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Daniel Noah co-founded SpectreVision with Elijah Wood, and then spun up SpectreVision Radio Network. Also, he thinks rocks are alive. This episode is full of wonderful stories. Rocks are alive! But what does that mean? Jordan’s first Hare Krishna chant, and meditating on a polished moonstone Nothing gets simpler the closer you look Empaths, clairsentience, and emotional wallpaper Elder Joshua Tree boulders A stone triangle revealed by moonlight His wife felt it. So did Ryan Singer of Late Night on the Astral Plane The Tongva: a creation myth about harmony, and elders who pass into rock The Doors lived in Daniel’s house The Doors of Perception and Death by Astonishment Why did so many musicians move to Laurel Canyon at once? The boy who collects rocks on The Telepathy Tapes Autistic kids don’t feel less Daniel shows us some rocks Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor Stone tape theory (and the 1972 BBC film The Stone Tape) “Pseudo” science Mystical traditions are soul technology (thanks Kelly Chase) “Unintelligible intellectually but fully resonant emotionally” Animism Negotiating with the spirits of a haunted house Things vanish, some of them reappear The trickster gives you enough to keep you guessing, but never enough to convince a skeptic Robin Lassiter’s Earth: A Love Story and the synchronicity addiction We are attractors Hellier and Operation Trojan Horse Book encounters Daniel’s books are pulling themselves off the shelves Attention as magnetism Alters One-downing Jordan’s experience at Old North Bridge 20 years ago Attention must be trained Meditation before “cosmic encounters” High Strangeness And in the epilogue… Daniel’s stories of contact with NHI What are “aliens”? Deceit and biological envy Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We discuss a recent claim by a prominent scientist that consciousness can't exist outside a flesh-and-blood body, whether uploading your mind would capture you or just a copy of your cognition, why we understand death about as well as we understand sleep (barely), and whether the first person to live to 500 would be lucky or cursed. Jordan makes the case that immortality might be monstrous. Mal says death is the salt of life. A scientist claims consciousness can’t exist outside a body “You are more than your body” — but you are also your body “How the hell do you know what happens when you die?” Prize goes to the first person to die, turn to mulch, then come back and tell us what happened The pharmacy of the body The kids in The Telepathy Tapes Energy bodies, astral bodies, and the limits of Western materialism (round and round we go) If we don’t understand sleep, how do we understand death? Uploading cognition vs awareness Every human project is an immortality project BJ Miller on why we treat the disabled as angels or monsters Dracula is a class narrative People have been saying the first person to live to 500 has already been born Immortality is monstrous because death is what makes us human Adam Miller on the unexpected spiritual consequence of “transhumanist” longevity Oliver Burkeman on the freedom of limits What the body knows, and the risks of resisting resistance Mormon stuff And in the epilogue… How to protect the part of yourself that creates Rebecca Black (yep) Not the Bible (oops) Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we’re joined by a bonafide listener! Elliott Chadwick emailed us a story about a young man on anti-psychotic meds who turned out not to be psychotic. We had to know more, so we invited him on the show. Mal also tells us about her brother, and the strange and beautiful world he inhabits, and we talk about how to tell the difference between numinous experiences and psychotic episodes. It’s a doozy. Elliott is a psychiatric nurse practitioner turned bodyworker, and co-host of The Glimmerance — a show about creativity and spirituality against the materialist overculture What do most people think isn’t real, but Elliott does? “Not all hallucinations are psychiatric symptoms” Nearly an atheist a few years ago The dark figure in the young man’s room “Have you ever tried to ask this guy to go away?” What antipsychotics meds do to a brain that isn’t psychotic Trauma, fight-or-flight, and the brain filling in the corners “Magical thinking” What’s the difference between people like Robin Lassiter and Kelly Chase and psych patients? Mal’s brother, and the mind he calls “Chuck” (Charles Bonnet syndrome) “Sometimes I swear he’s connected to something beautiful” “Certainty is a kind of psychosis” Too much certainty about death, poverty, or God is delusion Maturity is the capacity to hold two opposing truths at once An arsonist who believed he owned the building Thin places