Welcome to the 14^th season of the Walking the Shadowlands podcast, where we dive deep into the mysteries of the universe, the mind, and beyond. I’m your host, Marianne, and today we have a truly special guest who has spent decades exploring the intersections of myth, consciousness, and the unknown. But before we get onto him, I just need to say a few words about our podcast.

Sadly, this will be the last season of Walking the Shadowlands. Not because I have lost interest in, or no longer find joy in talking with wonderful people, and not because I have run out of guests for our podcast. Not at all. The simple reason is this. Almost every episode I have asked those of you who listen to and follow our podcast for help to keep this podcast on the air. And I was not kidding. For those of you unaware, I am a pensioner on government superannuation, so that means I am on a very, very limited income. I have been funding the costs for this podcast largely out of my pocket, with the odd and gratefully appreciated donation from a few people. But that was always few and far between. Before I moved to Aussie to live in January, it didn’t matter too much. I budgeted for the podcast costs which are well over $1,000 dollars a year. Some with monthly fees other apps and programs I use yearly fees. But, I simply cannot afford that any longer since moving here. So this will be our last season. And honestly, I am sad about that. But, we’ve had a good run, had some wonderful guests and it’s not done yet. So having said all that onto today’s episode.

Joining us is Keith Thompson, a pioneering journalist and author who has brought the world of UFOs into a new light with his insightful and thought-provoking work. Keith is best known for his ground-breaking book Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination, where he examines UFO phenomena through the lenses of psychology, mythology, and spirituality. His latest work Exploring the UFO Paradox, continues to challenge conventional thinking, inviting readers to explore the profound mysteries that lie at the edge of our understanding.

In this episode, we’ll delve into Keith’s fascinating career, uncover the stories behind some of the most enigmatic UFO cases, and explore the deeper implications of these encounters on our perception of reality. Whether you’re a sceptic, a believer, or somewhere in between, this conversation promises to open your mind and expand your horizons.

So, sit back, relax, and as always – are you willing to walk into this part of the Shadowlands, with the one and only Keith Thompson and myself and see what awaits us there? Then let’s begin.

Exploring the UFO Paradox with Keith Thompson.

Marianne: Keith, I’d like to welcome you to the Walking the Shadowlands podcast. I’ve been really looking forward to our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Keith: You’re welcome.

You wrote a book, called the UFO Paradox, a celestial and symbolic world of unidentified aerial phenomena. I read your book. I can see you’ve done a lot of work. I’ve got like six pages of questions here. I will say from the outset that I’m an experiencer. OK. I’ve been an experiencer since I was three.

All right.

So my perspective is perhaps a little bit different from others who’ve interviewed you, but I’ll try not to let my biases Creep through.

Your perspective is part of the data long as your objective toward your own experience, if you, and fair, you know, but I’m, I said bring it in.

Yeah. Sweet.

I decided the same thing when I  decided to talk about my near death experience and my childhood mystical experience .On the rooftop of my house. Anyway, those are things I decided, I’m over the idea that I don’t ever bring in my own experience and that way I stay objective.That’s not real objectivity. Your own experience is part of your life.

Very valid point. Thank you for that. Keith. What inspired you to write this book to begin with?

I wrote a book more than two decades ago called Angels and Aliens, which is a book about the UFO phenomenon. But even that, if I refer to that book, it’s the same question. What inspired me to write that book? Would be the question. I became interested and aware of the UFO phenomenon as a, I could almost say a cub reporter. Namely, I was 12 years old. And it was my turn to give a current events report in my sixth grade class. And it was at a time living in northwest Ohio where I grew up that the UFO phenomenon was active.

There was a case going on in Michigan that went on for three or four days. Lights, apparent craft. Interactions between people and the occupants, and so forth. As I recall, in any case, I, it was getting a lot of national publicity in those days. The national news might lead with a remarkable UFO sighting in Hillsdale, Michigan, you know, Walter Cronkite, great broadcaster.

So I started to collect clippings for it. And took it very seriously and it .Was my turn to stand up. So I told the story of this sighting. And I told in particular how a air force investigator named J. Allen Hynek. Who was a consultant to the air force at that time on UFOs. He was an astronomer and he was called into to evaluate the cases.

He didn’t know it at the time. But the Air Force did not take the phenomenon seriously. So they wanted him to provide cover, and basically dismiss them all. Which they thought he probably would do. So in any case, he flew into Michigan, and visited all the areas, all the hot spots, and this time to give a news conference with all the reporters that had gathered all over the country.

It was that kind of a sighting, really a lot of attention. So he stood there and said, I can’t explain everything that has happened, but I’ve talked with individuals. There’s clearly some very convincing evidence here. I can say as a matter of in passing that the one particular sighting with lights over near the swamp might have been, could have been perhaps… he put it very conditionally, could have been swamp gas?

Now swamp gas is a real phenomenon that involves the degeneration of leaves and foliage around a river or a swamp. And releases gas and luminescent lights and so forth. And as soon as he said swamp gas, he said it could have been, might have been, maybe? But that isn’t what the reporters heard.

They heard swamp gas. So they jumped up as a group. Herd journalism at its worst. Yes. And they ran out to the payphones in the lobby. That’s in the days people didn’t have cell phones. They called their news bureaus and said, Hynek explains it all as swamp gas. That was a misinterpretation. And he said so at the. But it was never really reversed.

And the local people in Michigan were appalled that this expert had come into school. Say nothing but swamp gas, which isn’t what he’d said. I told my class about this. And I said, that’s what makes it a great story. And it came time for me to take questions from students in the class. And one of them said, do you think it’s aliens from outer space?

And I said, on the basis of, you know, I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s one interpretation, I said. That’s one of the popular interpretations. There’s some people who feel it’s from like, Parallel realities. There might be like the Twilight Zone, I said. You know, it’s a TV show called the Twilight Zone.

I remember that.

That got everybody excited. And someone said if you don’t think it was if aliens, or Twilight zone, what do you think they saw? And I said, I don’t really know. And the truth is I wasn’t trying to dodge the question. And I wasn’t trying to punt the football down the field.

I simply said the descriptions did not match swamp gas. So at that point the time was up. And my teacher came up, stood next to me and said; I think what keith is trying to tell us, It’s with cases like this. And phenomena like this. It’s important to keep an open mind and ask relevant questions And I remember, Marianne, at that point. Just feeling incredibly validated as a young kid. I felt seen and heard by my teacher.

It was almost like a benediction,, that I was presenting something in a manner that she thought was like a young adult would do. So that really made an impact on me in terms of encouraging. Many of us have bad experiences with teachers and we’re told we come away feeling we’re not good enough or smart enough or anything.

I had an experience of feeling, I was quite adequate to whatever task was in front of me. Then she said the way the teachers often do. They refer to you by your last name. Mr. Thompson, she said, that was quite a good report. She said this in front of the class. You have the makings of a journalist or a scientist, maybe even a detective.

Follow the evidence wherever it leads. Yeah. Very upbeat, enthusiastic, and students clapped. And I sat down, I think we went to recess and I got to be a normal kid again.

What a great teacher.

That’s what someone else said too when I told her the story. That’s what a teacher needs. You don’t need a masters of education to simply encourage students to think, keep open mind, ask good questions. So I continued to pay attention. I had not seen any UFOs. So that was the objective side , of the phenomenon for me. The journalist, other side, the more subjective side came two years later, when I had a habit of getting onto our family rooftop of our house, when my parents weren’t around and my brother. I have three brothers, but I would take time to get away and from the hustle and bustle of crowd. I had a lot of friends, but I also was drawn to, I like quiet time. I’ve always had a kind of reflective side. So I climbed up the TV antenna, the old fashioned TV antennas that were built into the ground.

They were literally a structure separate from the house, And it ran up the side of the house. And it gave access to the roof, which we weren’t supposed to be on with multiple levels. And so this one went up on the roof. Like that song I think for the drifters. From the sixties, when this old world starts getting you down, there’s People are much too much to take, go up on the roof and find solitude.

I simply, I remember laying back and sort of just looking into the beautiful blue sky, wasn’t too bright, without any purpose or aim. And I had the experience of suddenly being everywhere at once. And no place in particular. And I felt surrounded by a brilliance that seemed to lift me beyond time and space, like nothing I’d ever experienced.

And in fact, it wasn’t any sense of anything I had done, achieved, or accomplished. It felt like the complete absence of anything to do. That by just simply letting go and looking… there was this sense of absolutely no division between me and anything else. Later I found out as I grew older, that had the hallmarks of a mystical experience, a direct religious experience. But at the time and really throughout my childhood, my family was not a particularly religious family.We went to church periodically, but it was more that good people. It was good for good people to be seen going to church.

Oh, yes. Yeah,

We were not a devout family. And my parents didn’t have any strong religious beliefs. And I had never gotten any religious education. So it wasn’t that I was drawn to have a religious experience or even I should probably more accurate says spiritual experience. A direct hit, if you will. But I knew that this was center court. I knew later it was called Buddha mind, a spirit, soul, God. Not God as a particular figure. But as the design intelligence behind everything. Patterning intelligence. So with that as a separate, a second anecdote of experience, that is really on the more subjective side.

