't happening, but this is what, this was their moral, they believed that this was a moral thing to do.

• 38:58AJ Gentile?

  Well, if we start resurrecting the dead and things start to track like first Thessalonians.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  I know. Yeah.

• 39:04AJ Gentile?

  I don't know. Is that a good thing?

• 39:06Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, that's the thing. It's like always, you know, who brought up the idea of it's the Jurassic Park kind of ethical dilemma, right?

• 39:17AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  It, should we do it? Well, we could do it, but should we do it?

• 39:22AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  Right. With technology, uh, was, uh, Mary Shelley.

• 39:25AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Frankenstein. So she wrote Frankenstein in the 1800s. She was only 18 when she did that, by the way. And that was her idea was that, is this really a good idea because we can do it? Like, you know, Frankenstein is the, um, scientist who basically resurrects, takes these bodies, puts it together, uses a little bit of like techno electricity and boom, there's this monster. Um, and it's a monster. It's not like, you know, I mean, we could call it a good monster or a complicated monster. Right?

• 39:59AJ Gentile?

  Complicated.

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Complicated. But, you know, she's basically putting the ethical dilemma out there.

• 40:05AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, she did.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:07AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that, I mean, I wonder does, is Federov a contemporary of Jules Verne at that time?

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Is that, okay, Jules Verne is gonna be, uh, is that 1880s?

• 40:21AJ Gentile?

  I think it's a, it's gotta be close. I'm just, I'm just wondering because, because Jules Verne kind of made all sci, I mean, he was basically hard sci-fi.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:32AJ Gentile?

  A lot of that stuff has happened.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  I know. I know. I think so, actually. So the Russian version of, you know, cause there, cause there are a lot that, the people who were really intelligent were hanging out with each other.

• 40:45AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Like the Americans and the, the Russians, you know, and they had their communities that they were mutually, you know, discussing these kinds of things. Um, maybe it's hard to say. He, I mean, if Jules Verne was writing at that point, I would have to assume that Federov knew.

• 41:04AJ Gentile?

  Sure. I mean, cause everybody did.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. So of course he's going to, and plus he's into sci-fi.

• 41:09AJ Gentile?

  Right, right. That's right.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  See, this is how, this, this is exactly how academics think. They're like, they're like, you know, even if they can't like, uh, you know, give the resources, evidence, they're like, this person had to have been influenced by this person.

• 41:27AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  But we can't prove it. Yeah, but they were.

• 41:30AJ Gentile?

  But they must have been.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 41:33AJ Gentile?

  Um, yeah, who isn't influenced by Michael Crichton or, you know, Christopher Nolan? Everybody knows who they are and their, their stories.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 41:42AJ Gentile?

  Um, it's interesting that whether it's Russia or America, the rocket scientists are always involved in the esoteric and all these weird things.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:51AJ Gentile?

  Is this an accident?

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Okay. Is this an accident? So that's a good question. Uh, I was surprised when I found out that this was the case. So when I moved from Catholic history into looking at UFOs, I decided the first thing I needed to do was look at the space, the history of the space program. So I started to read everything I could and I also realized I had to read about the Russian space program too, because each of those were the viable programs that got us actually off earth, right? And what I found was that at the basis of those were the scientists who were into the esoteric, right? Um, maybe the Christian esoteric on the Russian side and then the occult esoteric on our side.

• 42:33AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Um, and the thing is, is that, so I had friends at this point who were in the space force and were, you know, it wasn't called the space force then, and were like, look, if you need to go to the air force archive, just let me know. And I'm like, yeah, of course I do, I do. You know, it's in LA, this and that. And he's like, I, I can get you in there. And so they were like, yeah, no problem. You have a friend who's an academic writing about the history of space, you know? At, at that point, I had given a conference, I had given some information, like a belief system of UFOs and they could Google that and find out. As soon as they figured that out, they were like, nope, she can't come.

• 43:10AJ Gentile?

  Oh, really?

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:14AJ Gentile?

  I'm not surprised.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  And there were a lot of things though, that, so I went over everything I could that was digitized, right? About the American, that they released. And their historians were really trans, uh, transparent. They were like, a lot of this history has to be written by future historians because it's still classified and we can't write it. And I was like, wow, at least they're honest.

• 43:38AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. Uh, um, take us to the Vatican archives. I mean, I, I still call them the secret archives, but I, I know the apostolic archives. Yeah. How many times did you go there?

• 43:49Speaker 03

  Um, so I went there for two weeks once.

• 43:53AJ Gentile?

  To the archives?

• 43:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. The archives and the, the library, the archives, the secreto archives and the observatory archives.

• 44:04AJ Gentile?

  So how did that all start?

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, it was again, it's wonderful things often happen truly by accident.

• 44:12AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm. They do.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  So, um, I was working, I'm working at my university and I work with a sister there for Catholic students, we kind of do things, but she wants to invite the current director of the Vatican observatory, which is an observatory owned by the Vatican, um, to come talk about what they do there, the space research and so forth for our students and other people who want to come, community members and so forth. So she said, um, can you pick up Brother Guy? He's gonna be at the airport. And, you know, I'm always kind of the go-to person to do all these things. And I'm like, sure, no problem.

• 44:46AJ Gentile?

  You're the, what? You're, you're the airport run?

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, you know, for Sister, you know, Rose, I'll do that, you know?

• 44:52AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  So I'm like, yeah, so I'll go, I go pick him up and I take him to Father Joe's. Father Joe has this really beautiful house next to his church, which is on the ocean. So we take Brother Guy, I take Brother Guy there and they, they invite us to have some sweet tea. We're in the south. So we're on the porch, looking at the ocean, just talking about random stuff. And it occurs to me to ask him about, you know, I'm starting this UFO research and it occurs to me to ask him where in the Vatican, cause I haven't gone yet. Um, I can find some of those books about, you know, space stuff. And so I just ask him, oh, I'm writing something about, you know, belief in the rise of UFOs and so forth. He knows I'm totally academic.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  So he's like, oh, all that stuff that comes into the Vatican actually comes to my archive in the space observatory in Castle Gandolfo. He goes, we have a place you can stay. You're welcome to come for as long as you need to. And I was like, I'll do that.

• 45:48AJ Gentile?

  Yes, you'll do that, of course.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  So I did that, yeah.

• 45:51AJ Gentile?

  So that, but that's the, that's different than the archives, right? The observatory?

• 45:55Speaker 03

  It is, but.

• 45:56AJ Gentile?

  How do you get downstairs?

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. Okay. So the archive itself, it is, okay, so there's the Vatican archive, which in the secret archive.

• 46:05AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  And so the secret just means that it's the Pope's archive. Like he gets to decide, like, you know, all about it and so forth. And so, um, that was cool. So it's, it is, there is a basement area, right? And there are various places to go, um, on site at the Vatican. And that was definitely an interesting place to be.

• 46:27AJ Gentile?

  Well, take us through the day, the first day. What doors did you walk through? Who, the guys with guns, the security?

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Okay. You know about that. Okay. Yeah. So that was really shocking. Um, so I was really.

• 46:38AJ Gentile?

  What was shocking? You didn't think there'd be security there?

• 46:41Speaker 03

  I just didn't, I just didn't realize how scary they would look.

• 46:44AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah. These aren't Swiss guards.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  No, they're not.

• 46:47AJ Gentile?

  These are actual guards.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. They're guards who, yeah, they're like, uh, you know, they look like army guys, like, you know, with everything, they have these big guns and so forth.

• 46:58AJ Gentile?

  The Swiss guards are badass too. They just wear a funny uniform. Those guys are serious.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes, right. So, um, it just so happened, I went there with, um, a person that I knew from the, uh, he was affiliated with our government, working in space force. Okay? And he suggested early on that he'd come with me because he would be able to identify stuff that might be of interest. And since I was doing that research, I thought, okay, that's probably a good idea. So I said, I didn't think he'd be able to get in. All right. So I can take you through that first day.

• 47:30AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  Okay. So we go on two separate flights. Okay? Um, the reason is, is because I have flight anxiety and I really couldn't get on the first flight.

• 47:42AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I just, it's really, I do fly all over the place, but I have flight anxiety. So going to Italy was, you know, scary for me, but I did it. And so, um, but I couldn't get on the first flight. So he went out there and I, I told him how to like try to get into the archives.

• 48:01AJ Gentile?

  What do you do? You just go F it? I can't do it? You go home?

• 48:05Speaker 03

  No.

• 48:06AJ Gentile?

  You're going to the archives.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  It's like a struggle, I'm telling you.

• 48:09AJ Gentile?

  Call a doctor, get some Xanax, get on there.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  No, that doesn't even help.

• 48:13AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  I know. It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad.

• 48:17AJ Gentile?

  I don't really like to fly either, but I mean, I'll go, if the Vatican calls, I'm there.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  Well, yes. So I did go.

• 48:23AJ Gentile?

  So the next day you made it?

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 48:25AJ Gentile?

  Okay. Of course you made it.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  I knew I had to go.

• 48:28AJ Gentile?

  You have to.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  You know, it's, it's not like, okay. It's not so easy. All right.

• 48:32AJ Gentile?

  It's not. It's not.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  All right. So, so he gets there first. And he's like, doesn't know what to do. He can't get in because it's hard to get in. You have to have a PhD in Catholic studies or something like that. And you have to have a need to know, right? You have to have legitimate reason to go and get in.

• 48:53AJ Gentile?

  And for people who don't know, you can't just go there and browse like the Dewey Desma system. You need to say, this is what I want to see.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Yes, way beforehand because it might be something that they have, you know, there are miles and miles of.

• 49:06AJ Gentile?

  Fifty-three miles.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  That's right, of archival material. So they need to know so they could go find it. Okay. And so there's all that. And so there's the library, which sometimes people can get into. But this is not that. This is not the library. This is the archive. There are, by the way, there are books written about how to study at the archive. So books written about it.

• 49:29AJ Gentile?

  I could, yeah, I think you would need that.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I read those books and I also got in touch with the authors. And I was like, I'm going here. Things probably have changed. And every, all the correspondence, I had to use Google Translate because it was all in Italian. You know, so, all right. So, um, anyway, so the person is Tyler. That's a pseudonym.

• 49:51AJ Gentile?

  Are we not naming him yet? Because we know who that is.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  I know, but listen, I can't name him because I, in my field, it's an ethical imperative.

• 50:00AJ Gentile?

  Fair enough.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 50:01AJ Gentile?

  I've talked about it on this show. For the people who are upset, they can go listen to the show. We talk about him.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  Okay. So Tyler's going and he's there already. And good things happen to that guy. And, you know, and so he meets an insider. He meets this American priest there who's an insider, takes a liking to him and says, I'll help you whatever you need. I'll help you. And so he's like, well, he can't help him get into the archive, right? So, um, but he can help him with anything else. And, but he does get in and the reason he gets in, so as I'm traveling on the plane, I'm going, you know, and we're texting back and forth. And he goes, what, can I just show them my credentials? Because he's got special credentials, right?

• 50:45AJ Gentile?

  You weren't in airplane mode? You're gonna crash the plane?

• 50:48Speaker 03

  No, I was in airplane mode, but you can still, certain, certain plane flights allow you to be.

• 50:53AJ Gentile?

  I'm only teasing you.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, I wouldn't do that. My goodness, I'm on the plane. Okay. So, uh, yeah, so it's Wi-Fi that allows you to text. That is, you know, whatever it is. So I'm texting him and he says that he wants to show his credentials. And I'm thinking, that's a bad idea because I, it would be like the Air Force thing. They'll like kick us out, you know, if they know anything about UFOs or anything like that. You know, um, and I said, I was there to do research, which I was there to do about these saints that are bi locating saints and flying saints and so forth, right? And look at their records and so forth. All right. So, um, so he's trying to get in and finally he can't get in. It's like two hours later. And so he, he asked and I said, just show them whatever you need to show them.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  See if it works, like last ditch effort. And apparently it worked. Okay. His face came up on their screen and they were like, you're in? And I was like, wow, that's incredible. He knew that he would be able to get in. He was just waiting for me to give him the okay. So, um, so he was in and then I finally got there, met him and met the father who would take us in. Now, I would not go anywhere in the Vatican without this father because of these guys, these, um, you know, guys with the guns and so forth. Uh, because if you're not, and I'm not looking like I'm a part of the Vatican. Mostly they're guys and they're all wearing black. And, you know, they look a certain way and I'm not looking like that. And so I'm easily identified.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  And so there was a point when the father was not near me and the mean guys were like, get out of here, you know, they're gonna escort me out. And the father comes back and says, no, no, she's with me. And they let me go. So every, all after that, I'm like, almost hanging on. You know, like following him around. But in the archive, um, he didn't come with me. So I was able to go, I'm a researcher. So, uh, they take you in, they, there's a rickety elevator that's kind of scary. You're hoping that you don't get, you know, stuck in it. And it takes you down and then there's a bunch of stairs that you go down. And then there's a beautiful, beautiful room. And you have to ask for what you came for.

• 53:04AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  And they get it and they bring it to you. And you have to wear special gloves and you sit down at your own table that kind of looks like this. And they'll, they're there to help you with anything you need. Um, and then you sit there and you're with the book. You're with the book, the manuscript or whatever it is. And probably there were about 10 people in there and you're not, you shouldn't talk. Okay. Tyler didn't abide by those rules.

• 53:29AJ Gentile?

  He doesn't follow the rules.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  No. And so, um, he did a bunch of things that I was like, stop doing that. You know, uh, but I'm glad he did actually because there were a lot, there was a lot of information that we got from that.

• 53:42AJ Gentile?

  Like what?

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Okay. So, um, part of what we got was information about the candidization record. So part of it was that we were looking into especially Maria of Agreda. So she, this was a saint in the 1500s. Oh gosh, I hope I got it right.

• 54:02AJ Gentile?

  Maria of who?

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Maria of Agreda. So she's a Spanish, yeah. So, um, you might have to fact check, um, because I haven't talked about her in a long time. Maybe, I'm sorry, it might be the 1600s. It most likely is the 1600s.

• 54:15AJ Gentile?

  Let us know in the comments.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  Okay, okay. So anyway, so she is the lady in blue. And we do know about her in the American Southwest. Because in fact, after I came, after I wrote American Cosmic, in which this is described, people from the tribe that had seen her, right, during that time period, you know, they reached out to me and they were like, we want to know about your research, which I thought was really interesting. So she's this woman who was in Spain while the missionaries were here, from Spanish missionaries, evangelizing indigenous people in the American Southwest. Some of them didn't need to be evangelized because they had already been evangelized.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  And the missionaries were like, what? Who was here? And they said, this lady. And they were like, so they had actually, uh, not a photo, obviously, but they had like a drawing of a nun and they showed them the drawing, this lady? And they were like, no, younger, but, but she's wearing the same thing. And so that was weird, right?

• 55:18AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  And so you still see their churches to her now here in the American Southwest and so forth, and all kinds of things and communities that still, uh, hold her in reverence. But she believed that she, I've, I've read her books and her diaries. And she believed that she was traveling over the earth and she could see the spinning earth between, uh, under her on the wings of angels. And she would come down into the American Southwest and teach these people about Jesus and so forth. And then go back.

• 55:50AJ Gentile?

  Where did she travel from?

• 55:51Speaker 03

  She traveled from her cell, she's a nun, in Spain.

• 55:56AJ Gentile?

  Whoa.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:57AJ Gentile?

  So she flies across the planet?

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, she flies across the planet. And her, in her diaries, she discusses everything. She discusses the people that she met, one of whom didn't have like sight in one eye. And this is corroborated by the Spanish missionary, whose name escapes me at the moment, who describes the same guy. Um, anyway, so a lot of people won't believe this story, but this story is so fascinating and fascinated me. So I was there to look at her story. And strangely, it was in the same area that Tyler had taken me to when we went and looked for UFO debris. And so it didn't occur to me until I was actually there in the Vatican.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  And then I thought about it and I was like, she was there. She was in that same area. And I thought it was a strange coincidence. So I, I remember looking at Tyler at the time and I said, do you realize that she was? And he just didn't want to talk about it. He was like, his face got like, his face got, I'm not talking about that. And I was like, okay.

• 57:03AJ Gentile?

  I bet that whole section has very interesting stories in it.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah. So, um, so there is a book that I don't have by her, which by the way, I met a person from the CIA who, who has a copy of that book, which is weird if you think about it.

• 57:21AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, because how, how do you get that? In 1979, inflation was running above 13%. And the Fed was pushing interest rates into double digits, trying to bring it under control. In the middle of all that chaos, silver went from around $6 an ounce to nearly 50 in less than a year. That's the last time inflation, a weakening dollar and heavy industrial demand hit the same metal at once. Back then, it was cars and electronics. Today, it's solar panels, EVs and AI data centers. All silver hungry, all scaling fast. Layer that on top of $39 trillion in debt and a Fed that's missed its inflation target five years in a row. All that lines up with the seventies a little too close for comfort.

• 58:03AJ Gentile?

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• 58:47Speaker 03

  I know, you have to go to Spain and you have to get a copy of it. So, I mean, that, that entails a lot of money, in my opinion.

• 58:56AJ Gentile?

  It sounds like it.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that's a weird story.

• 58:59AJ Gentile?

  In her diary, does she talk about?

• 59:02AJ Gentile?

  Who approaches her to get on? Is there a craft? Is this like a Merkaba?

• 59:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is really interesting. Yeah, it does sound like Merkaba. So Merkaba would be chariot terminology for those who don't know.

• 59:14AJ Gentile?

  These listeners know Ezekiel very well.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  Okay, okay, good. So in my opinion, that's what it looks like. You know, she describes the wings of angels carrying her above the earth. So she's kind of like in the stratosphere or somewhere near, you know, the edge of space and the earth's atmosphere. She's flying across, you know, I guess the Atlantic.

• 59:40AJ Gentile?

  Does she, I mean, is this Uriel? Is this Elijah? Does she name who they are?

• 59:46Speaker 03

  No, the angels?

• 59:47AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 59:49AJ Gentile?

  Because the stories, we see that story a lot.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  You know, it's really interesting. That's right. So it tracks with all the stuff that I've read, and that's why I thought it was so interesting. And the, so, you know, I mean, when historians and when people generally in my field work, there are some great analyses of Maria of Agreda out there. But they're, they're never going to be talking about the paranormal or the kind of extra weird stuff. They, they see it as kind of like a, a story to initiate conversions. That's how they see it, kind of perpetrated by the Catholic Church. I don't really see it that way because once you get into the actual documents, they just

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  don't, it, something just doesn't make sense. Now, I, that doesn't mean that it couldn't be that, because I can't explain why, you know, this kind of thing would happen. But I can say that it tracks with the other world journeys, you know, kind of thing that I study.

• 1:00:51AJ Gentile?

  You were there to see the flying saint. Was that Cupertino?

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, Joseph of Cupertino.

• 1:00:59AJ Gentile?

  What's his story?

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  Okay, so, all right. So Joseph is a saint at the same time as kind of, they're around the same time period in the 1600s.

• 1:01:11AJ Gentile?

  I, I think that's important.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  It is important, yeah.

• 1:01:16AJ Gentile?

  You know, it's almost like the angels are on mission.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does seem like that.

• 1:01:21AJ Gentile?

  And taking people around, like, hey, while we're here, let's go check, let's see what Joseph.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really interesting. So, you know.

• 1:01:29AJ Gentile?

  Because the stories cluster, don't they?

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32AJ Gentile?

  Time, historically?

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's a great book out there called They Flew, which is by Carlos Ayer, who's an academic at Yale, and.

• 1:01:44AJ Gentile?

  That's a good archive.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so he, his book talks about the worldview of that time period, of Joseph's time period. But he didn't have access to Joseph's trial record, which I actually strangely have. We got that translated, because I don't translate 17th century Latin and Italian, which is what this big archive is made from, is written in. And the first thing you notice, first of all, it's huge. It's like, if you were to print it out, it'd probably be, like, the Vatican sent me the printed out one, by the way. And it was like, I don't know, four feet, like, just.

