Kreipel says, if they were dangerous, we'd already be gone.

If this was truly malevolent, we'd been toast a long time ago.

We won't be here talking.

He claims, Disclosure is something far bigger and far older.

Disclosure is a very good translation of apocalypse.

Apocalypse means an uncovering or taking the lid off and.

His biggest mind bender.

UFOs are real and impossible.

Let them challenge your worldview and your lens, whatever that lens or that worldview might be.

That's impossible thinking.

Here everyone, I'm Matt Ford.

Welcome to the Good Trouble Show.

Today's guest is the Jay Newton Rasor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, co director at the Esslon Institute, and the scholar who says the gods have always come from the sky and he's not speaking in metaphor.

He also launched the Archives of the Impossible, host to doctor Jacques Valet's groundbreaking research collection.

For decades, Jeffrey Cripel has explored how UFO encounters, mystical visions and pop culture collide.

His latest book, How to Think Impossibly About Soul's UFOs, Time, belief and Everything else is an eye opening read.

Here's my conversation with doctor Jeffrey Kripel.

Please welcome, doctor Jeffrey Kripel, doctor Cripel, welcome to the show.

May I call you Jeffer?

Do you prefer doctor Cripel?

What do you like?

No, of course, Jeff, Jeff's fine.

I'm a casual guy.

Okay.

Well, and I have to say when we met in person was actually at the.

At the Soul conference.

It was I think we were both grabbing breakfast at at the hotel that we were staying at and I'd never met you before, but I'm like, I think that's Jeff Kreipel.

So we chatted for a bit and at the time, actually I invited you on the show and you're you were like, yeah, let's do it.

And I have to admit just I kind of fell off my radar.

That's my add brain.

But I'm so happy you're here and very much appreciate the generosity of your time.

So I've read quite a bit about your background and I am just kind of really pretty blown away by what you've done and your academic credentials.

But tell our audience a bit about about your career in academia and where you are.

Now, that's a big one.

I've been teaching now for thirty three years, just trying to do the math.

I started out very much looking at male sexual orientation and ecstatic religious experience, which was a fairly i won't say mainline, but it was a very academic thing to do in the late eighties and nineties.

And as I worked more and talked to people more, I got more and more interested in what I now call the impossible, which is I think probably more interest to your to your viewers.

But that's a very gradual process.

You know.

I've been working in this area really for almost twenty years to be to be blunt about it, so I've been I've been in it a long time.

But I definitely approach it from a history of religion's perspective.

I see this as rooted in experience and then it then becomes or it doesn't become historical.

Religion usually doesn't become by the way, so that that's really my training is.

Also in India, I studied Indian languages early on Bengali and Sanskrit, mostly Bengali, and then I've really became an americanist in the early two thousands and looked a lot at the California counterculture and alternative religious currents there.

Now, Jeff, with your with your training and the history of religgens, what first tipped you off that perhaps these UFO stories belonged in that same sort of scholarly I always have hard type pronouncing that scholarly bucket.

Yeah, So you know, my joke is that gods have always come from the sky.

It's an ancient phenomenon that people have seen and had encounters of beings and entities that come from the sky or in our case, outer space.

Outer space, of course, is a very recent expression.

The other thing that really tipped me off was I couldn't avoid the topic, certainly when I wrote about the California counterculture, and seven is when the book came out.

The UFO remote viewing the whole gamut was absolutely central to the story.

It wasn't it wasn't tangential.

And then as I talked to people after working in the counterculture and writing on it, I realized that they weren't they were not lying, and that they had had very strange experiences that couldn't be slotted into the sciences or the humanities or in history for that matter, and so I began to privilege and I still privilege those experiences as the key, as the key that I can address anyway.

So you're talking about or sort of emphasizing that the gods have always come from the sky in your view, Are we witnessing a new chapter in an ancient history or is this just kind of a reinterpretation of the same symbols but for more of a technological lens.

Well, I would say no to both.

Okay, I think we are witnessing an uptake in the phenomenon and that there's something about science fiction and contemporary technological culture that allows us to see things we couldn't otherwise see.

So I'm not saying this is the same as you know, something that happened in the past, but it's clearly related.

And it's that that middle space between what's similar and what's different that really I think needs to be teased out and needs to be written about and talked about.

And I don't, man, I don't have I don't have the answers.

I'm I'm not sure.

I just don't know.

If I if I knew what the UFO was, I would say that immediately.

But the reason I'm so attracted to it is because I don't think anybody knows, right, so, and I mean that, I mean nobody knows, but that doesn't mean it's not real or it's not happening.

And because I think it is happening.

And the other thing that really draws me to the phenomenon is it's very physical, very material, but also very spiritual and very related to our religions as well.

And it's that both and that really really draws me to it.

Now, was there one particular moment that comes to mind or that you just woke up and said, you know what, I see the relationship and this is something I want to talk about.

And was there any hesitancy as an academic to open the sort of open the aperture.

To talking about UAP as a possible.

Sort of thing that occurred in religious so these kind of religious events that happened that are in scripture and whatnot, sort of deciding Okay, let's examine to see if perhaps it was an HI or something that fell into that bucket.

I'm not explaining myself.

No, well, yeah, I mean there wasn't any single case to answer your question.

