Cosmosis: Origins

This is Gods, Ghosts, and UFOs. My name is Jordan, and I came up with the name of this show, so I think it's only fair that my co-hosts explain what it's about. Oh, okay. Fine with me. But first, maybe introduce yourself? Yeah, good idea. I'm Mallory, and my day job is mostly comedy, which I think qualifies me to talk about the nature of existence. Foundationally. And I'm Tom, and I'm a musician and an author. And can I also just say that you tell stories like there's a crackling fire next to you all the time. All right, Tom, since we're getting all cozy, what's this show about? Well, it's in the title, isn't it? God's Ghosts and UFOs. It's not like these phenomena are separate from us. I think of what Alan Watts said. Consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies that makes the nervous system possible. Yeah. Tom's quoting Alan Watts, And I'm going to quote the great RuPaul when he said, God is the word we use for that which cannot be described. That's what we're talking about here. Miracles and mysteries and things that go bump in the night. We're just a group of big hearted nerds with magnifying glasses. Exactly. Let's talk about format. Every week we're going to cover something relevant from the news. With maybe a loose definition of news. Let's say current events with a particular event. and then maybe we'll get into a discussion about a related topic or maybe we'll take a deeper dive and sometimes we'll bring in someone who knows way more about the thing than we do yes but even when it's just us we promise it'll be a good time i mean come on do you really want to talk about one more political fart or do you want to talk about aliens and haunted houses and giant balls of conscious plasma in other words all the things they said weren't real gods ghosts and ufos every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. Part of the SpectreVision Radio Network. Cosmosis Origins can be enjoyed as an audio podcast, but it's also the first in our new Travelog series, best experienced in video on Spotify or YouTube. In my mind, the sound of cicadas has always been tied to the greys. I met both around the same time. The cicadas came first. Hanover, Indiana, 1987. I was eight. Within a year, two greys appeared in my bedroom. A brief, piercing memory. I have some guesses for why the appearance of the grays and the sound of the cicadas became entwined for me. An encompassing atmosphere, the perception of a collective mind, the impossibility of sourcing the origin or end of either for a child. When I think of the grays, the two sounds are still that ambient hum. Or a vacuum, the silence of being watched. But that wasn't the first experience with something so other. Other but close. Other but intimate. The first experience that I remember, I was about four years old. We lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We moved around a lot in those days when I was a young kid. I remember I was shoving this bin of toys across my bedroom floor, and somehow two beings just were suddenly there. Two, like what people probably call light beings, like what that probably is. Very slender, kind of the head was more slender than a human head would be, almost as if it was like a flame or something like that, thin arms, or what a representation of an arm would be, and not very much differentiation from chest to waist, just this kind of long, thin, almost like a child's drawing in a way of what a human would look like, like a stick figure. There was some kind of psychic connection almost immediately. It felt like there was some kind of communication happening, it felt like there was kind of a womb or a bubble around the room. And somehow because of that, maybe, like one was giving off more male energy and one of them was giving off more female energy. Communication without words, that just kind of went into my head. And it was along the lines of we know you. You've known us. We came to visit. You'll remember this. We're coming now because later we won't be able to. You won't be able to see us or we won't be able to visit you. That was the sense. The sense was that in the future, this communication would be impossible somehow. And they conveyed a sense of love. And then they disappeared. I didn't know what to do with that you know I'm four years old and I I went out into I remember my mom was at kind of the breakfast table adjacent to the kitchen and I went in there and I was like mom mom mom there are these two weird things that showed up in my bedroom. And she was so sweet to me about it. She said, you know, oh, you don't have to worry about those. Those are imaginary beings. Those are, a lot of people have imaginary friends. And you're at the age when people often interact with imaginary friends, and that's okay. Looking back on it, I imagine that it was the sense of love from my mom too, and being happy that there was an answer. Of course, it's also a situation where I recognize that those beings were real. So I don't remember any fear. I just remember being in awe. I like the purity that I can think of at that time because, you know, here we are so many years later and like There is so much that's muddy and confusing and challenging and deliberately difficult about exploring these topics for people talking about them, for people talking about them with each other. Anytime you put something online, it's grounds for criticism, skepticism, things like that. So there's that element, too, in the emotion, I guess. I recognize that there's, even after all these years of me being open about my experiences to a degree, that there's still a little bit of fear about opening the door further. Because as so many good and bad actors in this space say, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, can you? Thank you. In many ways, we don't actually live in reality so much as we live in the stories that we tell ourselves about reality. Stories about what is possible and what is impossible. Stories about who we are and what it means to be a human being. Stories like the Big Bang, Let There Be Light, Eve and the Serpent, Prometheus