Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron making for the best experience listen with headphones, George.
Basically, what we're dealing with here is I'll give you the bottom line. I'm not trying to sell it. I want to hear your thesis. I'm not trying to sell a book. I'm not trying to promote a lecture. This is based on what I've come across after intense research in the last year, and I have found out that the government has retrieved between ten and fifteen flactual flying saucers, three of which have been in perfect condition, one of which they tried to fly. They have between thirty and
fifty alien bodies in cryogenic storage. We even have the name of the person whose job it is to show these bodies to the heads of state and the people who are authorized to see them. They represent at least five different civilizations.
I'm Toby ball in This is Strange Arrivals, Episode twelve, Priests at the Ziggarat What do you see when you look at the UFO world? Do you see scientists and researchers who are scoffed at by their colleagues while they work to uncover the great mystery of our times, a professional wrestling style artificial drama created by people playing roles in what is essentially an entertainment industry, or something more like a religion or spiritual movement guided by a select
group determining its followers' beliefs. The answer is probably that there are elements of all three of these visions. But when I look, what I mostly see is something that resembles a religion.
Stories of UFO sightings and especially UFO contact, people who claim contact or some sort of connection with extraterrestrial or ultraterrestrial or interdimensional beings. I think it has gone underrecognized as an element of American or maybe Western spirituality.
Host of the Saucer Life podcast, Aaron.
Gaullas, these are stories that are things that in another time and place might have been considered divine encounters of some kind, and so can there be some kind of way to integrate some of these stories into our conception of human experiences with the divine, with the supernatural, going all the way back as far as we have records
of those things. At the same time, thinking about it like that might downplay the role that the popular culture and the historical context play in how these stories develop and what details are there.
In this season's final episode, I want to look at a theme that has come up again and again in conversations that I've had in the course of making three seasons of Strange Arrivals. Belief in UFOs and other paranormal phenomena can occupy the same place in people's lives as religion, and this can affect how they view UFOs. We've heard about Robert Bigelow several times during this season. He is a billionaire the owner of Bigelow Aerospace and Budget Suites
of America. He once owned Skinwalker Ranch, lobbied Senator Harry Reid to fund a Pentagon program to investigate the paranormal, and reportedly retrofitted storage units in Las Vegas to house debris from crash to alien craft. These are just a few of the things that he initiated or funded. In June of twenty twenty, he founded the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies, an organization that sponsored a competition offering a cash prize for the best evidence of the survival of
consciousness after death. Bigelow founded this institute just four months after the death of his wife of fifty five years, Dianne. His interest in an afterlife, which his wife shared, predated Diane's death. In nineteen ninety two, their son committed suicide at the age of twenty four, a devastating event. In January twenty first, twenty twenty one New York Times article Ralph Blumenthal, who we heard from earlier this season, as
John Max's biographer, wrote, seeking comfort. After their son's death, the Bigelows held sittings with the renowned medium George Anderson. Did their son make contact, Not really, mister Bigelow said, but what I got out of the readings I think was that his spirit existed and that he was okay. In nineteen ninety seven, he established the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, but shut it down after a few years when it didn't
make much progress. He then turned his attention to studying UFOs.
A lot of what drives Robert Bigelow's interest in the paranormal was the death of his son, which is a tragedy, but that type of loss will definitely push people to reach out to try and grab onto something greater in hopes that someone you love isn't truly lost.
Journalist and host of The Alien State podcast MJ. Benaias they're out there somewhere, they're still around for sure.
That's going to drive people. I know it would drive me. I mean, I've got kids. I know if something like that happened to me, I would definitely reach out to anything to try and hold on. So we know that there's this kind of moments in people's lives, whether it's through work, or whether it's through research, or whether it's through personal loss, as tragic as it is, that is going to propel them to find faith in something larger
than themselves. And I think the UFO topic, I think the paranormal topic in general, is that I think it's just our natural tendency as a species to latch onto that which is bigger than us that we hope is there.
Clearly, the desire for the existence of a greater power, be it divine or paranormal, can lead people down many paths, with religion being by far the most common, but it is not the only path.
