Gods, Ghosts & UFOs

Peg Serena is a stop-motion animator and a long-time listener who used to be a science-first skeptic. But then, when her kids started to ask her about what happens after you die, she realized she didn’t know what to say. Which is how she found herself binge-watching a medium show on Netflix, and eventually hearing the voice of her dead grandfather. And that was just the beginning. Peg Serena, circ...

For almost all of human history, nobody had a word for animism, because they just intuitively knew everything in the world is alive. Enter: science, which is very good at taking things apart to see how they work. But typically when you take something apart, like, say, a frog, it dies. This week James Taylor Foreman (of The Metaphor) explains that objects object, and how this connects to the idea t...

Joshua Cutchin has spent more than a decade exploring the wide territory of the paranormal — fairy food, brimstone smells, Bigfoot, the dead.… What do most people think isn’t real, but he does? The line between fact and fiction is very, very blurry. For example: stigmata. Christ would have been nailed to the cross through the wrists, but stigmatists bleed from the palms, which is where the wounds...

Tom returns! Mostly to tell us about his new show (the one he left us for), which tbf is straight fire. Then, honestly it’s just the three of us hanging out for like an hour, just in case you’ve been hankering for some unstructured conversation between the three of us. What do most people not think is real, but Tom does? Raised by Depression babies The Night Parade on SpectreVision Radio — where e...

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...

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 sa...

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...

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. Mi...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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 contac...

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...

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 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? Y...

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...

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 m...

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 outhou...

Scientism to Scripture Trevor was deep in the trenches of science—cellular biology, bioinformatics, a PhD in aging research, chasing longevity and the promises of the Human Genome Project. He bought the materialist worldview hook, line, and sinker. Until he didn’t. What started as intellectual disappointment in grand theories of consciousness led him through quantum physics, information theory, an...

Losing Ourselves in Good TV Ever since we watched Pluribus, we’ve been wanting to talk about it on the pod. Both of us have been wrestling with the concept of ego-death and the ultimate merging of all consciousness, and the core conceit of this show seems to tackle those very same themes. So, really, how could we not talk about it? We get into the so-called vampire problem in philosophy, the idea...

Pretty soon, we’re gonna have a little summer break. Among other things, it’s because Mal is shooting a movie and Jordan is moving his family from LA to Cedar City, Utah. But that’s not really what this episode is about. What it’s about is what happens when you make things that nobody asked you to make. Mal just finished the first draft of her first solo screenplay. Also, she’s been writing music...

Mal’s been slammed, so Jordan rounded up a bunch of good stories to serve up like a pile of gifts on a platter. First, why are people shining lasers at walls while tripping on DMT? Next, we need to discuss the fact that JD Vance is on record believing UFOs are actually demons. What does that even mean? (Hint: it probably doesn’t mean anything about UFOs or demons.) After that, an ancient Greek gee...

Kelly Chase was a materialist and an atheist. Then on a random Saturday morning in August 2021, something reached into her mind and showed her what she’s come to refer to as The Good — coherence, beauty, truth — whatever it is that allows creation to exist. The experience completely changed her life. But here’s the problem: she also knows that whatever did this to her could also make her happy abo...

Welcome to season two. This week: a dad in North Yorkshire set up CCTV after his cat refused to go downstairs. The footage is pretty convincing — toys moving, doors swinging, skateboards clattering. Except he’s a video game developer. And it’s 2026. And we genuinely cannot tell anymore what’s real on the internet. Which is the actual problem. Not whether this particular video is real, but the fact...