Original subtitles

[Hal Puthoff] Scientists are beginning to realize

that there appears to be more to this than we thought.

We have such excellent sensor systems

that have been developed.

You've got the pilots' tracking,

the infrared radar system, the detection of the events.

But what the military sees

with their devices is only maybe 10% of the cases.

What about what Whitley Strieber saw?

What I wanted to do

was to find out that there was some explanation for this,

that was normal.

A rational, rational explanation.

Whatever it is, it's part of being human

and part of our world that, for whatever reason,

we are very reticent to face head-on.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal] Welcome, everyone. Welcome to Rice.

My name is Jeff Kripal, and this is

our Archives of the Impossible 2 Conference Symposium mash-up.

It's great to see you all here. I know a lot of you.

So let me begin by saying that we are doomed...

...in a good sort of way.

What I mean is that there is no way,

no way at all we are going to wrap our heads

around this thing.

What some have called the phenomena

and what I wanna call the impossible.

Jeff Kripal's really one of the world's foremost thinkers

on weirdness and the paranormal.

His Archives of the Impossible conference was one of the first

UFO conferences that I went to,

and it was transformative for me.

I think that he's really created a space for people

who have had strange experiences

or who study kind of the outer fringes

of human experience, and so as soon as I walked

into Archives of the Impossible I was like, "Oh, my gosh,

I found my people."

Going first here,

I feel a little bit like the opening band

for a weekend music festival.

You guys get the Beach Boys.

You're really here to hear Janice Joplin,

Jimmy Hendrix.

And knowing a few of you, probably the Grateful Dead,

but you got me.

We've definitely undergone a kind of renaissance,

if you will, over the last two to three years.

Primarily because the U.S. government

has shown a lot more interest in this topic,

and that, I think, has kept things alive

and kept people really interested.

The second part of this, though,

is that the academic world

has really stood up and taken notice.

This is something that we really haven't seen

on this scale before, of mainstream academic science,

mainstream academic scholars, saying, "This stuff needs to be

looked at in university settings."

Jeff Kripal is one of the chief forces

within academia today fostering this change.

His academic credentials are impeccable.

Jeff was formally the chair

of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice.

Today, he's an associate dean.

And Jeff has opened up a whole intellectual landscape

within academia which previously was very, very limited.

[Kripal] The first thing I want to say or claim

is that the impossible constitutes

the deepest secret of human creativity and culture.

The Archives of the Impossible is named after a book

I wrote called Authors of the Impossible.

I was in Berkeley, California,

with a gentleman named Jacques Vallée,

and Jacques asked me to help him place his papers

and case studies in the University archive

because he was becoming concerned about their future.

You know, we live in a world

where all computer data is fungible.

I have correspondence with a thousand people

around the world studying this problem,

going back over 50 years.

Shouldn't we save it somewhere?

Jeff Kripal sent me a letter...

I guess about 10 or 15 years ago, at least.

And I thought, "How interesting,

a professor from the big, prestigious University

on the level of Harvard,

and suddenly in there, there is the Archives of the Impossible?"

Ed May donated a lot

of the remote viewing material,

and Whitley Strieber donated about 5,000 letters,

and it just kind of sucked things in from there.

Will this collection help future researchers connect the dots?

Well, so, first of all,

the Invisible College is an old term.

It arises in the 17th century

among British Protestant intellectuals

who are studying science,

and they know darn well that if they say out loud

what they're thinking, they're gonna be in big trouble.

Science as we know it

really came out of a group of enlightened scientists,

most of them noblemen, because they had

the luxury of their own opinions

and their own fortunes behind what they did...

who essentially took a position

that was somewhat antagonistic to the church position.

The position of the church was that many of the phenomena

of nature belonged to God, and you're not capable

of understanding those phenomena.

You're not supposed to open somebody's body

to look at how their heart is beating,

and you're not supposed to ask questions

about the stars because the stars are a mystical thing.