And in fact, I came down from the roof, came down the TV antenna. My parents didn’t see me. I never told anybody about the experience. Only because how do you go inside the house and say, Mom, I just had an experience where there’s no separation between me and the rest of the universe? I’m not sure that’s how I would have put it.

I actually wouldn’t have known how to put it. It was a moment of ineffable, nothing to say, complete silence. Before any words are spoken. But I always sense Marianne, that that was a primary… that I had seen behind the curtain. That I had seen something more real than ordinary reality. This was the backdrop.

Ordinary reality was real, but it was more like a low resolution version of a video. I had seen high resolution video, the full 1080 dots per second, or whatever it’s called, DPU, CPU. I don’t know technical language very well, but it was like seeing in a sense of full color, Kodachrome hyper-real.

Right.

And so between these two experiences, one was a direct inner experience. The other was something that is seen in the sky. But objects, I was I really had in without knowing it, I had really sort of crossed the divide between the UFO phenomenon and synchronicity. The very fact that these events happen in a way that makes them both physical. UFO events happen in a way that makes them both physical and psychic.

And it’s the hallmark of these events. And it’s one reason science just simply can’t wrap their mind around it. Because the Western scientific model is based on a division between mind and matter. Mind can’t communicate with other minds. Mind can’t communicate with the mind at large. That’s silly talk.

But simply because it’s not on the maps of reality doesn’t mean it’s not part of the territory of reality. So that’s the attitude with which I go into the UFO phenomenon as a journalist. And why I’ve stayed with it for two books. And that’s what brings me here today. I would not be having this conversation with you if I hadn’t probably had not had those experiences.

And that really set you on your path, didn’t it? Those experiences really opened you and made you question. Perhaps more than the average person would have.

It really did. You know, I define, as you know from having read the book, I speak of the UFO as a call from the cosmos. As a metaphoric call from the cosmos.What I mean by that is, This is a call to us, this phenomenon, by behaving the way it does. And I also include the near death experience in this category. I include the paranormal in general, clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis, direct interactions between mind and the material world that are not explained, but have been shown.

There’s very good science now for the paranormal, is very good anecdotal evidence. We all have experiences of, we call them coincidences, but these moments when we get a direct apprehension, you know what someone’s going to say before they say it. You know the song that’s going to come on the radio, even though you, you had no way of knowing, and you hear it. When the phone rings, you might’ve been thinking, for some strange reason of a girl who sat behind you in algebra class and who always laughed at your jokes. You thought, maybe I’m going to look up Mary Ellen someday. Phone rings. It’s Mary Ellen, who decided to call you and say, Keith, don’t you remember me from algebra class?

And I’m just shaking my head. I’m not saying that actually happened with Mary Ellen. There was a Mary Ellen in my algebra class, but she didn’t call me. But those things happen, including, you know, those moments when you’re in public. And you just have a strong feeling someone is looking at you, staring at you, for whatever reason.

Maybe they like your shirt. Maybe they don’t like your shirt, whatever. Maybe they’re just spaced out, but they’re looking, and you look, look around and they’re looking at you and you go, Oh, I knew I was being looked at. I don’t know how I knew. And there’s actually a lot of scientific evidence, there have been studies that have been done on staring that are, that separate out the, any evidence of clues or cues.

 So anyway. Yeah, so we live in a larger universe, so when I say the UFO is a call from the cosmos to expand our maps of reality. Expand our concepts to include territories that aren’t currently on the maps. And I have my own, I bring that up because these were calls for me. I now recognize my own callings. The call to adventure. as Joseph Campbell calls it in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. These were the beginnings of my own rite of passage and my own initiation. And that’s what I speak as an experiencer. I consider myself an experiencer in that I had that experience as a childhood. As a child, during my childhood.

And I also, 10 years later, had a near death experience before I even knew about the near death experience. It had all the hallmarks of a near death experience. But the authenticity of it was, I didn’t know what the near death experience was. So I was left to piece it all together when I found out there was a book that had been written by Raymond Moody

Raymond Moody, yeah!

Called Life after life.

Great book!

It is a great book and it really got many doctors to take a look at their own biases. And recognize that these patients come back with stories not only of having visited what appears to like heaven or celestial areas. Other larger realms,. But also Tell their doctor when the doctor says, I’m ready to tell you what your diagnosis is after the prognosis after the surgery, then the patient will say doctor, I already know the prognosis.

I overheard you talking to Dr. Smith in the other wing of the hospital this morning when you spilled the mustard on your tie. And the doctor says, how could you possibly have known that you were under anesthesia? You had no brain waves at the time, or you were very sick and so forth. And there are cases of that’s how many of the best doctors and scientists who have studied the near death experience admit they began as skeptics. And only when their patients began to say things that they couldn’t possibly have known, did the doctors begin to say I wasn’t educated in this in medical school. There’s more here than you think.

Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I just want to go back to your to what you said a few minutes ago. About rights of passage. And also that chart you wrote in that you have in your book that you talked about with the experiences. Now, Like I told you before we started, I’ve been an experiencer my entire life. And I’m also…

Feel free to share the essence of that if you would, so we can have common ground here.

I’m also a medium and a clairvoyant. And I believe that my interaction with the star people. Because they taught me. I often found myself in classroom situations where they were teaching me things. And I believe that they helped me to develop these inherent abilities that every human has.

Every human has it. There are some who are more well talented. We call them psychics, as if we also are not. But we overlook our own experiences and call them coincidences. And we often choose not to follow our hunches and we come to realize that was a mistake.

Yes. A hundred percent. So when you were talking about it, I, Totally understood where you were coming from. Having had my own experiences. Having had the star people teach me. and the lessons that they taught me have stayed with me my entire life. One of the things they taught me about, a lot, was the importance of vibration and sound in healing. And it’s only in recent, I don’t know how long…? That they’ve started using the solfeggio , is it solfeggio , is that how you pronounce it? Tones for healing people. That they’re all over the place now. And that was something that they taught me about when I was a child.You talk about how… you go into the psychological aspects of experiences, correct?

Yeah.

And you talk about how a lot of UFO phenomena involves high strangeness. Like telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and the ability of the mind to influence matter. I know for myself, that my interaction with these beings has enhanced my personal abilities. Do you think that Paranormal capacities represent an untapped part of the human development.

I do, I do because there are just ..Yes, the answer is simply yes. And we, we tend to feel ambivalent about that because first of all, many of us are hamstrung. And I, in my case, I, I wasn’t, I don’t know if what your religious orientation was? But some people are positively hamstrung by the instruction, which very often resembles something closer to indoctrination.

And there’s a strong divide between good and evil. And if you depart in any way from the scriptures, whatever your tradition is, Christian or not., you know, So in any case, that’s, that’s part of it for, for many of us, we certainly aren’t educated to to believe that we have greater capacities. There’s more emphasis now on human potential, where you can go to shops and take seminars and meditation and prayer and so forth. So there is a growing openness to the inner life, but by and large, I think we’re not fully tuned into who we are and our greater self.

100 percent agree with that. And I personally believe that’s by deliberate planning to keep humanity at a certain level, but that’s going into a whole different area, which I don’t want to go into that area. How do you think the cultural perception of UFOs has changed over the years? Do you think it’s changed much?

It has. There’s, I think we’re living now in the aftermath of a kind of the, some one researcher, Stanton Friedman called it the laughter curtain. Curtain of laughter gets drawn down. Oh, UFOs. You just forget. The giggle factor. And in fact, Kenneth Arnold, you may recall, was the pilot who in 1947 was actually out looking for a downed airplane. There was a reward, $5,000. Which wasn’t bad in 1947, if you could find the downed airplane. With which there would be probably tragic circumstances connected to that. In any case, he didn’t find the airplane. What he found outside his cockpit windshield were nine objects soaring very rapidly. Rapid speed.

He was a very skilled pilot. He was able to compute the speed instantaneously. And they were flying in formation. They described them. He called into the tower. And when he got down to to Oregon. He was at Mount Rainier when he flew into Oregon that day. Surprisingly, the news media was there to greet him.

He did not know he was about to become a celebrity of the abnormal. And he described the objects as, as moving as like a saucer would skip over water. You could imagine a Frisbee saucer could skip over water. That became he saw flying saucers. He saw objects shaped like saucers. And it was a national joke that. And and he quickly realized he could become the butt of this joke if he told much more. And yet people began to report many people have people i’ve seen these too. i’ve seen similar things and i’ve kept them to myself. So there is the stigma associated with them.

You may remember in the classic film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the opening scene. One of the opening scenes, was an air traffic control set up at an airport. And the air traffic controller had three different pilots on the horn at the same time. It might have been TWA, Pan Am, and United.