What actually end was I finished this book.

It's called Esslin America and the Religion of No Religion, and it's on something called the Human Potential movement.

And the basic idea of the Human Potential movement is that human beings have capacities and abilities that are essentially buds of our evolutionary future, and so we're evolving toward something else or something greater, and so human potential really translates into that.

What struck me when I was finishing that book, and I was six or so, was how similar that is to the X Men.

Actually, you know, I grew up, I grew up with comics and popular culture, and I was like, oh wow, this this is the this is this is the x Men.

But it's it's the x Men taken to another degree, as part of the world is physical, physical reality.

And of course the comic books, which is a fantasy for basic boys that was being invented on the East Coast.

So there was this East coast West coast residence that really fascinated me.

The other thing that happened was was actually Jacques Filet.

I really got interested in comic books of all things, and science fiction and the relationship to this broader historical movement called the human potential.

And I started to read Jaques, and I was blown away by the fusion of what I would call the humanities and the sciences.

He didn't Jacques didn't follow one of these lenses.

He did them both, and then he went beyond them.

And I was just like so blown away by that.

And it was Jacques actually who handed me in his apartment a letter from a comic book artist who was my childhood hero, Barry Windsor Smith, who had written about his own extensive paranormal experiences in a two volume autobiography called Opus.

And it was really Jacques who pushed me to really consider this linkage between American popular culture and the UFO phenomenon.

And then things got more and more wild, I would say, you know, after that, I wrote about Jacques, I wrote about bertrand mused another French researcher.

I wrote about comics and science fiction and book called Mutants and Mystics, and I just got further and further into this world.

And it's not that I think this is a fantasy or the stuff of comic books, but I think there is some there is some kind of linkage there that fascinates me.

And it's a way to talk about it, Matt.

We can you can communicate with people that we can't otherwise communicate with.

And that was actually going to be my next question, because you know your work straddles philosophy, religion, their paranormal and UAP.

So do you view these as part of sort of kind of like.

A single continuum or do they represent in your view, very distinct buckets, sort of distinct interpretive views.

I don't think they're distinct at all.

I think they're trying to get out the same phenomenon, which is all of those things and none of those things.

And you know, this is why I love intellectuals.

I'm such a fan of universities is because ostensibly, or ideally anyway, it's multiple schools and departments who are coming after an issue or a question from different perspectives.

Now, that of course isn't how it works out in practice in real life, but that's certainly the goal.

And I think the UFO in particular, or the UAP as it's called now, is a topic that you definitely need the sciences.

You need genetics and biology and physics and astronomy, but you also need history and philosophy, and religion, So it just completely blows up any kind of notion that you're stuck in a box or there's one perspective on it.

In what ways do kind of like sort of like the contemporary UFO narratives echo what has been written in religious texts, So divine messengers or angelic interventions or even like you know, the apocalyptic visions.

What would be some good examples of that.

Well, first of all, the whole disclosure movement.

Disclosure is a very good translation of apocalypse.

It's literally what apocalypse means.

Apocalypse means an uncovering or taking the little of and it encodes this end of things, but also this revelation of the nature of things.

And I think we've lost that matt you know, in our public culture, and I think that's a that's a problem, that's part of the reason we don't understand what's happening around us and to us.

And also this notion that there are strange entities in the environment that interact with human beings, but they interact through the through the imagination.

They're extremely strange and weird and absurd, but it's because there's a kind of biomimicry.

There's a kind of two way street going on that they're taking on or communicating to us through the human imagination.

And that's very familiar to the scholar of religion.

I mean, that's that's what religion is.

It's a communication with some kind of entity or some kind of non human intelligence to use the language of the time that is always translated in the here and now, you know.

But the premise of the religions is that there's a there there which is always appearing through the here here, if that makes sense.

There's there's there's this transcendent source that is appearing through something historical and and and whatever.

The imagination of this of the place and time is.

The other thing that strikes me very much as a historian of religions is that much of our UFO or alien invasion, certainly the movies, they're they're they're in a Cold war invasion narrative.

You know.

It's very it's very clear to me that that's a particular mythology or a particular take on things that is frankly not true of the entire phenomenon.

But I know it captures some of it.

I get that.

I want to affirm that, but it's not the whole shebang.

And as a historian of religions, I want to talk about the whole shebang.

I want to acknowledge people's and one more thing and then I'll shut out the last thing I want.

I really want to say is kind of less in numero.

You know, in the study of religion, is that the sacred is not the good.

In other words, when something erupts or appears or is revealed to a human being or to a human community, it can kill you as well as redeem you.

It's not this positive, you know, thing of light and love and beauty all the time.

It can be deadly.

And so I think that that training set me up really well well to take seriously people's encounters with entities that are not always positive.

And I'm always very suspicious of the religious interpretations of those but I understand why they do that.

I get it.

But I'm always looking at things comparatively or historically and I'm like, yeah, that's probably not it either.

Do you think then, like it would just be like a kind of like different and of difference in ethics between like what we view as right and wrong versus perhaps what this non human intelligence would view as right and wrong.

You know, for instance, I would view something coming into my bedroom and taking me away or taking my kids away as wrong versus you know, trying to like even begin to think of how they would view something like that.