These physicists and biologists in England

conspired to study those things together

and to put money behind the research

and to start publishing that research,

independently of the church,

and they call themselves The Invisible College.

It was essentially a group of intellectuals

who thought and studied things that were not supposed

to be thought or studied.

In the 1970s, Jacques wrote a book

called The Invisible College, and it was about a group

of intellectuals and scientists who were studying UFO topics

and parapsychological topics.

So that was the new Invisible College

because they were a college of researchers

that were not, uh... publicizing their work,

and Dr. Hynek thought that by then they were...

You know, maybe 12 or 15 of us in different countries,

suddenly some of the leaders in French science,

biologists like Dr. Chauvin,

physicists like Gustavo Beauregard,

who worked with Einstein, were vitally interested

in the UFO reports,

and we were discussing it together.

Most of them would not admit publicly to a TV station,

and so wouldn't come forward

and say they were interested in UFOs.

Invisibility is just a kind of code for,

"We're gonna do this in a secret fashion

because we can do more."

These extreme anomalous experiences,

which are not supposed to happen but do all the time,

lie somewhere close to the well springs

of human civilization in its various modes.

I consider the project here to be the Visible College.

I want to make the invisible visible.

I wanna mainstream it. I want to do it

in a much more public and much more explicit way.

Today more and more philosophers

recognize that... [sighs] there are aspects of the mind

that even if they are correlated

with things that are happening in the body

or happening in the brain that they're...

They're not reducible to these things.

There's something more.

It's amazing to me, honestly,

the way that academia has evolved

in the last 10 or 15 years.

This conference is setting the tone

for how people engage with this.

One of the really valuable things

that Jeff Kripal is doing is providing this very safe place

to explore further beyond the bounds

of current science and current explanation

and try to figure out what is going on.

I'm very grateful that I am still alive

at my advanced age to see a transition.

You came on my radar when Oumuamua,

which is an object that we detected in space

that you believe could possibly have been extraterrestrial.

We had a seminar, a lecture, about this object

at Harvard, and a colleague of mine,

after the lecture, said, "This object is really weird.

I wish it never existed." You know, that...

I was really appalled by this.

How can you say something like that?

You learn something new. It's a learning experience.

We learn that we have to revise the way we think

about reality, you know? That's a good thing.

Yeah, as somebody who covered national security

for so many years, it's fascinating to watch

how this issue kind of moved off screen

into the middle of the screen.

A former military intelligence officer

of 14 years, as well as two former fighter pilots,

appeared before Congress this week

to blow the whistle on UFOs.

The question is, "Do I think we're up

to the task of handling this

based off of the hearing yesterday

and the way it's been performed?" I think we are.

[Bender] I think what's most remarkable is,

no matter what your viewpoint might be,

if you believe the government is hiding aliens

or you believe, you know, the government knows more

than it's revealing, we now have U.S. senators

stand up and talk about UFOs as a serious policy issue.

Can you just give us some raw numbers

of how many UAPs you've analyzed,

how many have been resolved and sort of in what buckets,

and then how many are still left to be resolved?

[Bender] It's opened the floodgates for scientists

and sort of, you know, the academy, so to speak,

is to take this topic more seriously,

and not just marginalize it

as, you know, "Oh, that's... the tin foil hat crowd."

You know, this is a real scientific question

that maybe with all the technology we have today

we can answer.

Whether the government tells us what they know or not.

[Kripal] I had no interest in this early in my career.

I was interested in very typical things

that historians and scholars of religion

are interested in.

In the early part of the millennium,

I wrote a book on the California counterculture

and a movement that focused at Big Sur

around a place called Esalen Institute,

and I met a lot of people and these people told me

some really, really strange stories

that I knew couldn't have happened, but I knew happened.

Because I knew these people, and I knew they weren't lying.

I knew they weren't doing this for any kind of ulterior reason.

and I realized that we had no way of thinking

about those stories.