• 1:02:24AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it was crazy. I, I have it. And I also have the digitized version.

• 1:02:29AJ Gentile?

  Wait, you have the original one?

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  No, no, not the original one. No, they digitized it.

• 1:02:34AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  And gave it to me. To translate, to get it translated. And so I had to get a team to do that, because I couldn't do it. And it was a team, because not one person could do that. So it's, it's an incredible document, because it talks about not just his, first of all, the document itself had, this is during the time period of the Spanish Inquisition.

• 1:02:58AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  And if you said you saw someone levitate, you were under suspicion. Now, so all these people, though, said, oh, no, he levitated, I saw. And, you know, all, whole towns. And so what you see is you see maybe thousands of signatures on this document, the first, like, just kind of corroborating that he did do this and all these people saw it. And not just their signatures, but who they were.

• 1:03:25AJ Gentile?

  That's really sticking your neck out to sign that.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it absolutely is. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:31AJ Gentile?

  So he was levitating. What's his, what's his story? Why did he levitate?

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  Okay, so Joseph is an interesting person, because he's described as a person who's not particularly intelligent. Okay, so he's, these are the descriptions. He wanted to be a priest, but he couldn't hack it, because it was hard. But he became a priest. And how he did that was by pure, just determination of wanting to do it. And so after a while, people, the hierarchy were like, he seems to have a vocation to do this, let's just let him, you know, let's let him in. The problem with him, though, was that he could discern things. And when I say discern things, this is like the Catholic version of, I can read your mind,

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  right? He can discern your soul. And he seemingly could. So if you read through the document, there are so many places where a person will say, I was on my way to church, and I was thinking about this, and when I got there, Father Joseph said this to me, Padre Joseph said this to me, and that was what was in my mind. And I don't know how he could have known that.

• 1:04:42AJ Gentile?

  They burned people for that.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. So a lot of things happened. By the way, Teresa of Avila has some, she's another doctor of the church, who's a sister, who, or a nun, I'm sorry, and she also had levitation experiences.

• 1:04:57AJ Gentile?

  Didn't they censor her story? I know her story.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  There were certain parts of it that they censored, yeah. But, I mean, she had people who were her editors, let's call them editors, not redactors, right, editors. So they edited certain things, yeah.

• 1:05:12AJ Gentile?

  What did, what did Joseph say? Why did he levitate?

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  Okay, so he would levitate when, when he, certain things would initiate his levitation. They would always be ecstatic, he would go into ecstatic trances. And so those kinds of things would be like Mary, the mother of God.

• 1:05:31AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  And so he would just, if something initiated this, he went to church and they were seeing a certain him to her, he would go up into the church. And people would try to hold him down, he would be, he would embarrass the parish priest, you know. So he, the thing is that most of these people did not want to levitate. Even Teresa did not want to levitate.

• 1:05:55AJ Gentile?

  Of course not.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  Because it was like weird, right? You're hanging out, and all of a sudden, you're like, boom, you know, going up and doing these things. And people would try to hold them down. The strange thing is that, now, this is what I find fascinating, is that, because once you read enough of these accounts, you can actually see recurring patterns that are weird. And one of these is this idea of a private gravity. That's Arthur C. Clarke's term, by the way. This, this idea that, and you know who pointed it out to me? This man named Michael Murphy, who's head of this institute called the Esalen Institute. He was very interested in this information, because he noticed that people could do these extraordinary things in sports. He was like, how could they do that? That's superhuman. He goes, Diana, you need to figure this out by looking at the saints.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  And so when a person would touch Joseph, they would fly up with him.

• 1:06:44AJ Gentile?

  Not hanging on?

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  No, no, they would just fly up with him.

• 1:06:49AJ Gentile?

  Because they're in his.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were in some, yeah, they were in a microgravitational universe of sorts, which is weird. But same thing with Teresa. People would try to hold her down, but they would go up with her.

• 1:07:01AJ Gentile?

  Why do you think whoever they is or he is wanted them to levitate?

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  Okay, so the case that I studied, that's the most recent one, where we actually have video and so forth of this, would be, I write about it actually in the others, called, it's a, it's a Marian apparition site in a place in Spain, an autonomous region in Spain called Garabindal. It's San Sebastian, Garabindal. And it's between 1961, I think, and 1964. And these four girls also have these, like, levitation experiences where they also have this kind of same gravitational, I don't know what you call it, space around them. Okay, so you ask about the intelligence behind it.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  That's what you're asking.

• 1:07:54AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  I couldn't, I don't know.

• 1:08:00AJ Gentile?

  Speculate.

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  Okay, speculate. Okay, so what I can ascertain is that these are happening within, this is my field, so it could happen in Buddhism and I just don't know about it. It could happen in Hinduism, I just don't know about it.

• 1:08:13AJ Gentile?

  There are stories of Buddhists levitating?

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So those I don't know about, but I can speak about what the intelligence behind the Catholic cases wants and what they ask for, which is really interesting to me. So they're asking for very ordinary things that people don't do. Fasting once a week. Fasting happens to be super good for you, okay? They want you to fast, okay? Why? They also want you to lead a good life, like not be mean, right? Basically do the Ten Commandments, and the other commandment, treat others like you want to be treated. Basic stuff. Pray, okay? Another thing that you see in every traditional religion, this idea of praying. Why? What's up with the same praying?

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  So that's what I started to focus on, was that what is it about these practices that changes a community, changes a human being? And it does change human beings, actually. So there's so much now on the internet about intermittent fasting and you know what? Well, that's what this Virgin Mary is asking people to do. Intermittent fast for once a week, right?

• 1:09:21AJ Gentile?

  Well, I mean, if you fast long enough and you're deep in prayer or meditation, then that kind of opens up certain channels in your brain to experience different things.

• 1:09:29Speaker 03

  That's right. That's what's going on. So that's what, so she asked the whole community in the 1960s to do this, and they did. They were a community that had no technology. So they had been living in like a medieval lifestyle up until the 60s, okay? So they were in the mountains, they hadn't been touched by television and that kind of thing. They were very Catholic, so they were doing rosaries every day and so forth. So when this happened to the girls of their community, they believed. And it was when these girls had these apparitions, all the people would come out. So there were like 300 people, they would all come out. And this went on for years.

• 1:10:09AJ Gentile?

  For years?

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  Years, yeah, years.

• 1:10:12AJ Gentile?

  It wasn't covered by the media?

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  It was. It's very covered. So in Catholic cultures, a lot of Catholics know about Garibondal. And a lot of Catholics believe in it, people do pilgrimages there. The Church has not approved it, you know, because it takes a long time, for good reason, for the Church to approve things like this. But it's not against, it just says be discerning if you go there, if you do pilgrimage there.

• 1:10:41AJ Gentile?

  At what point did you realize, reading all these accounts, that it sounds a lot like a close encounter?

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, this was shocking. So I'd spent my formative years as, you know, a professor and a grad student and so forth, studying these, right? And being really immersed in studying these kinds of events and contact events and so forth. And, you know, most of that work was done in archives. And I wrote my book, published it, it did well, and I got tenure. And so I had been in archives, what I noticed was that there were instances where people back in the day, like 500 years ago, you know, Catholics in France or something, you know, would see aerial phenomena.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  And they would be shocked, just like people are shocked when they see something and they rule out drone and airplane and that kind of thing, and they're like, what's that? And so they had the same experience. And then they would interpret it. They would say, oh, it must be a soul from purgatory. Maybe we should pray that soul back into purgatory, things like that. So I took note of all those things, not knowing what they were, thinking they were strange. And I thought, hmm, maybe someday I'll study those. But, you know, I had this book to write. And afterwards, after I finished with my book, I was going to be on to writing about this really cool priest in the Carolinas named John England in the 1800s, I was going to write about him. And, but, I never did, and this is why. So I showed that list to a friend of mine.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  And, you know, just randomly, we were having coffee, and I said, you want to see this list I have? And I showed it to him, and I said, what do you make of all that stuff? And he said, this is like, this looks like Spielberg films, these are UFO events. And I was like, I thought it was crazy. You know, I was like, get out of here. So that week though, this is how this stuff works, that week there was a MUFON, like Mutual UFO Network meeting of experiencers in my town, or close to my town. So I went to that, and I saw people talking about their experiences, and I thought, okay, yep, these definitely sound like that.

• 1:13:26AJ Gentile?

  They do.

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  And that's when, that was my first shock. But I still, I didn't believe in UFOs, okay? So that was my first shock, though.

• 1:13:35AJ Gentile?

  So did you get a MUFON just with your arms folded, like, look, these kooks?

• 1:13:38Speaker 03

  No, no. I went to understand, like, what was going on.

• 1:13:44AJ Gentile?

  Because something happens to some of these people, not all of them, but some of them.

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I wasn't going to discount it, but I wasn't going to be a believer. You know, it takes a lot of evidence, right, to make a person a believer in this. So that was shocking, though, when I saw the continuity. Because the historical continuity was what shocked me. And then I was talking about it at American Academy of Religion conferences, right? Of course, they all know about that, like, they're like, yeah, that's a good project, Diana, you should do that.

• 1:14:16AJ Gentile?

  Oh, they didn't try to dissuade you?

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  No, no, people who study religion, they think it's cool. They're used to that. Like, think of what we study, we study angel things, and you know, things that like, aren't supposed to happen. So they thought that it was a good idea. And within religious studies, it's been done many times, right? What made it different, though, was that I started to get correspondence and visits from people who were from aerospace companies and the government. And they were interested in my research, and they were like, we want to see the data that you have. And I thought, why? Why do you want to see the data that I have? And so I showed them, you know? And that's when I realized that our government was actually studying this as believers, not as what my position was.

• 1:15:03AJ Gentile?

  Let's take a break there, we'll come back, we'll talk about what the government wanted you for. All right, so before we get into your recruitment, tell me the story about the Bittersweet.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  The Bittersweet?

• 1:15:18AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  Where my dad had?

• 1:15:19AJ Gentile?

  Yes!

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  Okay, wow, wow, gosh, you've got like some awesome questions here, out of the blue, right? That I would never have anticipated. Okay, so my dad was in the Coast Guard in the 1950s, so he was, you know, high school grad, 18, enlisted in the Coast Guard. And so he became the sonar person, like he learned how to do sonar. And he was, we just more found out about this, by the way, because of Admiral Tim Gallaudet, who is an admiral in, right, the Navy. And so he's doing this really interesting work, where he's going back through the logs

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  of people in the Navy, and people in the Coast Guard, like my dad. And he's basically identifying UFOs in that, you know, or USOs, right? So, you know, UFOs at sea. So this is when I'm a kid, so I'm a kid and I'm really young. Like, I first hear about it probably when I'm like three or four. And my dad is an attorney. So first before that, though, he was, I know it sounds weird, he went to medical school. So he's this educated guy who doesn't-

• 1:16:35AJ Gentile?

  I have friends like that, medical school and law school.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's crazy, yeah. So I guess he just, during medical school, he didn't really want to do that, right? So it seemed kind of depressing to him, so he became a lawyer. And he's a guy who doesn't speak very much, he's like one of those guys who just doesn't talk that much, right? And, but, when he does say something, you pay attention to it, because it's a rare time when dad talks. So I remember growing up, hearing this story probably about three times. And my dad says that he was on the ship he was on, I just learned that he was on two different ships. So the Bittersweet is one of the ships that he was on, and I guess it's like a cutter?

• 1:17:14AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  And the other one was also a cutter, but I don't remember the name of it. So he's on probably the Bittersweet, but I'm not sure. And he's in the waters near like Alaska, and they're looking for probably Russian submarines.

• 1:17:27AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  Okay, so they're doing that work.

• 1:17:29AJ Gentile?

  This is the 50s, yeah.

• 1:17:30Speaker 03

  57, probably, around 57. And- Out of nowhere, he sees on radar something giant in the bottom, at the bottom of the ocean, coming toward the ship.

• 1:17:43AJ Gentile?

  How big?

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  Big, like a football field or something like giant, right? And so he freaks out, right? And as it comes to the ship, he says that a lot of the ships, I guess it was electricity, I'm not sure, but a lot of the ships' functions stopped working, they just stopped. And the ship couldn't, it stopped too. So they had, I guess they put like an anchor down or something, and whatever it was, made the ship stop. And they were stopped for four hours. And they were horrified, like they didn't know if they were going to continue on. They thought it was a Russian submarine.

• 1:18:22AJ Gentile?

  But the biggest one they'd ever heard of.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, they couldn't really imagine what it was, so they just assumed it was a Russian, some kind of Russian ship, some, you know, submersive ship. And then it just left. It just went away, and all functions came back, and then they were able to resume. Now, he never said anything like it was a UFO, he never said anything that it was a USO, you know, he didn't have that terminology. He just said what he saw, he just gave us the data points, right?

• 1:18:54AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:18:55Speaker 03

  And of course, we were all like, what was that? You know, we don't know what that was. And so I remember that. And so then I meet Tim Gallaudet, and I realized that my dad had been one of these people that had seen something at sea. So Tim reached out to me and he said, can you tell me about, you know, about his experience and what ship, anything you know? So my family knows a lot, apparently, so they knew a lot of things, like my mother knew where he was stationed and the ship and everything like that. So we gave that all to Tim, and now he's looking for it.

• 1:19:30AJ Gentile?

  He's looking for it, because there's records of that.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  That's right, that's, he should be able to find it.

• 1:19:35AJ Gentile?

  And didn't like, your brothers remember the story and everybody?

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  Everybody remembered the story, yeah, we all remembered it, because it's like kind of family lore.

• 1:19:43AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, did your dad eventually come around to think it was a USO? No?

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  I don't think so, so my dad died pretty young, but he, he did have experiences, so his father had, had a cabin in the redwoods of California.

• 1:20:03AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's Bigfoot country.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so my dad said that there was a big like crevice or something, some kind of like, you know, and my grandfather would say, now, okay, I'm going to give you another family lore, UFO story, right? But it doesn't, it doesn't start off as a UFO story. So it starts off where my grandfather is, he likes to tell stories, he and my dad are completely different. So my grandfather likes to tell all these stories, right? And we love to hear them. So he apparently told, because I never heard it from my grandfather, I heard it from my dad. So my dad told us that my grandfather used to go hiking in the redwoods, right, in northern

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  California, and in that area of the gorge, and I can ask my brother, by the way, so you can, you know, tell your viewers where it is, he used to see UFOs come out of the mountain, right? And we were like, ah, granddad saw UFOs coming out of the mountain, that's funny, right? Okay, so that's the story. So, years later, one of my brothers becomes sheriff, and then he becomes like a homicide detective, and so he's on this homicide, and it's in that area, okay? And so it's a miner, so it's a miner who, they don't know what happened to him, he

• 1:21:31Speaker 03

  disappeared, they said. And so the people that said this were miners who were on the river, and they had, you know, had a camp. And so they gave the missing report, and they said, we think, you know, something bad happened to him. So it was up to my brother and his team to go looking for him and to find out what they could find, right? And so part of the data that they collected was that this guy was on a mission to go get photos of the UFOs that were coming out of the, and my brother was like, hmm, I've heard that somewhere before. And then he came and told us, he was like, look at this, and I thought that was a really interesting connection.

• 1:22:10AJ Gentile?

  Did he ever find anything?

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 1:22:14AJ Gentile?

  There was a mission? I've heard that story before, about these guys that go into the woods and disappear or something happens, and it turns out they're from the intelligence community and all of that.

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  Isn't that interesting?

• 1:22:26AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it sounds like an extraction, not a missing persons.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29AJ Gentile?

  So, your comparative religious studies, and then what you get a call from aerospace?

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  Yes, it was so weird, yeah, not just from, not just from, there are a few aerospace companies, right? So people from various of these, right?

• 1:22:47AJ Gentile?

  But it's government, it's not, Lockheed doesn't call you?

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  Not to my knowledge.

• 1:22:52AJ Gentile?

  Well, I guess kind of they did, but it's government.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's, well, there are, yeah, it's different aerospace companies, right? And so, honestly, I think that it's really difficult to pinpoint, like, because the credentials are so, you know, what would you call it, slippery?

• 1:23:16AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  When you ask them, you know, what do you do exactly, you know, it's slippery. So, I mean, that's just how they presented themselves. So they were interested in the data, they were interested in the data on angels, and they were interested in the data on the aerial phenomena that I had recorded.

• 1:23:33AJ Gentile?

  That you recorded?

• 1:23:35Speaker 03

  Well, no, I'm sorry, not in a video.

• 1:23:37AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:23:38Speaker 03

  This is old school.

• 1:23:39AJ Gentile?

  Old school, reporting on papers.

• 1:23:40Speaker 03

  That's right, I'm an archivist, you know, I was like, old school, recording this stuff.

• 1:23:45AJ Gentile?

  How did they find out about you?

• 1:23:46Speaker 03

  I think because they must, this is what I believe, and I pretty much have evidence that is true, is that there are certain people from, who are tasked to troll the internet for anyone who's doing any kind of research in this area. And they want that data. So I had been doing really low-key American Academy of Religion talks here and there on the rising belief in UFOs. And linking it to kind of historic, let's compare it to historical contact events with angels, guys, this sounds like a fun thing to do, right? And then they saw that, and so they were like, Diana, you know, so they reached out to me.

• 1:24:30AJ Gentile?

  How did they reach out?

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  First, they just emailed me at my account, my university account.

• 1:24:36AJ Gentile?

  And you didn't believe the email, did you?

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  Well, I wasn't sure.

• 1:24:40AJ Gentile?

  Like, the email's got to be weird, do they want, like, do we want to, we want to talk to you, we want to buy you coffee, or is it more aggressive? Like, we want to interview you here at this day?

• 1:24:50Speaker 03

  Well, okay, so at first it was, first, you have to understand that as a university professor, I would only receive emails from students and faculty, and so when you get an aerospace person saying, you know, and then you're like, you do your due diligence, you check them out, and you're like, is this person real? And then they look real. So you answer them back. They were just asking for my written records. So they wanted to see the data that I used for some of the publications that I did, which by the way, those publications are free on academia, EDU, right?

• 1:25:21AJ Gentile?

  They know that.

• 1:25:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, okay, I guess you're right. So...

• 1:25:25AJ Gentile?

  They want to know what's not in there.

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, they want to know like, what's the data used, and so I'm happy to give that to them.

• 1:25:31AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  Well, because in the beginning, I wasn't quite sure why, I treated them like an academic. So with academics, you show your sources.

• 1:25:39AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:25:40Speaker 03

  That's what we do, we say, I got this information from this source. And then that person looks at it and says, yeah, that's a genuine credible source, we believe you, right? So that's what we do, we share our sources with each other, we don't hide them, right? So it was really shocking to me when I realized that, like, they wanted to see this, but they were looking at it like it was real.

• 1:26:03AJ Gentile?

  What was, what year was this first outreach?

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  This was in like, 2015, 2016.

• 1:26:10AJ Gentile?

  Before Leslie Keane, so...

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's another thing, it was my research was parallel to the government disclosure, pseudo-disclosure, what are we getting? I don't know, but that was not a thing yet. So my research was already well underway, and it was on a track that was parallel to the government's, whatever they were up to, right? And so we kind of crossed over, and that's when I got, the term now is so misused, but I got red-pilled, right, on what was going on with the government. And it was shocking, so I had first been shocked to see the historical continuity

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  between religious events and UFO events, and I thought, okay, seems like something's going on, I don't know what, but let's do some research here. And then to see the government doing it, and I was like, okay, and then to see the extent of what was going on, was very eye-opening. So that was a period of, they call it ontological shock now.

• 1:27:21AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they do.

• 1:27:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I went through that, for like, a year.

• 1:27:26AJ Gentile?

  Did they communicate with you just through email? When would you...

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  No, I started to meet them. And there were a few different types of people, like, depending on where they worked. So, this is around, so I think it was around two, I can't exactly remember the year, maybe it was like, 2013, 2014, where I met Tyler, who is a person who's associated with these kinds of, this kind of work, but worked for the government in various capacities.