Is that kind of what you mean in in terms of, you know, whether it could be good or bad?

Yeah, I mean I think good and bad are the wrong ways to go at this man.

To be more blunt, I mean, the philosopher Kim Ingles talks about multi dimensional ethics, and she talks about how the ethics of a contact or in counter experience may not be our ethics.

You know, the you know, consensus or the ego or the will might in fact be violated in an encounter experience.

But that doesn't mean it's bad or sinister.

That means it's not it's certainly not us, it's not our egos, or it's not Matt, or it's not Jeff right.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't have its own value system.

Look, I violate the will and consensus of the furry dog I live with all the time, every time I take her to the vet.

Does that mean I'm bad or evil?

No?

You know, there's another purpose there and if you talk to people who are experiencers, a lot of their experience is negative.

It's really bad, it's really scary, but the impulse behind it and where it eventually goes is extremely positive and sometimes even ecstatic and cosmic.

So I think we have to we have to integrate both of those human responses into our models.

That makes sense.

And especially I love the analogy of the dog because obviously, you taking your dog to the vet is because you're you're caring for that living creature and you know that medical care is going to be a benefit to that animal.

Now the animal has no idea.

All the animal knows is is he or she is going into this room and has no idea why these people, these people are poking and prodding it.

So, you know, I think that's a really great analogy because there are in many ways I would think like that the animal cannot reason that maybe what you're doing is is for its benefits, So you know, they.

Can't the animal.

The animal can can children?

Man?

I mean yeah, I mean, I mean the same is true of children.

We take children to the to the medical doctor, and it's they don't have any choice in them, I mean, but and they get poked and prodded.

And by the way, the the the animals they get they get put to put put out, you know, so they can clean their teeth and do I mean, we do really radical things to each other, to each other and and to animals all the time.

So why why on earth when someone does that to us do we we think it's so surprising.

I'm puzzled by that, to be really quite honest.

Yeah, I sometimes wonder if it's sort of subliminally people think, well, look at what we do to cows and put you know, they're in our food chain and whatnot, and then all of a sudden, we're the bugs and there's something else higher.

So I could see how that that would you know.

Generate, you know, generate maybe a little little bit of concern on on folks folks part.

I want I want to back up a little bit.

You're talking about.

The the sort of changing of presentation of this phenomenon.

So just to make sure I'm following you correctly, what you're saying is that.

The phenomenon presents itself.

In a way that people of that particular time period or slice of time can can interpret.

Like you know, I've heard like UAPs in the past would sometimes show up as as airships like you know, with balloons.

That that sort of thing, is am I following you correctly?

Is that sort of where you were going with that?

Yeah?

I think the phenomenon does mimic our technology, and and it's it's often slightly behind our technology, by the way, right, which is which is really weird.

But but it clearly is Mimi king that.

And I think if we again, if we look at the whole picture, we have to be suspicious of that.

You know.

The other thing that studying religious experience has taught me, Matt, is to be very suspicious of what appears in ot way.

Well, I don't believe religious experiences.

You know, when when Grandma shows up in the seance, or my dead uncle or my dead father, I'm not so sure that's the dead uncle or the dead father or the I know it's pretending to be.

I get that.

I get that.

Or when a crucifix or the Virgin Mary or the Hindu God or whoever shows up, I'm like, oh, that's that's the culture biking.

That's not I mean, it is the phenomenon, but it's the phenomenon taking on the local culture.

And then the question is if so, if that's the case, it's like, how would you ever be able to just let's just say, like, for instance, Flying Saucer lands on the White House lawn and says, okay, we're here to help.

We're here to clean up the environment or zero point energy or whatever.

How would we ever be able to or could we ever really know what the true intent is behind whatever that is?

There is more to come from Doctor Kripel.

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Now, with that out of the way, let's get back to our interview with Jeffrey Cripel.

It's like, is it malevolent?

Is a benevolent How would we even be able to come to any sort of conclusion because we have no idea how this thinks or whatever this is.

Well, look, I mean, if this was truly malevolent, we sit at there, we'd been toast a long time ago, we wouldn't be here talking.

So I think the very existence of the species, and really the overpopulation of the species, speaks volumes to the beneficent or the or at least the neutral observation of the phenomenon.

I also think that understanding this biomimicry, or this this hermintical or this sort of back and forth nature allows us to be more critical and to be more aware of our own assumptions.

You know what I mean by thinking impossibly, don't don't shove things or reduce things to some scientific lens, but also don't reduce them to some religious lens.

Let them challenge your worldview and your lens, whatever that lens or that worldview might be.

And I think we get this hits back to the fear element.

I think we assume we know that we know it all, and we're sort of on the apex of.

Certainly a lot of scientists do yeah this stuff.

Yeah, of course they will, and because they think they're on the apex, you know, they think they got it, but they don't.

And if you talk to really smart people about this, they'll say things like, well, there's something about the phenomenon that that is pushing us outside of space and time, pushing us outside our model.

So I'm like, Or they'll say something like, well, maybe mathematics and sciences are mathematics and our science.

Who's to say it's their mathematics.

I'm like, WHOA, that's okay, that's really that's that's impossible thinking, right, you know.

And so that's what I'm trying to push, Matt is.

It's not it's not a dismissive or a reductive move.