In the quiet Mississippi town of Pascagoula,

two local men confronted authorities

with a rather bizarre story.

Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker

told of a strange craft landing near their fishing site

and of being taken aboard by three unearthly creatures.

When they carried me inside,

they seemed to... just leaned me back, you know,

and, um, this eye, it moved up in front of me

about this close, and it stared right at my eyes,

looking me right in the eye, and it seemed to have

hesitated there for a few seconds

and then it just started moving over my entire body.

[reporter] Sheriff Diamond, can you tell me

just what happened that night?

No, sir, I can't.

All I can tell you, it was two men

came in the sheriff's department approximately 8:30 or 9:00.

They were all excited and upset.

[reporter] Tell me about the lie detector test.

These men, in my opinion,

believe that they saw this, and that they were being honest

in reporting what they have reported.

[Kripal] Back then our only way of thinking

about these stories was not thinking about them.

"Oh, that's... that person drank too much alcohol"

or "that person was on LSD"

or "that person was hallucinating."

I mean, it's just this easy kind of explanations

that actually explain nothing.

And so I got really interested in why intellectuals

don't think about those experiences,

which presumably lie at the core

of a lot of basic religious beliefs.

[Bender] I actually liken a lot of this topic

to religion, because it is very similar to me.

I mean, I think there's a lot of commonalities.

For many people, the truth is out there,

and it's very emotional,

and it's part of their belief system,

just like if you're Hindu or Christian

or Jewish or Muslim, I mean, you have a belief system

and I think some people have experienced things,

and whether you and I think it's real, it's real to them,

in a real way, and so we can't just dismiss it,

especially since it's not just like just a few people.

You know, there's a lot of people...

A lot more coming forward now.

It was right up there,

and then it flew like, right across over and down that way.

[Kripal] I think paranormal phenomena are essentially

the building blocks of what become religion.

So things like belief in a separable soul

or immortality or divination or the ability to know

what's going to happen before it happens.

I mean, all these are kind of classical religious ideas,

but they're also really common paranormal phenomena,

and I think these beliefs developed because people

have always had these experiences.

I think that's really the bottom line.

Up there, I saw a UFO, and it went down the river,

turned right at the United Nations,

turned left and then down the river.

And you looked what sort of...?

Silent and it looked dark, like...

black or gray in the middle, and...

it wasn't a helicopter and it wasn't a balloon

and it was so near.

[Kripal] I teach at Rice.

Rice is a very STEM-oriented institution.

Most of my undergraduates are gonna be engineers

or chemists or maybe doctors. They're very science-oriented.

And when I started to teach comparative religion here,

I was using kind of classical religious texts,

and I realized they were dismissing all of them,

and they were dismissing them

because they would say to themselves,

"Oh, this person doesn't know science."

Well, let's say this Twinkie

represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy

in the New York area.

According to this morning's sample, it would be a Twinkie

35 feet long, weighing approximately 600 pounds.

That's a big Twinkie.

So I shifted, and I started to use the anomalous experiences

of scientists and engineers and medical professionals.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A scientist or an engineer is trained

in a very materialist worldview,

where there's only matter and the mind or consciousness

is some sort of accidental by-product of dead matter

behaving in very complicated ways in our brain.

So mind is essentially not real.

What the flip is is when a scientist realizes

that, "Oops. Actually, mind is fundamental,

and matter is actually some kind of expression of mind

or consciousness," and so they have

this complete flip of orientation,

usually from a near-death experience

or a psychedelic experience or an illness.

I mean, there's a lot of things that will flip

an intellectual or scientist, but once they're flipped,

they're flipped.

It's hard to get them back

to the earlier kind of materialist perspective.

My own flip I was living in Kolkata in 1989.

It was the fall of '89.

It was during a festival called Kali Puja,

which occurs in late October around our own Halloween.

You have this goddess with cutoff heads

and cutoff hands and goat sacrifice.

I mean, it's our Halloween, only way, way more.