Stealing Fire, The Tower of Babel, Pandora's Box, Natural Selection, The Number Zero. We reinforce the walls of these stories through repetition. We tell these stories to each other as though they are true, in books, in schools, in museums, in art. And over time, they solidify into facts. And those facts become the foundation upon which we erect the grand cathedrals of human knowledge. We walk through those cathedrals as though they were permanent. We dwell within them as though the stone could never crack, as though the tales memorialized in stained glass could never shatter. We mistake all that we know for all that is. We forget that deep below the surface of what feels solid and certain, there lies a labyrinth, an ancient mystery, a question that turns eternally in on itself again and again, always just around the next corner, always just out of reach. Most of the time, that story lies dormant, sleeping beneath the stories we tell. We build our lives above it, never knowing it's there. But sometimes, without warning, the beast at the center of the labyrinth stirs. It awakens like an old god, stretching in the dark, raking its long talons against the walls of our certainty, until cracks begin to spread. And from those cracks, something vast and unknowable slips out into the neat architecture of the world you thought you lived in. Once that happens, nothing is ever quite the same. The world will never feel as sturdy, and the stories will always ring a little hollow. You realize that what you thought was the bedrock was only scaffolding, and that the labyrinth has always been waiting beneath your feet. I had just such a moment four years ago. It was a quiet Saturday morning in August of 2021. I was sitting cross-legged in the middle of my bed, surrounded by books and notebooks, the covers pitched open like little tents across the duvet. For months, I'd been consumed by the question of UFOs. What began as a passing curiosity had become an obsession. I'd seen a UFO once when I was 13, but it didn't make much of an impression on me. I'd been on vacation at the Outer Banks in North Carolina with my family. One night, as I sat out on the deck looking up at the vast expanse of stars, I suddenly had an urgent, intrusive thought that if I looked straight up, right at that exact moment, that I would see a UFO. And sure enough, I tilted my head back just in time to watch a clear, bright light take two hard right-angle turns, zigzagging against the night sky, before streaking off across the horizon faster than anything I'd ever seen. I ran inside to tell my family, and they just laughed. They didn't believe me, and by the time I went to bed that night, I wasn't sure that I believed myself either. After all, what was more likely? That I'd seen something impossible, or that I'd simply been somehow mistaken? But still, I knew what I saw, And though I shoved it away into some dusty back corner of my mind, like an old key I kept in the drawer hoping to one day remember what it unlocked, I never forgot it. I didn't think about UFOs much until 2021, when I began to notice headlines about UFOs in the news. The stories quickly started to pile up. The Pentagon confirmed that some leaked videos were genuine, service members were beginning to speak out, and a task force was preparing a report for Congress. In a strange bit of synchronicity, it was at that same time that my family planned a trip back to the Outer Banks, and I decided to spend that time learning everything I could about UFOs. I assumed that I would find a tidy answer, black budget technology or an elaborate hoax. What I found instead was a bottomless mystery. There was overwhelming evidence that something real and significant was happening. And yet, whatever it was, it was far stranger than anything I could have imagined. I was hooked. I spent every free moment digging, reading, listening, and trying to understand. It wasn't just the phenomenon itself that gripped me. It was the furious, incredulous question beneath it. How had I missed this? How had I built an entire worldview on stories that left no room for what I had already seen with my own eyes? That morning in August was supposed to be like all the others. Hours of reading, note-taking, and connecting the dots. But instead, without warning, the ground gave way. I can't tell you what happened. Not really. I can only tell you what it was like. Our languages are built to describe the things we encounter within space and time. This was something beyond that. One moment I was myself, Kelly in her bedroom, mid-morning light falling through the window, pen in hand. The next, the scaffolding of self collapsed. The boundaries of my identity, the edges of my body, the story I told myself about who I was. All of it fell away. I was no longer a person sitting in a room. I was everything. I was every atom of the universe, alive and radiant with purpose. I was the inhale and the exhale of creation. Time unfolded not as a line, but as a vast lattice of meaning, each moment a luminous bead, infinite threads weaving them together into stories that were both utterly illusory and completely essential. And I could follow those threads, any of them, all of them, racing outward in every direction simultaneously. My consciousness split and rejoined, expanded and multiplied, and the movement of it felt like play. It felt like laughter. There was a presence with me, ancient and familiar, just over my shoulder, and it asked me without words, Remember? And from the center of my being, I answered, Yes, I remember. I can't believe I ever forgot. For what might have been two minutes or two eternities, I remembered everything. Why I was here, what my life meant. And to my utter astonishment, I saw that, despite what I may have felt in the darker chapters of my life, there had never been a moment of danger, never a moment of abandonment, Never a moment without soul-shattering, invincible love. And that love was the ground of my being itself, effortless, infinite, my birthright and my truest nature. I saw my life laid out in tableaus Each mistake each detour each dark night of