 Today we welcome Alexis Brooks to Skeptico. Alexis is a well-known journalist in the consciousness and UFO communities, as well as being a best-selling author and host of Higher Journeys Radio, a show you might have checked out if you're at all familiar with these fields and you've come across your excellent work. It's really a terrific show, some fantastic interviews with many best-selling authors, many folks that you've already listened to here on Skeptico, but Alexis brings so much to those interviews and it's just a great pleasure to meet her. Alexis, thank you so much for joining me on Skeptico. Alex, what a pleasure, and I just said my name's sake. I love it. You know, I'll never forget your name. And listen, let me just say right off the bat, I have somewhat recently become familiar with Skeptico, but I'm going to tell you a quick study and I'm loving it already. And I think I said to you offline that we have several mutual colleagues in common, all of which sing your praises, so I'm delighted to be here honored. Well, I mean, I think that's that's super nice of you to say. I just guess I wanted to give people a little bit of the background on the origins of this interview because it really did just spring from listening to your show and saying, wow, this is the kind of stuff covered in the way, in the in-depth way that really does try and get at the deeper questions on things that I really want to engage in conversation with. And I have this thing where I think that journalists like yourself, podcasters, you know, who are going through and reading these new books as they come out and then digesting them and assimilating the information and trying to make it fit with everything else that they've learned. You're just a wealth of knowledge. I just think of all the interviews I can do, these are the kinds that I think can be most valuable because you do have such a unique perspective and that goes beyond just kind of singing your praises or patting you on the back. I think you sit in a really unique position and I'm excited to take advantage of that and bring that to the Skeptico audience. Oh, thank you. I do appreciate that and I have to tell you as I'm listening to all of these accolades, which I don't know that I can live up to, I will say this time and time again, Alex, I am no more than my guests. I am the one who is blessed as I think we both are to have such a spectrum of knowledge. I say that I'm the luckiest gal on the planet that I get to engage with these clearly thought leaders that are leading the charge on what we call this new age, if you will. So, you know, every show I do. And as I said, as soon as we finish up, I'm going to be getting on with someone who I greatly respect, Neil Kramer, for the third time he'll be on my show. I learned so much. I'm really the one that's getting the gift, I have to tell you. And because I do have a natural thirst hunger, if you will, for these big questions always have, it feels right. It's easy to engage to talk about things that you enjoy. Absolutely. Well, that's a great lead in for, you know, just a real basic question. Who is Alexis Brooks? You have such an interesting background. Tell folks a little bit about your bio because it's pretty cool. I'm so tempted to come up with a sarcastic answer to who is Alexis Brooks. I think, and I'll say it with a little tongue in cheek, but I think a part of me is still asking that question. Isn't that one of the big questions we all ask? Who are we? May I use that as a segue? I don't know that that is the number one big question that I have had. Who am I? Why are we here? I think that's part and parcel of the bigger questions that we ask. But I will just say, Alex, I and I said this before, I think I came out of my mother's womb asking big questions. Really, really lucky that I grew up in a household with inquisitive parents, although they did both carry, have left brain positions. My mom was an educator, high school educator. My dad was an MIT scientist, very left brain, very normal, if you will. But when they sat down at the kitchen table, you know, the discussion shifted very quickly to UFOs and reincarnation in life after death and all of the Orthodox religions as well. And they explored that and they invited me to the table, literally, to participate as soon as I was old enough to do so. That coupled with my own set of, let's call them anomalous experiences, sort of just launched me on a course of natural inquiry, which I think many of us have. I think that's part of our journey. I think the only difference with me and others like me and maybe everybody else who I believe all have some form of experience at some point in their lives is I did not seek to shove it in a box, you know, put it in context with something that I had been told. But rather became determined to understand what is the true nature of reality? Really, that's the big question for me. And that's what really drives me. What is the true nature of reality? What is this that we're looking at here? And then comes the question, who is Alexis Brooks? Who is Alex? Who's what is this and why are we here? So don't know if I'm talking in circles or not, but it's been lifelong. Well, it's, you know, it's funny you say talking circles. It's like, I think what you're really saying is, man, we could talk for an hour about that kind of stuff, because it's the most important stuff. And I love the way you break it down. I love the way you lead into some of these things. Experience, or I think is such an interesting topic, because first off, we have to talk about the kind of anomalous experiences that you had as a kid. People are going to be interested in that. So let's just kind of put that on the table as much as you feel comfortable with what was happening to you. Well, I'm going to preface by saying, insofar as I can remember, my experiences were not, I don't think, unlike many others, we're talking about things like precognition. That was chief among the experiences that I would have dreams primarily of something that would invariably happen in the next day or so. It was a collection of these things over years that got me really pondering, you know, the idea of time. What is time? If I'm able to dream about something that invariably is going to play out the next day, then am I understanding the concept of time properly? So that launched me into an investigation of that, not immediately because these things were happening all of my life, even as a kid. But eventually, I would say that primarily my experiences were centered in the dreamscape, hearing messages. It's very hard to explain because we're going, we're talking about a scope of, I'm not going to say how many years, a lot of years. Precognition, I would have to say, or premonition would have to be the chief among them. I can't say that I have seen ghostly apparitions, you know, we hear in the more traditional sense, people seeing something at the foot of their bed. No, I can't say that I have experienced that, but I have seen subtle energy, you know, a scope of things, Alex. It's just, it's so hard to pinpoint. Let me ask you this then. When did it start? And then, because I think it's really interesting when you say these started at a young age, and