And each one of them was reporting some unusual aerial object. Some kind of a craft that they couldn’t, and they were calling the tower. Is there some other plane in the area? No. Is there any astronomical such? No, there’s no new planets that weren’t here yesterday. So they went back and forth. And finally, with each one of the pilots, the air traffic controller said Pan Am 747, Pan Am 742, whatever the number was. Do you wish to report an unidentified flying object?

There was a long pause and the pilot said negative. TWA, do you want to report a UFO? Negative. United. Negative. I wouldn’t know what to report. That was not just a fictional presentation, it was for the movie. But it was a very common thing. There were, there was already at the time enough, enough airplane pilots who were actually some of the best witnesses of these events. These, objects, these craft. That appear to be craft, I say appear to be craft because they change shape and form almost phantom like. But they’re real. So in any case, they knew the the laughter curtain could come down. And they might have reporters camped on their doorsteps with their families and their kids. So each one said, I don’t want to report what I have seen. Don’t want to investigate it. Don’t want to be known associated with it.

That’s changed. Now we know the Pentagon after years of ridiculing witnesses, dismissing it all, has come out and admitted they had an office in the Pentagon that track these phenomena. That, that they said were officially non existent. So we now have confirmation of the disinformation that they were telling us. Huge amount of disinformation we’ve gotten about this. And they gave it what I call an acronym upgrade. UFOs became UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. And that was partly their way of saying, we want to get rid of the associations with UFO’s. Which we have helped cause by the way, we helped cause the stereo… but we wanna call them unidentified aerial phenomena.

That’s a little less pejorative. Ironically, UFO was the phrase that was chosen as preferential to flying saucer, let’s just call it UFO, unidentified flying object. But even that became synonymous with flying saucers, aliens from outer space. The description became synonymous with the interpretation. And we’re probably going to see the same thing happen with UAP.But there is a growing openness and a greater willingness. Pilots now have procedures they can follow to file proper reports. So that’s a sign of progress.

Yeah, yeah, I was told back in the 80s, and I’m 68 this year, so I’ve had contact for a long time. I was told back in the 80s by my star people that the world governments had been told that they had to release the information of their presence to the general public. And they were given a certain amount of time to do so. Otherwise the choice was going to be taken out of their hands. But they said to me that a certain amount of people in this reality, had to be at a level of awakenedness. And by awakenedness, they meant questioning. Questioning the status. Questioning what information they were being fed. Questioning everything.

And that happened, that, that level There was a shift in the world’s energy that I actually physically felt when it happened. When we reached that certain level. It’s like what what is that saying that hundredth monkey, you know, how one monkey will be in something Yeah, it’s it’s a it was a shift and from that And from that time on, I knew what was going to happen. And that was when we started getting the Me Too movement. People started standing up and saying, no, this is not right. You got more vocalization, more polarization.

Yeah.

And then from that time, the government, instead of dripping, they started opening the floodgates and releasing more information. They… the press stopped being so negative about reporting these things and making a joke of them and started taking them more seriously. And then they had that how do you pronounce his name? Kerresh? Kerresh? They had that government hearing with all these military witnesses that came forward. And pretty much said, yes you know, there’s a percentage of these things that we can’t explain. So therefore they must be real. Therefore, they must be other beings out there who created these things. They didn’t say those words, but that was the implication.

Right. Those are all, I think I, I know what you’re talking about. And we’re in this period of time when there’s a great deal of emphasis on disclosure. The question is whether it’s a multifaceted topic. You know, what, what is to be disclosed? What is there to be disclosed? I think perhaps. Part of what is to be disclosed is the government doesn’t know what’s going on. And the government is not generally inclined to hold news conferences to say here’s another something that is doing in our airspace that we can’t explain, we’ll keep you posted.

We don’t know what it is. No, they’re not going to say that. So they’ve adopted. a strategy instead over the years of saying, we’re in charge of the sky. We’re the air force. We don’t see anything like this. But they did know about it. And so kind of disinformation has, you know, for you cited some of these other areas. I think, is there any other area of our lives that we found that it’s a good idea to keep secrets?

You see their secrets generally served. Think of the crisis of confidence in the church now, with the priest abuse syndrome. Mass and the denials and the moving of the priests from one parish to another. I’m not going to harp on that subject, but because it’s not a subject I’m an expert on. But we all know that these.

The secret arrangements, the church is having to come to terms with their having uncountenanced this. So think of any other areas of life where there are facts to be told and they’re kept secret to prevent embarrassment. To prevent people from becoming responsible. This is another example. I think there’s a crazy making Impact, that has happened to UFO witnesses, especially those who have had the high strangeness cases like the abductions. Yes. To be called, you know, mentally ill. Oh, of course. In fact, there’s no evidence that the class of people known as abductees have any particular psycho, this is not a psychological malaise.

There are, there is trauma. But there’s trauma that would be associated with what they’re reporting have happened to them. If someone is kidnapped, even not by aliens, if you’re kidnapped, you’re going to have trauma therapy for quite a while. Oh, yeah. You come back to when you’re recovered. Now just add the element of apparent aliens taking you from your bed and so forth. These are, we’re living with a phenomenon that, and, and we don’t know fully how many levels of reality are involved in this. But it’s, it’s additionally challenging that the response is, oh, you’re crazy.

Yeah, that’s always, for me personally, I have never not talked about my experiences with star people. My interactions with them, my face to face. And I was never abducted. I always went willingly. There’s a difference between abductees and experiencers. Abductees are taken against their will. And their experiences are generally negative. Or painful. And certainly very traumatic. Very traumatic for them. I’ve never had that experience. My experience has always been with my permission.

And I’ve always had things explained to me. If they were giving me a healing or working on me physically, they always explained to me what they were doing. And why it was necessary for this to happen. And they would never do .It without my say so. So there’s a big difference between experiences and abductees. And I do feel for abductees. Because they suffer so much trauma.

And even experiencers have to overcome their fear. You have to learn to overcome your fear. Because, especially if you don’t have. Especially if it starts later in life, or, or they start remembering later in life or to the point, because they have to come, overcome that fear. That’s why I call my show Walking the Shadowlands, because it’s part of this reality and part of that reality.

Yes.

And, you talk about in your book the possibility that UFOs or UAPs. Or the occupants are not extra terrestrial, but interdimensional from another reality.

Exactly. And that in some sense that may be from a parallel universe. Our physics possible string theory, which is an advanced division of physics. Suggests there may be 11 or 26 dimensions. there’s other researchers who look at the question of time travel. What would be the? Are these beings from the future, coming back to study their own history?

So there are many possibilities. Extraterrestrial is certainly the one that we associate with popular culture. With movies like Spielberg and The Day the Earth Stood Still. The sky is so big. It’s understandable why we think they come from, and we’ve sent. craft into outer space ourselves.

We’ve been to the moon. And been to Mars, at least unmanned. So we think, yeah that’s what they’re doing here. But it may or may not be from outer space as we understand it. But it’s from a larger reality, whether that’s a physical, Galactic sense of reality. Or from another more of a metaphysical reality, that would be more consistent with in other centuries philosophies, and a cultural… you know, the aboriginal, indigenous peoples around the world will hear about the first world countries having these experiences and they’ll say, this is nothing new to us. We have star people. We know the star people. Yeah. It occurred to you to come to ask us. Maybe we could give you some clues, save you time.

Talking about multiple realities, I actually did a couple of episodes on quantum theory. And is this a generated matrix that we’re living in? But when you were talking about multiverses and multi universes, my star people explained it to me like this, when I was a child. They said, You have an onion. The core of the onion is the earth, and every layer that forms that onion is another dimension of being, another reality. So earth is surrounded by multiple, multiple layers of reality.

That’s a powerful image. Yeah, I get it. And there’s that concentric sense of concentric. And we often feel that when we do have a realization in life, even in ordinary reality, it’s like something breaks through. You know, a sense of remembering something more close to essence.

Something essential. And very often , a deep life insight is, is like overcoming a sense of forgetfulness. Like you have a peak experience and an understanding you go, Oh, I have always known this, but I, I forgot it again. So remembering … knowing is often a kind of remembering of something that had been forgotten. So what is that original truth? It’s probably that which is closer to the core.

Interesting. I like, really like the way you put things in words. You are quite succinct. You know how to… I talk a lot to get to the point. But you say it really nicely. Look, there’s so much in your book that I read, that you covered, that were really interesting. You talk about the two men from Mississippi who had that, can you tell my listeners that story? That’s a brilliant story.

I’d be happy to tell you that story. In fact, I went down to Mississippi to speak with one of the remaining, one of the living witnesses. Since then he has passed away too. So both of the originals in that case have passed away. But in October of 1973, there were two men who worked in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Worked at the Iron Yard, Steel Yard. And they’re both ordinary community guys. And they decided to go fishing one night.

Charlie Hickson was mid 40s and Calvin Parker was only 18. He was a friend of the son of Charlie Hickson. So they went off. They love fishing. So that was what their thing was. If they could go fishing, they were happy. Went to a dock, it was after dark. And interestingly, Calvin Parker thought, he said, you know, you’re fixing to get us arrested.