There's a whole elaborate kind of religious worldview

wrapped around this as well, that I was very familiar with,

and I was in fact studying.

One night I came back late from visiting

all these temporary temples in the city,

and I fell asleep...

and I woke up,

but my body didn't wake up.

It was what... You know I think a doctor

would call a sleep paralysis event,

and this energy just kind of came out of nowhere,

came out of me, out of the room,

out of somewhere, and started to interact with me

in very conscious, very intentional ways

that were not me. It was not me.

And it was not subtle.

I thought I was being electrocuted.

I thought I was having a heart attack. Maybe I was.

I mean... But it was... it was powerful,

and it resulted in the... It kind of imploded

into my chest region, and the experience was

that I left my body and I floated to the top

of the ceiling in a kind of dream landscape.

I just felt like...

to use a later language that did not exist in 1989,

I felt like, you know, something had been downloaded into me.

It was just like, "Oh, my God. There's something in me now."

I grew up in a religious atmosphere as a child.

I had an orthodox bar mitzvah.

There was always an unspoken quality of faith

in the household, and I think probably

from a very young age, I had an instinct

that there was reality in the extra physical.

I had occasional experiences myself,

involving things like prayer or astrology

or tarot readings.

And I suppose that my chief interest

was in discovering how some of this ancient material

had endured across centuries and even millennia.

The Neanderthals themselves quite literally

had their own system of spirituality.

They had talismans. They had figurines.

They had devotional practices and paintings.

And we're talking about the most primeval origins

of humanity, so this is obviously something

that goes far beyond what we today would call credulity.

It's baked into the human experience.

When people claim they know what this is about,

whether it's some kind of fraud or it's some kind of mechanism,

I'm like, my eyes just roll.

I'm like, "You either don't know what you are talking about,

or you're lying."

For me, Jacques Vallée is the barometer.

I love Vallée's work because it combines

the sciences and what I would call the humanities

in really effortless ways.

[Puthoff] Jacques Vallée has a broader viewpoint

that maybe it isn't just E.T.'s

coming from some galaxy far away.

The idea that, "Well, it's just a spacefarer

"wandering around through the galaxy

and happens to take a look at us."

That doesn't really quite match the data.

There are hundreds of sightings every year,

going back millennia, which is a point

that Jacques really goes out of his way to make.

[Kripal] I think Jacques flipped

somewhere in the late '60s.

I think it actually happened in libraries in Paris,

and he was reading folklore around fairies

and demonology and sort of medieval folklore,

and he realized that these stories

were essentially about what we call UFOs today,

that there was definitely a connection

between the old folklore and occultism

and the modern mythology that's really developed

around the UFO in the modern world.

[Vallée] Open your Bible.

I mean, what is it that Ezekiel saw?

I mean, Ezekiel describes a craft, you know,

a material craft with entities

that made a tremendous impression on him

and abducted him.

He woke up on top of a mountain, you know,

some miles away

and he didn't know what had happened to him.

And he described wheels within wheels.

Ezekiel gives us this account

of the engineering, the architect-tonics

of this object are unfathomable

and enigmatic, and suddenly we're required

to interpret what the hell this means.

The Bible has preserved it as a religious experience.

Well, what was it?

[Santos] In the early books of the Old Testament,

that's really the critical first framing

in terms of the story of imagining ourselves into a time

when our ancestors understood

extraordinary experiences as every day.

And Jacques Vallée and his, um, Wonders in the Sky

gives us a great chronicle, for instance,

of aerial phenomena through the ages.

[Puthoff] There's some excellent events from Egypt,

millennia ago, where, you know, two armies are fighting,

and sudd enly there's craftin the air

that come down and help one side versus the other.

They imagined that they were the gods

coming to save their skins.

The evidence for that kind of thing is scattered

throughout our literature in all different countries.

So it isn't just a Western thing.

[Vallée] We don't have the complete map, you know,

but we have 19th-century observations by astronomers,

and in those days there was no stigma attached to it.

This was, you know, the waters of science,

with everything documented,

including some wonderful engravings

from Germany and from England and from France and so on.

Of tic tacs!

You know, that's straight out of a fairy tale.

I mean, if you read this without knowing the context,

it's another fairy tale.

It turns out fairy tales come from folklore,

and they are based on real observations.

In the 17th century,

if you were to tell a story like that,

the priest would say you are in contact with the devil.

It could only have been the devil.

And you would suffer the consequences.

So people in those days would filter into folklore,

into cute stories you tell the kids.

This has been very deep in human history.

We just don't pay attention to it.

We're at the very beginning

of a time where it's going to be feasible

to ask these questions seriously,

without the giggle factor, without the discomfort,

without what must be, for some people, spiritually unsettling.

The idea that some of these scenarios may defy

our conventional understandings of our religious traditions.

We have a bigger tool kit now than we ever had before,

in terms of both the empirical end of the studies,

the kinds of instruments we can use

in terms of examination of the physical world.

I also brought a few things,

you know, in terms of what samples look like.

Pieces of things people have picked up after a UFO case.

Jacques, in discussing,

he started talking about some of these materials

that he had from UAP.

Wait a second. I never knew about this.

There's actual materials that people have?

I can look at those.

That's something that a scientist can do.

These are materials that I have collected

with different teams in Brazil, data from 50 years ago.

The Ubatuba materials,

those two vials that have Muestra A and Muestra B,

"sample" in Spanish.

What's good about these materials

is that they have a chain of custody.

So I said, "Okay, well, as it turns out,

some of the instruments that I've developed

in my laboratory for the biology that we do,

are actually designed to look at metals."

I had all this instrumentation available to do the work.

And no, I'm not a metallurgist.

I'm not gonna claim things about metal structure

that I don't know, but I can at least tell you what's there.

One of the samples showed isotope ratios

of magnesium, which were way off Earth normal.

Now, that doesn't mean it's from an E.T.

It just means that somebody altered

the isotope ratios, but at the time these things were found,

that would have been a multimillion-dollar operation,

and it doesn't sound like something you would go

throwing around a beach in Brazil.

I just admire Dr. Nolan and his work.

I mean, obviously his work in biology and medicine

is exceptional,

but I admire his willingness to jump into this

and assemble a new generation of scientists

to look at the academic data.

We've already published, as you may know,

the sophisticated analysis of data

from an unidentified UFO case.

Council Bluffs, Iowa, '77.

[reporter] At Council Bluffs

on Saturday, December 17th at 7:45 p.m.,

three people traveling towards North 16th Street

noticed a reddish object about 600 feet in the air,

falling straight down.

An object was seen hovering.

Multiple people saw it from several different vantages.

Something bright seemed to drop from it.

[reporter] It disappeared behind the trees

of Big Lake Park, followed by a huge flash

of blue-white light, with two, quote, "arms of fire

shooting into the air, as if it had crashed."

They thought it was a plane crash.

[reporter] One eyewitness said, quote,

"It looked like a great big sparkler

with lava-like material dripping,

appearing to slow as it cooled."

Now, another young couple saw, quote, "A big round thing

hovering in the sky, below the tree tops,"

and they called the fire department.

Upon arriving, they found a pool of liquid metal.

The police arrived, took Polaroids, which I have.

And then large pieces of the material

were recovered by some of the witnesses.

There are a lot of potential explanations for it.

You know, all reasonable things

like thermite, et cetera, and they were all discounted

based on the evidence.

It wasn't a meteor crash because meteors

don't leave pools of molten metal behind.

They leave holes, you know.

Again, there's a story, there's witnesses,

there's police validation that at least the stories

all comported, and then there's material evidence.

[Vallée] As you can see, this one comes

from Council Bluffs in Iowa, which is a paper we published.

[Nolan] Jacques brought me the material evidence.

Now, I analyzed it with one of my machines.

We published a peer reviewed paper.