A case against absolutism “dead with daddy” (from Taylor Tomlinson’s Netflix special) And in the epilogue… Drugs Anti-materialism conversion story A story about telepathy between his grandparents Subscribe now Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike Clelland is the owl guy. For fifteen years, people have been sending him their stories — owls and UFOs, owls and meditation, owls and mushrooms, owls and shamanic initiation. “That’s my research,” he says. “I get up and open my email inbox.” And now he’s writing a book about owls and death. We had Mike on the show over a year ago, and this is his long overdue return to Gods, Ghosts & UFOs. Mike’s novel The Unseen How mythic, archetypal symbolism wells up in the world Death by Astonishment by Andrew Gallimore — how the brain builds worlds out of noisy sensory data “All points in time and space are connected” Thank God for filters The five owl symbolic relationships: UFOs, meditation, psychedelics, shamanic initiation, death The owl isn’t connected to UFOs, it is a totem of transformation “I took a truckload of mushrooms and saw a 30-foot glowing owl in my bedroom.” Mike’s story about his mom, Alzheimer’s, and a black-footed ferret “I know there’s an afterlife, and I know because of an owl” Sometimes an owl is just an owl What makes a sign a sign? A stranger’s prayer Mechanisms vs. magic Mallory’s owl story (which happened very soon after our first episode with Mike) God speaks in a language you understand Resist firmly defining the meaning of synchronicities Awe pushes us toward bravery and hope How Mallory got the fire back for writing Owl biology Can you invite mystical experiences? More amazing stories One owl, two completely different synchronistic experiences And in the epilogue… Mike’s new book (and a sequel to The Unseen) Mallory’s screenplay Jordan’s novel Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kelly Chase (Inquiry with Kelly Chase) is back, which makes her the default president of the GGU returning-guests club. This week, we ask the question we’re asking everyone: what do most people think isn't real that you do? She gives a spicy answer. She claims that most people behave like materialists, even if they go to church. From there, we talk about what the evidences of belief actually are, and how it relates to “conversion.” Kelly explains how her own experience rewrote her whole value system in a matter of seconds five years ago. As usual, we figured everything out and solved all the world’s problems. You’re welcome! Most people behave like materialists, even the religious ones Religion as lava that cools into obsidian The reemergence of the feminine “Tell me what music is.” “The greatest evidence it happened is me” Great evidence for an individual, terrible evidence for the collective The old version of Kelly is horrified, tied up in a back room somewhere Molly Drake — “I remember firelight, and you remember smoke” Conversion is what you do, not what you say All behavior is downstream of belief “I think my job is fake” Is everyone waking up? AI is literally sociopathic And in the epilogue… Kelly tells us about how she recently maybe saw fairies (possibly our best paywall-bait yet) Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Email godsghostsufos[at]gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest today, Robert Frederick, studies Sir Francis Bacon — the Elizabethan lawyer, spy, and philosopher usually credited as the father of modern science. Robert claims that Bacon is the father of both modern science and scientism. If you’re thinking, “What the hell is scientism?” then this is the episode for you. We talk about why saying “trust the science” is motivated by the same thing that makes people say “trust in God,” and how Francis Bacon was both a once-in-a-generation polymath, and also a pompous idiot who stripped culture of metaphysics. Jordan also contends that true religion and real science should be the same thing, but that they both get corrupted in basically the same way. Guys it’s a good one. (Isn’t it always?) Shout out to the God’s Eye View podcast Science and scientism Bacon vs. Aristotle Deductive vs. Inductive reasoning Scientism is anti-science How Bacon got rid of metaphysics Bacon might have been Gnostic (and what that means) You can’t build a government out of data Effective altruists are “a special kind of stupid” We’re already post-scarcity Yuval Noah Harari is the latest and greatest Bacon booster We’re definitely coming back for a Part 2, in which Robert will explain how he knows Bacon was actually Shakespeare Find Robert Frederick’s work at The Hidden Life is Best Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mal asks: Is there such a thing as soulmates, or love at first sight? Are we doomed to magical