This is no trespassing territory. And Charlie said, oh, it’s all right. The police never come back here. So they cast their lines into the Pascagoula River. And suddenly Calvin noticed blue lights flashing on the water. And he said as I said, you’re fixing to get us arrested. Now you’re going to have to bail me out of jail tonight. Because the police have come.

He was referring to the blue lights behind them, flashing in the front of them. They both turned around. They would have been happy to have it be the police. It wasn’t, or as they said, the police. It wasn’t the law enforcement. It was an apparent craft. An oblong shaped craft that had blue lights, landed in front of them.

They were flabbergasted! They were petrified! The door opened up from the bottom up, it unsealed. And out came two creatures that actually did not look like the classic humanoid type, that we associate with the greys or the classic alien. And the, creatures went to the two men. The two men were petrified, paralyzed, they went in. They were subject, they’re taken to different sections of an apparent, of the inside, which ironically, the inside was bigger than it appeared from the outside.

Not only is there missing time in many of these cases. You come back and three hours later like in the abduction cases in particular. Three hours of time is missing, but you don’t remember how you got home. And then memories begin to come that you, that you went through some procedures. So the missing time is a factor.

There’s also a spatial dilation. The sense of space. So a craft might look like it’s 15 feet on the outside. But on the inside it looks like it’s 30 feet. Which actually adds to the aura of absurdity, that it, that makes it possible for the debunkers, the skeptics to say that couldn’t have happened.

That isn’t the way things happen. Anyway, they both went through procedures. And they were returned placed on the shore and the craft disappeared. Charlie Hickson said now what are we going to, we got to sit here. And I, I remember the, I covered it in my book. He said to Calvin, he said we got to sit here and think about what we’re going to do.

Calvin said, we’re not going to do anything. We’re not telling anybody about this. And Charlie said what if this is an invasion? I don’t know what it is or not? But what we got to do is go to work tomorrow. I just got this job. He was thinking very practically. He had a lot of fear. He already had anticipated what it would mean to tell people.

Neither of them doubted what they had been through. That wasn’t the question. They had a disagreement. And so it was decided Calvin Park Charlie Hickson would call it in. Called the police. Police were kind of amused. They said, come on in, we’ll talk to you. They separated the two men and they interviewed them repeatedly over, and over, and over and using standard police technique, keeping them separate so they don’t confederate, tell the same story.

As the final stage. They put the two in a room together. They said, we want to go over this one more time with you. And Charlie Hickson said it’ll be like the 12th time you’ve asked me tonight. How many more times are you going to ask me to tell the same story? We’re just going to ask you guys together a few more questions.

And they had hidden a tape recorder in the drawer. A voice activated tape recorder. And the boys did not know this. So then they left them alone together. They figured if these guys are making this up, they’re going to say things like we’re really pulling the wool over their eyes. We got a story going.

They’d already been told by the sheriff. If you guys are making this up, you’re going to pay a big price because you’re using our time and energy. This is taxpayer dollars we’re spending here. Later when the police retrieved it and played the tape recorder, they heard these two men talking like they’d had the fright of their lives. And they did not know they were being taped.

They were describing the terror, existential fear and trembling, and how were they going to get back to their lives. And one of them said he needed a drink. The other said he needed sleeping pills. He didn’t want anybody else to know this had happened. When the sheriff heard this. They said, these men have had a real experience.

Yeah. We don’t know exactly what they’ve experienced, but if they’re making this up, they belong in Hollywood. Mm hmm. That was that tape recording was a very significant aspect of this case. And the case held up, has held up for 50 years. Interestingly, many years later, Calvin Parker finally decided, after living with this and not talking about it, not making it part of his life.

And anything more, any more than it was already part of his life, a part of his life he couldn’t explain. And he did not have an advanced education. He didn’t have any knowledge of philosophy. Or psychology or science. He only knew that the most unimaginable thing possible had happened to him and his friend that day.

He finally wrote a book. Finally agreed to a publisher, as long as the publisher let him tell it in his own words. And when he went public with the story many years later after using… even using an assumed name. He went by the name Randy. He didn’t change his name legally, but he called himself Randy. He didn’t want to be called Calvin Parker. Because he didn’t want to have Be the Calvin Parker people expected him to be. And have to repeat his UFO experience again with the implied ridicule and the smirking and the joking.

So Randy disappeared that day. Because finally he decided to tell his story as Calvin Parker. And when he did, Marianne, he gave a book reading in Pascagoula several witnesses came forward. Because finally Calvin Parker had re emerged to tell his story to the public. And in doing so they came to, I wish you had done this years earlier, I was ready to corroborate your story.

I kept quiet for the same reason you guys, we didn’t want to be ridiculed the way you were. So they had seen the lights. Some had seen the craft, some had had paranormal experiences throughout the community. I write in the book, maybe half of Pascagoula saw this. But was so cowed into silence that what an irony it would be, that if the majority of the town were actually witnesses. But kept a collective code of silence.

That code of silence is something worth understanding. You know, intuitive yourself. That you hear from people who, who think you must be making this stuff up. Or you, but you know, all the pushback you can get. Takes a lot of self confidence to live with this greater sense of self. But you find a new way. You find a larger life.

Anyway, he found a larger life. And that particular case is pretty much, now it’s relegated to history because both of the original witnesses are gone. But I decided to include it in the story because I went to Pascagoula. I went down to visit with Calvin Parker, got to know him. And it’s a very moving experience to spend time with him.

Yeah, it’s very interesting. I feel sorry for them because, their whole world was turned upside down. Like with so many people who have had experiences, that people have treated them with disdain. Of course that was encouraged. Ridicule, disdain. Oh you’re crazy, you’re making this up, you’ve got psychological issues, you need attention. You know, these are all the things that these witnesses are told. So it’s very, very difficult for them. And then in your book, you also talk about reality. And really what is reality? And you talk about the case of the woman in New York City who was taken out of her… who was abducted from her apartment. And her abduction was, yeah, her abduction was witnessed. And I remember reading about that when that happened. Could you elaborate a bit on that?

I can say a bit about it. I don’t make it a primary case in the book. But it was another, a journalist that I attended at … that I got to know from the Massachusetts, the MIT Abductions conference. Which was held, bringing together the various researchers.

He felt that was a, a case. But the reporting was, that the woman who said she was levitated out of her house into a waiting craft that this was seen by witnesses on the street at the time. There was still an eyewitness testimony. But there was, there was no independent corroboration. But this, this raised questions of to what degree you know, what is the nature of reality?

What is the nature of reality in which such events can happen? happen. And that’s why I end up drawing from a lot of secondary, not secondary sources, but sources outside the UFO field. For example, in religious contemplative life. Especially in the Roman Catholic tradition. The deeply committed, devotional nuns and priests. And, I’m not priests, but monks and nuns doing deep contemplative practice, especially as Catholic. Oftentimes their religious passion is so great that they form stigmata.

Yes. On their skin. A stigmata being signs of the cross or other emblems. They’re called other tokens. Now they don’t set out to create bodily artifacts of their faith. But their inner faith in Jesus or Christ. In God is so strong and overpowering that it forms on their bodies. And there are other examples, some other areas of life. It seems like I might be going far afield, but it is. It’s a start with the UFO studies that we’re talking about. And such things as levitation. There are also A good many cases in the, in the religious literature. Inside monasteries where deeply focused meditators, practitioners of prayer, also are reported to have risen from the ground.

They have levitated. Now what’s interesting about this, the scoffer, the debunker can have a field day with these stories. What evidence is there? Do you have any photographs? This sounds like hoax. These sound like tall tales. What is not often realized, is the Roman Catholic Church has a very stringent policy toward investigating these.

They do not want what they call pious hoaxes. They know that that could be a danger that some nun or monk might… some practitioner might have an ego need to claim special powers. So they put them through a lot of tests. A lot of evaluations. And they end up with a percentage of cases that are suggestive of supernormal, supernatural, if you will, human capacities.

And so in that sense, I put the levitating abductee in the same category. There are just simply many examples of time and space involving more corridors, if you will. More aspects than we’ve acknowledged. And I often say that if you have a consistent body of evidence, whether it’s in the UFO field, the near death experience, Paranormal studies, clairvoyance, telepathy, mind over matter, psychokinesis and so forth.

If you have these territories that are well defined and you have good credible reports. But they don’t fit onto the maps of our society. They don’t fit onto the maps of science. At some point the reasonable thing is to say, maybe the problem is the maps. Maybe the maps aren’t up to date. Has anybody checked the maps lately?

A good example was when the Italian astronomer Galileo, through his computations. And through his own use of a telescope, said, we’ve got it backwards. The sun does not orbit the earth. The earth is one of many planets orbiting the sun. He began to postulate this. And he got a knock on the door, and it was the Vatican thought police saying, senor, no more.

We don’t want to hear this. This is against Roman Catholic Creed. The earth does not orbit the sun. This is nonsense, heresy. He said, you don’t need to take my word for it. Look through my telescope. Look at my computation. So you’ll see that it’s right. We won’t look through your computations, they said.