It's a let's look at the whole phenomena and let's speak, let's be reflexive about our own world views whatever whatever those happen to be.

What do you think do you think?

Like, for instance, let me back up a bit.

So I've had orbs show up above my home, and magically it started whenever I began covering this thing.

So my entire adult life never had absolutely anything happen, and so all of a sudden it starts and it came.

This ORB came back ten to twelve times.

I don't keep a journal, but it was for quite a long time.

So the first time I see it, it's like, Okay, whatever this is is I don't know, checking me out or telling me.

I don't know if it's maybe saying to me, we know that you know, and that's why it's appearing.

But then, much to my surprise, all of this crazy paranormal stuff began in the house.

And that lasted for like four to six months.

And the ORB, you know, like I didn't have any like bad feelings about it or any It was never like told anything telepathically.

It was just there and floated around above the house, never came into the house.

But all of this stuff that happened in the house was you know, frankly, pretty disturbing.

Banging on the walls, things getting knocked over, some other things that I won't discuss.

But when all of this was happening, I kept asking myself why, Like what.

What would be its purpose?

Is it?

Is it just another way of messaging?

We know that you know or like any any sort of and obviously I know you don't know the answers, but but like, what would be your best guess as to why that sort of stuff occurs?

Okay, so I have a number of best guesses.

You know.

What I often say is it's us.

And by that I don't mean it's matter Jeff.

Again, I don't mean it's our social legos or identities.

It's some other, vast, cosmic extension of us that's also interacting with us.

And the reason I think that a lot of paranormal phenomena are negative or scary is that their forms of suffering.

You know, they're there, their manifest stations or realizations that we're trying to break out of a box okay, whatever that box is.

Again, we're trying, We're realizing we're inside a story, but we're saying this story isn't working anymore, and there are human beings suffering because of this story.

And so the paranormal phenomena appear to sort of break into haunt essentially that story, and to push, in your case, you out of it.

And I think if this is done enough times to enough people, you know, it has this cultural effect.

We have shows like this, or we make television, or we make film, or we write books or whatever it is we do to try to break out of this story, as it were, that we're in.

We're in a really bad set of stories, in case you haven't noticed.

And I don't I don't just mean the political stories.

I mean, you know, I once taught, you know, a month long course on sexuality and spirituality, and I asked people to tell their own stories.

Which was a mistake.

Man, I want to know why.

Well, I thought, I thought, okay, we're going to get through this in a couple of nights, like almost two weeks, you know.

I mean, it's like and people were bawling and crying, and I realized that there are almost no good stories that but people appreciated to understand why they suffered so and why there was such this disconnect.

But but it's not that they had a better story to tell.

And that's just one topic.

I don't want to focus on that particular topic.

But I think, I think culturally, and and and politically, but also so socially and religiously, we're stuck in a lot of really bad stories, correct, And I think a lot of this is trying to push us out.

I sometimes wondered when backing up a bit, so I would say, in a way, I was maybe close to kind of thinking there was really nothing outside of this borderline atheist.

And I think in a way like my personal experience with the paranormal in my home really sort of in my interpretation of it, proved to me that there is something outside of this reality.

So I lost my mother beginning of April, and as hard as it was, I think had I not maybe perhaps experienced what I experienced, I would not have the confidence that I have now that I will see her again one day.

Yeah.

So you know, perhaps for me and my personal journey in life, that put me in that sort of position that so when she did pass was a little bit easier for me to handle because I knew that wouldn't be the last time I would see her in my view of the universe.

So this materialist scientific story that I think a lot of us are in is fundamentally.

Depressing yes, yes it is, and.

It has devastating consequences on individuals and human beings and nation states.

And there is a connection between the flying saucer and the soul, or the UFO and the soul.

There is a connection between this very physical and very spiritual phenomenon and beliefs or ideas around death and immortality.

And they've always been there.

Mat That's really what I'm trying to say.

Now, do we know what that connection is?

No?

Do we understand what the physical landing marks or the radiation burns, how they're related to your mother and her passing.

No, we don't.

We don't know that.

But that's precisely what we should be talking about, I think, And I don't know where that conversation goes, but I am convinced that's the conversation we should be having.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And the more I have in the past month or so reflected on my past experiences, especially with all of this stuff that frankly has been pretty strange.

You know, I think back.

To have that not happened, where I would be emotionally or viewing like what has occurred, so in many ways as weird and kind of disturbing, as it was what I personally experienced, I do see that it was probably beneficial, beneficial to me in a good way.

That's it.

That's the double nature of the sacred, you know that, right, the fear and the so you know.

I have a friend who, you know, he jokes with me.

He pushed me, and he's like, well, why are you so why do you talk about monsters so much?

I mean, what is it, Jeff?

And it's very similar to what you just said.

It's like, yeah, but if there's a monster that appears in your bedroom or pounds on your fifty seven shouvy, that's awesome.

That means the world is not this materialistic, dead, dead, depressing thing that we keep being told it is.

Now there's something showing up that totally violates that that notion.

And again, it's not that I want to believe everything.

That's not the case.

But I love it when the universe or the cosmos or some species appears to knock us out of our our deadness.

Yeah.

I think that's awesome.

I really do.

Well.