What kind of magical thinking do we do reflexibly on a daily basis that 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 nonetheless in smaller, trickier ways, and this universal kind of touching vulnerability to that. My name is Sarah Krasisdean, 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.
I spoke with Sarah about her book The Believer, which takes a look at the lives, experiences, and beliefs of people from six different walks of life. Death doula ghost hunter, Evangelical Christian at the Creation Museum, Mennonite, a woman incarcerated for killing her abusive husband, and UFO believer.
I was hearing the same phrases again and again. And what the believer is is exprated 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 euthologists, 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 life. It's something that you know again, kind of I see across
all these stories. I saw across the stories, whether it was the paranormal researchers, the ghost hunters at work, or some of the ethologists, 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 intractable lack of control over daily circumstances.
Sarah sees a range of beliefs and interests addressing the human need to perceive something greater than ourselves. Again, for the vast, vast majority of people, this is found in religion. Religion runs on faith. You don't require scientific proof to believe, but that's not the case in the worlds of UFO and paranormal belief. The people in these worlds value proof. Robert Bigelow, for instance, has used his considerable fortune to study the phenomena he is interested in. It's not enough
to believe or have faith, he wants scientific proof. Any number of cable television shows center O finding evidence evidence of aliens who have visited Earth in the distant past, evidence of more recent famous encounters such as Roswell or rendelstromp Forrest, more current evidence of UFOs taken by cell phones or cameras mounted on military jets, or evidence that the government is hiding the truth from US abduction researcher Bud Hopkins claimed that experiencers from around the globe were
left with similar scoop shaped scars and even tiny implanted devices. The problem is that none of this evidence has stood up to scientific scrutiny as proof.
I think that one of the reasons why people are getting into UFOs as opposed to say, other religions, is because in modern times, you know, we consider ourselves these kind of rational, scientific minded people, and UFOs can kind of take the place of religion. But we can see it being real. My name is Jeff Knox. I'm a UFO researcher. I tend to focus on the history of
the topic. I also do a lot of work on archival stuff and digital preservation, scanning documents, files and preserving them for the next generation researchers.
Jeff speculates that UFOs offer a plausible alternative to religion because our current technology and scientific knowledge make further advances such as travel to other solar systems seem attainable by us or someone else.
We can hypothesize interstellar travel, we can hypothesize us visiting other planets, and we can think, well, maybe aliens are doing the same, they're visiting us, and so UFOs is something that kind of fits within our scientific worldview as something that's at least very plausible.
About some people who become involved in the UFO topic.
Jeff says, UFOs will act as kind of that belief system for them, and it seems more plausible than you know, fairies or angels or demons, because life in the universe ex stressal life is almost probably a certainty out there somewhere.
Another aspect of this dynamic of UFOs as belief system is that skeptical pushback against UFO claims can be seen as an attack against a person's core beliefs. It's understandably threatening, and the response from believers can seem excessive. One person who is often on the end of these responses is UFO researcher Mick West.
Is an interesting thing that blowback because the people in the UFO community, a lot of them are very passionate, and some of them are super passionate. It's almost like a religion, but in some ways it's more than a religion because for the individual person in ufology, they're often basing that belief on personal experience. So it's like, you know, if your religion was based upon God speaking to you directly,
it will be that personal. And for someone who's seen a UFO or even in some cases feels like they were had contact with an alien or even were abducted by aliens, is a deeply personal thing, and so when someone comes along and they're saying, well, that's probably just a bird, they take it very much as a personal attack,
and so they get very defensive. So I've kind of learned that over the years that you have to be understanding of people's beliefs if you're going to communicate effectively with them.
So here's the thing. If you are a UFO believer, what kind of proof do you need? What is adequate to confirm to yourself that this is in some sense real? Because there is no hard evidence right now that is going to make the scientific case, or if there is, it's not public MJ. Benias.
Whatever the phenomenon is, it's by definition kind of unknowable. You can observe UFOs for five thousand years and you will probably never get enough observational data to say, Okay, we can now make a scientific conclusion here. You can't just bring one into a lab. It's never really going to happen unless literally something crashes and we're able to recover it and haul it into a lab and study
it or something. We have a lot of stories about that type of event occurring, but there's no actual evidence or data to back it up apart from just anecdote. Unfortunately. That's kind of where we're stuck.
