Gods, Ghosts & UFOs

If you love this episode and want to share it with someone, we made it easy. Just scroll down to “Share this episode…” and pick a great moment to courageously copy and paste. Highlights: Rabbi Rami Shapiro is the author of nearly 40 books and co-director of the One River Foundation — find him on Substack “Religions are like languages. No language is true or false. The more languages you speak, the...

Real quick real fast — You know how we're basically betting the farm on people who love the show sharing the show (hint hint nudge nudge THAT’S YOU RIGHT??), well, we’ve done our best to make that even easier with this episode. After the bulleted list of episode highlights, you’ll see a section called “Sharing made easy!” If you want to share this episode with someone, all you gotta do is copy and...

A Benedictine monk with training in quantum physics, Gregorian chants, and exorcism claimed to have built a device that could see into the past. This man was Father Pellegrino Ernetti, and he assembled his Chronovisor with a secret team high-profile scientists that allegedly included Enrico Fermi and Wernher von Braun. Fifty years ago, they told everyone they took pictures of Christ’s crucifixion....

Way back during the COVID lockdowns, when the streets of Mexico City were quiet and empty of people, something else started walking them. Multiple witnesses reported encounters with humanoid entities that moved like mannequins. With stiff limbs, and lifeless arms, running on their tiptoes. Backwards. One guy got chased. Another got followed to a bus stop. Someone else watched one of these things l...

A former analyst for the Bank of England just warned that alien disclosure could throw global financial systems into crisis. Tom and Jordan can’t stop laughing. We’re already in financial crisis, aliens or no aliens. And if there was some official disclosure tomorrow, people would just go back to work and worry about groceries. Unless the revelation materially changes people’s lives, they won’t ca...

Brother Richard Hendrick is a Capuchin Franciscan friar and Celtic mystic. He comes from “a people who embrace faith but did not let go of magic and understand that one completes the other.” When Tom asks how to deal with anger and powerlessness in the face of cruelty, Brother Richard offers this: “Anger externalized is actually internalized fear.” Those moving in hatred WANT hatred in return beca...

Most people believe in ghosts. Always have. Always will. EJAE, the lead vocalist from K-Pop Demon Hunters, told a ghost story on Jimmy Fallon and nobody questioned her sanity, because it turns out people who DON’T believe in ghosts are the minority. Tom recorded in one of the most haunted studios in New Orleans in the ‘90s. And boy does he have stories. A distorted face in a window. A badly burned...

Today, we’re doing something ambitious and maybe a little bit stupid, but hopefully the right kind of stupid. We’re rejecting the algorithm. No clips for the feeds. No farming for engagement. Because social media is antisocial. Tom wrote a book about the Chapel Hill music scene in the ‘90s. Before discoverability tools and doomscrolling. Before music became something you listen to by yourself. Bac...

Most (most!) people report having noetic experiences. Knowing who’s calling before you answer. Predictive dreams. Feeling someone’s presence. Gut feelings that turn out to be true. The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and it just released a study about twelve unique “noetic signatures” based on deep survey data from over four thousand people. Some of...

Roman concrete has been healing itself for thousands of years, surviving earthquakes, volcanoes, the ocean… As she’s actively recovering from surgery, Mal has lots of questions about self-healing. And also why her dad keeps telling her to use colloidal silver. Jordan Crowder has a lot to say about how the body heals, it turns out, having survived some major, life-threatening health crises himself....

A Norwegian physicist just published a peer-reviewed paper that mathematically describes consciousness as a fundamental field that existed before space and time. She proposes testable predictions—including the possibility that if consciousness differentiated itself into structured reality through something like universal thought, it might have left detectable patterns in the cosmic microwave backg...

If you’ve got a quiet moment this week, here’s a thoughtful radio essay from Tom that explores the intersections of Victorian literature, social conscience, and what it means to truly connect with our fellows. Yes, it turns out we can be serious sometimes. Please try not to faint. In this piece, Tom tracks the circumstances that led Charles Dickens to write A Christmas Carol, from his disastrous A...

Let’s talk about drugs. This week we learned that some doctors have figured out how to make DMT trips last as long as you want. They can dial it up or down, or turn it off if things go south. And in the ultimate hack to do this legally, they formed an actual church, and they’re recruiting members for what they call “expeditions.” Their stated goals are to develop therapies, solve advanced problems...