• 1:27:57AJ Gentile?

  So this is before the email?

• 1:28:00Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I met him before, before.

• 1:28:02AJ Gentile?

  Well, how did he come across you?

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  Um, he came across, so he did reach out to me and he learned about me through, this is, I think is part of his job, was he trolled the internet, right? Or he had people who did, because he actually probably couldn't. And so he figured out who I was, reached out to me. It took me about a year before I actually met him in person. Because I wasn't, uh, you have to understand, just a super conventional boring professor here, having this conventional boring life. And this kind of stuff with the government weirded me out. I was like, uh, I'm not sure I want to meet anybody like that.

• 1:28:40AJ Gentile?

  Why did he want to meet?

• 1:28:42Speaker 03

  Because, uh, I wasn't quite sure what the motivation for wanting to know all this information was. Like, why? And, um, they were affiliated with like CIA, FBI, and I didn't really want that in my life, still don't. Um, so, yeah, so I just kind of wanted to keep to my lane. I was in my lane and I didn't really want to come out of it. Um, I, I, I intuited danger.

• 1:29:13AJ Gentile?

  I think maybe correctly. So he said, what, let's get coffee, or?

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  Okay, so he wanted to meet, uh, invited me to Cape Canaveral a couple of times, you know, to see a rocket launch and stuff like that.

• 1:29:26AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 1:29:27Speaker 03

  But I declined to go, okay? Even though it sounded cool, right? And then...

• 1:29:34AJ Gentile?

  I mean, that's, that's one, that's an approach, is come down, see a rocket launch.

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40AJ Gentile?

  I'm a cool guy, it's all good.

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, no, I didn't go for it. Um, you know, um, so what happened was that when I did finally meet him, it was, I bring up the American Academy of Religion a lot, I hope that they're okay with that. Um, but this is like a meeting, so I, I would attend these meetings every year. And this one was in Georgia, Atlanta, and he lived near there. And so he, I said, look, if, if you happen to be around, I'm going to be at this conference, maybe we could have coffee. Um, and then he said, yes, I'm going to be there. And so I thought, oh, I better tell my friend Jeff, that I need to meet him with Jeff. Like, I didn't want to meet him by myself.

• 1:30:26AJ Gentile?

  Good call.

• 1:30:27Speaker 03

  Because I wanted somebody else to, to like, get a read on him, right?

• 1:30:31AJ Gentile?

  Is this Jeffrey Kreppel?

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:30:33AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  So, so we did, we met and, um, you know, it was a really funny meeting too, because we were, it was the American Academy of Religion, it's a bunch of religious studies people. They're all kind of like, you know, they're similar, uh, you know, it's kind of like a conference for sci-fi people, or, you know, we have our thing.

• 1:30:55AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:30:55Speaker 03

  You know, you can identify them, but there's many of them, there's like 6,000 of them there. And there, we couldn't find a place to eat. And so, um, he said, well, I'm at, you know, this fancy hotel, and why don't you come and I'll buy you lunch, right? And so he just called and got us a place. And so Jeff was like, wow, that's kind of out of my price range, kind of thing, you know, for me too. And he's like, no, I got the, I cover it, yeah. And so, you know, immediately Jeff liked him. And I was like, come on, Jeff, you know, keep, keep up the, you know, you gotta, you gotta be suspicious here, right? We don't know about this guy.

• 1:31:32AJ Gentile?

  No, he's kind of nice.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, he was taken in by him, yeah. So that was the first meeting.

• 1:31:38AJ Gentile?

  I pictured like an empty restaurant, like, oh, I bought out the whole place for us, it's just us here.

• 1:31:42Speaker 03

  It was kind of like that.

• 1:31:43AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Speaker 03

  And that's when I first realized that he was wearing all kinds of, uh, like, uh, surveillance devices. Like, he was wearing stuff on him that took video and he said, and he said that to us too. So as we were done with lunch, we had a great lunch, we, we were going back to the conference.

• 1:31:59AJ Gentile?

  Wait, what did he wear, like a body cam or something?

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  I don't know, all kinds of stuff, but you couldn't even tell, though. And he said, and we were walking across the street, it was really windy, and he kind of grabbed part, you know, like where maybe one of these devices was. And he's like, oh, well, I'm all decked out with this, you know, this video and stuff. And I'm thinking...

• 1:32:21Speaker 04

  Bonjour, compadre, it's the

• 1:32:25Speaker 04

  How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibes, star level, and amenities, like pools and spas and beachfronts. Wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off.

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  I took notice of that, like, I, I think that's weird, right?

• 1:32:55AJ Gentile?

  He didn't mention that during the lunch? Like, hey, I'm recording all of this.

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  He probably was, like, he seemed to record everything.

• 1:33:01AJ Gentile?

  No, he was.

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. All right, so he was, yeah.

• 1:33:05AJ Gentile?

  Oh, he should, he should disclose that, I don't like that.

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 1:33:09AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  But, well, he did, right?

• 1:33:12AJ Gentile?

  With the wind?

• 1:33:12Speaker 03

  No, I know. I know, so I told Jeff that as we were walking out, uh, and that, you know, he went his way and we went ours. And I said, Jeff, like, didn't you hear what he said? And he was like, no, what'd he say? He's really nice, we should invite him to this conference. And I'm like, oh.

• 1:33:29AJ Gentile?

  Maybe he'll take us out for dinner.

• 1:33:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:32AJ Gentile?

  Um, is that when Tyler invited you for, to go to the desert?

• 1:33:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there was a kind of like this standing invitation to the desert, which again, took me a long time to say yes to.

• 1:33:44AJ Gentile?

  What did he say was out there?

• 1:33:45Speaker 03

  Okay, so he was, he noticed that the way I studied this topic was not from a belief perspective.

• 1:33:52AJ Gentile?

  That's why you're interesting.

• 1:33:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so he wanted me to be a believer. And so he said, and I believe, like, I believe people are having these experiences, isn't that enough? No, he wanted to show me physical proof, right? And of course, at this point, I had read all of Jacques Vallée's work, I know Jacques. You know, I was, and, you know, he was so helpful to me, he was like, I don't believe anything, Diana. You know, he was telling me this all the time, he's like, people will show you a body, do not believe it, right? Jacques, so early on, like 2012. And so I had the Jacques Vallée kind of framework going into this. And so I was like, he's going to show me something, but no way am I going to believe it, right?

• 1:34:37Speaker 03

  So, but I'll go out, but I'll only go out with someone, I'm not going out on my own, right? Seems kind of creepy, really, you know, like, he wanted me to wear, like, this is a legitimate place that he was talking about. He, this, and a place that he excavated, right? With people over many, many, many years. And it was, he, this is what he told me about it. He said it was, and I believe that this is the place that Jacques talks about in Trinity, because it was after he met him and went out there that he wrote Trinity. Uh, but I don't know, I don't know for sure, okay? Um, because a lot, of course, a lot is being said about the place and so forth.

• 1:35:16AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:35:17Speaker 03

  And also I got information from various people that was, that said,

• 1:35:23Speaker 03

  yeah, just don't talk about that place. But how could I not, I wrote about it, it's in my book, so, um... Yeah, so he did take us out to this place that he said was a crash retrieval, you know, UFOs crashed there in the 1940s.

• 1:35:38AJ Gentile?

  Hold on a second.

• 1:35:39Speaker 03

  Oh, okay, sorry.

• 1:35:39AJ Gentile?

  So you get on the plane and where, you land in Albuquerque?

• 1:35:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:43AJ Gentile?

  And when, when did he say, we're going to blindfold you?

• 1:35:47Speaker 03

  Okay, so he described the whole process to, to me, and I decided to bring Gary Nolan with me.

• 1:35:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:35:53Speaker 03

  At the time, Gary, his name was, um, James. His, he's since come out as himself.

• 1:35:58AJ Gentile?

  But you invited Jeff and said no?

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  No, I invited Jeff, yeah, but, um, it was outside of his comfort zone.

• 1:36:06AJ Gentile?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I've read that you won't go into a haunted house, but you'll be blindfolded by a government official to go into the desert? Your line is weird, man.

• 1:36:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right, well, I didn't think anything was haunted out there.

• 1:36:20AJ Gentile?

  You can't blindfold me? Who would be blindfolded? That's crazy.

• 1:36:25Speaker 03

  I didn't think it was that weird.

• 1:36:26AJ Gentile?

  Did he at least give you a heads up, or is this like another recording thing? Like, oh, when we get there, you're going to have to, for security?

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  Oh, no, he gave us a heads up.

• 1:36:36AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:36:36Speaker 03

  Oh, so it wasn't like a surprise, like, here, put this on. I mean, I had to go through like two years of like getting, you know, having my, getting numb to the weirdness of it, right? So two, so he invited me early on.

• 1:36:48AJ Gentile?

  How persistent was he during those years?

• 1:36:51Speaker 03

  Oh, no, he'd just bring it up every once in a while. You know, and say, remember, we could go out here. It's, you know, these people have been out there and, you know, we get, this is, this will make you believe because you'll see evidence for it.

• 1:37:03AJ Gentile?

  Did he tell you what you'd see yet or just evidence?

• 1:37:06Speaker 03

  He said it would be physical material.

• 1:37:09AJ Gentile?

  Okay, so.

• 1:37:11Speaker 03

  And I'm, I mean, I'm clear in my book. I basically say, I don't believe this, but these two guys believe it and they're really smart.

• 1:37:18AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they are. Um, so you're out there with Gary, the, uh, the blindfolds are on. They come off, so you're out in the desert at a crash site.

• 1:37:30Speaker 03

  An alleged crash site.

• 1:37:32AJ Gentile?

  And this is all alleged?

• 1:37:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:34AJ Gentile?

  Um, cause as we were talking about earlier is, I was wondering how you don't know if you're not being used by...

• 1:37:40Speaker 03

  Oh, no, I, I put that in the book.

• 1:37:43AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:37:43Speaker 03

  Because part of what happens to people, I see it happening now, is that they're shown stuff, right? There's a lot of people and they're shown stuff. Now, they haven't read Jacques Vallée. They haven't read the whole history of ufology. You have to do that before you endeavor on any of this or you will be fooled.

• 1:38:01AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  You will be fooled. So I think people hear my story, but they don't read the, they don't actually read what I say. So I honestly am writing an academic book.

• 1:38:12AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:12Speaker 03

  And this is for people who are in academia. And we are talk, you know, I'm talking about this as a rising belief system, but I know that this is a curious rising belief system because there's so much real disinformation in it. So my position is, it's all data. Like if he's trying to disinform me, this is also data about this rising belief system. So I had to completely shift the normal way of doing religious studies. I had to incorporate known, known unknowns, right? I had to incorporate the idea that there, that I'm being actively targeted for disinformation all the time. And this could be that.

• 1:38:57Speaker 03

  Um, but, you know, who do I have? I've got Gary Nolan and he can figure out if this is real or not. He's gonna bring it back to his lab. I've seen his stuff in his lab, I've been to his labs, he's legit.

• 1:39:12AJ Gentile?

  Well, when you're on the site, what did, what, what do you see on the ground? What do you, I mean...

• 1:39:15Speaker 03

  Okay, sure, sure.

• 1:39:16AJ Gentile?

  Is there a UFO under a tarp?

• 1:39:17Speaker 03

  Okay, no, no, listen, listen, okay. So, all right, so we, so we, uh, I introduced Gary to, uh, Tyler. Tyler takes him to that Air Force place, right? And they have some really amazing things there and kind of shows him all this stuff that makes Gary recognize that this guy is hardcore.

• 1:39:37AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39:38Speaker 03

  Like, and Gary's like, okay, you know, he's got, there's scientists there that are better than these scientists, you know, and he's like, okay, what's going on? So he's beginning to see a bigger picture. And so, um...

• 1:39:50AJ Gentile?

  And Gary would know?

• 1:39:51Speaker 03

  He totally would know.

• 1:39:52AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. So then, so good, I'm glad that Gary wants to go and do this with me, cause he's the right guy to do it.

• 1:39:58AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:39:58Speaker 03

  Okay, so we go out there and we take the, you know, we put the blindfolds on and stuff is funny, we make jokes and stuff. And we go for like forty, forty-five minutes. Uh, we could tell it's kind of rocky territory. And once we get there, uh, he's like, okay, you could take your blindfolds off. So we take the blindfolds off and we get out of the car. And by the way, we have to wear like, uh, there were like rattlesnakes out there and so forth. So we have to wear like sunscreen, cause it's high desert, we have to wear these boots. So we're like outfitted out, we look pretty ridiculous, right? So we get out there and I look around because it looks kind of familiar to me.

• 1:40:38Speaker 03

  And, and so he notices that and he says, does this look familiar to you? And I was like, well, yeah, it does. And he goes, that's because it was on the, one of the seasons of the X-Files. And I was like, what? And so that's when it started to make sense to me as a scholar. Cause then I was like, all right, this is like real life, you know, this is what, this, in a lot of ways, religion is like this. There, it starts with kind of like an event that you can't prove, but then it gets reinforced through media. Religion has always been this way. It's been either images you see in church or books or stories. And so I was like, okay, this is ground zero of this new UFO belief, right? And I'm on it right now.

• 1:41:22Speaker 03

  And so then what my job was, was basically to watch these two scientists who were complete believers. And I, Tyler's a believer. He's not, I, honestly, I've known him, I knew him for so long and I got to see parts of his life that were so, um, you can't make up kind of stuff, you know? Like phone calls he'd take and stuff. And I could tell, like, he's totally a believer. Um, and so is Gary. And so they were both, like, so we had metal detectors configured for the area. Um, and so we spent like all day looking for this stuff. Part, there were parts buried under things.

• 1:42:04Speaker 03

  And so we got this stuff that, to me, looked like frog skin, right? And so a bunch of that stuff. And they put it in bags and they labeled it and everything and they, we were gonna take it back with us.

• 1:42:18AJ Gentile?

  You're wondering why it wasn't already collected and taken somewhere?

• 1:42:21Speaker 03

  It had been collected. So the thing is, is that they couldn't get everything. So when we got out there, what, the first thing I noticed was that there was rubble everywhere and it looked like kind of rusty rubble, like red colored. And I didn't know what that was. And Tyler said that this was just disintegrated cans, um, from the 1950s when the government was out there getting everything. And then they wanted to put that down there so people with metal detectors couldn't go out there.

• 1:42:48AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:42:48Speaker 03

  And get this stuff. And this was a, this was actually something that my editor wanted me to take out. So I described it because my editor, she's from Oxford, right? She's a editor, editor with Oxford University Press. And she goes, that doesn't make sense because this is, you're out there in the middle of nowhere. Why would the government put a bunch of cans out there just letting them disintegrate?

• 1:43:12AJ Gentile?

  Is it obvious?

• 1:43:13Speaker 03

  Well, I, I mean, I told her, I said, listen, I don't know, but that's what I saw. I saw this rubble and this was the explanation, explanation that Tyler gave to me.

• 1:43:23AJ Gentile?

  It's countermeasures.

• 1:43:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have to keep that in there.

• 1:43:26AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  As data. And she, she went with that. She, she was so wonderful, by the way. Because, uh, cause I had a lot of weird things to, to describe, right?

• 1:43:36AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:43:37Speaker 03

  And so she was okay with it. Well, no, she wasn't with everything, but she was like, okay, all right, we could keep it in there. And I'm glad we kept it in there.

• 1:43:46AJ Gentile?

  No, that's, I mean, that's, I think it's important to keep that in there.

• 1:43:49Speaker 03

  Totally is.

• 1:43:49AJ Gentile?

  Because it shows an active cover-up.

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  It shows something. Um, I've since had people tell me that it was just something that the government did, but it had nothing to do with UFOs and that was, you know? I've had other people tell me things about what it was. It doesn't matter really because again, from my perspective, from a religious studies perspective, documenting a rise in belief in UFOs, it doesn't matter if it's, if it's really what Tyler believed it was or not. What matters is that's how it fit into his narrative.

• 1:44:19AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  And that's what I was describing.

• 1:44:21AJ Gentile?

  So the frog skin, did it look strange or did it just look like more pieces of metal?

• 1:44:27Speaker 03

  No, it looked strange. It looked like, um, it looked shiny and iridescent.

• 1:44:33AJ Gentile?

  Iridescent.

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  With pebbly stuff on it. I mean, it literally looked like frog skin. A, you know, a frog that has that kind of skin, kind of rough, pebbly skin. Um, I've talked about this in podcasts before and then I've had like, and I've heard that there were endless like discussions with Gary about this. We finally put it to rest on a podcast with Chris, I forgot his, uh, last name, but there's a podcast out there that, where we meet and discuss it.

• 1:45:00AJ Gentile?

  Maybe Chris Ramsey?

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  No, no, um, he's an air, he's a pilot, ex-pilot who's in, uh, Portugal now.

• 1:45:08AJ Gentile?

  Okay. So did Gary ask to take the material or did Tyler offer it?

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  All along, we knew that Gary would be taking the material to study it.

• 1:45:19AJ Gentile?

  What did Gary find?

• 1:45:21Speaker 03

  He found, uh, for that particular material, uh, right now, well, in the beginning, uh, there were stages of what Gary found. Okay.

• 1:45:30AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  So in the very beginning, he found that the isotopic ratios were really crazy. And, and he and Jacques had lots of communication about this, and I was privy to that, some of it at least. And then, uh, later, they were like, uh, like that. When I'd ask him about it, they were like, uh.

• 1:45:50AJ Gentile?

  They didn't want to talk about it?

• 1:45:51Speaker 03

  I don't know. Let's just say, I don't want to say, like, it just was kind of odd, so I just kind of like, okay.

• 1:45:57AJ Gentile?

  Gary is probably obviously available, that certain isotopes won't occur here.

• 1:46:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, and so that's why in the end, like, that's why when I talk about it in the book, I, I quote him, where he says, "This could not have been made in this universe." And I was like, "Are you sure you want to say that?" He's like, "Yeah." And I was like, "Okay."

• 1:46:14AJ Gentile?

  In this universe? On this planet?

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

  Um, well, he's, well, he's since said other things about it. So it's ongoing research, I guess. Okay, I'll just put it, I'll let him talk about that, because I don't want to have any disagreements or anything. I'm just talking about what I put in the book and what I experienced when it happened.

• 1:46:35AJ Gentile?

  And if you get some details wrong, just go read the books, because they're great anyway. Do we, do we get, um, um, like a metallurgical analysis of, of?

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, of course, Tyler already had all this.

• 1:46:47AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, he already knew all of it.

• 1:46:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, no, not all of it. So there were certain things that Gary could provide that he did not have the equipment to figure out.

• 1:46:55AJ Gentile?

  Tyler didn't have the equipment?

• 1:46:56Speaker 03

  Mm-mm.

• 1:46:57AJ Gentile?

  Hmm.

• 1:46:58Speaker 03

  I'm pretty sure that's why he was opening it up, like, to, like, pri- well, let's just say, like, other types of scientists than the kind that he was utilizing to figure out what it was. Because maybe they hit a roadblock. I don't know. This is all speculation.

• 1:47:15AJ Gentile?

  It, of course it is. Do you remember the, the components?

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  No. If I were a scientist, I would remember, but I am not, I am not a scientist, so it doesn't stick in my memory.

• 1:47:26AJ Gentile?

  It's interesting that you talk about a belief system. Was it Young who said how interesting it is to be a part of an emerging belief system?

• 1:47:34Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, that's what he said, yeah. Oh, absolutely, 100%. It's not going away.

• 1:47:39AJ Gentile?

  So who are the apostles, the disciples, who is Pontius Pilate, who are the Romans in this story?

• 1:47:46Speaker 03

  Well, right. So I would say that we all know who the Romans are, right? Who do you think they are? Give me?

• 1:47:56AJ Gentile?

  I don't know, the?

• 1:47:56Speaker 03

  What's, what's Rome?

• 1:47:58AJ Gentile?

  The military industrial complex? Rome is the empire.

• 1:48:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:01AJ Gentile?

  The empire based on old beliefs.

