Transcript of #166 Diana Pasulka - Religious History, UFO Phenomena and the Ancient Mysteries of Purgatory

Diana Posulka. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Hey, it's an honor to have you here. I've been trying to get you here for quite a while now and had a... Man, I just got in. I don't even remember the first person that introduced me to what you're doing, but it's been a beginning hit from all angles. Wow, really? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I've been really looking forward to this interview. I grew up Catholic. I'm into UFOs. I can't wait to dive in here. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I just want to say thank you for making the time.

It's my pleasure. Absolutely.

But let me give you a quick introduction here. Okay. You're a writer, professor Minister of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. You have offered a series of books, including American Cosmic: UFOs Religion and Technology, Heaven Can Wait, Purgatory in Catholic Devotion culture and encounters, experiences with nonhuman intelligences. You've been a guest on several prominent podcasts such as the Joe Rogan Experience and the Lex Friedmann podcast, and you've served as consulting producer on the Emmy Award-winning Netflix series, Encounters. You are also the Religion Consultant on the Conjuring and was featured in the JJ Abrams Docu-Series, UFO. You spent your career teaching and writing about American religious history and Catholic history, including studying at the Vatican Archive. Sounds fascinating. Your research connects religion, technology, and now the enigmatic realm of the UFO phenomena. Now Now you find yourself working with scientists and military personnel on the topic, something you never thought she'd be doing when you began your career. You're a Christian believer and a mother, probably the most important things, right?

Yes.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Everybody starts off with a gift.

All right. Wow, thank you.

A little something for the ride home.

Oh, thank you for giving me two because I have a lot of kids.

We'll give you some more.

They'll love this. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I think my son wanted me to have a gun, but I don't know about that.

Do you want a gun?

No, I'm just joking.

All right. Well, Diana, we were just having a conversation right before we started recording, and I was going to start this interview in the year of 2012, but it sounds like you had an experience as an 11-year-old girl.

That's right. Yes.

Let's start right there.

Okay, sure. Yeah. It was when I was 11 that I decided to do what I'm doing now, which is looking at religion, but Most specifically then, I wanted to read the Bible, which I did. So I had an experience. So in my upbringing, my parents were secular, right? Christian, right? So That means that we didn't have a Bible in the house. We celebrated Christmas and that type of thing. So I had never read the Bible, and I didn't actually know the story of Jesus. I knew, of course, Jesus Christ, everybody does. But I actually didn't know the story. So it was on an Easter, and I was doing Easter eggs at the table, and the TV was on, and Franco Zufferelli's Jesus of Nazareth was on the TV. So I was somewhat watching it, but not really paying attention, and I was doing the Easter eggs. And at some point, there was the scene where the mob is just about to kill this woman. So there's this mob of men, and it's this woman who's an adulterer, and they're going to stone her to death. And of course, it's super dramatic. And I'm doing the Easter egg, and I look at that, and Jesus is writing something in the sand.

And I'm like, well, he's got to stop this. This is terrible. And so he looks up and he says, those among you with sin cast the first stone. And that converted me somehow. Somehow, to me, that was something that reversed the law because it was the law that she be stoned. But he reversed it. And I thought I was a pretty serious kid, and I knew that people did bad things and there was bad in the world. To me, this could be something I thought this was hopeful. This was like a person who provided some type of hope. I decided that I'd watch the show because it started on Friday, and I believe that was probably Friday night, and kept going on Saturday and then ended on Easter Sunday. I kept watching, and my parents thought it was strange because I never really cared about that stuff before. But every day I woke up and I was like, I'm going to watch this show tonight. Now this sounds ridiculous, but it's actually true. I didn't know that he was crucified at the very end. So at the very end, he gets crucified. To me, it was devastating because I couldn't believe it.

I was like, wow, he actually provided some hope to these people, and now he's being crucified. So my mom was observing this and thought it was really strange. I had tears. So the next day, I made my take me to a Bible store to buy the Bible. She didn't know what to get. So we asked the clerk, this is my first Bible. In fact, it's our only Bible. What should we get? So we got this red-letter edition of the King James version of the Bible. And the red-letter edition, for people who don't know, it's the edition that has Jesus's words all in red. And to me, that was exactly what I wanted. So we got the red-letter edition. I brought it home, started reading it right away from beginning Now, you have to understand that my grandparents were Catholic, so they had Bibles, but my parents were just agnostic. They didn't go to church. So I started to read the Bible, and Immediately, I could tell that it wasn't an easy read. It's not an easy read. For anybody who just cracks it and decides, Okay, what does this book really say? It's hard to read.

Some parts were easy to read, like the the red letters, right? Easy to read. But like the Old Testament, Hebrew Bible, Genesis, that thing, I could tell that it was an ancient text. And so I made it my goal then. I became Christian. I I decided I'm a Christian. I don't know what my parents are, but I am now. And I asked my parents to take me to different churches, whatever church was a Christian church. I was 11. So it was a full on religious conversion that I had that I didn't recognize until later. And I said, I want to grow up and I want to go to school or whatever needs to happen so that I can read this book in its original language because I could tell it had been translated. And so I finally got that. I did it. So that's what I did. It was a rocky trip there. But I went to a Catholic school, which is where at that point, nuns were running the school. So it was a really good school. I graduated really early when I was 16. I did go to college, and then I went to the Jesuit School of Theology, which is a school where you can do an academic degree with priests.

So priests were my peers. So I went to school with priests in formation to be priests. So I got an education that priests get. And then after that, I got my PhD, and I've been doing this ever since.

Wow. So you literally started at age 11. Yeah.

I still have the same Bible, too.

Man, that's great. That's awesome. I mean, it's pretty profound for an 11-year-old to read the Bible.

Yeah, it did freak my parents out, to tell you the truth. They thought it was odd, but my father was more okay with it. He's passed away. But my mother, I felt like she was worried about me. She thought I'd become a nun. And I actually know nuns, and they're good people. And I keep thinking, that's not the worst case in the world.

There's definitely worse career paths than being a nun.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Wow.

Well, I know that... So as I mentioned, I grew up Catholic and still go back every now and then. I got a lot of questions. But you started studying purgatory in 2012. And so Could you describe purgatory for the audience, for the people that don't know what that is?

You bet. Sure. So I started it earlier than that. So it was something that started as soon as I became an assistant professor. And this was in 2002, 2003. In order to keep that job, you have to publish, which is normal for a professor. So I was interested in ideas of the afterlife and the soul. These interested me. In the Catholic tradition, which is what I was trained in, there's this thing called purgatory. This is also Eastern Orthodox. Most Christians that are not Protestant believe in this thing, this thing called purgatory. And it's like a way station for souls that aren't good enough to go to heaven. If you are a normal person, not the best person, but not the worst person, you're not going to hell. You go to this place called purgatory, where it's supposed to be a place of purgation, where you work off your sins and then that soul goes to heaven. Well, this was a doctrine of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. It somehow went away So it's still a doctrine, but Catholic don't know about it, and they don't pray for souls that are in purgatory anymore.

It used to be a huge devotion, and I wanted to know why it disappeared. I started to do archival research. So archives libraries of old manuscripts and books from ancient times to the present. And there's some really great archives in the United States, and of course, at the Vatican. So I started to look in these archives for what Catholic in 1200, 1300, throughout time, thought of purgatory, basically. As I was doing that work, I was writing a book, like a survey of purgatory. Well, it turns out purgatory was actually a place in Ireland So there's actually a place. It's still there. It's on a plate on an island called Loch Dyrg, which is Red Lake, the Red Lake in Ireland. It was a place where people thought that they could go to a cave, and if they withstood it for 24 hours, their souls would be cleansed after that. And they did this in the late medieval time period till about 1200. Hold on.

So they thought that if they could handle being in a cave for 24 hours, is there anything substantial about this particular cave?

Yeah. So this cave would have demons and things like that in it. So you have to survive being assaulted by beings of the afterlife in this cave. So for the medieval mind, they don't separate out demons and angels and stuff. Those were part of their reality. So this cave was the place where they could go to an underground area where they could have these battles. And if they survived those battles, their sins would be forgiven. That's not the only purgatory cave. There was one in Italy as well. This was where the doctrine emerged from, and then it became an actual doctrine. Then as time went on, people started to think of it not as a place, but as a state of being. That's how purgatory changed. I wrote that book. I wrote that book. But during the study of that book, I came upon aerial phenomena. So Catholics from 1200 up to 1800 saw things in the sky that they couldn't identify. If they did identify Usually, you can see it right in the reports, too. They're like, We saw this orb. We don't know what it is, but we think it's a soul from purgatory.

So we're going to pray it back to where it should go. And so I started to collect these. Sometimes they saw things and they interpreted them as like flying houses, things in the sky. Sometimes they saw things and they thought they were angels. And so I had a lot of these, and I didn't understand what they were, so I put them aside, and I wrote my book on purgatory, and I got that all done, right? And so I had all of these things. And I was on to my next book, by the way, about a Catholic bishop. So I wasn't really going to write about those things. But I still thought that they were weird enough, and there were so many of them. The patterns were the same. So I showed a friend of mine, and he looked at them and he said, these look like Steven Spielberg films. They look like UFOs. And honestly, I thought he was crazy. And I was like, no way. Those are not UFOs. But a UFO conference was happening in my town that week, so we went to that. And that's where I met people who had sightings of UFOs, and it looked like a pattern match.

When I heard them talk about this, and I was like, this looks exactly like the Catholic reports. That's when I began to do this study into UFOs. That happened in 2012.

Before we go into the UFO stuff, I'm actually very interested in the purgatory stuff. Yeah, absolutely. What do you think? Okay. The purgatory originated as a cave?

Well, that was one of it. A couple of caves. That was one of its practices. If you look at the Catholic history of purgatory, the official idea. It basically says, Catholics, we don't know. The Pope would say, We don't know what it is.

Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses. That's right, more than 40 free online courses. Learn about the works of C. S. Lewis, the stories in the Book of Genesis, the meeting of the US Constitution, the Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic, or the History of the Ancient Christian Church with Hillsdale College's free online courses. I've talked pretty openly about my return to Faith on the show, and Hillsdale offers some incredible courses to help discover the Bible's profound lessons about fatherhood, the nature of sin, and the consequences of sin on both a family and a nation. Their online courses are self so you can start whenever and wherever. Go right now to hillsdale. Edu/srs to enroll. There's no cost and it's easy to get started. That's hillsdale. Edu/srs to enroll for free. Hillsdale kilsdale. Edu/srs. Even though I'm excited for the new administration, there's a lot of tension in the world. Russia, Ukraine, the border, inflation, who knows what could happen next? Me, I'm not waiting around to find out, and I don't think you should either. Look, it's simple. I want you to go to seanlikesgold. Com. You'll learn about my partners over at Gold Co.

They're a great precious metals company that I trust. They're one of the top-rated gold companies in the industry with impeccable customer service, and they support the show. For my listeners, they're going to give you a free gold and silver kit where you can learn about how precious metals could help you protect your money. You could also get up to a 10% instant match in bonus silver on qualified orders. That extra 10% is a great way to get started. Plus, it helps support the show. All you need to do is go to seanlikesgold. Com. That's meleksgold. Com. Make sure you do everything in your power to help protect what's yours. Performance may vary. Consult with your tax attorney or financial professional before making an investment decision.

They tend to try to say it's not a physical place where these souls end up, right? But they don't know what it is. Is it a spiritual place? They tend to say it's a state of mind or a state of being. So I would look at it like a state of being for the soul.

So it's a realm.

