INTERVIEW 3: David J. Halperin

or where did they come from? The question is what do they mean? My name is David J. Halper Right. I was a teenage UFO investigator back in the nineties sixties, and I grew up to become a professor of religious studies. For twenty four years, I taught judaic studies in the Department of Religious Studies that the University of North Carolina

at Chapel Hill. My areas of special interest were religious traditions of heavenly ascensions and other worldly journeys, which I think I realized even while I was studying them were my teenage uphology. In a more respectable guise that, as I describe in my book Intimate Alien The Hidden Story of the UFO. At the age of twelve going on thirteen, I became utterly convinced that UFOs were real and that it was my destiny to solve the mystery of what they were and what they what they meant for us.

And gradually, as I went off to college, I let go of the belief but the UFO. If I let go of the UFOs, they never let go of me, and I remained. Really I was quite aware of this, captivated by what I would now call the UFO mythology

and it's intersections with certain more ancient traditional mythologies. And eventually, in the course of my academic career, I published lots of articles and five books on Jewish Messianism and mysticism, and I also published a coming of age novel, Journal of a UFO Investigator, and in Intimate Alien, I turn around and look at what the UFOs meant to me, how they've been a leading thread through my own mental life, and it worked out moved out from there to what

they mean for our culture, for the people who believe in them, and for the people who disbelieve in them but often seem just as emotionally engaged with them as the believers. What's the thesis of your book. You can talk about that a little bit. Yeah, let's put let's put it in a nutshell. UFOs are a myth. But when I say that, I don't mean what many of

your listeners may think. I mean. Nowadays we use myth often to mean bunk or nonsense or something that's not true, which is not how I use the word at all. I use it in a much more Youngian sense as a kind of collective dream of our culture and perhaps even of our species that come that that comes bearing meanings and a truth for us that needs to be recognized. So when I say UFOs are a myth, I'm I'm saying the very opposite of calling them bunk. I'm saying

they're vitally important. Attention must be paid. Can you talk a little bit about Young and what his sort of take on the UFO phenomenon was. Yes, which is interesting because he was never quite clear what his take was.

He The last book he published before his death, which came out in German Inn and then in English in nineteen fifty nine, was called in the English translation, Flying Saucers, a modern myth of things seen in the skies, and I would reiterate that when Young said this is a modern myth, it doesn't mean oh, it's nothing, you just forget about it. It is Wow, we got to pay attention.

We've got a myth growing among us, ladies and gentlemen. Now, in that book he discussed the meanings that the UFOs have for people, so there were chapters on UFOs in art, UFOs in dreams. He was actually much more interested in that than in nuts and both sightings, because he wanted to know what the UFO as a projection of what's

going on inside us means to us. But he finally he had to confront the question is it possible that, in addition to being psychic projections, which he said, that's definite, that they might be physical realities because it's not too clear how psychic projections would appear on radar or how there could be photographs taken of them. So in the last chapter of his book he waffled back and forth,

and throughout the late fifties he continued to waffle. Charles Lindbergh, the Aviator, told a story of going to visit Young in Switzerland and expecting to have all sorts of fascinating conversations about the psychological meanings of UFOs. And you just said, no, they're really up there. And then Lindbergh said, you know what, wait a minute, I I talked to General Spats. He said, Slim, don't you think that if there was something flying around

up there, we know about it by now. And Young said, there are many things in heaven and Earth that you, in general Spats don't know about. So so I mean, I mean, we don't have Young's version of that encounter. We just have Lindbergh's. But he came away completely non plus that he was he was talking to her a real uf HO believer, and yet at other times Young

seems to have denied it. So we don't really know where he stood all that question, but where he stood on what UFOs can mean to us that he didn't waffle. The circular shape of the UFO, he said, was the Mandola an archetype. And I suppose we have to talk about what an archetype is that conveys wholeness, the unification of opposites, That it appears in all different cultures, all

different religions, It appears spontaneously in people's dreams. And here's something I would say that Young did not say that it's not too easy to see why a flying disc is an aerodynamically workable kind of craft. So if you want to imagine the UFO is a real space vehicle that gets a little bit hard, but as a mandola that comes from inside us and that we project into

the sky, it makes perfect sense. Now I use the word archetype, and I have to clarify that for Young, we are hardwired to organize our thoughts as human beings in certain universal patterns, which is what he called archetypes. And these will crop up spontaneously in one culture after another and go through the whole list I gave before one religion after another. People will come to the analysts

having dreamed of their archetypes and so forth. So that that was Young's approach, and I have to tell you I first read it what I was twelve years old, and of course I didn't have the slightest idea what it was about. There were three books on flying saucers in our library. One of them was Young's, another one was Grave Markers. They knew too much about flying saucers, which I hope you will ask me about. The third was Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers, which we may

want to touch on also. And I read all three of them and I couldn't make head or tail out of out of Young Generally, I don't suppose most twelve year olds could, but it would have helped if I'd had somebody to plain to me that when Young spoke of a modern myth, he wasn't putting UFOs down. So why don't you talk about Gray Barker Gray Barker. Okay, let us talk not about Gray Barker at first, but

about Dave Alberin twelve years old. He's working on an extra credit science paper which I don't think I ever wrote, and it was going to be on life on other Planets, and I figured, well, why not talk a bit about

flying have a chapter on flying saucers. So I went to the Public Library of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and I uh looked, looked in what some of your listeners will remember, others won't know what I'm talking about, a card catalog, and found the three books that I've early ever mentioned, uh, took them out, went home and started reading Gray Barker, and pretty soon I wanted to hide under the bed. I was so scared. Barker's book. We'll talk a bit more about who Barker was, but his book was published

in nineteen fifty six. It starts out with the Flatwoods Monster, which some of your listeners may recall, is the entity seven ft tall with a glowing green face that landed on September twelfth, nineteen fifty two, on a hilltop in West Virginia, was said to have looked worse than Frankenstein as long as I lived, at one of the witnesses,

I wish I'd never seen it. I mean, I was pretty spooked out by That goes on to talk about the Shaver mystery, which we might might want to talk about, but the the focus of the book is an incident in Autumn three in which a Bridgeport, Connecticut UFO researcher named Albert K. Bender is visited by three men in black suits who terrorized him into stopping his UFO researchers. That is the germ of the I don't know whether

to call it a myth or a legend. I was sort of waiver there of the men in black which forty years after Barker's book came out, made it to Hollywood in the form of the movie Men in Black, which we can talk about also. I read this book, I was frightened. I was also energized because the book challenged the reader to do what Bender did that somehow or another, Bender was able two solve the riddle of the Flying Saucers on the basis of the data available to it. And you or I, says Barker, might do

that too. Let's work together. Send me your ideas, and we'll see if we can discover what the Flying Saucers are and who the Men in Black are. Now Here I come to, I think a crucial point, because you and your listen ners may wonder why, even at the age of twelve, did I believe such fantastic stories. And the answer is that I knew they were not fantastic. I had personal experience with the Men in Black. I

knew them at firsthand. In my house, there was a terrible secret, and that was that my mother was not merely a semi invalid with a hard condition, as we thought of her, or at least I thought of her. I think my father knew better, but that she was slowly dying. I didn't know this, but I didn't know. I knew it, and it could not be talked about. So I had personal acquaintance with a secret too terrible to be revealed, and the inhibiting forces that kept it

from being revealed. Barker spoke in the language of myth. He spoke the truth that I knew. It was only many years later that I knew that Barker was also speaking the truth that he knew. Barker was gay, and the life of a gay man in nineteen fifties West Virginia would have to have been a continued exercise in concealment, in not letting out the secret that could destroy his

world if it was known. What I am saying is that Barker, using the language of myth, using age old images like the Man in Black and we can talk more about that, conveyed the truth of what was happening with him with an authenticity that spoke to what was happening in me. The Bible says deep calleth unto deep, And as I envision it looking back, Barker's deep unconscious called to my deep unconscious, and I could not doubt.

I therefore believed in the men in black and because their existence in terms of the myth would make no sense unless the flying saucers were real. I believed in flying saucers. He said, maybe we could talk more about the men in black and in the movie. Yeah, okay, I think let me let me first say who who? Who I thought the men in black were, because I believe Bender was actually was visited by three men. And what's interesting is Bender didn't say or they wore black.

He said they wore black hats and dark suits. Barker changed that ever so slightly, two black suits. And here I will say that Barker the curator of the Barker Collection in Clarksburg, West Virginia, which is a wonderful place to visit. The data's name is David houch In. He said at one point that Gray Barker has written one

of the Gospels. And I think he's absolutely right. And because I mean, in my my my studies of the Gospels, which I've done as a religious studies professor, I've seen how the gospel writers took earlier traditions, reshaped them, slightly changed emphasis, interpreted them through juxtaposition with one another, and came out with something new. And Barker did precisely that. I mean, as a twelve year old, if someone had come to me and said, you know, how do you

know any of this crap is true? How do you know Barker didn't make it up? Well, by the time I was, I was in my twenties, I knew very well that he hadn't made hard to any of it. I mean, the Flatwoods Monster, you know that that that incident really happened. I mean, I think probably what happened was there was a barn owl flying out of the darkness, said a group of jittery witnesses were just seen an unusually bright meteor which they thought was a was a UFO.

But but Barker didn't make it up at all. He he he gave the results of what even his critics have admitted was an excellent investigation of it. And when he said that Albert Bender was visited by three men, or that he quoted Bender as describing that, I think he was absolutely right, and I think we have to make sense of it in terms of the historical context. This was nineteen fifty three. UH Senator Joseph McCarthy was

at the height of his power and influence. UH J Edgar Hoover's FBI was almost single mindedly devoted of ferreting out the communists, those masters of deceit who wore a thousand disguises, And they got ahold of a business card. I'm not making this up. This is from Barker's book, A Business Card for vendors organization which was the I

F s B, the International Flying Saucer Bureau. And they saw the word international, and the alarm bells started ringing that this was a communist front organization and they needed to shut it down, which they succeeded in doing. But in the course of that created or gave a new incarnation to an age old myth of sinister figures in black,

who I think, at bottom our embodiments of death. Barker entertained a number of hypotheses about who the men in black might be, and our Reiterator's book came out in nineteen fifties six, and he considered the possibility that the men in black might be government agents, and if that was the case, that put him in a somewhat ambiguous

situation which is hard to envision. Now we have to go back to nineteen fifty six, in which, according to polls, an overwhelming majority of the American public trusted the government two always or usually do what was right. So if the men in Black were the villains suppressing the truth about the UFOs, and the men in Black were government agents, you would expect the next step to be to villainize

the government. But Barker refused to do that. He said, surely the government would know better than a sorcery researchers what was the good of the country. And at one point Bender reports that he was told by his visitors, you're on your honor as an American not to say anything.

And Barker and everyone else who was concerned, of all the other people from the I F. S B who desperately wanted to know what had happened with Bender, they all took for granted that that is a binding commitment that if you're on your oath as an American, you better keep what you promised. So that was the situation

in fifty six. Then came Vietnam, then came to gain and now I think it's something like of the public trust the government to do what's right, and so the men in Black are woven into a nefarious government conspiracy to suppress the truth. And then to the movie, which I was quite honestly looking forward to it a little disappointed when I saw the form that it came out in,

which how does that fit into all this? The movie is very interesting because in a way it's an answer to the most popular are one of the most popular TV series at the time, which is The X Files. In The X Files, Molder and Scully fight and sort of an eternal battle, neither side can gain total victory

against the forces of secrecy and suppression. They don't wear black because when you think about it, you know, so if you know the motto of the X Files is don't trust anybody, And if the sinister suppressors of the Truth where uniforms identifying saying hey, we're sinister suppressors of the truth, then you know you are. You automatically know who you're dealing with. So there's no place for it there.

But the essential point is that there is there. There are these shadowy agencies that fill the role of the Men in Black, and they are the villains, the investigators of the heroes. Now you go to the Men in Black movies and it flips the evaluation around. I've got the credit Professor Barnar Donovan, an expert on film and communications, for making that point. The men in Black, they may use unpleasant tactics, but they're doing it all for our good.

Where is it We may seem imposing, but believe me, if we appear in your section, believe me, it's for your protection. And they not only suppress us from knowing the truth, but also they prevent us from remembering it. What is it? Uh? Well, what was that? What? What's their machine called the neuralizer or something like that. Vivid, vivid memories become fantasies. And here there's the influence of another stream of tradition, the alien abduction tradition, which depends

on the suppression of memory. So here we've got a spinoff from Barker, but looking at it from the point of view of what if the men in Black are the heroes? I mean, after old Barker himself said the government would know better what's for our good? And the men in black no better? What's for our good? Can you talk about alien abductions? Since you since you brought