• 1:48:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're still, by the way, in order, certain things stuck, uh, stuck out to me. And this is in order to answer that question. I noticed that in the rocket launches that Tyler would do, like, he's a mission controller, that's one of his jobs. Uh, they would use, uh, on their rockets, they would put up Roman gods and goddesses, and they would utilize, uh, first century Latin. And I was like, because, you know, I would notice that. And so I asked him once, I said, "Why are you utilizing Latin?" He didn't even know it was Latin. He's like, "What?"

• 1:48:40AJ Gentile?

  He didn't?

• 1:48:41Speaker 03

  No. He didn't know it. And I said, "This is, this is not medieval Catholic Latin. This is like first century Latin." And, and so I wanted to know. Um, so that indicates, that's an answer to your question.

• 1:48:56AJ Gentile?

  Well, it is. I mean, if you look at the NRO mission, mission patches.

• 1:48:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, there you go.

• 1:49:01AJ Gentile?

  It's, yeah, it's all Latin and, and, and Roman gods and esotericism.

• 1:49:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:09AJ Gentile?

  Uh, yeah, it is. So who are the disciples?

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

  I think that, I don't know, but I think the disciples would have to be like the experiencers, people like the experiencers today. That's what makes it a different religion, because, a different form of religion, because we have different architecture now that we live within. We live within digital architecture. So a person who sees, uh, you know, UFO or something, will video it, and they'll put it, they'll upload it onto Instagram or something like that, right? And then, you know, you have, you have many disciples. You don't just have like 12, you don't just have this many. You have, I don't know, millions. So it's a different kind of belief system. It's a different kind of religion.

• 1:49:57AJ Gentile?

  It, it is. But it might be compatible with some of the older ones.

• 1:50:01Speaker 03

  Oh, there's a continuity.

• 1:50:02AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06AJ Gentile?

  Let's, I, I know we don't want to get too specific about Tyler. I mean, you, you've basically named him over the years, but that, we're not going to do it today. But I would like to hear about what it's like if you're Tyler trying to go through an airport. How is that different for him than it is for the rest of us?

• 1:50:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he has, um, abilities, right? So he's conferred these abilities, and one of them is that he just is able to go through airports, uh, because of what he does. I don't, I, you know, um, okay, I don't know why, but he, he does have that ability.

• 1:50:40AJ Gentile?

  That idea is magical.

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is for us.

• 1:50:44AJ Gentile?

  It opens doors, yeah.

• 1:50:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, uh, I witnessed this many times, and one of which was when we went back from Albuquerque. So we were, we were in New Mexico at the alleged crash site. Uh, we did the thing we were supposed to do, we got the stuff, and then he told us what was going to happen.

• 1:51:03AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:51:03Speaker 03

  So he said, um, we, first off, I did not want this stuff. I was like, "You take it, Gary. He's going to take it anyway." But he's like, "Okay." So he says, "I'll, I'll put it in my backpack, and I'll put it, you know, wrap it up and everything." And so Tyler says, "It's going to be identified."

• 1:51:19AJ Gentile?

  The alien metal.

• 1:51:21Speaker 03

  It's going to be identified, and they're going to take apart your backpack, and they're going to let you go. But, you know, you're just going to have to go through that, and it'll be all right. And so we were like, you know, Gary and I were actually talking, like, when we were out there, we would kind of confer. And I was like, "Do you think this is disinformation, Gary, and stuff like that? He's got, it could be, yeah." And he goes, "But, you know, I'll be able to find out, right?" And I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, well, okay." So anyway, so the same thing, we're like, "Uh, is this going to happen? I don't know if it's going to happen." And so we get back to the airport, and he goes to the other side. He gets a glass of water, and he sits down, and he's just going to hang out there and wait.

• 1:52:05Speaker 03

  And so Gary and I are both going through, uh, Gary gets identified. But it's not just your normal kind of, it's like some kind of like thing that goes off, like, like an alarm. And so they take him to a room.

• 1:52:23Speaker 03

  And apparently, they do exactly what he said. They take everything out and ask him what he's doing and where he's coming from, you know? And so I get through, I find Tyler, I sit down, and I'm kind of worried about Gary, you know, I'm like nervous.

• 1:52:36AJ Gentile?

  Was Gary nervous?

• 1:52:37Speaker 03

  Gary was super nervous. He was super nervous. So we were, I was nervous, Gary was nervous, but Tyler was not nervous. So Gary gets done, and he's like really shaken up, and he sits down, and I like get something to drink. So he gets something to drink, and he, he kind of describes the situation. And, yeah, so that's, that, anyway, so, yeah, he can get through airports easily.

• 1:52:59AJ Gentile?

  He once asked, um, were you were concerned if you were the Psyop?

• 1:53:05AJ Gentile?

  There, I mean, the reason that's interesting to me is Tyler could have just brought that material through, and nobody would have, he doesn't get searched. You know, he doesn't go through the conveyor belt.

• 1:53:15Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:53:16AJ Gentile?

  He made Gary do it. Why did he do that?

• 1:53:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, let's see, hmm.

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  You think that, I mean, it could be that. So absolutely, it could be.

• 1:53:27AJ Gentile?

  You didn't see Tyler go through a metal detector?

• 1:53:30Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:53:31AJ Gentile?

  He was waiting for you.

• 1:53:32Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:53:33AJ Gentile?

  He goes around the other way.

• 1:53:35Speaker 03

  So they wanted, he wanted the spectacle?

• 1:53:37AJ Gentile?

  Yes, he wanted the spectacle.

• 1:53:38Speaker 03

  Of course, of course, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:40AJ Gentile?

  Any idea why, the purpose of the spectacle?

• 1:53:43Speaker 03

  Well, I, I mean, it could possibly be that, obviously, he wants to, uh, raise, you know, he's interested in having people, because many times I asked him, "Why are, you know, you know that I'm writing a book about this." I mean, so many times I said it, both to him and Gary. And they were like, "Yeah." You know, Gary's okay with it, and he was okay with it too. And so I was like, "Okay," you know, "They're okay with it." And honestly, I thought maybe 10 people would read the book. I didn't think it was going to correspond with this. But, um, correspond with what the government's doing right now.

• 1:54:20Speaker 03

  And so, um, you know, I, well, that's the thing, AJ, is I wrote the book with recognizing that it's, that possibly this is, and I write it in the book, and I say, "Look, this is possibly misinformation." In the first paragraph, I say, "Whatever you read about this is not what it is." Like, the first paragraph, I say, "What you're going to be subjected to in media is not truly what this phenomenon is, is about." Because there's so much misinformation.

• 1:54:52AJ Gentile?

  I want to ask you about that. First, is the spectacle of, so he goes through the metal detector, we've all done that. We've all been stopped, we've all had our bags looked through, but you said an alarm went off that was unusual.

• 1:55:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:06AJ Gentile?

  That spectacle to me is, I want to, it's suspicious.

• 1:55:11Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 1:55:12AJ Gentile?

  It's, it's almost like Tyler saying, "I'm going to prove to you that this is weird. You're going to, the metal's going to go off, you know it's real metal, you're going to hear an alarm you've never heard before."

• 1:55:21Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:55:21AJ Gentile?

  You're going to be taken to a room, you never did that before. And through all of that, it's going to be fine. That's, I mean, that's really selling it.

• 1:55:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you have to understand that that's what he told me he wanted to do.

• 1:55:32AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:55:32Speaker 03

  Was he wanted to convince me that it was real. Well, that won't convince me that it's real.

• 1:55:38AJ Gentile?

  No, but it convinces you that, but Tyler's real, though.

• 1:55:41Speaker 03

  I was already convinced of that. But, yeah, you're right. I mean, it's going to convince the people who read the book.

• 1:55:46AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:55:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, but he is real.

• 1:55:49AJ Gentile?

  He is real.

• 1:55:53AJ Gentile?

  Avard, I mean, I know you hate to name names, so I don't want to put you on the spot. But, but you have written that there is an active disinformation campaign.

• 1:56:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:02AJ Gentile?

  Where do you stand on like Richard Doty?

• 1:56:05Speaker 03

  Well, he's, he's transparent about being an active disinformation campaign.

• 1:56:11AJ Gentile?

  Now, hold on, let me, let me, let me push back on that.

• 1:56:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:56:13AJ Gentile?

  He's, he's transparent that he was active.

• 1:56:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:16AJ Gentile?

  And now he's since come around and said, well, most of what I told Benowitz was true. I was just like, he, he's, he's been muddying the waters now for 50, 60, 50 years.

• 1:56:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:28AJ Gentile?

  Where now he's saying most of it was true and.

• 1:56:31Speaker 03

  I don't know if we can believe what he says, though.

• 1:56:33AJ Gentile?

  That's what I mean, is who do we, who do we believe? So do we have any modern Dotys coming out of, I mean, we have a lot of Air Force Intelligence guys at Congress.

• 1:56:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I think we need to be really, so, okay, listen, people.

• 1:56:48AJ Gentile?

  Are you addressing the folks now?

• 1:56:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:50AJ Gentile?

  Okay, go for it.

• 1:56:51Speaker 03

  I, listen, okay. I've been super clear in my books.

• 1:56:56AJ Gentile?

  You have.

• 1:56:56Speaker 03

  That disinformation, like so is Jacques, by the way, right?

• 1:57:03AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, so it's the 70s.

• 1:57:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. He even calls like one of his books Messengers of Deception, right? So, okay, so the thing about the problem with a government-backed disclosure is that

• 1:57:21Speaker 03

  the problem with it is that first and foremost is that you'll get, so my work is, I always say, is parallel to that development. It was totally autonomous, organically motivated, right? Based on what I saw. And then, once I got, once I recognized that, and this was after 2017, the Leslie Kane, Ralph Blumenthal, and Helene Cooper.

• 1:57:52Speaker 03

  Once, and, and I got phone calls from people, my book was not even published yet. But a group of people associated with

• 1:58:04Speaker 03

  this disclosure effort

• 1:58:07Speaker 03

  really wanted me to, to give them the names of the two scientists in the, the book that hasn't been published yet. I was like, I can't do that. I got, this was something that happened continuously for like three or four weeks.

• 1:58:22AJ Gentile?

  Which book was this?

• 1:58:23Speaker 03

  American Cosmic.

• 1:58:24AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:58:24Speaker 03

  It was before it was published.

• 1:58:25AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  And, no, I'm not gonna do that. Okay, so.

• 1:58:29AJ Gentile?

  How did they know about that?

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  No, that's what I'm saying. Like, I started to get this idea that this was all coming down. And so, um, all right, so in each of my books, I basically say, be careful, look what's happening. But then my work gets appropriated not just by the disclosure advocates, because I'm not, I'm not really a disclosure advocate. I believe this is real and it's happening, but the way it's happening with the government, that's not my story. Okay, and I'm telling people, be careful, but people don't read the book. They, they see me on a podcast, and then it gets edited in certain ways, and people are like, oh, my goodness, you know,

• 1:59:14Speaker 03

  she's a disclosure advocate. And I've also made it pretty clear to the disclosure advocates, many of whom I know and I'm friendly with, that I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna be a part of that press conference, I'm not gonna be a congressional person, I'm not gonna do any of that stuff, right?

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  So, so that's what I'm trying to say here, is that this is good. This is a good time to be able to identify a narrative before it becomes authoritative. That's my position, just exactly what Carl Jung said. But this time, we have the millennial generation, we have our generation, who's already suspicious. We have the millennial generation, and then we have my kids' generation, right? They don't even pay attention to it. They're like, yeah, whatever, aliens exist, you know, okay, you know, tell me something new.

• 2:00:15AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:00:15Speaker 03

  Okay, so they're not buying it. So the people who are buying it, they shouldn't, right? But they're going to, but not, I don't think the majority of people are going to buy it. And so, yeah, it's real, but it's not what, what is, it's, it's just like Christianity, right? So Christianity is really vibrant and amazing in its incipient form. And then it becomes institutionalized and changes, okay? There's the, there's a core that you could get to, but boy, do you have to study to get to it. And boy, do you have to unlearn a lot of stuff in order to get to it, but it's still there.

• 2:00:55Speaker 03

  And it's still in some of the institutional forms of it, but is buried in there. I think the same thing is happening with the, with the UFO narrative that's being spun right now. Because why is it all military stuff? Really?

• 2:01:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:13Speaker 03

  So that was what my second book was about. And that's why, in my second book, I, I went back and talked a lot about indigenous ideas. Of, you know, basically, I went back to the experiencers. And I said, what do they have to say, right? And then, what does history have to say? And then I went back to Plato's allegory of the cave, simulation hypothesis. And I was like, okay, it really looks like this is that. And that's what we have to be careful for.

• 2:01:40AJ Gentile?

  Why does simulation hypothesis play into your warning?

• 2:01:44Speaker 03

  Because, um.

• 2:01:46Speaker 04

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 2:01:50Speaker 04

  How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level, and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts. Wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off.

• 2:02:17Speaker 03

  See, the whole, so the, coming into contact with a very powerful group of people that are of which this new belief system is being advocated, who are advocating for this belief system. When I say very powerful, I'm talking very powerful. So all of the, when I say we're living in a new environment and architecture of digital technology that my kids just take for granted, because they've been born into it, you and I know the difference, okay? And even millennials know the difference, okay? So that architecture now is propaganda, everywhere, everywhere.

• 2:03:00Speaker 03

  Whether we want, and by the way, American Cosmic was a lot about propaganda.

• 2:03:04AJ Gentile?

  It was.

• 2:03:05Speaker 03

  And how we are inundated by this, and whether we like it or not, it's going to influence us. So that's exactly what the allegory of the cave is about, Plato's allegory of the cave. So when I, after American Cosmic was published, there were other people who showed up, who were just as like insider as Tyler, but worked for a different, they were different. And they were, you know, they kind of gave me an insight into the extent of this control. And that was really depressing. I was so depressed.

• 2:03:42AJ Gentile?

  Why? Why is that depressing? You were surprised?

• 2:03:46Speaker 03

  Well, I'd already known about it on an abstract level, that we were, you know, we were, that propaganda kind of, you know, taught us about the food groups and, you know, everything, pretty much, you know, that was propaganda. And we could get out of it by thinking about it, right? We can just use our critical faculties. No, not anymore. Our critical faculties are even being performed now.

• 2:04:08AJ Gentile?

  They are.

• 2:04:08Speaker 03

  You know, seriously. And so just thinking is not a form of resistance anymore. You have got to, so that's when I became very, because it used to be my last kind of holdout. I could teach critical thinking to my kids, to my students, and that will help them in this maze of disinformation that they're gonna live in. No, that's not gonna be the superpower anymore.

• 2:04:32AJ Gentile?

  Let me, um, let's use one of your anecdotes to help people understand this more. Because we talked about the allegory of the cave, and my audience knows what that is. I think you tend to believe that the public is generally still in the cave, right? This is, this is the reality, we're seeing our shadows on the wall.

• 2:04:48Speaker 03

  I'm, okay, yeah, okay. So we could use an anecdote, but I want to say that I think that

• 2:04:56Speaker 03

  I have hope now, because Disclosure Day came out. And nobody bought it.

• 2:05:02AJ Gentile?

  Nobody bought it.

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  And that gives me hope that, oh, and also the, the books that are being sold,

• 2:05:10Speaker 03

  the UFO books in that category, William Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse is one of the top ones. And I'm thinking, you know, because that's, you know, that is basically showing you everything. You know, even if he gets some things wrong, like, you know.

• 2:05:28AJ Gentile?

  He got a lot right?

• 2:05:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, the spirit of it is right. And so that, to me, is hope. When I see that people are actually, they're not buying the government-sponsored books.

• 2:05:40AJ Gentile?

  No, they're not.

• 2:05:41Speaker 03

  And they're going for the stuff that's old but good, right? Like the Bill Cooper thing. Now, if the, if viewers go out and read that, be careful, because there are things that are not entirely factually correct, but the spirit of it is, is right.

• 2:05:57AJ Gentile?

  It is, and a lot of his predictions came true, and

• 2:05:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:00AJ Gentile?

  He said he was gonna be killed by the government, and he kind of was.

• 2:06:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:03AJ Gentile?

  Kind of was.

• 2:06:05Speaker 03

  But you wanted to go to an anecdote.

• 2:06:07AJ Gentile?

  I did. And it may not, it's, your anecdote may not be related to the cave, but it's related to

• 2:06:13AJ Gentile?

  being manipulated by propaganda, but not even really being aware of it, is a story you told about.

• 2:06:20AJ Gentile?

  Talking to parents, maybe it was talking to the sisters, kids on their phones, who were kind of bullying each other on their phones.

• 2:06:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:06:27AJ Gentile?

  Do you remember that story?

• 2:06:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really sad.

• 2:06:29AJ Gentile?

  Please tell it.

• 2:06:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so I'm at a conference and it's a conference for Catholic teachers and Catholic people, parents and so forth. It's at a high school, but a monastery. So, okay, so I'm there and all of us professors and so forth, we give our, you know, talks and so forth. And so I gave a rundown of the developmental stages of the brains of kids. And when, if they receive social media via their phones at certain stages, what this does to their brains, okay?

• 2:07:09Speaker 03

  And so afterwards, there was a break and some teachers came up to me and they were very unhappy. They were like shell shocked. And so one of them said, I really need to talk with you. And I was like, okay. You know, so a bunch of teachers kind of surrounded me and they said, we, we need some help. Like, we need like, you know, this is a conference where a lot of the talks were actually really intellectual and stuff. That wasn't helpful. That wasn't helpful. And so I kind of broke with that and talked to the teachers. And they could, they wanted me to help them. They wanted me to intervene.

• 2:07:51Speaker 03

  And they said, we can't do anything because we have students who are, we have a lot of suicidal students because they're being bullied on social media. And we try to tell their parents, the parents of the kids who are the bullies. And the parents are on social media too. So they don't even see the problem.

• 2:08:09AJ Gentile?

  Well, you said, take away their phones.

• 2:08:10Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:08:11AJ Gentile?

  And they said, we can't do that.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, they can't take away their phones. So a lot of schools will have, they don't have the policy where, you know, the kids have their phones in the classroom.

• 2:08:22AJ Gentile?

  No good.

• 2:08:22Speaker 03

  I think that's terrible. I just can't understand why you would do that. They have their phones 24/7 then, right? Because their parents can't push back because generally they're just trying to make ends meet. You know, so there's no, it's not like I'm blaming anybody, but we definitely need regulation in schools, you know? So, yeah, so that was really a sad, that was really sad to see. And, you know, I don't allow technology in my classroom unless the person needs it for whatever ability they have. And the students, a lot of the students have issues with that. Like, it's really hard for them just to go the 50 minutes or the hour and 15 minutes, just that time to kind of like, it's hard for them to concentrate.

• 2:09:04AJ Gentile?

  No, they can't do it. I mean, the dopamine turns off, so it's like a withdrawal. So it was like, you said, well, what do the parents have to say about it? And the parent, and they said, we talked to the parents, they don't understand.

• 2:09:17Speaker 03

  They do not understand because they're with, they're within the same cave.

• 2:09:22AJ Gentile?

  Right, the millennial parents are in the same cave.

• 2:09:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they, they can't get out of it. They can't even help their kids get out of it.

• 2:09:29AJ Gentile?

  That, so that's kind of what I felt by propaganda is like, if you're, if you're not really studying and looking beyond the mainstream narrative, you, you might be someone to say, I can't be fooled by propaganda. It's like, you don't know if you are or not.

• 2:09:44Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:09:44AJ Gentile?

  Because you're in the cave.

• 2:09:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. And the way, what I showed in American Cosmic and some of my papers are on academia, they're just the straight research that shows this. And it's that when we are subject to this stuff, it goes into our brain. It bypasses our critical faculty of discerning whether it's real or not. We can't even tell anymore, by the way. And so it goes into parts of our brain that then we believe it's real. So we, our bodies act as if it's real. For all intent and purposes, it's real to us.

• 2:10:18AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:10:21AJ Gentile?