the soul suddenly revealed itself as necessary as perfectly placed I saw that even in the moments when I had done everything in my power to destroy myself, I had been guided and protected like a child. I saw that nothing is ever lost, that everything is always here. And then, as suddenly as it began, it was gone. I was back in my bedroom, back in my body, gasping and sobbing with laughter and grief tangled in my throat. The vision slipped away instantly, scattering like a broken string of pearls through my fingers. Already it felt like a dream, but I knew with absolute certainty that I had been changed. The person I had been only moments before was gone. What happened that morning didn't just change me. It unmade me and left someone else in my place. For my entire adult life up to that point, I had been an atheist, a strict, almost militant one. I believed the universe was absurd, indifferent, and empty of meaning. But when I returned to myself and found myself sitting back in the middle of my bed, I didn't just believe in God. I felt God. not as an entity, not as an abstraction, but as the ground of being itself, moving through me, in me, as me. I realized with astonishment that I had a soul, that it was eternal, and I could feel it stirring inside me like a living flame. Other changes were subtler, harder to name, but no less absolute. I suddenly knew in my bones that goodness was real, not just as a social contract or a useful fiction in a relativistic universe. I saw that goodness was a force, a cosmic reality of coherence and light. I began to see that my thoughts, my intentions, even the energies I allowed into my body carried weight, that what I put into the world mattered in a way that I'd never considered before. All of these ideas, even moments before, would have been laughable to me. My own thoughts were suddenly foreign. I wandered through them, lost. Because I knew instantly that the person I had just been moments before was gone, and with her went the life I had built. Would my fiancé still recognize me? Would my family and friends think I had lost my mind? Did I believe that I had lost my mind? There were moments when that seemed like the only sane conclusion. But the grief wasn't just about how others would see me. It was the death of certainty. The death of the scaffolding I had trusted. The quiet terror of realizing that my old world was never coming back. In the days that followed, I moved like a ghost through my ordinary life. The career that had once defined me suddenly felt hollow. The inbox I had once worshipped became meaningless. And when I wasn't working, I was consumed, researching, writing, circling the mystery like an animal at the edge of a fire. I started praying and meditating every day, though I had no words for who or what I was praying to. I lived in two worlds at once. One where I could still pass for who I had been, and another where everything had already changed. It was in that suspended place, gasping, grief-stricken, but unable to turn away, that I sat back down on my bed, the very spot where it all began, and without thinking, picked up a pen. What spilled out was not an explanation. It wasn't even an attempt at one. It was an outline, a map, however improbable, of how I might begin to follow this thread. It was the skeleton of a podcast I would call the UFO rabbit hole. When I launched it a few months later, I told myself it was just a pet project, a way to make sense of my own internal chaos and questioning. But looking back, I can see it for what it really was. the flair that I sent up, desperate to see if anyone else was out there in the dark. I didn't know if anyone would answer, or if what I had to say would make sense to anyone but me. I only knew that I couldn't go back, and so I had to find some kind of path forward. And to my surprise, the podcast grew more quickly than I ever could have imagined. Within a matter of months, it wasn't just reaching people, it was exploding, becoming one of the biggest UFO podcasts in the world. The flare I had sent up was answered in a chorus that I hadn't even dared to hope for. But even as the audience grew, I was still wrestling with what it meant to be an experiencer. And ironically, the podcast actually helped with that. I could bury myself in the research, pile books and interviews and government documents into neat stacks of meaning. but facing what had happened to me was something else entirely. I didn't want to touch it. I wanted to live in the new life it had created for me without having to open the door all the way to the realities of what that life had been built upon. So in those first months, I mostly kept to myself. I kept my head down. I lurked on UFO Twitter, scrolling through threads, watching conversations unfold from the shadows. I posted occasionally, but I shied away from connecting with people. The whole time, that familiar tug of imposter syndrome haunted me. After all, there were people who had been researching this topic for decades before it ever blipped onto my radar. Who was I to be here? Who was I to be saying any of this aloud? Then one day, near the end of summer 2022, almost exactly a year since my anomalous experience turned my life upside down, I got a message from Jay Christopher King. We had never spoken before. I didn't know much about him other than that he was the director of the Experiencer Group, a space that I had kept at arm's length, precisely because it was too close to what I was avoiding. But Jay had plans. He and Jamesy and Doley were putting together a series of small, intimate conferences in New York City called Inquire Anomalous, and he asked me if I'd be willing to be a co-host. The lineup was staggering. Gary Nolan, Christopher Mellon, Jeffrey Kripal, Whitley Streber, Leslie Kane, and more. It was like someone had dropped the canon of modern UFO history onto a single stage. After months of hiding in the background, it felt like getting my letter to Hogwarts. I said yes without hesitation. A few weeks later, I flew into New York for the first conference. I'll never forget the feeling of driving into the city