Yeah, like a realm, like another dimension or something like that. We would call it, like when you and I talk, I'd say, Sean, it's another dimension. It's another dimension. My soul, hopefully will go there. I'm not saying I'm good enough to get into heaven, but I'm hoping for purgatory things. Because I believe in the soul. I also want to say this, that I should have said this earlier, that the things that I'm going to say are my own opinion based on what I've studied and how I've lived, and they don't reflect my university. So my university is a state university. It's not going to be... I I won't be publishing a peer-reviewed paper talking about the reality of the soul, but I believe in it. So I'm a believer. Absolutely.

So you believe in purgatory?

Probably not like it's described by the Catholic Church. I believe that the soul continues. And I believe that... And by the way, this is based on not just what I see in Catholicism. I do comparative religious studies. So I've read stuff from ancient Egypt, and I've read stuff from Hinduism and Buddhism, things like that. Almost everything I read about within these religions and people, too, that I've spoken with. I have a lot of friends who have PhDs in various fields. And I asked them about what they know about this. It appears that this even goes back to Plato, by the way, and Socrates. This is the Greek tradition, the philosophical tradition. What happens to a soul after the body dies is determined largely by what one does in one's life. So I take that very seriously.

Yeah, me too. Me too. Does the Bible Is purgatory anywhere in the Bible?

Is there anywhere in the- No, no. The word purgatory is nowhere in the Bible. It actually wasn't even codified until the 1200s. So that's late. So Jesus dies in '30. Well, heck, that's a long time after Jesus is... But there are references to praying for souls that presumably are in another place in the Bible. So there are references to that, but it's not called purgatory.

What is that called?

So in the Book of Daniel, there's references to prayers said four souls that have passed on. And there are also, I'm trying to remember in the New Testament where this is. I will have to give that to you because for some reason I used to know it, but I not. But no, in the Bible, there's nothing that references purgatory.

So I got another question for you. If it's not in the Bible, should we be paying attention to it at all?

Okay, so if it's not in the Bible, should we be paying attention?

Because there's a lot of like, and I can't really think of anything off the top of my head. This is all new to me.

Yes, yes, of course.

Like you said at the beginning, I can't even remember this is on or off camera, but you were Most Catholics don't even know their own religion.

Yeah, I know. It's true. It's sad.

But that's a lot of us. But which is part of the reason why I stepped away and started looking for other sources. But I've been talking to a lot of people about God, Jesus, the Bible. And it seems to be there's a lot of little things that different religions believe in that have absolutely no reference in the Bible.

Okay, so I will tell you what I think, Sean. You may not like it. Okay There are things that are not in the Bible that we should pay attention to. I'm going to talk about that. Remember when we talked about how purgatory was codified in the 1200s? The Bible wasn't even codified until the fourth century. This is going to be 300 years to be more conservative. This is going to be 200 years after Jesus dies. The early Christians, they did not have a Bible. They didn't have what you and I have, what I was so interested in when I was 11. When you start to do biblical scholarship, really get into, and I wanted to preface too. In religious studies, we don't have an agenda. We're not advocating a religion for any religion. We study it. This was as clean as I get when I decided to do this because I was like, I just want to know. I'm interested in this guy, Jesus, and I want to know what life was like for him and his followers. That entailed doing biblical scholarship. And I went to school, which is this place called the Graduate Theological Union, which is the Divinity School of UC Berkeley.

Every Christian denomination is there, almost. You've got So Episcopal, you got Catholic, you got every Catholic, Dominican, Franciscans, and you also have people affiliated with UC Berkeley, so you take classes there if you go there, too. In this environment where priests are taking courses and people who are going to be ministers in the Anglican Church. They're all taking courses, Presbyterians, and they're all taking what's called New Testament. In New Testament, you learn how the Bible was put together. And I I remember taking this class, and there were lots of people in it, like 35 people. Every single one of those people was going to be some type of theologian minister. I think I was the only one who was going to be an academic. Every single one of those people went through trauma taking that because you're brought up to believe a certain story about Christianity. When that story gets deconstructed in such a way where the teachers using the language of the Bible, which was Greek, the New Testament, it was written in Greek, and basically showing you how it was put together, what we have, what we don't have, what other books were out there being used by Christians, this destroyed a lot of people's faith.

And I know people whose faith was destroyed. Some of them went on to be scholars of religion because they had that much training. They were like, well, I got to put this degree to use, even though I'm no longer a believer. I met priests whose faith was destroyed, priest in formation. My faith was strengthened. My faith was strengthened because God is a God of truth. And I was like, I am not afraid to know what is the truth. It's not going to make people happy, but I will learn it. And if it's wrong, I'll learn that it's wrong. So when I learned these things, I wanted to know more. So I actually extended my education beyond my PhD. So when I got my PhD, I wanted to study with John Dominic Croson, who was at that time the foremost scholar on Jesus in the world. He was teaching at Berkeley. And so I asked the chair of my department if I could take courses with him. He was like, yes, absolutely. So I got to take courses with him and learn more. Again, it just made me stronger in my faith, stronger Christian, a better teacher for students.

I have had students students who've come through and they've been what are called biblical literalists. So a biblical literalist is a person who takes the Bible literally. It's hard to take it literally because there are discrepancies in it, which is what I knew when I was 11 And I was like, this doesn't seem that God would create something that had discrepancies in it. This must be translated wrong or something like that. That's what I thought. So I've had students who went on to be ministers a very conservative Christian faith, but we're still great friends. And we would have the conversation about Jesus with the demon and legion. You know that story where Jesus comes to a town and there's a demon possessed man, and the demon speaks to Jesus and says, Get away. My judgment isn't here yet. And Jesus gets the demon and makes it go into these pigs, right? And thus saving this man of being possessed. I would read this in a certain way, and my student would read it absolutely literally, and we would have a disagreement about it. Then we were still good friends, and he would go on. I would say, That's fine as long as you know that I'm teaching it this way.

If you know that, I'm okay with you having your opinion about it as long as you know that this is how scholars view it at this point. We would disagree, but he would go on to be a minister. Now, what's It's funny, is I've come to his perception of that after 10 years and going through the UFO thing, I'm like, I think he's right. And if he's watching this, I believe you now.

Wow. Yeah. What are some of the things that aren't in the Bible that we should be paying attention to? Are you talking about maybe that... What's that? Is it the Book of Enoch?

Okay, so there are things that haven't been written down, but we know them through material culture. So we know a lot about Christianity by what they decided to put... Okay, see these beautiful paintings that you have in here? Well, I know a lot about you by looking at those paintings, I know that your friend painted them. I honestly thought that they were photos. That's some artistic talent right there. But what that means is that what is most important to us, we tend to make images of. And so the early Christians, not all of them could read or write. So they had material culture. And you see these in the catechons. And so this is where they buried their dead and they hid out because they were being persecuted by Rome. They had a lot of these things that are basically called frescoes. If you look at their frescoes, you could see what was important to them and also how they worshiped. You see that they were diverse. So women worshiped with men. So there wasn't this strict gender separation. That didn't appear. There are some written things that we should pay attention to. And some of those things we found only in the 20th century because we still do archeology.

So we found the Dead Sea scrolls, which tell us a lot about the early Jewish community that became Christian because Jesus is Jewish. So he's not Christian, he's Jewish. So his community, then we have to understand it in its context in terms of what he said and the message that he brings down. He also talks a lot about the Holy spirit. What did he mean by that? He meant the presence of God. And I think that is super important. And that's something, by the way, that I believe still is alive. And you could feel the presence of Jesus in certain communities that profess their devotion to him and profess to do what he asked us to do, love one another, those kinds of things. So that's not in the Bible, right? Although we could use the Bible to help us create this community of believers. He also instituted a community of people to carry on what he was doing. That community had some books that we've just found out about in the 1940s. Let's understand, too, in the first century, the early Christian Church was almost decimated by Rome. It's a church that had been...

Bad things were happening to Christians and to Jewish people. Their temple was destroyed by Rome in '70s. So that group dispersed and tried to survive. So that's how they started to write things down because they couldn't keep an oral tradition alive. So they started to keep it going like this. So they wrote things, and some of those things we just found. They utilized And this is really important, too. They utilized the Plato's Republic. So the early Christians used Plato's Republic, too, which is a really amazing book. And if you haven't read it, you should... Well, it's a hard book to read. Again, it's very much like the Bible because it's ancient. But it tells a very important truth. It seems like Socrates and Plato were also onto this one God, right, of justice and truth. That was somehow separate from their government. Their government was not just and truthful. They wrote a book about it called Plato's Republic. When I say they, Plato wrote it, but Socrates didn't write anything. So Plato wrote it. But that was being used by the early Christians. So what was important for them is important for me to know.

So I want to know. I'm not trying to tell anybody what to think. I am not the minister of a church. I'm not trying to advocate. But the way I do Why? And listen, I'm Catholic, but that doesn't mean that the Catholic church, I'm not a representative of the Catholic church. And I know a lot of people who are Catholic. And I look at to see what people do, right? What do they do? And if I think what they're doing seemed really good and righteous to me, I like that, and I listened to them.

Okay. I had asked a lot of people about Ezekiel.

Yes.

And it sounds like you have an explanation I'm looking for. Yes. Can you go into that, please?

I can. Yeah. Thank Yeah. So you're talking about Ezequiel's wheel, right? So the Ezequiel's wheel is today. Okay, so I'm going to tell you what I know about it from a Christian perspective. So it's in the Book of Ezequiel. Ezequiel is a prophet. Okay, so the Bible, this is the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. It is written in Hebrew. And this is the beginning of the Israelite community. Okay, so there's Genesis that describes the story of God having a covenant with these men to create his people. And that's the Book of Genesis. And there's some angel accounts in that, too, I think, that are really interesting we could talk about So we get to the history of the Jewish people, and you get to the prophets. So you know about Egypt. So they're in Egypt, and they have to leave, and Moses gets them out of Egypt. And so terrible things happen to them in Egypt, and so they need to leave. So they do. And then you get to a certain part of the Bible. It's like a history of the Old Testament. It's like a history of God's people. And so then they get to the prophets.

So the prophets. Ezequiel is one of the prophets. And again, there's a government, there's Babylon. He's basically trying to control the Jewish people, and it's not good for them. So Ezekiel offers hope. And as a prophet of God. And what happens to him is that he has this, what some would call a vision, but it could very well, because this is what happens when people have encounters today, say with UAP or what they there to be angels or something like that. They can't tell if... And you see this also with Paul in the New Testament, when he sees Jesus, he says, I don't know if it was like a dream or if it was real. I cannot tell. So it's a very confusing thing that happens to Ezekiel, but it's called Ezekiel's vision. But I'm sure he thought it was real, and it seems real. So he has a waking dream, maybe, or a vision that appears real. And it's of these beings that look odd. They have wings, and they also have wheels associated with them. And this is in chapter one, so it's at the very beginning. And he has this. And what it is it gives him the realization that God's people will continue, even though they're being pretty much decimated by the Babylonians.

So the Babylonians are putting them in exile, and they're breaking them up. And he has this vision of these beings who impart this knowledge to him. Now, that is part of a mystical tradition within Judaism that I've talked... When you're in my field, you get to have friends who have PhDs in areas that you don't. So that's basically one of the best things about what I do, in my opinion. I like it. I get to go talk to friends who are expert at New Testament and say, Is this tradition in the New Testament? And yes, apparently it is. Now, these people won't say this publicly, so I'm going to say it. But it's called this, Sean. Ezekiel saw what's most likely a Seraphim. A what? A seraphim. A seraphim? Yeah, it's a seraph. So seraphim is the plural of seraph. It's an angel. It's a type of angel. And you've seen it before this. It's like the eye with the wings around it. And sometimes it's shown with wheels. And so Ezequiel interpreted this, and other Jewish people interpreted this to be the throne of God, the very throne of God. These were the beings at the throne of God.

