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In the course of doing research for this season of Strange Arrivals, I ran across the book The Believer Encounters with the Beginning, the End, and Our Place in the Middle, by Sarah Krasnstein. Like Strange Arrivals, it is concerned with issues of belief, but approaches the topic a little differently. Here's my interview with Sarah. We talk about the creation Museum, UFO experiencers and people who will come to your house inclensed of evil or just annoying spirits.
My name is Sarah Krasstein, and I am a writer, and you'll find that I have a very strange hybrid accent because I am a dual American Australian citizen, and I've spent probably about half my life in each country by this point, and I often forget what's the right word for the right country. And we're in the liminal podcast space, so I guess that doesn't matter, but I'm flagging it. That's me.
What was the impetus behind writing this book?
So it's probably generous to describe it as a process, but with each of my kind of book length work so far, it really just starts off as something that's
not really even intellectualized. It's just a feeling that these are interesting stories that deserve kind of more than a magazine type treatment, and that if they're willing, these people that have kind of sparked my curiosity or interest, I would like over the next indefinite period, which so far has shaken out to about four years each book, to get to know them, like see the world through their eyes,
their interior life. And with the Believer, it was disclosed over the process of those kind of four year interviews that it was different people speaking from vastly different perspectives about the grief in the gap between the world as it intractably is in the world as we'd love it to be, and what they did to make that gap cognitively or spiritually work for them.
How did that become apparent to you?
Well, again, like I say, it's just like and this is difficult because before I wrote full Time, I was a lawyer and I have a PhD in criminal appeals, and it is not a really intellectualized, repplicable process. It's much more intuitive. It's that there's something that they're telling me that is either immediately identifiable to me and I feel it too in some strange way, or alien to me, and I want to explore that difference. So I was
hearing the same phrases again and again. And what the believer is is six braided together, very different stories that on the surface have nothing in common. And I was hearing this phrase again from all these people, whether they were the ghost hunters or the Eufologists, or fundamentalist Christians or Buddhists, that this life can't be all there is.
There has to be something else out there. And whether they came at that from a you know, Kingdom come evangelist perspective, or a Buddhist non attachment perspective, or a personal kind of agency perspective or literal alien perspective, it was this longing for something more, for some meaning, for something greater than we appeared to be able to produce for ourselves in this kind of quotidian, daily daily life.
Was it just these six groups that you looked at, or were there other ones that that you sort of started with that kind of fell away as time went on.
As a writer's question. That's right, Yeah, there were there's always what are they say? You've got to have a lot of milk to get to the cream, you know. There's there were a number of others which I wished could have worked, but for whatever reason, usually because they're coming to me with kind of a prepackaged story, or they are kind of to screen ready or camera ready and I don't feel I'm getting the kind of true emotional honesty or depth, they fall away. But it could
be for a range of reasons. So the process kind of self selects people that are happy to speak to me honestly and who I'm happy to spend time with. And that's not going to be everyone that I initially thought at the beginning it would be.
I've got a bunch of just I mean, they they're like slightly detailed, but I think they kind of hit it different. Things. I thought was that I thought we're interesting in the book, so and I think this is answers in Genesis, which I've been interested in for years. Just bizarre, bizarre that ken Ham is such an odd the idea that you're trying to prove Noah's ark, and that there are like triceratops is on the arc is
just so strange. But I think it's in one of those sections that you make a point about tolerating uncertainty versus defending a point just for the sake or defending a solution just for the sake of like having that solution. Can you talk about that a little bit? I thought that was an interesting point.
Yeah, And it's something that you know, again kind of I see across all these stories, or I saw across the stories, whether it was the paranormal researchers, the ghost hunters at work, or some of the euthologists, the kind of inability which is a very human, universal inability. We all do it in different ways to have difficulty tolerating uncertainty and therefore our own actual lack of control over daily circumstances, yet alone the larger course of a life
manifested in Kentucky. As you know, it's in the literal name of the ministry. It's answers in Genesis. Anything you want to know, there is an answer, a solution, a certainty for and I'm jealous of that. I found myself increasingly jealous of it over my time there, which was the shortest of any kind of the stories in the book. It was only a week, although it felt like a million years. It was you know, any any question, any kind of gotcha moment that science could provide, would have
a neatly wrapped up, seemingly watertight to them answer. And I was not really interested in defeating religion with science, you know, as the ministry specifically, you know, has been the subject of Bill Nye's work, and you know, it's something that's easily mockable and easily kind of defeated. It's
just like cotton candy, these arguments. But I was interesting more in what was underlying that impulse to kind of have a complete explanation for circumstances that you know, the best astrophysicists will tell you are still not fully understood, and that's part of the joy in the glory of science. They couldn't sit in that space. And then it led to the question, well, where can the rest of us not sit? What is intolerable to the rest of us? What kind of magical thinking do we do reflexively on
a daily basis. It might not be as extreme as having a big, perfectly articulated argument why dinosaurs had to be on Noah's ark and they were vegetarians and whatnot, but we might do it, you know, nonetheless in smaller, trickier ways, and there's universal kind of touching vulnerability to that. Yeah.
I feel like a lot of the UFO people end up talking to would say the same thing about like skeptics, in that it's like, you like the you like to be able to sort of get rid of the uncertainty of what's up in our skies and that we just can't really comprehend it by by providing explanations that are comprehensible, which I think is sort of the flip side of the coin that I look at them at. But it's, uh, yeah, it's an interesting thought. And Georgia, I can't even read
my own handwriting. Yeah, so she seems like she's almost like the ultimate of that in which it's She kind of makes the argument at one point that essentially like, Wow, when people take issue with something I say, I just like I realized that it's not really me they're taking issue with, it's the Bible. And so if they want to take on the Bible, And it's like this sort of complete confidence that her interpretation of the Bible is absolutely correct, So any criticism of her is actually sort
of a criticism of God. So she's not going to like get too worried about it. I thought was kind of interesting.
Yeah, Like I think all kind of the executive positions that they use. Everyone I spoke to kind of had this very neat reply to these issues of meaning and answers being somehow entirely external from them. And again, it's wonderful. I'm jealous of that kind of faith that there's a plan, it's explicable. This is not my thing. I didn't come up with this. I'm just you know, discovering or you know, going along with something that exists objectively and independently, and
anyone else who can't see that is wrong. And again, underneath that kind of maddening logic is you know, a very young part wanting certainty and justice and fairness and control. But yeah, I mean at the level of conversation or discourse, it's really not good enough. It's quite unsatisfactory.
Yeah, So I want to talk about this spirit section a little bit. So it's just kind of interesting because I didn't know I have any background in it. What was your what's your take on that experience?
So you know, it was like take your writer to work day for the paranormal investigators who agreed to let me watch them at work, and they're clearing haunted houses, and they're leading kind of workshops and conferences into how people can do this for themselves, or little field trips into haunted places, and again a very unlikely place to
end up. I had no independent interest in this before I was in Kentucky at Answers and Genesis and at the Creation Museum, which you know, after that week it became clear that this really wasn't about any kind of ethical system or morality, and it was more about kind of this fundamental injustice of how can we explain the fact that all this and everyone we love, including ourselves, will die? And what will we do with the idea that death just exists? Can we make it less scary
by conceiving it as a punishment for sin? And is that? Is that really kind of a form of grief or longing for something that feels more comfortable? And so I thought, well, who can I find that has a more spacious attitude towards death? And that opened up a whole bunch of stories and the paranormal researchers were one of them, because again, death becomes explicable, becomes friendlier, it becomes something that you can wish away or think away more to the point.
And I didn't expect to be as freaked out as I actually was, so more fool me. But I mean, I think most of the time. Well, firstly, I have to say that these were some of the most pleasant people to spend time with that I've worked with. They were universally quite intelligent, universally very kind, and self aware in many ways. So one of them was a neurophysiologist whose kind of leisure time on the weekend is spent
looking for empirical proof of ghosts. Another one is kind of comes at it from a more kind of depth psychology background. But again, it's been actively clearing haunted houses for about three decades, and lovely people to spend time with their work, their hobbies or interests. They approached this in a very utilitarian, pragmatic way. It's almost bureaucratic, and it's mundanity that they're just there clearing another house. And so I had come along with that. I was just
doing my job as well. And then you're sitting there at midnight and a you know, one hundred and twenty year old building, and I found myself very nervous to go to the bathroom by myself down a long, dark hallway, or you know, wondering about the space at my bed and finding myself more freaked out than I thought I would be. So isn't it interesting where we end up? Yeah?
I thought when I was reading that part, I was thinking about how important setting is for so much stuff that you know, and that being in some abandoned place that's really dark and quiet and like every creek like sort of sets a tone for certain moods or perceptions
or whatever. I really liked the Vlad. I just I kind of kind of felt bad for him because he wanted so badly to perceive the stuff that all these other people were just like, you know, supposedly perceiving with like no problem, and just like, oh, look at all these people, Look at all these spirits hanging out in this room. It's like I can't see any of them. I can't feel it. I want to get back to that.
A second part of one of the things that you brought up in here that I thought was interesting is you talk about the god helmet and how you know, which I guess is a contraption that somebody came up with, and that if you use weak magnets can initiate a sounse that there's something in the room with you, and if you, you know, stimulate another part of the brain, you can like kind of give it sort of positive or negative. What was your thought about including that?
So Latt is a he's an academic. He teaches neurophysiology at a university, and he has a very kind of intellectualized approach to the world. Super smart guy, loves a footnote, loves the small print, and presents in every way like a professor. And then, as you say, has this real longing to kind of experience what many of these more very intuitive, kind of hippyish people were experiencing spiritually when
they walked into a space. There was something that he told me once about how the brain responds to the physical stimulus of you know, for instance, if you like touch someone's wrist and then you touch further up their arm, the brain will register touch at every point in between. It just kind of fills it in as a shorthand for that explanation of why it physically felt something at the start and at the finish of the space of
your arm. And I thought that was really interesting also metaphorically, for how we tend to fill in these creepy spaces or empty rooms or the quieter parts of our lives with a story that might not be comforting but makes sense to us, or a story that is suspiciously comforting. How bad we are at something that's unknown or not yet proved, or that we can't make sense of, or
that we wish was different. So I found kind of that correspondence between what the body does physically and what the mind does cognitively through a whole range of cognitive dissonance biases. We have confirmation bias and conformity bias and normalcy bias and nego bias, and what it lacks in accuracy, it really makes up for in comfort uncertainty. And we
say that in a range of ways. So you know, it played out in the kind of ghost hunting sense in that way, a willingness to approach evidence or the possibility of kind of collating what would ideally be a peer reviewed standard of academic scientific proof on the one hand, and kind of the reality of this is not a space that lends itself to that sort of proof and what are we going to do? How we're going to you know, think about that in that glaring gap. So
all of that was kind of at play. It was what I was seeing, but it was more more creepy that I thought it would be. While having all of these kind of thoughts.
You know, two things. At one point, I think it's flat who says we don't know what caused it, so we just assumed it was something genuinely paranormal, which I just thought was kind of nice but also interesting. The other thing that I was kind of, you know, troubled by is that is that Spirits seemed like kindergarteners in some ways in the way that Rob was kind of dealing with them. So you've got this sort of scene where he goes to this guy, Ah, is it George or Jane?
Oh, I think Jane at the old Man's house.
I think it's Gene George. It's somebody's different. Yeah, And he's like clearing out his house and he kind of carries on this sort of you get one side of this conversation he's having with this with Spirits, but he's essentially like kind of disciplining him and telling him to like do what he wants them to do. And apparently that's what it takes. Can you do that if you're not an intuitive apparently.
Not strictly, not in according to the rules of that discipline, But the upshot is that if you're not intuitive or psychic, you won't be seeing the ghosts so often in these spaces. I was the only admitted non psychic, and I was therefore spared the possibility of seeing or experiencing any kind of paranormal interference. So you won't see it, and you can't kind of show them away. And again, I mean thinking of it more kind of metaphorically or at a
deeper level. He said to me, this is his name is Rob Tilley, and he's been clearing haunted houses for thirty years and a lovely guy, very smart, very creative, really wonderful person to hang out with. He was like, you know, they're just like annoying people. They're just of like bullies, and if you don't give them attention, they go away. So what does it mean to be haunted by something? What does it mean to feel a threatening presence or the yeah of the past where you are now?
And how comforting might it be to have someone in there who seems to control what is uncontrollable and hurting you and scaring you. And it was a very beautiful kind of human moment. There's nothing kind of exploitative about what he's doing. He does charge like the bare minimum to cover his travel costs, but if he's dealing with a client who can't afford it, he will he will
do it for free. And so I have to say, like, I didn't expect this at all from myself, but you know, we had moved into a new house during the course of that research, and I remember it's a very old house. My house was built in eighteen eighty and I remember having a thought, well, oh, there's something creepy here. I can call Rob and he'll take care of it. And it was so comforting. So, you know, I didn't expect to have that thought me and go through my mind, but there it was.
You've got a guy in the industry, I know a guy.
Yeah.
My conversation with Sarah Kraststein will continue after the break. For people who are listening, there's there is like at the end of this, you write, I think very sensitively about Jean's experience, and he I mean, he basically says that, well, his wife died and you know, that's fine. What he
really misses is his dog. And then you have this kind of two paragraphs, one talking about what it's like to have lived with somebody for however many years and just not really miss them when they're gone, and then what his life is like now he's sort of adopted this sort of spiritual view of things, and how that's not really worked out exactly the way that he he most likely would have liked to. So he's gone to this new world with its own set of problems for him,
which I thought was sort of insightful of moving. The other thing before we kind of move on is that there's every once in a while like something would pop up in a couple of places in ways that were sort of unrelated. And one of those things in the first section of the book is dragons, because I believe there's some conversation about how, because dragons are mentioned a couple times in the Bible, that they definitely did exist
and existed with people. And then there's also I don't know if it's rob but he has to rid a Chinese gentleman. I think is how he described him house of a dragon, and it was just so big that he ended up just like wrapping it around the outside of the house.
And that was a purely like that was a water cooler conversation between two kind of house clearers about how they dealt with these dragons and where they put the dragons. Very you know, it was like they were talking about the traffic. It was beautiful to behold. Carl Jung wrote a book on flying saucers where he was interested not at all and whether they were real or not, and more in the kind of archetypal or symbolic experience of all of us. All cultures have recourse to this shared
repository of images, and what did they serve? What purpose do they serve in human society and personal meaning making? And the idea that this dragon, which if you think spent enough time thinking about the physicality of a dragon, is an actual thing is quite terrifying. What role do these kind of fearsome, mystical, beautiful, you know, literally awesome beasts continuously playing in these different cultures and our different kind of personal outlooks. So again, you know, between six
stories that on the surface have nothing in common. I kept on saying they were like harmonies. They were just kind of like these little resonances and echoes. And it was this notion that let's not try to defeat this with logic, because if fact moved the world, we wouldn't have any of the stories that are in the newspaper every day. What can we where can we go emotionally that makes us recognizable to each other and might create
some chance of understanding mutual dialogue or not. I'm not that hopeful about the actual reality of that manifesting, but I think it's a really interesting space to wonder about.
I want to get into the UFO stuff a little bit. So you talk about I guess kind of the two biggest Australian UFO stories. Why did you pick these two? And that was kind of interested, like your entry point to them as well.
So I'm not a UFO person. I'm not interested. I had not before I found these stories been at all across or interested in becoming across the areas. And I was looking at one of those websites says like what happens on this day randomly, so it wasn't I didn't even set out looking for a UFO story, and that's when I first learned about Frederick Valentiche and that was kind of in my back pocket for a couple of years.
And then when I had spent that time with the ghost Hunters and the other Australian story in the book, which is a woman who helps people die is a Buddhist death dula, and I had these two kinds of ways of thinking about death, thinking about the unknown, and then I started looking at Valentage in that light as well, less for the truth of how that pilot disappeared and more about the people he left behind, thinking about the lack of kind of confirmation, the lack of knowledge, and
what one does in the space where you don't even have a body. Then it led to the fact that you know, I've been in Australia since nineteen ninety four. I've lived in Victoria all that time, where Melbourne is. It's the capital of the state of Victoria. And I had never heard about the Valentage disappearance. And I know that people who are interested in the area globally have
heard about the story. And I found it so odd that it had been kind of ghettoised in Australian history or Victorian history or kind of cultural history that it's still kind of a niche story. Yeah, I contacted the fiance that he left behind, and I started the research in that way, and that led me to the west All siding.
At this point in the conversation, I was interested that the Westall sighting didn't attract the same theorizing from researchers that Aerial School or Roswell or any number of high profile encounters have. I asked her what she took away from her look into this case.
Yeah, I mean, i'd say journalistically, like forensically, from like a not a strictly speaking legal standard, but you know, using actual evidential rules that the people that I spoke to definitely did see something at the school, I mean, and they had there is funny memories. The funny thing because the short answer to your question is, I think everyone saw something that the military then tried to cover up.
And then from there, as kids left the school and kind of ran down to the adjacent park land, that's where stories start to differ in fairly cinematic ways. But what happened at the school, and again I kind of write about this weather balloon that had come down, you know, not long before in a different place, and what that would have looked like, particularly to you know, people in
the mid sixties. So there's kind of more mundane explanations for what they may or may not have seen and what the government did or did not want them to be telling other people. But the guy that I spoke with and completely reasonable, totally normal guy, he was like, there was a road here, I was standing on it, I was kicking with football on the football field, and
this is what happened. And you know, I go back and I look at historic roadmaps of the suburb at the time, and there was a road there and it hasn't been there for forty years. So the memory of that is perfect. Is he then one hundred percent reliable
in his recollections, which are you know, bona fide. He actually believes this that when he goes down to the parkland, there's you know, a balloon that changes shape and it's weightlessness and element you know, all of these different things that start to kind of get a lot more murky and a lot more dramatic after the citing that everyone can agree on. So I don't think it's an all
or nothing kind of proposition. I also don't think that, you know, government's covering something up, could cover something up for a totally mundane reason or operational reason that has nothing you know, I often wish the government was effective enough to be carrying out some sort of big you know, jupe like that. But often this the explanations are so much more banal and damply disappointing than we kind of created in our minds. So yeah, Westall is interesting for
that reason. And if you do try to find a lot of the evidence, and other researchers have have done a great deal of work in that area, the primary sources are noticeably missing. That's interesting as well. Videotapes of the coverage, news coverage at the time. So again, all of those issues of memory and group memory and kind of that that sort of bias confirm confirmation bias are live there. But something something was seen on that day with what it is is a different story.
Yeah, there's all these things that happened to memories over time, and you know, as you're as you're telling the story, any you know, that becomes what you remember rather than you know, there's all these different polluting aspects. So you talk to a few other people Jamie and Aspasia, Aspasia, Yeah.
Aspasia, Espasia, Leonardo.
They were pretty interesting, super interesting. What led you to them?
So the different Australian grassroots ufo RES research organizations are a kind of initially confronting, confrontingly similar massive initials, and I had to kind of educate myself about their differences and their histories. And yeah, Jamie was the spokesperson for the Sydney based research group and he I was. Yeah.
So I was looking for people that had kind of immersed themselves in this area, aware of the knowledge that at least if you have a sighting in Australia, the police or the military are not going to be interested in the slightest if you even got through to them. These are the groups that would take you seriously. And I think there's something really beautiful about that willingness to listen and to kind of meet people where they are
in their concerns. Also, you know, there but for the grace of whatever you want to call it, if I'm driving home one night, these are the people who will listen to me. So I kind of came to him with not knowing a great deal and I had a number of really wonderful conversations with them. I went to the UFO Research Sydney group Christmas party and spoke to kind of the broader base of members. Are the Leonardo's are fascinating people, even if you just take out the
UFO stuff. They are you know, self educated in many respects to a level that you know, you'd wish most people had that curiosity about other people in the world. We live in what we share and just full bottles on kind of anything that I was curious to know about. So that's how I got there. I spoke to a whole range of you know, it's a broad church. There's not one type, there's not one kind of personality. But yeah,
a lot of interesting stories came out of that. And Valentage was the reason why I went there initially, but it kind of opened up outside of that particular incident.
Some of the stuff they said was super, super interesting. And then they are also like, you do include a Spasias like sort of theory about how if you put a I can't remember exactly what it was, but like you put a bear in a water long enough and it turns into a whale. And that's not how evolution.
Not how evolution again, I mean the correspondences between this belief that look at this screwed up planet, look at what we've done to ourselves in the late state of capitalism. Is this natural? We must not be from here, There must be some other place. And how this, you know, incredibly intellectual woman who has read everything in her field and can talk at a very high level for as long as you want. What is she showing at an emotional level? At least? That's very similar to what Georgia
at the Creation Museum was saying about. This can't be all there is that We've got to have something, you know, there's another home for us. We look around what we've done this, this can't be us really And I found that really moving again, kind of the if you could take the highway to the intellect to the emotional heart
beneath all this kind of intellectualization. Maybe while we're all wearing very different clothes in the arguments about it, maybe we're coming from the same kind of wounded place.
That's interesting. So I guess maybe the last thing I want to talk about specifically is you talk about Neil who you know, he says like he always had a sense I didn't belong here, And then I believe he's had abduction experiences and then he has this thing where
these giant craft land in his backyard. I thought that this is another kind of interesting and moving story about a person dealing with I guess, just a sense of you know, unbelonging or isolation or what have you, and you know, bringing some sort of importance or reason for this.
Yeah, that's exactly right. So you know, sitting around the Leonardo's dining room table chatting with this man and you know, again they came to this their work by starting the first kind of support group for abductees in Sydney, but also I think Australia nationally. And I was interested in what he was saying. And he's a perfectly nice guy.
He's got kids, he has a business, he has a big dog and a messy car, and you wouldn't look twice at him, or if you spoke to him on the street, you wouldn't think this guy is not credible. But I was less interested in his stories of kind of contact and abduction or the veracity or otherwise of what he was saying, and more interested in observing the relationship between him and the Leonarders. What does it mean? To have an abductee support group. What is that dynamic?
What does it mean to kind of find somebody who's willing to meet you where you're at and to say, I mean they very much believe him, but also kind of to confirm that you're worth listening to something disturbing. Disturbing happened to you and you're not alone in that. And I found it kind of gently beautifully ironic that if we are kind of alone in the big universe or being menaced by, you know, these powers that we don't understand, how beautiful that at least in those spaces
they're not alone. And yeah, so watching and also but at another level, you know, in a country where a million people are having a cup of tea with their neighbors at a table or were anyway pre COVID, this is just one of the infinite human conversations that's going on on a Tuesday afternoon, and it is about what happened when you were visited by multiple alien aircraft on your farm that time. So I just find it adorable and infinitely interesting that that was just another kind of conversation.
Yeah. Interesting. It also struck me like how a fair amount of the stuff there's like sort of a good versus evil battle going on. So that just seemed like another interesting sort of through line through most of this stuff. I mean, that's like religion and you know, even rooting for sports teams. But I just it's another kind of one of those themes that seem to sort of flow through everything.
Yeah. No, well, thank you for saying that. I mean that as well, kind of this idea that maybe it doesn't matter that we do this, Maybe this kind of inability to see clearly doesn't really matter. Maybe that's just how we are built, but how we use it is probably the difference between good and evil if you insist on looking the other way when it comes to proof of consequences or the faults of your kind of reasoning process. Could that could be you know, quirky in one context,
or it could be genocidal in another context. And it's kind of at its cool are the same impulse of cognitive dissonance or magical thinking, and so the facts both do and don't matter. Our approach to it very much, very much matters, and is often the difference between what we call good and what we call evil. And it's not as much as we'd wish it to be as external as we think it is.
Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Rima L. Kayali, Jesse Funk, and Nuami Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick and
Aaron Mankey, and supervising producer Josh Thane. Learn more about the show at Grimminmild dot com, slash Strange Arrivals and find more podcasts from iHeartRadio listening to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.