Transcript of #2533 - Diana Pasulka

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night.

All day.

I'm not looking at my Travis Walton doll. You know who he is, right?

Of course I know who he is. Yeah. Yeah. And I believe him.

I do too. I mean, he certainly seems believable. I'm, you know, people that tell the same story for decades and decades without any variation to it. It's hard. I mean, you know, he— I don't know what happened, but all the people that were with him during the time— we're talking about, for people just listening now, talking about Travis Walton, who was a man who in the 1970s was a logger in Arizona, and he was, uh, allegedly, or according to him, abducted by aliens. And the people that he was with saw him get hit by a beam of light They freaked out, took off. They were driving away and they were like, we got to go back and get him. We got to go back and get him. They turned around, went back and got him, tried to get him. He was gone. The craft was gone. And he disappeared for 5 days and then turned up and had this insane story.

Yeah. And then he's taken those tests like—

Polygraph tests.

Yeah. Polygraph tests like every year or something like that. He takes them regularly and he always passes them.

Well, so did the people that were with him.

Yeah, yeah. And I've seen people interview the people that were with him even just recently, and they're like, well, whatever, regardless of what I think about Travis as a person, yeah, that happened.

Yeah, one of the guys actually got in a fistfight with him the day of the abduction. The guy did not like him. Like, they hated each other. And then, you know, they were young guys.

Yeah.

And then he— had to testify and he was like, "It happened." Yeah, yeah.

Whatever it was.

So yeah, I believe him and his interpretation has changed a lot, too, through the years. Not the facts, the facts are all the same, but his interpretation of them, like, you know, were they— because he thought they were pretty malign, like bad, right? He didn't enjoy being abducted, let's put it that way. But then over the years he said, "Well, maybe something spiritual happened." But I don't know where he is at right now. I haven't seen a recent interview.

There is an interesting one that is out now with him and Bablos are sitting across from each other.

Wow.

Yeah. In a diner. It's very weird. And they're sitting there eating pie, talking about, you know, what they think this whole thing is.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Yeah.

So what's new in the world of all this?

Well, a lot.

Right.

So the government has been releasing UFO files since May 2026. And this is something that a lot of people think is really important, and it's a form of disclosure. They're pushing, the group that is pushing this and happy that this is happening, they're also wanting the president to come out and say, yeah, there are these things. I saw JD Vance on your show the other day. That was really interesting. He's, of course, I was interested in what he had to say. You kind of pushed back on his, what he was talking about in terms of calling, I don't want to use that word, the D word, right? Demons?

Why don't you want to use that word?

Because I must take this opportunity now to say that I am speaking on your podcast as a private individual, and I don't represent my university talking about this, okay? So, I mean, seriously, look what happened to him. So, he basically was honest and said, "Yeah, I think that these are demons." Well, you know, that was the headline, Joe, but when you actually listen to what he had to say, it was more complicated. And so, I thought that he did a good job of talking about it with you, and if you want, we can talk about that, why he would think that. He is Catholic. I'm Catholic. I do history of Catholicism as part of what I do. By the way, I'm a professor of religious studies at a university. So yeah, I've been looking at that. I've been doing Catholic history my whole life. So I started looking into UFO experiences in 2012. Lots of stuff is new.

Okay? I didn't think that he had a very satisfying explanation as to why he would say, "I think they are demons." Yeah, I can fill that out. Okay.

Okay, or fill that in. All right. So, he's coming from the perspective of Catholic theology. So, in Catholic theology, there are generally, if you're looking at anomalous phenomena, which they do, supernatural anomalous phenomena, a lot of weird stuff happens within the history religions. So they have categories for understanding this stuff, and the categories include 3 different, um, categories, basically 3 different types of things. Supernatural things, which they think can't be explained and that they're like miracles. You know, someone terminally ill prays for a saint's intercession, and then they become healed, and doctors say we can't figure that out. That's supernatural. That's a miracle from God. Okay, that's one category. The other category is the natural, so things that are within nature. We can explain them. You know, everybody knows what a natural kind of event is—hurricanes and things like that. But there are events that cannot be explained but don't merit supernatural, the supernatural category. And those events By the way, there's a word for it and they call it the preternatural. This has been a category that Catholics have had since at least the medieval time period. Because they're trying to figure out, let's just talk about UFOs.

If UFOs are here now, most likely they've been around for a long time. So whatever Catholics were seeing in the medieval time period, they had categories for trying to understand it just like we're trying to have too. So they say, the theologians at the time said, like Aquinas, Thomas Thomas Aquinas. He said, okay, the preternatural, these are events that happen, and they're either angelic, like, you know, good things like that, or demonic, which are fallen angels, or other things, because God has created other things other than, you know, he's created the unseen and the seen, some things that we can't see. So in the preternatural, there happens to be experiences that people have with things that seem to be similar to what people talk about when they're talking about being abducted by UFOs, beings that appear and disappear, beings that can seemingly read your mind. So this would be the theological category that Catholics have called the preternatural. And I think that's what J.D. Vance was trying to get at.

But why would you call that a demon?

Okay, so this is a good question, and that's where I'm going to kind of like help I could push back on you and then you could push back on me again. All right. So the fact is, is that we don't know. Okay? We don't know. So there's analogous experiences that people have. Now that I've been doing this since 2012, a long time, it is beyond a doubt that there's a pattern match between people who have these experiences and people who have demonic experiences. That's an analogy, but that doesn't prove that they're identical.

When you say pattern match, what do you mean?

Yeah, so I'm talking about what people actually experience. So when people have these experiences, what happens to them? They report things like things appearing and disappearing, luminous lights, okay, lights showing up, aerial phenomena. They also report beings, beings that can somehow read their minds. They also report that sometimes they feel like these beings put thoughts in their minds. Okay. These are all things that Catholics who know the history would say, wow, that sounds like this kind of situation. Does that mean it is that situation? There's no— no, we can't say that it is. And that's where your point is relevant. Your point is that how do we know that they're demons? We don't know that they're demons, but it warrants an investigation, I think, into the similarities.

Okay, but when you think about demons, most people think about evil. They think about something that does horrible things to you, possession, you know, something that causes you to murder people, or something that wants to murder you, or something wants to steal your soul. That doesn't seem at all like what we're talking about with these UFO experiences. What it seems like is you're encountering something that has a superior intelligence, of superior technology, something that's very different, that communicates telepathically, but they don't seem to have vicious intentions. So I don't understand the distinction. I understand why you would call that a demon, unless you're just using that in this old-school term, because the people that were experiencing this supposedly, or assumedly, when we're talking about ancient times and they didn't have words for it and they didn't know what they were experiencing, they would call that a demon.

Yeah, okay, so this is a really good comment, and this is something that I'd agree with you, like, in before 2016, I'd say, yeah, you're right. What changed? Okay, that I did a lot of research, and, um, and what I found was that— let's take an example because examples are good— uh, Skinwalker Ranch. So there are a lot of people who are associated with looking into UFOs, who are well-known to UFO people, who work at Skinwalker Ranch. Okay, so I learned about Skinwalker Ranch pretty early on, 2013 or so, and I learned about it from Gary, Gary Nolan. All right, so he said— he was talking to me about it, and he said, yeah, a lot of my friends are working out there, and they want me to go out there and do some study of what's going on. There's anomalous phenomena. They think it's associated with UFOs because UFOs show up and this and that. And I said, oh, are you going to go out there? And he said, no, I'm not going out there. And so I was like, well, okay, why? And he said, because it's really negative. The things that happen to people, they get something called the hitchhiker effect.

And so the hitchhiker effect is when this scary stuff that's associated with like a haunted place follows you home. All right. I've heard of that before. Yeah. The hitchhiker effect. I think it's called the hitchhiker syndrome or something. And so I met a lot of people who had this happen to them who had had UFO experiences. So I would say that no, not all UFO experiences are like that, but enough of them are like that for me not to ever have one. And also to associate the preternatural. That's what I started to understand, that, well, the preternatural is still the best category that we have for looking at this because not all preternatural phenomena, even for Catholics, is negative, right? Some of this is actually really positive. But the thing— the problem is that human beings have a hard time figuring it out. Like, you know, it could be deceptive. This is another thing where Gary Nolan comes in. He was on Tucker Carlson, I don't know, like 4 years ago or something. And he said— and I've talked to him about this too— Tucker asked him about, well, what do these things, you know, what do they say?

And he goes, oh, they lie. They're deceptive. And he's a guy who doesn't have a dog in the race in terms of religion. He's not affiliated with any religion. So, you know— When he said they lie, what specific examples does he have of them lying? Okay, so listen, when we start to look at this type of situation with these experiences and so forth, what a Catholic would do, like what would a Catholic priests say would do would be to identify if there's deceit happening, to identify if there are negative effects. And, you know, because there's criteria for looking at the preternatural. And so a lot of things that happen are when you have, you know, these abductions, which some people view as positive, but some people don't. They don't like these abductions. So yeah, they'll say things that aren't true. Like what? I don't know. They'll say, like, okay, I'll take an example. I'm not going to out any experiencers that I know, but I know a lot. So at this point, I've had, like, I don't know, about 1,000 people talk to me about their experiences. So one in particular regularly gets prophetic messages, some of which come true, most of which are not true.

Okay, that means when, when you have one or two prophetic messages given to you by an anomalous, you know, being or whatnot, and it comes true, you're willing maybe to believe it, right? Oh, this is, you know, telling— this is telling me good information. But then they start not to come true, and then if that person makes this public, that person then is, you know, people associate them with falsehood and deceit, and that's not a positive thing.

Okay, but have you taken into consideration that this person might be mentally ill? Of course. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. This idea that they're getting all of these, like, whatever it is, visions. I mean, how are they receiving this information? Are they receiving it telepathically? Like when you say prophetic.

Yeah, yeah. So, there are different— so, you asked me what kinds of people, like what they would say, right?

Well, if these things are deceiving them, so they have these prophetic visions, right? How are these visions manifesting themselves in their mind? Yeah, yeah. Is it coming as a voice? Are they seeing an event happen?

Okay, so There are a variety of ways in which people receive this type of information, like prophetic information. I would say that some people actually see things and the beings impart telepathically, like mind-to-mind transmission, something— this is going to happen— and then they believe it. Okay, this happens within angel events, like Marian apparitions. It happens to people in abductions as well. You know, I mean, that's what happens to them. They see things, they sometimes have visions in their dreams. So there are a variety of ways that people can get this interpretation.

Visions in their dreams could also just be dreams. Like, how can they make a distinction between just dreams, like, "Oh, Godzilla was chasing me, I was on a skateboard, I ran into my cousin, we hid in his basement, and then I woke up." Like, that's just a dream, that's not a prophecy. And if they are having those dreams as well, as these visionary dreams that they think are inspired by some entity. How are they making the distinction between the two of them if both of them exist at the same time in the same person's mind? Yeah, yeah.

So within the culture of— within our culture, we tend to put dreams in the same category. We say the dream about Godzilla is like, you know, all dreams are the same, right? They're either bad dreams or good dreams or neutral. Within there are other cultures that distinguish different types of dreams. And within the Western culture, there have been times when people have distinguished different types of dreams. Like, say you take the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, you have Joseph, right? Joseph is a guy who's going to be big. He's a prophet. And he has dreams where he's able to tell the future. And he's able to distinguish between those dreams. So within certain cultures, even cultures today, like different religious cultures, they have distinctions. The Martu in Australia, they have, you know, they talk about the Dreamtime. So we're kind of a culture that puts all dreams in the same category, and granted, that's true. In terms of discussing whether or not people are mentally ill, Travis Walton is not mentally ill.

Right, but Travis Walton is not having prophecies.

No, I know, but he's one that doesn't. And there are others who do. I understand.

But we got to this place because you were talking about beings that deceive.

Yes. So I'm saying that— I'm saying not all of them deceive, but I'm saying that I'm trying to explain.

I'm trying to ask you. Yeah. Yeah. How are they deceiving? Well, I just told you.

So they'll be giving people information about the future, some of which is correct and some of which is not. Okay.

So how are they giving them this information? They're giving it to them telepathically, or is it coming to them in a vision, in a dream?

It's— they're two very different things, right? Yeah, but it could be both depending on the instance.

Right. But if it's in a dream, how do they know it's coming from this entity and not just a dream? That's my point. Like, you're saying that they're being deceived.

Well, a lot of them won't make that distinction. And so that's where you need a— the abductees. Yeah. Won't make that distinction because they've never had this happen to them before. So of course they're going to think this is true. But my position is that be careful because we don't know if it's true or if it's not.

Right. But I mean, how are you making the distinction between what is just their imagination and them being deceived? This episode is brought to you by Bluechew. I'm sure you've heard of Bluechew by now, but let me tell you what they've been up to. They've been on a mission to get you bricked up for years, and now the number one brand for better sex. Over 5 million happy men have bought Blue Chew for better sex. And you know what? Girls love the results too. Their new 4-in-1 chewable Blue Chew Gold is for performance and passion. 2 ingredients maximize blood flow for stronger, longer-lasting boners, and 2 get you in the mood. It's designed to dissolve under your tongue for fast results. They are number 1 for a reason, and we have a special deal for our listeners right now. Buy 2 months of Bluetooth Gold and get the third free with my code ROGAN. You also receive free overnight shipping. Visit Bluetooth.com for more details and important safety information. This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience. Right.

That's the good question. I don't know.

So how is Gary Nolan saying they lie?

Well, he's taking data. And he's saying that they're saying this, they're telling these people this information and it's wrong information. And so he's not making, he's not trying to make a big claim. He's just basically saying, Tucker asks him why, what kind of things are they saying? And he said, well, they're being deceived, right? They say deceitful things. And my point, by the way, getting back to the original—

But it would be, it's very frustrating.

Go ahead. No, no, I know you're frustrated. The original question here is, what is J.D. Vance talking about when he's saying these are demons? And I'm trying to explain that he's referencing this theological category that has been around for a long time and that is actually quite useful in adjudicating what's going on when people are having these experiences now. I'm saying that I'm not trying to propose that these are like experiences Honestly, I wouldn't want them to happen to me, and I don't wish them upon anyone. But some people—

You wouldn't want to meet an alien?