What happens after we die? It’s one of the fundamental questions that drives all human interest in religion, philosophy, and science. But while it might not conform to strict materialism, we actually do have a huge body of evidence about what the so-called afterlife might look like. You’ve heard of near death experiences, but you might not know how rigorously they’ve been studied. There are thousa...

Nick Cook is a British aviation journalist turned consciousness researcher. We discuss his take on the Age of Disclosure documentary, why the UFO conversation has become impossible to have like adults, and how simulation theory might be the most grounding framework for understanding reality (no but really). Highlights: Nick’s storied career, from winning four Royal Aeronautical Society Journalism...

Kicking us off this week, Mal takes us through the complete James saga—a YouTuber whose mysterious “UFO” turned into toxic performance art. After that, a high-level conversation about The Age of Disclosure, before Tom finally gets to share a wonderful update from Loch Ness. It’s good, guys. It’s real good. Highlights: Recapping and then tying off the story of James the UFOtuber How he started off,...

This week, for kicks, we decided to flame a rancid piece of alien abduction “journalism,” including feeding the thing to AI on a whim to see what happens. Then, on the back of an article in The Debrief about a supposed “Seventh Sense,” we get into a speculative conversation about transhumanism, biology, technology, and human perception, before circling back to waste more time with sycophantic LLMs...

This week we’re looking into a technology-assisted variant of an ancient, mystical practice to locate subterranean water veins, and then Tom’s got the full scoop on America’s first documented haunting. You can also expect an update on James the YouTuber with a tuber of a UFO, which has frankly not aged well. We have a lotta fun, don’t we, guys. Highlights: Map dowsing! How it’s the same and how it...

This week we did a bit more diligence on 3I/Atlas (it’s a big deal, ok!), and dove into the surprisingly emotional world of English psychic pub nights. We also took an extended virtual through Florida’s Everglades to see what we could see about the Skunk Ape. And then we stuck around to hear Tom’s theory about how Disneyland is a kind of metaphysical purgatory. Enjoy! Highlights: David Shealy, who...

This week we’ve got updates from James the UFO-Tuber, those photographic telescope plates from the mid-20th century, and Enigma’s recent USO report. All that ends up kicking off a deeper conversation about ontological wheel-spinning, and how a guy named Reed Summers is trying to help move the conversation about UFOs and NHIs in a more practical, impactful direction, especially against a chaotic in...

Welcome to our (very) haunted Halloween Special. We’ve been sitting on this one for a while, waiting for the right time. In the first half, listen to the chilling, remarkable story of a childhood haunting. What starts as an early encounter with a long-haired figure in the shadows escalates into possession, physical attacks, and a deeply unsettling episode of missing time in a bathroom. (Good luck...

This is what you might call a sequel episode, since we’re not only revisiting the Fresno Nightcrawlers (thanks to some hot tips from a listener), we’re also checking in on “just James,” the anonymous UFO-Tuber. Also, yes, we’re finally covering 3I/Atlas. Sometimes, you gotta hold your nose and jump onto the bandwagon. Highlights: Turns out we were wrong about the Fresno Nightcrawler video Tom conn...

Mothman Prophecies screenwriter and fellow podcaster Richard Hatem (!!!) joins us this week to tunnel down into some of the weirdest stuff on the Internet. First up, the Fresno Nightcrawler, followed by a sketchy Las Vegas ghost hunt email scam, and finally a lively discussion about whether “James” the YouTuber actually found a flying, radioactive metallic pill in the desert, or if he’s creating t...

We’re thrilled to welcome Mark Turner to the show. A Navy veteran, Rhine Research Center volunteer, and experienced remote viewer, Mark helps us dig into one of the most rigorously studied and widely dismissed phenomena in modern history. Find out how the CIA and military spent decades proving remote viewing works, why your ego is the biggest obstacle to accessing non-local information, and the po...

First off, Chris Styles’ decades of research into underwater UFO incidents off Nova Scotia, followed by a longer-than-usual conversation about the spiritual consequences of belief. Then, finally, we find out that nature independently invented psilocybin at least twice through completely different biochemical pathways, strongly suggesting some sort of collaborative evolution between us and mushroom...