I mean it's it's essentially kind of knocking over the head and saying, you know what, this isn't the end all be all you are, there are other things out there beside you, and and this this isn't everything, you know, It's like, hey, we got this other stuff too, And it's I think in a way it's it.

It brings that front and center and makes you realize, oh wait, this maybe there is more than all all there, you know, all there is, and and because you're experiencing it and whatever this is is is is right in front of you and you're you're you're seeing that, Okay, there's more to the universe than what I was maybe told or maybe what I thought.

And that's in many ways, I think that is very free.

For lack of a better I do too.

I do too.

I think it's there's way more.

I think it's much weirder than not only than we can imagine, but that we can imagine.

I mean, it's it's out there.

I yeah, I just I just want to affirm that.

I I think that's really the case.

And one of the things that, again to go back to religion, that that experiencers taught me was the more I knew about a story, the more they told me about what happened to them, the weirder it got.

Hmmm hmm.

Actually, it actually never made any sense Scott stranger and stranger and stranger until I realized, oh, well, this is one of the points of the phenomenon, is the fact that it's so strange or absurd or weird that that's that's the whole, that's one of the messages here.

So let's not take that away because it's like, it's like people who want to I laugh when I hear this, They want to create psychedelics without it, without a high or without a trip.

I'm like, what, what is the point?

What is the point.

That Simon ls dear anything?

If you don't the experience, it's the experience that matters that counts, not not the freaking molecule of right, It's like alcoholiss beer.

It's like, yeah, I don't drink, so I do drink alcoholists alcoholic non alcoholic beer, and I can tell you it's nowhere is.

Fun that that's.

Not It's not the same thing.

So it is not the same It is not the same thing.

Now you've said that there's kind of a shocking truth.

I think was the quote at the center of the UFO u AP mystery or or whatever you.

Prefer to call it.

Even if we never learn exactly what that is.

What good might might it do for our minds and our spirits?

Maybe this kind of touches back on what I what I encounter, what good might to do for our minds and spirits?

That this truth remains hidden?

Or is it better than it not remain hidden?

What is that?

Well, first of all, it's hiding itself.

The camouflage is internal to the phenomenon.

It's not our fault, Matt.

It's not like somebody knows the truth that isn't telling it, or somebody's messing with somebody else.

Of course they're doing that too, I get that.

But the phenomena itself is deceptive, is camouflaging and so, and camouflage is not a sign of a sinister nature.

Again, we know, we know from the natural world the camouflage actually allows things to survive and pray and to exist.

It's actually a really good thing.

And it's often used by the way for reproduction as well.

You know, deception is woven right into the natural world as something that makes it possible in the first place.

If you talk to human beings who have had these encounters or experiences, and you talk to them long enough, what you realize is that the most important thing about the whole experience is how it shocks their nature, their notion of reality.

They that's what's important.

You know that John Mack called that ontological shock in the nineteen nineties, but he was actually drawing on the study of religion, by the way, which had come up with the phrase already in the nineteen fifties.

But it really refers to this idea that this experience demonstrates in very clear fashion that what I thought was real is not what is real, and this something else is going on.

I think that that revelation or that experience is extremely positive and powerful, and I think that's what I think.

Where this is going, you know, or where it should go, is just some kind of ontological shock.

And that's why I'm so against explaining it in terms of some worldview.

I'm like, oh, that's not ontological shock, that's the opposite.

That's just more reductionism, more stupid explanation.

That doesn't work.

Do you think that what we'll call it trauma experiences trauma?

Do you think it fits into the sort of broader psychological framework or sort of mythic framework, Like I.

Guess what I'm saying is like.

The trauma that experiencers often go through is in a way, does it maybe represent sort of like an initiation or like a kind of a rebirth of how they view the world, and that sort of trauma or that traumatic experience.

If it weren't traumatic, would it have the same kind of end effect on people.

So, I mean it depends on how you understand a human being, Matt.

I definitely look at human beings as containers or as nodes in a network, as it were.

And so what you have to do to understand that larger network or that larger environment is break open the container or the person.

And so trauma is the most effective way to do this.

Historically, you know, human beings suffer.

We suffer illness, we suffer death, we suffer psychedelics, we suffer all kinds of things, and that can crack us open into this larger universe which is extremely powerful and positive.

But the trauma itself can just destroy us.

I don't want to romanticize suffering or trauma, but I think something has to happen to the human being to break that person open.

And so this is why again I think so much, so many paranormal phenomena are traumatic experiences because the person is being split open to this larger ecosystem or this larger reality, and depending on how that person responds to that, that's either a good thing or a bad thing, or a neutral thing.

I think that's really where the difference comes in in terms of how it's interpreted.

But the phenomenon itself is you know, psychedelics are traumatic.

They do really really major things to the human brain and body.

So are near death experience by definition, and near death experience as a traumatics died, so but you don't get the near death experience without the near death.

I'm trying to say, now, someone will come back to me and say, well, I had a revelation of a greater reality, you know, looking at a sunset or a painting, or like, Okay, good for you.

That's great.

But for most people, know that doesn't happen.

You know, most people need shocked or broken or split open in some ways.

And this is why, again, I think the relationship between mental pathology and the phenomenon is completely unknown, you know, because we just fall into these easy binaries.