Not the aliens that people seem to be meeting. So no.

Which one would you like to meet? Well, I don't know.

I mean, hypothetically, like, I'm not sure that—

I like to put it out there.

I'm down. If they want to meet me, I'm down. Okay. I'd love to meet one. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I want to know. I'm not scared. They don't seem to steal you. They don't take you away and never bring you back. They just— they just interact with you. I'm down with that.

I mean, we have to distinguish between— yeah, go for it. Meet an alien. You don't want that?

You wouldn't want that?

Look, if you—

You are a person who writes books about aliens. Yes, I do write books.

Well, somewhat about aliens. I write about the religion about aliens.

Yes, but a lot of the subject matter has to do with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Or whatever it is. Yeah, we don't know what it is.

It might not be extraterrestrial.

It might be interdimensional.

Yeah, yeah. Or it might be here, something that's of a superior intellect that's been here all along.

And it might be something within the category of the preternatural. Right. Yeah. So my point is that if it is, if it was, whatever it is, I— you're right, I've been studying it and I can say that if those are the aliens, no, I don't want to meet them. If they're the ones that, like, people have come and told me about and said, I wish this never happened to me, you know, then no, I don't want to meet them.

But that's— it's different people, right? And different people have different tolerances for experiences. And when someone says, I wish this didn't happen to me, it's because they can't handle it. And whereas other people might be able to handle it.

Maybe. But like, look at the things that the fighter pilots like David Fravor and they don't seem to have a problem with it.

Like they, they're, they're not saying, I wish this never happened to me.

No, but they are saying that this looks pretty dangerous. I wouldn't want it to. First, I hope that this does— this isn't an enemy technology. Yes. They're like, if that's our— if our enemies have this technology, it's done. It's game over. Yeah. Yeah. So that's scary. And if it's not, then it's definitely something that we should take notice of. Right. So if that's what's in our skies and there have been reports of people, there is an Australian report of pilots who have passed away because of this type of thing, like they died and so forth. So how so? I can't actually remember what it is, but it's a, it's a report of an Australian young guy who encountered something in the sky, and he was never found again. He was just, you know, what happened? I don't know. He disappeared in the sky? Yeah, and there are—

With a jet?

I don't know if he disappeared with a jet.

I wish you knew more about this story. I know, I know.

Maybe someone could get it up for us and we can look at it, but it's a really famous—

James slapping away at the keys. Yeah, it's a really famous Australian report. Here it is. —1978, 20-year-old Australian pilot Frederick Valentich— Valentich? I think it's Valentich. Valentich took off on a routine training flight over Bass Strait. Everything seemed normal until his radio transmissions began. Valentich reported a strange aircraft hovering above him with 4 bright lights, metallic surfaces moving at impossible speeds. Then came his final chilling words: "It's not an aircraft." After that, he vanished completely. His Cessna was never found despite extensive searches, and no trace of him was ever recovered. Radar had detected another object in the area but never interacted with other flights. To this day, no one knows if Valentich crashed, got lost, or encountered something far more mysterious. Even decades later, this remains one of aviation's most baffling disappearances, and the last words of a terrified pilot still haunt those who hear them. So there's one guy.

I don't know. You can go meet that one, Joe. And you know what?

I think that maybe he's like in a cool place right now. All right. Just chilling, having a good time in another dimension, hanging out with these creatures. And they're explaining to him the future of the universe.

But, you know, that— the thing about what I do is I'm— I have a lot of information that people impart to me that is— that I can't actually talk about. Right. And that sadly, that happens to people in—

because they ask you not to. Yeah.

They say, I need help with this or this is my experience and I don't want it public and so forth.

I mean, even without disclosing their name.

No, no, they come— I know who they are. And so I've had people who are pilots talk to me.

Is this, by the way, coffee? This is ice-cold coffee. How's it cold? What? It's ice cold.

I boiled it twice.

This coffee—

I'll try to make it again. I mean, I made it today. I made it.

It's ice cold. That's crazy. It's literally ice cold. That's weird. Are you sure?

Yeah, I hit the button twice.

It definitely didn't work. It binged and everything. Must be broken. I mean, it's crazy cold. It's like cold water. Yeah, I'll start it over.

How weird. But here, I got more information, a couple more descriptions from that pilot. Maybe it's aliens.

They're deceiving us. They fuck with Jamie's cold water. Um, 7:06 PM, Valentich contacted the Melbourne air traffic controller Steve Robey, reporting an unidentified aircraft trailing him at about 4,500 feet. Over the next several minutes, he described a long, shiny metallic object with a green light The craft appeared to be orbiting above him, was moving at high speed and playing some sort of game, in quotes. His engine became rough idling and coughing. His final words: That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again. It's hovering and it's not an aircraft. Transmission ended with 17 seconds of metallic scraping or keying sounds, then silence.

So yeah, so this isn't, um, So pilots and families of pilots have told me things similar to this, not as dramatic maybe.

Can you get another cup too? I poured cold coffee in this.

So similar. And so I guess I just, you know, it looks pretty grim.

That guy, that one. Yeah. Yeah. And they're all like the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I've always wondered like how much of that movie was There's so much of that that was based on previous UFO encounters and even figures like Jacques Vallée. Jacques Vallée plays— the French scientist in that movie is based on Jacques Vallée. Yes. And so— and there's scenes where these pilots show up that from like World War I, you know, and they've been gone forever and now they're back and they haven't lost any time. I've always wondered, like, How much of this is based on stories and reports and folklore or whatever the government knew?

Yeah, I think that it's based on stories and things that they— like Jacques has heard and so forth. And by the way, Jacques thinks it's deceptive too. So his idea— he spent, of course, his whole life studying this. And he wrote a book called Messengers of Deception. Yeah.

I think I read that one. Yeah.

So, you know, once you do—

I read a bunch of his books.

John Keel. John Keel doesn't have a good idea about these things at all. Thinks they're pretty nasty. Doesn't want them in. You know, the Mothman Prophecy? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So he wrote that and that movie is based on his life. And he's, he's down on it. He's a doomer with respect to aliens.

How so? What is his perspective?

Okay, I'm going to give it to you right now. All right. Give it to me right now. All right. So he calls this— it reminds me of Catholicism in the sense that he has a category for it. It's called basically the super spectrum. And it's here with us now, just like you said. It's around us. But you and I can't see it. But some people do see it, and some people interact with it and have— like, it breaks into their reality. And for those people, he thinks that they're unlucky because all the things that happen to them, like men in black show up, he thinks things like the beginning of all religions is basically about someone who had an interface with a para-being, like one of these para-humans in the super spectrum. So it's kind of like an invisible reality all around us according to John Keel. John Keel was a pal of Jacques Vallée's. He's passed away, but his books are really amazing. And if you want to get an idea about the super spectrum and the phenomena, You should watch that movie of his called Mothman Prophecies.

It's really good. And so this super spectrum. Yeah. Like, what does he think that is?

So he thinks that it's a— it's like a space all around us. It's been here forever. It controls us. It controls humanity because it sends things like— he thinks UFOs are part of it. He thinks Virgin Mary apparitions are part of it. He thinks ghosts are part of it. So any kind of woo thing is there in the super spectrum. And sometimes some people have the ability to see what's in the super spectrum. And he thinks they're cursed. Now, he thinks angels are part of the super spectrum. So he doesn't make any kind of distinction between the good things in it and the bad things. He said they're all bad. If there's one that appears to be good, it's actually bad. So again, he started, you know, he was kind of like a Charles Fort type guy. So he started to get a lot of these events and he studied them and everything like that. Over years, he developed a theory that these were nasty things and that they were— even if they appeared good— and that they were at the beginning of all religions. All religions come from the super spectrum. Obviously not that part about how it's like Catholicism, but religions tend to have theological categories that talk about things like the super So what Jacques talks about in his books, it sounds very similar to, you know, his control mechanism and is very similar to John Keel's idea.

It seems like—

just speculating, but it seems like we're dealing with a very limited framework that we operate in, that we as human beings operate. Do you want to take this, Jamie? Do you need this? Okay. That we operate in this world of the senses that we possess— sight, sound, feel, touch, all that, you know, smell. We, we have these senses for understanding what's around us, but only those. And it's not capable of detecting everything that is reality, everything that is the universe, everything that is from subatomic particles to whatever the fuck it is that we haven't even discovered yet. That's all around us all the time. And so if there is the potential for other realms or other dimensions, and these things exist in some sort of a space where they can interact and traverse in between these dimensions and interact with, with us at will whenever we can, we're kind of left in this speculation space where when people have these very novel and unique experiences, like Travis Walton, and then we are supposed to go, "Okay, did that happen? It didn't happen to me, but is he telling the truth? Okay, maybe he is. If he is, well, let's see if he lies about other things.

Well, he doesn't seem to lie. He's been around a long time." Travis has been around for a long time telling that story. Like almost 50 years now, right? Like, when was his experience? I thought it—

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, you would think he would have a few other fibs.

I agree, I agree. And he doesn't.

Yeah, if it was a lie— and I don't think it is— but if it was, that's a big lie to have only one. Yeah, only one crazy cockamamie lie from 1970, whatever it was.

See, you're— what you're doing is you're— this is part of their criteria for assessing these kinds of events. Okay. It's called, you know, taking time. Right. So over time. So when a— when an anomalous event happens within, like, say, Christian culture or whatnot.

Thank you very much, Jamie. Appreciate it. The cold is all right, but it's like, it's, it's crazy. It's cold. That is weird. Yeah. Dude, something's going on. Put your finger in it, feel how cold it is. It's cold like cold water.

I understand. I know, I know what happened.

Oh, do you? Yeah. What happened?

You have to hit the start button to make it boil. I didn't hit the start button.

Oh, user error. But it beeped. I thought I did.

That did. Oh, because it didn't— it was turning off.

Okay, this is hot.

Here we go. My bad.

Quiet as the French press. Where were we?

Categories. Oh yeah, yeah, you were basically just making a move, a strategy. Yeah, sure, thank you.

Yeah, like looking at something— like, I mean, that's my perspective on Bob Lazar. You know, Bob Lazar has been telling the exact same story forever. I've had many conversations with Bob. I've had dinner with him. I've hung out with him a few times, dinner with him several times, hung out with him in the studio. He showed us that most recent documentary before it was released, and with Luigi, the guy who made it with him. I don't, you know, I know a lot of people that are full of shit. I meet a lot of people that are full of shit. I've had people sit here in front of me, and then somewhere in the conversation, I'm like, oh, this person's not being honest. This is, this is something. They've got an agenda. They're pushing something, or they're pretending they know some things because it sounds good, but they don't really know some things. I get real suspicious of people. I'm not suspicious of him. It's weird, you know, he's obviously incredibly intelligent and very well studied when it comes to science, when it comes to, you know, whatever it is, whether it's elements, particles, when, you know, he, he understands what he's talking about in a very deep way..

And when he's explaining these experiences, when he talks about this craft and his experiences at S-4, he seems to be telling the truth. And then since then, we know first of all that no one knew about S-4 back then, but he did. He knew where it was. He knew exactly where it was. And he knew about the flights that take people out there. He had a total understanding of, uh, Los Alamos Labs. I mean, he went there, he knew the people that worked there, he knew how to get around the building. When George Knapp took him there, he knew everything about the facility, yet they claimed that he never worked there. And then they found him on the employee roster, so he did work there. Yeah. So they lied, they tried to cover up. Why would they lie and say that he didn't work there? Yeah. Well, probably because he was involved in some shit that they wanted to keep secret. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. There's a lot of weirdness to the Bob Lazar story. And then when you see some of the footage that was released, particularly after the New York Times story of 2017, the footage that's released mirrors the way he describes this craft operating.

Yeah. And so how would he guess correctly in 1989?

Those are all good points. So yeah, I told you last time I was on here that Tyler, right, in my American Cosmic book, told me that he was the real deal. Even though I had people who, you know, Eric Davis, you know, telling me, "No, Diana, this guy's no, no." I believe Tyler. So everything that you say, I agree with. Yeah. I don't know. I mean—

You're always going to have people when you have a fantastic story like Bob Lazar's story, you're always going to have people that want to say that the guy's full of shit. That there's something wrong, he's lying, it's not true, it's fake.

But I mean, Eric Davis would be a person who might know, right? Mm-hmm. So he's a physicist who studies this and even briefs Congress on— but no, so I don't know. I tend to— when Tyler tells me things, and now that everything he said kind of has come true, I believe him. You know, I believe that It's true.

But if Bob Lazar is telling the truth, it's so disturbing, the idea that there's a group of humans that operate in our government that have information that the general public does not have, and that they're the gatekeepers of this information. And they've determined, for whatever reason, that either it's not wise to tell people or it wouldn't benefit them to tell people, like, whatever it is. I think it's a crime against humanity. I think if you're a person that knows for a fact that there's something here other than us that either visits us or exists amongst us or travels here from another dimension, I think you have an obligation to tell people.

But what if it's not that? What if it's actually something we've created and we don't want anybody to know about it? And Lazar happened to find out, and that's why we don't want— you know, I mean, think about it from the perspective of people who are trying to keep Americans safe. So just to push back a bit. Okay, go ahead. You know, what if that's it?

So if that's the case, why would they bring a guy in to tell them, how does this work? Show us how this works. Because that was his job. Oh yeah. They brought him in and said, tell us how this works. And like, and he was like, what are you talking about? This is ours. It has an American flag sticker on it. Like, don't you know how it works? Why are you asking me how it works? This seems kind of crazy. That's not what you do if you have super advanced technology. What you do is you bring in people to improve it and make it better. You don't bring in people and say, how does it work?

Yeah. Okay, wait, I have a couple of comments about that. Okay. So when I first started, I was, I was aware that people I wasn't aware as much as I should be, but I was aware that people in my position, you know, who were basically just doing like academic work on the UFO belief, the rising UFO belief, might have people come and give me disinformation.

100%. Yeah, I have the same situation.