We won’t look through your silly telescope. We’re telling you that you have one more chance or you’ll be under house arrest. He continued to make his claims.. Because he was a man of science. He was also a deeply religious man. So he didn’t see it as an opposition to his faith. There are some things he felt the Bible could have authority on. And some matters that what this emerging practice called scientia, science could weigh in on. So he ended up in house arrest. Not the worst conditions, but. So anyway, around sometime in the 1960s, maybe the Roman or the, I don’t know what year it was, but relatively recently. The Roman Catholic Church said, oh, by the way, we were wrong about Galileo. and now better than, better late than never.

Yeah. And now they have their own telescope in Hawaii.

The Vatican does?

Absolutely!

And it is said, actually, I don’t know the evidence for that. But it is said by some researchers that the Roman Catholic, the Vatican has some of the most extensive books in their libraries on the UFO phenomenon. And on psychic phenomena. So it is a repository. The Catholic, the church has been a repository of this lore and this literature.

But the Galileo case stands out in particular. That a good example of what happens when direct empirical evidence is refuted. And that’s what we have. We have in the name of science, we have people today, the scientists who simply take a scoffing attitude toward these extraordinary phenomena. Are in the name of science, actually behaving very much like the Vatican.

Yeah. So the position, the Vatican is now more open to these phenomena. And it’s now the, the Church of Western Science that is the the dogmatic perspective. Not open to real evidence. So it’s a mindset that doesn’t forms. It’s the closed minded approach that simply assumes, that writes off entire realms of phenomena on the basis of well, that isn’t possible! They’ll often say the laws of nature.

The laws of nature are not ironclad. They change. We learn things. And the laws of physics. I mean, like with these quantum physics, they’re proving things that… they’re showing things that science can’t necessarily explain. Yes, I have a long section in the book that’s kind of hard to, to go into, but I can tell you that the essence of it is the experiment with photons. Light particles, small molecule, entangled particles. Entangled photons. Essentially, the experiment was set up a device that would emit photons, light particles, to the left and the right. And each particle was sent a vast, vast distance. But there was a continuing connection between the two of them. Between the two particles. Beyond local connection.

And that is not supposed to be possible. Non local connections of transmission of information and connectivity, is not supposed to exist. They tried many attempts to correct the experiments. To find out what could possibly be causing this aberrant reading. It wasn’t an aberrant reading. What’s the implication? It isn’t that we should set up constant experimental light particles. What the light particles show is entanglement, engagement. This is a connected universe.

Correct!

And it points to the fact that consciousness is that kind of a field. It is a field in which everything is connected. The idea that the fundamental particles are the basis of reality is perhaps backwards. So that’s what we may be looking at.

Very interesting, isn’t it? In your book, you go a lot into mythology and symbolism.

Yes.

Entwined with modern UFO experiences. Are there any particular myths or symbols that frequently appear in these encounters that you’ve come across?

I describe how certain characters from mythology, for example, Hermes in the Greek myths, was considered a trickster figure. And trickster stands for that part of our normal human affairs where our fates get crossed. And our our chances get mixed up. And the road that points east is really to the west. And the one that points south is to the north. And trickster says, Oh no, that’s the area. The Coyote, The Trickster Myths of the Native Americans, Coyote and Raven.

These are stories that stand for this sense in which the paranormal often behaves in trickster like fashions. Poltergeists. The phenomena of seances are filled with twists and turns that challenge rationality. Not that rationality should be ignored. But there is sometimes super rational, above rational knowing.

So the trickster figure and other figures from mythology, including Proteus, who was a prolific shapeshifter. Speaks in my mind to the sense in which the UFO phenomenon does have different forms and shapes. The apparent craft are different. Not only saucer shaped, but a cylindrical. Tic tacs off the coast of California, shaped like the Tic tac candy lozenge.

So I draw on these images of figures from myth that are rampant shift shapers, shape shifters, I even say it backwards. Shape shifters. To help bring into mind ways to personify how these phenomena are challenging the categories that make sense to us. We are almost required to say that these categories do not… that the UFO does not make sense.

That’s it. You understand? It doesn’t make sense that things. That’s because there are things that are beyond our senses. There are ways of knowing that intuition doesn’t make sense. One definition of intuition is knowing, without knowing how you know. You find ways to get information.

You see somebody and you have a strong intuitive hit. This person is probably sick. They may have an illness. There’s something in their background. They’ve just lost their mother. These are very disturbing experiences to have when you have an intuition about somebody. Do you tell them? And so forth. I mean, they bring up complex issues. And this phenomenon brings up complex issues about where we draw the boundaries of reality.

Yeah. That’s a very valid point. And as my star people always used to tell me, there are many, many more realities than the one you’re currently knowing of.

That’s true. We think of the phrase facts don’t care about your feelings. There’s, there’s truth. And when people say I have my truth. You can’t have your own truth. Yes, you can have your own truth. There are different levels of truth. Different levels of facts. We can talk about objective facts, but we can also say that you can also use the word truth to define what is true for you. What is true for me? If we lose that kind of ability to talk about the multiplicity of truths we can have. We lose something important.

I think your book is a really well written, really well researched book. And you go into a lot of different authors. You talk about a lot of historical figures. You have some wonderful quotes in there. I’ve lost the piece of paper that had a really awesome quote by one of the guys on it. And you altered his quote, you turned his quote around.

Oh, I know what it was. It was I never said it was possible. I only said it was true.

That’s it! Yeah.

That was a particular philosopher of science who was when told that the accounts he was giving of reality through his contact with seances and alternative, he said, look, I’m like you. I never said it was possible. I only said it was true. And I quoted that. I said, I’m willing to turn it around. I never said it was true. I only said it was possible. So let’s play that, that range between what is possible and what is true. Sometimes what is true is considered officially impossible. Yeah. And using Galileo officially, it was impossible that the earth would Orbit the sun. But it was true.

Another good example was in the 18th century in the United States and throughout England and other places. There were seen by the villagers rocks, fiery rocks falling from the sky. The learned men of the age said, there are no fiery rocks falling from the sky here. We have the deluded villagers, perhaps intoxicated by beer. Or intoxicated by religion, and there are no such thing. They would come and look and say, here’s some of the rocks that fall. And indeed, the learned men of science found that there were rocks that showed burn marks. Then they assumed it was a hoax. But, the fact of the matter is, they were meteorites.

 They were meteors that had fallen from the sky. They were fiery rocks. And they landed in the fields. So nature didn’t suddenly invent meteors. Nature. What we did was invent meteors. Meaning we discovered that we named them meteors. And we acknowledge that meteors are part of nature. Nature didn’t suddenly invent this phenomenon.

We invented a name for a phenomenon, that prior to that we hadn’t understood. Sometimes it’s the villagers. UFO witnesses are very often the villagers. They’re not the men of science. Or the scientists. The agents of official culture, scientists, news media ,academics are very often the scoffers. And that this phenomenon appear sometimes will appear to them too.

But, it’s the ordinary people who are reporting these events and are told, no, it didn’t happen. Go back home. Go back to your little lives, people. So there’s something about the democratization of this phenomenon. I always cheer when ordinary people have the willingness to stand up and say, I know I saw something that was not ordinary. I can’t explain it, but you can’t tell me I didn’t see it. I like that.

I do too. I like people who stand in their truths. Do you think that Your investigations into the UFO phenomena have altered your own spiritual beliefs or perspectives? Or perhaps have influenced your own spiritual beliefs or perspectives on consciousness?

Oh, very much and I, that is partly due to an experience I had in my twenties. I was with friends in Hawaii. We were body surfing off the coast of Hawaii. And I got caught up in waves that were much bigger than I had planned on. And got taken out. And I was in real trouble. And the riptides were immense. Long story short, I came to a time when I said, I’m going to die. I’m not going to survive. And I, after being crushed by a very big wave and pulled further out, I felt myself rising. I said, Oh, I’m coming out of the water. That wasn’t quite what it was.

 I was rising up out of my body. I was having an out of body experience, which I did not know such a thing existed. I felt myself leaving through the back of my head. I suddenly saw the body that I had recognized as me for all my life. Oh, that’s Keith. I’m not that. I’m that which is seeing that. So suddenly my consciousness, which had been localized in my body, was now the vast consciousness. And I could see the body. I could see my friends on the shore who had not gotten into trouble. And were calling on me, get in, get in. You know, pulling for me to win.

And I went through a series of stages. This was a time when the near death experience was not well known. It had not yet been made famous. I was not familiar with the near death experience. I had not encountered the book by Raymond Moody called Life After Life. So the stages of NDEs were not known to me. Which was actually a strange kind of confirmation of the authenticity of the experience.

If you’ve known about the near death experience. You go through the tunnel, then you say, then the critic can say you, you had pre knowledge of this. You wanted, you simply must’ve just had a dream. You must’ve been in an altered state. You say you went to heaven and you saw dead relatives.