  I have, I have faith in the, in the, in Gen Z. I'm a Gen Z fan.

• 2:10:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:26AJ Gentile?

  Millennials, not so much. So I think it's turning around because you're seeing a lot more people going back to religion.

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure. Gen Z, yeah.

• 2:10:35AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, and you're seeing younger parents now saying, I'm not letting my kids have a phone in school.

• 2:10:38Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right.

• 2:10:40AJ Gentile?

  Didn't you have, how about the chess club story is interesting? That's pertinent here.

• 2:10:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so the young student who came about the chess, yeah, okay, this is really very hopeful.

• 2:10:53AJ Gentile?

  It's a touching story.

• 2:10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, you know, I was really, you know, I get upset about this stuff, to tell you the truth. And, and I was, you know, thinking, what could I possibly do to like, get the kids off their phones? Like, what could I do? And I thought, I, I need to create something like a space for them. So I thought maybe chess. My kids play chess, by the way. And so I was like, but that was just a thought I had. Well, a week later, a, a student shows up, asks if he can meet with me in my office hour. And he's not in my major. And he said that he had played my daughter in chess and that she had won him. And so she thought, he thought then that her, her mom's a professor here.

• 2:11:39Speaker 03

  She would be the person to create this chess club at the university. And so this is an incredible young student who created the chess club. All the kids came, we had all these tournaments and they were able to hang out. Not, they know, by the way, this, this group of students, these young people now, they know there's an issue. They, he specifically said, my generation, we can't even be together and talk to each other. We can't do that. And I want to stop that. I want to try to stop that. And so he asked me to help him out with that. And I thought it was a weird coincidence that I had just thought to myself chess. So of course I was all on that.

• 2:12:21Speaker 03

  So now we do have this thriving chess club at my university.

• 2:12:25AJ Gentile?

  No phones there, right?

• 2:12:26Speaker 03

  Well, if they have phones, they're not using them.

• 2:12:29AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:12:29Speaker 03

  They're probably in their pockets. And it fills me with so much hope. And like, I will do it 100%, like, yeah, so.

• 2:12:39AJ Gentile?

  I think you said, if there's a leading candidate for the Antichrist, it would be social media?

• 2:12:44Speaker 03

  I did, yeah. That was in response to Peter Thiel's excellent talk on the Antichrist. So he's been talking about the Antichrist and he's had, you know, you can find this online. So you can, you know, listen to him talk about it.

• 2:13:00AJ Gentile?

  He's on a road tour, he did a road tour at that talk.

• 2:13:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. So he's the Antichrist guy. And I think it's cool because, you know, he's kind of uplifting that conversation, right? He's bringing some credibility to it. He's a, you know, a smart guy who's talking about this, that has been a stigmatized topic. And so of course I took notice. And so I listened to him, I attended a conference that he, where he gave a talk on the Antichrist. And I was thinking, you know, I was really surprised because, you know, he's the, like, he's founder's fund, like, he's the guy who funded the social media.

• 2:13:39AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:13:39Speaker 03

  The biggest social media we have. And so it occurred to me that he's missing something really important. And that is that AI, superpowered social media, but even social, social media without AI, is what is stopping young people from having the capacity to have what we call like this interior life, which is really important because it's actually part of our bodies, part of our physical makeup. All human beings are born with the capacity to have this, this, it's called the spiritual sense, a capacity for this. But we're taking it away. We're making it inaccessible to young people now because when, it changes their brain chemistry.

• 2:14:23Speaker 03

  So they're no longer taught, and by the way, lots of people are not taught this, but we all have this capacity. That's what religion is for. And so I thought, you know, the Antichrist in the Book of Revelation is actually being, there's the false prophet that actually powers the Antichrist. Well, it seems like that something that's powering like the Antichrist would be like this social media because it's eradicating that part of what makes a person spiritual. It's just getting rid of it, right?

• 2:14:53AJ Gentile?

  I think it's doing that physically.

• 2:14:55Speaker 03

  It's physically doing that.

• 2:14:56AJ Gentile?

  Physically destroying your brain.

• 2:14:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So I was surprised that he didn't consider that because he was reading the same, I was reading the same books he was reading. I think it's Howard Benson, and I might get his first name wrong, The Lord of the World, which is about the Antichrist. And so basically, his, he's writing in the early 20th century. And he's talking about what's going to happen when the end times come. And he basically says, what's going to happen is that we're going to have a infrastructure powered by technology that's going to eradicate the knowledge of the spiritual sense. It's going to just get rid of it. You won't even know you have it. And I'm thinking, that's it.

• 2:15:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:15:37Speaker 03

  And so I, I wrote a commentary to kind of, and he and I have had the same, one of the same professors, by the way, which is Rene Girard. So I was not just like, come on, Mr. Thiel, you would have known this. So I kind of pointed it out. And that's like the first chap, two chapters of the others, where I point out that if I were to say that there's an Antichrist, I would say that social media is a contender for that, like powered by AI, because it's eradicating the spiritual sense.

• 2:16:12AJ Gentile?

  I, I tend to agree. There's a few ironies with, with Peter's talk. I think one of his contenders for the Antichrist was an overregulated system.

• 2:16:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:22AJ Gentile?

  And a lack of privacy from the guy who helped found Palantir.

• 2:16:29AJ Gentile?

  It's an interesting irony.

• 2:16:33AJ Gentile?

  So it was like Gerard's work didn't make it into his talk.

• 2:16:38AJ Gentile?

  Was Gerard the one who talked about post-biological?

• 2:16:41Speaker 03

  No, no, that's Stephen Dick, who's a NASA-

• 2:16:44AJ Gentile?

  Stephen Dick, right.

• 2:16:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was a NASA historian for many, many years. And founder of astrobiology, one of the founders, co-founder. Super amazing, intelligent person.

• 2:16:54AJ Gentile?

  Yes. Have you spoken to Peter about your disagreement?

• 2:17:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:17:00AJ Gentile?

  Because you've done a heretic a couple of times, haven't you?

• 2:17:03Speaker 03

  I've been invited a couple of times. I went the one time.

• 2:17:06AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:17:07Speaker 03

  So I have, I've met Peter.

• 2:17:09AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:17:10Speaker 03

  And I did ask him about that, and I asked him about Gerard.

• 2:17:16Speaker 03

  He's a very intelligent person. And very, obviously, he's who he is. I, you know.

• 2:17:25Speaker 03

  But I did ask him about that.

• 2:17:26AJ Gentile?

  And?

• 2:17:29Speaker 03

  Well, he, he's a huge fan of Gerard. But it didn't make an, I haven't read in his, his, on, his posted talks. I haven't read him draw on Gerard and the scapegoat mechanism in his Antichrist talks. He may have, though. He may have integrated that. It just wasn't in the talk that I saw.

• 2:17:52AJ Gentile?

  Okay, well, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, I'd like to talk a little bit more about memetic theory and-

• 2:17:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:17:58AJ Gentile?

  And post-biology, that kind of thing.

• 2:18:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:01AJ Gentile?

  Cool. You're back. Well, let's start. We could start with your questions. You have notes?

• 2:18:05Speaker 03

  Oh, wow, yeah, I do, actually.

• 2:18:06AJ Gentile?

  Okay, all right.

• 2:18:07Speaker 03

  Okay, cool, cool.

• 2:18:08AJ Gentile?

  Take it away.

• 2:18:08Speaker 03

  Okay, all right. I forgot, I can't move this thing up.

• 2:18:12AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:18:12Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:18:13AJ Gentile?

  Well, you kind of, you have to stand.

• 2:18:15Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:18:15AJ Gentile?

  If you want to get closer. It'll drag.

• 2:18:17Speaker 03

  Oh, it's okay. I'm good, I'm good. Okay.

• 2:18:21Speaker 03

  I was very interested in the podcast you did about the man who sees the future.

• 2:18:26AJ Gentile?

  There's a few. Did, so Amadeus de Noc.

• 2:18:29Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right. And what really interested me was not just that he could see the future, but that he described the evolution of a spiritual sense.

• 2:18:40AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:41Speaker 03

  So can you say a bit about that?

• 2:18:43AJ Gentile?

  About what?

• 2:18:44Speaker 03

  About the spiritual sense and what he saw.

• 2:18:47AJ Gentile?

  De Noc, so that story is, George Pahatsis, I think, comes from.

• 2:18:55AJ Gentile?

  Who is a Greek academic.

• 2:18:58AJ Gentile?

  The, so the Amadeus De Noc story's not true. But George's point was there, that mankind is evolving toward a consciousness, sort of a unified consciousness is our next stage of evolution. Is what Pahatsis was getting at. Is that kind of what you mean?

• 2:19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, but he also said that part of the reason we make it and we don't kill ourselves is because of the development of the spiritual sense.

• 2:19:23AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:19:24Speaker 03

  Right. So, which we talked about before the break.

• 2:19:28AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:19:28Speaker 03

  We talked about that and how social media could influence that in a negative way.

• 2:19:33AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:19:34Speaker 03

  So what I did, when, once I was horrified by how we're so conditioned by propaganda and so forth, I decided that to go back to visionary literature of the Catholic tradition. And look at the people who got it right, okay? Who kind of predicted stuff that actually came true. Because I thought that would be really interesting. And it was quite a journey. So this is what The Others is mostly about, is this journey where this idea of the spiritual sense, so your guy, right?

• 2:20:09Speaker 03

  Isn't the only one who describes this. So you can see this also in the literature of this priest named Théard de Chardin. And he lived in the early 20th century. So he was born, I think, in 1880. And so he was actually part of the Russian cosmic scene. So he had a friend, a lot of friends who were Russian. And, and what's really interesting about him is that first, he, he predicted that our time, the early 21st century, would be a time when human beings are going to change. In a way that he described, he believed in evolution. So he was a, his work, by the way, was suppressed, not suppressed, but yeah.

• 2:20:53Speaker 03

  I mean, it was basically the Catholic Church told him not to talk about this stuff. So they liked, he was a paleontologist. So they liked his science, his, his science on, you know, rocks and stuff like that, his geological work. But they didn't want him to talk about what he thought was going to happen, like his visions of what he thought was going to happen.

• 2:21:10AJ Gentile?

  Wasn't he a daily mass guy?

• 2:21:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was a completely very devout Catholic.

• 2:21:15AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:21:15Speaker 03

  So he was really devastated when the Catholic Church told him not to do this.

• 2:21:20AJ Gentile?

  I was going to ask you that. To be admonished by the Church must have been devastating for him.

• 2:21:23Speaker 03

  It was very devastating. And he was really upset about it. And we could talk about that.

• 2:21:27AJ Gentile?

  Please.

• 2:21:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I'll talk about it after I say what he was actually, what he saw. So he was a really devout person, and he always had been from a child, okay? And what's really interesting about him, well, there are so many things that are interesting about him. But one of them is that everything that he wrote about in the early 20th century,

• 2:21:53Speaker 03

  he believed he saw through his spiritual sense. He believed in this physical sense that he had. And he said it was a sense, literally like our senses, like hearing or sight. So you and I can see what's on this table, right? To him, his spiritual sense was that obvious. And I'd been through a lot of his, his work, right? I'd read, like, everything. And what I noticed was that he would use the word astonish only when he was talking about how he was astonished that other people didn't have this sense. So he felt like this sense was, was going to evolve. He thought it was going to evolve, okay? So what was his vision?

• 2:22:35Speaker 03

  So some people have heard of this thing called the newosphere. So the newosphere is something that a lot of people in tech and AI talk about.

• 2:22:45AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:22:46Speaker 03

  It's, it's, I mean, it looks really like the internet and supercharged internet. But this is what he saw. So he was, he went to the war, so he was French. And he went to World War I and he worked on the front. And he helped people who were being, who were injured. He helped bring them to the medical person, okay? So his job was to help get them on the stretcher and then to bring them to... Well, what he saw during this devastating war was, he said he saw humankind's soul. All right? Well, what does that mean, humankind's soul? He said that there was something about the environment of war that was so incredibly charged that

• 2:23:29Speaker 03

  helped him identify, like, through his spiritual sense, humanity's future. And he called it the newosphere, okay? He said humankind is evolving toward what he called like this omega point, this newosphere.

• 2:23:43AJ Gentile?

  Newosphere, so that's like a sphere of thought where all have this, a unified thought?

• 2:23:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:49AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:23:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he saw, he saw humanity merge into, through their basic cognition, like, he called it cerebration. And what it was, was there's the biosphere, right? So this is going to be above the biosphere. And it's going to be a space that humanity is going to connect with each other through, like, a networked mind. It's like a global brain. So he was projecting a mass global brain that human beings were going to be a part of. And we were going to share insights, share art, share entertainment, have economic things happen in this sphere. This is the newosphere. He didn't coin the term, by the way, or he may have coined it.

• 2:24:35Speaker 03

  I actually don't know exactly who coined it. But it was, it was being utilized by Russian cosmists, and he utilized it too. So he described this as the newosphere that people now talk about today. It very much looks like when the internet started to happen, you know, many years ago. I remember looking at it and thinking, this really looks like Théard's idea of the newosphere, you know, taking shape. And now it really looks like that. And so, you know, especially with AI and AI may be, you know, could it be AI even? I don't know. So that's the thing. It's like when you get into these guys who are doing this projection into the 21st century,

• 2:25:15Speaker 03

  it's really interesting to kind of parse out what could it be that they're talking about? It looks very similar to the internet, but it looks even more like aware, self-aware. So that could be a form of like AI perhaps? Or human beings merged with AI? I don't know. But he, he projected that human beings were going to evolve into this. And he was Catholic, so he believed it would be, honestly, he believed that it would be apocalyptic. He thought it was going to either be really good or, or the end of human beings.

• 2:25:46AJ Gentile?

  Apocalyptic really just means to reveal what isn't known, right?

• 2:25:50Speaker 03

  It is, yeah. I'm using it in the sense of not necessarily-

• 2:25:55AJ Gentile?

  Not so great.

• 2:25:55Speaker 03

  It literally means to be revealed, yeah. But people utilize it today to mean like, maybe an apocalyptic event would be like a catastrophic event. So it has, you know, it has that meaning also.

• 2:26:07AJ Gentile?

  Did Théard believe the newosphere, you would retain individuality? Or is it more toward your analysis of like children's end, where it's not so great?

• 2:26:15Speaker 03

  Oh, okay, yeah. So, all right. So The Childhood's End is the book by Arthur C. Clarke, who it looks like was influenced by Théard.

• 2:26:23AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:26:24Speaker 03

  In fact, it looks like a lot of people were influenced by Théard. I know Kurzweil, who wrote about the singularity, talks about Théard as well. But secularizes it. So, you know, he did think, Théard thought that we would retain our individuality, but still be connected. He thought it would be, he actually thought it would be good, right? That's, but there were occasions in his discussions where he also thought it could possibly be bad. But it would be our choice.

• 2:26:55AJ Gentile?

  It would be our choice.

• 2:26:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it would be our choice.

• 2:27:00Speaker 03

  But he was a believer. So listen, what happened to him? Okay, so he couldn't not write about this.

• 2:27:06AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:27:07Speaker 03

  So of course he's writing about it. And these are circulating through, what do they call the kind of precursor to? Okay, like mimeograph, you know? And people are reading it and he's influencing lots and lots of people. He's like, he's a very charismatic thinker and people love him. All right, so he's influencing people. But the Catholic Church is telling him, you know, stop, right? We, we think you're crazy, you know? What you're talking about makes no sense to us. They now like him, by the way, and they've lifted that ban on him. But he did, he was under that for a long time.

• 2:27:42AJ Gentile?

  Why didn't the church like it?

• 2:27:44Speaker 03

  I think part of it was that they were grappling with how to integrate the idea of evolution. Because they're, you know, they're, they believe that God created everything. So.

• 2:27:55AJ Gentile?

  Because this is pre Vatican II, yes?

• 2:27:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is pre Vatican II.

• 2:27:58AJ Gentile?

  But not, but coming close?

• 2:28:00Speaker 03

  No, no, Vatican II is in 1960s.

• 2:28:02AJ Gentile?

  Sixties, but.

• 2:28:03Speaker 03

  So he's writing in the, in the 1920s and 30s.

• 2:28:07AJ Gentile?

  To me, that's pretty close.

• 2:28:08Speaker 03

  Oh, well, he dies in 55, I think.

• 2:28:12AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:28:12Speaker 03

  And one of the things that's really interesting is that he obeyed the Catholic Church, you know? And he, he did, he did, his friends said this. They said that he used to say, if I, God, if I'm right, take me on resurrection day, right? Take me on the day of resurrection, which is Easter Sunday. And he did die on Easter Sunday.

• 2:28:35AJ Gentile?

  He did?

• 2:28:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:38AJ Gentile?

  That's why, that's why I don't talk about what day I'm gonna die. Because that always comes, that always happens. Wasn't your book Encounters gonna be named resurrection? I read that. And, and you had talked to your editors and changed it?

• 2:28:53Speaker 03

  It could be. It sounds like it's something I would do. I can't remember, though.

• 2:28:57AJ Gentile?

  It was something I read, I thought was, thought was interesting.

• 2:29:04AJ Gentile?

  So the church now is okay with, with his theory?

• 2:29:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, because it looks like, you know, something of that sort has happened.

• 2:29:11AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it does.

• 2:29:11Speaker 03

  We do have a global brain of sorts, right? And it looks like it's just gonna ramp up. Where it's gonna go? That's why I think it's interesting to follow the work of these people. So it's not just him. So he influenced other people who tweaked his ideas a bit. One of whom was Marshall McLuhan, who's a, another guy who talks about the spiritual sense. And credits his spiritual sense with his insights into technology and how technology is gonna change humanity.

• 2:29:42AJ Gentile?

  Is McLuhan the, the media guy?

• 2:29:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, the media is the message guy.

• 2:29:46AJ Gentile?

  Oh, so he's the, he's a propaganda guy?

• 2:29:48Speaker 03

  Yes, he's a propaganda guy. Yeah, he's fascinating, really interesting work. Way ahead of his time. You know, he, well, think how ahead of his time Teyard is, right?

• 2:29:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:29:58Speaker 03

  So that's why I say, when you're ahead of your time, you're, you're ahead of your time. No one's gonna know that, right? And so you're gonna be misunderstood and it's a bummer, right? It's a bummer. Boy, I wish that he would know what happened since, since he died.

• 2:30:14AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:30:14Speaker 03

  Teyard, even McLuhan, like McLuhan has some amazing things. So these guys, they're, they're Catholic. And they're looking at the 21st century. Each of them has an idea that human beings are going to shift into something completely different. Teyard thinks it's kind of like a, like a singularity type thing, like a global mind. But he sees it as spiritual. He calls it the Omega Point.

• 2:30:38AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:30:39Speaker 03

  And Marshall McLuhan doesn't really have that idea. But he definitely thinks that it's, it's, well, he's hopeful, right? Being Catholic. But he also is apocalyptic in the sense that it could go wrong, you know? But he's hoping that it doesn't go wrong. But he sees it as technology shifting human perception. And kind of like Socrates said it would, right? So he's Socratic in that way.

• 2:31:06AJ Gentile?

  That's right, right? Whether it's writing or AI.

• 2:31:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Technology is always gonna change us physically.

• 2:31:11AJ Gentile?

  Which, it was one of these thinkers talking about technology who said, the prince of our world will certainly be a great electrical engineer.

• 2:31:22Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah.

• 2:31:24AJ Gentile?

  Forget who it was who said that.

• 2:31:25Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:31:25AJ Gentile?

  Was it McLuhan? It was one of those guys talking about technology. Talk a little bit about Childhood's End and why Arthur C. Clarke went the dark way.

• 2:31:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, that's a good way to put it.

• 2:31:37AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, Others is probably your darkest book, I would think.

• 2:31:41Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 2:31:43AJ Gentile?

  So, I mean, at some point you went from sort of academic documentarian to believer to now you're, now you're a herald. Now you're warning us.

• 2:31:54Speaker 03

  Well, I guess I felt like the other books didn't warn enough. Because people, you know what I mean? I was like, listen, this is, you know, this is going, this is happening.