in the back of a cab, watching the skyline rise up around me, and knowing deep down that my life was about to change. The first night, I met Jay, James, and several others for dinner. Looking back, I can see how many important friendships were born around that table. But even in that first moment, I knew Jay was different. There was a spark of recognition, like finding a long-lost brother. We didn't just share a near-obsessive sense of mission. We shared a bawdy sense of humor, a love of the absurd, and a distinctly Midwestern sensibility that made existing in this strange new world feel a little less alien. With Jay, the connection was effortless. From there, we slipped into a friendship naturally. Jay became the person I would call when I needed advice. His knowledge of the field was encyclopedic. On top of his work with the Experiencer Group and the Inquire Anomalous conference series, he'd also previously done some work for the legendary UFO researcher Richard Dolan. It seemed like he knew everyone. He quickly became someone that I didn't just like, but that I trusted. Someone that I could count on in a space that was often confusing and unpredictable. It turned out to be the perfect time for a friend like Jay to enter my life, because my own reckoning with what had happened to me was getting harder and harder to hold at bay. For all my research and long nights writing, I was still avoiding the rawest part of the truth, that I was an experiencer. Jay wasn't just the director of the experiencer group. He was a lifelong experiencer himself. That was always there, quietly shaping who he was. But in those early days, it wasn't something we talked about much. I think he knew I wasn't ready. My first real glimpse into Jay's history came almost by accident when I stumbled across an article written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ralph Blumenthal, in which he detailed Jay's long history with the anomalous. Strange phenomena in his childhood home, encounters with gray-like beings and other strange entities, and unexplained telepathic messages. Reading it, I really didn't know what to think. Abductions and entity encounters were still at the very top of the list of things I wasn't ready to touch. But avoidance has a way of wearing thin. Around the time I was beginning to unravel, Jay and I had started working and traveling together more, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become our docuseries. And when you travel with someone, you get to see them in every light. The fatigue of long days, the laughter over bad meals, the way conversations unspool late into the night when you're too tired to keep your guard up. As I began to reveal more about what I was going through, Jay opened up too. He started to share pieces of his own history with me. The stories were fantastical, encounters with entities, missing time, moments that strained the limits of what I thought reality could contain. And yet, I never once doubted his sanity. Jay was thoughtful, inquisitive, and if anything, almost overly skeptical of his own experiences. He didn't cling to answers. He was still seeking, and he accepted with a rare kind of grace that the answers might never come. In his more vulnerable moments, I could see what that had cost him. That alone told me everything I needed to know. This was his reality. Getting to know Jay in that way changed me indelibly. It wasn't just instrumental in helping me come to terms with my own experiences or in encouraging me to start identifying publicly as an experiencer. He helped me accept the broader reality of the anomalous itself. It's one thing to dismiss abductions as delusion, to write off people who share those kinds of stories as unstable. That's easy. But when someone you know to be honest, grounded, and sane looks you in the eye and tells you what happened to them, you can't just push it away anymore. You have to face it. That's what my friendship with Jay did for me. It shifted the trajectory of my work. And Jay brought more to the table than just his history with the phenomenon. Before he ever got into this work, he had been an artist, a filmmaker, and had years of experience in television production. He had the eye and the instincts for how to tell a story, and he cared deeply about how experiencers could be represented in ways that preserved their dignity and complexity. With our shared interests and complementary skill sets, we began to imagine how we might work together to tell these stories in a way the world could actually hear them. And so we did. We started a production company on Tocalypse Productions. We raised the money for our docuseries, and before long, we were on our way. But then, in the fall of 2023, something happened. Something bad. Jay and I had just started production on our docuseries, Cosmosis, UFOs, and a New Reality, and it felt like there was an endless field of possibility laid out in front of us. We had something to say, and we had each built our own individual platforms to be able to say it. We were running on adrenaline and inspiration, and we felt like we were exactly where we were supposed to be. And then, like a thunderbolt out of the sky, it all came to a screeching halt. without ever intending to, we saw behind the curtain. We wandered too close to something we didn't understand, and we got burned. Badly. I'm not someone who's unfamiliar with trauma. I was the victim of sexual violence when I was young. I was kidnapped while traveling in Colombia. I held my father's hand while he took his last breath decades too soon. What happened was worse than all of those things combined. It was worse, not just because of the severity of what had happened, but because it showed me a kind of darkness that I didn't know existed. Jay has described the world that we found ourselves in in the aftermath of those events as Kafkaesque. And I think that's the perfect word. If you're unfamiliar, the term Kafkaesque refers to a situation or experience that feels absurd, nightmarish, oppressive, and confusing in a way that echoes the work of Franz Kafka, the early 20th century writer. In