The only thing we found about it was that it was inhomogeneous.

It's a fancy way of saying incompletely mixed.

The material shows no sign of technology.

The material is clearly the result

of an industrial process.

And it was incompletely mixed.

Okay, so why?

Again, that's the question you ask all the time

when you see data. It's like, "Why?"

Why would you do it? What could have generated it?

And why would you dump it in the middle of a field

in a small farming town in Iowa?

Yeah.

Right. Well the purpose of the Sol Foundation

is to legitimize the subject matter

and to bring a level of discourse that's professional.

Academics, for all of its flaws, has a methodology

that it uses, which involves proving something

to a level of acceptability through peer review.

Now, peer review doesn't mean it's right.

We're saying, "Here's the kinds of questions

we need answers to. We need a white paper on this"

or "we need something published in the literature

that examines this problem."

Just in the year and a half or so

that I have become active

and have started interviewing people,

I have met dozens of people who...

commercial, military, Coast Guard mariners

and submariners who have had observations.

This is several dozen people that have seen phenomena

in our oceans in the tropical, Eastern, Western Pacific,

the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean,

the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean

and the North Atlantic and Eastern Seaboard.

So... this is happening.

I love my job in the Navy because every part of the Navy

needs to know something about the physical environment.

The Marines or the Army, they use a term...

They talk about high ground and taking high ground,

because high ground gives some advantage over...

tactical advantage over an opposing force.

There is a high ground in the ocean,

and that's what I gave the U.S. Navy.

Having knowledge of the physical characteristics

of the sea surface as well as the ocean volume

will help determine how well your sensors perform,

whether they be acoustic or optical or radar.

And so knowing where we can basically see the adversary

and they could not see us, giving detailed information

about the ocean structure was basically providing high ground

to the Naval forces I supported.

Do we have any sensors underwater,

uh, to, um, detect on submerged UAPs,

uh, anything that is in the ocean or in the seas?

So I think, uh, that would be more appropriately

-addressed in close sessions. -Okay.

July 15th, this thing dipped into the water

and that sent the crew into sort of a routine.

They announced something to the effect

of splash, splash, which marked the spot

where the thing went in.

They conducted a search, looking for wreckage.

There was none there. It disappeared

from sonar and radar and this thing was just gone.

That's a term people are using for UFOs in the water,

that, uh, Unidentified Submerged Object.

I think USOs have been observed since at least the '60s,

and there are some books and reports

that have been published since then,

and now we're seeing more attention

towards the topic.

Carl Fint is one of those who has published a book on that,

and now, more recently, Richard Dolan

is publishing a compendium of all the reports of USOs.

He's letting me review that for him.

We're seeing in the oceans the same kind of phenomena

that's in the atmosphere, in our skies,

where different types of craft

in different shapes, like triangles and discs,

and, uh, elongated cylinders.

We're seeing different lighting configurations,

like you see with UFOs,

and we're seeing basically activity and characteristics

that defy the laws of physics as we know them.

And when I say we're seeing, these are the reports

that eyewitnesses have come forward with.

Multiple witnesses report seeing a large blue object

fall out of the sky and into the ocean.

[woman] Oh, it [bleep] went and landed in the water,

whatever it is.

[reporter] She described it as being larger

than a telephone pole,

and said she never heard it make any sound.

The idea of the space and ocean comparison is interesting to me.

There is a famous astronaut named Scott Carpenter,

who I got to meet, and I asked him,

"How do you compare the two?"

And he said, "Oh, space is just glorious.

It's bright, it's shiny.

You go... You launch on the top of a rocket

and it's, you know, it's very fast

and you get these missions done quick,

and they're brilliant,"

and then he kind of paused for, like, a dramatic effect

and he said, "The ocean is cruel, it's cold,

everything breaks in it, and it's just difficult."

We've only explored about 5% of the ocean's volume.

Think about that.

