Hey everyone! I just wanted to drop this quick bonus episode to let you guys know about another really exciting UFO docuseries coming out this Sunday, October 27th on MGM+ called Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown. This series from JJ Abrams’ production company Bad Robot features Whitley Strieber, Jeff Kripal, Garry Nolan, Leslie Kean, Chris Mellon, Jay Christopher King, Tim Gallaudet, Mitch Horowitz, and many more. And hey, guess what? I’m in it, too. It looks like it’s shaping up to be a fantastic show, and it is an absolute honor to be involved in this project next to so many people that I admire. 

In this episode, I sat down with Co-Executive Producer, Kevin Lincoln to hear more about the show and about the process that he and his team went through to bring this to life. I’ve been very impressed with Kevin and his team and how far they were willing to go to chase this story down all the strange rabbit holes that you find on this path. Kevin is a very intelligent and extremely well-read guy, and this was a fun conversation that made me even more excited to watch the show. 
 

—Kelly

 

In this episode of the UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast, host Kelly Chase returns from a hiatus with a brand new conversation with James Madden. The episode explores themes of psychoanalysis, epistemic vulnerability, and the psychological motivations behind belief systems in ufology. Together, Kelly and Jim ponder the deeper implications of mind control, trauma, and the symbolic nature of our cultural fascination with UFOs, aiming to navigate the complex landscape of human inquiry and understanding.

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TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Welcome Back to the UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast

01:02 Upcoming Documentary and Personal Transformation

02:27 A New Direction for the Podcast

02:44 Conversation with Dr. James Madden

04:35 Dr. Madden's Recent Work and Psychoanalysis

06:36 Freudian Insights and Human Motivation

10:37 Epistemic Vulnerability and Belief Systems

15:07 Challenges in Ufology and Disclosure

22:20 Language, Belief, and Mind Control

25:41 Reflecting on Personal Beliefs

26:26 Freud's Death Drive and Trauma Reenactment

29:52 The Addictive Nature of Unfulfilled Promises

31:08 Comparing Ufology to Sports Fandom

33:18 Personal Struggles and Finding Meaning in Danger

35:21 Cultural and Political Outrage Cycles

40:28 Symbolism in Dreams and Collective Psyche

44:29 The Unending Human Project and Self-Destruction

46:29 Concluding Thoughts and Gratitude

In this episode, you’re going to hear from Peter Levenda who spoke at the Inquire into Anomalous Experience and the Phenomenon conference in April of 2023. Although this talk is from a little over a year ago, I think you’ll find that it feels especially timely given everything that’s been going on in the news. It’s also well-timed with the upcoming release of the third book and final book in the Gods, Man, and War series that he authored with Tom DeLonge. War will be out in September, and I know many of us in the community, myself included, are eagerly awaiting its arrival.

If you aren’t familiar with Peter Levenda, he is an author and researcher who has written several phenomenal books on occult history. While most of his books aren’t directly about the UFO phenomenon, they are invaluable resources for people who want to understand the full context of the hidden histories in which the phenomenon is inextricably enmeshed. In particular, I recommend Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement in the Occult and the Sinister Forces trilogy. 

Also this week, James Iandoli (who co-hosted the event you’ll be hearing from today) just released a really fantastic interview with Peter Levenda on his Engaging the Phenomenon podcast. If you’d like to hear more from Peter, I’ll have that episode linked up in the episode description so you can go check it out. Make sure to subscribe to James’s podcast while you’re there, if you haven’t already. It’s one of my all-time faves.

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EPISODE BRIEF

Watch Peter Levenda on Engaging The Phenomenon

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The podcast is still on hiatus as I work with the Ontocalypse team to wrap up production on our upcoming docuseries, The Beyond: UFOs & A New Reality. But while I’m away, I’ve teamed up with Jay Christopher King to bring you guys a series of unreleased talks from the phenomenal Inquiry into Anomalous Experience and the Phenomenon conferences.