Of course you do. Yeah. So we have to be— that you're talking about discernment. Like, we have to be super discerning about who's, you know, our BS meter has to, like, be really well working or working well. Okay. So but The person who took me out to the desert with Gary during that time to an alleged crash site, which Jacques then goes out there, he basically also wants Gary to figure out this debris. So I'm thinking, we obviously don't know what we have here, if it's legit. Okay, so here are my comments about what you just told me about Lazar. Either they're setting up this situation where they're gonna have someone like me and Gary who are like, they're trying to back engineer this, right? And we're saying that publicly without any kind of knowledge that it could be disinfo. And then they have Lazar who we're gonna plant, and they do this with Benevitz and stuff. They plant stuff for— Benevitz? Yeah, yeah, you know Benevitz, the guy who, he had had stuff planted in his computer? Do you not know about him?

No. What is this story?

Oh, it's called Project Beta. This is a book a friend of mine wrote about— I can't remember. Yeah.

So— Oh, Paul Bennewitz. Yeah. I've heard his name before.

Yeah. You should read this because this is a disinfo scam on this poor guy who—

So Bennewitz believed that he had intercepted communications from alien spacecraft and discovered a secret underground facility called Dulce Base. Dulce? Dulce Base? Dulce. Dulce? Is that how you say it? I'd say Dulce, but— Dulce. A base managed by aliens in cooperation with the US government. His claims appeared in the popular press in the early 1980s. According to some sources, Bennewitz was the target of a government disinformation campaign that ultimately led to his psychiatric hospitalization. Author Greg Valdez proposes that Bennewitz was targeted for his investigation of cattle mutilations. Valdez argues the mutilations were a government testing program looking at the aftereffects of radiation from 1967's Project Gasbuggy, in which an underground atomic device was detonated just 21 miles southwest of Dulce. They were testing the cattle to avoid panicking the public. Okay, so this, um, The problem with that story is the cattle mutilations still go on. This is like completely not accurate.

This is just a brief Wikipedia about this.

Probably way more to the story.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, Doty. Yeah. Doty. You know Doty, right? The guy who went— they placed misinformation on his computer so that he believed that he was—

They placed it on his computer? Yeah.

They placed it on his computer. How so? They went into his house when he wasn't there and put it on there.

And what did they put on his computer?

They put on all this information about, like, that he was in touch with these aliens. So they basically cultivated his belief that he was in touch with aliens. They did that purposefully. And Doty— Doty's first name. Oh, gosh. I can't remember. Ed Doty? No. He's really famous within ufology because he's a misinfo guy.

So, but he's a misinfo guy. Yeah, so he's fully—

yeah, intentionally placing misinformation out into the public about UFOs, which is a thing.

Is he still alive?

Yeah, he's still alive.

And that's what he does for sure. He used to—

yeah, Richard— Richard Doe. Yeah, he for sure does that.

Um, how do you know he does that? What do you mean?

Everybody— what do you mean? I'm surprised you don't know that.

Well, I'm speaking sometimes when I talk, I'm speaking for the entire public that probably doesn't know what we're talking about, and I think it's probably good that we fill them in.

Yeah, sorry, sorry. Okay, so Richard Doty has come out and said this is what he does. And I know people who know him, like the entire group in, you know, the Invisible College people with Hal, and they all know who he is. And Kit offered to introduce him to me, by the way, Kit Green. So, and by the way, all of these people are people who work on the— used to work on the program AATIP and so forth. To study UFOs. But my point though here in talking about this was what if Lazar was a person like me and Gary who was being given information? We're credible, right? He's not so credible. But like, you know, he's this person that's been given information and placed out there so that— and he's just on the edge of credibility, just so, you know, he's credible but then he's not credible so that he could be taken down if necessary. That's how they get this information out there. Now, who Who am I talking about? They. So what I'm trying to say is that what I've observed is that the government isn't unified in this whole UFO thing.

They're fighting against each other. I try to stay out of their crosshairs, frankly. What they're doing, though, is that every time somebody comes out and says, you know, here are the new UFO files, I'm studying them and so forth, then they get taken out by like counterintelligence. So it's like intelligence and counterintelligence. So that is really confusing. The end result is total confusion, and you really have to have an ability, like, to understand, like, your discernment has to be well developed.

Right. So I believe that. I believe that there is disinformation and deception. I think that's a great strategy if you want to make something look ridiculous. You take truth, and then you attach a bunch of fantastic ridiculous claims to that truth. And so that it dismisses all of it, right? Because it's all in the same category and it's all easily debunked. Like, oh, this is the same guy that also said that, so this is nonsense, right?

That's exactly right. Tyler used to say we hide truth in a circle of confusion.

Yeah, which makes sense if they're trying to—

yeah, that's what they do, right? I mean, I don't know anymore. Like, today, like, Jacques at one point Wright, many years ago, decided that the field of ufology was so confusing that he wanted to go back before the Industrial Revolution and do UFOs from a long time ago. And he wrote Wonders in the Sky, all about that, stopped at like, I think it was like 1860 or something like that. Right. And so he did that, and I feel like I've done that too. Like, I started that way actually., and I wasn't looking for UFOs. So I saw, you know, so in a sense, I understand that move because—

When you say you weren't looking for UFOs, what were you looking for?

Oh, well, my first, the first part of my academic career was about looking at souls from purgatory and Catholic things like, you know, what Catholics thought about things that they experienced, like angel contact events. And that's when I started to take a log of these aerial phenomena. I did not know what they were. And so Historically, you can see it all over the place in the records that aren't digitized. There are a lot of records, like people that say, "Oh, we have, you know, AI has everything of human, all of human knowledge." No. Have they never been to an archive? An archive is a really old library. There's a bunch of stuff there that's not digitized and that's still human knowledge.

What were you looking for?

Oh, okay. Back then, this is in my book on Purgatory. I was I was trying to find out why purgatory was a thing for Catholics for many, many years. And then after the 1960s, people rarely talked about it as much. So, by the way, I'll get a lot of hate from people about this because Catholics who do devotions to souls in purgatory, for souls in purgatory, will say, "No, we still do this, Diana." I know that. But the emphasis, like Catholic churches used to have a special place in the church for these devotions. We don't have that here. And so I wanted to know what happened. And so what I did was I spent 10 years going through records and archives all over the place. And I found an answer to that. But I also found a bunch of aerial phenomena that people didn't know. You know, they were like looking up at the sky too back then. And when they saw something in the sky, they couldn't like place. Well, what is this? They'd interpret it as like a soul from purgatory. You know, we need to pray that soul back into purgatory because, you know, sometimes these things would harass people.

They'd come down like orbs and harass people. They just assumed it was like a bad spirit or something like that. So I took all of this down because I thought it was really strange, and I didn't want to put it in my book, but I wanted to do something with it at some point. So when I— I didn't believe in UFOs. I had never thought about UFOs, but I showed the log to a friend after my Purgatory book was published, and he said, "Oh, this looks like Steven Spielberg films," and I thought he was crazy. So that's how I started studying UFOs. Oh yeah, that's how I got into it. So I was already doing that. Jacques was one of the first people I actually wrote a hard letter to, sent it through the mail to him, and, uh, that's how I met him.

So Jacques' books— what is interesting is these old stories, because the old stories that go back to 1700s and 1800s, they mirror these UFO encounters.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's what my work did.

Yeah, it's a very similar pattern, which is also strange because is if you think about human beings, the exponential increase in technological ability that we have just from the 1800s to today, far superior technology. But wouldn't you assume that UFOs would also have this exponential increase in their technological ability? Yeah, definitely. But yet the stories seem very similar. Which is weird, right? Because it was the same kind of craft and the same kind of experiences and the same kind of— like, wouldn't they get better at it? Like, isn't there— don't they have the same ability to improve?

They might be better at it. They might be better at it. We just are not good at ascertaining if they have gotten better at it. But so what if— and this is kind of what I've been exploring recently— What if the, you know, our growth in technology is pretty amazing. What if the only way they can actually interface with us in any super meaningful way that's not creepy, right? What if it's through AI? What if that, so if religion was a way for us to communicate with non-human intelligences that kind of evolved in different places, right? Like a technology itself, right? Religion becomes these ways, you know, if you look around and you see— I noticed that you had some cool Buddhist statues out there. All right, so if you look around at religion, what is it that people in religion do? A lot of them pray in certain ways. Well, like, why are they doing that? What is prayer anyway? Um, some of the, uh— so you can see that there's something that they're trying to do. They're trying to interact, contact. There's like a contact contact with these. And so what if AI all of a sudden is a different form of contact?

And I'll give you a reason why I think this way, or that I'm speculating about it. When I started to ask the people who should know, like Lou Elizondo, and, you know, before that Tyler, and, you know, Hal Puthoff, and people like that, tell me what best, if you were to describe describe what it is we're dealing with. What best is the description? They would always point me in the direction of science fiction, and they would say, "Read this, read that." I was like, "Science fiction? Okay." I'd read it, and it would inevitably point to a technology that helps interface humans with it so that it's not us interfacing because perhaps— remember you talked about those faculties that human beings have, these faculties for understanding reality, but we can't understand reality in its full reality-ness, right? We can't do that because we're constrained by the ways in which we perceive things. Those are the perceptual faculties. What if AI becomes a perceptual faculty for us and we're able then to interact with it? So perhaps it has evolved and it's helped us evolve too. So that's what I'm trying to say. That was a long answer to your comment.

So perhaps AI is a bridge for helping us interact with these things? Yeah, communicate. Okay. Um, so as far as what the government knows and then deception. Yeah. Why do you think that they don't disclose all the information?

My personal opinion? Yeah. Okay, so this is nothing that I can point to. Of course I can't. You know, there's no source for it. My personal opinion is because this is above government. It's not theirs to disclose. The government can't disclose something that's not theirs to disclose. What do you mean by that? I mean that there's probably a group of of people that have this information or have parts of the information. I don't even know if one person has the whole story. It's super compartmentalized. But my intuition is that it's— well, we know that there are parts of it that are so highly classified, right? We know that. Mm-hmm. And so, yeah, It's like, you know, they call presidents short-timers and so forth. They're not read in, quote unquote, to the program. Right. So I would— what if it's like it's been around for a long time and the people who know about it have been around for a long time too? What if that's the case? So after I published American Cosmic in 2019, I met other people. So, you know, I met people who indicated to me that they just basically wanted me to not write anything else about this stuff.

They just were like, why don't you just focus on what you, you know, your Catholic stuff and just like, don't do this.

This episode is brought to you by Visible. It's officially summer, folks, and boy, what a summer we are having. It feels like one of those good old-fashioned summers where you just want to enjoy every moment and keep up with the action. Your best companion this summer? Visible Wireless. Visible gives gives you unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. So you can make this the summer of fun and savings. Visible is more than just a wireless plan. It's unlimited wireless designed to always keep you connected with no contract to tie you down. Switch today at visible.com. Plans start at $25 a month, or get our premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code ROGAN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details.

And who did that? Yeah, yeah, some people that I had met. So they, they're people that are associated with the government in the fact that they're part of intelligence communities. And, you know, so I was interested in what they had to say. And to me, they didn't tell me anything, Joe, so I'm not going to tell any secrets or anything that I don't have them. But they indicated to me that, yeah, this is like, nobody's going to know about this. So people like, yeah, so that's what happened after American Cosmic. Part of that went into encounters, but not all of it.

So how did they express this to you, that they don't think that you should be talking about this?

Well, they didn't express it that way. They just said that my time would be better spent looking into other aspects of religion. Did you say, "Why?" Of course, I wanted to know.

And what did they say to that?

Well, they didn't really say, they didn't really answer that question, but I guess you could say that my experience with them was my answer. My experience with them was that this was something that people weren't going to know about and that these secrets wouldn't be told.

So you're like, they're essentially saying to you, you're wasting your time. Pretty much. Yeah, we're not gonna tell anybody. You're not gonna get any more information. What's out there is out there, and that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. What's your opinion? Like, when, you know, one of the things— I'm assuming you saw the Age of Disclosure documentary. Yeah, definitely. One of the things that I thought was really interesting and made sense in the Age of Disclosure was this thought that that if there are these hidden programs, they have essentially misappropriated funds and lied to Congress in order to fund these things, and all these things are huge crimes, and if they don't have amnesty, they're never going to disclose. This is like Lou Elizondo talked about— Yeah, yeah. —all these different people talked about this, they're like, the only way you're ever going to get this information is by giving some sort of mass amnesty to all these people that were involved in these programs so that they'd never have to worry about being prosecuted. My problem with that is when I hear something like that and you're talking about misappropriation of funds, you're talking about lying to Congress, you're talking about enormous amounts of money that are involved in these programs, where did that money go?

And did that money all go to those programs or all those really ethical people involved or did a bunch of people get rich bullshitting about this stuff? And is that why they're calling for amnesty, so that they don't have to worry about being prosecuted for stealing money? And that's a lot of this, you know, obfuscating, all this confusion, a lot of this misinformation is because there's a lot of people that are in deep shit if this gets disclosed.

So basically they're in deep shit if they— if the thing that gets disclosed is that they've been stealing money.

Yeah. Well, listen, if you have complete total autonomy, you get an enormous amount of money, and you're working on these programs, you know, no one knows where this money's going. And we have a problem with that already, right? Like, we have a problem with the Pentagon never passes budgets. Where'd the money go? Mm-hmm. You know, that's like part of the issue. What is this, Jamie? Long-hidden UFO information at the center of Trump push to free former officials. Former employees can now share information with AARO or the PEARSS task force without fear of violating agreements. So this is new. Yes, last week. Oh, interesting.

No one's officially come forward as far.

Okay, but that's— but look how it says that there. Scroll back up. It says without violating agreements. That's not the same thing I'm talking about.

It's not exactly, but this— they have NDAs and it's right. That's another issue. But what that doesn't—

it doesn't exonerate them from lying to Congress or misappropriating funds. That's part of the problem, is that if they have these these programs that are hidden, and there's no congressional oversight, there's no— they don't have to be audited. If she— in all these, in any government program that has no oversight, you're going to have waste, and you're probably going to have fraud, and you're probably going to have a bunch of people that are, you know, essentially beyond reproach. They have so much power and no oversight at all. Like, put a little bit over here, put a little bit over there, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Next thing you know, these people are wealthy for some reason that you can't explain. Like, look what's going on with Congress with insider trading, where people that are making $170,000 a year worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one can explain why. Yeah, yeah. You got— you have to imagine that these people would also be tempted to do that if they were involved in these programs. So even if these programs are real, let's say it— let's say the research, the back-engineering research, cost $1 billion.