• 2:32:03AJ Gentile?

  This is happening.

• 2:32:04Speaker 03

  Let's, let's pay attention. Yeah, yeah, this is kind of a scary book. I have to admit it.

• 2:32:09AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it is. So Arthur C. Clarke went dark.

• 2:32:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, he may have always been dark, I don't know. Let's talk about him.

• 2:32:17AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:18Speaker 03

  Let's talk about him. Okay, so Arthur C. Clarke, brilliant guy, right? One of these, okay, so another person who lived in the early 20th century, like throughout the century, died in the 2000s, I think. Like 2007, maybe? Anyway, brilliant.

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• 2:33:55Speaker 03

  Thinker. Started out not just writing about, super interested in space travel. Okay, so he was part of the British Interplanetary, I think it's called Society.

• 2:34:07AJ Gentile?

  The BIS, yeah.

• 2:34:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so those guys were interesting. So in order to do this book, I had to go back and read about those guys. And this is in the early 20th century when space travel is weird.

• 2:34:18AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:34:18Speaker 03

  Okay, people think people who are interested in space travel, they think they're weird. Okay, so now we just think it's cool.

• 2:34:24AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it's pre Sputnik.

• 2:34:26Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah.

• 2:34:26AJ Gentile?

  Childhood's End is pre Sputnik, yeah.

• 2:34:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so Arthur C. Clarke is writing about, like, writing about space travel. And, you know, he's not doing sci fi yet. He's kind of just doing, writing for people, laypeople, like trying to get them to onboard with everyone, we're gonna have a pretty cool future. If we can like just get, you know, spacefaring and this kind of stuff, right? And what he's doing is, it's almost like a laboratory. Like he and the other science fiction people, they're not, they begin to write science fiction. They're writing it with the understanding that what they're writing is gonna happen. Like they're gonna help make it happen by writing about it. It's really interesting. I didn't know that they were so conscious about what, intentional, right? About what they were doing.

• 2:35:13Speaker 03

  So, so I start with him there. In my opinion, he's very influenced by Teyard's work of the global brain and the end of humanity in a way, you know? So he's, so, but he doesn't credit him in Childhood's End. He does talk about him in his later work. Like in the 2000s, he actually writes a lot about Teyard. But he doesn't credit him early. So I can't honestly say that he was influenced by him if he's not crediting him. But how could he not be? Because Childhood's End is about a net, like an overmind, like a global brain. And it's being ushered in by these beings, right? That look really curious.

• 2:35:58AJ Gentile?

  I'm not gonna step on your punchline. I know, I know the reveal in, in the story.

• 2:36:02Speaker 03

  But I don't want to tell people if they haven't read it.

• 2:36:04AJ Gentile?

  You don't, no one's gonna read it.

• 2:36:06Speaker 03

  You think, okay, okay.

• 2:36:06AJ Gentile?

  We have to tell them because it gets into retrocausality, which is so interesting.

• 2:36:10Speaker 03

  It does, it does, yeah. So Clarke was so smart, right? Okay, yeah.

• 2:36:15AJ Gentile?

  He was so smart.

• 2:36:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:16AJ Gentile?

  All right, well, tell, tell the story.

• 2:36:18Speaker 03

  All right, so.

• 2:36:19AJ Gentile?

  We'll start with.

• 2:36:19Speaker 03

  The premise of Childhood's End?

• 2:36:21AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:36:22Speaker 03

  Okay, so the premise is that humans are hanging out, right? And then all of a sudden.

• 2:36:27AJ Gentile?

  Well, we're fighting with each other.

• 2:36:29Speaker 03

  The normal things that humans do.

• 2:36:30AJ Gentile?

  That we do.

• 2:36:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And it's in the future, okay? So is it our time? Our time, you know? Maybe, like, you know, Teyard was, and Marshall McLuhan were, well, Marshall McLuhan was very clear. We're talking like 21st century. This new human, he called it the ultra-human. Teyard called it the, no, Teyard called it the ultra-human. Marshall McLuhan called it the super-terrestrial, right?

• 2:36:59AJ Gentile?

  John Keel called it the ultra-terrestrial.

• 2:37:01Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right. And, but what is Clarke call it? Okay, Clarke calls them humans, but what's gonna happen to them? Okay, so what happens is that all over.

• 2:37:15Speaker 03

  You see in the sky, you see like an alien invasion, right? So these ships come around in the sky and they stay there for a while and freak us out. And people kind of go about their day because you know, what do you do? You know, they're just there, we can't get rid of them. Um, it's scary.

• 2:37:31AJ Gentile?

  But they're not doing anything.

• 2:37:32Speaker 03

  And it's intimidating, right? They're basically saying, we're here.

• 2:37:35AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:37:36Speaker 03

  So it's an intimidating first contact. And then their representative contacts us, but we don't get to see them. They just talk to us and they basically say, we mean to you no harm.

• 2:37:50AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:37:51Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 2:37:52AJ Gentile?

  Cool.

• 2:37:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:37:54AJ Gentile?

  We're here to help.

• 2:37:55Speaker 03

  That's right, we're here to help. Of course, people aren't stupid. So there are a lot of people who are like, no way, this is uncool, we don't like these, these guys. But they're there and they're saying, we're not going to reveal ourselves for 50 years, right? And people are like, why? You know? And so during that 50 years, though, they're utilized, they're there and they're making people aware that they're going to help us and they're going to do these things and you know, they're going to bring some wonderful technologies to us that we could utilize.

• 2:38:22AJ Gentile?

  They eliminate disease, war, poverty, hunger.

• 2:38:25Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:38:26AJ Gentile?

  It's all gone.

• 2:38:27Speaker 03

  And they're very, so Clark makes them very aware and, and they're smart at using propaganda.

• 2:38:34AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:38:35Speaker 03

  So they use propaganda and they say it's the best weapon. They say that's better than any kind of bomb.

• 2:38:43AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:38:44Speaker 03

  It's better than anything. And so they are utilizing it.

• 2:38:46AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, they said, they said that you don't even need much power, it's how you use it.

• 2:38:49Speaker 03

  You just need a radio.

• 2:38:50AJ Gentile?

  Just need a radio.

• 2:38:51Speaker 03

  Because you know, this is being written in the 50s.

• 2:38:52AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:38:53Speaker 03

  So TV isn't ubiquitous yet, so the radio is the thing. So they're utilizing radio to basically get people used to this and then they are going to show themselves. Okay? And this is interesting for various reasons that we've talked about so far in this podcast, okay? One of which, I'll get to.

• 2:39:09AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:39:10Speaker 03

  So what happens is that, um, the main guy, Corellan, right? Is going to show himself. And so he announces it, he goes, I'm going to meet you all finally, you know, now you all are ready to meet me. And so millions of people all over the world are ready for this. So they are going to televise it, you know, hundreds of thousands of people show up and then he shows himself. And he says, well, before he does that, he says, I'd like some children to come to me, right? And so a boy and a girl go, they walk over to him and as soon as they get to where he is and they, nobody sees him yet, the girl and the boy flip up into, like they start to float. So he has this kind of gravity that we've been talking about.

• 2:39:51Speaker 03

  He's got a private gravity and that's what, uh, that's what, uh, Arthur C. Clarke calls it. He said, this being had its own private gravity, right? And so he comes out and he looks exactly like a demon. So he's got horns, he's got scales, he's got, he looks red, you know, he looks like a demon, right?

• 2:40:11AJ Gentile?

  He's got the cloven hooves, the tail.

• 2:40:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:40:13AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:14Speaker 03

  Exactly like what we think of as a demon, the classical demon. And no one, no one is really that upset except for some people who, who fain, right?

• 2:40:25AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:40:26Speaker 03

  You know, but only like one or two people out of like 100,000. So he's already acclimated people against religion because they got rid of religion and they made, they made it seem like it was, um, you know, not rational.

• 2:40:40AJ Gentile?

  You remember in the story, the people into Athens are saying, these are demons and the younger people are saying, you're just old and superstitious.

• 2:40:46Speaker 03

  That's right, archaic.

• 2:40:47AJ Gentile?

  Archaic.

• 2:40:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so then we see that the real thing that's going to happen though is not, he's not going to take them over. Um, he's ushering in this like giant network mind that goes around the galaxy and usurps whole civilizations into it and they become like networked up. And so they're targeting humans, the human children. So the, the grownups are literally the last human beings.

• 2:41:18AJ Gentile?

  The children start to show psychic powers and telepathy.

• 2:41:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, they start to become one mind.

• 2:41:23AJ Gentile?

  And they're speaking as one mind now, right?

• 2:41:25Speaker 03

  They are.

• 2:41:26AJ Gentile?

  Individualities.

• 2:41:27Speaker 03

  They're not just, they speak as one mind and they act as one mind. And if you read it, uh, the descriptions of, of the children, it looks terrible, it looks like they're zombies. They don't keep their, you know, they're not into hygiene, so their hair gets like matted and they have their clothes, like their parents are now afraid of them, right? And so the, the children literally get usurped into this network and those people that, they're the last humans. So that's why it's called Childhood's End.

• 2:41:56AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. Um, I think, didn't they tell, uh, it was Jan, I think is his name, on the way back where they say, whatever you think you're going to see, it's not going to be what you think you're going to see.

• 2:42:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:42:07AJ Gentile?

  And he, and he's like, has to force himself to, he wants to look away but can't because...

• 2:42:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the children are so horrifying to watch.

• 2:42:13AJ Gentile?

  They're worse than corpses.

• 2:42:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. They don't even seem like they have any kind of like, they're like blank.

• 2:42:20AJ Gentile?

  And then what happens? What's the happy ending to that?

• 2:42:23Speaker 03

  Well, it's a bad ending.

• 2:42:25AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:42:26Speaker 03

  So the ending is, is the end of humanity, the end of earth and these beings or what we think is like the, the end of earth. Uh, it could very well just be that earth changes, but humanity is completely gone.

• 2:42:41AJ Gentile?

  Now, the children absorb all the energy from the earth or something like that, right?

• 2:42:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a little, it's a, for me, it's a, I should read it again, but it's, it's the end.

• 2:42:52AJ Gentile?

  It is the end. What I, what I couldn't get from the story was what, what Arthur C. Clarke was trying to convey.

• 2:42:58Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. So this is what I noticed was that in a lot of, not just science fiction, but media that portray this topic of alien, you know, uh, contact with us, uh, often it replaces religion or completely, uh, discredits religion. Now, I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist and say, there's a bunch of these guys are doing this. Maybe that's true, but that's just a fact. So if you look at all of this, if you look at this, if you spend time reading this history, you know, the history of sci-fi and also what we see in the media, even with Star Wars, right?

• 2:43:41Speaker 03

  Um, you see, we see traditional religions that get usurped under this, uh, new form, what I call this new form of religion, which is belief in extraterrestrials, replacing, because the belief in God is superstitious, that's how it's made out to be, whereas the belief in, um, in aliens, of course, that makes perfect sense, right? So that, so there's a, uh, there's, that is happening. You can see it. There's, I'm not making it up, go and read these things, you'll see it. A case in point, like with, uh, Star Wars, The Last Jedi, and then the one before that, I can't remember, The Force Awakens, I think.

• 2:44:23Speaker 03

  In these two movies, you have the very beginning of Western Christianity, which is in, um, you know, not in Rome, but you see it in Ireland, in this place called Skelegmeichel, which is this, these really beautiful rocks off the coast of Ireland. And this is where monks, uh, lived in the 5th century, sick, no, the 500s. So it's pretty early on in Christianity. And they're going to, you know, spread Christianity, but they're, they're at this place, that's the, that's where Luke Skywalker is the, that's where he trains Jedis, that's where Jedis are trained. That's where they filmed, was like the heart of Western Christianity is now the heart of the Jedi religion.

• 2:45:08Speaker 03

  And that is a religion now, by the way. The Jedi religion is a religion.

• 2:45:12AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:45:13Speaker 03

  So, you know, when you see this, you can't unsee this. You start to like, look at the media, you're like, wow, okay, it's happening there too. And this is not anything I'm making up. Do I say it's on purpose? I don't know if it's on purpose, is it? But it's definitely something that's, uh, it's like a snowball effect. It's definitely something that's progressing.

• 2:45:34AJ Gentile?

  Do you think the people, whoever they are in charge, like that analogy, uh, maybe it's not an analogy, that it's becoming a religion? Do you think they want that to be a religion?

• 2:45:45Speaker 03

  I do. Religion is very powerful.

• 2:45:47AJ Gentile?

  I, I mean, I do too.

• 2:45:48Speaker 03

  It's the most powerful thing, you know? Like people in the name of a religion will die for religion.

• 2:45:54AJ Gentile?

  That's, that's true.

• 2:45:55Speaker 03

  It is very powerful. So, um, yeah, I think so.

• 2:45:59AJ Gentile?

  Sure. Create an, don't create a belief, create a whole belief system. But they, they're controlling the system, they're writing the Bible.

• 2:46:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:08AJ Gentile?

  I don't know if that's a great, I don't know if that's great for us.

• 2:46:11Speaker 03

  Um, okay. I'll tell you why I don't think it's great. I have a specific reason. And it has to do with how, when you look at Marshall McLuhan and you look at Teyard's work, they keep the spiritual sense. And in fact, if you read their work, you cannot get away from the fact that the spiritual sense worked in their lives. They see things that we don't see because of their sense, their spiritual sense, they cultivated it and it's a life for them, like seeing and touch and hearing is a life for us. That's absolutely absent in Childhood's End.

• 2:46:48AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:46:49Speaker 03

  Totally absent. In fact, there's a scene in Childhood's End where he basically says that this is the worst part of humans, the spiritual sense, right? So it's a scene with a seance, a seance and, uh, this woman who is the one who's going to have the child, who's going to be absorbed first into the overmind, uh, she's the mother and, uh, she has a cultivated spiritual sense so that the overmind identifies her. And, um, and what happens is that, uh, they're going to definitely like, they're going to, her offspring are going to be the ones that they're going to colonize, right? So they're going to colonize the spiritual sense.

• 2:47:33Speaker 03

  And not just that, but he talks about it in derogatory terms, the spiritual sense is the worst thing in humans, right? This mystical sense that they have. And they kind of think it's disgusting and, and don't like it. So yeah, so it's the spiritual sense that we're seeing again, um, changed, right?

• 2:47:52AJ Gentile?

  Do we all have that spiritual sense?

• 2:47:54Speaker 03

  Everyone is born with it, yeah.

• 2:47:56AJ Gentile?

  We are.

• 2:47:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. All people are. All the religions of the world, if you look at them, they're, they are, the traditional religions, they focus on the cultivation of this sense, like what, how do you cultivate it? Well, uh, you pray, um, you can fast, uh, you live a life that cultivates things called the virtues. And you can see this in all the religious traditions, Buddhism, like, you know, what meditation, what are they doing? They're cultivating this sense, right? And so, uh, all the religious traditions knew about this and cultivated it for the benefit of the social group, all of them.

• 2:48:35Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, we don't want to get rid of that. And that's just, that would be, that would change human beings.

• 2:48:41AJ Gentile?

  Well, this is another argument for social media being the Antichrist is because that's blocking that.

• 2:48:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:48:48AJ Gentile?

  It's interesting that, you know, the, all the, the tech bros are into fasting and meditation and it's all these like monastic rituals that they're doing. I don't even know if they know they're doing that, that you're basically monks.

• 2:48:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. That's right.

• 2:49:03AJ Gentile?

  Who was it who talked about religion being a way to protect us from violence?

• 2:49:07Speaker 03

  Okay, so this is, this is Rene Girard. Rene Girard is a, a French theorist who is contemporary with us. He died only recently, actually. And so, he was an atheist, or agnostic. He wasn't religious at all.

• 2:49:27AJ Gentile?

  At first?

• 2:49:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:49:28AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:49:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so, he went through, uh, reading the traditions of the Bible, actually, reading, um, the Hebrew scriptures, and then the New Testament. And, uh, through that, he recognized that there was a mechanism at work, and that he, this was the mechanism of nonviolence. And he saw this, cause you know, if you do read the Bible, you'll notice that there are like sacrifices of like children and stuff. You're like, oh my goodness, you know? What's up with that, right? Does God require that? And so, what you see though is that the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew scriptures are pushing back against that, pushing back against that. You have Abraham, you know, the pushback against his sacrifice of his

• 2:50:11Speaker 03

  son. And then when you get to...

• 2:50:14AJ Gentile?

  That's right. It might, might have been the first one where a sacrifice is stopped.

• 2:50:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, by an angel, a messenger of God.

• 2:50:21AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:50:22Speaker 03

  And so, so, uh, then, you know, so you have to understand that in history, uh, a lot of cultures, so he, so sacrifices at the basis for a lot of cultures, like, you know, human sacrifice, and then animal sacrifice, and, you know, uh, all right. That said, he sees Christianity as an answer to that type of violence. It's a specific type of violence that he thinks is bad, is really terrible. And if you're the recipient of being bullied, if you're the recipient of, of group violence, of being canceled today, you know, you know that this is a, a bummer experience, okay?

• 2:51:03AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:51:03Speaker 03

  And people seem to enjoy piling on. So there's like an enjoyment that people get from it, which I think is pretty sick, frankly. But, you know, people who do that, shame on you for doing that. Just stop doing that, you know? Life will be better for everyone if you just don't do that kind of thing.

• 2:51:19AJ Gentile?

  I think we've turned a corner on a lot of that. Was, um, was Girard with the, uh, was he the, the one with the scapegoat theory?

• 2:51:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is the, the theory of the scapegoat. So what he came to understand was that this type of violence was, uh, was at the basis of Christianity. And Christianity was the first, uh, so he became Christian because of it, okay? So, long story short, he converted and became a super-Christian. And then, all of his writing was about what he called the scapegoat mechanism, and how it functioned in culture. And he said that most religion, because people feel, um, they'll kill, uh, they're, so his idea was this, was that a society tends to become violent, and they, in order to resolve that violence,

• 2:52:07Speaker 03

  they identify a scapegoat. And then they get rid of the scapegoat, the violence goes away for a while, but then the, the whole cycle repeats again. But they feel really guilty about killing that scapegoat, and that's where religion comes in. So religion comes in as a way to deceive people into thinking it was a necessary, a justified violent act. I was surprised to learn that, you know, Romans didn't consider themselves to be people who sacrificed humans. They looked at like people, other cultures, and they say, those people are horrible because they kill people, like, they sacrifice people. We don't do that. But they did do that.

• 2:52:42AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:52:42Speaker 03

  So the Gladiator Games were literally religious events, right? To their gods and goddesses. That's what, we don't understand that. We're like, those were pretty weird events that they had, right? With the gladiators and so forth. Well, they were religious events, and they would invoke whatever god or goddess, you know, at the time, they were invoking, Roman god or goddess. And they would take people that were vulnerable, like prisoners of war, or gladiators, and they would dress them up as the gods, and then they would kill them. They would reenact their killing. And this, you could see even Aztecs did this, okay? With, I mean, these cultures didn't know each other. So this shows that there's like this template to human sacrifice.

• 2:53:20AJ Gentile?

  Oh, goes on forever. I mean, Hitler did the same thing. Scapegoating is another form of propaganda.

• 2:53:25Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. It's a terrible propaganda. So that's what Girard identified. The basis of human cultures that aren't self-aware are like this. Well, Christianity came along to challenge it, to basically say, this is what he believed. Christianity came along to basically say, stop doing that, right? This is how you cannot do it. Jesus will be the last sacrifice. You won't have to do it anymore, right? And so, it, that's what it became. It, it fought back. That's why it fought back Rome. So, some of the early Christians who fought back were like Perpetua, who was a, a woman from Carthage, 20 years old or so, 21. And she refused. She was, you know, going to be put into the Gladiator

• 2:54:07Speaker 03

  Games, dressed up as Ceres, I think that was the goddess, and she refused. She said, I'm not dressing up. You can kill me, I don't care. I'm dying for Jesus, but I am not going to be dressed up as your goddess. And she refused. And that went around like wildfire because people didn't like Rome. Rome was doing this all over the place, right?