That’s just your imagination. But for me, the significant event happened when I was no longer in my body. I was separated from my body. I was convinced that I had died. I was with sense of peace. And tranquility and calm. And everything was perfect. Life was perfect. So my friend Mary, who was part of our group that was with us in Hawaii, was on the shore with another friend of ours. And she was saying in the same tone of voice I’m saying. Only using more anguish. She was saying to Mark, our mutual friend, why didn’t Keith listen?

Why did he go out? I told him it was too dangerous. I told him it was too rough. I heard this, but I didn’t hear it from my body. I heard it from, from wherever consciousness had, had taken me. Whatever the consciousness. And I told her, I went to her, if you will. And I said, I’m okay. You’re okay. We’re okay.

I won’t be back. But, I’m okay. She couldn’t hear me. I realized I could hear her. I could hear the physical world that I was no longer part of. Or at least not part of in the same way. So here’s the thing, there’s often a point in a near death experience where the person is told that it’s not their time. I don’t remember being told, but I suddenly found myself back in my body. So it must not have been my time. Although I did feel there was a period, a place that if I crossed a certain line, I would not be coming back. There was literally a sense of a physical pasture. Or a marker. So I was back in my body. I was literally being accompanied by two dolphins in the ocean. Almost right out of a magical realism film.

And I was more lucid. I was very, but I knew that I said, I was seeing through my eyes again. There were my friends who were wading out and pulling me out of the water. Like the rescue scene in a movie. I can still remember one of my friends, you know, they knew I had cuts and scrapes. And they were concerned about my wellbeing. And had I had any permanent injuries. And they thought I had drowned. I thought I had drowned too, but I guess I’m back. And that’s a heck of an experience. You start out the day. You become the whole sense of infinity. Suddenly you’re back in the body. Which taught me a lot about how consciousness is.

There’s a lot of mobility of consciousness. It can take many forms. So, I remember one of my friends his name is Moore. He said, dude, we thought we’d lost you out there. We thought you’d given it up. And actually, I thought that was a very helpful comment. I said, I did. I died. I went to death. And I’m back. And I looked at my friends as I was talking. They thought I was delirious. Because I sounded delirious. This sounded like the ravings of a lunatic. Because they did not know about the near death experience either. Someone today had had a, came back from that kind of a crisis or a medical operation, and said that they’d gone through a tunnel. They’d seen loved ones. They had a complete life review.

Reliving of the key elements of their life. I said you had a near death experience. I saw that I don’t know I saw that unsolved mysteries, but my friends didn’t give me any support for the idea that i’d been to the other world and back And I fully acknowledge I didn’t die. It was a near death experience ,or I wouldn’t have come back So in any case I learned very quickly that there were some prices to be paid by describing the full details. There’s a German poet named Goethe who said tell a wise person or else keep silent.

Tell your truth to a wise person or else keep silent. Because the common man will mock it right away. It’s a great reminder that so very often the community does not want to hear news about reality, that doesn’t fit with what the religion has taught them, with what science has taught them.

In fact, as you know, there are many religious people who fear anything that isn’t strictly in the scripture. Okay, I respect that. I’m not here to argue with organized religion. I’m not here to really argue with anybody. If anyone wants to negate what I’ve, what I find in my book or in my life. I move on, you know, it’s like arguing about politics, at a certain point.

It’s not helpful to argue about politics or religion. The old saying, don’t argue about politics or religion at the dinner table. And it’s generally a good path. And experiencers in general, as you know, have to learn to find ways to talk about these things. And the good news is these days there is more understanding. So there are support groups, people seek each other out. And I think the knowledge that there are other realities. Is growing.

Yeah. Absolutely. When you were talking just then brought to mind, one of the things my star people, they find a source of amusement. Is that humans have to put things in boxes.We have to box. We have to label. We have to categorize. That’s how we as humans think. And these experiences go in one box. The paranormal goes in another box. The near death in one box. And unless you, have an understanding. You don’t even want to look in that box. Because it’s outside of what you understand. It’s very interesting, how they find it interesting, that we have the need to do that. And we do.

It’s, it’s amazing. Not only do the many of these events, UFO and near death and paranormal experiences. Supernormal, supernatural, whatever term you want to use. They not only question rationality as it’s generally known. But even there, there’s some sense in which they even undercut logic. Or seem to undercut logic. People say That’s not logical. That’s not logical. And then it reminds us that certain things we take to be true. Are actually what should be called axioms. They are assumptions that are held to be true. We take certain things to be true. You ask, how do we know that? It’s just common sense.

It’s commonly believed. For example, Aristotelian logic from Aristotle. Here’s a good example of something that seems true. If A equals B and B equals C, that means A equals C. Right? When A is equal to B, B equals C, then also A equals C. Well, that is true, isn’t it? It’s logically true.

Right, logically true. Right.

What set of, and I’m putting it in terms of equations, precisely to show. But we say that’s true, we know that’s true as an axiom. But it is not necessarily the case that a primate called human being with a cognitive structure that’s about 30, 000 years old, has necessarily probed the deepest truths of the entire universe simply with Aristotelian logic. Maybe nature has degrees of logic that have greater freedom. Such that A equals B and B equals A. C and A equals C is simply a myth. It’s a belief. It’s useful. That belief that the letters are equivalent is useful for performing certain equations. Logic is useful. Aristotelian binary logic is useful.

But the UFO phenomenon points to the possibility. And psychic phenomena point to the possibility that does not exhaust all the different kinds of logic. Nature may have greater degrees of freedom than our narrow logic gives us. So It was a profoundly liberating thing for me in writing this book. To say that things that I take to be common truths are simply axioms, that I use to guide my way around.

It’s good to know there’s a stop sign. That not only is it probably for my own safety, To stop at the stop sign, so I don’t, you know, get side swiped by the car from. It’s also good to know that if I go through that red sign, I may very well get pulled over by a guy in a black and white car with a light on top who writes me a $200 speeding ticket. Or, you know, moving violation.

It doesn’t mean that red light, or a red stop sign doesn’t mean stop. It does mean stop, but it’s not the largest truth in the universe either. So it’s important to understand there are certain rules locally to follow in, within time and space that are useful to follow. But there are, there are constant reminders that there are phenomena that point beyond the accuracy of those truths.

That’s brilliant. I love the way you word things. I could listen to you for a long time. What advice would you give to aspiring writers and researchers who are interested in exploring the intersections of UFO phenomena, mythology, and consciousness?

I would say that, unfortunately, within this field, precisely because it is so squirrelly, that the phenomena are so elusive. And yet they’re real phenomena that don’t fit our categories. It reinforces in a certain kind of mind. A certain kind of mindset. Where people want to be right.

And they tend to be people who want to be right anyway, about most everything. You know, the know it all. We all, I’ve got an inner know it all, you probably do too. In certain situations it gets provoked and we try to, that’s when it’s useful, a little self awareness, okay, I tend to get triggered. But the phenomenon, the UFO field very often encourages an over emphasis on knowing.

And I’ve come to realize that not knowing, actually is a not knowing with certainty, how to explain something. It makes it possible to continue to explore it. Not knowing in Zen Buddhism and other mystical practices, sometimes it’s referred to as don’t know mind. And a good teacher will say, cultivate your don’t know mind.

There’s an old teaching story about the student who comes to the wise teacher. And says, I’ve come for knowledge. I’ve come for insight. You’re widely acclaimed to be the greatest teacher. The teacher says, come in, sit down. Would you like tea? And he says, yes, thank you.

And as the Zen Master’s preparing the water brings it over, the student is revealing all the things he’s learned from other teachers. To make it clear to the teacher that I’m not just an ordinary student. I’m extremely, I I’m an advanced student. And begins to reveal to the teacher all the things the teacher knows.

And so the teacher will pour the tea into the cup. And continue pouring it. And the tea goes outside the cup into the saucer. And the student says, what are you doing? I said I’m following your lead. You have so much knowledge. It overflows your cup. And the student, hears it, bows to the teacher. And at that moment it is said, attained enlightenment.

The know it all attitude makes it impossible for new knowledge to come in. And the tea overflows the cup. And there’s just a lot of water on the table. So the proper approach to come to a teacher is come in silence. Come empty. And maybe there’s a possibility of coming away with something. Maybe not, maybe you’ll leave empty. But in any case, I say to people who are living with these phenomena, you don’t have to have all the answers. Trust the process. Open your heart. And you may get discouraged by people who refuse to affirm anything that you’re involved with. Find people who will affirm you. And have a relationship with your own inner life that makes it okay no matter what.

Oh, that’s great advice. I really like that Keith. Thank you. Are there any upcoming projects or topics that you’re excited to explore next. Or do you feel that you will continue along the UFO field?

I, I don’t know what I’m going to do next. The book is just coming out as we’re talking and this is, I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. To get the word out and now that I finished the book I’m in the process of talking it up. And look forward to Additional conversations. These areas are very interesting to me.