Make it say it cost $3 billion. Where's that money going? Where's it all going? Where'd it go? You know, that's part of the problem with having no oversight. Yeah, no auditing, no oversight, and a bunch of people that have complete ability to hide anything they're doing, including what they do with the money. Yeah, yeah. And so if they've been doing that for decades, who knows how much fraud is involved? Yeah, you have to assume, like, these are human beings, and human beings, if they have that level of power and that level of secrecy and no oversight at all. And also they're working with defense contractors, they're working like, you know, overseas offshore accounts. There's a lot of weird shit goes on.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, it could be that. Do you think it is? Yes.

Really? Yes. You think that's a factor? Okay. All right. I think that's a major factor in this whole thing.

All right.

So I think that's the, that's the I think that is probably the reason why you have these calls for amnesty. Because if you're talking about amnesty, like, amnesty for what? You guys do something? What'd you do? Misappropriation of funds, lying to Congress. Okay, so you don't want to be in trouble for misappropriating money, and you don't want to be in trouble for lying to Congress. What if that— does that include all the fraud that potentially could have taken place? And I'm not accusing anyone of fraud. Yeah, I don't know anything. Yeah, this is pure Tinfoil hat. Let's just talk shit. That's all this is.

Yeah. Yeah. So you think it's just basically a big, like, almost like a Ponzi scheme?

I think that has to be an aspect of it because that's an aspect of it in almost all aspects of government. I hear what you're saying.

I guess—

just think of the problem that was exposed with Doge, with the NGOs, right? Right. Where you find out that there's literally billions of dollars gets distributed and there's no record of it. There's no receipts. Bottom of that article. Uh, during the same event, former Air Force intelligence officer Grusch renewed his allegations that the secret UAP programs had operated outside normal congressional oversight, calling it a real fraud, waste, and abuse issue— there it is— and claiming his investigation uncovered slush funds to the tune of billions of dollars per annum for these activities. The Pentagon has disputed Grusch's central claims, and AARO has said its investigations found no No evidence, no verified evidence of extraterrestrial technology or credible evidence that the government has secretly recovered or reverse-engineered craft of non-human origin. But yet there— he has talked about programs that he has been read in on that are back-engineering programs.

Yeah, yeah, I know. So like, is it— so someone's lying? Yeah, to call it a slush fund I think is really an interesting you know, term, because that indicates that, that they're not doing anything, right?

Doesn't necessarily. It could indicate that they are doing something, but they're also profiting wildly off of this something that they're doing because they don't have any oversight, right? Which is when you get creepy people that have incredible power like that, that's just normal. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. What's more absolute power than your you have massive amounts of money, yeah, a blank check, and you're also— you're in the fucking super secret top secret group. Yeah, you're in the club of the people that know, the wink and the nod, and you're going into these fucking vaults in the middle of the mountain and you're looking at an alien spacecraft and you've got bodies that are in formaldehyde or whatever the fuck they're doing with them. You know, you would think those guys could do whatever the fuck they want.

Yeah, that's right. They're humans. Yeah, yeah, yeah, men.

Yeah, yeah, they're men that are probably very ambitious and wealthy. Yeah, yeah, and they want to be more wealthy, and they got all this money coming in, and they're working on these programs, and then they can occasionally show you some stuff. Look, this is what we've discovered. This is what we figured out. This is what we can apply to military technology.

Okay, so So maybe. Okay. So maybe that's it. Pure speculation.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. No accusations. I'm just saying, if you had to look at it from the least charitable perspective, you have to say that's probably an aspect of what we're dealing with. And that seemed to me when I watched Age of Disclosure from a cynical perspective, I'm like, what is this? What is this request for amnesty? What's the— amnesty is a weird thing to say, you know, like if you're people get suspicious when you have amnesty. Mm-hmm. Why do you want amnesty? Yeah, you worried about like, are they really gonna prosecute people that have misappropriated funds and lied to Congress because they have alien spacecrafts? Is that really what Congress is gonna do now? They're gonna go after these people and say, I look, I know you finally did tell us that we have been visited, that we have these downed alien crafts, we're gonna put you in jail because you didn't tell us before. For, and because you lied to Congress and you used these funds to back-engineer these crafts. Yeah, yeah. Does that really make sense that they would put these people in jail for these top-secret government programs? No, no.

Yeah, I agree.

Um, I just think if you just factor in people, factor in people and blank checks, I always say someone's getting— it's not like these are the most benign altruistic people that they're super charitable and they only want to do the right thing for humanity and they're very comfortable with their meager government salary. Yeah, yeah. Eh, probably not, right? Right. Probably when you think about human nature and people when they have access to money, especially that kind of money, that's crazy money.

All right. So if I can offer my speculation, totally speculative.

Totally. Okay. I like this kind of talk.

Okay, so remember that I start out not caring about UFOs at all, not believing nothing like that, just kind of doing my boring Catholic scholarship stuff, right? Not boring. Well, yeah, I didn't think so, but you know, geeky stuff, okay? Not interested in that scene. All of a sudden, I realize that there's this historical continuity in the records.

And there's physical evidence.

Yeah, yeah, there's physical evidence.

Which is important for people to know that maybe if they've never heard this subject before and this is the first podcast they've listened to, when we're talking about Gary Nolan and some of the things they've found at these crash sites, we're talking about alloys that you can't make here. Yeah. There's something about them where they're layered at an atomic level. There's some weird shit to them. That's right.

And so I try to keep myself autonomous from the ufology narrative, either proposed by the government. By the way, a lot of people are like, it's government-sponsored. There's a lot of government-sponsored stuff out there that you're getting. None of my stuff is government-sponsored. Like, I did this totally autonomously on my own. Still do. Completely, you know, I don't have a publicist. I'm not out there doing it like that. That said, I've met a lot of people and I've seen a lot of things now since 2012 about the topic. And so if I were to speculate about it and let me just describe some of the things that come into my brain every once in a while when I'm thinking about it, I'm like, okay. You know how Eric Weinstein talks about like he would know the smart people, he would know the physicists who would be on this case, right? He would know these guys because he knows physics. He's super intelligent, you know, but I don't think he does know them. And part of the reason I say that is because this is in 2014 or so, so a long time ago, when I'm, you know, when you're doing something for so long and you're in this community of people and you, you can't make stuff up, like stuff happens, you're like, that really happened.

And one of the things that happened was that I got to see that there were there were some laboratories associated with the government that people couldn't get into. It was like you couldn't go to those. And the people that worked there were the best of the best, like the laser people, the people who knew lasers and who, you know, they were better than anybody at Yale. They were better than anybody at Harvard or Stanford or anything like that. They were the best. Through knowing me, Gary got to go there, so I have a Witness, you know, because they were cultivating him. They were trying to figure out if he could actually help with figuring out what this was. So, those things are things that I noted and I kept in my file in my brain, right? Okay, well, that's weird. Think about people like Harold Malgram, right? He's a person who is was an official advisor to a couple different presidents in the capacity of military, so super high-level clearance and everything like that. He had been recruited. He was a physicist at Cornell. He'd been recruited when he was 27. So this happens. So people do get taken into these— I don't know what you'd call them— programs or whatnot, and they do work, and they have these clearances, and they're hidden.

Just like, um, they're hidden. Sometimes they're given fake job titles and so forth so people wouldn't think. I see people online now saying, oh, that person doesn't have that clearance because they had this job. How do you know? Like, seriously, how do you know that? Because the government is really good at hiding these kinds of things. So over the years— that was a long time ago when this happened to me, 2014— I started form an idea. You know, and it wasn't just that, it was other types of things that I learned. That there's something going on for sure and it is what they're saying but maybe it's not— I don't know what they're reverse engineering. If it's anomalous, you know, from another planet or what it is. I do know that they're doing something and they've been doing doing it, and they're probably going to continue to do it, and that I don't think they're going to share.

Yeah, and why would they, especially if it affects national defense?

And so, yeah, and so part of what's happening now, you know, with rich people getting into this and trying to get the people in the program to come out, because that's what that looks like when David Grusch talks about that. I'm thinking they're just trying to get these people in the program to come out and, you know, so they can, they can get the technology. Right? And that's not— I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think that's going to happen.

So what do you think happens? Do you think that they find very talented physicists that are in universities and they have these outreach programs where they look for these people that are very talented and they recruit them very early on?

I think so. I think that they get recruited really young. Uh, 27 is probably old. To get recruited.

Which probably makes sense, get them as early as possible before they— Yeah, get them into the program. Before they get involved in any sort of commercial venture or any other company. That's right.

So in my second book that I've written about it called Encounters, there's a chapter called The Children of the Invisibles where I talk about this potential speculative group, and it's total speculation, Have you heard Eric Weinstein's take on—

there's a particular upstate university, upstate New York university, that has a completely overqualified physics department that's also attached to a hedge fund that does Bernie Madoff type numbers that don't make any sense at all? No, I didn't. I haven't seen that one. Yeah, it's— he talks about it in this one particular university. He is keen on this might be something, because he's like, it doesn't make any sense that these insanely talented physicists are all in this one place and no real research comes out of it, no real— nothing gets done. But yet they're also attached to this hedge fund that does these insane numbers that don't make any sense at all, which is a great way to just funnel money through and keep these programs running that are completely top secret. And these people aren't publishing, they don't have anything these insanely talented physicists are not really getting anything done.

Yeah, they get fired at my university if they weren't publishing. Right, right.

There's something, there's something weird about it, he says. Yeah. And he keeps pointing to this one. Do you remember that? What they— Stony Brook and Renaissance Technologies. Yes, that's it. He's, he's like, if there's something there, if there's a there there, that's where it's at. Yeah. Which makes sense. Like, if you had had some big-time program. Like, I know a guy who was a professor, so he was teaching at a university. I probably shouldn't say what he's teaching. He was also a CIA operative, so he would literally be involved in fucking gunfights, and then a week later he would be— you know, they would extract it. Take people, they do all this crazy CIA super secret operative shit. A week later he's teaching university courses. Yeah, yeah, like Indiana Jones on steroids. Like, this guy was like really doing that, which is like, whoa, okay. So if you have this university where you have these people that are teaching these classes, like, and they're probably looking for super secret, super talented physicists that are coming up to recruit into these programs. But what they're doing, as far as their, you know, air quotes, research that's public, is nonsense.

And what they're really doing is working on something, probably some sort of very novel propulsion system. And that's what Weinstein thinks. And he thinks that a lot of this stuff that people are seeing in the sky is probably ours.

Ours. So that's right. So say it's ours and say he's right. Okay, so, but I guess my point is, are you, you know, then shouldn't that be okay? Shouldn't we be okay with that? Because isn't, aren't they, aren't we Americans? Aren't they like helping us?

Well, if that's the case, yes, certainly.

Why would we try to get them to come out and, you know, like force them out.

Well, we certainly don't want that information to get to China or Russia. We— if there is some sort of a race to develop a novel propulsion system, like, who was it, Jamie, that was in here that was saying that one of the uses for this technology would be instantaneous delivery systems of nuclear weapons? So, you know, when we're talking about these propulsion systems that essentially they're folding space, folding space and time, where they can, instead of going from point A to point B, which is like, you know, 1,000 light-years, instead of doing it in however much time it would take to travel that through, even if you're going the speed of light, you go instantaneously because you're essentially folding space and time and just appearing in this new place. Well, you could do that with a bomb. Bomb. And so instead of like a missile having to fly to Beijing or Moscow, it instantaneously arrives and detonates. And that this was one of the proposed uses of this technology, which is fucking terrifying. Yeah, that these knuckleheads are taking this incredibly potent technology that these extraterrestrials have used to get here from another planet And we were like, wouldn't that be a dope way to deliver a bomb?

Yeah. And then they're working on that. Yeah. But it's also, isn't it their responsibility to do that? Because if China figures out how to do that, or Russia figures out how to do that, or Iran figures out how to do that, you've got a real problem.

So this was what— remember you asked me those people that I met, like, after American Cosmic gets published? All right. So this is pretty much the line they gave me was that Diana, it's best to talk about this stuff about morality and, you know, Christian stuff and so forth, because look, what we're doing is we're keeping us safe in the United States. And do you really want a non-ally to have, you know, an enemy to have this technology? I'm like, well, no, of course not. You know, I mean, so yeah, what can you say to an argument like that other than, well, yeah, that would be terrible?

Well, if I believe them and if they're being I mean, if it's true and they're just looking out for the interest of America, 100%, I'm with them. I get it. I understand. I mean, I don't know.

I know that's the problem is that we just don't know.

I'm never going to point fingers and go, fuck those guys. They need to tell us everything. Right. The problem is you're telling everybody in the world everything then. You're telling China everything. Yeah, that's right. You're telling Russia everything. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's right. I get it. And I get that that's why if, say, the Roswell crash of 1947, if that is legit and if they really did fly it out to Wright Air Force Base in, you know, two separate planes just in case one of them crashed, if that's really the case. And the lore is that Truman met them there and that they disclosed that they have this craft and they have this material. You have so many different people that were at that crash site that have very similar stories. Yeah. And then you also have this very shortly after that, you have technologies emerge. Yeah, you have fiber optics, transistors, a lot of weird shit that's attached to them in terms of like the provenance of like how these technologies were evolved and developed. There's some sketchy shit involved in that, and the allegation is that this is something that's been reverse engineered.

And then, okay, well, you don't want that getting to someone else. Yeah, right. Yeah, if we are involved in conflicts with other nations, and we most certainly are, why would you— you got to keep that stuff secret. So I get that argument as well. And if so, if extraterrestrial technology is real and that we do have crafts, and saying extraterrestrial is just a placeholder word for whatever it is, interdimensional, whatever it is, some super advanced non-human intelligence created technology, if it does exist Yeah, I would say from a national security perspective, you've got to keep that under wraps, especially if we don't truly understand it. If we don't truly understand it, we're not really capable of making it. Yeah. I mean, the way Lazar describes the craft itself, it was like it was 3D printed. Well, there was no 3D printing in 1989, right? Well, there is now.