In this talk, we hear from Joshua Cutchin. Josh is a researcher and author of several books including Thieves in the Night: A Brief History of Supernatural Child Abductions and Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death & the Paranormal. In the traditions of great works like Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia, Cutchin’s work explores the profound connections between folklore and myths from around the world and modern reports of contact with UFOs and non-human intelligences. And in this talk from the December 2023 conference, he dives into the themes that emerge in accounts of all of these phenomena that indicate that they all are deeply tied to the mysteries of death, the soul, and what lies beyond the veil. 

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This episode is brought to you by The Experiencer Group. 

The Experiencer Group is a private online community dedicated to support, curiosity & community for people who’ve had anomalous events of all kinds. They hold regular support meetings for people who are processing anomalous experiences, book clubs, special guest speaker presentations, and more. You can learn more and sign up at tegmembers.com.


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EPISODE BRIEF

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In the third episode of this series, we’re bring you a panel discussion from the April 2023 conference. This panel was hosted by Curt Jaimungal of Theories of Everything and features Leslie Kean and James Fox. Listening back to this discussion is especially fascinating given the timing. This was just a couple of months before the article written by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal broke in The Debrief where the world learned about whistleblower David Grusch and his allegations about the existence of top-secret UFO crash retrieval programs. So besides being a great conversation, it’s an interesting time capsule of the period when this story was in development.  

One quick note about this episode:

The questions from the audience were a little bit hard to hear, so in the interest of clarity, you’ll hear the questions read by Jay.

___________________

This episode is brought to you by The Experiencer Group. 

The Experiencer Group is a private online community dedicated to support, curiosity & community for people who’ve had anomalous events of all kinds. They hold regular support meetings for people who are processing anomalous experiences, book clubs, special guest speaker presentations, and more. You can learn more and sign up at tegmembers.com.
 

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EPISODE BRIEF

INQUIRE ANOMALOUS YOUTUBE CHANNEL
The full video of this talk will be released on the Inquire Anomalous Youtube channel next week. Subscribe now and click the bell so you get the alert when it goes live.

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The podcast is going to be on hiatus for a few more weeks as I work with the Ontocalupse team to wrap up production on our upcoming docuseries, The Beyond: UFOs & A New Reality, which is due out this summer.

But I didn’t want to leave you hanging, so in the meantime, I’ve teamed up with Jay Christopher King to bring you guys a series of unreleased talks from the phenomenal Inquiry into Anomalous Experience and the Phenomenon conferences. In the second episode in this series, you’re going to hear what is one of my all-time favorite talks from Inquire Anomalous, which was given by Dr. Michael P. Masters this last December.

Regular listeners of the show are already familiar with Mike Masters as the guy who, quite literally, wrote the book on the extratempestrial hypothesis. You can find links to that and all of Mike’s books in the episode brief. 

In his talk at Inquire Anomalous, Mike spoke publicly for the very first time about his own experiences of contact with non-human intelligences, including a very strange incident that occurred at the International UFO Congress in 2022. I was lucky enough to be present for this talk and to get to talk to Mike afterward, and I was absolutely blown away by his ability to speak so candidly about what he has experienced—and even more so by his bravery in stepping forward publicly. I’m deeply grateful to Mike for being willing to take that leap, and for inspiring me to do the same.

If you’d like to watch the full video of this interview, that will be posted on the Inquire Anomalous YouTube channel next week. 

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This episode is brought to you by The Experiencer Group. 

The Experiencer Group is a private online community dedicated to support, curiosity & community for people who’ve had anomalous events of all kinds. They hold regular support meetings for people who are processing anomalous experiences, book clubs, special guest speaker presentations, and more. You can learn more and sign up at tegmembers.com.


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EPISODE BRIEF

NEW ON DREAMLAND: Exploring the Deep End of Consciousness and Contact Experiences with Dr. Michael Masters

INQUIRE ANOMALOUS YOUTUBE CHANNEL
The full video of this talk will be released on the Inquire Anomalous Youtube channel next week. Subscribe now and click the bell so you get the alert when it goes live.