But is scientific certainty necessary for belief in UFOs? When I interviewed Diana Pisolka, who is a professor of philosophy and religion, at University of North Carolina Wilmington. I asked her a question about how proof of alien visitors would be accepted by religious and non religious people.
People in religion, practitioners of religion already believe is things that are non human intelligences. They already had this category. They've lived with it their whole lives. Right, they go to synagogue, they go to temple, you know, they go to wherever you know, church, and there they talk about unseen realities, spiritual realities, things like that. Atheists want hardcore evidence, They want like a flying saucer to land on the White House lawn. But that kind of thing, I'm not
sure they're gonna get that. They're gonna get some stuff, some you know, realities like radar signatures and things like that. They're gonna get that. They're also going to get a lot of reliable, credible witnesses who've seen things as well.
So her answer seems to be that belief will have to be based on indications, not proof. Signs like radar signatures and stories, the types of things, signs and stories that underpin religions, and maybe that's all that Many people need, something that supports their faith in the existence of UFOs, even if it falls short of actual proof. But for others, myself included, something more is needed, something that would hold up under scientific scrutiny or in a court of law. MJ. Benias.
For me to believe, I need to actually see it. I need to actually research it. I actually need to speak to the people who are there. I need to see more data in order for me to actually believe in it. And I think it's a lot of people, and I think that's why the UFO topic remains in this category of permanent observation and anecdote and never getting anywhere further.
If this sounds like things are at an impasse, they aren't, because there is no lack of interpretation and conjecture about the types of information that Diana mentioned, and there is also the promise of more information to come after the break Strange Arrivals will return in a moment. Over the course of three seasons of Strange Arrivals, we've examined a host of leading figures in the UFO world. One who we haven't, though his name has come up a few times,
is Jacques Vallet. Valet has had a wide ranging career, including as an astronomer, computer scientist, and venture capitalist, but he is best known for his UFO research and theorizing. He is the inspiration for the character Claude Lacombe played by Francois Truffau in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Vashonieri, please one more question.
Have you recently had a Close Encounter? We heard John Keel complain that Vallet was taking his ideas earlier in this season. Valat is a critic of the extraterrestrial hypothesis and speculates that the phenomenon might be extra dimensional and responsible for some religious events, such as the Fatoma Visions, a supposed apparition of the Virgin Mary, who imparted prophecies to three farm children in Portugal in nineteen seventeen.
Mick West, I think this is something you see in UFO researchers, is that they're not really objective and that they a lot of people are interested in UFO research because they're trying to validate something. They're trying to validate a particular belief that they already hold, and so they're not really trying to figure out what happened in certain cases. They're trying to use certain cases to bolster their argument, and it seems fairly obvious that's what's happening, even if
perhaps they don't realize it themselves. Jacques Valet has a tendency to believe everything that the witnesses say. So they've spin some complicated story about being visited by aliens or something happening, or white powder being sprayed on their house or something like that, and he believes that it all happened exactly as they described it, and then he tries to fit that into some kind of framework. And the only way you can really do it is kind of
go really far out there. It's not just simply people seeing lights in the sky that they can't explain, which might be alien spaceships. I mean, that's almost fairly straightforward. How do you explain these actual encounters that people supposedly have and he comes up with explanations about essentially tricksters from other dimensions who are going in and perhaps even altering reality on an individual scale. They're really just not
based on evidence. That just a way of trying to fit the stories into reality, and the stories really don't comport with reality. And so the simpler explanation is just that these stories are not accurate. But if your default position is to believe this story is one hundred percent accurate, then you've got to jump through so many hoops to try to make it actually fit in the world.
We saw this dynamic with John Keel's theories about the super spectrum and ultra terrestrials. The point is that people like Valet and Keel and mac and Heinek have served as interpreters of UFO information throughout the years, and now, following the twenty seventeen New York Times article describing the Pentagon's UFO program, there is a new generation. The characteristic of this generation is that they claim to be privy to knowledge that the rest of us are not.
I happen to be privileged enough to.
Being on the fact that we have been visited on this planet.
With absolute certainty, that four species, four different species at least, had been visiting this planet for thousands of years.
And the original stuff that a tip did was Foye exempt and people, how do you know that? Because I stood there with the memo in my hand that said these are literally I watched the DoD memo that said it and it was signed.
Is that it is my belief that the United States is in possession of exotic material, and unfortunately, that's about all I can I can say at this time. Again, M J.
Benias, Ancient history was what I used to teach you, and the ancient Babylonians had these massive temples, and they would believe that at the very top of the temple, the priests could go in there and commune with the God. You could talk to the gods and the gods would respond, but only the priests could do it. If a person like you or me walked up the ziggarette and walked into this temple, nothing would happen. But if a priest did it, they would see God and they would communicate.
It's kind of a very similar situation. We're kind of trusting people within the no trusting people who claim to have evidence of UFOs or evidence of aliens or whatever. We're trusting them to be the ones to communicate with the gods for us. But if we try, well, we're we're not on the inside, we're not part of that community. We're never going to get access to that. So it
kind of exists in this kind of anecdotal world. Much like the priests of ancient days would communicate with gods and then come back down and say, like this God says this, you have to listen to me because I'm a priest. I think it's kind of a similar mindset.
You have this kind of religious system operating within eufology, within the paranormal community, within nineteenth century spiritualism, of these kind of priestly class that functions at this high level, that has access to allegedly all the evidence from the anecdotes, and then the rest of us who will never see that ever in our lives.
A theme in the world of ufology that goes back decades is the belief that the government knows much more about UFOs than it is letting on the idea that the government will at some point reveal publicly what they know is called disclosure with a capital D. We talked
about this a little bit in the previous episode. The twenty seventeen New York Times article kicked off renewed anticipation that disclosure was imminent, if it wasn't already under way, and this heightened excitement about disclosure sets a dynamic that can be seen in religious movements. In eighteen twenty two, a wealthy Baptist named William Miller determined that the second Coming of Jesus Christ would occur in eighteen forty three
or eighteen forty four. In eighteen thirty one, he made this prediction public, and over the next decade the movement grew. He eventually set several time periods or actual dates when the second Coming would occur, and each would see a building of excitement and then pass without event, but his followers remained until a final date of October twenty second,
eighteen forty four was put forward and then passed. This was referred to as the Great Disappointment Capital G Capital D, but some followers remained in daily anticipation of Christ's return. More recently, in nineteen ninety three, the ninety year old Monoca Mendel Schneerson suffered a stroke while praying at the grave of his father, leaving him unable to speak. Schneerson was a rabbi in the lubavitre sect of Orthodox Judaism, based in the Crown Heights section of New York City.
He was known as the Rebbee, a title given to the spiritual leader of the sect. There was a wide belief in the Lubavitor community that Schneerson was likely the Masayak or Messiah. After his stroke, the community was consumed with the expectation that at any minute he would be revealed as the Messiah. This is from the January third, nineteen ninety three edition of The New York Times about so called messiah beepers. In the pre cell phone days, beepers or pagers were a way to get a message
to someone who wasn't by their landline phone. The messiah beeper was to alert people that the Messiah was revealed.
They need the beepers so they know immediately when the Messiah has arrived. There's an expectation that at any moment there will be a revelation, said heim Alberstam, the audio visual expert who oversees Messiah beeber sales. People are very tense waiting could happen any second, said schiffra Hendry.
This kind of anticipation is very powerful. It galvanizes believers and disclosure acts in a similar way. The truth is going to be revealed soon, or the revealing of the truth has already begun. The two congressionally mandated Pentagon UFO reports over the past two years were the subject of great expectations from the UFO community, thinking that this would be the moment that the government secrets were revealed. Both reports were duds, revealing little and forcing believers to sift
through the verbiage for clues. But an odd thing happens when these events fail to come off. Many followers don't lose faith. Often, in fact, they become even more convinced. William Miller's followers stayed with him through several prophecied dates that ended in disappointment. The same happens in the UFO community.