It seems it’s part of my calling as you know, I In the book, I describe this as a call from the cosmos. This is news from the universe. And so I think it’s part of my own calling to do this. I get a lot of feedback from life. You’re on the right path by asking these questions. So one of the things I say to people, I don’t lead with this very often. But I did come back from the near death experience with one thing that did not come back with me, was any fear of death.

The fear of death disappeared that day. And again, that’s not an accomplishment. I did not lose fear. It wasn’t a question of anything I worked through. Suddenly a sense of that life, that death was something to be feared, something to be resisted. disappeared. And I think it’s because I had come right to the edge of death. And I know that there’s more.

This consciousness continues. I know it does. I can’t say how I know. But there are so many realms of evidence, deathbed visitations. When I was with my mother over a decade ago in hospice. Precisely because I had been through the near death experience, which by the way, I had never told my mother.

My mother was, older and we were not close around metaphysical things. And so I don’t think she would have even known what to make of it. And also there’s that sense when you describe an experience like a near death experience, is it a form of bragging? Sometimes people think you must know it’s intuitive.

If you say I have intuitive, I do clairvoyant. Are you claiming you have clairvoyant? Is this an ego? Is this an ego trip? As you know, you didn’t do a training program. You may have done trainings to enhance your skills. But you are acting on an orientation, you didn’t remember choosing. Maybe your capacities as a clairvoyant, as a telepath are… were, those decisions were made at the soul level when you came in to be a human being. So anyway, I’ve learned people often think if you describe a near death experience, they can think that it’s sounding like you’re bragging that you’re, that you’re special. Or a prophet.

So I’ve learned to be very careful. In any case, I’m going to go back to my mother. I was with her when she was dying of cancer. Literally with her when she drew her final breath. And one of my other brothers was on the terrace nearby. So I had the final moments with my mother. And Marianne, I felt the Energy.

I felt an energy fill the room. I felt a gathering, murmuring of voices. And I felt presence. And I turned to my mom, who was sedated on painkiller. I don’t remember which one exactly it was. But she had cancer. So she was already in a coma. But as you know, the hearing is the last to go. Yeah. Why it’s very important when you’re with somebody in hospice. Or a dying situation, don’t talk about them in the past tense.

Yeah.

Talk to them now. And tell them it’s okay. One, one of the things that the living are worried about is whether you can get along without them. Yes. And they are concerned about you. One of the things I reassured my mother about was my brothers. I’ve named them all by name. I said, Mom, believe it or not.

We’re all okay. This is your time. We’re gonna do fine. This is your time. And when I would step out of the room, to use the facilities or something, I’d say, mom, I’m going to go take a walk. I’ll be back shortly, but gonna give you a little time. I’m gonna step out. And I was told by the hospice people that the reason that’s a good thing to do is ’cause sometimes the dying person does not want to be with anyone when they die.

Yes, absolutely.

They want to go on their own. And that’s that’s their own privacy. So I would leave the room knowing that when I came back, my mother might have chosen to leave. But no, she didn’t. She went right when I was by her side. And as I said, I not only felt presence. I felt this murmuring. I turned to her and said, Mom, your friends and family have come to take you. You’re totally free to go. And we trust this is your journey. And I heard music that I know was not coming from the room. Celestial music. Again, it was not a capacity of me. This is not a talent I had achieved. I do not lead workshops in how to hear celestial music.

It was an opening into what is. And it was the dying of my mother that made it possible. Probably in relationship to the fact that I had already dropped the resistance to dying and death. I think if we all realize it, that the division between life and death is actually very subtle. And if we… Very Subtle. Would stop resisting it so much, we’d find that we could be with dying people all the time.

We could encourage them on their journey. Because we’ll see them again in some form, I believe. And it’s not necessary to think I’m going to meet my mother in heaven as she exactly is. It’s to know that that’s even probably a cultural framework that might be… it might be a reincarnation framework.

As you know, there’s some good evidence that reincarnation does exist. Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia did a series of multiple life studies. Where people who were convinced they died of a gunshot had a birthmark in their face. Or their shoulder that’s correlated with it .And they remember being a name called such and such. They went back and studied the birth records and there was someone by that name. So it’s pretty uncanny.

Very, oh wow, you bring up so many interesting subjects. I was actually a nurse for most of my working life and…

oh you were?

Yeah, and I, when you were talking about, you know, how the hospice nurse told you to tell your mum you were leaving and stuff like that. I’ve seen that. I can’t tell you how many times people have sat with their loved one for days, days. And as soon as they go out to go to the toilet. Or to have a break, the person dies. And I’ve seen that time and time and time again. And I always tell people it’s because they don’t want you to have the last memory of them taking their last breath. Because that’s all you will remember. So they were doing you a kindness.

I, listen, I can tell you something, and you’re going to love what I’m going to tell you now. After my mother died, I put my finger up to her nose to feel for her breath. And I did the checking of the pulse. Very intuitive. But it was pretty clear and it felt her heart and she was gone.

And so I told my brother who was out on the terrace, I said, George, I said, mom has passed away. Mom just stopped. She’s died. He said, oh, he came in. He was my other brother, I have three brothers. He, the two of us were the most okay with what was going on. We were the able to be with it for whatever reason.

 I came to realize that a lot of people. Who knew my mom was dying, did not want to go in to say goodbye. Because they didn’t want to remember her that way. And I said, that’s your choice. And it’s also totally okay for you to go in. You’re going to find mom is in a coma. And she’s not going to look like she did 20 years ago.

She would be radiant and beautiful and dressed for dinner. She’ll be in a gown and she’s dying. But if you can be with that, as she is. You might find that you can avail yourself of a really beautiful opportunity to say goodbye to her. But it’s totally up to you. One of my friends did that.

He took, he swallowed hard. He went in, he considered my mother his aunt. You know, we all have those people, Aunt Joanne, Uncle Bob. They’re not really our uncle and aunt. They’re our figurative aunt. Yeah. All those people. So he called her, her name is Marmee. He called her Aunt Marmee, grew up with, with us.

He didn’t want to see Aunt Marmee in that condition. But he thought it through and he wanted to see her, see her off. And he, to this day, thanks me for not forcing him. But for encouraging him to rethink that decision. And he saw that she was not who she used to be. And he also realized that the real fear that he had, was that he would not be who he used to be.

His own mortality was there. So he’s told me that I got more okay with my own mortality as a result of your allowing me to be with your mom. Thank you. He said, I said you’re welcome. You’re welcome. So when my mother had died, we my brother and I stayed with her for an hour. And we did some chanting, and we said some prayers and just sat with her in silence. Her deceased body.

That’s beautiful.

And there came a knock on the door, you’re probably familiar with it? It was time for a patient check, and the hospice nurse looked in, how’s everything going? And I remember saying, things are fine, mom died. Those two things could both be true. Things are fine. Mom has died. It’s okay. I can still remember she looked, had a second look. Second take, startled. She goes, Oh. And then she said, Oh, you’re one of those families that’s okay with this. You’re the people we love. What she meant was so many people, even in hospice. Who, who are putting their family member through this opportunity to make their death part of life.

When the patient dies, they go out and get the nurse. Mom has died. Mom has died. What do we do now? You know, kind of panic. So she saw, Oh, you’re okay. You’ve been sitting with your mom. Okay. Are you, you guys okay with it? If you’re fine with it now, if you, how long, how long ago did she die? I told him an hour ago. And I said we’re finished. He’s well, good. Why don’t you boys, I think she said, referring to us as our mother’s son. Why don’t you boys go take a walk or get a Coke or something, coffee. And we’re going to take care of, you know, we have our procedures to do to prepare the body. And remove the catheter and those kinds of things.

That’s what she did, but I can still remember the initial confusion on the part of the hospice worker. That we had not called them right away to handle the situation. We described having sat with her. And then she said, Oh, Oh, you sat with your mom. In other words, it’s okay. You, you’re okay. But this is who we, this is what we want people to do, is to live with the dying of the love loved one as their final passage. So anyway, it was a almost a compliment. She was paying. Yeah. But we were complimenting her for acknowledging that we were on the same team. We didn’t need her to do anything. We would sit with our, what was wrong with sitting with our mother for an hour after her physical death? Were we going wrong?

Were we violating some rule? Were we going to get fined by the county? No, there was no problem. I’ll tell you one more detail. Before the nurse came into the room, my mother had died. My brother and I were sitting with her and we had done what I said. We, we said prayers and did some chanting.

I walked across the room. I had a sudden insight. My mother was a very fashionable and very beautiful woman when she was quite younger. She almost looked like a movie star. Or many of her photographs were really elegant. And she always took care of her appearance. So I walked across the room. When she had come into the hospice she was on a gurney. But she brought in her purse because she came from the hospital to the hospice. So she came to the hospital on foot and she came to the hospice. So she had her purse and she had some clothing. So she had her purse and in her purse was all her makeup. So I took out her hairbrush and I combed her hair.