it up. That was the focus of the first season of Strange Arrival, starting with Betty and Barney Hill and focusing on them, but eventually getting to you know, the whole. Bud Hopkins, Dave Jacobs, John mac Weirdness starting with Betty and Barney Hill is our watchword, right because that's where the abduction tradition begins, or it begins in its modern form. Because one of the things I stressed in my book is that all these mythic themes have both a history

and a prehistory. The history of abduction starts in February on Bay Street Road in the Bay State Road in Boston, in the office of a psychiatrist named Benjamin Simon, where an interracial couple Betty and Barney Hill, have come to explore what seems to be something that they can't quite remember about their encounter with a UFO in the White Mountains of New Hampshire about two and a half years

earlier September. Simon puts them under hypnosis. He is an expert in therapeutic hypnosis, and unlike many of his successor hypnotist he could not care less about UFOs. He doesn't believe in them, he's not interested in them. All he's interested in is dealing with what are really some fairly dangerous symptoms in Barney Hill, he has high blood pressure, he as ulcers. He also has one that's not particularly dangerous but is very weird, a ring of warts that

have appeared in a perfect circle around his groin. And from the almost the first time Barney, who has put under hypnosis, he remembers being to him and Betty being taken aboard this alien ship, laid on tables and subjected to all sorts of bizarre examinations and ordeals, which include, for Barney, a cup being put over his groin. The cup's traces turn out to be the warts. Now, what's happened here? One thing? Most of your listeners will probably know this, but we are. But Betty and Barney Hill

were an interracial couple. Betty was white, Barney was black. And you know, granted, this is New Hampshire and not Mississippi where six years earlier Emmett till Was was lynched for supposedly making suggestive remarks to a white woman. They are both plenty nervous, particularly Barney, about how they're being

together is going to be accepted in their travels. Now, whatever is coming up in Barney terrifies him beyond measure that saw Himan later said that I was afraid he was going to throw himself out the window to escape whatever he was experiencing. And for me, I am I have to deal with what what to me are two contradictory facts. One is that they never encountered the UFO.

The light that supposedly followed them through the mountains has been identified, I think convincingly as a light in an observation tower on top of one of the mountains, which seemed to move as there against the sky as their car moved. That's datum number one and datam number two. Something authentic and powerful was emerging from within Barney that had been triggered by that experience it and this, I would have to say, I consider the most controversial part

of my book. I think that what was emerging was a collective memory of being abducted in Africa into slavery, being abducted in the middle of the night, taken to an alien ship, and subjected two strange examinations. And I think this is what shaped the abduction tradition in this country.

That the story of Betty and Barney Hill, which received great circulation in nineteen six six with the publication of Two Look magazine articles on it that it planted seed in the collective psyche of our nation, and then in the late eighties the nineties it bore that seed, bore fantastic bloom. And that's when we deal with amateur hypnotists like Bud Hopkins, whose goal is not therapeutic but investigative.

So how do you take a look at that era of abduction research, because you know, but but Hopkins, you know, he clearly wasn't concerned with this collective memory of of of um, of slavery or anything like that. I talk a little bit in in season one of the podcasts about you know, being a humanist and seeing through the technology encroachment and as potentially a threat to a person who's a modern artist and and lives a sort of

bohemian lifestyle. And that what he comes up with in his interviews and his writings and stuff is this very sort of cold, technocratic invader that doesn't have seemingly any kind of culture to them. Right, It's just like this very sterile lab doing these sort of inscrutable and sort of violating experiments on them where you don't really you

know that you have no control over it. But I'm interested in what in how you kind of take a look at this well, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is that must have been how the abductees in eighteenth century Africa felt being scrutinized there. And by the way, Betty Betty Hill remembers that the space ali the UFO beings are very puzzled that her teeth don't come out whereas barneys do, which seems rather absurd

for space aliens. But it is no longer quite as absurd when we remember that slave traders were advised listen, you have to be sure to check people's their potential purchases teeth, that is a that way you can know for sure how old they are. Yes, so I think that that is part of what was injected by the