That we know of. That we know of.

That we know of. But there is now. But that's the thing is this, that we know of. Of, there's only so far you can go with that, that line of thinking. Is when you go back far enough, it doesn't work. So like you go back to 1947, 1947, you're dealing with propeller planes. Okay. Propeller planes. And then also novel propulsion systems that can instantaneously travel from one place to another.— you know, they can go like what happened with the Tic Tac, where they have it on radar going from 50,000 feet down to sea level in less than a second. So that's, that's technology that we had in 2004. That doesn't seem likely, right? And it might be the case, but then you go far enough back to like, like the— the— what was the guy's name? Kenneth Arnold. Yeah, those sightings, which was what, '47? '47? Yeah. Okay, well, that's— there's no way.

Like a couple months, like, right after Roswell, before Roswell, I can't remember. So that's—

there's no way. We didn't have that technology then. There's no way they would have such superior advanced technology that our fighter jets jets looked like toys. They just whizzed past them.

Well, I hear that, but, but I don't know if you've seen the images of Kenneth Arnold's plane, but it looks like that German fighter plane. So it looks exactly like that. Maybe we reverse engineered that and had it. I don't know. I'm just saying that.

Yeah, but Kenneth Arnold's plane was only capable of going like how fast? It wasn't that fast. And this thing, these, these crafts were going way faster. Yeah, this is what he said he saw. Like, he's got a fucking propeller plane.

I did just look up the first turbojet engine plane was 1941. Yeah, yeah. Whoa.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What were they using that for, fighter jets?

Back in 1947, was there's them flying around World War II.

In '47, they had fighter jets that had propeller turbojet. Yeah, but a propeller turbojet is a propeller.

Yep. Uh, here's the— like, if you fly—

I've flown in turbojet propeller planes before, and they're pretty dope. Those are the pictures coming up. Oh, okay. So that does look like a jet engine. It's definitely something different, right? Was that— what did the planes look like back then? So pull up a fighter jet from 1947. See, those are—

whoa, wait, it was a, it was a specific plane that looked exactly like what he saw. It was a German plane.

Well, that one that Jamie just pulled up is pretty crazy because it's circular.

No, I know, but the other ones looked— I mean, literally exactly. They were called the wing planes because they looked like wings.

I understand, but even that, those right there, those are still propeller planes. That is what Kenneth Arnold says he saw. That's totally different. Yeah, like, whatever the fuck that is, it's crazy. And he saw that thing skipping across the sky.

Okay, wait a minute, James. Me.

If you keep going and looking for it. So the idea that our best shit— It's HO something. Okay. The idea that our best shit is propeller planes, but yet we also have these things with no visible means of propulsion that are all flying at 1,000 miles an hour or whatever it was, several thousand miles an hour. Couldn't have been quiet either. Right. Yeah. It's just weird. It's— if you go back far enough, it doesn't make sense. Sense that there's superior technology that's not being utilized ubiquitously across the entire military?

Well, I think that most likely if they, they have something that they want— okay, so this is again speculation, all right? Right. I don't know, I entertained the idea— this is 80 years ago. No, I know that. I entertained the possibility that they had some pretty amazing stuff.

I don't. Okay. I don't. I just don't think that's possible. And that we still have it, and that's what maybe it's I would say in 2026, 80 years later, with all the technological advancement, maybe there's some crazy shit that they have today. And I bet there is. Like, look at this thing. This is a German bomber.

There, that is— yeah, that's what I'm saying.

All right, you gotta believe me. But that's just a drone.

You're a witness. No, no, that's an actual—

is that a photograph?

No, they have a photograph of those. I am not kidding you.

Okay, I was trying to just start with that.

Yeah, yeah. So look at that upper left-hand corner. It says secret Nazi UFO. Yeah, but they had that.

Yes, they're—

that's a photograph. Yeah. No, it's not. I'm just— I'm just to be, uh—

okay, well, does it say up there? It says, uh, a Horten 229, a German prototype. Yeah. Plane from 1945.

So, so literally, see, I'm telling you, Joe, this looks exactly like Arnold's, uh— it does. UFO. It really does.

Okay, thank you. Jet-powered flying wingcraft. That literally looks exactly like it.

So if I'm right about that, then you should Like, listen to my speculation, right?

But how fast did this go? All right, let's see. That's pretty dope. Could have been pushing it to the limit. I can't believe they had something like that, you know. How are the Germans so fucking advanced? I know, and so evil at the same time. Like, what the hell? Okay, designed—

er, where, where is it? 560 miles an hour. Mm.

600 miles an hour. And how fast was Kenneth Arnold's craft able to go? 621 miles an hour.

Wow. So, you know, he saw these in formation, so we were most likely doing something with those. We— what?

So, you know, the United States. So you think that we had acquired that technology?

We did. We, we acquired it. We were utilizing it, right?

So Operation Paperclip, we brought over a bunch of these Nazi scientists. And so you think that what he saw was these Nazi crafts? Yeah. So they had—

yes, I think so. But that doesn't take out a lot of weirdness about it because he also had a lot of very strange anomalous experiences, Men in Black experiences, paranormal experiences. Kenneth Arnold did? Yeah. So, and yeah, and to him, he interpreted this as being religious.

Is there a video of that German thing?

I was just looking at the first comment says it should be noted this is a full-scale mock-up made for radar testing by Northrop Grumman for a Nat Geo documentary, not the actual Ho-229.

That picture I put up. Oh, interesting. Is there any actual documented photographs of the Ho-229? Um, that's what I'm gonna go with.

If there was only 3 of them and they weren't ours—

So we know that jets existed in '41, and so— and then the Nazis had really advanced technology in terms of automobiles, in terms of engineering, rocketry. They were way more advanced than us, which is why we took all those Nazi scientists from Operation Paperclip and ignored their war crimes so they could work for NASA.

They had an important weapon too that we never talk about, that we also took, a form of propaganda. They had propaganda, specific form, not the kind that you can Google and see Nazi propaganda and stuff like that. That like a really effective form of propaganda.

Well, how— in what way would they have?

So that's another thing.

So, so this is an actual photograph of it. Whoa. So if you saw that thing flying through the sky in 1947, you would probably think that's from another planet. That totally looks like a space— I remember after September 11th, July 11th in 2001, I was filming Fear Factor, and we were in Southern California near— what is the base that's out there? Is it Edwards? We're near one of the Air Force bases, and I saw a stealth bomber fly overhead, and it looks like it's from another planet. It looks so crazy. We stopped filming. We were like, dude, what the fuck? It looks like like Darth Vader's flying it. Yeah. You know, it's so weird. Yeah. It doesn't seem like it's ours. Now, I know it is, and I know they exist, but if I didn't, right, and I saw that— yeah. So you got to assume also that if I saw it in 2001, maybe they had it in 1999, maybe they had it in 1989, maybe they had it in '79. Maybe they had something like that.

That article says that we found that prototype in Germany, brought it back, and then this is what Northrop potentially made after.

So this is a— this is a wing powered by propellers though.

We didn't know how to make those jets, right?

And so they probably put the jets on it later. But fuck, that looks alien. Yeah. So when you think of the Kenneth Arnold sighting and you think of the description that he had, it's very similar to that. Yeah. So that might have been it. Yeah, yeah. But that doesn't— that doesn't jive with the Tic Tac. The Tic Tac's bananas.

Yeah, it is. It is. Like, that—

the speed that that thing moved, every human being inside of it, if there was a person flying in that, they would have got turned into Jell-O. Yeah. Just from the G-forces. That's right.

That's right.

Also, there's no material that we have that could survive that kind of speed.

Yeah. Um, I know.

See, this came out in those— I think this came out in those alien documentary or one of the dumps. Yeah.

So this is— a lot of people have said that it's Lockheed Martin created that thing, and that is exactly what it looked like, including those weird things at the bottom. Those weird things at the bottom, whatever that stuff— those little— whatever those little tube-looking things at the bottom of it, that is part of what they described when they said they saw the Tic Tac. And there have been people in the air quotes disclosure movement that have said openly that thing was a Lockheed Martin device.

Yeah, that's right.

Okay, so that's the case. What, what is that? And how's that thing moving? And how's it moving that way in 2004?

Yeah.

And if Lockheed Martin has this kind of technology 22 years ago, yeah, that, that baffles me and that defies— your imagination just runs wild.

So that's my point, is that if this is happening, and this has been happening, it's like, it's well— this is something that's kept well guarded. And even, I don't think, even with the disclosure today, I don't think that push is gonna be effective. Active, right?

I see what you're saying. So that thing from the disclosure dump from—

I'm looking at more info right now. Yeah, what is that? Perplexity has to say about it. It's not a hoax, real, or, uh, it's certainly a ho— oh wait, almost certainly a hoax.

Oh, how dare you, Perplexity! But what is Perplexity getting this information from? So it says, what the story claims, a document circulating on social media since August of 2025 reports to be a leaked Lockheed Martin CIA flight manual for a craft called the CL-957 Gen 2, nicknamed Tic Tac, per the claims. Instagram Skunk Works post. Someone made it on Reddit, it says. Okay, of course. Jason Wilde on X, Reddit forensic breakdown, Tocana YouTube analysis. No provenance, nothing in the Freedom of Information Act archives, uh, the CIA Crest database, Black Vault, or National Archive references. CL-957 or Orbit Lance, real black programs, Oxcart, uh, Have Blue, Tactic Blue, all eventually left paper trails. Wrong designation scheme. Lockheed CL, um, blank blank blank California temporary design numbers are documented. CL-282, CL-1200, Lancer, etc. And CL-957 doesn't appear in any credible listing Document artifacts. Analyst flag typography, formatting, and classification marking inconsistencies versus real technical orders, plus anachronistic F-22 references and an odd CIA series aircraft phrasing.

Hmm. It's only been found on social media, nowhere else.

Well, then it's real. Don't you know that X is the news now? Don't you pay attention? God, Jamie. Sorry. I want to believe. I want to believe that Lockheed Martin has that. Well, we always have Travis Walton. Yeah, but like Travis is one guy with one story. Very interesting.

There's a lot of them though. Yeah.

Oh, 100%. There's a lot of weird stories and there's a lot of weird stories of what Travis— the thing is, the real problem is once once it becomes iconic, right? Like once there's a story that gets out there, like Betty and Barney Hill, for instance. Yeah. You hear that story and then that story becomes a part of folklore. That story becomes a part of people's imagination. And when you start thinking about grays, you immediately start thinking about Whitley Strieber, right? You start thinking about Communion, you start thinking about Close Encounters. So you already have these images in your mind of what these things are supposed to look like.

That's right. Yeah. And that's a part of the problem, right? Right? Uh, kind of, yeah. Yeah. That is a part of the problem. I was going to go down another path. Okay. Okay. So about reverse engineering stuff, like, how does this work? Right. All right. So one of the things that I came to, like, understand was that a couple of people told me about this, and it was nothing that they intended to tell me, by the way, but I asked. So, you know, Tyler Roberter was doing this reverse engineering type of thing. He was trying to find people to help him with this. And he would have what he thought were alleged UFO debris that he had found at various places like in New Mexico and so forth. And then what he had to do was he had to get together a group of engineers that could actually reverse engineer it. And he would tell them, he wouldn't say this is a UFO or this is something found in the desert. No, no, he would say this is China's or this is Russia's, and we need, in order to keep our, you know, dominance or whatnot, we need to get this reverse engineered pronto.

And that this lie would then motivate these guys, okay, and that they would reverse engineer this and he would come up with something, okay. So later on, I would listen to Hal, and Hal would give these, these talks. Hal Puthoff, by the way, who's, who's one of the people is interested in UFOs and knows a lot about them. And so he gave this talk at the inaugural Seoul conference, and I was there. And so I was listening to him, and to me it sounded like what he was saying was exactly what Tyler was saying, that he was saying, we have this, you know, but we don't actually know how to do this, how to back engineer this. So we're gonna give it to this talented group of people, and we're gonna tell them that this was already made made, but a non-ally, like an enemy, had it. So basically, by telling them this, they would then, like, in a sense, do kind of like a trick on their minds, and they would actually reverse engineer it. They would reverse engineer something that he said already existed. So in a sense, it was like, um, not only working with time in a weird way, or like kind of like, you know, projecting what was going to be in the future, telling them it already had been So that made me think, this is like the propaganda that I'm talking about and that you just started to talk about.

Like, if we could then on a mass scale tell people that we have something or this is the case, maybe there would be a critical, like, mental construct and people would actually do something, rise to the occasion or something like that. That could have been propaganda for the space race, right? That could have been like the moon landing stuff. I'm not saying that didn't happen, by the way. I'm saying that part of it was a way to get Americans to win the space race. We had to already believe that we won it, right? In order to create this stuff, we already have to believe that someone else created it. It's like the 5-minute mile. You see what I'm saying? 4-minute, right? Why? Maybe it's a 5-minute to me. The women's 5-minute mile, right? No, the 4-minute mile. That's right. So we already had to believe that it had been done in order to do it.

Right. Because once someone broke it, then a bunch of people broke it.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So, so, oh, and then I was asked by people who are in the government to speak to interagency agency scientists. And so they would have me talk to these scientists, like 50 of them, right, from various parts of the government, and basically tell them the story of American Cosmic. And I was like, okay, I'll do that. Why? You know, they didn't say anything about why, but I started to think maybe this is like a Hal Puttoff thing, or maybe this is like a Tyler thing, that I'm doing this for them so that their brains can think this has already been done.

Better do this. Mm. So when you say the sophisticated propaganda that the Nazis have, that we took this technology from them, like, what do you mean by that? Like, what was their tech? What was unique about their propaganda?

All right, so I don't know exactly, but I do have some ideas. And two of the ideas I have are what I just told you, that if you can seed the population with images and belief, you know, that will impact their belief, you can change it. Okay, there's that one. But there's also the one that, you know, Bill Cooper's book, um, Behold a Pale Horse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so in Behold a Pale Horse, he talks about the quiet weapons, where he's talking about basically technology and how technology is going to engineer consent. And he's talking about this in, I don't know what exactly when he Engineer consent. Yeah, engineer consent of the population about certain things, and you do that through utilizing social media. Well, he's not calling it that. He's calling it quiet weapons, but you know, back then, putting stuff on TV and creating a narrative that people buy into and believe. And he said that this is going to— you see this, by the way, with Arthur C. Clarke. Clark in his book, in his short story Childhood's End, or no, it's a book, where, you know, he's talking about aliens, where these aliens are engineering humanity through technology, through social media and things like that.

Hmm. So this could be what the Nazi propaganda, the weapon is that it could be used as a weapon, but it could also be used for good.

And it could be used to facilitate technological innovation.

By telling them that it's already been done. Yeah, yeah. You know, when I was— I ran in college, so I was a college runner for track and cross-country, and I had a great team of coaches who would teach us sports psychology. And part of what we would do would be we would already see us winning. We would already see— and they would also tell us, so-and-so ran this this, you know, you can do this. So in a sense, they were utilizing that on our team, and it was good.

It was, you know, helpful. Hmm. Right. Well, it's very important, your mindset, especially when it comes to athletics, because there's so much that's involved in competition that's psychological. Yeah. Do you think that that also is the case when it comes to technological innovation? Definitely. You have to believe that it can be done. Yeah. Or that it has been done. And that it helps you figure out the pathway.

I mean, this is what I'm telling you. So with the people that I just talked about, we're talking about Tyler, right? We're talking about then Hal, even though I don't think he'd say that that's what he was doing or talking about. That's what I interpreted his talk to be. And he's talking, you know, he has some really interesting ideas about physics and matter and reality and so forth. And then later on, Yeah, that's what I think, you know, I think that that works. That actually works.

It makes sense that it would— that the blocks that people have in their mind about what is and what is not possible, that if you say not only is it possible, it's already been done.

So yeah, so yeah, so I don't know, like when we start to talk about like the various things that we've been talking about, like, you know, if this is real and that happened and so forth, maybe that's what the— they're trying to get us not to to talk about the really interesting things like maybe that, you know, that form of what, what could be a form of mind control.

I understand that, but when it comes to technology that could have military applications and that we've had all these military conflicts, you would imagine that you would see some of this stuff being utilized, and there's no real evidence that there has been. Like, there's no evidence from Iraq or Afghanistan, from any of those conflicts that we had something that moves faster than the speed of light and that we have weapons that were indescribable until Nicaragua. So, or Venezuela rather, the Venezuelan contact where we, conflict rather, where we abducted the president and we came in and incapacitated everybody with some sort of a sound weapon. Like that all stuff sounds like super science fictiony. And when you realize, like, that is real, they absolutely did that. So they have had something for a long time that can do things that are beyond our understanding of what we thought was possible. Yeah, yeah. Hal Puthoff had that crazy story about when he was working for the Bush administration where they brought him in with a bunch of other scientists.

Yeah, I know about that. Thought leaders.

Uh-huh. Yeah, and they said, we are going to disclose that there are alien crafts and that we We have biological remains of creatures from some other place. What is the negative and what are the positive impacts of this? And I want you to put a numerical value on each one of them and tell us what, what the result is. And all, all the people that they brought in all had similar conclusions when they said, how's it going to impact government? How's it going to impact religion? How's it going to impact society or economy? There's way more negative than there is positive. And so they decided not to disclose. And when he tells that story, just like, God, that tracks. That tracks, like, that they would do that, that they would say, maybe we should tell everybody, but this is gonna be the impact. My belief is that's a temporary impact and that society is gonna continue to function because it's pragmatic. We're gonna have to. You're gonna have to have an economy. You're gonna have to have government. You have to have all these things while also knowing we're not alone. Own, and maybe that would help dissolve some of the conflicts that we have.

Because if we think that we're the only gang in town, and then there's another gang over there and we're duking it out with them, if we find out that, well, actually there's a gang from another planet, that's the Reagan speech. Yeah, I know.

To the United Nations. Yeah.

That all the UFO dorks went like, oh, he's telling us something. Yeah. That if we were faced with a threat from another world, how quickly we'd put aside our their differences.

Yep, that's right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I, I'm with you. I think that people won't be, um, they won't go into shock.

And but it would temporarily disrupt everything, and that therein lies the problem. The problem is the collapse of the economy, global trust in government. Like, if the government really isn't the people that are in control, if there really is something far above and beyond the human government that has some sort of an influence on world events, that's a real— it's tough to vote in a congressman that says they're going to enact change when we're being observed by extraterrestrial life that can read your mind.

I don't know if that's true. I don't know if I agree with you on that. I think that it's all— I think people will be all right. I mean, we're having the government say today, right? I mean, JD Vance on your podcast just said it's— they're demons, right? That's pretty bad. JD Vance doesn't know.

Aren't we all fucked if he just thinks that they're demons? Like, what? No, I think he doesn't seem— I think he says he's too busy to like really dig into the UFO stuff, which I kind of get and understand, but also don't. Because if that was— obviously I'm never going to be vice president, but if I was, that would be like the first thing I would look into. As soon as I got into my desk, I'd be like, where they have everything, I'm going there. I'm going there. I'm gonna say you have to show me, and I'll keep my mouth shut, but I need to know. Like, you need to show me. We need to know, like, what are we— I need to know what position we're at in order to move forward. I don't know. I need to know where are we operating from. Are we operating from a position where human beings are the advanced dominant intellect on Earth? Earth or not? Because if it's or not, that changes everything. But you're rare.

You're the rare person who— like, most people in the United States believe in God. Like, there are more than 80% of people who believe in God. They think God runs it, right? God is a non-human intelligence. But that doesn't—

they're not mutually exclusive. Like, God could exist and also intelligent life from elsewhere could also exist. That's right.

And that's why most people be shocked or upset. I don't think that there's going to be a level of anxiety that people predict, honestly. I don't—

well, hasn't the Vatican even addressed this and saying that if alien life exists, that God could have created life? Yeah, other places, of course.

Yeah, which really does make sense. Yeah, yeah. So they're not going to be upset. And there are a lot of Catholics in the United States. So I mean, people in the United States or even all over the world, there are countries like in Brazil where they're okay with, you know, if there If there are aliens up there, it's not going to change. They're probably watching us and nobody's going to be upset about that. They're still going to vote for their presidents and their congresspeople and so forth.

Yeah, but it does—

So, Joe, you're like the only one here that I— not the only one, but you're representing a small minority of people, in my opinion. How so? Because you think that it's going to change everything. You think that it might actually change your worldview, but it's not going to change the 80% out there. It's not going to change their worldview.

I think that's a guess. Mine's a guess as well. It's a guess of how it's going to affect the world. I would assume it affects it in a pretty spectacular way. If we have undeniable proof that there is some superior intelligence that's interacting with us and perhaps even controlling events and preventing certain things from happening saying, like when they go over nuclear bases and stop weapons functions.

This is a religious worldview. That's all— that's the religious worldview you're, you're identifying right there.

How is that a religious worldview? That there's an intelligent life form from another planet that comes—

okay, not another planet, but like, you know, there's an intelligent interdimensional— right, we don't know if it's from—

yeah, yeah, that's a guess.

Yeah, so most religions are assuming that there are other— there are gods goddesses, or there's God, and there are angels and demons and things like that. They're, you know, non-human intelligences. So they already think this, and this is already a worldview.

Well, that's what gets weird when you get into the really old scripts like the Book of Enoch.

Mm-hmm, that's right.

That, you know, Anna Paulina Luna, she's the one who turned me on. Yeah, yeah. I've listened to the audiobook of the Book of Enoch twice now, and every time I listen to them, like, what the the fuck were they talking about? Yeah, yeah. What is— what are the Watchers who came down and bred with the daughters of man and created the Nephilim? Like, what is— what is all this stuff?

Yeah, that informs a lot of Christian doctrine.

Well, not really, not today, but because it's not included in the canon. But what if it right?

It's included in the canon, but just not in reference to the Book of Enoch.

I mean, if you go to the Book of Enoch, it's not in the canon, but Enoch is referenced in the Bible. Absolutely. Yeah. Which is kind of nuts that you don't get the Book of Enoch.

But you have the worldview of Enoch. A lot of Christians still believe in that. And it's, I would say that, I don't know, like more than 50%. So even though, so yes, so more than 50% believe, they believe in the worldview view of Enoch, that there are Watchers and fallen angels and things like that. That, you know, this is the supernatural worldview, and it's alive and well. She believes in it, right? She believes that there are— She? Yeah, Anna Paulina. Oh, yeah. So, I've heard her say that she thinks they're interdimensional beings also. So, in a sense, the preternatural. Right.

Imagine a world, imagine how religion would be if the Book of Enoch was regularly taught on Sunday at church. That they would tell you that story along with Moses and along with all the other stories, that they would tell you about the Book of Enoch. And everybody in the church would be sitting there like, what? What are you talking about? Who are the Watchers? Like, what are they? They came down and, and lay with the daughters of man? What? Yeah. Like, this was a part of an ancient story. And the real question is, whenever I read these biblical stories, I'm always trying to— I know that they're writing things down. First of all, they're writing it in ancient Hebrew, and then it's transcribed and translated into Latin and Greek and all these other languages, and a lot is lost in that translation. A lot gets interpreted very weird. Weird because of just the way languages are formed, just the way they structure sentences. Like, a lot of the context of it is weird. Also, in ancient Hebrew, numbers double— letters double as numbers.

Yeah, a lot of coded stuff, right?

Yeah, so there's numerical value to the words, which is really weird.

There are churches, though, that do teach that. There are some religious traditions. I agree with you that this tradition is not well taught to Christians or Jewish people, you know, today. But that doesn't mean that the Christians aren't going to go out and learn for themselves. They do. They do learn for themselves, and they actually have communities that know about this. So, lots do.

Well, certainly the Ethiopians. Yeah, of course. Right? Which is weird that the Ethiopian Bible has that in it. They have the Book of Enoch as a part of the Ethiopian Bible.

Yeah, that— well, it's one of the first Bibles. It's one of the first— so Ethiopian Christianity is like one of the oldest forms of continuous Christianity.

But there's no real translation of it that's available in English, right? Isn't that the case with the Ethiopian Bible?

Well, let's see. Yeah, I guess you're right. I don't actually know about that. I mean, you can look it up. I mean, people can look up this stuff and there are people who write about it, like my field, people write about about it, right?

Your field. But I mean, the average Christian is not really aware of what's in the Book of Enoch.

Yeah, you're right. You're right. So that's where, like, a basic studies religion class, like, where, you know, if you take my class, I'll make you aware of it. I'll make you aware of the different forms of Christianity, right? The ones before the Roman Catholicism and, you know, the earliest forms of Christianity. I'll also make you aware of the supernatural worldview I feel like it's all—

there was something that happened. There's real events. And I just don't know if the stories are accurate. I don't know if the written version of these stories accurately relays the real events that took place and what they're trying to say, especially when in regards to the Watchers and the Nephilim and all that stuff and the giants. Ants. There's just so many weird parts of those stories that we're just supposed to just accept. Like, what is that? That sounds to me like genetic engineering is what it sounds like. It sounds like a primitive translation of, or explanation of, what genetic engineering of human beings was.

That's what it sounds like. You know, that belief was still around, um, after Jesus was crucified, and within the early church, because Paul writes about it in his letters.

What does he write about?

Okay, so you know the tradition of women wearing veils in church? No. Yeah, so if you go to a mass today, like a Catholic mass, some women will be wearing veils, and if you go to a traditionalist mass, they will be wearing veils. And the reason that Paul gave was because of the angels that were attracted to to them in church. So you have to be careful, women, when you go to church, the angels might be there who might be attracted to you. He doesn't say that specifically, but that's part of the reason why. So the early Christian church was— they were immersed in that worldview. That worldview is still around.

So the women wore veils so that the Watchers wouldn't find them attractive?

Yeah. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. And some women still wear veils. Crazy. So yeah, a lot of that tradition is still here.

So just a residual interpretation of whatever the original story, the original event was. That's right. Do you think humans were genetically engineered?

I'm— you know, I'm Catholic, right? I'm Christian. Okay, so what do you think happened? I mean, of course my views have changed. So before I got into the UFO thing, I was a— I went to Catholic church. I went to daily mass sometimes. I was Christian. I've been Christian since I was 11. I was raised by secular parents. They were not—

How did you get involved in Christianity?

I was converted through— on Easter, by the way, on Good Friday, by watching, and I didn't try to watch, it was on TV. My parents had put it on, and I was 11, and I was doing Easter eggs, and they were playing Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth. And I started to watch it. Now, I didn't know that he was crucified at the end because I was just a kid. I wasn't raised religious at all. And my dad came from a Catholic family. My mother came from a Jewish family. She's Jewish. And so they didn't practice religion, total rationalists. So I was watching it, and it was when the scene where the woman, the adulterous woman, is just about about to be stoned to death by these guys, right, this big group. And they're just about to throw the stones, and Jesus goes down and starts drawing something. And I was like, what is he gonna do? And he basically says, those of you without sin, throw the first stone. And I was like, oh, that was brilliant, right? And so then I was hooked. I was hooked. And at the end, he was crucified. I was devastated.

And so I told my mother, I said, Mom, you have to buy me "Like you have to." So the next day we went out. She doesn't know what to look for, so we go to this store and the person helped us out and they gave us a King James Version of the Bible, red letter. I said, "I want everything that Jesus said. I want to know all that he said." And I was hooked on it. So I read this thing, I read the whole thing, and at that point I recognized I had to grow up and I had to read the original sources because that was hard to read. To read. It didn't make sense. I was like, "This doesn't make sense to me." What he said was beautiful, and I was hooked. I became a Christian.

What didn't make sense to you?

What part of it? The whole Bible. The whole Bible, when you start to read it from beginning to end, you know, there are all those things that you just don't understand. There are two creation stories in Genesis, and you're like, "Well, why are there two?" And you know, there are all those names and lineages, and you're like, "What?" You get to the book of Leviticus, and it has all these rules and regulations, and you're They're like, "You just don't understand it." And I knew that at that point I needed to learn the original languages and how they were put together. That's why I decided to become a professor of religion. And so I became a Christian, and I was a born-again Christian. And then when it came time to go to high school, I asked my father— he had connections to Catholics— if I could go to Catholic high school. Luckily, I went to a Sisters of Mercy high school where they were beautiful people, and I learned Catholicism in action, like actually helping people and stuff. And I became Catholic. And so I've been Catholic my whole life after that. Did your parents ever join you?

My dad did, yeah. He's passed away. He died pretty young. But yeah, he did. He was brought back to religion because of me. Wow. Yeah, yeah, it was really pretty intense. But that's just how it was. But anyway, so I became very interested, obviously. I thought, this is super important. We have to know about how this happened, just like you said. How do I know this really happened? And that's when I became aware of the Ethiopian church, the earliest texts for Christians, Christians, and I don't think Christian churches do a good job of relaying this information to Christians, frankly. I think that they don't do the best job and that they could do it better. And so I now teach New Testament at my university, and I do my best to kind of convey what these people were experiencing and the kinds of— people still experience those things today. So yeah, so that's how I became, that's how I became Christian.

Interesting. So when I said, do you think that human beings were genetically engineered? Your response was, I'm Catholic.

Yeah, unless you're talking about God doing that genetic engineering.

So you think that the Bible is an absolute literal translation of real events? No, no, no. So what do you think it is?

It's a— okay, so Catholics don't believe in biblical literalism, which is that you can't because there are so many parts of the Bible that contradict. So you'd be, you know, that would be a contradiction. But they believe that it is the inspired word of God written by people, written by men. And so there's fallibility in terms of the— not in morals and the conveying of the spirit of Christianity. Right. But, you know, so, yeah, that's what they believe. So in terms of the genetic engineering, I believe that Enoch, the Book of Enoch, it conveys the spirit of truth, absolutely. Do I believe that there are— that's why I believe that if the— according— listen, when I started to study UFOs, I was not expecting at all what I found. And what I found reinforced my own my own Catholic upbringing or self-chosen upbringing.

How did it reinforce it?

Okay, so that's where I was at, actually. So I was pretty secular even as a Christian, especially after I went to graduate school. So I went to graduate school, studied all of this stuff, and then became a professor. And I believed in the spirit of the book. I believed in the spirit of Christianity. I believed it's true. True. Therefore, I taught it to my kids, I went to church, I'd sometimes go to mass, you know, they have daily mass in Catholicism. I homeschooled my kids in a Catholic homeschool group for the most part until they needed some outsourcing in math. And so, but it wasn't until I became, I studied UFOs that I recognized that the Book of Enoch is alive and well today. That's what I recognized. In ufology. I encountered stuff that I thought looked pretty dodgy. I was like, "This looks like the preternatural." That's what I'm saying. It supercharged my Christianity to the point where I went back and I reread all of that stuff again. I recognized that whatever they're dealing with now, when people are having these experiences and so not all of them, but a good many of them are, you can, you know, look to me similar in kind.

I don't say they're identical, but they look similar, and therefore, if that's the case, then, you know, I need to be a different type of believer. I need to be a much more believing believer. Believing believer? Yeah, and I can't be secular about my Christianity. I I actually have to practice it, live it, be prepared for what comes next, kind of that lifestyle. That's what— that's the kind of lifestyle.

Is it in any way frustrating that you have studied so much of these encounters and these experiences, but you don't have a personal encounter or personal experience with these things?

Well, that's an assumption that you have.

That you don't have one? Yeah. Do you have one? Well, maybe.

I don't feel comfortable talking about it, but yeah, I have some experiences.

Why don't you feel comfortable talking about it? This is part of what you do for a living. You talk about other people's encounters. Why would you not feel comfortable talking about your encounters?

Well, because that is— I mean, I'm not sure what to think of them. That's why I— listen, this is not what motivated me to study ufology or those kinds of things. When I think about the encounters—

Did you have these encounters before you studied ufology?

When I look back, I say yes, I had those encounters, yeah. When did you first have an encounter? I didn't interpret them as UFOs, though. Well, I did have a family member who had an experience with what looks like a UFO, and it was documented. I actually found a documentation of it from the time in a newspaper. Other people had I've seen it too. So I live in a place that has UFOs. I grew up near Folsom Lake, and there are lots of UFOs around that area. So he had a— this is, of course, a long time ago when he was not interested in UFOs, I wasn't, and he was young riding his bike up a hill, and he saw it, and it kind of— it was a classic UFO I turned around and looked at him, and he was like, "What?" And sped down the hill screaming. Came into the driveway. My parents went out there. Now, my parents are complete rationalists. And they see it too. And they saw it, and it just kind of hovered. And it was like a giant orb, orange orb. And it hovered for a while, and then it just went up into the sky and disappeared.

Disappeared. And so they had this. This is before I went to college. It was a very long time ago. And then later, when I started to study this, I had family members tell me, "Yeah, remember that?" And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, tell me about that." And so they reiterated that this is what happened, and they wanted to kind of get it on the record. And then one of them found the documentation of a newspaper at the time and sent it to me. So I have that data. So there's been that, but that's kind of a normal thing. Like, people have those experiences and, you know, nothing changes in their life.

But you said that you had experiences that you're not necessarily comfortable in talking about.

Well, I didn't have a UFO experience. Like, I haven't had UFO experiences like that.

What have you had?

Well, I have the very normal experience of a person who is a believing Christian, and if you if you're that kind of person, you will have experiences where you feel like this is, you know, there's more to life than kind of what you're taught at school. So that's the kind of experience I'm talking about. People in the Book of Acts— Can you elaborate? Yeah, yeah.

What do you mean by that? What experiences have you had that made you feel that way?

Oh, I've had lifelong experiences like that. Like what? Well, just that certain things happen at the right time at the right moment. Lots of people have these experiences. If you read about Mel Gibson doing his movies, you know, The Passion of the Christ, he talks about very powerful things that happened on the set. So things like this, things that you know that they're not probable, like Jim Caviezel being hit by lightning when he's on the cross and things like that that happened.— that's— you're like, wow, okay. I mean, you could say that's a coincidence and you can look at it from that perspective, but it's all outlined in the book of Acts in the New Testament if you read that book. It talks about these very significant experiences to the people. But the reason I don't talk about them is because if you talk about them to people who don't have those experiences, they will just say, well, that's just a coincidence, or that's that. So you're like, yeah, that's one way to look at it. So you can't convey— it's like a— it's a question of this qualia. It's a question of your own perception of it.

Right.

But as an educator, don't you think perhaps if you have had these experiences, you have a responsibility to try to relay that information to people?

No, no, no, no. Because I I teach religious studies, so in religious studies, you'll see this in my book too, you're teaching about the actual book, the social context, the historical context. You're not actually advocating for a belief system.

But relaying your personal experiences is not advocating for a belief system. It would be.

Why? It would be.

Because isn't it a belief? Isn't an experience open to interpretation? An ex— so how would you be relaying your belief systems by having an experience that you detail in an honest way that's open to interpretation?

I would do that if I was in a, a situation where that kind of experience was helpful to people. I— and I have done that before. Like, I've been on podcasts where where they would say they're Christians and we're talking about Christian life and so forth. I would explain my experiences and we would talk about that and people would talk about their experiences. But when you're at a secular university, that's not what you do. You don't do that. When I'm writing as a scholar of religion, that's not what it's about. It's not about whether or not these experiences are feel. What it is about is about how this is shaping culture now.

Mm-hmm. What I meant when I asked you that question, I'm talking about UFO abductions, encountering beings and entities. That's what I'm talking about. I'm like, have you had one of those experiences? I have not.

No, I have not.

But don't you wish you did?

Um, no, it doesn't look like I wish that I did. When I look at what happens to people who who have had abductions and these experiences, it looks traumatic, Joe. I don't know. I don't want that. Interesting. Like, life is already traumatic enough, you know?

Right. I get what you're saying. When you hear about people that supposedly they have this ritualistic practice where they manifest orbs and they meditate— What do you think that is?

Yeah, so I do believe that they're doing something.

A friend of mine did it recently. Mm-hmm. Did she? What happened? She's very rational. Okay. She's a very rational person, very intelligent person, and she wants me to do it with her. She's like, you gotta come and try this out. I'm like, we're trying to set a date where she's like, I'll explain to you how I did it and how you do it. I was like, all right, I believe you. Like, I've been friends with her for decades. She's super rational, very normal person, very intelligent, not crazy in any way, shape, or form. And she's like, this is gonna sound fucking nuts, but if you do this, and if you do it and you give it enough time, they will show up.

Is this with like Stephen Greer? Is it like C5 with him?

She doesn't do— she's okay. She's not in any way associated with that guy, but she was taught how to do it by someone else, and she said she went on some fucking thing where they all did it together. Yeah. And then she's done it privately, alone, and she said you could do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's gonna—

she said it's gonna sound fucking insane, but it's real. Okay, what do you think about that?

All right, well, I believe that it happens.

What do you think is happening?

I'm not sure what's happening, but I don't think I would do it. Why not? Because I believe in cognitive sovereignty. Like, I believe that we should be sovereign, like, you know, not have something interacting with us. Yeah. Beyond our— mentally and spiritually. And, you know, so, yeah, that's why I wouldn't do it.

But does it take away your sovereignty to communicate with something else?

Yeah, a lot of times it does. So one of the things that I noticed when I started to talk to people, and I don't want to like, you know, tell you not to do it, but I'm going to do it.

Okay. You're not going to talk me out of it.

All right. All right. I wouldn't do it. Yeah. So one of the things I noticed was a lot of people in the beginning when I was doing this research would, and still today, would say, Diana, you can contact these beings. Kings. Okay. And this is how you do it. And you have to give them permission. And I was like, what are you talking about?

That sounds like vampire shit.

Yeah, that's right. I'm like, I'm not getting a vampire in. Yeah, yeah. You have to give them permission. Yeah.

And, and that's not weird. I wonder if that's where that comes from.

All right. Well, that's what I'm telling you, right?

The vampire lore is that you have to invite them in.

That's right. But that's the demonic lore too. Really? You have to invite them in? So, I mean, if you're going to do that, that's— you're inviting them in.

Oh boy, so now I'm second-guessing it.

I'm just saying, uh, there's—

Jamie, would you do it? I mean, I almost tried.

I think, I think I try it daily, but like just in my own head.

What do you think about people that have psychedelic experiences where they encounter entities?

I think they're encountering entities. Yeah, so I think psychedelics in is the quick way to open up that spiritual part of your brain, but it's a dangerous way. Well, look, okay, I'm not— I don't want to go down this road. I've been on— I've gone down this road before, but— What's wrong with it?

Why don't you like to go down that road?

Oh, because I guess there's part of your brain— actually, we talked about this last time I was on here. We talked about the spiritual sense, remember? We talked about the pineal gland and stuff like that. Yeah, okay. So I've learned a lot about it since then, all right? And what I— I— it's a real thing, okay? And again, the Christian churches don't do a good job of conveying that this is really important for Christians to know about. And not just Christians, but religious people all over the world. This is what they're doing when they're doing those protocols of religion. They're trying to cultivate the spiritual sense. Why? Because the human being is oriented toward the sacred. We're a very specific type of thing. We're oriented toward the sacred. The spiritual sense is what helps us connect to it. We could utilize the spiritual sense through certain things—fasting, living a certain way, and that sort of thing. It's really important, by the way. Digital culture like is messing with that, by the way, the spiritual sense. Okay, so psychedelics are one way to like hijack into it and, you know, open up that world. So it's a quick way, but it's— it's— I wouldn't call it the ideal way, although in some religions like the Church of Native Americans, that's their way of doing it.

That's their way of doing it, all right? They have rituals to do it with, you know, sacred Yeah, so to do it casually and without, you know, without attention is probably, might be dangerous. I've done, I've utilized mushrooms when I was young. I like that word. Utilized? Yeah. You know, when I did it though, like I was really young.

Very official.

I was, I was very young. And I prayed before I did it, my friend and I, and we had a really good experience and so forth. But I think I was just lucky. Okay, I think I was lucky.

Why do you think that?

Because I've had friends who've had really terrible experiences. Right. And so I think that it's best just not to, unless you're like born into that culture that does that, and that's part of your religion.

One of the things that seems to be the case in a lot of the people that have had had these bad experiences is that they try to fight it and that they try to battle with the experience. They try to take control of it. The ego gets in the way. They want to regain some sort of a control over their consciousness, and they fight with it, and they have bad trips. You know, there's moments when you do psychedelics where you realize, "I just got to let it go. I just got to realize that I'm not in control of this at all." and just let it go. And some people can let it go and some people can't. I've seen people struggle with it. I've seen people that can't let it go and they fight with it and they have really bad trips and it's very scary to watch. But I think that's the root of it. I think the root of it is you're battling with something that you can't beat. You just have to just let go and just take it in. Here we go. Whoosh! Just go on the ride. And some people can't go on the ride, like, no, and they're grabbing the walls and they're grabbing vines and they're trying to stop their progression.

They don't want to do it, like, it's too scary for them. They don't want to let go. They don't want to— they don't want to erode their belief system. They don't want to expand their view of the world. They're just too— it's too scary. They have a problem with fear. They have a problem with the unknown. They have a problem with having this very isolated view of reality and having that shattered in front of them. They don't feel comfortable with that, and they try to resist it. I think that's what's going on. Hmm. I think you have to understand, like, what it is, and you have to understand that you're not in control, and you got to let it go. You got to go for the ride. But that's also me saying that, and my psyche is very different than another person's psyche, and theirs is different than yours. And everyone, everyone's different. Everyone has different experiences, different psychological vulnerabilities, different, you know, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, we were talking before the podcast about the Shroud of Turin. Oh yeah, yeah. And you—

and we, by the way, we brought that up last time I was here, and that happened accident, remember? Yes. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of people have been talking about that since we talked about it.