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Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support.

Today, I’m bringing you something a little different. As most of you already know, my new media company, Ontocalypse Productions—headed up by myself, Jay Christopher King, and Jordan Flowers, is currently in the midst of completing our first docuseries due out this summer entitled The Beyond: UFOs & A New Reality.

While we’re hard at work on that, posting for the podcast will be a little bit more sporadic over the next few weeks, but rest-assured that The UFO Rabbit Hole will be back to its regularly scheduled programming in June. And you’ll still be getting a couple more new episodes in the meantime, including part 2 of the Through The Looking Glass series before then.

But while things are a little quieter around here, I thought it would be a great opportunity to bring you guys something special. That’s why I’m teaming up with Jay to bring you a series of never-before-released talks from his phenomenal Inquiry into Anomalous Experience & the Phenomenon conference series—or Inquire Anomalous for short. Regular listeners of the show have definitely heard me talk about Inquire Anomalous before. These have been my absolute favorite conferences to attend over the past few years. They’re small, intimate, and the all-star line up of speakers who are truly on the bleeding edge of anomalous studies makes it a truly unmatched experience. 

In this first talk presented by Inquire Anomalous, we’ll be hearing from Tim Gallaudet. Tim Gallaudet is a retired Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy, and a career oceanographer. His former roles include serving as the Deputy Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as well as the Oceanographer of the Navy. He’s also the former superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory. 

More recently, Admiral Gallaudet has made exciting contributions to the field of UAP studies, particularly in the realm of the too-often overlooked subject of USOs or Unidentified Submersible Objects. He recently released a new article through the Sol Foundation which is a must-read on the topic. You can find that linked int he episode brief below.

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This episode is brought to you by The Experiencer Group. 

The Experiencer Group is a private online community dedicated to support, curiosity & community for people who’ve had anomalous events of all kinds. They hold regular support meetings for people who are processing anomalous experiences, book clubs, special guest speaker presentations, and more. You can learn more and sign up at tegmembers.com.

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EPISODE BRIEF

INQUIRE ANOMALOUS YOUTUBE CHANNEL
The full video of this talk will be released on the Inquire Anomalous Youtube channel on Friday, April 5th. Subscribe now and click the bell so you get the alert when it goes live.

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In today’s episode, I had the absolute honor of speaking with one of my personal intellectual heroes, Bernardo Kastrup. 

Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of the Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (with a focus in ontology and philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (with a focus in reconfigurable computing and artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the 'Casimir Effect' of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has also had a 25-year career in high-technology, having co-founded parallel processing company Silicon Hive (which was acquired by Intel in 2011). 

Bernardo Kastrup is also the author of 11 books. I basically have an entire Kastrup shelf inmy office. His book, “Meaning In Absurdity: What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us About the Nature of Reality” is, in my opinion, one of the most important books written on the UFO phenomenon. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Just a heads up before we begin—if you aren’t familiar with Kastrup’s thinking on analytic idealism, the first part of this interview might be a little challenging. If you stick it out, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how elegantly analytic idealism deals with some of the more mysterious aspects of the anomalous phenomena. If you’d like to learn more about analytic idealism, there are some great resources and videos that can walk you through it step-by-step. [Links in episode brief.]



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EPISODE BRIEF
[Links to videos on Analytic Idealism in Episode Brief]

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TIMESTAMP
00:00:30 Introduction
00:04:35 How working with artificial neural networks at CERN led Bernardo to break with physicalism
00:07:12 The difference between intelligence and consciousness00:08:36 Analytic idealism
00:12:26 How does analytic idealism relate to the ideas of Donald Hoffman?
00:14:38 If the world is mental, why doesn’t it behave like a dream?
00:17:23 Bernardo’s UFO experience
00:19:37 How UFOs repel our attention
00:23:02 Memory and UFOs
00:25:46 UFOs and analytic idealism
00:30:09 Logic and finding meaning in absurdity
00:35:11 The “call of the absurd” and the control mechanism
00:39:27 How marketing and propaganda hijack the control mechanism
00:42:47 Are “nuts and bolts” UAPs and high strangeness UFO encounters the same phenomenon?
00:48:44 Bernardo’s ultraterrestrial hypothesis
00:58:37 The rise of AI, NHIs, and the coming consciousness shift

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support.