What ends up happening is the prophesied disclosure or the prophecies landing of the ships never happens, and so it dies down for a bit, and then it repeats all over again. Cycles or people come up with new justifications as to why the disclosure hasn't happened yet, or as to why in some of those religions the ships haven't landed yet. To help us all out, they come up with excuses and justifications as to why the prophecy's never occurred. They push it, and this is basically again the same
thing you see with disclosure. They come up with reasons why it doesn't occur and then they push the data out further. This way, you kind of never reach an endpoint and you can keep the cycle going perpetually. And unfortunately a lot of people in the UFO world, while they may not be in an actual uf OR religion, they treat the topic like a religion. It becomes their belief system and they approach it in the exact same way.
I want to come back to something we looked at in episode ten, John Keel's ideas about the super spectrum and ultraterrestrials. In his book The Eighth Tower, he lays out his theory that there is a whole reality that inhabits the same space that we do, but which we cannot detect because it exists at frequencies beyond our ability to sense. Occasionally, his theory goes, a being from the
super spectrum is pulled into our reality. In our reality, it doesn't have a form until it is experienced by someone, at which point it adopts the form that matches the experiencer's expectations. That is, it appears to be what the observer expects of a paranormal being expect a ghost, and the ultra terrestrial is a ghost. Expect an alien, and you get an alien. The idea is that there is an external thing that exists but doesn't really have a form until it is given one by our own subconscious
It is created both outside of and within us. Does this make sense? Maybe not literally, but that's not how Keel claims he meant it. Researcher and folklore professor David Clark.
I thought he was convinced that these ultra terrestrials were real and the big sort of thing that blow as he was at the time when I met him and we had this long discussion, was he just told me that he invents it. The whole thing.
You know.
It was a literary device.
And it seems to me to be a great literary device because people have always told stories about the magical or the paranormal. These stories have been told through centuries and across cultures. Jacques Valet would say that these stories are told about something real and strange that we don't understand. I think telling these stories is part of the human condition. It's a way of trying to understand the world we
find ourselves in. The Other part of this is that these stories reflect the times UFOs appear in the late nineteen forties, when our own craft were becoming increasingly common sights in the skies. Before that, it was airships that reflected our use of hot air balloons, and before that, when we had no access to the skies, it was divine beings such as angels. And this makes these stories different from religious stories, which stay rooted in the era
they were created. There is no serious reimagining of Old Testament figures in the mind world. They will always be of their time. Throughout this season, we've looked at the effect that researchers have on UFO accounts. I think about Keel's literary device and how our expectations determine what form the paranormal takes. I think these expectations largely come from
a handful of prominent UFO researchers. Did Bud Hopkins, David Jacobs, and John Mack stumble upon a vast conspiracy of alien abduction, or did their accounts of it cause some people to interpret their own experiences, whatever they were, real or imagined, as abductions. Did Jacobs and Mac happen to only interview people whose abduction experiences fit with their theories, or did the researchers they talked with determine how their subjects recalled
abduction experiences. I'm sometimes asked how researching three seasons of this podcast has changed my thoughts about UFOs. Well, it hasn't changed my belief that there aren't actual physical craft from a different planet or different dimension flying around our skies.
I just don't see the evidence. I think it's also important to acknowledge, though, that a lot of people sincerely believe that they have had experiences with UFOs or the paranormal, whether it be experiencers of alien abduction or witnesses to the appearance of strange lights or craft, and these perceived experiences often have a profound effect on those people's lives. Just because I don't believe their experiences were the result of something not of this world doesn't mean I don't
honor their right to their own memories. In the end, they agree with Aaron Gullias when he says that UFO's stories are under recognized as an element of American spirituality. They are the mythology of the technology driven post World War two world, and like myths from other times, they tell a story about our fears and our aspirations. Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.
This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Rima El Kali, Jesse Funk, and Noemi Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron and supervising producer Josh Thame. Learn more about the show at Grimminmild dot com, slash Strange Arrivals and find more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.