Oh, it's either this or it's that.

It's either an hallucination or its genuine I'm like, why is it one or the other?

When?

Why when the person split open?

Can't this result in some kind of pathology but also reveals some greater aspect of reality?

And I think, so that's the deeper question, Matt.

Sure.

And I also think we assume that all these experiences are for us, they're somehow good.

And I'm like, why do you think that?

It's kind of self centered thinking?

In a way?

I think that's all about us?

Right, It's not.

It's all about us.

So I mean this goes back to the offense that I think materialist take, or people who want it all to be localized in the human bucket.

I'm like, no, no, this is exactly not that.

And I know it offends you, but it should offend you actually.

Now, your current work, The Superstory, examines the hidden mythologies in science fiction and kind of esoteric thought.

How do UAP narrative narratives function as kind of modern myths?

What would be some examples of that?

Big time?

So by myth, I don't mean liear, I mean this grounding narrative.

I mean the water the fish are swimming in.

They don't even know it's water.

They don't even know they're swimming in a story.

And so what the superstory looks at.

It looks at physics, it looks at lucary biology, and it looks at cosmology and neuroscience to sort of basically make the argument that the world or the universe we're living in today is very much defined by modern science, whether it's contemporary physics or cosmology, or evolutionary biology or neuroscience or what it is.

So let's think with that, and you know, to kind of make it real.

I guess when someone has a near death experience, they don't see the Virgin Mary and the saints and go to purgatory, they see a galaxy or they go back to the Big Bang or something.

I mean, they are integrating modern science into into the religious experience.

But also those religious experiences are informing the sciences.

It goes both ways.

It's just one way.

And so a lot of the scientists have these Poultergeist experiences or have these mind over matter effects and they know darn well that it happens, and so they're pushing they're pushing the scientific box, you know, because of these experiences.

And so that's what the superstory is.

The first one's called the Physics of Mystics, which is not out.

I mean, I haven't even submitted it yet.

The second one's called Biological Gods, and the third one is called the UFO as the soul.

And so the UFO comes in big time in the third volume.

And where I think it really comes in is the end of the world.

We'll imagine the end of the world.

They think about the UFO or the flying saucer or the apocalypse as it were.

And I, you know, Jung said this already in the nineteen fifties.

This is not a new thought, but I think it's essentially a correct thought.

We don't we don't think in terms of angels or demons anymore.

We think in terms of aliens and visitors and and you know, other other UFO like entities.

But it is very much this, this this disclosure or this revealing of the nature of reality that and by the end of the world, I don't just mean bombs going off or or the or the ecological disaster.

I mean a real revelation of reality and ending of one world view in the beginning of another.

Okay, So that's that's what that And you know, those three volumes are that just this is what writers do.

They just say, Okay, I'm writing three bars so they don't die.

By the way, I just like, I got to have a reason to live.

So that that's that's that's three volumes.

That'll put it out for a while, put it off.

So that's kind of the joke.

But on the other hand, I think the superstory is it's not me.

It's something our culture is telling in a million ways, and and so I'm just trying to name it.

I'm like, well, this is what's going on.

You know, this is happening right now.

I mean, even when I go to the grocery store and I buy a bottle of wine, it actually there's a whole.

There's a whole.

There's a whole series of wines called evolution.

I mean, or I can go to the gymnasium and it says evolution.

You know, why is lifting weights and drinking alcohol evolution?

I mean, no, it's not.

But but they're they're they're living in this this bigger superstory that I think we are really kind of fundamentally swimming in.

And I'm trying to get the fish to name the water.

Essentially, now, when the UMO answry when the UFO interacts with the fishes that were guess what, It comes from above the water.

You know, I think there is this is an old science fiction kind of forty in trope that the UFO with the flying saucer comes from the outside and it intervenes and essentially our aquarium as it were, and teaches the fish that it's not just about the water.

It's not.

That's a great analogy.

That's actually the perfect analogies.

They come in, throw in the hook or net or whatever, take you out, do some things, throw you back in the water.

And yeah, it sounds it sounds like my childhood going fishing with my dad in Texas, So I.

Know, I know I used to I used to go fishing with my dad too, And yeah, I mean, it's just it's not just the water.

Yeah, I mean, that's that's a T shirt right there.

It's just I yeah, I think that needs to at least go on your website.

That's some swag that's going to sell.

So we were super super fortunate, to lucky, fortunate, whatever, actually really the word would be honored to have doctor Jacques Valet on our show a couple of months ago.

It was first time he had been on our show, and I have to say I could just listen to that man go on for hours and hours.

We only had him for.

An hour, but it was such anpaced hour.

So he told us a little bit about the Archives of the Impossible.

So for our viewers that aren't familiar with it, what are the Archives of the Impossible?

And what role does this academic archive play in preserving the anomalous experiences documented by doctor Valet.

Yeah, so it was really Jock who began them.

I mean, I know he's probably too humble about it, but he approached me in twenty fourteen and was looking for a place to place his papers in his correspondence, and he wanted a university archive to accept them for posterity sake, and so I naively went I just thought I would help him and I would just a place some universities.

But then I started thinking, well, why can't we do this?