This episode is going to be different, because for the first time I’m going to talk about something that I never thought I’d talk about publicly, which is my own anomalous experience and how it changed everything about my life and directly led to me starting this podcast.

This is the story of my own highly subjective journey. I’m not asking you to believe anything that I’m saying. My own opinion about what happened to me has changed more times than I count, and I have no doubt that it will change again. My purpose in telling this story isn’t to convince you of anything, but rather to explore in as open and unflinching a way as possible, what it’s like to have an anomalous experience, and to use that as a way to discuss the many complex questions that these experiences raise.



NEW Class from Dr. James Madden
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EPISODE BRIEF

THE INSTITUTE OF NOETIC SCIENCES
I want to thank the Institute of Noetic Sciences for their collaboration, generosity, and patience with me as I’ve worked on this story. You’ll see in episodes 2 and 3 of this series how exactly they became involved in the strange tale I’m about to tell. In my opinion the work that they are doing is some of the most important work being done in the world and is helping to lay the scaffolding for a new and emergent understanding of the nature of our reality, what it means to be human, and our place in this vast and dazzling cosmos.

I hope that if you aren’t already familiar with IONS that you’ll take some time to explore their mission and their work. And if anything in this series speaks to you and you have a little extra give, please consider making a donation to help support IONS into the future.

To make a gift, visit noetic.org/give.


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Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support.

Today we are going to be continuing our Disclosure Field Guide series. As the disclosure narrative continues to unfold, this series seeks to offer a roadmap for those trying to make sense of just what exactly is going on in this strange and confounding moment in our human history.

In the first episode, we talked about how to deal with the ontological shock of recognizing that the world that we live in is not what we were told, and how to get reoriented within that new paradigm. In part two, we’re going to go a step further by diving into the history and structure of the institutionalized secrecy that has kept the reality of the UFO phenomenon hidden in plain sight for decades.

This episode was guest written by Mark Burchick. To find out more about Mark, click on the episode brief below.

Follow Mark on Twitter.



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7 – 9 pm ET

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Sign Up Now




EPISODE BRIEF

BECOME A PATRON
Patrons get lots of great perks like early and ad-free episodes, access to the private The UFO Rabbit Hole Discord server, and twice-monthly Patron Zoom calls with Kelly Chase.

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Content Warning: Sexual assault

In this episode, I had the pleasure of sitting down with someone that I regard to be one of the best minds and brightest lights in this field, Whitley Strieber. Whitley Strieber is an author of both fiction and nonfiction books, perhaps the most famous of which is his pioneering 1987 book Communion, which detailed his experience of abduction that occurred in the winter of 1985. Since then, Whitley has made many other contributions to the field including his most recent book entitled Them, and the book Super Natural which he co-wrote with Jeffrey J. Kripal, both of which have been referenced several times on this podcast. Whitley is also the host of the long-running Dreamland podcast. You can find links to all of this and more in the episode brief.

Whitley’s work has been instrumental to my thinking and growth in this space, and I’m so grateful for both his courage and generosity in sharing his time and his insights.



NEW Class from Dr. James Madden
Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World
Four-week online class via Zoom
Wednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 2024
7 – 9 pm ET

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EPISODE BRIEF

MORE FROM WHITLEY STRIEBER
Books by Whitley Strieber
Dreamland Podcast
Unknown Country
Follow Whitley on X

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Terrible, Glorious, & Useful by Trevor Shikaze

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