95% of the ocean's never even been examined,

and so when you think about it,

if we're just seeing a little bit in the areas

of the ocean we're looking at now

in terms of USO activity, what might we be missing?

Could be quite a bit.

We're gonna have to somehow wrap our minds

around the fact that the scientific method

that is directed toward the physical world

isn't complete.

There has to be another level of methodology

that somehow enables us

to accurately address this numinous level of reality.

And that is going to be a very interesting journey

because I have a feeling it's not going to involve

detection with instruments, as we now understand.

I think that those instruments will be as much part of us

as they are part of the world around us.

And I don't want to speculate.

I was a science-fiction author, but I'm not now.

The accounts of experiencers,

from my perspective, are testimony.

And, over time, testimony becomes a record.

People will sometimes dismiss testimony as anecdote,

which is actually a term that's intended to be disabling.

But we use testimony all the time.

We use it in medicine to try to understand

under what conditions a person experiences pain

or under what conditions is that pain alleviated.

Therapists and patients use testimony commonly to prescribe

psychopharmacological drugs and so forth.

We use testimony to measure the efficacy of those drugs.

So testimony is a common source of information in the sciences

as it is elsewhere.

Over time, testimony becomes record,

and that's a part of what's happening in our time.

Most people that have had anomalous experiences

don't want to talk about them.

They don't want to shout about it from the rooftops.

They're not looking for publicity.

They just want to talk with other people

that have been in similar situations,

and they want to do the research so that they can figure out

some more clues to these enduring mysteries.

The Experiencer Group is a community site

for people that have had anomalous experiences

of any and all kinds.

So that can mean people that have had UFO encounters,

encounters with non-human intelligence.

There are people that have had out-of-body experiences,

near-death experiences, and precognition.

We find that folks that have had one type of experience

sometimes, you know, the quiet secret

is that it's more than one modality

that they have actually experienced.

[Strieber] You sit down and you read letter after letter

after letter, you realize that this is something marvelous

that we've discovered about ourselves.

People will sit down and write a detailed long letter

about something that really happened to them

that is the central question in their life.

There's a strong association

with fear and the shame and the hiding

that people feel when they can't talk about anomalous experiences

and then it's also important to remember that there are

other experiencers that seem to have lucked out,

and it's just all cosmic high fives

the entire time, right?

Just in the last nine months alone,

we organized three hybrid conferences

that happened online and in New York City,

featuring people like Garry Nolan,

Leslie Kean,

Ralph Blumenthal,

Christopher Mellon.

That has been incredibly fruitful

for small group work to be able to have luminaries like that

coming into the situation

and engaging with other experiencers.

One situation that I recall that really helped

unlock recognizing that I needed to deal

with my history with anomalous phenomena

was a situation where I was in Miami

for a wedding, with my ex-wife,

and we had a shared experience

where I was looking out the window of this high-rise

that we were in and there's an illuminated swimming pool

down below.

I was looking at it, and for some reason

about five or six stories down

between where I was and the pool,

there was this ball of electricity

that just appeared out of nowhere

exactly where I was looking,

and I just thought, "Uh-uh, oh, this is not good,"

and, seemingly, this ball,

maybe it was about the size of a basketball or so,

it started slightly moving and growing in size

towards where I was.

I called my wife over and she saw it out the window,

and right as she saw it, it moved very quickly

towards our position,

and she turned around to run away from it,

and as she did, she was seemingly rendered unconscious,

and I had to move to grab her head

so it didn't hit the floor on her way down.

And when I turned around,

there were two non-human entities.

And strangely... I know it sounds very weird...

they were standing outside the window in some way,

as if there were some overlapping realm

that they were on.

And, as had happened at other times in the past,

I was somehow moved over to kind of an operating theater,

and I was... I was laid down on a slab

that was seemingly levitating,

and there was some kind of medical procedure happening,

and I woke up in the morning with part of my suit still on,

on top of the covers in the bed

and my then wife was just staring at my face.

She had already woken up.