And it took us a number of years to negotiate that particular gift, but he was the first, that was the first collection that we accepted, and you know, that was in about twenty eighteen or twenty seventeen, somewhere in there, and then we've had about eighteen of these different collections come in, and I've learned a lot about archivists and how archives work.

And the more I learned, the more impressed I am.

I mean, this is the way to have a conversation over many generations.

And so when I approach a potential donor about papers or it's an easy ask, Matt, because essentially what I'm saying is, look the university.

This university is going to preserve your papers for as long as it exists, and it's going to store it in a climate control building, and it's researchers are going to have access to it.

It's going to go on and on and on, and so that's really what we do is that.

But I do it inside or with a university.

I host it, or I suppose intellectually host or lead it.

But it's not me, Matt.

It's the broader or bigger university and something called Woodson Research Center that really does this thing.

But we work carefully with donors, and again there's been about eighteen of those, and so it does constitute this collection of anomalous phenomenon.

We've had UFOs for sure.

We also have remote viewing, We have mediumship, we have science fiction in there, We've got graphic novels in there.

We've got a whole range of things kind of looking at this from different different perspectives.

And then I host a conference series called Archives of the Impossible, which takes place about every other year now, and it's overwhelming, Matt.

It's not soul, but it's like that.

It's essentially like that in the kinds of people that come to it.

And we had to shut registration down in twenty four hours this last time we did it.

Oh wow, Okay, so I've better sign up early next time.

Yeah.

I mean, that's how popular it is is.

And I don't mean popular in a superficial sense.

I mean people really are looking for this conversation, and so we bring people in and have plenaries and panels and we try to have this conversation.

I'm curious, and actually, this was going to be a question I was going to ask a little bit later one.

What what is it like.

Now in academia when you bring this up, when you are speaking with your colleagues fellow professors that may or may not be related to religious studies.

Have things changed?

Has the stigma reduced?

And then That would lead me to the second question.

When you were putting together this Archives of the Impossible and pitching it to the university, what was that initial conversation, like, how did you sell it?

So I will just say this will sound like an advertisement, but it's not.

It's very genuine.

Rights University is a very special place.

It follows its faculty and it allows their research interests to blossom, and then it backs them up and it follows essentially.

I didn't find that on the East Coast.

Frankly, when I taught on the East Coast, I found that the universities wanted to tell me what to do, and I found that odd.

I did not find that at Rice.

So it's a remarkable place.

I in terms of my colleagues, I can't speak for them, of course, but my sense is I have a couple of senses.

One is, first of all, I'm a scholar religion.

I don't know anything to begin with.

I have no authority and the pecking order of knowledge, and therefore I can get away with pretty much anything.

You know, I can cause good trouble and love that.

Yeah, and Lewis would like you, Yeah, you appreciate your work.

Now on the other hand, I will say that my colleagues in the sciences or the social sciences or the humanities, I think they're in the closet on this one.

I think there's a lot of support and frankly a lot of love, but they don't want to articulate it.

They don't want to come out of the closet because they don't want to sound like the tabloids.

But also there are real finance, financing and grant costs to do.

Anything that can possibly be at risk for them.

Yeah, well not possibly there, it is at risk.

There is a risk, and it's a real taboo still to this day, and I just want to honor that.

But we can do that in the humanities.

First of all, there's no money in the humanities.

There's no very few grants are finny, so there's nothing to take away.

But also it's easier to do that, you know, for a variety of reasons.

So I think there's a lot of support and a lot of and I really do try to stick to the rigor and the intensity of the disciplines.

I mean, I really do honor whatever my colleagues are saying, because it's they're the ones who represent their disciplines.

I don't so, and they know that they understand the effects and the the the honor too.

It's really a conversation, Matt.

It's not It's not a matter of me somehow beating people down with religious texts, right right.

I'm curious if in your view, if let's say, again, flying saucer lands on the White House lawn.

I know that analogy has been used a million times and these beings came out, and you know, whatever, what do you think it would it would negate what has happened in the past, or would it negate any prior the gate, any religions or what was written about?

Like, do you think it would cause people to look back and go, well, maybe some of the things in.

The Bible or written about in the Bible were this.

Would it be a net negative?

Would it be a net positive?

Would it just be a readjustment or reinterpretation of what the you know, what the prophets have said in the past, et cetera.

So I think my my feeling is that, you know, there's a whole branch of scholarship that sees disclosure in positive terms in terms of the religions, and then there's a whole literature that sees it as negative as as problematic.

I'm more in the latter camp.

I think if something did land on the UF, on the White House lown as it were in the aliens camp, I think it would be really shocking and would negate a lot of a lot of people's religious beliefs.

Okay, So, but that's that's a choice I make.

That's maybe that's and maybe it's wrong, Matt.

I mean one of the things we do in the field a lot is we don't we allow ourselves to be corrected and and and and disagreed with it.

I mean, it's just true, it's not even allowed.

It's just like I don't Maybe I'm wrong, but I do think this notion of ontological shock is is more fundamental than people understand, and that it applies as much to religious belief as it does to scientific belief.

Sometimes I wonder if this sort of potential for ontological shock is explains why some folks are so dogmatic in.

That no way this exists, no way of course.

Yeah.

You know, like is it when scientists or these debunkers that I always criticize, you know, when there's saying, oh, you know this does it match our physics or whatever?