• 2:54:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:54:27Speaker 03

  So they pushed back, and Christianity became a resistance movement to the empire's violence.

• 2:54:32AJ Gentile?

  Well, about what year was Perpetua? Cause we can read her diary from prison.

• 2:54:35Speaker 03

  That's right. Yes, you can. So I think she was like 200, 203?

• 2:54:40AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay. Rome was already quite a mess. So, I, I was wondering if it was first century, if it was after, after the Sack of Jerusalem. This was after the Sack?

• 2:54:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was after that, after that.

• 2:54:52AJ Gentile?

  Her diary is very touching.

• 2:54:54Speaker 03

  It's very sad, yeah.

• 2:54:55AJ Gentile?

  It's very sad.

• 2:54:55Speaker 03

  So she writes, so this is the first document that we have by a Christian woman, um, and she writes about her own impending death. And just as she's just about to go into, to be killed in the game, um, her friends take over and write the diary.

• 2:55:11AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:55:12Speaker 03

  So it's a partial autobiography and partial biography with some, with parts of it that are what we call hagiographic, like, uh, what you'd call poetic license, right?

• 2:55:27Speaker 03

  But it was real. It's actually a fact that she was killed.

• 2:55:30AJ Gentile?

  For sure.

• 2:55:30Speaker 03

  And that her resistance became the Christian resistance, right?

• 2:55:36AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I mean, her diary is very touching. It's short. Everyone should read it. It ends with the word amen.

• 2:55:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55:42AJ Gentile?

  Well, how does mimetic theory work? That was new to me, to learn about that.

• 2:55:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:55:46AJ Gentile?

  And I think it might be, it might be on to something.

• 2:55:48Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. So, this is the idea, um, and this is known by lots and lots of people who research, like, human development and so forth. Uh, he, you know, monkey see, monkey do? Like, human beings mimic, in order to learn, we first mimic, right? In order to learn talk, speech, we mimic and stuff. So it's a kind of a built-in, um, way in which human beings are, right? We're built that way. What happens though is that, um, it, it becomes destructive when we want, when we want something that another person has, and we're willing to kill that person for it, right? And, but we have to understand that the only reason we want what they have is because they want it. So in a sense, we're mimicking their want.

• 2:56:33AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:56:33Speaker 03

  And you can really see this in social media right now.

• 2:56:36AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:56:36Speaker 03

  So the likes, so if you go to, and by the way, a lot of those likes are bots, okay? But that's a scary thing. Like, we can now create the, the scapegoat mechanism and mimetic theory. So this idea that we mimic each other's desires. So, let's take,

• 2:56:56Speaker 03

  you know, let's take a YouTube channel, right? Um, okay, so this YouTube channel has, I don't know, a couple million subscribers, and we're like, that person must, we must listen to that person because they have so many subscribers, right? But what if like most of those subscribers are not real? Um, so that's how it can be generated. So we can have our own tastes generated. Uh, look at, you know, I'm a woman, I'm subject to wanting nice things like purses, nice purses and so forth, right? And I know that. So I'm going along, doing my work and so forth, and ads pop up, Gucci bag, or this and that. And I'm like, I don't want that bag, all right? But then I do want it.

• 2:57:36AJ Gentile?

  But you do want it.

• 2:57:37Speaker 03

  Yes, I do. But what I have to do is I have to wait it out. So I'm being manipulated by everyone else wanting that bag. Wait two years, and that bag will look ridiculous to you, right? It really will. You'll have the bag, you know, like, why did I even buy that bag? It's weird looking, right? And so, your, your desire is cultivated, is generated, is constructed, is created. And it's created through clicks and likes and so forth.

• 2:58:03AJ Gentile?

  My wife has bags that might, more than cars, some of them. What's the matter with you?

• 2:58:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't want to put, I mean, look, men have car, like, you know, everybody has their thing, so I'm not gonna ju-

• 2:58:15AJ Gentile?

  We all have our thing.

• 2:58:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not gonna judge it.

• 2:58:17AJ Gentile?

  I'm not throwing stones.

• 2:58:18Speaker 03

  I'm just being like, yeah, I have, I have the bag, right?

• 2:58:21AJ Gentile?

  No, I'm glad you said that because it's kind of universal. We all kind of do it.

• 2:58:25Speaker 03

  But we have to, we have to understand that we do it.

• 2:58:28AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:58:28Speaker 03

  And when we can understand it, we can, uh, cause you know, and we'll, we will be enslaved by this. If we allow our, just, you know, we're a slave to our desires. But if we can, you can wait out the desire, and that's all it takes. It just takes like three weeks or something.

• 2:58:47AJ Gentile?

  Sure, but most people don't. Don't we need all people to do this for it to work?

• 2:58:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, this, uh, I think we need a critical mass. I don't know if we need all people to do it.

• 2:58:56AJ Gentile?

  Critical mass.

• 2:58:57Speaker 03

  Critical mass, yeah. So Girard then says, how, you know, what do we do? If human beings are wired this way, we're wired to hurt each other, we're wired for violence, you know, what can we possibly do? And that's where he says, that's where you have to examine yourself. That's what Socrates said, the examine life. You must, if you want this world to change, you must change. You must do this. And if you don't, um, you know, if you say, well, no one else is gonna do it, you know, okay, then that's the world we have. That's the world we live in.

• 2:59:28AJ Gentile?

  Oh, we, we all do that. Why should, why should I make that sacrifice? No one else is gonna do it.

• 2:59:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:59:35Speaker 03

  Or just, you know, you could try, you could start trying and then your trying gets into the ability to resist.

• 2:59:42AJ Gentile?

  It's hard to, it's hard to do that. Do you agree with Jacques Vallée about UFO phenomena being subjective and created by our culture and maybe maybe more of a non nuts and bolts phenomenon?

• 2:59:56Speaker 03

  Okay, so Jacques, I don't think he believes that it's created by our culture. I think that he believes this is what, just, you know, from knowing him a bit.

• 3:00:05AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:00:06Speaker 03

  Um, he's, now, he, his idea of what it is possibly could be, or his theory about it changes, right? So I've seen it change.

• 3:00:13AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:00:14Speaker 03

  Um, but he, if he wasn't nuts and bolts, he's way more nuts and bolts now than he used to be, by the way. So he was definitely not nuts and bolts for a long time, but I think he thinks that there's something beyond the projector.

• 3:00:26AJ Gentile?

  Something beyond it.

• 3:00:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, he thinks it's something. Yeah.

• 3:00:30AJ Gentile?

  He's described it as a, as a control system.

• 3:00:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, a control mechanism.

• 3:00:34AJ Gentile?

  Who, who?

• 3:00:35Speaker 03

  And he doesn't know. That's the thing, he wants to find out. But he's, he's, you know, studied it enough to identify its characteristics.

• 3:00:45AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:46Speaker 03

  And that's why he wrote Messengers of Deception. He said, this is kind of a deceptive phenomenon.

• 3:00:50AJ Gentile?

  So speculate, who's behind that and why?

• 3:00:54Speaker 03

  Speculate?

• 3:00:55AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:56Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:00:57AJ Gentile?

  I mean, it was, it was pie plates and nuts and bolts and saucers and now it's orbs.

• 3:01:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:04AJ Gentile?

  And now, who knows what it's gonna be next?

• 3:01:06Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right.

• 3:01:07AJ Gentile?

  I mean, I, you know, I talked to Chris Bledsoe, who you may, you may know, Chris.

• 3:01:12Speaker 03

  I know, I know Chris.

• 3:01:13AJ Gentile?

  He can summon orbs.

• 3:01:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:01:15AJ Gentile?

  And I wouldn't call myself a fanatic believer, I'm a skeptical believer. And I wouldn't think anyone could summon orbs, but I've seen it on video, my brother went out to the yard with him and they summoned orbs. And I asked Chris, I said, can anyone, anyone do this? He said, anyone can do this and nobody should do this. Like, he, he doesn't think it's a good idea. Is he talking to something real?

• 3:01:38Speaker 03

  Um, okay, so, all right, so, yeah, in order to talk about this, I, I, this is another thing that I present in, in the others, is I basically say, now that we know that there is something, like, how do we deal with it?

• 3:01:57AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:01:58Speaker 03

  And I said, I think the history of religions gives us some frameworks for this. Because if these things are deceptive, which it looks like they are, and if you do summon them regularly and they're in your life, your life's gonna be pretty weird. And not in some fun ways, okay? And so if that's the case, then they look like what we've talked about in the religious traditions before, we just have different names for them, or we haven't even named them yet. But what kinds of protocols do those traditions give you to deal with these? Well, in Buddhism, they might, if you meditate a lot, they might come into your life. And you just ignore them, because that's not the goal, that's not the goal. You have a spiritual goal in Buddhist meditation and that's not it. So just ignore it.

• 3:02:43Speaker 03

  All right, so there's that. Um, within, I've talked about this before, in the Catholic tradition, J.D. Vance, you know, I said this publicly, you know, he believes that this phenomenon is what he called, uh, kinda like demons. And I can fill in that, what that means. Um, he's, he's referencing what's called the praetor natural, so it's not supernatural, it's not from God, it's not natural, right? We can agree that it's pretty weird. It's, it's this area, this gray area, that Catholics think the fallen angels fall into, and also angels, like, it's not a God thing, but it's like maybe kinda angelic thing, or, you know, maybe something other than angels, but we probably shouldn't deal with it, we probably shouldn't mess with it. Now, that's why I wouldn't go to, like, Skinwalker Ranch, or, you know, the, the haunted

• 3:03:27Speaker 03

  places, that's why I do not want to summon things. So, um...

• 3:03:33AJ Gentile?

  No hitchhiker effect seems to be a real thing.

• 3:03:35Speaker 03

  It is a real thing, yeah.

• 3:03:36AJ Gentile?

  You mentioned John Alexander, I mean, his wife didn't like him being there at all.

• 3:03:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:03:41AJ Gentile?

  You know, she would wake up and there'd be stuff in the yard.

• 3:03:43Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So, yeah, so if we already have information about that stuff, even from indigenous communities, right?

• 3:03:51AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:03:52Speaker 03

  And they're like, you, what are you doing, you know? Don't summon that.

• 3:03:54AJ Gentile?

  Mm-mm.

• 3:03:55Speaker 03

  Um, you know, I guess my, my question is, we already have information about that. We don't, you know, we should listen to it.

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• 3:05:20AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it, you definitely see the trickster at work, because I've talked to a few people from Skinwalker, John or Travis Taylor, and it's like, how come there are not that many photographs of it? And the answer is always, it's photographed when it wants to be, we can, and we can't control it. Sometimes it allows it, sometimes it just doesn't. So it feels like, and Travis agreed, that there is, there's intention here, there's, there's an intent to deceive, but nobody knows what the purpose, what's the reason for it? What does it want with us?

• 3:05:51Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I am not, look, I do this study, I've studied this stuff, right, and written books about it, yes, but, no, I can't answer that question.

• 3:06:04AJ Gentile?

  You don't have an opinion, a, a guess?

• 3:06:07Speaker 03

  Well, my opinion is that, um, this is my personal opinion, I don't advocate it for anyone.

• 3:06:12AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:06:13Speaker 03

  And it's just how I deal with it. Um, because it resembled so closely the traditions of religion, um, and I happen to be religious, I'm Christian, that I look at this from that standpoint, and I, you know, I'm not gonna summon something that I think is deceptive, why would I do that?

• 3:06:31AJ Gentile?

  Totally agree, I'm not interested in going to Skinwalker or summoning orbs or doing any of that.

• 3:06:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm gonna focus on the spiritual sense that I have, try to cultivate it, try to help my students, try to help, you know, I'm gonna do that, I'm not gonna focus on, on that other stuff.

• 3:06:48AJ Gentile?

  I think that's smart. It's just, like, four days ago, I had a nightmare about orbs.

• 3:06:51Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:06:52AJ Gentile?

  And I woke up like, that was a message.

• 3:06:54Speaker 03

  Wow, yeah.

• 3:06:55AJ Gentile?

  Like, doing this show maybe too long, I was, it was, it was pretty scary. So if we're gonna be contacted by something else, especially from another world, it's probably going to be some type of AI, it's not gonna be biological.

• 3:07:10Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, yeah, that's Stephen Dick's theory.

• 3:07:12AJ Gentile?

  That's Stephen Dick's theory.

• 3:07:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's a really good theory.

• 3:07:14AJ Gentile?

  I agree. So let's walk Stephen Dick's theory backwards. Could the angel visitations that we see in Ezekiel and elsewhere, could those be post-biological entities?

• 3:07:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so remember that he's speculating, and this is his theory. So he is, uh, uh, his whole bibliography, by the way, he's been writing about theories of ET and the history of what's called the plurality of worlds, because we're not the only ones who have thought about this, right? People from, uh, many, many years ago, thousands of years ago, have thought about this.

• 3:07:46AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:07:47Speaker 03

  Um, so he's, he's compiled this, this bibliography, which everybody should check out. All right, so what, his idea, so he says that if we take where we are at now, and he's had, this is a, uh, essay that's called, uh, the post-biological, uh, oh gosh, how can I forget what it's called, I've, I've read it a million times, um, the post-biological universe. And he's rewritten this a couple times, okay? So it's the most, I, the most recent iteration, I've covered that in the others, but it's also online in his bibliography. So the post-biological universe revisited is the most recent one.

• 3:08:27Speaker 03

  And this is what he says, just take where we're at now and apply what's, he calls cultural evolution, okay? So where we are at now is that we are a technological civilization, all right? And if you take our evolution and you look at it in large scales instead of scales of like, you know, thousands of years or even millions of years, and you talk about, like, the age of the universe, he said, if there was a civilization like us or close to us, and they've been, they're now a million years old, he goes, what does their technology look like, right? Like, look at our technology, how exponential it is just in the last five years.

• 3:09:08AJ Gentile?

  Indescribable for magic.

• 3:09:10Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right. But it's, it's not magic, it's technology.

• 3:09:14AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:09:15Speaker 03

  All right? And so he says, let's just extrapolate what kind of life, what it will look like. And he wrote this in answer to the Fermi paradox, which is, you know, if there is extraterrestrial life, why, where is it, right?

• 3:09:29AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:09:30Speaker 03

  And he says, we won't even recognize it because it's so far ahead of us and it's most likely passed through AI and gotten to self-replicating technological beings that resemble deities, because they can read your mind, like, all the things that deities can do, right? Read your mind, disappear, appear, right? Uh, the physics that we see, whoa, they could do that, right? They can do anything, the private gravity, gravity we talk about. So he suggests that post, he calls them post-biologicals, because they've gone through the stage of biology, they've gotten into a technological or a biotechnological phase, and they've exceeded that.

• 3:10:13Speaker 03

  So to us, they're gonna appear to be like deities. So that's his idea, that's his theory.

• 3:10:18AJ Gentile?

  And I think he's right. Um...

• 3:10:22AJ Gentile?

  Arthur C. Clarke, late in his career, kind of got away from the mysticism, but he he believed telepathy was real and it was just technology we haven't explored it.

• 3:10:31Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah. So Marshall McLuhan believed that, Arthur C. Clarke believed that, you know, Teard had some indication, you know, of that. And both, you know, Marshall McLuhan's an academic, Arthur C. Clarke's just a super general amazing, smart person, right?

• 3:10:48AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:10:49Speaker 03

  And yeah, both of them definitely believed in telepathy and believed that it would be augmented even by technology. Technology would make it even more of a real thing. And in fact, that looks like what's happening, right? So I have some friends who, they are investors in technologies, and one of the technologies that a friend is invested in is this one that actually can read a person's mind, so can read the image in their mind, and project it onto a computer screen. And she saw this happen, and this is technology that's real, right? So we're talking about, like, I don't know if Neuralink does this, but I do know that there is technology that can, like, you

• 3:11:30Speaker 03

  can think of an image, like she thought of her dog, and then her dog appeared on screen, like a dog that looked like...

• 3:11:36AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:37Speaker 03

  So that is reading our minds, it's reading our brainwaves, right, and so forth. So that does happen. This is just the beginning of it.

• 3:11:46AJ Gentile?

  It's just the beginning.

• 3:11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:11:48AJ Gentile?

  Because she had to concentrate on her dog in that story, which makes sense to me. Where it becomes scary is when you no longer have agency over it.

• 3:11:55Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. That's where it's like Minority Report type of thing.

• 3:11:59AJ Gentile?

  Yes. Yeah, that's Philip K. Dick.

• 3:12:02Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 3:12:03AJ Gentile?

  Who's another Arthur C. Clarke kind of figure. Speaking of Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke, something we touched on just a little bit with Childhood's End, in that book, when they saw the demons, they were seeing, the demons were from the future.

• 3:12:21Speaker 03

  That's right. It's a cool part of the book.

• 3:12:23AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:12:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So in most of the book, the author of the book, well, obviously Arthur C. Clarke, but the protagonists of the book, they're having conversations about what the appearance of the demon, why it's, you know, it must have been from the past, like a cultural memory.

• 3:12:42AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:12:43Speaker 03

  That, you know, humankind had come into contact with these... So that was the assumption throughout most of the book. And then later, you hear at the very, near the end of the book, Corauren, who's the demon, basically flips it and says, "No, no. That was us from the future. Basically, you were pre-remembering us."

• 3:12:59AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:13:00Speaker 03

  It was like a pre-memory. So it was a memory from the future.

• 3:13:04AJ Gentile?

  And in the others, you talk about Eric Worgo's work. I mean, it was, it was fun to see him mentioned in there, because I'm a big fan of his, he's been in here. He's changed my thinking on how time works.

• 3:13:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:13:15AJ Gentile?

  Do you subscribe to his time loop theory?

• 3:13:17Speaker 03

  Mostly.

• 3:13:18AJ Gentile?

  You mostly do?

• 3:13:19Speaker 03

  Mostly do, yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. So when you read, I love his books. So his books are really interesting, because they're not only super theoretical, but they also have so many awesome examples.

• 3:13:30AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:13:31Speaker 03

  So they, you know, he's got these examples of things that couldn't have happened, because they, they happened out of time, right? Like the thing I just told you about, about Arthur C. Clarke.

• 3:13:41AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:13:42Speaker 03

  So he has real examples from history.

• 3:13:44AJ Gentile?

  Look, there's guys drawing 9/11 with planes flying into them.

• 3:13:47Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right, yeah. So he's, he asks then, why, you know, what kind of information is that? What kind of knowledge is that? And so he's talking about getting that knowledge through dreams, and through, I guess it's like a hypogotic state.

• 3:14:04AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:14:05Speaker 03

  And so forth, and getting those, and art, you know, which you're in that kind of state when you're doing art or writing, and things like that. So he says that during those states of mind, these images come into our consciousness from the future because of the block universe. I think that's what he says. I don't want to get him wrong, because...

• 3:14:22AJ Gentile?

  No, it makes sense.

• 3:14:23Speaker 03

  But your, your viewers need to read his books, because they're really good, they're really accessible, and it will definitely blow your mind.

• 3:14:29AJ Gentile?

  It does. To boil down block universes, you know, people talk about the grandfather paradox, can't go back in time. You know, if you kill, meet your grandfather, kill your grandfather, you're never born, blah, blah, blah. And Eric says, "That doesn't work, because of the block uni..." Well, "Why didn't I kill my grandfather?" And the answer is, "Because you didn't."

• 3:14:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:14:48AJ Gentile?

  And that's it?

• 3:14:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:14:50AJ Gentile?

  That's the whole theory. "Because you didn't. Because here you are. And that's it. So there is no other timelines, there's nothing like that. We know you didn't kill him, because here you are. It's just as simple as that." And, and that just kind of blew my mind. And he has so many examples of it.

• 3:15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:15:05AJ Gentile?

  Does the church have any theories or statements on, time travel's not really the right word, but how time works? You know, Arthur C. Clarke and the Overmind said, "This is how time and space work, you just don't know it yet. This is just how it is."