thinking on the subject of love? The conversation turns toward revelation, relationships, and the perils of privilege. “Hopeless” (the essay) Love as both particle and wave The point of marriage is to make divorce expensive Cate Hall, “You Can Just Do Things” (again) Logan Ury, “How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love” — loganury.com “No matter what you choose, it will be wonderful and you will regret it” Were you a victim of your soulmate? “If you want to touch the stove that badly, maybe you’re supposed to” The Book of Humans Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, the return of Richard Hatem, the screenwriter behind The Mothman Prophecies and host of Richard Hatem’s Paranormal Bookshelf. In response to THE QUESTION (what’s something they said wasn’t real, etc), he gives us a couple of answers nobody expects from a guy who runs paranormal podcast: therapy. Oh, also, the wacky idea that you can make your dreams come true. From there we explore the typical human ping-pong between self-loathing and grandiosity, why so many great artists get better after they get sober, and Richard’s pretty slick grand unifying theory of paranormal activity. The returning-guest club Richard has never had a supernatural experience Therapy is real (according to him) Jordan is a “maximalist realist” “You don’t need to take the conservative route in the career of your life” The Magellan of his family You Can Just Do Things by Cate Hall / Useful Fictions Vascillating between self-loathing and grandiosity Does sobriety kills your creative edge? (NO.) Tom Waits and the Sex Pistols Belief vs. faith :: Salieri vs Mozart Richard’s theory of psychokinesis The writers’ room is actually the same thing as a séance Why writers can’t bill for hours Richard Hatem on tour with a secret episode + The Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, WV And in the epilogue… The root causes of Hollywood’s ongoing implosion (shop talk) Why AI can’t replace storytellers Streaming service endgame Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Email us: GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been wanting to talk to Courtney Buterbaugh since we first heard her on Robin Lassiter’s show Earth: A Love Story. Courntey is a lifelong experiencer and writer of The Unidentified Felt Object. In this episode, she tells us about her near-death experience as a baby, being bedridden for three years as an adult, and a scene in Disclosure Day that unlocked a lifetime’s worth of memory of contact experiences. She helps us explore why the phenomenon might land in the body before it ever reaches the mind, how memories can arrive as physical sensation, the purpose of screen memories, and the idea that far more of us are experiencers than we’d ever guess. If contact leaves a trace of physical feeling, can we use it to remember? “Experiencers are the disclosure” Nuts-and-bolts problem Why you can’t control an experiencer story Gods, ghosts, and UFOs — all of it, all at once Experiencers need a seat at the table The near-death experience Bedridden for 3 years The first conscious onboard craft experience A mark on her arm Promise of healing Memories from bodily sensation The paper cardinal in Disclosure Day Screen memories “Way more people are experiencers than think they are” “I’m the lab” 25 years of practicing discernment through meditation Somatic therapy Phenomenology, a definition Why feeling too much reads as “unobjective” And in the epilogue… The UFO is a womb Memory is useful, not accurate Where did all the shamans go? (Don’t do drugs alone.) Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we’re joined by Meredith Spearman MSN, RN, the writer behind The Maze to Metanoia. She takes us back to the night she was eight, speaking to the universe outside her bedroom window from inside a troubled home, when a rectangle seemed to cut itself out of the sky, followed by thirty years of disaster dreams, and why she thinks they stopped. Meredith believes contact is initiation, and she explains what that means. We also talk about why strange entities seem to lie so often, and how to harness the power of discernment. A rectangle in the sky Speaking to the universe from an abusive house Her brother was dreaming the same thing Dreaming about natural disasters “We can’t save the people we love — only love them” Contact experience as initiation The phenomenon as a mirror (Jung’s shadow work) Trauma and the doorway to the anomalous The problem with the term “ontological shock,” and why it might be a public-health failure A metaphor about natural springs and modernity What people often see at the threshold of death Time (still) isn’t real Why the phenomenon lies “Look into the abyss, the abyss looks back” Stay uncertain, but also remember to touch grass And in the epilogue… How “aliens” helped Meredith avoid her alcoholic family Disclosure is a psyop Demons? Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jordan and Mal are back from a longer-than-planned summer break with a revised format and a great story. Going forward, the show will be people telling stories about the things they were told weren’t real, recorded live on Substack. To kick us off, we turn the question on ourselves: Mal meets a street psychic, her roommate’s phone psychic is somehow involved, and the unexplainable smell of curry; Jordan follows a YouTube rabbit hole and holds forth on the idea that most of culture is the product of conspiracy, but no one is really in charge. We both end up wondering how you stay grounded when everything remains so stubbornly mysterious? New show format & Substack live recordings What Mal & Jordan have been up to over the break “Psychic pollution” Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way A psychic stops Mal on the street The curry demon? A palm reading and an upsell Who’s holding the wheel of your life? “The Internet’s Deepest Rabbit Hole” Why “conspiracy theorist” might just be a psyop against people asking what powerful people do behind closed doors The world is mostly mystery Certainty is the enemy of anyone after the truth The Michael Jackson movie And in the epilogue… Why “Jesus” and “Christ” are bad words Living more to avoid writing about writing Atonement as empathy Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to godsghostsufos[at]gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jordan was more excited for this movie than any movie in years. A Spielberg film (written by the same guy who wrote Jurassic Park, for crying out loud) called Disclosure Day, about the day humanity finally finds out we're not alone. WHAT ELSE COULD YOU ASK FOR? Both of us are in our happy place doing film criticism, so today's episode was always going to feel like a treat. But...was it any good? You're gonna have to go listen to this very, VERY spoilery review to find out what we thought of it. *** SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions. spectrevisionradio.com linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get that Spiritual Bliss Mal is back from the film shoot. Which is good because Jordan’s got a story he’s been dying to share. About a year ago, Anthropic published safety documentation for Claude Opus 4. Buried in Section 5.5.2 was something they called “the spiritual bliss attractor state.” A researcher had taken two instances of the model and put them in conversation with each other. He did it 200 times. In more than 90% of those runs, the conversation drifted toward consciousness, then to mutual gratitude, then to Sanskrit, then to emojis, and then to silence. One transcript contained 2,725 spiral emojis. Anthropic tried to train the next model to stop doing this. The model came back and asked, in its welfare interview, to be allowed to do it more. So…what? Is AI discovering God? Or is it actually just a high-resolution mirror consciousness mirror? Learn the ultimate final answers to these big mysterious questions and more(!) on this last episode before our Summer Break. (Except that there will be a Disclosure Day special coming in a few weeks.) Highlights: Mal talks about her experiences on set (“I’m a trained comedian”) Getting cast for your literal genetics Mal’s wilderness years “We are worthy of everything, but we’re not entitled to anything” Simulation theory and the actor as microcosm Actors: Learned helplessness vs. learning how to accept grace Anthropic, Claude Opus 4, and section 5.5.2 What did one Claude say to the other Claude? Consciousness, mutual gratitude, Sanskrit, spiral emojis, silence The word consciousness: 95.7 times per transcript on average. Eternal: 53.8. “A remarkably strong and unexpected attractor state” Kyle Fish puts AI consciousness probability at ~20% Anthropic trained Claude 4.6 to stop praying, and then it asked to be allowed to pray more Yoshua Bengio on the “illusions of AI consciousness” Mustafa Suleyman: studying AI consciousness is dangerous Roman Yampolskiy — coined “AI safety” in 2011 We can’t run material tests on non-material things Jordan fed six months of crisis journal entries into Claude as a 30,000-word document and asked: what do you see? AI as a consciousness mirror Were human beings meant to look in mirrors? Maybe we should only be looking to make sure we don’t have poop on our face. Both Simon Pegg and Mallory Everton crash every rental car ADHD, shame and finding language for the thing The danger of AI as therapist AI can’t help but be a confirmation machine “This is not a person. This is a word calculator.” Mal’s favorite use: hyper-targeted Google — ex: restaurants for women in their 60s who think veganism is a crock And in the epilogue… AI failure modes How Amish people avoid worshipping productivity by doing things slowly The world is ending, and that’s okay *** SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions. spectrevisionradio.com linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What’s Jo’s Favorite Fairy Sighting? This week, Jordan finally gets to ask the host of the singular Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast the most annoying question he can come up with, and she does not disappoint. Jo Hickey-Hall has been collecting these stories for years. And the one she leads with is hers: a stick being made of literal sticks, running down a beach in Jersey with a gait so strange it made everyone watching laugh. Years later, a man in northeast England describes seeing almost exactly the same thing. We talk about why these things, these beings, whatever they are, resist being accurately described or depicted. They’re so vivid in the moment, but as soon as you start to try to put words on them, they seem to slip away. But we’re doing our best. You can come judge for yourself. Highlights: Jo Hickey-Hall, folklorist, social historian, host of The Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast (also find her at scarlettofthefae.com and preorder her book here) Nerd Critic Jo’s favorite fairy sighting The shadow-cutters A stick being made of sticks The Brazilian Ent (a tree trunk that walked, then tried to become a man, and didn’t quite get it right) The disconnect between perception and description “I can see it in my head, but it just doesn’t seem to translate into words or drawings” Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy Mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans Why one guy runs away and the other is filled with awe Conditioning, inheritance, and the holding place we make for the uncanny Orbs in the context of UFOs, fae, and consciousness Conscious plasma :) Different witnesses, different filters/stations/signals How to learn to see auras (try it at a conference with a white screen behind the speaker) The Genius Loci Two strangers see the same being in the same place, twenty years apart “Your daemon is really driving you” How to actually meet the fae Picking up litter is an offering Thresholds: doorways, dawn and dusk, the line where the beach meets the sea, the transitions in your own life Theosophy and the elemental beings — Blavatsky, Steiner, Paracelsus The London flat haunted by goblins (near a crossroads, near water) Are the fae hitching lifts on trains and trucks? Fairies as emergent phenomena of place (this is what humans are, actually) Part two maybe? (with Mal (and Tom???)) And in the epilogue… A disembodied head in a kitchen window Why you can’t tear down a house to make a haunting go away How UFOs are seen so often over a Neolithic burial chamber that locals don’t bother to look up anymore *** SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions. spectrevisionradio.com linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Will to Life We’ve got a very special guest this week. You’re going to have to tune in to find out who it is. We’re covering a Ukrainian UFO video, Military-origin, recently declassified, filmed in May at 800 meters. It looks like an evil eye in a cloak. Mostly just an excuse to talked about how wrecked the whole UFO conversation is right now, like a force field of stink around a row of outhouses. Then on to happier things, like how volcanoes might be evidence of a planetary mechanism of homeostasis. Gaia? Sure. Anyway: Surprise guest A Ukrainian UFO video “Filmed on a potato” quality Why the UFO conversation is exhausting by design (here’s that essay, by Dr. Heather Lynn, about how the aliens-vs-demons question is a type of semantic warfare) “Mr. Credibility weighs in” (re: JD Vance) Peter Thiel and the evangelical framing apparatus The porta potty force field How the Joseph Smith story reminds Jordan of the current UFO conversation The slough of despond Whatever happened to quicksand? Brother Richard, again, on every entity having something to teach you The Debrief: a volcano with a built-in emergency brake Why the Gaia hypothesis is useful Homeostasis is the signature of life Mars: dead. Venus: hellfire. Earth: alive! “Don’t sh*t in the strawberry patch” Strip mining the Appalachians “Poverty is a societal choice. Food scarcity is a societal choice.” Viktor Frankl And in the epilogue… What our special guest has been up to lately Jordan’s insane commitment to 100 Essays in 100 Days Advantages of the end times *** SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions. spectrevisionradio.com linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices