All language subtitles for Cosmosis - UFOs & A New Reality (2024) - S01E03 - Hidden Realms

[intriguing music playing]

[McCabe] Peterborough in the U.K.
in 2014, late September or October.

I'd gone outside into the back garden
to smoke a cigarette before bed.

And it was a completely
cloudless night.

And I was looking up
at the stars in the sky,

thinking how beautiful
they were.

And all of a sudden,
there was a double flash

of pure, brilliant white light
in the sky.

And I thought, "Well, that
must be lightning, surely."

And as I was thinking that, there was
another double flash of pure white light.

And I looked straight up, two balls of
pure white light traveling side by side.

And they broke off at a 90-degree turn so
fast that they left visible trace lines.

Instantly amazed, ran
through the house,

hoping to see them or more,
whatever they were.

Uh, and there was
nothing visible.

At the speed they were
traveling, not surprising.

But I hung around for a little bit
longer, hoping to see something else.

And it was at this point that I
checked the time on my phone.

And it was 11 minutes past 4.

So I gave up waiting, extremely
tired at this point.

So I simply came in the house
to go to bed.

And as I was walking
up the stairs...

I was struck by an
extremely powerful feeling

that put the hair on
the back of my neck up

and, uh, what I can only
describe as an instruction.

If I were to describe in words how
perfect this instruction was, it was...

It told me, "Don't close the
door, go outside and look up."

And so I did.

I was shocked and confused and
curious all at the same time.

So I turned around,
I opened the front door

and stepped outside
and looked up.

And as I did so...

[majestic music playing]

The most beautiful,
huge golden object.

I instantly became aware of an incredible
amount of what felt like static electricity,

an absolute silence,
complete lack of sound.

All I could hear was
myself breathing.

But also, there was an intense
feeling of love, intimacy,

a kind of connected feeling as if it could
read my mind, as odd as that sounds.

So beautiful and magnificent,
but shocked as well.

And there was a moment
of awkward silence

because I didn't know what to
do, what to say, what to think.

So I waved up at it.

And then I started to have a realization
that this could be dangerous.

I suddenly started thinking, "Well,
somebody else needs to see this.

This can't...
Nobody's gonna believe this."

I couldn't believe it myself.

I remembered that I had my phone
in my top left breast pocket.

The moment I thought that,
it felt like I'd messed up.

And this thing immediately
starts to move left.

I didn't want it to go, so I started to
walk under it, and it started to speed up.

So it went from a walk
to a jog to a run,

that I just stood back and just watched
it for maybe 30 seconds or something

as it just went up higher and higher
and higher off up into the atmosphere

until it was such a small dot and
then out of sight completely.

I didn't realize how shocked and stunned
I was until I came back in the house

and I noticed that something odd had
happened, but I kind of dismissed it,

that the dawn had broken and that I
was missing maybe 20, 30 minutes.

I couldn't place how that
seemed so out of sync

because the whole thing only seemed
to last a couple of minutes,

a few minutes at best.

[man] Do you remember
what you were thinking about

just before you first saw
the UAP in the sky?

[McCabe] At the moment that
I was looking up at the stars,

thinking how beautiful
they were,

I was actually thinking about
and talking from the heart

to my recently
deceased grandmother.

So I was thinking of her at
that moment that it all began.

I was hoping that she was with my grandfather
and happy, if such a place exists.

And it was at that very moment
that it all began.

[mysterious music playing]

[King] The year was 1917,

and physicist Albert Einstein found
himself facing the impossible.

As he worked through his equations
for general relativity,

the math was telling him something
that couldn't possibly be true.

For centuries, science had accepted that
the universe was static and unchanging,

yet these equations suggested
a different story,

that the universe was
rapidly expanding.

Believing this
couldn't be the case,

Einstein introduced a solution he
called the cosmological constant.

This constant was a way
to adjust the numbers

by adding a
hypothetical force

to balance the gravitational
pull of matter,

allowing for a stable,
static universe.

Problem solved.

That is until 1929, when
astronomer Edwin Hubble,

using the most advanced
telescopes of the time,

studied the light from
distant galaxies.

He discovered this light was shifted
toward the red end of the spectrum,

a redshift that indicated the
universe was, in fact, expanding.

Einstein later called the
cosmological constant

the biggest blunder
of his career,

as he had trusted the
conventional wisdom of the day

over what the math
was truly revealing.

[Chase] The mental trap that Einstein
fell into was a very human one.

Despite the fact that we don't have
working scientific explanations

for things as fundamental
as time and gravity,

we humans tend to assume we more or less
understand the nature of our reality.

When faced with evidence
that contradicts this belief,

we're quick to dismiss it because
we "know" that it can't be true.

Progress in science, however,

comes from paying attention to the
data points that don't make sense.

When the planets didn't follow
expected paths,

we discovered the true structure
of the solar system.

When photons behaved as both particles
and waves, depending on observation,

we unlocked quantum mechanics.

The path of scientific advancement
has always been paved

by the things that we thought were
impossible until we knew better.

[King] Understanding the UFO
phenomenon is profoundly challenging

because it defies our
expectations of what is possible.

Much like Einstein's initial
rejection of the expanding universe,

our reluctance to embrace the full
spectrum of UFO-related experiences

stems from deeply ingrained
assumptions about reality.

These phenomena don't just
stretch our understanding.

They shatter it, forcing us to confront
the limits of our knowledge and biases.

This discomfort often leads us to reject the
most bizarre and inexplicable accounts,

often dismissing them as
too strange or unbelievable.

[pilot] Look at that thing!

[Kripal] I think it's easier to
talk about the physical craft.

I think it's easy
to do the science.

That's within our grasp
and that's within our methods.

I think it's very difficult to
talk about the strange stuff,

precisely because
it's so strange.

It's absurd. It doesn't...
Again, it doesn't make sense.

And so it's very difficult
to talk about that

and not get embarrassed
or not fail in some basic way.

So I think that's why the
conversations go the way they do.

I mean, people...
People want to...

[soft laugh]

They want to have some kind of authority
or they wanna know something.

They don't wanna stand
up and say, "Well, I

don't know," or, "Wow,
this is really weird."

You know, that doesn't
get very far.

[Iandoli] I think that experiencer
accounts are generally marginalized

in the UFO conversation
because they're dangerous,

they're direct, they're to
the point, they're personal.

It's easy for somebody to hear about
a UFO encounter or a UFO report,

and it's some kind of object that's
up in the sky, and it's over there.

But once you hear an
experience account,

especially from an experiencer
themselves, it's very personal.

And when something is very
personal, it becomes very real.

You now have to deal with it.

You now have to face
that level of reality.

[pilot] There's a whole fleet
of them, look on the ASA.

My gosh.

[Chase] If we're going to make genuine
progress in unraveling the mysteries of UFOs,

we're going to have to be willing to
include these unconventional narratives.

These stories shared by individuals
who have experienced UFOs

and non-human intelligences
firsthand

hold valuable insights
that are crucial to a

comprehensive understanding
of the phenomenon.

By forcing experiencers to take a back seat
in the conversation about the phenomenon,

we're essentially ignoring a
significant portion of the data

that could provide
the breakthrough we need.

Embracing these narratives,
despite their strangeness,

is essential if we're going to move
beyond our current limitations

and gain a deeper, more accurate
understanding of the UFO phenomenon.

You know, me personally,
I mean, I've seen UFOs,

I've, um,
had precognitive dreams.

I've had near-death experience,
I've had out-of-body experience,

I've had, uh, remote viewing.

Precognitive dreams, out-of-body
experiences, seeing UFOs.

UFO sightings,
precognitive events.

I lived in a couple
of haunted homes,

or what people considered to be
haunted homes, when I was a kid.

So apparitions, shadow beings.

Poltergeist activity,
things moving.

And some synchronicities that really
stretch the bounds of credulity.

[King] It's actually incredibly
common for people to experience

more than one type of
anomalous phenomena.

It's a giant secret within the paranormal
community, an open secret at this point,

that if you experience
one modality,

you're likely to experience another
modality later down the line.

[Lassiter] I believe that

experiencers have experiences

that are actually common
to humans.

I don't think that we
experience anything that

is inaccessible for
other people, actually.

I think that this is
a very human thing.

I think that our culture
and consensus reality as it is

has made it very taboo
to talk about these things.

But if you scratch the
surface with most people

and ask them, "Have you
ever had anything?

A weird dream, a strange
experience, a precognitive dream,

something that
you can't explain,"

usually, people are able
to come up with it.

I think that it's a part of
being human that we have lost.

[Kripal] So, you know, I have this
notion that I call the impossible.

And what I mean by that is that things are
happening and appearing all the time,

and that we're slicing off or we're pushing
off the table things we don't understand

so that we can claim some
kind of understanding

or some kind of explanation
of what's left on the table.

And so the impossible
is actually not impossible.

It's very possible.
It happens all the time.

But it's impossible because
we say it's impossible.

We say, "Oh, this can't happen,"
therefore it doesn't happen.

But it does happen.

[Finley] I'm confident that these kind
of things, these anomalous experiences,

happen much more broadly
than we might think,

but that people's relationship
to institutionalized religion

and sometimes other
orientations like science

keep them from recognizing them
or cause them to deny them,

often because they
don't have a language

or a legitimate frame in
which to understand them.

[Chase] There are a lot of
aspects of anomalous experiences

that can make it hard for even the
most open-minded people to accept

because they're just so different from the
experiences we have in our everyday lives.

These are the kinds of things that just
sound crazy to your average person

because we don't have any
other way to make sense of them.

And so when these things
happen to people,

most people instinctively know that talking
about it publicly would be a bad idea.

And even when they
do talk about it,

the story that they tell is
usually not the whole story.

[Strieber] I think there is
potentially a lot of stigma about

talking about human interaction
with the visitors

because the great majority of people
have only a vague knowledge of UFOs,

and no knowledge of
or awareness of

the possibility that people
may be interacting

with someone who apparently is
associated with them in some way.

So there's a lot of stigma, and it
can be very disruptive in families

when one member of a family has a
close encounter and no one else does,

and they talk about it.

People have been put into
mental institutions for that

and been divorced and had their
children taken from them.

It's very dangerous. So the situation
is quite fraught, even now.

[King] There's a lot of
pathologizing about these issues.

Going to a therapist and just
saying that you saw a ghost

could make somebody
question your sanity.

But people have seen ghosts in all
world cultures, going back centuries.

So why can't we talk
about this stuff?

[Bishop] I think UFO witnesses
hold back some of their stories

because they want people
to believe them.

And if you say something
completely unexpected,

there's less likelihood that
somebody's gonna believe you.

They're gonna say, "Oh, well,
you know, you must be nuts

because I wanna
hear about a UFO.

I don't wanna hear about
your dead relative,

and I don't wanna hear about
strange phone calls,

or I don't wanna hear about something you saw
leaping through the trees a week later."

This just doesn't make
any sense to people.

So I think people do talk about
what they experience,

but they leave out a lot
just to protect themselves.

[King] The thing
that's so insidious

about stigma around anomalous experiences
is that it's self-reinforcing.

We tend to not talk
about these situations.

And when we do, we rarely include all
the details of what actually happened.

And the result is that we don't
have a good understanding

of how complex and nuanced
these experiences are,

which makes it more difficult for people
to speak up about what happened to them

for fear of sounding crazy.
It's a vicious cycle.

[Chase] If we're going to move
past the stigma

and start to make real inroads in
understanding the UFO phenomenon,

we're going to have to stop
being so squeamish

about the details that
make us uncomfortable.

As much as we may want
to ignore all the weirdness

and high strangeness that goes
along with these encounters,

the reality is that we can't
separate those things out.

And in some ways, you could even argue that
that strangeness is the UFO phenomenon.

If we're going to be objective,

we're going to have to be willing
to consider all of the data,

especially the data
that's most challenging.

You know, my first sighting,
I was 6 years old

in elementary school
in Port Arthur, Texas.

And that was my mother taking us
to school, my sister, and myself.

My mother just says,
"Look, flying saucers."

This most strange statement
I've ever heard in my life.

And there were the three most
beautiful saucer-shaped craft

with pods on the top
of the saucer,

sitting in position only
maybe 50 feet in the air,

right over those steeples of
that church, just right over it.

And they sat there for a good
30 to 50 seconds, I would say.

But I looked at the
school building,

and I remember people
hanging out the window

and I saw hands and fingers
pointing out windows.

Every window was up,

and there were hands or heads sticking
out of windows looking at these things.

And then across the street in
the playground was dead quiet.

People in their cars
were all looking up

and some were getting out
of their vehicle.

Every eye and hand was
pointing towards the sky,

and these objects. They simply
just, at one moment in time,

they all just went straight up,
and they were gone.

And everything went back to
normal in that timeframe

and nobody talked about it
the whole day.

Isn't that weird? How can
that even be possible?

[Chase] Something that's really
common in UFO encounters is that

multiple people will report
seeing something strange,

but they won't agree
on what they saw.

So, what's going on here?

Could there be something about the phenomenon
itself that plays with our perception?

[Madden] I think it's
certainly possible

that non-human intelligence
could hack our perception

because human intelligence
can hack our perception.

And we know that. Today, think of all
the ways that video can be faked.

Think of all the ways
that audio can be faked.

Think of all the ways that
projections could be produced

that would trick lots
and lots of people.

So I don't think it's
hard to believe that

non-human intelligence
could hack our perception

because we can and do
hack our perception.

In fact, I would expect that if
they're non-human intelligence,

that they probably would
hack our perception.

[Kripal] I personally am
not just of the opinion,

I'm of the conviction that a lot of the UAP
or UFO phenomena that we see is deceptive.

And by that, I don't mean human beings
are deceiving other human beings,

although they're doing that too.

That's all overlaid over this.

I think the phenomenon itself
is, um, staged and deceptive.

[Bishop] I was first introduced to that
trickster hypothesis or the idea of it

with George Hansen's book The
Trickster and the Paranormal.

And the trickster is an archetypal image
entity idea that runs through many cultures,

even the Western cultures.

I mean, the Fool is
basically the trickster in

a lot of ways, or the
Joker in the card deck.

And it was a revelation
to a lot of people

because it looked at the issue
as something
that was disruptive,

which it very much is
for the witness.

[Cutchin] A trickster is one
of many archetypes

that you might see manifested
across various times and cultures.

And in a lot of
indigenous cultures,

these were characters who were
guardians of the threshold.

They would often play pranks
on people

but their role was to upset certain
norms that the society was embedded in.

And sometimes tricksters
were good or bad.

Most of the time they
were mischievous,

and they would sort of reveal
one's own failings.

And it's very prominent in both the
paranormal and the UFO literature.

[Bishop] And the reason they're
there is to stir things up

and to show people that they
don't understand everything

and that there is more to know and that
there is a lot of humor in it too.

And if you can mix all
those things together,

a better understanding
of something comes up.

I mean, when somebody
tells a joke,

that is a source of healing, and
it's a source of understanding.

That's what the best comedy is.

And the trickster,
I think, does that.

It throws this absurdity up in front
of us, so we start to question things.

And I think that that's one of
the roles of the UFO, in, uh...

In, at least in our culture.

Other cultures have integrated this
kind of stuff into their cosmologies.

We haven't.

So until we do, maybe it's just
gonna keep being a trickster.

Certain aspects of the--

- [car horn honking]
- [Cutchin and crew laugh]

This is the trickster.
This is the trickster
right here.

Certain aspects of this
trickster archetype

tend to manifest themselves in
all sorts of paranormal activity

from traditional hauntings
to UFO sightings.

And oftentimes, these will be
ways that are subtle

and sometimes they'll be ways
that are really creative.

But it is this aspect that seems to
mire the phenomenon in unbelievability.

A lot of times it seems to have a sort
of prankish or impish quality to it,

where it sometimes undermines
its own existence

or lives in this realm
of non-falsifiability

that you see
time and time again.

[Leffall] We were driving
back home.

We decided to take the long way,
kind of the back roads.

And we're driving, and we're
probably about halfway back,

and we see a light in the sky.

It's kind of out of nowhere,
just appears.

And then it stops and moves over
to the other side of the road.

We see it stop again,
go up, go back down.

And we're saying, "Did you see that?"
She's like, "Yeah, I saw it. I saw it."

We're kind of tracking it,
but we're inside the car.

It would seem like whichever way we
tried to go to get a glimpse of it,

it went the other way,
made it hard for us.

And it was almost like
there was some intelligent

control of whatever it
was we were seeing.

You know, when we kind of
compared notes about what we saw,

the interesting thing was
we both saw something,

-but we both also kind of described it
differently. -[Finley] Very differently.

We both saw something luminous. We both
saw something that had structure to it.

It was nighttime, so it was
kind of hard to make it out.

But she said she saw something that
was more cylindrical in shape.

I thought I saw something that
was more triangular in shape.

What shape it was, I don't
know if that really matters.

I think what matters is,
you know, we're leaving here

-and we saw something that didn't
make sense to us. -[Finley] Sure.

[King] There are so many fascinating questions
that come from this particular account.

Why is it that two different
people who saw the same thing

also saw it differently?

This is something that
actually happens a lot.

And it makes you wonder how much of what
we perceive is objectively accurate.

And could there be things going on
in our own immediate environment

that we're not aware of?

[Madden] Let's
introduce a concept.

Umwelt in German
literally would mean

"around world" or
"nearby world."

So, what's the umwelt?

Well, the umwelt comes
from this notion that

an organism creates
an environment for itself.

It creates an "around world"
for itself.

So the idea here isn't that the
organism thinks the world into reality.

What the idea is, is that the
organisms have to be able to

sort what is relevant
to their well-being

from what is irrelevant to
their well-being. All right?

And that world of relevance
is their umwelt.

So let me give a
simple example here.

There's a certain kind of tick, and this
tick has a very limited perceptual system.

It can sense the amount of butyric acid
that's in its immediate environment,

which is the acid that mammals
release from our skin,

and it can sense slight
differences in heat on surfaces,

and it can sense when indeed it has made
contact with a surface, and that's it.

With a limited set
of perceptual tools,

that tick can sort of time
so it can drop on you

and very quickly find where
there's a good blood source

and, you know, go ahead and start
the process of stealing your blood.

But even though effective,
the tick's perceptual apparatus

leaves behind far more
than it brings in.

So if that tick were to, you
know, encounter me right now,

it would get something
right about me.

I am indeed emitting
acid from my skin.

There are indeed differences in surface
temperature on my skin, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay, but think of how much
it misses about me,

all the attributes I have
that it misses.

We should then note
humans are no different.

We have a certain
perceptual apparatus

that was evolved to perform
certain very specific tasks

that were good for
humans to perform

and that work though mostly probably
by ignoring lots of other things.

Well, I think then, that should lead
us to say, "Okay, what are we missing?

What else might be
in this room?"

In the same way that the tick is aloof to
the very blade of grass that it hangs on,

we could all be aloof to the very "blades
of grass" that we're hanging on right now.

And there might be things that are
actually very interesting out there,

maybe very distressing
out there,

that we're just not
picking up on.

[Strieber] When we first start out
in the world, we're atabula rasa.

And what the brain begins to do
is it begins to make comparisons.

It builds an image of reality
over the first few years of life.

When you're first born, you probably see
very unformed symbolic images, if anything.

But by the time you're 3 or 4, you know
a door is a door, a house is a house,

and you have an immediate
awareness of what's around you.

But when something that isn't
from this reality enters into it,

the brain suddenly has trouble.

An adult in confronting
an unknown phenomenon

has a lot of trouble forming it
into what it actually is.

So there's a gap between what's
out there and what we're seeing.

But we don't know how that gap works
because we can't tell the difference.

[Madden] So if there's anumwelt,

there's got to be anuber-umwelt,
a super "around world."

So the idea is organisms carve out
a space of relevance to themselves

from a much broader space that
is the sum total of the world.

And the idea then is we
walk around in anumwelt,

but it doesn't mean that we
couldn't possibly bump into things

that were in the uber-umwelt.
Now think of it.

If indeed we were to encounter
something from theuber-umwelt,

it would be something that literally
does not make sense to us.

It would be something uncanny.
We might even say alien to us.

We shouldn't be surprised then that we
bump into things that we call ghosts,

that we bump into things
that we might call fairies,

we bump into things
that we might call spirits,

we bump into things that
we might call Sasquatch,

we bump into things
that we might call UFOs.

[Chase] The idea that our senses don't
give us an objective window into the world

can help us to explain why some of these
encounters are so weird and uncanny.

And it could also
help us to explain

one of the other odd aspects
of anomalous experiences,

which is that they often happen
in the wake of trauma.

And this idea is called
the filter theory.

[Kripal] So when I say that paranormal
phenomena are about trauma,

I don't mean that reductively, by which
I don't mean that the UFO or the ghost

or the precognitive dream or
the telepathic communication

is nothing but a memory of something
really bad that happened in the past.

What I mean is that the
traumatic event or the

suffering poked a hole
in the human being,

and the human being is now more porous,
more open to reality in a way.

That's not necessarily
a good thing

or not necessarily
a healthy thing,

but it does, I think, render
human beings more porous,

and it allows other
things to come in.

And behind all those comments
is what I call,

or what other people
have called, the filter thesis.

And it's essentially the idea that the body
and the brain do not produce consciousness,

but they mediate it, they filter
it, they actually reduce it.

That consciousness exists everywhere,
it's essentially cosmic,

and that what happens
with a human body and a brain

is that consciousness
gets filtered or reduced down

to Jeff or to whatever
your name is.

And it's a fiction, and
it works for a time,

but then what happens in trauma is
that something punches through Jeff

or punches through the ego,

and suddenly you have access
to this broader awareness.

Talk about therapists, my therapist
said I had hypervigilance,

-[Finley] Oh, okay. -that's
the term that they used, um,

which I know has a negative
connotation at times,

but I think what one person
may call hypervigilance,

I think another person
might call survival skills.

- Sure.
- Right?

And I think in order for our ancestors
and for us to still exist today,

given all the challenges that,
you know, we faced historically,

not just from, you know, racism and,
you know, lynchings and segregation,

but, I mean, we're out in the
backwoods of East Texas,

you've got mountain lions
and wild hogs and snakes

- [Finley] Very much.
That's right.

and, you know, coyotes and, you know,
all kinds of other, you know, dangers.

Most African Americans
in Texas

trace their roots back to East
Texas because of the slave trade.

So you had a region where there
were, call it natural threats,

and then you also had a
host of unnatural threats.

So I don't know how you could
survive in a scenario like that

without having some
form of hypervigilance

or some form of heightened
awareness of your surroundings

and being able to navigate those
circumstances and situations.

And maybe that trait, whether
that's the cultural trait,

whether that's a genetic trait, whether
it's, you know, a learned behavior,

maybe some of those things contribute
to why you might be more aware

when you experience a phenomenon
that, you know, is anomalous.

Like maybe you're just more tuned to
the anomalies than the average person.

[Kripal] I think human suffering
and trauma are really important

to paranormal phenomena
in general.

I think Courtney's story is about human
beings and about human suffering.

It's about the
world of the dead.

It's about social justice.
It's about a lot of things.

And I think these are the themes that come
up again and again when you really look at

not just UFO phenomena, but
paranormal phenomena in general.

You need some kind of deep emotional
trauma to invoke these processes.

These processes are a
kind of cry for healing,

they're kind of a
cry for justice,

they're kind of a cry for other
human beings to pay attention.

So that's what I hear
in that particular story.

But it's also what I hear in a lot
of these stories, by the way.

I think it shares that.

[King] The reality of the UFO phenomenon
is far more complex and nuanced

than it is portrayed
in the media.

These experiences are often wrapped up
with other high strangeness events.

They tend to operate
by a dream-like logic

that makes them hard
to make sense of later.

And the experiences themselves are
often felt to be deeply personal

and sometimes even spiritual
experiences for the people involved.

And because we don't have a good
way of talking about these things,

these are the aspects of
encounters that are mostly ignored

in the larger conversation
about UFOs.

[Chase] What's clear is that if
we're going to understand UFOs,

we're going to need
some new models.

And one of the best models that we
have is called the Six Layer Model

which was developed by Jacques
Vallée and Eric Davis.

After looking at
thousands of cases,

they identified that people have all
kinds of effects from these encounters

that just simply can't be explained
by the nuts and bolts paradigm.

They broke down these effects from these
encounters into six different categories.

Physical, anti-physical, physiological,
psychic, psychological, and cultural.

[Elizondo] So the Six Layer Model is really
a way to sort of talk about the phenomenon

in a way that does
it justice, right?

It doesn't just narrow it down
to the physical,

where you have, yes, nuts
and bolts craft seemingly

that leave physical impressions
on the ground.

There are people who have
been able to touch craft,

and there are all of the signs and
symbols there of a physical object.

But then you also have this weird
that comes along with it, right?

Where you walk into something, you
walk into one of these crafts,

and it's much larger than
it looked on the outside.

Um, or maybe it's the opposite,
where it looks really huge,

but you go in and it's
a really small room.

You have that too.

And so there's sort of these other aspects
to it that make it feel very dreamlike.

It doesn't feel like objects
in space-time necessarily

when you're actually interacting
with the craft.

[King] With UFO reports,

you often have people reporting
things that sound contradictory.

On the one hand, we have
indications from many reports

that UFOs, at least sometimes,
are physical craft.

If we take David Grusch
at his word,

physical craft have been recovered
by various world governments,

and attempts are being made
to reverse engineer them.

All of that suggests
something solid and tangible.

But on the other hand, UFOs do things that
shouldn't be possible for a physical object.

They can pass through
other solid objects.

Time seems to move
differently around them.

They seemingly appear
and disappear at will.

These things seem to indicate

that UFOs aren't operating in the
physical world as we understand it.

[Iandoli] Some of these
experiences are so strange

and so extraordinary,
so liminal,

that it doesn't seem that they're
confined to typical physics

the way that we understand it.

Some of these experiences
happen in liminal states

that exist mostly within
our consciousness,

even if after those
experiences, there's some

kind of biological or
physical effect afterwards,

the experience itself seems to transcend
our typical physical reality.

[Elizondo] You also have the effects
these craft have on people.

And the first area of that is
obviously physiological effects.

Just from being near these craft,
people have had pretty serious injuries

that seem to be radiological, like
exposure to non-ionizing radiation,

where they've literally
been microwaved.

They come away with red skin
and puffed eyes, right?

And so that's been something
that's been studied for a while.

It's not well known, but it's a pretty
serious aspect to this phenomenon.

[King] This is another area where
we seem to see UFOs operating

in a realm that is both physical
and non-physical.

Because while we have
many reports,

including reports from highly
credible members of our military,

of serious injuries like
severe burns and brain trauma,

there are also other effects that people
experience from proximity to a UFO

that are much more strange
and much harder to explain.

[Strieber] Interestingly enough, being in the
proximity of a UFO, being close to a UFO,

very often causes disruptions in
the normal flow of consciousness.

And a person will
have experiences

such as apparent
movement through time,

uh, become psychically active in
ways that they weren't before,

and other sort of phenomena,
epiphenomena, will occur.

And if they do become psychically
active, that may last.

It may become
part of their lives.

And so proximity does indeed
affect the psyche very profoundly.

[Chase] The psychic aspect
of the UFO phenomenon

can be really hard
for people to accept.

Things that happen typically
include telepathic communication,

precognitive events,
and levitation.

These are all things that most
people don't even accept to be real.

And so it's really hard to factor
it into our understanding of UFOs.

And yet, when we go to
the experiencer data,

these are the things that
are reported all the time.

[Kripal] I don't think there's any way to
separate the UFO or UAP and psi phenomena.

I think they're not the same thing,
but they're very much integrated.

The one is often an after-effect or a result
of an encounter or a contact experience.

I think to slice that off
is a huge mistake.

If you want to understand
what's going on,

you need to take into account
the human effects

and how human beings are changed
by these encounters.

Because that might, in fact, be the
phenomenon. That might be its intention.

Um-- And I think, of course, this
is what a lot of people want to do.

They wanna focus on
the nuts and bolts,

but they don't wanna focus on the weird and
the strange, which is how they frame this.

Or the woo, as they say.
I think that's just a cop-out.

[Elizondo] Then there are
other effects as well,

right, that are a little
bit more personal.

And this happens to
especially people who have

close encounters with
not just the craft,

but also sometimes the entities that are
usually associated with these craft.

Where after this exposure, it sort
of starts to set you down a path

to rethink who you are, to rethink
how your life is unfolding.

[Masters] Ontological shock is
when something happens to you

that challenges your notions
of ontology, epistemology.

What is our role
in this universe?

What is the universe?
What is reality?

I've personally experienced that on a
number of occasions, and many people have.

Something happens where you might
have missing time, or you see a UFO,

or you get abducted into a UFO,

or you have telepathic
communication with beings.

All of those things
aren't normal

in the way we conceptualize
day-to-day life,

so it challenges our
notions of what is real,

and that causes
a shock response.

[Strieber] A first encounter
is extremely stressful,

especially if it's a physical
encounter with physical beings.

It can't-- There can be
nothing more stressful.

But the stress doesn't stop with
the shock of the encounter itself.

It is the even greater shock of what happens
to your mind and your consciousness

when it comes into contact
with a consciousness that is
so provocative, so active,

and can actually enter your mind
and enter your consciousness,

something that you're not
used to ever having happen.

The stress level is extremely
high, and it can be devastating.

[Finley] I think for those
who have experienced
the phenomenon,

or even those who are just
compelled by the data,

it forces us to think of ourselves
as connected to something bigger

than what we experience
in our material reality

that seems to appear
as our primary reality,

that we're connected to
something beyond that.

And it forces us to think
about what that might mean,

and what it might mean in
the social and historical realm,

that is to say, how we live in this
world, our ethics, how we treat others,

what we do with our lives, how we
treat the environment, and so on.

For me, it pushes us to consider
all of those kinds of things.

[Elizondo] When you have
an experience like this,

there's this thing that happens where
it takes you from your present context.

It takes you out of
your everyday reality,

and it forces you
to look at a new one.

It's not just an observation,
it's an experience.

And it invites a sort of participation,
and it demands a participation.

You really don't have a choice.
Some people do, but many don't.

And there's just something that happens
when you're put into that kind of a place

where you're forced
to surrender.

It's almost like pain, right, where
when you have a pain in your body,

you have to attend to it.

And if you don't, the pain gets
worse and worse and worse.

And when we have
these experiences,

it's almost like it's forcing
you to pay attention.

[Bishop] I think when somebody sees
a UFO or has an experience of one,

it kind of forces you to confront
what your belief systems are,

how you feel about things, how
you feel about other people,

your place in the world,
and how big or small it is.

And if people can
integrate it properly,

I think it's often a good thing,
even if it's traumatic.

[Strieber] A new reality is what happens
when it touches you in any way.

When you realize that it's real, even
if you've never had an experience.

When you have an experience of close
encounter, either physical or non-physical.

When a UFO comes
into your proximity,

close enough for you to know
that it's something

other than simply a
moving star that could be

a satellite, these
things are devastating.

They cause you to reconstruct
your understanding of the world.

[Chase] One of the most fascinating
aspects of anomalous experiences

is how they impact the people
who have these encounters.

While these experiences can sometimes be
extremely stressful and even traumatic,

many people come out
of these situations

with a deeper sense of meaning
and purpose in their lives.

Asking questions about what these other
intelligences and subtle realms might be

seems to help us clarify who we
are, what's important to us,

and how we ought to be
living our lives.

[Leffall] I think it starts
before the UFO sighting.

So my worldview, I think, is really shaped
really a lot by anomalous experience.

When I was 3 or 4 years old,
I got run over by a horse.

The horse was trampling over the top
of me, but somehow didn't step on me.

If you ask my grandmother about that
story, she has her own take on it.

But I think everybody agrees that a 4-year-old
getting run over by a horse, you know,

and walking away from that incident,
you know, kind of unscathed

is pretty miraculous.

And then when I think back
to that experience,

I just remember seeing the scene
after the horse was about to hit me.

The horse is coming, I see the horse's
chest, everything goes black,

and then I see the
scene from a different

vantage point, almost
like 10 feet in the air.

I never thought about it. I didn't
know what a near-death experience was.

I never heard of an out-of-body
experience. I didn't know

about any of that stuff, really
probably until more recently. Um...

I just remember
after that experience,

I felt like I had this knowing that,
you know, my life was spared,

and that my life was supposed to
be lived a certain way,

and that I should conduct myself
in a certain way,

and that effectively,
I was given a second chance,

and I should make the most
of that second chance.

[Chase] It's really interesting
to consider that

the psychological impacts
of these encounters

could translate into more
widespread effects as well.

As these ideas and stories work their
way into our folklore and our media,

these are things that can begin
to affect us on a cultural level.

And people like Jacques Vallée
have gone so far as to suggest

that this might actually be the
purpose of the phenomenon.

[King] Jacques Vallée proposed that the UFO
phenomenon might be what he referred to as

a control mechanism that influences and
guides human beliefs and behavior.

This control mechanism
works at the level of myth,

feeding certain belief systems
while undermining others.

It's been compared
to a thermostat

where the goal is
to guide humanity

by keeping our beliefs
within certain parameters.

But why this would be done,

or what the ultimate goal of the control
mechanism might be, is a mystery.

[Kripal] I'm
articulating a position

that Jacques has articulated
in a much fuller fashion,

and it is manipulating us, and
it's manipulating a worldview

or a mythological system that's
much deeper than we're aware of,

and we're running our cultures
on that operating system,

but we're not really looking at
the operating system.

And I think the UFO
or the UAP phenomenon

has been at the core of the history
of religions for millennia,

and I think the religions have
been running the systems.

So absolutely, I think
this is a big, big thing

that has gone on for thousands of
years and is behind human culture.

[Chase] People can sometimes be
surprised or even uncomfortable

about the fact that a lot of the
leading voices in UFOlogy right now

come from the world
of religious studies.

People don't always
love that comparison.

But at the same time, if we're
talking about something

that can impact and change
people's belief systems,

that operates at
the level of myth,

and that can even give people a
deeper purpose in their lives,

then we need to talk to people
who are experts on those things.

And that's exactly what religious
studies scholars explore.

[Pasulka] If you look at
the history of humans,

you're going to see that it's a history
of engagement with non-human intelligence

because a lot of people believe
in non-human intelligence.

A lot of people who are in different
religions believe in non-human intelligence.

They could be angels, they
could be God, bodhisattvas,

and these beings, they believe,
exchange information with them.

[Kripal] My joke is, when a god
comes down out of the sky

and does something to a human
being in the ancient world,

that's called religion.

But when that happens in the
modern world, that's just crazy.

And so we draw this distinction
between what can happen today

and what happened
in the past,

and I think it makes
us comfortable.

And I think it preserves
our religions too, you know.

So I think there's a lot of
reasons why we resist this notion

that anomalous or impossible
things happen today.

I think there are religious reasons,
there are political reasons,

there are existential reasons, there are
all kinds of reasons people do that.

A good portion of what I do is I
look at the historical record,

I look at these things that
we call ascent narratives.

You find them in every
single culture.

So I've been studying this in the Christian
tradition and in the Jewish tradition.

And what happened was that I was writing
a book about the ascent narratives

regarding purgatory,
which is a Catholic doctrine.

It's about what happens to your soul
after a person who's Catholic dies.

Do they go to heaven?

What happens if they are not, you
know, good enough to get into heaven?

Well, their soul
goes to purgatory.

And I had to do a lot
of archival research,

which is basically archives are
libraries for really old books.

A lot of times you have to be
really careful with the pages

because if you touch them,
they'll disintegrate.

I'd look through these records and I
would find these ascent narratives.