And I was like, "Can we talk about this?"

And she was like, "No, we can't talk about this."

And I realized that that relationship

was not going to work.

And I realized that the way that I was handling this stuff

was not going to work,

because denying that it was happening

or acting like I wasn't an experiencer

didn't make it go away,

and so I separated from my wife

and I started researching these subjects,

and now here I am about 12 years later.

[Kripal] Here's the thing people don't understand.

When I talk about revelation, for example,

which is a religious notion,

what I mean is the person doesn't make up the story.

The story appears to the person.

It's passive.

The person is shown something.

It's not... It's not the dreamer or the visionary

or the near-death experiencer that's making some shit up.

That's not what's happening.

Something is happening to the experiencer,

their person being shown to them,

and that's why they'll say it was a revelation.

They're not sitting around daydreaming, you know,

making up something, you know, fantastic.

That's not it at all.

The first time that I encountered

Whitley Strieber's work was the film adaptation

of Communion.

I was probably 14 or 15 years old,

flipping channels,

and then shock and amazement

that I saw a being on television that was...

that was close enough to what I had seen

when... when I was younger.

And I remember being perplexed,

a sense of panic that I couldn't really identify

the source of, and I remember the visual of seeing

Christopher Walken playing Whitley Strieber

and him being severely troubled,

working with a therapist,

and I remember turning off the television at that point.

I think I wasn't ready to engage with the idea

that, as an adult, I would have to be doing similar work

as what I was seeing in that scene.

I didn't want to engage with that yet.

People really responded to that

because they thought, "Well, wait a minute.

This is very much like what happened to me."

And the face on the cover, I sat beside the artist,

Ted Jacobs, who drew that face,

and described my memories in great detail,

and that face is pretty much what I remembered.

It's a very complex human experience,

and like so many other people, couldn't let it go.

What I remember is that through my wall

came some beings around my bed,

and I ran between them and ran out of the room

into my mother's room to hide from them.

And what happened is, um, they followed me in there,

and that's the last I remember of it.

Um, however, it's interesting because after that,

uh, I never told anybody about that,

and I just buried it in the back of my mind,

and me and my brother, we never even spoke about it.

The abduction process,

which is what I experienced, is only a small part

of our relationship with whatever they are.

I think Whitley is a hero.

I think Whitley Strieber is such a brave, courageous,

and an important figure in this field.

It can be hard to figure out how to approach Whitley Strieber.

The gravity around him in interpersonal situations

is very strong.

I remember meeting him for the first time

and having to walk away...

I remember the first time in meeting Whitley

that I actually had to walk away and go to the bathroom

so that I could cry and come back.

He's used to people saying "thank you" to him.

But I can't thank him enough.

Annie put it one day.

She was reading all these thousands of letters

we got pouring in, and she comes out of her office

and says, "Whitley, this has something to do

with what we call death."

And, you know, we were way beyond

the alien abduction idea at that point.

I can't tell you what's going on,

but I can tell you this.

If we ever figure it out, it's going to change the world.

[Eben Alexander] Probably every two or three months,

I would hear fairly compelling stories

of near-death experiences or shared death

or after-death communications that should have gotten

my attention, but I kept dismissing them,

thinking, "No," you know, "That's wishful thinking."

"We don't have any way of proving that."

"No, we don't seem to have memories of past lives."

I don't know that I believe in reincarnation."

Certainly having my own personal experience

went light-years towards opening me up

to accepting and admitting this beautiful kind of expansion

in our knowledge of ourselves and the universe.

There came a slowly spinning white light,

and this white light had fine silvery golden tendrils,

and it came towards me very slowly, spinning.

And as it did so, I realized that it came

with a perfect musical melody.

Then in the Core realm I was told,

"You're not here to stay." "We'll teach you many things."

You'll be going back."

So why was it that I had the most profound,

rich, detailed spiritual experience

when my brain was most demonstrably off.

That was part of the mystery I was to answer

over these 15 years since that time.