Hills experience. But it seems to me that each of the uphologious slash therapists, they's hypnotists, had their own theology I would even call call it to defend, which they did through I think implanting some ideas, not all of them in the people they hypnotized. And I mean, I don't know, are you referring to your interview with Carol Carol Rainey, Yeah, that that was a lot. I mean, I did other research, but I thought it was Did

you listen to that? Yeah, I listened to that. I was quite fascinated because I'd never known that Hopkins was an atheist, and here we find it's the same thing that I wrote in my book about Richard Shaver, that he was an atheist who created this incredible baroque mythology of uncanny beings of near infinite powers, as if there's a demon god who rules the universe. I would wonder what there was in but Bud Hopkins which led him in that direction. Now, his colleague John Mac went in

a very different direction. For Mac, when he could, he would say, yes, they It's true the abductors used rather rough methods, but their aim is to redeem us. And in Mac's case, I think what we are dealing with here is a resurgence of his hunger for spirituality after having grown up in an aggressively anti religious household, and he will see the Ufo beings as leading us two a better future in which the mandola Ufo brings together. I think of the linemen Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, that your

magic binds together. What custom has strictly divided, and that's what the UFO will do, and that's what his uf his UFO of doctors do, So I think that way, I think we can see the individual idiosyncrasies of these uh ufologists playing it out. And by the way, we've not mentioned a key name here, which is Whitley, Strieber and we Hana. And perhaps at some point we are to talk about Streeber's Communion and what his best seller

Communion and what that contributed. But I need to say here that the spread of the abduction tradition reflects broader trends in our culture. That it's a form of uphology that was ideal for the culture that came into being really in the eighties, in which the therapist's office, which had once been regarded as faintly ridiculous, just think of Peanuts, Lucy with her psychiatric help five cents lemonades stand the the therapist office was a place where you came to

know the truth, and the truth set you free. You can detect, though, somewhat before the riseing wave and then it's fall of the alien abduction beliefs, a similar rise and fall of another related set of beliefs and that is the belief in repressed memories of sexual abuse, which are recoverable as UFO abductions are through hypnosis. Now, remember Carol Rainey mentioned satanic abuse, which I think is also

part of this complex. But the idea what I called in my book the unremembered, that there is something crucial that is forgotten is not a strong enough word for it. It is the unremembered, and then retrieving the unremembered is

the way you recover the essential truth about yourself. Memories of sexual abuse had their vogue, then they fell from favor very rapidly, and I would say in some measure unjustly, because I think there was a lot more truth in the belief of repressed memories of abuse then most people are willing to credit. Now m and there they're discrediting. Helped bring the alien abduction tradition into discredit, which is why by the end of the nineteen nineties we hear

very little about it. Well, let's let's go back just a little bit. When you mentioned with Lee strieber Um, who is not somebody I know very much about. What's interesting about him, Well, he's an extraordinary man. To begin with, I mean is extremely creative. I have met him. He impressed me as as as deeply sincere and also extremely intelligent. Let's start with his book Communion, which was published at in January of seven. It's you. You've seen the book,

or have you? And you know the cover? Yes, the book. The book. I often when I read it, I cannot remember much from it. After I've read it. The cover is unforgettable. This is the face that we all know by now, the face of the UFO alien, or, if you want to be more strict about it, the gray which totally pervades our culture. It's hard to realize that

before we had no conscious knowledge of that phase. It erupted into our awareness with the publication of Streeper's book, and with that, Streaber's book erupted into best sellered them. It was on the New York Times best seller list for some fantastic period of time, I think at least six months. The book focuses on an episode in the December and which Streaber was abducted from his bedroom by a group of strange beings like the one depicted on

the cover, whom he sees as went essentially feminine. There is a very strong erotic overtone in Streber's experiences, which comes to characterize the nineties abduction story. At first, Streaber couldn't remember what had happened to him, Then spontaneously the memories recurred to him. Then he underwent hypnosis by an acknowledged psychiatric expert in therapeutic hypnosis, doctor Donald Klein, who produced more detail. But I don't, in my opinion, not

a great deal of clarity. But what is really extraordinary about the book was what I call the recognition response. That people looked at that cover and they said, I recognize this phase. I've seen it before, and I'd forgotten I saw it, but now I remember. Streeber claims to have received tens of thousands of letters describing such experiences. I do not question that assertion. The letters are now

archived at Rice University. I have not seen them myself. Way, if whenever we get beyond COVID, I may decide to take a trip out to Houston to take a to take a look at them. Because what this suggests to me is, and here we're coming back to our old friend Dr Jung that that face that was painted by an artist named Ted Jacobs at Strieber's direction was something archetypal that, as I put it in my book, when the human mind looks into the darkness, this is the