Yeah. You were saying something though, that the piece that they used for carbon dating, that this is a piece that had been repaired, but I saw there's a lot of dispute about that online. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people say that that is just some sort of apologetic excuse excuse for why the numbers don't match up correctly. But then I've also seen things that say that the pollen that is on the fibers matches up with the exact kind of plants that existed in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, and that that all aligns, and that further testing needs to be done to determine the actual date of it. That aside, There's still no explanation for why that image exists and how it was created. Yeah. And I've never seen anyone explain in any way that makes any sense how that could have been forged by someone, how it could have been a forgery from someone that long ago that they could figure it out. Also, they could make it a reverse negative image image. So the only way you see it is through when you look at it in a negative.

I know, it's pretty crazy.

Yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Yeah, yeah. Whatever it is, it's really weird. It is totally weird.

And there are people who— there is a guy who's a doctor of, like, blood, a hematologist, and he seems to have no— he's not religious, or he's not like, out there advocating for religion. And he just happened to study it. He studied the blood and again, he was like, and the injuries, because he can study the injuries and identify, and they match up. I mean, I'm not an expert on the Shroud, but believe me, every expert that's out there since I was on your podcast a few years ago have they've reached out to me and they're like, "Tell Joe to get me on," and so forth.

Do you know someone that's a real good credible expert? Yeah, I know someone.

Well, that man I think has a good video out there. Check him out. I don't know his name, but he's— I mean, you should be able to find if you do a search. Yeah, this would be him.

"New study claims blood stains on the Shroud of Turin consistent with torture of Christ." That's not—

he doesn't have an Italian name, the one I know, but I mean, that could be too. I mean, he could be out there doing that. The guy that we found, I can send you the link, but he's an American guy, and he's just, you know, he doesn't have a fancy video or anything like that. But there's another guy who's Catholic called, his name is Father Dalton, and this is his expertise. He knows about this. Now he's theological, but he actually does have studies and so forth.

And what is What is unique about his perspective?

So his perspective is that first you have to understand the Catholic Church is very careful about what they put their, you know, what they say is true and not true. It takes them forever to say something's a miracle. And often when they identify something as being miraculous, they have a huge team of people, often who are the best at what they do, they, and they might not be Catholic, okay, they could be atheist and so forth. So, this was studied at Duke University, the Shroud of Turin, in the 1980s. And I happen to know a priest who was a graduate student there in PhD program, and he witnessed the whole study. So, Father Dalton would be a person who is Catholic, obviously he is a priest. However, he is not going to say, you know, he's going to give you the facts about each of the studies, and he's going to talk specifically about what we don't know, what we don't know about it, what, you know, might be— as a Catholic, you have to say, this is not— we don't know about that. Like, yeah, you're right, it could be this or that. Same thing with the Guadalupe tilma, right?

So, you know, a lot of people say it was created by God and, you know, put on this— you know about that, right? So the Guadalupe image The Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City that was said to be miraculously put. Well, there are some things that have been added later. So I think the Shroud is like that also. But there's been a lot of studies by—

What's so interesting about this Guadalupe thing?

So this is a tilma, which is a cloak. It's from— this is from the 1500s. So this is an image that allegedly, according to devotional Catholicism, this image was imparted onto this cloak. And the cloak was worn by a guy, by the way, I think, I'm not sure, but you know Mel Gibson's Icon? I think that might be part of this. I'm not entirely sure. So here you have something that is unexplainable. Part of it is explainable because after the image was put on, people had painted over it, like, I don't know, 100 years later and subsequently, you know, just to upkeep it. I think the angel was added, a couple of things were added later, but it's not as anomalous as the Shroud of Turin.

Wait, wait, wait, let me explain this well. Okay. This painting.

Okay, so this appears to be a painting, but underneath there's an image, and the image is the Virgin Mary herself without her cloak, without the angel, and without the sun around her. This image allegedly had been put on this guy's cloak, Juan Diego's cloak, in the 1500s. So she wanted a basilica, which, by the way, she's in right now, and that's what she asked for. The bishop at the time said, "I don't believe you, Juan Diego. You have to show me proof." So he went back to the place where he had seen her, and she said, "Go up and get a bunch of flowers and put them in this cloak of yours, and then bring them to the bishop." the bishop. They are out of season. They don't grow in Mexico. So he did. He went and got the flowers. He went back to the bishop in Mexico City and he gave them to him, and when they opened it up, there was an image of the Virgin Mary on the cloak, and that's where— this is what that's supposed to be.

I still don't understand why that's unique. It's just a painting.

No, no one painted it. It just showed It was just there.

Okay, well, what's it made out of? Like, what is the ink? What is the dye?

Yeah, so, okay, so, all right, so this is where it gets complicated. So the original cloak is agave material. It's made out of like, you know, agave. Agave plant. Yeah. And the original image appears to be the agave plant fiber. Fibers somehow. The image was from the fibers. It's not paint. There's no drawing.

These colors?

Okay, so the colors of the cloak around her, that's later, in a later edition. Whoa.

Okay, how do we know that?

Uh, art historians have looked at it, like people who do— they use infrared photography and they're able to identify by the layers of it.

So that the image existed originally and then people painted over the image?

Well, they painted around it.

They kind of embellished it. So where can we see the original?

I'm looking. I mean, it's hard to get that picture because that to me is not as interesting as the Shroud of Turin.

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

They're both really— also, it's painted over already. Yeah, yeah, it's already been sort of bastardized. Yeah. That's the Shroud of Turin. It's just weird because it's not ink. Yeah, it's not dye. It seems to be some sort of like it's burned in somehow or another.

Yeah, right. Yeah. So if you got someone on here to talk about it, I would either get Father Dalton or I would get that doctor.

I would want someone to dismiss it as well. I would want two people.

Yeah, yeah. I think that would be a great—

I'd love to see it because What you're saying about the parts of the fabric that had been repaired, and that's what they did the radiocarbon dating on, I've heard that disputed online. Okay. Yeah, but that would be a thing that you would say if you wanted to really believe that it was more than 2,000 years old. You would say, oh no, no, no, they got the wrong piece. Yeah. And also, why was it repaired? Like, why would someone repair it?

Well, because it's, it's a it's a devotional cloth for the Catholic Church, so they're gonna keep it, you know, by adding more cloth to it. Yeah, because it'll, you know, disintegrate or whatnot. I mean, it's been making the rounds for a long time, right?

Yeah. Oh, oh no.

Yeah, it says it was found in 1350, and they don't know how it got to where it was.

And don't they— yeah, that's right. And don't they say that That's the— when they do the radiocarbon dating, it goes back to around that area. I think it goes to like the 1200s. That's where they think it came from. That's where it originated.

Yeah, so even if it did, it's still anomalous.

It's still weird. Yeah, it's definitely weird. It's weird in the sense that it wasn't painted. It's not dye. It seems to have been created by energy. What is the, uh, conventional description for how it was made? Let's see that. Let's see what it says. What's the conventional description? Let's see. How was it made? Rectangular linen cloth, 4.4 meters long, 1.1 meters wide, bearing the faint front and back image of a bearded crucified man. Conventional description how it was made as a physical object. Material, hand-woven linen made from flax fibers. Weave, thread, side strip. Okay, but what about the image? Okay, a faint sepia— is that how you say that word? Sepia. Straw yellow image shows a man with wounds consistent with crucifixion, rather. Um, side wound, wounds at the wrist and feet, puncture marks around the scalp. Conventional skeptical mainstream explanation for how the image was produced falls into a few camps: medieval painting pigmentation or pigment application, uh, reported finding red ochre and vermilion pigments in a gelatin collagen tempera binder, concluding it was painted in the 14th century. This remains the dominant skeptical explanation. Rubbing or bas-relief transfer technique— researchers like Joel Nickel have reproduced shroud-like images by rubbing dry pigment iron oxide over cloth laid on the bas-relief sculpture, producing the same negative image surface only characteristic acid scorch or chemical staining technique.

Dating: 1988 radiocarbon test performed independently by labs at Oxford, Arizona, and Zurich dated the flax to 1260 to 1390 CE with a 95% confidence, squarely in the medieval period, consistent with its documented appearance in Leary around 1355. Under the conventional view, this dating settles the question. It's a medieval artifact, artifact likely produced as a devotional or pilgrimage object during the period when relic veneration was a booming industry. Okay, so what they're saying is it's made with pig pigment, but I thought it wasn't made with pigment.

Yeah, and also that there are bloodstains on it. Actual blood? Well, that's what it's supposed to be, right?

But is any— that's what it's supposed to be, but has anybody ever done a study, a, any kind of tests on that? The bloodstains are real human blood applied before the image was formed. This is what Shroud proponents contest all the above, arguing the C4 sample came from medieval repair patch, that no reproduction fully matches the image's properties, uh, superficially of the 200-nanometer 3D encoded distance information, no brush strokes, and that the bloodstains are real human blood applied before the image formed. But the mainstream conventional description remains: 14th century linen cloth with hand-produced image made in France as a religious artifact.

Yeah, yeah.

The thing is, people want to believe that it's the shroud that Jesus was buried in, right?

Well, people do want to believe it, but I don't— I didn't necessarily want to believe it. Like, I've had— I used to not believe it.

Do you believe it now? Definitely, yeah.

Why definitely? Um, because of the the information by the blood doctor guy, which I hate to keep calling him that. I wish I knew what his name was. And also my friend who was at the Shroud analysis at Duke University, and also like what Father Dalton talks about, you know, I mean, the thing is, is that it looks pretty weird. It's definitely weird. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so I believe it, but I'm not like, I can't prove that. And I'm not going to. That's why I do religious studies, by the way. I'm not a theologian. I can't say, yes, you must this. I don't know. I, I believe it. That's what I can say.

Dr. John Campbell? Yeah, I think that's him. 3 million subscribers on YouTube? Yeah, yeah, that's him.

Yeah, that's him.

Okay, but why do you— I still understand, why do you believe? If it turns out that these people are all saying the truth, that it was made with dye. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Then I'll just change my perception because I have new data. I will change my theory. Like right now, I believe it's the truth.

But that data does exist, that it's made with dye.

Okay, so dye could have been put on it. I believe that there is an image on it. There is an image on it. How did that image get there? That image— so this is the kind of thing that things could have been done with it. It was repaired. It was, you know, it went through many hands. I mean, I am a person who knows I know about Catholic relics. I know what happens to them. So these are things that would be normal in the life of a relic, that they would be handled sometimes with care, sometimes not with care. So yeah, that's my belief, Joe. Like, if I get, you know, analysis from somebody like Gary Nolan, and he does this, like, you know, microscopic analysis of everything and says, no, Diana, sorry, this I'll be, "Oh, that's too bad.

I really enjoyed having that belief for 10 years." But it seems like if the radiocarbon dating was from 1988, like, shouldn't we do some sort of an updated analysis of what this thing is? Yeah, that's right. To settle it?

Totally. Yeah, I'm all for that.

That's a good question. Where is it now? Where does it live?

Is it like a dinosaur tomb? Honestly, I think it's in been, but I could be wrong. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, in Italy. Oh, wow. Yeah, I could be wrong though, but I think it is.

Can you look at it? Can you go there and look at it?

Yeah, I think you can. Yep.

It's in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. It's been housed there since 1578. Okay. Wow.

It's always been amazing no one's tried to steal it.

Don't say that. Why?

What, would they have ever made a fake to hide the real one? And that's like maybe we're testing the fake one. Yeah, that could be.

Duh. I don't know.

The real one's got special powers or something if you put it on.

Plot thickens. Um, anything else should we talk about before we wrap this up? Is there anything else we didn't cover?

No, you have it. You have an alien image up here and he has horns, looks like a demon.

Yeah, that's the mothership logo. Go. Comedy Mothership. Oh yeah, okay. Yeah, just saying. I know there's no real significance to it though, it's just fun.

Yeah, of course, of course.

Allegedly. I see you did notice that though. It is weird. I get it, especially after we're talking. I should have showed that to JD. I'm like, you think that's—

oh yeah, yeah, he may have noticed it and chose not to say anything.

I don't think he did. Okay.

I think he probably would have brought it up.

So nothing, nothing else to— is there anything else you wanted to talk about before we wrap this up?

I just published a book. It came out yesterday called The Others. And what is it about? It's about stuff we've been talking about, but it's also about religion and about the spiritual sense and things like that and AI. So it has a, it has a theory of of ET, if we're talking about ET, it has a theory of ET in it and a couple other things.

So yeah.

What is your theory of ET? Well, I'm rehousing some theories, so I'm like the theory of advanced technology being what people are encountering when they're encountering what they consider to be aliens and ETs. ET, we talked a little bit about this last time, it was something that I was thinking of, and I just rehashed it so it's there in the book in a more developed form. If I were to just do an elevator description of it though, I would say that Steven Spielberg's film AI is a really good film about ET and what he thinks, you know, if ET were— I know he's just done Disclosure but his movie AI seems like—

When was that movie?

It was a long time ago, but it's really good if you rewatch it today. At the end, I'm not gonna do— well, people should have seen it already, right? At the end, there are aliens, and they're basically— humans have long since gone, and their technology, their AI, has improved itself to the point where it's a life form. And so that would be like the theory of—

I think that's probably— 2001. Oh wow. Haley Joel Osment. Oh, I kind of remember this. Jude Law.

It's about AI, but at the end it ends up being kind of like a theory of ET.

Yeah, which I kind of have a feeling that life eventually stops being biological and becomes digital. And maybe that's what people are encountering.

Yeah, that's what the Others is. It has a chapter, two chapters about that. Yeah. All right.

Well, Diana, it's always fascinating talking to you. Yeah, you too. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. Did you do the audiobook or did you have an actor do it? No, I did it. Thank you. It's always better. It really is. It's always better when an author actually does the audiobook. There it is. The Others: UFO, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny. And I really loved your other book too, American Cosmic.

Oh, thank you, thank you, appreciate that.

All right, thank you so much. Thank you, thank you for being here. Let's do it again sometime. Yeah, next time you got another book. Okay, I'm sure you're gonna keep writing.

All right, next time, yeah, about Christianity, probably.

Okay, cool, we'll do it. All right, thank you. Bye, everybody.