And this tradition is called the Merkaba tradition. And Merkaba is literally chariot. So it's a tradition of sightings of these beings that are God's angels. And by the way, so this happens to Ezequiel. And so it then begins this new era for Jews who at this time are in exile, hope that things are going to get better. Okay, so hope that things are going to get better. Before that, there was an interesting angel encounter that Jacob had. Jacob is one of the people who is the son of one of the patriarchs of the covenant in Genesis. He has this encounter. He's going to meet his brother, and it's probably not going to be a good meeting because they have a rivalry The night before, he has an encounter with... There's different interpretations of it, but it looks like it's an angel. It comes down, sometimes people interpret it like God or a messenger of God. It is an angel. It that fights with him. It literally fights with him all night. So he has this battle with this angel all night long. It dislocates his hip, but he refuses to give up. He wants a blessing from this thing.

And in the end, he gets it. He gets this blessing. And he changes his name from Jacob to Israel. And again, what it does is it foretells a new era for God's people. So me, looking at these kinds of events, they're very epic, these kinds of things that happen when people have these sightings of these messengers of God.

You know, some of this sounds like what some people would call a psychedelic download. Have you ever heard of that?

Yes.

What do you think about that?

Okay, so I know a lot about that, actually. And even within the... In religious studies, we have a whole group of people who do look into antheogens, which are psychedelics and religions and religiosity type of things that come out of that. So Indigenous people from the United States, America, there's the Church of Native Americans, the Native American Church. They use peyote. And so they utilize plant medicine in a very structured religious way, and they have experiences this. So most likely there's a link there. Perhaps what Ezequiel sees is something that maybe... I'm not trying to... I'm very happy to say that in this environment, a controlled, respectful way of doing, psychedelics, this is legitimate what they're doing. If one's doing it recreationally, I've seen some pretty terrible things to happen with people who aren't respecting that you can open something up. You can open up, Let's just say it's a dimension because we don't know what it is, but it appears to be another realm that people can access either through psychedelics or through a religious protocol. It seems like it happens.

Have you done psychedelics?

Yes. When I was younger, I did. Yes. And again, I felt like it was something that was okay for me to do because, well, I'll tell you, I did it innocently. So I was a 16-year-old, and my friend had some. Her parents were grateful dead people. I know. So they had- They had the good stuff, Well, they had mushrooms, and my friend got some. And I already knew at this point, I don't know how, but I already knew that it needed to be done in reverence. It needed to be done. So we actually prayed to God before we did it. And we said, if this is wrong, God, please let us know, but we're going to do this. And it was a really beautiful experience. I mean, honestly, it was good. But I don't do it now. Why not? Well, because I think that I was lucky and innocent when I did it, Sean. I know that it's helpful for people. I've known people to be, specifically Iselocibin has helped people I know recover from things, say they were on the front in various tours of duty, and they've been helped by treatment. I guess my position is, and I don't guess this, this is my position, is that when done with the correct intention, I think it's good and all right.

Without that intention, it's dangerous, and for this reason, that it perhaps will open something up, and it could be that you do meet something like another being of some sort that we've been talking about. That being could be good or it could be bad. Both exist in my opinion.

You think these realms... I've done psychedelic works, psychedelic treat therapies, and it stemmed from mental Ill injuries from service. But I don't want to get into all the good, whatever. That's a whole other conversation. What I'm interested in talking to you about is the realm that you go to.

Yeah, the realm is really real.

Do you believe it's a real realm or is it developed in your imagination?

Right. So I- Or is it both? Yeah. Okay, so I believe it's a real realm.

Life comes at you fast. Making sure my family is taken care of is my top priority, and Fabric by Gerber Life makes it super simple. Fabric by Gerber Life Life is term life insurance you can get done right from your couch, all online and on your schedule. You could be covered in under 10 minutes with no health exam required. Fabric has flexible, high-quality policies that fits your family and your budget. They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can cancel it anytime, so there's no risk. Fabric is more than life insurance. Free digital wills, access to investment accounts to invest for your kid's future, and more. All manageable right from your phone. Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family. Apply today in just minutes at meetfabric. Com/shawn. That's meetfabric. Com/shawn. M-e-e etfabric. Com/shawn. Policy is issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company. Not available in certain states. Price is subject to underwriting and health questions. You guys know my wife and I are always looking for ways to improve our sleep. We just started using Cozy Earth's bamboo sheets, and they're already making a difference. Between work, travel, the kids, and everything life throws at us, knowing we'll have a comfortable bed to come home to is a huge relief.

If you're looking to make your home and escape from the outside world's demands and surprise your Valentine, Cozy Earth's sheets would make a great gift. Guys, listen up. I'm not joking. My wife loves these sheets. She's been raving about them for months now. Visit CozyEarth. Com/srs to get up to 40% off. Cozyearth prides itself on the responsible production of all products. Plus, CozyEarth's bedding products have a 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty, so there's no reason not to try them. Skip the candy, surprise your wife or your girlfriend with CozyEarth. They deserve it. Head to CozyEarth. Com CozyEarth. Com/srs now to get up to 40% off. That's CozyEarth. Com/srs. Don't forget, if you're asked in a post-purchase survey, let them know you heard about CozyEarth right here on the Sean Ryan show. Once Once again, your ladies are going to love it. While we may have won this election, the fight to restore a great nation has just begun. Now is the time to take a stand and Patriot Mobile is leading the charge. As America's only Christian conservative wireless provider, Patriot Mobile offers a way to vote with your wallet without compromising on quality or convenience.

Patriot Mobile isn't just about providing exceptional cell phone service. It's a call to action to defend our rights and freedoms. With Patriot Mobile, you'll get outstanding nationwide coverage because they operate on all three major networks. If you have cell phone service today, you can get cell phone service with Patriot Mobile with a coverage guarantee. But the difference is every dollar you spend with Patriot Mobile helps support the first and Second amendments, the sanctity of life in our veterans and first responders. Switching is easy. Keep your number, keep your phone, or upgrade. Their 100% US-based customer service support team will help you find the perfect plan. Right now, go to patriotmobile. Com/srs or call 972 Patriot, and get a free month of service with promo code SRS. Switch to Patriot Mobile today and defend your freedom with every call and text you make. Visit patriotemobil. Com/srs or call 972-Patriot.

And I don't think... The reason I believe that is because if you do what's called field research and talk to people either who access this realm without psychedelics and then those who access it with psychedelics, a lot of times they're talking about similar types of things that happen in those realms, like certain experiences, certain things that they meet, like entities and things like that. That would indicate to me that that is a real realm. How we access it, I don't know. I do know, though, that if we... I know we're not talking UAP right now, but when I met people who were in the government who were studying studying UAP, who are studying UAP, they're very interested in this realm. They're interested in this as... Consciousness is an access point.

What do you mean by that?

So our consciousness can access us, and things can access us through, I would call, through something that we have in our consciousness. I think that we're at the very beginning of understanding it, and I think we should be really careful.

Why do you think we should be careful?

Okay.

Do you have specific examples?

Well, yes. Okay. So this gets really scary, though, because it could be that there are... I've met people who have been doing ayahuasca, right? And they do it fairly consistently, I guess, right? And I've They've told me that they've been what they call, and I'm not putting words in their mouth. They've been possessed. What they described to me is something that I've heard within the Christian tradition of being possessed. Or even it happens in most religious traditions, by the way. It doesn't just happen in the Christian tradition, possessed by something that is bad and is harmful. It could be that something like that could happen if one's not prepared to deal with the realm. There is a reason in the Jewish tradition that people... And by the way, you also get this in the Greek tradition. So when I say I'm looking at this from a meta-perspective, not just from each tradition. So I feel blessed, actually, to be able to have studied this from multiple different religious traditions and secular traditions and philosophical traditions. When a person goes through life preparing themselves to access these, what we'll just call in this conversation, these other dimensions, this realm, they've been prepared.

They've been prepared. They have a group of people to help them, like in the Merkaba tradition. You don't do it until you're in their 40s. You have to actually have gone through maturation. You have to prepare your brain. In the Greek tradition, the Socratic tradition, you prepared your brain by doing math. You were an athlete. A lot of them were... They were like MMA fighters, right? They were wrest and stuff. So they trained their bodies. So most people are not like that. Most people are not... They're just going through life and they're doing their job, and then they want to do this thing. They want to go down and do ayahuasca. Maybe five times, it works well for them, but on their sixth time, it's the worst thing that has ever happened to them in their life, and it has PTSD repercussions for them. That's what I'm saying. That type of thing. I know people that have had that happen to them. That's why I'm on the conservative side of that.

When you're talking about other people that are reaching the same dimension or realm or whatever we want to call it that are getting there without psychedelics.

Yes.

How are they? Is this through meditation?

How is this? Okay, so in almost every major religious tradition, you have a tradition of this. And they're usually called monastic communities, communities of monks and nuns, or they're called in Hinduism, saniasins, renunciates. And even you have this in, like I talked about Socrates and Plato in the Greek philosophy philosophical tradition. You have a group of people who go off, live together, and help each other. In Buddhism, it's called the Sangha. It's a community of people helping each other become ready to access realms that provide knowledge, wisdom, truth, things like that. And these realms, I'm what's called a moral realist. That's a philosophical position that believes that things like truth and justice, these are real things. And if humans died, they would still exist. Truth and justice would still exist. I believe that. And that only comes from living my life for as long as I've lived and going through the training that I've gone through. There are lots of people that aren't moral realists. Most people are not, I would say. But once a person has a taste that this realm exists and that truth and beauty exists and that you feel it, and it's something amazing.

I feel like Jimmy D. Hendrix knew about this through his experiences with psychedelics. Are you experienced? He was experienced. And he says, not just stone, but beautiful. Well, I understood that. And I understood that not from the Now, he was dead, by the way, when I was exposed to his work. But yeah, so once a person recognizes that that stuff is worthwhile, then one wants to go through those training, get get through that protocol, go through those communities. Do you think- And by the way, this is also what helps people deal if there is something that one encounters that's not truth and beauty. And there are those things, obviously.

I mean, I just... I think we have a lot to learn in those realms.

I do. In those dimensions.

I do, too. And I've never actually had this conversation with anybody before, but I think a lot of people go back because there's so much positivity coming out of psychedelics. I mean, that's why I went back. But I have so many thoughts going through my head. The dimension or realm that it takes me to always scares the hell out of me. It's not necessarily a bad experience. I have a lot of anticipation type anxiety if I'm going to do it because I know I'm going there. Majority of the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. I always learn a lot. It's always a very intuitive type experience. It's funny you mentioned truth and justice and things like that because you might feel justice about certain events that have happened in your life that you didn't feel that you got justice from. You might get that coming out of those types of experiences. Then with the truth, I mean, I've had so many intuitive experiences about my family, my own life, my business. It's just lots of... It's almost like a download of information or a, Hey, I need a new roadmap to my life. Let me strap in here real quick and figure this out.

There's just so many positive things coming out of it, but I almost feel like some of the things that you're talking about live in that realm. Should we be exploring that realm somehow, some way more effectively than the way we are?

Emphatically, yes. So in my opinion, I just spoke to a young man here on your team. He told me, he's 25. He told me about his experience of school, which was horrible. Horrible experience when I know, right? We don't teach kids this. Our culture is completely evacuated of the reality of this, that it's real. And And there might be means of accessing these amazing things. Yeah. So if you took... Even when we do teach it, we teach it as if, like I did, sadly, for a while. Teaching it like it wasn't actually real when we taught Plato's Republic and the kinds of things that he would talk about in his dialogs. But they're real. And what if And I teach them now like, they really believe these guys. Like, wow, do they exist? And I go, I believe they exist, but I'm not saying that you should believe they exist. I personally do. And so that makes an impact on a young person. So what I'm saying is that they crave this. Don't you? You say you keep going back. This is something that we need as human beings. It's something that we've been deprived of.

It's really weird. I crave it. I don't know if craving is the right word, but I don't know any Any other way to put it. I feel like psychedelics make you smarter. I really, honestly believe that psychedelics make you smarter. Smarter at accessing memories, smarter at accessing, memory smarter, Navigating your life. It just clears all the shit up and gives you clear direction and where to go and new perspectives on past events. And in current events and in relationships. But at the same time, I really have a lot of respect for the medicine itself And so it's not... You're not going to see me at a party eating a bag of mushrooms.

I was just going to ask you that. I was going to say, okay, it sounds like Sean is doing this in the environment where there's reverence and respect.

If I do it, calendar's It's locked off. It's no kids. I take it very seriously. I don't mess around. I don't just do it on a whim. I put a lot of thought into why I'm doing it, what I'm going to do it, how I'm going to do it, preparation for afterwards. I'm not just going to come back to work the next day. If I'm going to do it, then I'm going to set it up to where I'm going to get the most out of the experience. But yeah, it's just interesting to talk to somebody like you about that. So I wanted to ask you about the Have you studied the Dead Sea scrolls?

No, those are in Hebrew, in the type of Hebrew I'm not. And in fact, even probably, oh, gosh, they're not the language that I would be able to crack the code of them. But I do know about that community, and I have friends who study them. So that's how I have knowledge of them. So within the field of religious studies, there's so many things you can't know everything. And knowing that... Even if you know the language, you have to know that specific language from that time period.

Okay. Well, let's move into how did the interest in the UFO stuff even happen?

Yeah. So I'm the last person, by the way, who would be talking about UFOs if you talk to me 14 years ago. Nobody would say that I would be talking about UFOs. Anybody you talk to who knows me What? Diana is talking about UFOs. So this happened because of the purgatory book. So I had created that log of aerial phenomena, historical aerial phenomena, and I thought it was weird. And so I showed my friend, and we went to this conference where I met people who had these experiences, and they were telling me things that looked like a pattern match to what I was studying. I thought, I'll go ahead and look at this a little bit further, but I didn't tell anybody. I was just doing an analysis. Then I thought, this is interesting. It's basically a modern day ascent narrative, the ascent of the soul. If you see images of people being abducted or cows being abducted, you'll see the cow rising into ascending into the spaceships, the people, the farmer being ascended. We see the same thing with images of purgatory. You see, maybe not cows, of course, but European catholics will be ascending into their soul's ascending, but it shows them ascending.

So I thought this is like a modern day ascent narrative. I could use my methods for studying this, no problem. It won't discredit me to study this. So I started to do this study, and it was really interesting. Then what happened was they started to get emails and phone calls from aerospace engineers, people from known aerospace corporations and institutions. They wanted to talk to me about my research that I was doing. I was like, Wait, I think you got the wrong person. No. This kept happening. I decided, okay, they wanted to meet with me. A couple of them wanted to meet with me. I thought, okay, I'll meet with them because why do they want to know about this angel event that happened in the 1800s? How did they get one of you?

Were you writing papers?

I started to do conferences with the people that I know who are other professors of religion. For us, it was like, yeah, modern day Ascent narrative, easy to understand. But they would then somehow were scouring the internet of any academic who is doing the word UFO or anything like that. That's how they found me. Once I was found, a lot of them reached out to me. At first, I was a little bit it off because I thought, this is odd. It flicked me out, to tell you the truth. But I did start to talk to them. And one of them, I actually put him off for a year and a half. I mean, I know it sounds weird, but I had five young kids and I was busy, right? So I didn't make this connection. I thought it was weird. But when I started to talk to them, I recognized that they weren't looking at it like I was looking at it. They were looking at like it actually happened. Whereas I was looking at it more like a metaphor. This is something, this is their interpretation of something they saw in the sky. They wanted to know what they saw in the sky.

They also wanted to know what kinds of things happened to these people. Were they injured? And a lot of times they were. And so that started to get me to relook at what I was doing. And I started to look at it from their perspective. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I think that these things are probably real. And And that was shocking. So I was shocked for a whole year. What I did was, thankfully, I had a friend, Jeff Kreipel, at Rice University, and I shared all my stuff with him. And he was shocked, too, by the way.

What was it What was the turning point for you that made you think that this isn't metaphorical anymore?

Okay, so the turning point was when I met a person who I have to call Tyler because Because he's anonymous. One of these people that when I look back now, I recognize worked for one of these SAPs, most likely. I can't prove it, but it looks like it. So He worked for- Can you describe SAP for the audience, please? Yeah. It's called a Special Access Program in the military, and he worked for an unacknowledged SAP. And And he described his work as a hobby. This was in 2013. He described his work as a hobby. He had lots of clearances from different agencies, Department of Defense and NASA, a lot. And he worked as a mission controller, and he also worked as this... He was like a space shuttle. He worked in the space shuttle program for his duration until it ended. He was always at a launch to the space shuttle. He also did scientific stuff. So he was this character that I didn't quite understand when I first met him, and he really wanted to know the data. So he wanted to know, he really was interested in any work that I would do at the Vatican And he was also interested in any work that I did that had to do with consciousness.

Because he said that in his field, he said, consciousness is the next step. That's where we are studying. And that's why we're interested your work. And so, again, I was really slow to work with him because I was concerned. I was concerned about what it would mean for my life. It might change my life. And it did. It did change my life. So that's what changed, is that I started to look at the Catholic tradition again from a new lens. So I had looked at like Teresa of Avilage, this Nun, who lived in the 1500s, and she had an experience with one of these Seraps or an angel, right? But she didn't call an angel at first. So I went back and I looked at these experiences that these people had that we now, when we look at them, we see the nice prayer cards, and it looks really like a sweet encounter that they had. But really, the encounter, when you read the primary source material that you see in the archives, it looks really different in how it's represented. And that was shocking to me because- Which archives? Okay, so there are two main archives that hold...

There's lots of different archives. But the ones that hold lots of information about this, first is the Vatican Archive, and the Vatican that used to be called the Vatican Secret Archive, but it's called the Apostolic Archive, and it's the Pope's Archive. You can't just go to You have to actually have certain credentials to get into it. And so I have those credentials, so I was able to go there, and I was able to look at the primary source material for some of the saints in the Catholic and Christian tradition that looked like that had angel events or levitated and had anomalous activity. And I was able to look at that and assess the primary source data on my own, which is really fascinating. Wow. Yeah. So I did that work.

Can you name one of the saints, or maybe- Oh, yeah, all of the saints.

So once you start to look at the saints, you see that what is said about what was said in the very... There are what are called a memory source material. This would be some of the first material that comes out about that experience that that saint had. Teresa of Avila wrote her own experience. That's what makes it so important, is that she wrote about it. It was later what's called redacted. It was changed by the church. She said she saw this angel, and it wasn't a vision, it was in reality. She said that it was short and it was shiny, and she was confused because it didn't look like an angel. She goes, it must be a cherub, right? She had confusion about it. It had a dart. She said this dart, it took and it basically put it in me, right? This looks like modern day UFO abduction reports. Once you start to see those connected sections, you cannot unsee them. And you're like, okay, got it. This is different than how it's represented in the prayer card, where it's beautiful. And I hope that I'm not offending the Catholic that are looking at this because it's their childhood.

They were brought up with these images.

How do you know it was redacted?

Oh, because we have the redactions.

So do you have the original transcripts as well?

Oh, yeah, I have those.

Why would they redact it?

It didn't conform to their theology. It happens all the time. It even happens today.

So are you saying that the... I know it happens in government all the time.

Oh, yeah.

It's standard. Are you saying that the Catholic Church just took a first-hand account and said, No, this doesn't align with what we think, so we're just going to change it. Yes, yes, yes. And then left the original transcripts in?

Yeah. Well, yes. Because people didn't read as much as they read now, and they weren't betting on us, going back and looking at it. And it doesn't matter to them now. They're okay with it. Like, literally, they're okay with it. They're like, Yeah, we did that.

Okay.

Because they didn't do it today. They weren't the ones that did it. But the Catholic, after Teresa had her experience and told the priests that were her, quote, unquote, confessors, those were like a therapist. They were priests.

I mean, it's just interesting because then it's I mean, what else did the Catholics just change?

I think it happens in every religion, to tell you the truth.

I'm sure it does.

So we can get angry at the Catholics, but in every religion, a person has an event that a legitimate event that is profound for them. And then they tell that event and it changes people's lives. And then that religion is like, that didn't happen. Kind of thing. They redact it. It's happening now with the UFO topic.

Yeah. I mean, it happens in all subjects.

It's just weird that they're okay with it. Oh, yeah, they're okay with it.

Yeah, we changed. But I'm sorry. Sorry about that little. No, I know.

It's shocking. Yes, it's shocking what you like. This is why people had their faith challenged in that class I told you about. Their faith, boom, gone.

Yeah. All right, sorry.

Sorry to interrupt. No, you're not. All of that is good information because your viewers are going to have the same questions. They're going to want to know, too, right? So, yeah, so that happened. So I decided to go back through the Catholic tradition and look at as many as I could. And lo and behold, it's like almost every one of them looked like that. And that's when I started to become- Like a little cherub? Yeah. Well, they looked different. They didn't look like what the angels we are. And a lot of times they were disturbing, like Joan of Arc's experiences, super disturbing.

But- How were they?

Okay, so she saw Joan of Arc, we all know who she is, right? Okay, so she's a warrior a girl warrior, who was told by God to fight for the French, right? Against the English. Okay. And who told her this? So I'm like, who told Joan of Arth this? God. But did God come down and say this? No. It was first she didn't recognize what it was, just like in Therese of Avila. And remind me to tell you about that, this lack of recognition, this confusion. It's a being of light, and it appears in her father's garden. It appears to her and says, Joan, you're going to be doing this. And she's like, what is this? So she doesn't take it seriously until it shows up again. Then she recognizes that it's Saint Michael. Then it acknowledges that it's Saint Michael, and that it's going to ask her to be a warrior, and that this is what she's going to do. It says, go tell this person, and she goes, and they listen to her because she has knowledge that she shouldn't have. She has precognitive knowledge of stuff. And of course, when people do that to you and you're not suspecting it, you believe them because you're like, they do have special knowledge, right?

And so then she does all these things. She eventually gets burned at the stake. That's why I want to say it's disturbing because she does take these troops into battle. She is victorious. It does give her military acumen. It does help her, but she also ends up being burned at the stake. The question is, to me, is like, would I want that for my daughter? No, I wouldn't. When an angel Do you want an angel to appear to you? Maybe, maybe not. So that's what I'm trying to say, is it's a lot more complicated when you start to get into it. That doesn't mean that it should kill your faith. I mean, if you're a person of faith, that faith should withstand looking into it, looking into it. So yes, that's what I did. Wow. That's how I got into the UAP thing is that these guys were looking at it, but from the perspective that it's real because they believe that it was happening and they want to know what's going on. They want as much data as they could get. That's what I was doing then. I was providing them with this data.

In the midst of providing them with this data, I started to work with one of the guys. At the time, this is between 2013 and 2018, special access programs, reversion engineering programs, I didn't have that language. Nobody did that I knew. They weren't in Congress. There wasn't talk about this. The New York Times stories didn't break yet. I was working with a person who was doing this, who wanted to know how to utilize these debris that were being found. I went to New Mexico to a crash site, alleged crash site, with Gary Nolan, by the way. We found debris.

We found a debris.

We did. It was me, Tyler, and Gary. Tyler had known of this for years, like his whole life. He was in his '60s So for four years, he knew about this. It wasn't Roswell, and I have a feeling it wasn't Roswell because it was the real place. So Roswell is probably the camouflage place. I'm going to be creating a lot of A lot of people are going to be interested in this topic, obviously. But yeah, so this is my experience.

So we went to- What did the debris look like?

Right. So the debris looked like metallic frog skin. Metallic frog skin? Yeah, it looked like frog skin, but metallic.

Do you have any pictures?

No, we couldn't take pictures of it.

How did you get access to this place?

Okay, so Tyler, having amazing access, he's a guy who could get through an airport, didn't have to go through TSA. He was a guy who the IRS never audited. So he seemed to be above the law. So I describe him in American Cosmic. I was amazed by this person. I was very impacted because I'd never met a person, I didn't even know they existed. But part of what he did was he troubleshooted... I remember during a SpaceX launch that was crashed. And I think this is in 2018 or '17, it was crashed. His phone was going off. And astronauts, all these people were like, How do we fix this? He was like a guy who fixed crashed stuff. So the challenger crashed. He was on the team to figure out why it crashed. And by the way, Judy Resnik was his friend. So he had- Who's that? Judy Resnik, she was the astronaut who perished during the Challenger crash. Oh, okay. So anyway, so this is the person who I worked closely with. I brought him even to my university. He talk to my students.

So Tyler, just so Tyler is a code name. Yes. Obviously, some type of government official, right?

Working for it? Most likely, yeah. And I believe still lives.

Are you still tied in with him?

I know about him, but we cannot talk because of everything that's happened.

Okay. So what else was at this site?

Okay, so he asked me to go to the site because he said that I didn't believe in UFOs. And he's right. I didn't. And he said, You are a person who thinks that they're somehow imaginary or in another realm. He goes, But they're in this realm. They're physical. And I couldn't really believe that because why? Unless I have evidence for it. And so he said, You should go to a place I know of and you'll be convinced. He asked me to go, and it took about a year for me to say yes. When I said yes, I said, I need to bring someone with me. I need to have one of my colleagues come with me because I don't want to go by myself. He said, Maybe. So he said, because apparently it was a place, it was under a no-fly zone, and it was a place that was secret. But he'd been going there, and I think it was a crash retrieval site, frankly. Now, what I'm learning about, by the way, I keep going back to my book, American Cosmic, because I wrote a lot in that book, and I wrote it all truthfully.

So that means that there's data in there that at the time I did not understand. Now, when I go back and read it, I learn from my own I'm like, whoa, that happened. I have a lot of stuff from him, a lot of presentations and papers and everything that notes that I still go back to. And now I understand. At the time, I didn't because I didn't believe in them. I didn't know it was happening. I didn't know that this was going on. I didn't believe in it. He invites me to New Mexico to this place. He says, It's going to be a place where a UFO crashed in the 1940s, but it's not Roswell. I was like, Ha ha. I was the chair of my department at the time, by the way, and already had won research awards for my work in Catholic history. Nobody knew that I was really doing work in UFOs. I was only a couple of friends. It's nothing I advertised. So I said, I'll invite Jeff Cripal to go with me, the guy at Rice, colleagues good friend. He said, Diana, that's just way too out of my comfort zone to do that.

I was like, It is weird. We had to wear blindfolds to go. I said, Okay, I'll ask. I had just been introduced to Gary Nolan. He's a professor at Stanford. He's now well known. I asked him if he'd go with me, and he said, Yes, of course, I'll go with you. He had all the laboratory equipment to figure it out anyway. I told Tyler, I said, Gary Nolan, and he looked him up. It took him a couple of days, and he came back and he said, Okay. I was like, Cool, we're in, so we're going to go. It was me and Gary, and Tyler was taking us. We went to New Mexico, we stayed at a place, and then the next day, we're going to the crash retrieval place. We had special metal detectors that Tyler had configured and brought. We got in the car and we went. We didn't wear blindfolds yet until we got to a cattle great place. Then Tyler said, Put the blindfolds on. We put the blindfolds on, and we went another 40 minutes. Then when we got out, we out and we took the blindfolds off. And I looked around and Tyler said, This is such a funny part.

He said, do you recognize this place? I was like, no, of course I don't. He goes, this is like one of the episodes on the X-Files. And I was like, okay. He said they had an insider on their team. And I thought that was so... Honestly, it was really... You have to understand, I still didn't believe. I was like, I wanted to know why these guys believed because they both were believers, complete believers. We spent all day there. We did get parts. We did get this stuff. It was hard to get, by the way. It wasn't easy. So it couldn't have just been planted there. There was rubble everywhere, and it was rubble. I didn't quite understand why it was there. My editor wanted me to take it out, but it was disintegrated aluminum cans, I guess from the 1950s. Tyler said that they put that out so people couldn't find the debris. We took the debris back. Tyler predicted what would happen. He said, Do you want to take it back to the airport, Diana? No, I don't want the debris. I don't want anything to do with it. Gary was going to take it.

We get back to the airport, and he said that Gary was going to get stopped. It was in his backpack. That exactly happened. He said exactly what was going to happen, happened. I get through. Tyler doesn't have to go through TSA. He's already at the end. He's cool, collected, sitting there watching us. I come through and I sit down. Gary, so Tyler had said to us, Don't be afraid, Gary. This is what's going to happen. It'll go off. They're going to check your backpack. They're going to look everywhere. It doesn't matter. Somebody in DC or something is going to know. But you have nothing. You're going to be let paths. He doesn't have anything in the backpack. Gary's like, okay. But Gary was sweating the whole time. It happened exactly like Tyler said. He was sweating when it happened, and I was afraid for him. I was afraid. Tyler was just cool, calm and collected, drinking a glass of water. Gary came out. We got over that, and then we went back to our homes. Gary later looked at it through his microscopes and things that he has laser microscopes and things like that. He said it was anomalous.

That's it? Anything else?

I mean, whatever else happened. There's a lot. Yeah, a lot happened, but I can't say what happened after that. I know everybody's going to hate that.

Interesting. Let's take a quick break.

Yeah, okay. Cool.

Are you looking for a voice that truly represents your values? Meet AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens, founded in 2007. Amac was created to champion the needs of Americans who believe in faith, family, and freedom. Today, AMAC is over 2 million members strong and growing. The mission is simple but powerful. To protect the interests of all freedom-loving Americans, advocate for common sense policies, and offer incredible member benefits, including the award-winning AMAC magazine. To exclusive discounts on travel, insurance, and everyday services to a strong voice in Washington, AMAC is here to make a difference in your life and our nation. Joining AMAC isn't just about benefits, It's about belonging to a community that stands for timeless American values. Right now, regardless of your age, they're offering an incredible deal. Enroll in a five-year AMAC membership for 47% off. Visit amak. Us/srs today to take advantage of this special offer. That's amak. Us/srs. Join AMAC and be part of a movement that stands for you, your family, and your future. All right, Diana, we're back from the break. We just went over your work with Tyler and Gary Nolan at the the crash site. How was that briefed to you?

I mean...

It sounds weird.

It just sounds like, Hey, we're going to take you to this site where a UFO crashed. Yeah, right.

I know. That's exactly how it reacted. So it was in the context of when the aerospace engineers reached out to me and I started to talk with them and I corresponded with Tyler, and then I met him. And And then we shared information about these things. And then he said, You're not a believer. You're still not a believer. And I'm really open. And I said, You're right, I'm not a believer. And he said, Well, I think I could show you something that would make you a believer. You need to have physical proof. You don't think this is physical. You think it's imagination. And I said, yes, I don't believe in it. And so that's when he said, I could take you to this place. And like I said, it took me about a year to say yes, that I'd go to this place because it was weird, right? Especially at that time. Like today, because people talk about crash retrieval sites and stuff, you'd go, oh, a crash retrieval place. You may not believe in it, but at least you know what it is. I didn't even know what he was talking about. I hadn't read the the day after Roswell by Colonel Corso, right?

I didn't know any of that. I did afterwards, of course. I had to do that in order to understand what was going on. But that's how it was brief to me.

So I read that you were in to the Vatican with a... Was it a NASA scientist?

It was Tyler. It was Tyler.

Okay.

What did you- So he had affiliations with that, too, with NASA also. What happened? Okay, so this was a really interesting trip.

What prompted the trip? Let me start there.

What prompted the- Okay, so the trip had nothing to do with UFOs in the beginning. It was purely about my scholarship, right? So I do Catholic history, and I know people at the Vatican. I was invited to go by Brother Guy Consolmagneau. He is the director of the Vatican Observatory, which is the observatory of the Vatican. It's been around since the 1800s. He's a Jesuit. He went to the school I went to, and he's a monk. We were talking, and I was interested in UFO stuff. I asked him about the Vatican, if they had anything that had to do with space. He said, yes, we have a whole observatory archive. Everything that has to do with space at the Vatican comes to our archive. I was like, I'd like to look at that. He said, You're welcome to come and stay. We have a scholar's residence. You could stay as long as you want. I said, Okay, I'll do that. I knew that I could go and stay there, but I hadn't yet decided to go to the archive of the Vatican. But the opportunity arose for me to do that, and it was to examine the levitation record of what we call the canonization records.

Canonization is a process where people become saints, and so there are big records. You just don't say this person is a saint. You have to prove it. So they these records at the Vatican. This was for Joseph of Cupertino, who's a saint who said to have levitated. I was supposed to go and look at those records. By the way, I have those records in a strange series of events. Those records are now in my possession. Signed an agreement with the Vatican about it, and I didn't intend for that to happen, nor did I even want those records, but I do have them. I keep them in a safe place. So And they're translated, too. So I have these records. They were in 17th century Latin and Italian. So that's something I can't translate. So I had to find a team of translators. So in any case, I'm supposed to go to the Vatican. And so Tyler says, I'd like to go and look at those records, too. And I thought, that actually might be really an interesting thing. I'll see what he thinks about these levitation records and also the space observatory stuff because he's a space guy.

He's been in the space program his whole life. It would be really interesting for me to see his reactions to this data. I thought it would be good for him to go. But this really had nothing to do with, in my opinion, the UFO thing. But it actually did, but I didn't know it. We ended up going. Let me describe how he got in, because he shouldn't, by rights, get into the secret archive because he doesn't have those credentials. We thought about that. Now, it takes a while. You You can't just go there and say, I want to see these books or these old manuscripts. You actually... Because there's 53 miles of shelving at the Vatican. So they need to know what you need to... They need time in order to find it for you. So a year in advance, I was in touch with the Vatican and said, I need to find these. Do you have these and these? All the records. And so they said, yes. Okay. We had to fly there. He was on a different plane than me. And he got to the Vatican before I did. And We had anticipated that he wouldn't be able to get into the Vatican Archive.

We did the best we could. We got a friend of his who was a department chair and said, I vouch for his character. He's doing research in this area and stuff. But he couldn't get in. So I was on the plane, he was texting me, and he was like, I can't get in. They're not letting me in. He said, I think I should show my ID. Now, I didn't really want anybody at the Vatican him to know that I was there with someone who's a space researcher because I didn't want them to know that we were looking for anything that had to do with UFOs, because in the one sense, I wasn't. But in the other sense, I just wanted the best impression when I got there. So I didn't want him to do that. And I honestly didn't think it would work. So I didn't think he'd be able to get in. But after an hour or two, I'm on the plane. I feel bad for him. And he finally says, Can you please I'm going to do this, all right? And I said, Okay, just go ahead. So one of his IDs, I don't know which one, he shows to the guy who's the security at the secret archive.

And he said he dropped his wallet and he went down to pick it up. And when he looked up, he saw his face on the screen of the guy's computer, and he was in. And as soon as he got in, he met a priest who was an American, and we got access So that's when I... Again, he changed my idea of Catholic history. He also changed my idea of the Vatican. So when we got to the Vatican, I couldn't believe it. I was like, How come this guy has way more access than me. How did he get that access? So it was a mystery to me. But he also pointed out a couple of things, too. So there's some really, really scary guards in the Vatican itself that don't look like the Swiss guards. They look like Eritrea guys. They have these... I'm not well-versed in guns, but they look like they have machine guns, right? And you can't go anywhere. I was holding on to Father Kelti, who was showing us around in the Vatican and helping us out. If I was away from him, I was fearful of my life because these guys were mean.

They're like, Why are you here? Kind of thing. So Vatican has some incredible security. Also, Tyler pointed some things to me. We were at the Vatican Observatory, and in the garden, they have a beautiful garden there, the Papal Gardens, in fact. There were these gardeners. He said, See the gardeners? Yes. And he said, Are they gardening? I looked at them and, No, they were not gardening. And what were they doing? He was pointing out to me the intelligence at secret service type people at the Vatican, he could spot them. And when he would show them to me, it was like my eyes, like I didn't see before. To me, I just in my mind, registered gardener, and that was it. I didn't even bother looking at them. But no, they weren't gardening. And if they were, they should be fired because they were bad. They weren't gardening. They were posing as gardeners. So that was all over. I saw that. And so I saw the Vatican in a completely different light when I was there. And we did find interesting information that basically made it into the last chapter of American Cosmic. So that book had been done in my mind before I went to the Vatican.

After I was at the Vatican, I wrote to my editor and I said, this has to be the last chapter of the book, and she agreed. So I incorporated a lot of the data. Tyler had a conversion experience. So he was a Southern Baptist, but he was one of those Southern Baptist that... Like I was a Catholic, in name only. We maybe go to church and stuff, but we were not true believers. But after his experiences there, also seeing the the documents that he saw, recognizing that the thing that he was looking at, which is UAP stuff, looked to be exactly like angel contact events. He became very religious after that.

Why I've heard that the Vatican has what? The largest observatory or the biggest telescope.

Okay. So it's- Is that true? Yeah. No, it's not the biggest telescope. They have telescopes that are large. They may have just purchased one. They have two observatories, one in Arizona and one in Castle Gandalfo, which is near Rome. Not in Rome, but near Rome. Why? Why? Well, I mean, they had it before we did, right? So they've been studying. They've been scientists before Americans were scientists. So once you start to understand it, it's not weird. I know it sounds weird because you're not used to thinking about the Vatican has these telescopes. What are they doing? But think about it, Descartes, all those guys, scientists and Catholic, so European Catholic. Once you understand that Catholicism has been around for many, many years, you start to recognize that most of the scientists in the Western tradition have been Catholic or on the outs with Catholic. So Catholic have been around. They've been doing science. So Brother Guy, Consulmineo is the Director of this thing called the Vatican Observatory, and they still do science. So They're scientists and Catholic.

I don't know where you're at. We're talking about Ezekiel, Ames, angels. First, I thought maybe we're going with we, I mean, you. Ufos are spiritual entities. Then you're at a crash site and you pick up a chunk of metal, and we're at the Vatican. So what are you thinking? What is this?

What is all of this? Yeah.

Is it two separate things? Is there a spiritual entity in a nuts and bolts?

Thing or where are you at? I think so. Yeah, I think so. I think so. I don't know.

You have to think about this all the time.

Well, of course, this is what I'm doing right now. So yes, I do. But that doesn't mean that I have an answer. So I do know this. I do know that when people who are part of these programs, or not anymore, of course, because the programs are under scrutiny, when aerospace people reach out to me, they're looking at this. They don't know either. They don't know. They want to know. So it's an area of exploration. And to me, there's something that I think of some of them are missing, and it's something that Tyler did not miss. It's that there's a spiritual component to this. If you don't get with the spiritual component, you're not going to have access to the information. That's what I believe, only because that's how I've seen it in the last 12 years. Since I've been doing this, there are a lot of people, governments, people who represent government, our government, who are scrambling to figure this technology out, safeguard this technology, or do something with technology for either weapons or to better humanity, all of these things. But the people who I've met who seem to have the most access to this, they don't have those intentions.

Those intentions are not their intentions. To me, there seems to be, just like when you said you did psychedelics, your intention was allowed you to have a positive experience. That's my interpretation. Because why do I think that? I'm not randomly just thinking that. I'm thinking I'm saying that because I'm going back to the history of these protocols that allow people to access these realms. When you are reverent and respectful, it seems there's a better outcome. Well, maybe that's the case here. I don't know, but that's so far my conclusion. So what I do know, though, is that it appears that there's a- Let me help me understand.

So you're saying that your intentions for research might trigger a specific outcome?

Or answer. Let's see, that sounds very quantum, but I think that your character might determine access to information or knowledge. So Tyler had a certain character, and I don't see that in the people who are scrambling to be the first UFO genius scientist.

Okay.

Completely different characters right there.

How do you differentiate the... I asked you if you believe there's a spiritual component in the nuts and bolts type component? How do you differentiate the two? I mean, are they two? Do they have any relation to each other?

I don't know. So this is something that I think people are trying to figure out. Let's put it this way. Okay, if you think about something that we think to be subjective in our minds, completely, you could even call it spiritual in the sense that it's spirit, it's not matter. That would be our thoughts, right? We tend to think of thoughts as completely non-physical, non-material. Would you not agree?

I don't believe that anymore.

I I know you don't believe it anymore. Okay. Why don't you believe that anymore?

And I agree with you. Why don't I? Through some of my own experiences and I interview It's impossible for me to articulate this, but I'll try. I think that you can believe or manifest or whatever you want to call it, realities into existence. I honestly believe. I think I've done it. I think other people that I know have done this. I think that we know very little about consciousness. I think that we may have the to create our own realities, but we don't have the knowledge on how to do that. I think we get little snippets on how that could be done. But as far as a full scope, I don't think anybody has a... Does that make any sense at all?

Of course, no, it makes perfect sense. But you did go through a period of not believing that thoughts could be things, right? That could be measurable.

Yeah.

Okay. So I would suggest this. And this has something to do with the question you asked me about the parts being spiritual or material. We're at a point in time, and this is part of what is fascinating to me, so I've been documenting it. So I wrote some articles. By the way, my articles are free on academiaEDU. And I wrote an article where where this was about 2017, 2016, where I was documenting the computer brain interface that's happening, that's really taking off right now. Then there were two studies. One was at, I think it was the University of Washington, where people had, and this is now common, where they were using brain imaging, but they were able to identify what a person was thinking about. A person was thinking about a dog, and the image of a dog would become something that could be seen on a computer screen. So they had technology that was able to read brain waves. Therefore, thoughts, which we used to think were completely subjective things that were internal and private, were no longer that. We We're seeing the beginning of that process. And I think that the beginning of this process is going to be exponential at this point because of what Elon Musk is doing and other scientists.

With Neuralink?

Yeah, with all of these types of things that are happening. I also think that the government has been in on this in terms of its remote viewing programs, utilizing consciousness in order to obtain information. So I would suggest that UAP is like this. It's very similar. In terms of the combination, we're going to be able to identify. When people report UAP events, a lot of what happens is that they report experiences of what you call downloads, like experiences of information that they're getting from whatever it is at our UAP. That's been consistent in the historical record. Like Joan of Arc. This light appears to her, and then it says, Do this, do this. At first, she resists because she's like, What are you? Then she goes, Oh, you're Saint Michael. I can trust you. Then she gets the downloads of military information that she actually utilizes. She's a kid, by the way, when this happened. I think she's 15. Wow. Yeah. So how are Catholics in that day and age? She decides to dress like a boy. I mean, How does a young girl in that day and age convince older men that this is a good thing, and they're convinced?

So what I'm saying is that it's something like that. By the way, I do think that people should not accept the download as easily as they do. I've met too many people who are tortured by this process. So now that I've been doing this, I've met many people in the thousands who tell me about their experiences. And a lot of them are brilliant people who are super successful, and they believe that their success is because of the download experience that they have. But that download experience also causes them to receive so much information that they believe they should tell people about. Like, oh, I received this information. I really should tell this person. And they get tortured by these experiences. In the very beginning of the publishing my book, I would get correspondence and outright people talking to me and coming to me and saying, you'll have this experience, but you have to accept it first. You have to say yes. And I would always say no because I don't trust it. So I think that that was smart on my part. So if you get something and it's like this thing that says, okay, you have to accept this in order to get this download.

Do you accept it? Why accept it? Why? So people, in our time, we don't have the language. We've lost religion for the most part, right? So we are, even you admit, I'm Catholic, but I don't know my tradition. I never learned the Bible or anything like that. So we've effectively lost our connection to these wisdom traditions. And I'm not saying we should keep all of what they say. A lot of those things I don't keep, but I'll tell you what I do keep, and that's the reticence to allow my mind to be hijacked. So I call it cognitive sovereignty. So I think we should identify that we do have sovereignty if we're quickly losing it because of the technologies that are happening. But we've got to, at least where this is concerned, where UAP is concerned, I think we should be careful and not just say yes to that.

I mean, so you're a skeptic. You Did you think that UAP... Sorry, I'm off on my timeline. Did you think that UAP activity when you went to the crash site was complete shit, or did you think it was some type of a spiritual entity? Have you dove in and had you looked into the Vatican stuff before you went to the site?

Yeah. So I already knew the tradition of contact events with angels and that thing.

Did you believe it at that time? Did you believe that it was- I believe that people had experiences. So when you went to the crash site and you saw an actual chunk of metal that you believe came off of some type of- I'm still not sure I believe that.

I don't know what it came off of. I just know that it was a real physical object.

So it didn't necessarily turn you into... It did not turn you into a balloon.

No, no, no.

I mean, it had to have brought up some type of... It had to have brought up thoughts. If this is real, is it two completely separate things? Because then I don't think a chunk of metal is going to fall off of an angel.

It's hard to say.

Or a spiritual entity.

I don't know.

So when people- What do you think about guys like Ryan Graves or I forgot, is it John Fever?

Yeah, John Fever and Ryan Graves, fighter pilots.

What do you think about accounts, first-hand accounts like these guys?

Yep, totally anomalous UAP is what I think. It could be... I mean, They don't know. They think... I mean, I've heard Ryan Graves talk. I was in a talk that he gave to scientists, and he was explaining his experience in more detail than normal. And it was interesting interesting because he said that through different types of technologies like infrared goggles and things like that, but other types of things, you could see a whole array of different types of things. And I know that already. So that even comes from, if you look at the ufology of John Keel, he talks about this thing called the super spectrum. And he's basically saying that some people... You know how humans only see certain visual light and dogs and cats see other things, right? So it could be that these objects are not... We cannot see them with the... But some of us might be able to. Some of us might be the unlucky few that can see these kinds of things because Oh, this also occurs in massive events like Medjugoria, like Virgin Mary apparition sites, where only the visionaries can see the Virgin Mary, but no one else can.

But they've been tested and their eyes are tracking something absolutely, and they're all tracking the same thing. So they're seeing something. So it's not just UAP stuff that's anomalous and weird. It's religious stuff, too. So I think that we are coming into a space, and UAP is helping us do that, where the religious stuff is actually becoming much more real to us, at least for me. When I started to see UAP as real for these scientists, I started to think this religious stuff that I've been looking at is real, too. I mean, I actually believed in it, but I didn't believe in it as viscerally. I didn't believe in it as crying out for God to help me through this because it's real. That's the- Have you talked to any of the higher ups or leadership or clergy or whatever they call it at the Vatican? The Magisterian?

What do they say about this type of thing?

Some of them are horrified that people are even going to the Vatican and talking about the Vatican with respect to UFOs, and I understand why. I don't think that they're inclined to view it as UFOs. I think that they're inclined to view it as we live in a universe where God's created many things, and these could be angels that people are seen or demons. I think that a lot of people in the Vatican will look at it from a spiritual perspective. That's how they looked at it before. And I think that they're waiting for secular people to get up to speed.

I really want to know what you think. Do you think they come from space?

The ones that we're seeing now? Okay, so I have a particular perspective. It might change, but this is what my perspective is now, and it's purely my own based on, and I'm not advising anyone believe what I believe. So that said. And of course, this is nothing that can be put in a paper and peer reviewed and published. This is just my perspective on talking to Sean and telling you and people who listen to you. To me, this looks pretty weird, and I'm not liking it. So I get a feeling from it. And I feel that, and especially what happened to me after a American Cosmic was published. I had people surrounding me. So I had... First, I had a collegial friendship with Tyler and Gary, and we were studying this, these objects and things like that. And Tyler became a Catholic, or just much more Christian, let's put it that way, a believer, that what he was studying were like angels, and that changed his life. Then I felt, wow, what I'm studying is real, and that changed my life. So I was changed. Directly after that, I was targeted by what my friend Tim Galladette would call counterintelligence.

They had the same idea, by the way. They did not view these things as extraterrestrial, and they thought that they were bad. And so this group was... I got a distinct feeling that there's something really bad happening. There's something really bad. And I started to talk to people who now we call whistleblowers. So they would talk to me, and they would say the same thing. They're afraid. They would be afraid. And by the way, none of those whistleblowers are at the congressional hearings, none of them. And they don't want to be. And in fact, most of the information that's getting taken from them is being taken in ways that are not public and not what I would call nice. It's uncomfortable. So I believe that if we were to call these things anything, they would be in the realm of the angelic and the demonic. That's how I feel about them personally right now. My mind might change in two years with more data. But I feel that because of the types of responses I've had from people who are associated with our government, and they shouldn't, in my opinion, they shouldn't and P. That's how I feel, my experiences.

Interesting. You talk a lot about... Thank you for sharing that, by the way.

Yeah, I think this is the first time I've actually shared it to tell you the truth. I mean, I'm an academic, and I've been talking as an academic. I've been going to universities to talk. I'm now talking publicly, and this is the first time I've actually said that.

That's what I think. Not that I've done even a smidget of the research that you have, but it seems to be the only thing that could not leave a trace. When I brought up what I think about other realms and manifesting or praying into, or whatever you want to say, I think that the human mind, I think we've been indoctrinated to think that we have a lot of limitations that are not really there. I don't know how we're going to break that. But you talk a lot about technologies. What technologies are you speaking about?

Okay, so are we talking about the UAP-affiliated type of technologies or the AI that's happening right now?

Let's go with both.

Okay. So let's see. Well, obviously, we have some issues coming up with with respect to AI, and especially with things like Neuralink. Not to say it's bad. I'm just saying that we've got things to deal with as it's becoming much more rolled out to the public. So the cognitive sovereignty type of thing. I mean, I think there's a point. If you look at the Bible, the Bible does say this, that at some point all the things that are hidden will be exposed. Okay? And I was talking to, this sounds weird, but a Game of Thrones producer, one of the producers for that show. And he was asking me what I thought would be like if the Apocalypse happened, how I thought it would roll out, because I think he's thinking of making a show about it or something. And I said, okay. This made him nervous, too, which I thought was pretty funny. I said, all those thoughts that you have, they're all going to be known. If He was like, That's horrible. He's like, That's terrible. I said, But actually, that's literally what it says. So all the things that were hidden will be known.

What does that mean? I think part of it is what we're seeing with AI, that what if our thoughts were known? How would that change us?

How that change us? I guess that would be the ultimate truth.

Yeah.

Right?

I think so. But what if we... I mean, that's something to think about. But again, I said, look, I didn't make that up. That's actually there in the Bible. You can look it up.

I mean, if you can see and read somebody's thoughts, then you know their true character.

Yeah. And that, of course, I heard your discussion with the exorcist. I forgot his name.

Father Dan Rehill.

Yeah, it was fascinating. Where he talked about this, and you did, too, about the reading of the minds, right? So this you see in the That's a historical record, and you also see it in almost all religious traditions, where when a person has done... Even people without doing a lot of the protocols or a lot of prayer or meditation, they have this ability It's called the discernment of souls to actually know a person's character or read their minds. I have that in that record I told you about the Joseph of Copertino. Apparently, he had that ability to know that thing. It's probably just something that is possible. Obviously, it's possible.

What are you talking about with AI? What else?

Okay, so there is a talk that I give occasionally when I'm asked to do that, and that's to talk to teachers about the use of AI for college students and high school students. It's not just AI, it's technology in general. Part of it is basically what happens to our brains when we're in certain developmental stages, like we're 11 up to 19. Certain developmental stages happen in the brain. I don't want to call any social media out in particular, but some of them are created to shift the brain. Now, whether that's an intentional weaponization, which can damage the brains of young people, or whether it is something that coders did purposely to create a product that was addictive for monetary purposes, it's not doing us any favors because it's creating a generation now of people who have to fix that because their brain has been trained on it. So my work, my greater work, even beyond UAP and Catholicism was looking at how technology and belief work together. I think you have Sean Webb on here.

Do you know Sean Webb?

Yeah.

Do you know Sean Webb? Yeah.

I love Sean. Well, I don't know him in person. We've only corresponded, but I know his work. Yeah. So he's doing this, too. He's trying to ameliorate this issue that we're having. I do know coders and people who are working in AI who understand this. Then my friend Jose, who's the former Marine who was my student as well, he's working on a program also. He works directly with high school students. What he's trying to do, too, is to help adjudicate to to stop this happening because it's happening. He says that it's a weapon that we're all now targets. Whereas wars were fought before with certain people and targets, now we're all the target because the weapons are now... We carry them around, and we subscribe to them and so forth. And it's a very real... It's a real thing. People at the university are slow to understand this. People in the high schools, the teachers see it, but they can't stop it. The parents can't stop it. The parents are probably addicted themselves. This is the talk I give that I'm most happy about when I'm asked to give a talk because teachers come up to me and they're in tears.

They want to help their students. I have teenagers, and I have students. All my students are between the ages of 18 and 24. This is what calls us... This is a problem that needs to be addressed now. We can't really put it off. This is something that is more important to me than studying UAP or studying Catholic history. I'm more concerned about this.

About social media.

And what it's doing to us.

And the technology behind it. Yeah. What do you think people can do?

When I tell them this, there's really no incentive for them to do this, so I understand that. But we've got to not raise our kids on it. We have to let our kids go outside. We have to go outside because we could easily become addicted too. Most of my work is now online, and it shouldn't be. I'm a teacher. I should be with my students, we should be talking to one another. So universities have to stop this process, which I believe is intentionally is part of stopping the flourishing of Americans and humans.

Is Sounds like a devout Catholic woman who's very well-versed in all of this. What do you think about spiritual warfare? Is that what all this is? All the stuff we're seeing?

Yeah, if we call it spiritual warfare, there's also real warfare, right? So I think they're both real. And I think that it's happening. We're having... So when I say we're targets, right, because of what's happening. That sounds like a conspiracy theory, right? And so people would call... I know people at my university would say, Diana, don't say that. That makes it so bad and evil. But the things that are happening, I go back to RFK's speech when he said he was going to be behind Trump, and he gave this speech, and he said, If we could just love our children more that we hate each other. And he talked about the injuries that children have because of certain things that are happening now. I mean, I thought that was truth right there. And I thought that that was something that I wish people in the school systems would take to heart because the kids that were charged with teaching, what are we doing? We shouldn't be teaching them through the medium of the iPhone or the phone.

I guess what I'm asking is, how is this happening? Are people under some type of a demonic influence? And that's how this is happening?

I don't know. But if it is the case, we could easily get out of it. We could choose not to be under that influence. We have human freedom. We have freedom to make a choice.

Yeah. I feel like most people don't realize they are under that influence.

Yeah. What do you think? You tell me, and I'll talk to you more about it.

You give up to me, and I'll talk to you. What do I think? I'm just trying to explore all of this stuff. But I I don't know. I'm at the beginning of this in cracking this open in my own way. But it's always been good versus evil, right? But the lines are becoming very blurred. The thing is now that just nothing really makes sense to me that's going on. Some of the the stuff that's going on with kids. And I don't know where it is coming from. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I definitely know what you mean.

Some of these agendas just don't make sense. I don't know how many... I don't understand how many people, how so many people can get behind some of these just absurd agendas that are only even possible through technologies. And And sex change. It's such a foreign... How did that happen? And stuff like that. With within kids. And that's where I'm at.

I understand that. I get it. So I'll tell you a little bit about my struggle with that. It was during the writing for Encounters. That's when I already knew that the government was on the up and up with a lot of things. Okay, no problem. I get that. I've known that for a long time since I was in... Since I was young, okay. But when it becomes so real to you, for me, it was the UAP thing, and I was like, Okay, this is really... Then I began to ask this question, and then Jose influences me a lot by explaining warfare today. This is how warfare is fought today. Your kids are targeted. By the way, I actually I home-schooled my kids for a while until they exceeded my ability in certain areas. I could see once they transitioned to school, how that would then impact them. It was frightening to watch. I then was as a mom, but also as a professor who's been through this UAP realization a recognition of the suppression of knowledge, it brings it home to you when it's your kids. I was depressed. I was depressed. I was depressed for about a year, maybe longer.

And so I thought, who has talked about this before? For me, going to books is what I do. So I looked back and I saw that, again, Plato's Republic, it talks about the cave, the allegory of the cave, is where you're in this cave and people are creating a fictional world. It's basically the matrix. So if you haven't read Plato's Republic, the matrix is about it. And then you got brave new world was an update of Plato's Republic. Then 1984 was also an update of the allegory of the cave. So this is the idea that there's something that's being hidden from us, and there are characters who are hiding it from us. And like in 1984, they're terrible, They're going to try... There's a never-ending war in 1984. And so people have been through this depression, Sean, and have talked about it. And it made me more depressed because I was like, damn, it looks structural. It looks like this is just the structure of the world. Who else has said this? Well, Jesus did. Jesus said this. Jesus said, You must live in the world, but not be of it. Jesus also spoke in parables, which was code.

He was speaking to his own audience. He was speaking to the audience who had ears to hear. That's when I was like, Now I finally understand. It takes me a while to really get something. I had to go through those experiences in order to truly understand that not everybody's going to get it. And yeah, they're going to look like they're, you call it demonic. I might call it they're in the matrix. There's different words to describe it, but they're not awakened to something that you and I feel like they should be awakened to. And in fact, they're hurting themselves. See? So it's like something that's maybe the way it is.

When you talk about some of this being structural, and it sounds like over generations and generations.

It seems like it. I mean, if Socrates is talking about it, and then through Plato, and then Jesus is talking about it, and then it gets redone in every generation, brave new world, 1984, the matrix in the 1990s. It's the same recognition. Has anything been become... What does this mean? I mean, I think it has a message for us. And so you and me, we're American. We want to save the world. We're like, we have it in bread that we can make it better This can be better, right? But this thing suggests that it's a structural, just posing it.

You think that there are maybe family companies? I mean, who holds the key?