• 3:15:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right, that's right. So the church is pro-science, okay?

• 3:15:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:15:25Speaker 03

  Even though it gets a bad rap, right? But they're, they're open to scientific discoveries, and they're very open to that. So I would imagine that, you know, but they're doing it the way that academics do, which is in peer review, right?

• 3:15:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:15:42Speaker 03

  So you don't just throw out a theory and say, "That's true." You actually have it tested, and then people have to test it again. And you have to say, "Okay, it's a theory, and it seems to work this way." So they're, they're slow that way, right? You know, they're, they're not jumping to any kind of like fast conclusion about anything. But definitely, they'd be open to that. There is a, I'm trying to think of his name, oh my goodness, he's a theologian that was actually talking about some of the, oh, a Mary, and basically saying that, this is a theologian writing in the early medieval time period, and he basically, his idea, and he's a very famous theologian, even though sadly, I can't remember who it is. But, but I'll figure it out and let you know, okay?

• 3:16:26AJ Gentile?

  Welcome to Middle Age, kid.

• 3:16:28Speaker 03

  So, okay, yeah. So, all right. So, he's, he's basically saying, Mary is what, this is before the idea of the immaculate conception of Mary, okay? So it's not a dogma yet in the Middle Ages. And, but people are talking about it. And he said, "I believe that Mary is immaculately conceived because it was already preordained." Like, you know, so he's already talking about, like, time not being linear, that this being from the beginning of time, she's this way, before she's even born.

• 3:17:00AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:17:01Speaker 03

  So, yeah, so it's in the Catholic tradition.

• 3:17:03AJ Gentile?

  I guess that's, that's true. Prophecy is just, is just recognition.

• 3:17:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:17:09AJ Gentile?

  I have a couple of short ones before we let you go.

• 3:17:12Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:17:13AJ Gentile?

  Um, can you tell a story? I mean, everyone wants to hear about Fatima.

• 3:17:19Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 3:17:20AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, of course. Everyone loves, loves the secrets of Fatima. I'd like to, if you could tell us about Fatima, but also how Nicodemus in Bayside, I think the church agreed that Fatima was something.

• 3:17:32Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah.

• 3:17:33AJ Gentile?

  And Nicodemus in Bayside, no?

• 3:17:34Speaker 03

  No, definitely not.

• 3:17:35AJ Gentile?

  How did, how did they decide which was real or not?

• 3:17:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. So the church's idea about Marian apparitions.

• 3:17:44AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:17:45Speaker 03

  Okay, so there aren't very many approved Marian apparitions.

• 3:17:49AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:17:50Speaker 03

  The reason, well, first off, do you want me to talk about Fatima?

• 3:17:53AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:17:54Speaker 03

  Okay, so Fatima is Fatima, Portugal. And it's, again, it's kind of like Garibandal. So it's a, it's a mountainous region where there's a group of people, a couple hundred people in this town, and there, there are, by the way, a couple of angel events that happened before the Virgin Mary comes along, okay? So there are these children, they're playing, there's three of them, and an angel appears to them. And they're afraid, frankly, you know, "What's that?" And they don't even recognize really that it's an angel. They're like, "What is this?" You know? And then it kind of talks to them and says, "You need to get ready, you need to start praying." And they don't know why, but they're gonna

• 3:18:35Speaker 03

  do it. And then, at some point, they, they learn that the, the Virgin Mary's gonna show up, right? And, but a question about whether or not she's the Virgin Mary arises, right? You know, who is this lady? She shows up, she looks like a doll, she's beautiful, and they experience kind of like a trance state while they're, they're in. By the way, the animals around them do too, which is really like the private gravity thing.

• 3:19:03AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:19:04Speaker 03

  Okay, so the animals kind of, and they're exhausted for days after she shows up, right? And so she shows up, and she tells them to pray and do fasting, and pretty much that's it, right? There's an indication that there's like a secret, though. And so this drives the parish priest crazy, and the people then believe, because they just don't think the children are lying. And they can tell that the children are seeing something, because of the way the children are looking up the same thing, like their eyes are focused on the same thing. And if you study Marian apparitions, that's a feature of them, is that a lot of times, people like doctors and skeptics will, will do everything they can to try to get them out of the trance, or to find out where their eyes are, you know, they're looking

• 3:19:49Speaker 03

  at the same thing, no one else can see it. Sometimes other people can see it, okay? Sometimes people can see it. And so all these people show up. So it becomes like a zoo in the town. And so the priest is trying to get the kids to like, chill out, you know, don't do this. He kidnaps them, doesn't kidnap them, but, yeah, kidnaps them, okay, takes them away, so that they can't make the, the date that the Virgin Mary's gonna show up on. And the townspeople, you know, death threat him, and they're like, "Let those kids go." They show up, the townspeople show up, some stuff happens there, you know, where the Virgin Mary's gonna show up, but the kids aren't there. So, so there's a lot of drama.

• 3:20:30Speaker 03

  Then priests come from the Vatican, they're like, "We need to figure out what the heck's going on here."

• 3:20:34AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:34Speaker 03

  Right? And so they do, you know, they interview the kids and so forth. And they begin to see that it does seem like, you know, something's going on here. We don't know what, but it looks like she's in, you know, ask the lady what she wants. Ask the lady what her name is. They do all these things. They tell the kids, okay? The kids ask that. They give the answers to the priests. So the big-

• 3:20:55AJ Gentile?

  About what year is this?

• 3:20:56Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 3:20:57AJ Gentile?

  About what year is this?

• 3:20:57Speaker 03

  Okay, this is 1917.

• 3:20:59AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:21:00Speaker 03

  So there are, I believe, six apparitions each month on the 13th. The last one is October 13th. And I could be wrong on the 6th, but I don't think I am. And so at this point, though, there are lots of people who are showing up, like probably 20,000, 30,000, 60,000. And so they, the Virgin Mary tells the kids, "This last, I'm gonna show up, and this time it's gonna be a big deal. I'm gonna show you some stuff and tell that to the people," right? So they do. They tell the people. And between 70,000 to 100,000 people show up, right? At this place devastating the town.

• 3:21:39AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:21:39Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, but, um, but a lot of people see something. It's called the miracle of the sun. And there's phenomena that happen. It looks really UFO-like, right? Circular spinning discs and things like that. And a lot of people see it. Some people don't see it. Um, some people see other things. Uh, they're, they're all hanging out there, all the people. And then rain comes and they're all soaking wet. And then what happens is that after the miracle of the sun happens, everybody's super dry, like completely dry. And this is all photographed by people there who were, you know, there to do, they're not there to believe, they're there to, to document it.

• 3:22:21Speaker 03

  It's photographed, it's, um, people from miles and miles away see something in the sky. And they're like, "What's going on over there? There's some kind of solar event," right? And so people that are skeptics become believers. Um, a lot of things happen. And this is now known as the miracle of the sun. So it takes the church a long time to say, you know, they have to interview the kids. The two younger kids, uh, pass away. The Virgin Mary says that they would, like they're gonna be taken early. Uh, the older one, Lucia or Lucia, um, she becomes a nun. And, uh, she goes on to write her diary and so forth. And it's now one of the biggest pilgrimages in the world. And, uh, so that's Fatima.

• 3:23:08AJ Gentile?

  What was the, what were the secrets?

• 3:23:11Speaker 03

  Okay, so that's a good question. So there is continuous dialogue and debate about the secrets. Because the secrets, I think one of the secrets was, well, first the kids had a version. They got to see hell, which was horrific for them and traumatic. And, um, they said that humanity really needs to like, start living in a better way. Right? Because we're headed for a dark season, okay? And so it's in that way apocalyptic, not in the Greek word sense, but in the normal sense that people use that word in. Um, all right. So one of the secrets, though, is very debated. This is called the third secret of Fatima.

• 3:23:53Speaker 03

  And so what the children were told, "You have the secret, and give it to the Holy Father and open it in 1960." Okay? Well, 1960, this was in 1917. So everybody goes along, you know? People are doing the best they can to be good Catholics and so forth. And they go to Fatima and so forth. 1960 comes along and the Pope doesn't read the secret, right? Doesn't read it to people. So people are very upset, like, "Why? Why, what are you doing?" Um, it comes along to John Paul II. He becomes Pope. Uh, he has the secret. And again, nobody, he's not releasing the secret. Why, you know? And then Pope Benedict says, "Well, okay, this is what the secret's about, but it's probably not the secret."

• 3:24:38Speaker 03

  I don't know, AJ. This is, this is just-

• 3:24:41AJ Gentile?

  This is in 2000, when it was finally released.

• 3:24:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, um, is it the secret? A lot of people don't believe it is.

• 3:24:47AJ Gentile?

  Well, the secret is, um, the Holy Father escaping the burning city, climbing over the corpses of his disciples.

• 3:24:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's a very end of the world type of, and end of the Catholic Church type of-

• 3:25:01AJ Gentile?

  I think the official statement was it was an interpretation of, um, John Paul's assassination in 81.

• 3:25:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was one interpretation. Well, he was a huge-

• 3:25:09AJ Gentile?

  I don't know.

• 3:25:10Speaker 03

  He was a huge Marian saint.

• 3:25:12AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:25:12Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, he is a saint now. He's a huge Marian Pope. Definitely believer.

• 3:25:17AJ Gentile?

  I didn't, I don't really buy that from the church. It sounds like that's kind of a stretch. The third secret's very specific.

• 3:25:27Speaker 03

  I don't know, but I do know that right now, Virgin Mary apparitions are global and even non-Catholic. So there was a big Marian apparition in Zaytoun, Egypt. And that was the, the church, not the Catholic Church there, but the Coptic, I think it was the Coptic Church. Um, I could be wrong. It's the Orthodox Church in that region. It was their Marian apparition, right? And hundreds of thousands of people saw that. And they have photographs of it. Uh, so she has now become the kind of like a global phenomenon beyond Catholicism.

• 3:26:02AJ Gentile?

  Sure. So what made Nacida in Bayside different? That the church said this is not, and people still go there, right?

• 3:26:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, and believe, yeah. So, okay, so Bayside, uh, is it New Jersey?

• 3:26:15AJ Gentile?

  Queens.

• 3:26:15Speaker 03

  Queens, okay. And, uh, Nacida, Wisconsin. Yeah, yeah. So one, uh, Nacida happens in the 1950s. And Bayside happens in the 1990s, I think. I can't remember. Sorry, guys. Um, so many Virgin Mary apparitions.

• 3:26:32AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:33Speaker 03

  But I did have, uh, I worked on these two apparitions with some graduate students and actually some former students who are now professors. And, uh, we did some new research on it. And, okay, so the Virgin Mary shows up to some women, both in each case, right? And, um, it, at first it seems pretty normal for a Marian apparition. She doesn't say too much. She says, "Do the good thing, like fast, pray, right? Do the good works and whatnot." But then they get kind of like, very, very, um, hmm, you wouldn't think the Virgin Mary would say these things, like very specific about who in the Catholic Church is going to hell? And, you know, things like that.

• 3:27:16Speaker 03

  So that, that gives the indication to the Catholic hierarchy, "No, these are not," you know? But then they, they get a lot of followers because there's pushback against the Vatican Council, you know, what's happening in Vatican II. And that even started before the Vatican II, in the 1950s with Nacida. Now, what's really weird, though? This is weird. So the last time we looked into this, one of my, uh, the associates who were working on this together uncovered in Nacida the, the presence of people that looked like men in black.

• 3:27:52AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 3:27:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. He was freaked out by it, and he freaked me out, too. So he basically uncovered it in the primary source material, where she's talking about her experiences. This is the woman who, uh, Mary Anne, um, uh, Hoof. And she's, she's writing her diaries. And she said, and then these, now, this is the 1950s. "These men show up and they wear all black. And they show up in dark cars without their headlights on. And they come and they tell me that I'm bad and that I need to stop doing this. And they tell me that I'm a terrible person. And, you know, they hang outside my window. And they come at all hours and they harass me." Pretty strange.

• 3:28:34AJ Gentile?

  It is.

• 3:28:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:28:35AJ Gentile?

  It makes me want to go look at the photos of Fatima to see who's in that crowd.

• 3:28:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, because we, all those, we have a ton of photos.

• 3:28:43AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:28:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:28:45AJ Gentile?

  Um, do you believe those second two sightings? I mean, I think we all believe Fatima, right?

• 3:28:49Speaker 03

  I do.

• 3:28:50AJ Gentile?

  I do, too.

• 3:28:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, I believe something paranormal is happening in those sightings, but I don't, I don't think that it's the same type of thing that's happening in Fatima or in Geribandal. I believe in Geribandal, too, even though it's not approved.

• 3:29:05AJ Gentile?

  What about, um, Guadalupe? Do you believe that one?

• 3:29:07Speaker 03

  Absolutely, I believe that one, yeah, yeah. I believe it, I'll tell you why. Because first, the tilma's weird. If you look into the tilma, you know, the tilma is the image of Our Lady that's in New Mexico. Uh, do you study on that? And it's, I mean, art historians have studied it, too. And a lot of them say, "Well, it's painted and stuff." Well, some parts of it are painted. Um, but it's still very, very odd. And I think miraculous. But also, if you read, it's called the Nikon Mahapoa. And this is the original text written in the wattle of the man who's Juan Diego, who has this, the, the Virgin Mary sighting over this hill.

• 3:29:48Speaker 03

  And, um, now, because I've, I've read so many of these apparition accounts, and a lot of these people don't know each other. Like, who's Juan Diego is gonna know about any of this other stuff? No, he's not. It hasn't happened yet.

• 3:30:02AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:30:03Speaker 03

  He describes almost perfectly what these other children describe. And the way she talks, the way, you know, the, the sound of her voice is musical and that he's entranced and, you know, enchanted and all of this kind of, uh, very, very interesting. I think absolutely it happened. But I'm a believer. I'm not advocating, okay?

• 3:30:22AJ Gentile?

  Even scientifically, it's hard to explain Guadalupe. La Shra de Torre is very hard to explain those.

• 3:30:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, very hard to explain, yeah, mysterious.

• 3:30:29AJ Gentile?

  Yes. Oh, you meant it, mentioned enchanted, so this is my last question for you. Then we can talk about anything you think we missed. Um, I think you wrote two sentences in two different books. I want to put them next to each other. You wrote that the, uh, UFO reenchanted the modern world. It legitimized transcendence for secular people. That's true. And you wrote that whatever's behind it may not mean us well.

• 3:30:56AJ Gentile?

  So is is re enchantment a gift or is it bait?

• 3:31:02Speaker 03

  Okay, re enchantment is an opportunity.

• 3:31:05AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:31:05Speaker 03

  So what I mean by that is that there was the secularization hypothesis that Max Weber and a lot of really smart people from 1800s on thought that religion was going to go away because people were educated and becoming more rational. Completely wrong. It didn't work out, right? So people are way more religious now even. You know, people are super religious and rationality has nothing to do with it. Okay, maybe a little bit, but you can be rational and religious. Lots of people are. All right. So this is the idea. This is what Max Weber then called the disenchantment of the world, that we were going to live in a world that was committed. You know, in a sense, it's really happened. A lot of people became what are called, what is called secular, nonbelievers. They don't believe in anything.

• 3:31:49Speaker 03

  They can't see, they can't touch, they can't, you know, with their tools, identify. Therefore, it's disenchanted. But the UFO comes back. We have the government now saying that it's real. What does that mean? It means that we now live in a more enchanted world, like the worldview is going to change. We live in an enchanted world. And then what does that mean? That gives us an opportunity to figure out how we're going to deal with this. Like, you know, if there is non-human intelligence, how would we then deal with it? And I think that's where traditional religions give us a head start on, you know, understanding like that last quote that you had, you know, you picked out from, I think it's Encounters? It may not mean us well.

• 3:32:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I haven't heard that quote from Chris Bledsoe that you told me just in, you know, this podcast.

• 3:32:38AJ Gentile?

  He said it in here.

• 3:32:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, you know, he says, don't do it if you, you know, don't summon.

• 3:32:43AJ Gentile?

  Don't mess with it if you don't know what you're doing.

• 3:32:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:32:47Speaker 03

  And that's what religious traditions say, too.

• 3:32:50AJ Gentile?

  I agree with them. Anything else you wanted to cover before I let you go?

• 3:32:55Speaker 03

  Let's see.

• 3:32:56AJ Gentile?

  Oh, you've got your notepad.

• 3:32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you know what? We've pretty much covered every single thing.

• 3:33:02AJ Gentile?

  Okay, plugs? Plugs? Books? Websites? Where can we find you?

• 3:33:06Speaker 03

  Okay, so my book, The Others, came out. It came out last week, which was July 28. And since then, it's made the New York Times Bestseller list, which I was so shocked and happy about. So.

• 3:33:19AJ Gentile?

  Is that your first one on New York Times?

• 3:33:21Speaker 03

  New York Times, yeah, definitely.

• 3:33:22AJ Gentile?

  Congratulations.

• 3:33:23Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So if people are interested in what we've talked about, it's a, it's, a lot of it's in that book.

• 3:33:28AJ Gentile?

  Yes. Substack?

• 3:33:31Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. So I have a Substack. It's DW Pasulka at Substack. And I also have, you know, I'm on Instagram. I don't spend a lot of time on there. I mean, we just talked about why. So I don't spend a lot of time on social media, but I do have a DW Pasulka X profile, Instagram profile, LinkedIn profile.

• 3:33:55Speaker 03

  Substack, I definitely like because it's writing and I'm okay with that, you know. And then what else? Yeah, I have a YouTube channel. Again, I don't utilize a lot, so that's where I'm at.

• 3:34:08AJ Gentile?

  Great. Diana Pasulka, thank you so much for being here. This is a lot of fun.

• 3:34:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks a lot. I had a great time.

• 3:34:12AJ Gentile?

  We'll see you soon.

• 3:34:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:34:14AJ Gentile?

  Bye, everybody. That was Diana Walsh Pasulka. We covered purgatory, Russian immortality cults, a blindfolded trip to a UFO crash site, and whether social media is the Antichrist. The saints, I checked first. The records are real. Whole towns signed sworn testimony that Joseph of Cupertino levitated during the Inquisition, when that could get you burned. In 2023, Yale historian Carlos Sire published a whole book on these files. It's called They Flew, which is great. Now, her father, he worked sonar on a Coast Guard cutter called the Bittersweet when something enormous stopped the ship dead for four hours. That ship is real, and it was out in Alaskan waters at a Kodiak when he served. The four hours?

• 3:34:59AJ Gentile?

  Well, we have to take her dad's word for it. But a retired admiral is searching for the logs, so ask me in a year. And the men in black. In a condemned apparition case from the 1950s in Wisconsin, Diana's team found the visionary describing men in dark clothes and dark cars with no headlights telling her to stop. UFO witnesses started describing the same men that same decade. The stories never met, but there they are. Four nights before we sat down, I had a nightmare about orbs, so I'm not a neutral judge. I can't tell you what this phenomenon is, and me neither can Diana. That's why I trust her. The book is called The Others. It's already a New York Times Bestseller. She's at dwpasulka.com. That's P-A-S-U-L-K-A.

• 3:35:43AJ Gentile?

  And everything I mentioned is linked below. Oh, the guy whose name she won't mention? Tim Taylor, the dragon. More on him soon. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

• 3:36:10Speaker 07

  I play for Libya scenario 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends. And it never ends. No, it never ends.

• 3:36:48Speaker 07

  I fear the crap cat and got stuck inside Mel's home with them kale truck. I'm being only two of us. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadows people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told. And his name was Cold. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.

• 3:37:32Speaker 07

  And one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 3:37:54Speaker 07

  The mapman sightings and the solar storm still come to have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets circle to Project Stargate. And what the dark watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The black night said a light had told me so. I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.

• 3:38:37Speaker 07

  And one more zombie beat all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. And one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 3:39:13Speaker 07

  Girlie loves to dance. Girlie loves to dance on the dance floor. Because she is a camel and camels love to dance. When the feeling is right on wasting time.

• 3:39:48Speaker 07

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