And I put on some lipstick on her dead lips. And I put on some powder and around her. I didn’t do mascara because I’m a boy. I’m a guy. I don’t know how mascara goes. I didn’t want to turn her into a theatrical figure. But I simply took care of her appearance. I suppose the way they put on a funeral home, you put some makeup on them. But I wasn’t doing it as someone to stage her body.

I was saying, this is how you’d like it. And I remember had this feeling that she was saying, thank you, Keith. You know me best of all. I’m not going anywhere unless I’m looking at my best. And my brother, he was totally moved by that as well, but there’s nothing quite like putting makeup on someone you love, combing their hair for the last time and giving them a hug and gentle kiss on the cheek. The fear of death is probably the ultimate fear that underlies all other fears. All the other letting go fears we have in life are probably based on our own fear. That what if we, when we let go, we won’t exist anymore. Existence will be over. But maybe existence is, now existence, you know, consciousness, Life existed before I was here.

I doubt that life will exist after I’m here. Consciousness existed before I plugged into it, or imagined that I plugged into it, as a separate self. When this sense of separate self passes away, why wouldn’t I assume consciousness that formed as Keith will continue? But it will probably disperse, maybe take some new forms.

And enter its spirit body and take its next journey. I don’t think anything ever ends. Here’s what I think is that the proper dichotomy is not between life and death. It’s between birth and death. Life continues in all forms. Birth begins the physical body’s birth. And death ends the physical body’s life.

So the life and death matter? After death, life continues. Can I prove that with scientific accuracy? No. But there’s so much around the deathbed phenomenon.. Out of body travel visits with angels and other messengers. Strongly suggestive that this form that seems so solid to us in which we take to be the soul realm of being is actually s o l e, is different from the soul realm s o u l. You know, the soul realm is a larger realm that includes sometime as a body and then sometime after a body.

That’s, that’s the way I frame it. That’s how I hold it. And it’s consistent with the fact that I don’t fear what’s after the body’s life.

That’s absolutely beautiful Keith. And it actually rounds again into the whole UFO phenomenon. My star people have always taught me that this body is not who I am. It’s just the vehicle, like a car, that I used to get from point A to point B. And then, when the car has It’s outlived its usefulness, so I just move on to another.

Very much. And, and you’re right in connecting it with the UFO. I mean, and there are people in the UFO field who wouldn’t know why would he have a section? Why would he bring in his near death experience in the book? I mean, I, I’ve had a little bit of that over there. But they literally don’t understand what connection I make. So that’s fine. There are people in the field of UFO studies who do see it solely in terms of hardware, technology, extraterrestrial. And whatever level of meaning is meaningful to you.

And it may involve all of those things. It may, this phenomenon, just as the physical body forms and stays in place and ages with physicality. You know, I can feel my own hands right now. I, I have a sensation. The, the UFOs have phases when they appear as physicality. Show up on radar, leave ground indentations. But also move through walls.

And and, and, and so anyway, it’s they, they tend to materialize and dematerialize. And that is the challenge with that is to come up with an acceptance that there are dimensions of reality that are greater than what we’ve been taught. Simply because we weren’t taught as children. Life is a lifelong learning venture. So we keep learning. And the end of life, if you know some things you didn’t as a teenager, that suggests you’re on the right path. You learn more.

100%. Many abductees have experiences where they’re taken out of their body. Physically removed from their body. They have their interaction with whomever they’re interacting with and they’re put back into their body. And that’s very easy for star people to do that. Because this body isn’t who we are.

 Part of the school is a school of interdimensionality. We were rather than being disrupted. Seeing these phenomena as disrupting life, as we know it. We’re being initiated. We’re being educated in the larger cosmic life. I think it’s pretty clear this is what post, you know, the Tibetan Buddhists are very good.

As you know, they have the Tibetan book of the dead, is a guide Book for how to prepare for the post mortem journey through what they call the bardos. These are distinct realms in the post mortem journey There’s a huge part of tibetan buddhist practice that is oriented toward traveling without fear. When you leave the body and hear overwhelmingly loud noises and flashing lights, not to get distracted and drawn back in. But to go toward the clear, bright light.

What if the UFO phenomenon is part of that process to teach us to get more, a greater facility outside the body? And outside the body as we know it. And, you know, most of the traditions of the world have language about subtle bodies. There’s the causal body, the astral body. Different forms of subtle body.

The Egyptians have different bodies called the Ka and the Ba. The ancient Greeks had language for the different levels of embodiment, different subtle, the subtle body, subtle matter. Yeah. So with, if that’s the case, then UFOs are part of the instruction process.

Wow. Very interesting conversation, Keith. And I enjoyed your book. I found it very well researched. Where can people get your book if they want to read it for themselves?

There’s all around the world. If you have an internet connection, there’s amazon. com, barnesandnobles. com, any of the other booksellers online. If you’re living in a community, I’m a big fan of local independent bookstores.

I like to help them survive. The book is available in print, in an ebook. I also spent time this summer in a sound studio doing the audio book. For any of our listeners prefer audio books, more and more people do like audio books. They can go on their walk. Go to the gym. Go on that long trip on the plane and listen to the book rather than read it.

Brilliant. Where can people reach you, Keith, if they want to contact you? How can they get ahold of you?

I’ll give them my website. It is www dot thompson at large. That’s my last name with A-P-T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N at large. A-T-L-A-R-G-E. It’s just what it sounds like. No special symbols. thompson@large.com. The Thompson at large was, I chose, this is the web name available. It means I’m. At large with ideas, making connection. I’m out there. So Thompson at large. com. There’s an email form there. People can write me. I, there’ll be a little notice when they do that.

I’m not able to respond to every everybody. I tried to but if somebody will write and say, I’d love you to read my manuscript, it’s really not always possible to do that. But I’d like to give encouragement. And I like to hear from people. So anybody who reads the book and wants to share their thoughts or.

I get I hear all the time. I did a radio show the other night and got got responses very quickly saying thank you for saying what you did. I feel encouraged. Here’s what happened to me. Here’s my experience. People very often need to be able to have somebody who’s willing to listen to the degree that I’m able. To play that role. I feel. You know, delighted.

Oh, that’s awesome. And are you on social media as well, like Instagram or TikTok or?

I don’t do any of those really. I am on Twitter. It’s my full name, or it’s called X now, Keith Thompson, just both of my names together with the numeral one. Keith Thompson, one at X or formerly called Twitter. So that’s another place to reach me.

Brilliant. So for any listeners, if you missed Keith’s contact details, you’ll find them on his page on the podcast website, www.walkingtheshadowlands.com. There’ll be links to his website. There’ll be links to X. So if you missed his contact details, don’t worry. You can get them from our website. Keith, I have absolutely enjoyed talking with you today. It’s, we’ve gone all sorts of areas and I loved your book. It was an awesome book. So I encourage people to go out and have a look at it, get it for themselves. It’s a good read, especially if you’re interested in this area. Is there anything that you would like to leave with my listeners that is profoundly important to you. Or just something that we haven’t covered that you might like to say?

 I’ve came up with a quote yesterday. You’re familiar with William Blake from, from your part of the world mystical. It’s a quote that I found yesterday and I’ve been pondering it all, all day today. Very simple. In the universe, there are things that are known and things that are unknown.

And in between, are doors. They’re doors in the known and the unknown. And the way we get to there is to go through the doors. I’ll just leave that as a kind of inspiring thought along with the, I often cite this quote by the Zen master Suzuki Roshi. You may have heard of this from his book, Beginner’s Mind.

It’s a very simple reminder. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, There are a few. So if you feel you’re an expert, you know, we’ve all met the experts who tell us what’s possible. And that’s not possible, and that’s not possible, and that’s not. There are a few possibilities.

In the beginner, One of the things about being a beginner is you don’t know what’s possible. There are many possible. You find out what’s true. You find out what’s possible. So be a beginner. No matter how much you know, be a beginner. Always be willing to keep beginning. And in that, it’s like the, come to see the Zen master, come to see the teacher with an empty cup. Don’t come with your cup full. Because there’s nothing to put in the cup. It’ll just overflow, makes a mess.

Okay, that’s really lovely. Thank you so much for your time. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and I was especially touched by your sharing about your experience with your mother’s dying. That was absolutely beautiful.

Oh, I’ll bet, especially as a nurse yourself. And thank you. I would not have known you and I know about your website now. And about your podcast. So I’ll I’ll keep my eye, I’ll keep tracking you as well.

Thank you, for your time Keith.

And that wraps up our conversation with the insightful and ever-intriguing Keith Thompson. I hope this episode has left you with a fresh perspective on the mysteries that surround us and perhaps even a few new questions to ponder. Keith’s work challenges us to look beyond the surface and explore the deeper connections between myth, consciousness, and the unknown—reminding us that the world is far more mysterious than we often realize. And again, I would like to thank him for his generous time and a great conversation.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps us bring more thought-provoking content your way. And as always, stay curious, keep exploring, and join us next time for another journey into the extraordinary.

Until then, I’m Marianne, bidding you farewell from the shadowlands.