And what happened was
I had so many of them.

And a lot of them had to do with objects
that would come down from the heavens

and greet people or meet people, and
people would have engagement with them.

And I thought this was different
than your normal ascent narrative.

So I continued to
write these down.

I had a big log of these, and I
asked a friend of mine about this.

And he said, these really look
like modern day reports of UFOs.

And I rejected that at first. I
thought, "No way, that's pretty crazy."

But then what happened was there was a
experiencer group, a group of UFO experiencers.

They had a conference in my
town, and I attended it.

And when I attended it, I listened to people
basically talk about what was in my log.

And that was the first time that
I actually made the connection

that what had happened a thousand
years ago, 2000 years ago,

was still happening today.

And people were using
almost exact language.

[Chase] The similarities between
modern accounts of UFO encounters

and the kinds of mystical events that
form the basis of world religions

are hard to deny.

But as Diana herself argues, we need to be
careful not to take this comparison too far.

It's really easy to assume that
angels and demons are actually UFOs

or that UFOs are actually
angels and demons.

But UFOs and angels and demons are just ideas
that we've attached to this phenomenon.

And the fact that these things are
so similar and yet also so different

should give us a hint that we
don't have the whole picture.

[King] One of the many
similarities

that the UFO phenomenon
shares with religion is that

it seems to be inextricably linked
with our beliefs about the afterlife

and what happens to people
after they die.

Dead friends and relatives often appear
or convey messages to loved ones

during UFO and
contact experiences.

Religious texts are
filled with stories about

people being taken to
the afterlife in ships

or in bright balls of light that sound
a lot like modern UFO encounters.

This relationship between the UFO
phenomenon and the dead is perplexing.

And yet it's difficult to deny that there
does seem to be some profound connection.

I first encountered it on
my first abduction in 1985

when a school friend who I did
not know at the time was dead

was there in part of the experience,
which was very extraordinary.

And, uh, then about
three months later,

I found out he was dead and,
boy, that was, floored me.

But later then, when my wife
started to get people

to come up to our cabin
to have close encounters,

they would always be announced by someone
finding that their dead friends or relatives

had showed up either during the
experience or a few hours before.

And whenever that happened,
Annie would say to me,

"You'll see the visitors
tonight." And we always did.

This is part of it.

And is it that they
are in the world

in such a way that they don't have a
barrier between the living and the dead?

Or do they bring kind of an
illusion of our own dead with them

in that we don't have any dead?

There's no real dead.

We don't know the answer
to these questions.

But we do know this, the relationship
between the visitors and the dead

in some way exists
and is quite real.

And exactly how that all works, I think
we're fairly far from understanding.

[Pasulka] Today, people talk about
NDEs, near-death experiences,

and these people in my field
will call ascent narratives.

Because even a thousand years
ago, 2000 years ago, you go back,

people have always had
these narratives of ascent,

what happens to people
after they die.

A lot of cultures believe that people
ascend places, maybe to heaven.

Different cultures
have different names.

[Cutchin] Well,
psychopomps are figures

that historically have been
charged with leading human souls

from this life
into the afterlife.

And these sometimes come
in the form of deities,

and they sometimes come in the form
of folk figures or even ancestors

or highly placed members of a society,
including shamanic practitioners.

And in the case of their
similarities to UFOs,

there are numerous aspects that you can sort
of pick out of the UFOlogical literature

that seem to suggest
qualities similar to that.

Like psychopomps, the UFO is a
transportation-obsessed phenomenon.

And it does the exact same thing
that psychopomps did.

They transport people
to other realms.

[Finley] You're talking about an ancestry
that you have continued to experience.

Can you say something
about that?

Because I think that's-- A lot of
times when we talk about ancestors,

African Americans and others,
we're talking in the abstract.

- Right.
- But you believe that

- you're really connected
to your ancestors. - Mm-hm.

- You've heard from your ancestors.
- Mm-hm.

- They led you to this land.
- Mm-hm.

- Which you bought, which you now own.
- Mm-hm.

- That's really powerful.
- Right.

And here's my thing. If it wasn't
them, who was it? You know?

- Whose ancestors was it that led me here,
right? - [Finley laughing] Right, right.

So I do believe they're here. I
believe that they watch over us.

I think they guide us.
I think they teach us

if we're willing to listen
and we're willing to learn.

So they're not abstract
concepts to me.

They're individuals that
had life experiences,

that had lessons
that they taught.

And I believe that
they continue to teach.

I'm discovering this
as I'm talking.

I think there's probably an element
of this, which is, you know,

because you're open, you still honor and
respect them and you want to learn from them.

I think they might be more
inclined to communicate with you.

- [Finley] Sure. -Because
you're willing to listen.

I don't know how it works,
but I just know what happens.

You know what's happened to me.

How does all that come
together in a meaningful

way for you that helps
you moving forward?

And what does all that mean
moving forward?

Yeah. Well, I think a couple of things.
Number one,

if you don't know where you've been,
you don't know where you're going.

And, you know, I think a lot of us have
lost sight of our history and our heritage.

And I think that makes it hard for people
to know, you know, what to do next

because they don't fully recognize
what's happened before.

And so when you think about, you
know, slavery, think about Jim Crow,

you think about all the things that
our ancestors had to go through,

but we're here.

You know, my grandmother did the
tree of 10 generations going back.

And that meant those people overcame
those things in spite of those things.

And that, you know, they
have a legacy, you know.

And so when I talk to my sons and
they're, you know, cutting up in class,

like, "No, no,
we don't do that."

No, you come from this. This is
the history. This is the legacy.

This is what this is about.

And this is how we have to steward
and shepherd that legacy.

Your grandmother's experiences,
these visions you've had,

the voices you've heard,
the UFO phenomena,

all have sort of pushed you
in a certain direction in life.

Is that what you mean?
Or is that related to

when you say you've been asked
to be a steward of this land?

Yeah. You said,
that's what I'm implying.

That's not what I'm implying.
That's what I'm saying.

That's what I'm saying.
That's exactly what I'm saying.

I didn't wake up one morning and
say, "You know what I'd like to do?

- I'd like to go own a slave plantation.
- [laughs]

And I like to see, you know,
I like to have my child

have dreams about their dead
ancestors communicating messages.

Like nobody asks for this type
of phenomena to appear.

But when it happens to you and you believe
your great grandfather is asking you

to purchase this property and you
don't know what the property is,

you know, if your great grandfather
asked you to do something, you do it.

I mean, that's just
how I'm raised.

My mom asked me
to do something, I do it.

And I think I've been
asked to do something,

and I've been able to see the positive
attributes that it's brought to our family.

You know, we started back
having family reunions

like we used to have
when I was a kid

and we hadn't had them for 20 years, you
know, and now we're having them again.

And so I don't think I've been asked
to own property and raise cattle.

I think I've been asked to
preserve our family history

and to preserve our family stories
and to share with the world

that there's more to reality than
just materialism and nuts and bolts

and that there's things
that happen that lead you.

And if you listen to those
little voices, it can lead you

to a place that you might not
have ever thought you would be,

but probably is the right
place for you to be.

For many African Americans
and people in general

who are Christian or
otherwise religious,

they allow those ideas to pathologize
and demonize these experiences

that probably more people than not have.
That hasn't happened to you.

Can you say something
about that?

You've been able to
hold those intentions

where one doesn't
cancel out the other.

Right. Well, let me just say, I think a
lot of Christians don't read their Bible.

Just start with that. A lot of
people claim to be Christians,

but they don't really know
what the word of God says.

Trust me, I'm aware of
scriptures like Deuteronomy 18,

where it talks about not consulting
with, you know, necromancers, right,

which are people who talk to the
dead and that kind of a thing.

Um, and we can get
philosophical on this,

but I don't know if I wanna
go down that rabbit hole, but...

when you read the Bible, it's
full of anomalous experiences.

That's why they wrote it.
That's why it was so impactful.

That's why so many people followed.
That's why so many people believed

because there were things that
were impossible that happened,

- and they were impossible, but they
still happened. - [Finley] That's right.

And so we have this view that miracles
only happened 2000 years ago.

Miracles don't happen today. God
doesn't give visions to people today.

You know, he only gave visions
to people 1000 years ago.

People only saw stars
in the sky, you know,

2000 years ago when Jesus was born.
They don't see them anymore. You know?

Ezekiel saw the wheel 2000 years ago.
We don't see that anymore.

But who's to say
that that's the case?

You know, I think
in a lot of ways, you know,

the Bible is, you know,
living and breathing.

And I think it's given us a lot of context
about what happened historically.

I think it has given us a way
to look at the world.

But by no means do I think that
the miracles are over, you know,

and that God can't perform
a miracle tomorrow

and can't speak through someone,
you know...

- You know, the Old Testament says God
spoke to a donkey. - [Finley] Yeah.

So why can't he speak
through a 5-year-old?

You know, like, come on, like,
what are we talking about?

[Finley] This idea that
miracles happened in the past,

or that sacred figures are ensconced
in the past and not today

happens across all kinds
of religious traditions

and not simply ones that
that Courtney decries.

The flip side is he's
able to connect miracles

in his own tradition to anomalous
experience and the paranormal today

in a way that for
him is empowering,

because he can see miracles
happening, hearing from ancestors,

through a child,
including his own,

as something that
makes perfect sense.

Why should revelation, why should miracles
using those "religious terms" cease?

Is the world so different now?
Is it not so enchanted?

Not so for Courtney.
He sees this all as coherent.

There's no break
between the past

and seeing the divine
as active in the world

and speaking through people
and doing fantastic things

as different from what he and his
family have experienced today.

And I agree with them. Why should we just
see these kinds of things in the past?

[Madden] I think one of the virtues of the
UFO phenomenon is it's showing us that this,

the miraculous didn't seem to just,
like, end in the first century AD,

that it's always been around and
maybe suppressed or controlled,

or, you know, like we're only
allowed to think of it

under certain politically safe
circumstances, stuff like that.

But it's actually been around.
I think this is important for us

because it's a re-enchantment
of the world, right?

It's allowing us to live in a world
that maybe has something to say to us

that isn't indifferent to us
for good or ill, okay?

But it's re-enchanting the world, what
we've been told under the sort of...

the weight of physicalism and
materialism since the enlightenment,

that we live in a fundamentally
indifferent and boring world.

And even though sort of founding
events of the religions didn't happen,

that's always the story.

Well, now it seems like the world
may indeed be enchanted after all,

and reports of its indifference to
us have been grossly overstated.

Re-enchanting the world isn't about
relinquishing our objectivity

in favor of fairy tales.

It's about seeing the world as it truly
is, in all of its magnificent complexity.

Upon seeing the Earth
from space,

many astronauts have described it
with newfound wonder, beautiful,

heavenly, shining like a jewel.

That view from orbit allows
them to see a reality

that can too often be lost on us in
the course of our everyday lives,

that the planet
that we call home

is infinitely precious
and incredibly rare.

Travel hundreds of millions
of miles in any direction,

and you're unlikely
to find anything like it.

In the cold vacuum of space,
the Earth is a solitary beacon,

a flame around which
life gathers.

[King] And in the
staggering abundance and

diversity of life that
calls this planet home,

there are seemingly
infinite ways of being.

Bats fly through a
labyrinth of echoes,

their sonar painting vivid
pictures in the dark.

Elephants speak across
miles of silence,

their low rumbles of language
felt through the ground.

Butterflies flutter through
a garden of polarized light,

flitting through colors
beyond human imagination.

Spiders spin through
a web of vibrations,

every tremor a whispered
message from the silk.

Even species that are familiar
exist in a world

that would be
unrecognizable to us,

one might even say alien. And yet
each of these fantastical worlds

is a real one that exists
alongside our own,

intersecting it in some places while
remaining entirely apart in others.

Which begs the question, could
there be entities on this planet

that, like infrared light, exist outside
of our human ability to perceive them?

What strange intelligences
might be lurking in the shadows

at the edges of our
own perception?

And what might a greater
understanding of who they are

teach us about ourselves?

[inspiring music playing]

[dramatic music playing]