You're asking who are the puppet masters? Yeah. Yeah. That's what I asked, too. When we're taught in college or high school, we're the Plato's Republic thing, the allegory of the cave. If you pay attention, you know that these people are in a cave and these puppet masters are making puppets on the wall, and people think that that's reality. Then one lucky person gets out and goes up out of the cave and says, Wow, there's a whole reality out here. I have an obligation to go back and tell these people that they're in a cave. They go back to tell the person they're in the cave, and this is how Socrates talks about it, says, They'll kill you because they think you're crazy. In fact, they think that person is crazy. Okay. All right. That's the set up. My question has always been, and then you talk about it as a metaphor in college and stuff, and your professor talks about it. But my question was this, and my daughter, by the way, took a college class, and it was on that. And I said, Who do you think those puppet masters are? She said, Mama, that's just an allegory.

There are no real puppet masters. I was like, No, I think there are. I think there are. Think about it again. Go read it again. And so then I'd ask friends of mine who had read it and should know, and they were like, dang, I never thought about that. Finally, I found a philosopher who reached out to me, actually, saw me on a podcast and said, These puppet Puppet Masters, I agree with you. They are a real thing. Like, Playdra just doesn't put something in there. So who are these Puppet Masters? I think that's where George Orwell identifies it. And you know who agrees is Aldous Huxley. Aldous Huxley. So he has, All your viewers, everyone, should watch Aldous Huxley's, I think it's 1958 talk, maybe it's in the '60s, but I don't think so, at UC Berkeley, where he basically talks about the Puppet Masters, and it's his group.

Wow. Does he talk about how... I mean, so to pass on, to be... So what, are they born into the Puppet Masters?

It's an oligarchy. Yeah, he says it's the oligarchy. He goes, It's always existed and presumably always will. That's how he opens his speech. It's a horrifying, enlightening talk. Everyone should watch it. It's free on just internet search to duck, duck, go it or whatnot. It'll come up. He's a super articulate elite, and he writes, Brave New World. And he tells us how it's going to happen. We're going to like our servitude because we'll be taking drugs. That's pretty much it.

How does this get passed on from generation to generation over thousands of years without ever being- Okay, so this answer was provided to me, actually.

I don't know if it's true, though, but by the counterintelligence Reargent group. Basically, there was a person who had been connected to a family that had been around since traces are reached back to 1,200. This family, they weren't the king, but they were the people, I forgot their name, but they have a specific name. But it's the person who takes care of the bedpan of the king. Do you know that person? So there was a specific job. The bedpan, of course, is the bathroom like the toilet for the king. And this person has to change it for the king so that it's always nice and clean. Now, this person has access to the most private parts of what the king knows. And this later becomes This is what this person says, intelligence communities. Goes into the Vatican, and these people become the people who gather the intelligence associated with the king, the royalty, the dynasty. I don't know if this is true, but this was what this person said. And this person, by the way, had some evidence. It's not like I'm just saying I'm accepting a made-up story. Like, I saw this person's family, like historical photos.

Interesting. And so what? Does that person manipulate the king into some type of agenda?

Yeah. So this would be the oligarchy that Alex Huxley is talking about.

Okay. Interesting. Very interesting. I know you've worked a lot with NASA or people inside NASA.

Yeah, I haven't actually worked with NASA, and NASA would be horrified to say that I did.

I didn't mean to say you've worked for NASA.

People affiliated with NASA Yes, I have worked with.

Excuse me. Thank you for the correction. Yeah. What are some of the... There's a lot of conspiracies around NASA. Does any of that bring true to you? What's your experience been?

Well, when I first started to do the work on looking at UAP and so forth in 2012 and '13, I decided to look back to our space program, basically. I thought, Surely there's information there. So the Air Force has an archive, and there's a lot of information. And what I found was interesting. So I looked not only at our space program, but the Russian space program, because both of these programs got us off Earth into space, and the Russian space program did first. So both of them were interesting to me. And Most likely, if people are up in space, maybe they're seeing something up there. Maybe stuff has been reported. A couple of things happened. First was that I did have friends who were NASA-affiliated, and they looked into it for me to see if they could get me into the archive. At first, it was like, no problem. She can come. What is she studying? Then they said, well, she studied the history of UFOs, and they were like, absolutely not. I could not go. I was like, oh, that's interesting. That was of interest to me. But also I learned about the history of our space program.

One of my colleagues was always going to JPL, so Jet Propulsion Laboratories. I found out that it had been created by Jack Parsons. So it was Jack Parsons Laboratory. But nobody knew that. A lot of people I talked to who were NASA employees, they didn't know about Jack Parsons. In fact, the person, Tyler, he did not know either about Jack Parsons. So Jack Parsons was one of the early founders of our rocket technology program. Okay. But he's not talked about. And the reason he's not talked about is, and I understand why, is because he believed he was getting the inspiration for his rocket technologies through doing rituals. He worked with Alastair Crowley and the guy who found Why can't I remember his name? Elron Hubbard.

Elron Hubbard. Elron Hubbard.

Elron Hubbard. And so Parsons is believing that he is contacting nonhuman intelligences that are... His interpretation of them is that they're deities, right? They're deities. He even manifested one and then married her. But he believed that they were allowing him to create the rocket technology. Now, that's his belief, and he was doing rituals to that effect. On the Russian side, you have the Konstantin Jacob Wachewski, so earlier than Jack Parsons, but also creating rocket technology, also believed in nonhuman intelligence, but was Christian. So he believed that these intelligences were angelic and that he was, if you're in contact with that realm, that if you're specifically genius enough, that you'd be able to interpret their information and create what he created. He was like Jack Parsons, but for the Russian side. Each of those what we call them fathers of our space program were involved in something that was pretty similar, but one thought it was Angela and the other just thought it was... I mean, he's working with Alastair Crowley. Wow. Yeah.

Wow. That's interesting.

Yeah, it was really interesting. And what I found was that our space program today even has some really interesting rituals associated with it when it does certain launches at Cape Canaveral. Maybe not all of them, but the one that Tyler was involved with, they had images of Roman gods and goddesses put on the rocket They would use Latin on their mission patches, and they would also have specific rituals that they would do, sometimes involving US presidents. They would position the presidents at a certain point where astronomical event would happen.

Like the President of the United States?

Yes, the President of the United States. They didn't know what they were doing. They were just being positioned there. So they're like, stand here, Mr. Obama or President Obama, and he would stand there with his wife and look this direction. It was part of the whole thing. And there were photos. He has photos of all of that.

Can you be a little more specific? Why would they stand him in a certain- Well, see, okay, so this is obviously some type of ritual, and I don't know why they're doing it.

I just know that... I mean, I'm a scholar of religion. I know a ritual when I see one. He didn't even understand it. So I noticed that they were using Latin, and I noticed it wasn't medieval Latin. I was like, this is a particular form of Latin. It seems like it's Roman theology. So they're using the images of Roman gods. And I would ask them, I said, why are you using the images of Roman gods? Why are you putting them on your mission patches and also utilizing Latin phrases from that time period. I mean, you're sending it up into space. Who up in space is going to read Latin? And his answer was, our sponsors. So I mean, that's what he said. And So he also had all- Which Roman gods do you know? Yeah. So there would be, obviously, Apollo, right? So all the missions, if you think of all the missions, they're all those gods and goddesses.

Do you have any ideas of where this stemmed from?

Okay, so I do. It's just a theory, though, and I could be completely wrong. But it seems to me that there might be an element within our government that maintains this theological tradition, this Roman theology. Could it be a form of free Masonry? It could be. I don't know. But I just know that that's what it looks like.

Interesting. Why would they carry on these traditions?

I think at some level, there's belief in those traditions. I don't think that they would do it just because. Do you?

I don't know. I mean, could have played devil's advocate here a little bit, but I mean, I was a seal. I was the agency. We had developed our own traditions. And for example, in one of my platoons, we had a patch and had a Spartan helmet on it. And we, underneath the Spartan helmet, we put saying that the Greeks used to... The Spartans used to say that said, Come home with your shield or on it. Put that in Greek underneath. And so somebody could probably look at that and go, Why do these Americans have Greek writing under a Spartan Helmet because Spartans were all badass warriors that we aspire to be. And so we adopted some of their traditions, sayings, whatever you want to call it. It's really more of a morality type, like a morale type thing to keep us going than really anything else.

So that's What I think, because if you asked anybody like Tyler, me asking him those questions, why are you doing this? He did not know. So in a sense, and I even wonder about the use... I mean, I understand the Spartans were badass warriors, right? So of course. But I mean, the very specific positioning of the presidents and the attention to detail seemed pretty... I honestly, that's all I have for that. I don't know. I don't- I'm with you.

I just, I also- Of course, we have to be that way.

We have to like...

I mean, Indians. I mean, a lot of... There's a team over at Still Team 6. It's probably not an Indian. I don't know. But they all have feathers, and It's a tradition at that unit now. Or a lot of people in that space gravitate towards Vikings and have Viking sayings. There are Latin things, too. So I don't know. It could be probably not if you're positioning a president in a certain manner, but it could be something armless.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, it could also be that the Romans ruled the world. First century Rome was an empire, and maybe that's what they're signaling. We are the empire. And if anybody else is in space, we are the empire. That could be that, too. So it could be as simple as that.

Well, Diana, is there anything you want to talk about today that we haven't discussed yet?

I think we discussed a lot of things today, so I think we're probably good.

Would you come back?

Absolutely. Wait, I have a question. Do I get a gun next time?

Do you want a gun?

I'm just joking. I had to ask for my son.

We can do that. Can you give me three people that you think would be that you would like to see on this show?

Three people that I'd like to see on this show. I'd like to see Dr. E. Whited. She is a pilot in a space. She helps train astronauts. She was at University College London, and she's really interesting. I'd like to see her. If you could get Tyler D. On the show. I'd like to see Tyler D. On the show.

Well, I know somebody that could probably make that connection.

Okay. Okay.

Sitting right It's a loss for me.

Let's see who else would I like to see. Do you have plans to get Elon Musk on the show?

I would love to get Elon John Musk on the show.

Okay. That would be a good one, too.

All right. Perfect. Well, Diana, once again, I want to say what a fascinating conversation. I love talking to you, and I hope to see you again. I can't wait to see what's next. What is next for you? Before we go in this, I'm sorry.

What's next for you? Oh, no, that's okay. Yeah. So I'm doing another book on... It's called the Uncanny Frontier, about probably my last book on UFOs, I'm thinking. And I also teach a class. Actually, it's a class that... I teach classes on UAP, not affiliated with the university, by the way. So I do that, and I teach a class on those books that we were talking about. The class is called The Original Red Pill, and it's basically about Plato's Republic and then Jesus's Gospels, and how those went into 1984 and brave New World. So it's basically a class on what do we do now that we're confronted with the world we live in.

Perfect. When does the book come out?

So the book comes out this coming fall.

Oh, okay.

Or maybe winter. It's supposed to be done in the summer.

Okay, so next year.

Next year, yeah.

Perfect. Well, maybe we'll have you back on then if you're into it.

I'd love to. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Sean.

My pleasure. One last question.

Okay.

Are we living in a cave?

Some of us.

All right, perfect. It's a realm, isn't it? All right. Well, Diana, thank you very much. Thank you. I really appreciate it. I did enjoy the conference.

Yeah, me too. Me too. Thanks, Sean. I appreciate it. Yeah.

Micedrop, hosted by former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland. It's raw.

Any single time that you left the wire, you could lose four guys.

It's unfiltered. That's the most horrible screaming I've ever heard. Taking a hit on the chin, you want to pay it back. It's tough talk from the top minds in their field. Would I choose to not do our duty as military fighting men?

No, I would not make that decision without question.

Micedrop. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.