his novels like The Trial and The Castle, ordinary people are suddenly caught inside vast, surreal systems of authority. These systems are faceless, incomprehensible, and inescapable. The characters never really understand the rules they're being judged by, and every attempt to get clarity only deepens their confusion. What makes it so unsettling is not just the bureaucracy itself, but the sense of powerlessness that comes from realizing that the world you thought you understood operates by logic you can't access, controlled by human beings who are seemingly devoid of humanity. And that's exactly where we found ourselves. What happened to us was covered up by people that we thought were friends. We were told elaborate lies about why it had happened by people that we trusted. We were told it was being handled, but it became clear rather quickly that we were the thing that was being handled. And wherever we turned for help, we found only more lies and manipulation. The tendrils of this monster we had stumbled upon seemed to stretch everywhere. By no fault of our own, we had seen things we weren't supposed to see. We knew things we weren't supposed to know. And even though we didn't quite know how to put all those pieces together and were, frankly, too shell-shocked to even really try, apparently we needed to be neutralized. They needed to know that we would never talk. And it worked. They got their wish. so why say anything now i swore when i started this work that i would never be the kind of person who referred to anonymous sources or said things publicly that i couldn't fully and openly support with evidence the trust me bro trope in ufology is so entrenched and ubiquitous that it ends up poisoning the discourse with endless speculation and supposition. I've always hated it, and I never wanted to participate in that in any way. I'm also acutely aware of how it becomes a slippery slope. The field of ufology is littered with the spent careers of researchers whose credibility was eroded away by their inability to say what they mean and to tell the truth about what they know It makes you look like a kook at best an opportunist, a charlatan, or a disinfo agent at worst. And it's dangerous. Even without naming names or giving any details, we're towing a line that it's been made very clear that we are not to cross. And we have no illusions about our ability to protect ourselves or anyone else should it be decided that we've gone too far. We know that we can't. The names and the details of what happened have become one of our very few cards that we have to play for our safety. Though they aren't the only ones. We've learned so much more since then. And we've made sure that the truth doesn't live or die with a single file or a single story. But there is a cost to silence. I'm not someone who's comfortable with lying. Lies are corrosive. They eat away at trust, at intimacy, at the fragile threads that connect us to one another. After what happened, the change in me was obvious. People would ask what was wrong, what had happened. And I'd deflect. I'd offer half-truths, change the subject, or just pretend I was fine. Even my own husband still doesn't know the full truth. That kind of secrecy is alienating and isolating. It builds walls where there should be connection. And slowly, it makes you feel like you're drifting further and further away from everyone you love. And even from yourself. But the worst part isn't the loneliness. The worst part is that it's a moral injury. A moral injury happens when you're forced to act against your own values. When you're pushed into a situation where survival means betraying what you believe is right. It's not like trauma, where something is done to you from the outside. A moral injury comes from within. Because you can't escape the knowledge that you did something that violated your own code. And that's exactly what lying feels like to me. Every time I deflect, every time I deny, every time my name is used to prop up someone whose values I abhor, I can feel it eating away at me. I can tell myself that we didn't have a choice, but the truth is that we did. And to protect ourselves and the people we love, we made it. That's the wound that doesn't heal. Since the fall of 2023, I've felt like I've been slowly drowning. Telling what I can of the truth is me fighting my way back to the surface and finally taking a breath. It's me saving the most important parts of myself in the only way that I know how. It's taken me a few years to begin to unravel what happened. We're both still processing, and I probably always will be. Along the way, I've stepped back publicly from some of my stances I once held about ufology and the field in general. People didn't know what had happened, but it was clear that something had. The changes were impossible to miss. I've tried to say what I can, where I can. Jay has as well. But the truth is that, despite everything we've seen, we don't have the big answers about what is going on with UFOs and the secrecy around it. we've just seen enough to know that we don't actually want to know and that we want no further part of the machinery that surrounds it so where do we go from here jay and i share the sense that our work is not done. Over the last several months, we found ourselves circling the same questions. How do we keep going honestly and authentically? How do we stay true to the inquiry into the phenomenon itself and not get swallowed by the macabre circus that surrounds it? How do we find joy in our work again and maybe even help bring that goodness and joy to other people without dragging all the rest along with us? The answer is simple, but not easy. Block out the noise, follow the signal, get out into the field and back to the ground truth of the mystery. Because you can read books forever. You can parse documents until your eyes blur. You can stand in rooms politely sipping drinks next to the people who claim to know. But nothing compares to walking into the places where the anomalous is happening, listening to the people who are living it and standing on the fault lines yourself. That's