Is that really just a cover for them, not an excuse, because not necessarily in a negative way, But is it a mechanism to avoid things, avoid the fact that some of this may be very disturbing, disturbing in an and uncomfortable, and therefore they maybe use these other things as a method to not have to think about it.

I think so.

I I think that again, this is what I mean by impossible thinking, is not reducing it to your your explanatory framework.

And I think people want to do that, and I think, particularly some people in the skeptical community, they essentially it's essentially an ideology, essentially pushing a kind of materialist ideology.

And it's not that there aren't lots of cases that they can talk about, of course there are, but but that's an ideology.

That's a belief system too.

That's some that's the water of the fisher swim those fish are swimming in right.

I just I'm very suspicious of any of the water.

Matt.

What about it that it's not what we think it is or what about it?

It's it's the water is created by the fish, and the fish are created by the water, and it's a mutual, really, but it's not not all of the ecosystem's water.

You know, there's a sky above the water.

To speak in the metaphors again, and I just don't.

I just don't believe the limits or the ultimate nature of the water.

So then, with this sort of thinking impossibly as being kind of a necessary act, what advice do you have for these scholars or journalists or debunkers or the curious public on how to think through the impossibilities without sort of losing sort of like critical rigor or academic rigor or scientific rigor, Like how do they coexist?

Well, I don't think there's any need to lose academic or critical or scientific rigor.

I mean, I think those things go together really well.

But it is going to get messy.

You know.

If you think you can do this, you know, on the weekend, as it were, or that you can preserve the littles of your worldview, good luck, it's not going to happen.

So I don't.

I don't want to underestimate the costs of this, but I don't see I don't see a way around it, or a better way around, a better way around it.

I think just the nature of honesty just requires us to deal with it.

And you know, the popularity of the UFO man as you know, is astonishing.

It truly is.

It's astonishing, and so let's let's embrace that and use that to talk about these other, these bigger issues that are embedded in the phenomenon.

I don't want to just use one issue to talk about another.

But if it's embedded in it, then all the more reason to talk about it.

So if humanity is undergoing all it say like sort of like a metaphysical disclosure.

It's not about the nuts and bolts, craft or the visitors, but or so about really the nature of consciousness itself.

If the President were to come to you and say, Jeff.

What should we be preparing for?

What would that be?

Well, first of all, I think what this is really pushing us is to some model of the universe that's not spiritual but also not strictly material.

I think that division is itself false, that that division reminded matter.

So I think we're being pushed into a reality that's both of those.

At the same time, if the President or Congress were to come to me, my advice would be look out, you know, here comes don't think that this is going to be popular with your voting block.

It's not.

You know, this is not going to be popular with the religious crowd.

It's not.

But that doesn't mean it's not true, Matt.

This is the power of the academy and the beauty of higher education is you can speak truths that are not the result of just people voting.

You know, politics is not knowledge.

Knowledge is not politics.

So it depends do you want to do you want to talk about what's real or do you want to talk about what people want to hear?

That?

Those are two very different things in my opinion.

Sure, well, at least we know that members of Congress like to do the right thing and not worry about their constituents.

So for some joking, well, they like it as they like it as long as it's a threat narrative, as long as it is bad.

But what if it's not bad, What if it's not a threat, then suddenly it's become something entirely different.

So I don't know, you know, that's again that's the that's where the push is.

Yeah, yeah, I mean I've often said in conversations with folks, like I can underst stand if I were a president, why they would maybe not disclose it unless it were purely yeah, like unless they were totally looking at it from altruistic, from an altruistic.

Point of view.

But of course they have to worry about.

The economic and social stability of the country, political stability, all of those things.

I mean, yeah, that's why.

I'm not a politician that I mean either.

I mean, listen, evolution.

Evolution is a fact.

Right, it happens, but it was completely.

Rejected by by the by the courts, and by a large still is rejected by large blocks of the population.

I'm like, well, they're wrong.

Okay, they're just wrong.

Let's just go on.

So that's that's more.

What I'm trying to say is knowledge is not politics.

You know, truth is not always useful in this in this articular way.

So finally, what would be what is your hope for audiences to take away from your upcoming volumes in the Superstory series.

They're fish swimming in water, and and to realize you're swimming in water, and to be aware of that story and to question it, to be able to pop outside of it as well.

And again, I don't know what our descendants will say or they'll what new stories they're come up with, but their stories won't be adequate either, Matt.

But it's that constant it's that constant transformation that that really I think I most want to say, or I most want to want to just hold up to people.

I absolutely love that.

Well, Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the show.

This has really been a very enlightening conversation.

And it Yea, I think as you kind of were alluding to earlier, it's like all of this is not going to be settled in one conversation at the dinner table.

It's it's a pretty big conversation.

I think it's going to go on for quite some time.

Time.

Yeah, a long time will pass our.

Lives absolutely well, Jeff, thanks for joining us, and hopefully I will see you at your next Impossible archives.

But no, I'm sorry, I'm plubbing that again.

What is the archives?

Are the impossible?

There?

You go?

So well, at least when I make it out to Houston, I'll have that straight.

So anyway, thank you very much for doing what you're doing, and it's been a true pleasure.

Thanks for coming on the show.

Folks.

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