face that sees staring back. And I will tell you one more thing, one more story of recognition. I gave a lecture at U n C Greensborough, Uh, and I think I think it was about UFOs and I showed a power point slide of that phase. About two years later, a friend of mine, an old friend who teaches at U n C gree g wrote to me saying, didn't you show an alien face two years ago? Well, I came across something very similar in Maria gam Buddhas's book on the Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, and wow,

he was absolutely right. This is a sculpture of a of a masked individual dating back to something like four thousand BC, which looks not identical with the cover of Communion, but very similar to it. So here's where we get into that supplementing of the history of a mythic theme with its prehistory, in this case genuine prehistory going back to Kossovo, where that sculpture was found in something like six thousand years ago. Yeah, the picture in the book

is striking. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Um So I definitely wanted to get to talk about Roswell because that's that's how this this season begins. Um. And you that that's how you that's sort of the closing section for the most part of your book. Um, so maybe you can talk about that and your your understanding of that. Okay, welcome. First of all, I will state the negative. I do not believe a spaceship crashed. I do not believe there was any government cover up of the reality of the

crash spaceship. I do believe the Roswell myth is of pivotal importance, precisely because once it began to circulate in Now, the event of Roswell was for but until no one ever mentioned the bodies of aliens being found in connection with it. It was in that got started, and that has become the most familiar of all the UFO stories. I mean, practically everyone you ask in this culture has

at least has heard of Roswell. And by the way, I thought you used an extremely good criterion for the prevalence of something in the culture, which is if are jokes about it comprehensible and jokes about Roswell are comprehensible. I can give examples if that would take too much time. And essence of Roswell to me is death, and that, to me is the most essential element of the Ufo myth. There's no question the mandola that unifies opposites is important.

All sorts of unconscious themes, I would say, archetypal themes are fused in the image of the UFO. But at bottom, I think the UFO is death, which is the most alien thing we can conceive. We really can't conceive that, the most alien thing we can fail to conceive, and also the most intimate born with us, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh all the days of our life. And this is of course why I call my book intimate Alien. Now I can give details, I

don't know whether you want them about about Roswell. I thought particularly talking about the red haired officer and his you know, his black companion, I thought was super interesting. This is something that it's really that that that we need to recognize about UFOs, that there's the mythology about

them is not limited to the sky. It's really most interesting when it's on earth and there are all sorts of features of the Roswell myth which makes sense thematically in terms of the myth, and one of them is that witnesses to the crashed object and it's dead occupants are threatened and harassed by a team consisting of a red hair officer and a black sergeant, who I think our mythological figures this i'd rather speculatively, I will admit I saw the red haired officer is going back to

the ancient Egyptian demon god Seth. Not that there's a living tradition of Sethian belief, but that's Seth and the red haired officers spring from the same unconscious sources. And similarly, a number of stories about Roswell have a team of archaeologists at the sight of the crash, and so the witness they remember that they're the They were probably for

some eastern university, probably the University of Pennsylvania. You know it sound which sounds very very very mundane, very verifiable, except nobody's ever been able to find any archaeologists from University of Pennsylvania anywhere else who had anything to do

with a UFO crash. But when you ask what does an archaeologist do, he or she gives voice to the silent dead, and I think that's the symbolic function of the archaeologists in the roswell Man read the story as a myth, and you really want to put it on the shelf beside the great mythologies of the world. Is there something that we haven't talked about that you think is is especially important for people to know. UFOs are

such a rich subject and such a powerful subject. But I think I don't think there's anything that I would give vital that we haven't talked about. What would I would What would I end up with? I'll end up with two quotations. One is from Thomas E. Bullard M Well uphologists referred to regularly as Eddie Bullard, who emailed me once that if there are indeed extraterrestrial vehicles flying around our skies, they are for the most part innocent

bystanders to our inner psychic conflicts. So that's one watchword I would use for understanding the UFO. And the other is the old Master Gray Barker, who died died prematurely in Gray Barker told a an audience that if you go out into the night and you look at the sky, and you do not see a UFO, then look inside yourself. You will surely see one that's interesting. That's interesting. Well,

I I really appreciate you taking the time. It's certainly a much different way of looking at it that I think people are used to, and I hope it encourages them too to pick up your book and explore further. It's say it same to you, Toby, I'm very grateful to you for the opportunity to talk. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D Audio and Grimm

and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Mankie. Learn more about Strange Rivals over at Grimm and Mile dot com, and find more podcasts for my heart Radio by visiting the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.