the place where the magic lives. And that's how I found myself alone on a winding road, heading deep into Appalachia. I was on my way to a cabin in the woods to meet up with Jay and our friend Justin and to begin again. Thank you. Hey, friends! It is so great to see you. Hi. I missed you. Oh, I missed you, too. How was the drive? Good. Is it right? Yeah, good. Yeah. Yeah? Do you want to help with your bags? Oh, we can get them in a minute. Thank you, Gaville. Yeah. Yeah. All right. One question. Do you mind if I put a mic on you? Are you a fed? I think a fed would be a little bit quicker on the draw than I am right now. But here we go. All right. Let's see. There we go. Put that right there. Boop, boop, boop, boop. Should be fine. Can I get mine over here? Yep. Okay. Cheers. It's so good to see you. Things have just been so crazy. It feels like the narrative's on overdrive. Every day it's something new. I can't keep up with it. I don't even want to keep up with it anymore. You mean the online discourse? Yeah, just UFO world in general, I think. It's just gotten so frenetic. It feels like the zone is getting flooded with so many different stories and whistleblowers, and yet somehow all of it doesn't really amount to anything. And there's something about it that rings kind of false to me. Do you know what I'm saying? I completely agree with you. So it's difficult because what we see online is so based around the idea of legislation. and you know i'm hopeful and i want to be optimistic i'm not a firm believer in progress from the government the u.s government the way that it's been going the last few years or maybe ever with especially with regard to this topic like i don't i don't know exactly why such a majority of the community online, regarding UFOs, et cetera, really feels the need to focus so squarely on that if it's not about managing a narrative when it comes down to it. This journey started for me with mystery and wonder and inquiry, and I feel like I've just gotten to this place where I feel underwater with the drudgery of the narrative and the intrigue and the cover-up and who's telling the truth. And when I catch myself getting so caught up in that stuff, I end up looking at what we're really talking about in kind of the popular UFO discourse, and it bears almost no resemblance to the actual phenomenon. What I hear you talking about are stories that people tell each other, right? Yeah. And not only that, you're also talking about a managed narrative. You're talking about a discourse that's like season 50 or season 80 of a TV show that's a cover-up. And we jump the shark. And we jump the shark. Big time. Fonzie jumped the shark. Everybody jumped the shark. Well, and it feels, I agree, because it feels really managed. And the thing that always strikes me about it is just how none of it seems to resemble the phenomenon the way that I've come to know it through my own experiences or other people's experiences. I mean, you're in support groups with people every single week talking about this stuff. Like, what is that even like for you? And what is it like for people that you talk to in these groups to have this one conversation going on in kind of the disclosure world that seems so kind of counter to what people are experiencing in their everyday lives? In the support groups, what I see most often is that people are mainly rooting for it for the purposes of validation, for their own validation, if anything. And that, to me personally, is heartbreaking because I don't feel like elected officials should be the arbiter of self-validation or the validation between partners, family members, etc. Like, I just I don't I think that that feels false. Yeah, we've surrendered too much if we do that. Yeah, we've surrendered far too much. I don't think that experiencers should be looking towards elected officials who are basically, you know, at this stage of the game, largely bought by corporations. and in this field especially, there's so much weight that goes unacknowledged for understandable reasons in terms of how many politicians seem to be in the pocket of defense contractors and the military-industrial complex in general. And, you know, like, I don't see exactly how that becomes a force for validation for people that are actually experiencing the phenomenon themselves. You know, when we were making the docuseries last year, that was such a revelation for me. How so? Because actually getting out into the field and actually talking to experiencers, talking to people where these things actually happen and just getting away from the noise. I felt like I was able to learn things and have insights about the phenomenon, about what we're actually dealing with here. And it changed me. And it also kind of woke me back up to that feeling that got me excited about this. in the first place, that feeling that I feel like I'm kind of losing again. And I just, I'm ready to find it. And I think that just getting out into the field and following that signal as much as we can, and already this is so great. And I'm so happy to see you. I missed you. I missed you too. It's fantastic to be here. All the burnout was real, but this feels great. Yeah. Well, cheers, friend. Cheers. Again. it's hard to know where to begin with something like this how do you follow the signal of something that may not want to be found at some point you just begin you take a step and then another you let the environment close in around you you stop trying to see and you start to listen We came to the Ohio River Valley because it has a reputation. Things happen here. Strange things. It's as if the unusual gathers in the cracks. In the fog between day and night. In the thin places between worlds. And maybe even in people who live between realms. John Keel called places like this window areas. Zones of high strangeness where the veil seems to wear thin. You hear stories, lights in the sky, voices in empty rooms, creatures slipping in and out of the dark. It's like the world forgets how to hold itself together for a brief moment. But what makes a window area? Why here and not someplace else? It could be the geometry of the land, the quiet hum of magnetism, the invisible web of energy threading through the earth. Or maybe it's deeper than that. Maybe it's about reality itself. Out here with fewer eyes to collapse the wave, maybe the field loosens, breathes, stretches, and reveals what it usually hides in the glare of too much observation. I do know this. When you show up with intention, when you come open and curious, there's a shift. You feel it. The air changes. the wider bandwidth opens up. And maybe that's part of the secret. Maybe it isn't just the land that can open a window to the other side. Maybe people can be window areas too. Hey mom! How did it feel for you recognizing that there was fundamental reality to some of these anomalous experiences that were happening? You know, it changed over time. And I would say, I will back into my answer by recognizing that I grew up in the church, in a Christian church, with the stories of extraordinary events. And so there was some base knowledge that there are realms beyond what I ordinarily see. So there's that. But I know, for example, when we were in Fort Wayne and you were very young, to recognize it felt anxiety producing on my end. and as if I could not contain the truth. I was working hard to make meaning out of it and to put it into categories that I knew and open up the possibility that it's a whole new category that I didn't know. And then over time, recognizing as different things happened with you and some with me, there was sometimes a real deep anxiety and fear and sadness. And so I would try to hold on to the normalization of I would see it in other cultures, I would read it in books, I would talk to others with the same experience, and that helped me normalize it. And at the same time, I lived with anxiety, fear, frustration, sadness, all of them in war. So it was oh this is the truth I know this is the way it is and oh my goodness. That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. Words are kind of weak for the feeling that goes with this. a very basic level for me as a parent was wanting safety, wanting you to feel secure within yourself, wanting for you to feel comfortable in your own skin and safe in the places we are. And a sadness that, at least as I was observing, when you felt safe enough to say something to some of your peers, they would abandon you. Even with the best intentions, I had hopes that your life would look a particular way. You know, I'd like to say I did, but I did. Of course. And this was so much a part of your experience. that I knew whatever path you were on would be part of the path. And I felt like that would be isolating. I felt it would be challenging energetically and physically and emotionally. I was worried that you would not find a community that could support you in that. You know, my primary concern, of course, is for you. So to have you have that is very, very centrally important to me. But I also care that other people have it because of what you all are doing. Thanks, Mom. That means a lot to me. And what others are doing, too. Yeah. It means a lot to me. I really appreciate that. You know, something that I'm realizing over this last year is that I think I, even though I've made my whole life about this and I've rearranged my whole life around what happened to me, I think there's like a big part of me that hasn't actually accepted it. That anomalous experiences, that you experienced them in the first place? Do you mean that? Yeah, I mean, I think that whatever happened to me, it changed my entire life. And that's so obvious to everybody who knows me, right? Everything about me changed. But at the same time, there's a way in which I have kind of refused to directly engage with that. Like I, there's a way in which I continue to over intellectualize it. And in some ways that's what the UFO rabbit hole was. It was me trying to make some sort of rational, objective sense of this thing that I had no, no way to make sense of. And I think I, in some ways I'm still, I still haven't quite gotten to a place of acceptance. Like there's still a part of me that's so cerebral about it. and that I feel like in some ways that's holding me back, that I've spent too much time overthinking it and that I need to just sort of live into it in a way that I maybe haven't been willing to, at least not publicly. Do you think that that cerebral or critical distance, whatever that is, do you think that you're keeping that for the purposes of safety? Yeah, I mean, I think I'm just afraid. I'm afraid to admit it to myself. hmm there's still like an aspect of consent in all of this that I don't feel like was really present in what happened to me like I'm so objectively happier and more useful and more fulfilled and I love the work that we're doing together and I love my life but I didn't choose this I like I didn't decide this I didn't see it coming if you had given me the choice four years ago, I would have said no. And so there's a part of me that has a hard time accepting that, that it's happened against my will, even though it's a good thing. I know it's all jumbled up for me. And part of it too is just that I'm afraid of how it looks. I wish I wasn't like that. And I feel like I've made so many strides in the last few years about no longer caring as much about how any of this looks to anyone. But the truth is, is that like, I am desperately afraid of being seen as, as, as crazy, or as credulous, or as, you know, any of the many, you know, adjectives that are slung at people who talk about weird, impossible things that aren't supposed to happen. And I think I've been trying to like, hold on to this version of myself that's like more connected to consensus reality and that has this kind of like lofty objective view looking down on all of this instead of instead of really owning the ways in which I'm not that that I'm in it you know and I kind of hate that there's a part of myself still even though I'm happier and more fulfilled and doing work that I love that there's a part of me that still doesn't want to fully own that publicly, that there's a part of me that just wants to keep that private. You know, there's a way in which I've kept, I've removed myself from my own work, where it's all kind of a commentary on other things and other people, but it's not, I've removed myself from it and therefore not been as vulnerable as I think I could be. Because it's scary to put yourself out there. It's scary to own this stuff. I mean, in some ways, I'm even scared about putting our relationship out there. Sure. You know what I mean? Like, you and I have been through so much, and we're so close, and like, you're such an important person in my life, and I'm afraid of opening up our relationship to the scrutiny that comes from other people looking in from the outside. I could see that. There's a way in which I want to keep the things in my life that are important to me, kind of close to me. because I'm afraid of what it means to put them out there. But I don't know how I can continue to do this work in an authentic way if I don't do that. Other people around you, your husband, other family, other friends, I am kind of GGG for going straight into the weirdness pretty often, right? Yeah. I like to think that I'm doing it in a responsible way. And I like to think that I'm not goading anybody into doing something that's not going to work for them. I always want to try to be careful. And at the same time, I have a comfort level living in that weirdness that a lot of people don't have. And so sometimes I worry or wonder about whether, you know, if people look at me and they're like, well, he's doing okay, you know, then it should be fine for me too. And that's not always the case. That level of preparation that you're talking about and that level of self-awareness and being like, I guess it depends on whether you want to kind of strip that away or not. So I guess by extension, here we are, we've got cameras around and Justin's over here and we're all doing our thing. In doing this work in the way that we're currently doing it, it's rare. Most people don't approach the field in this way. And here we are. And there's going to be a lot of exposure. there's going to be a lot of vulnerability. And there's a strong likelihood that if we keep peeking into these window areas that we're going to encounter one or more things, right? So are you sure that that's something that you're okay with doing? I mean, I'm smiling because I feel like in some ways we've had this conversation before. Like we've at different levels and in different ways, you know, like I, I appreciate so much about you that I feel like you, that you're aware of the process that I've been going through over the last few years. and that, you know, unlike what happened to me, that, like, you're always kind of, like, making sure that I'm cool with it and that, like, I'm aware of what I'm getting into because, like, I'm only very recently initiated to something that's been, like, native to you. But it does make me a little sad sometimes because I feel like you're often... There have been conversations that we've had where I've felt like you were trying to give me a way out or like like letting me know that like the door is always open and that and that I can go. And like as much as I appreciate that, like. It makes me. A little sad just because I recognize that that's. Part of the just calculus for you of relationships. Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. There have been a lot of folks through the years that maybe slept over it at my house when I was younger. And an encounter happened, and I had no idea that something like that was going to happen that night. And then I wake up, that person's really weirded out, I feel guilty. especially in a situation where I, especially when I was young, I didn't want to tell anybody about this stuff, right? And then if something happens, it feels like I was withholding something important. But how was I supposed to know that of all nights, something like that would happen then, right? So there's, you know, over the course of years, over the course of decades, there's there's a fair amount of baggage that can happen that way. And so with that, like, I definitely have felt in the past, like I have to give people agency or remind people that they have agency and that it is, it's out of an act of love for myself. Um, it hurts me often, but I also realized that I can't let people get into that level of depth with the phenomenon without kind of taking a pause and a thought there. You know, it's important. But I also want you to know that that even if there was no cosmoses and even if for whatever reason at some point I decided to walk away from all of this they're like I'm not I'm not gonna walk away from you like you're an extremely important person in my life my life has absolutely gotten weirder and that weirdness is not always comfortable but there's nothing about being your friend that's a sacrifice. Oh, I, I really appreciate that, Kelly. I really appreciate that quite a bit. Well, I'm, I'm happy to live into the weird with you. So my point in all of this is that I'm all in and I really just want to go have fun. Like, let's go have an adventure. I would love nothing more than that. Uh, and maybe more than one adventure. Yeah? Yeah. Alright. Yeah, okay. You're all in. Yep. Let's do it. Alright. Justin? I'm in. Let's do this. Alright. Nice. Alright, well cheers. Cheers. And cheers to you. Cheers, Justin. We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Now receiving frequency transmission. for me, like, like, I will have a dream, uh, about a series of things, and then that next day, um, those things will, will sort of pop up, and sometimes it's like, oh, like, I know I'm gonna run into this person, so I'm dreaming about them the day before, or whatever, You know, I was just flipping through my dream journal this morning. And when I opened the journal, I opened right to a page that was about Walton Goggins. and I actually met Walton Goggins yesterday which just felt like another weird like oh cool I need to keep dream journaling Transmission complete. Stay tuned to Spector Vision Radio. Stay. Stay.