then the related question is, what do you do with that? I mean, what do you do with that? It's at school, you know, fortunately at the kitchen table, you had, you didn't maybe have to hide it so much. But at the Thanksgiving table, you know, it changes everything about your childhood, right? I suppose. But again, I've been asked that question before. I think it was Jimmy Church that asked that question. And basically his question was, did you feel a sense of inhibition when you were having these experiences and perhaps unable to talk about them? Well, guess what? No, I don't know why call me strange, but I have welcomed, you know, bringing other people into my circle to talk about these things, because I also had a sense, and yes, even at a young age, that other people were having these sorts of experiences. So I didn't feel any inhibition is insofar as I can remember being in school, not that I necessarily thought about it that much. I mean, these things weren't necessarily happening on a day to day basis, but they were certainly happening enough where it raised a fundamental question for me. What are we dealing with here? I'm going to go back and you're causing me to reflect on so many years ago, certain experiences that I've had. And I will tell you a couple that I recall outside of the pre cut, the broader sort of ESP, what we broadly call ESP. I recall seeing a craft. Really? At what age? I want to say it was pre-adolescent, certainly no more than, you know, maybe in the adolescent years, 13 or so, 12, 13. My folks and I were, I mean, only child and my parents didn't fly. They were afraid to fly, interestingly. And so everything we did was a road trip. My mother being from Ohio, we would take annual visits to Ohio, we would drive. And this is a vague recollection. This is why I have not talked about it this much, because a lot of these things are just starting to sort of crystallize in my memory now, which I'm finding with a lot of other people, by the way, kind of triggers for remembering things. But I have a vague recollection, Alex, of being in the backseat of the car. It seemed as if we were in close proximity. We were closer to Ohio than here, where I am on the East Coast. We're driving from the East Coast. And I have a recollection of seeing what appeared to be a cylindrical silver craft. When I say cylindrical, I'm looking at my microphone right now, my Yeti, my Blue Yeti microphone. And it almost looked like that oblong, but cylindrical. I have a vague recollection of seeing it perhaps out of the right side of the window, but also the back. And I do not recall my parents reacting at all. It seems as if I kept it to myself. Now, as I'm telling you this, I'm kind of taking myself there. This is a very interesting dynamic with recollection, recalling something that happened many years ago. And I've really labored over this, because I've asked myself, okay, Alexis, are you imagining this? Is this coming from somewhere deep in the recesses of your mind? Or is this something that you heard somewhere else and you're bringing into your experience? All of us, me being, call me a skeptic, if you will, call me pragmatic at a minimum. You have to rule out every possible thing first. We're still left-brained people, right? But there's something there evergreen that has never left me. And I believe that experience. And the more I put attention on it, the clearer it gets. I believe that's an experience that I can put in my anomalous portfolio. I'll tell you another, if I may, as it comes to me. And this recollection did not come to me until I started researching what is called the shadow person phenomenon. Are you familiar with that term? I've worked with Rosemary Ellen Giley, who's been a friend of mine for many years. I was actually in her book back in the 90s on dreams. And she, as many know, is well researched in the field of anomalous phenomena, particularly in what are referred to as shadow being hat people, shadow people. We have all these names that we have, and also the gin. Shadow people, for those in your audience that may not know, are, well, they're described many ways. But there seems to be a consensus of this very shadowy-like silhouette-like figure that will show up invariably in a room. Not always, but oftentimes in a bedroom, a threshold of a door. Sometimes they're wearing a hat. Sometimes they're not. I mean, there are a variety of experiences. But the common theme seems to be no features are seen. It's just a shadow in the shape of an individual that will simply watch you. No words. I mean, there's variations to the story, but this is the common theme. No words, no assault, although there have been some cases of that. Okay, so this is a very, very common phenomenon, by the way. I have surveyed. I haven't done any formal surveys, but I've talked to many, many individuals who didn't even know the name shadow person per se, but would invariably describe a very similar account on a regular basis. Now, in the course of the research that I had been doing, having Rose Mary Ellen Giley on my show quite a few times to talk about this, I had a vague recollection. Here we go again. These triggers, when you're doing your own research, you start to say, wait a minute, something's resonating here. And I have a recollection. I know it was pre-13 because we were still living in the Boston area, right in Boston, in fact, in which I would be in my bedroom and a shadowy figure wearing a cloak, almost like an African dashiki, believe it or not, would enter my room. I don't remember any other details beyond that. That's all I remember. But it wasn't until I started doing the research on this that the memory started to flood in. Oh my gosh, I think this fits the criteria of a shadow person. So there you go. Oh, that's awesome. And there's so many ways to go with that. And I'm tempted to jump in there and talk about those. But there's a bunch of other topics I want to talk about. But before we leave that, the one question I guess I'd have for you on that is, have you ever thought about or have any opinion as to why? Why you, why these set of experiences for you when they happened, any thoughts about that, especially with your precognition background? Right. Because you know where I'm going with all that. Does that resonate with you at all? Why you, why that? I don't think that's the main question I've asked Alex with any of these things. I think the question I have asked is, why us as homo sapiens sapien? Is there, as I like to say loosely, we obviously have skin in this game. Whatever phenomenon is going on broadly, we must play a role in it. So to answer your question, I don't know if it's directly answering. I don't know that the question for me was why me. I think I just somehow felt at an early age that this is really, I say the paranormal is a misnomer. And it's not an epiphenomenon of reality. This must be fundamentally what reality is. But what role do we as a species play in this? I totally get that. But you know, I think there is a parallel question there. What role does Alexis Brooks play in this? Why is she experiencing that in the backseat of the car? Why mom and dad are, the memory is being screened out of their consciousness? Right. You know, why? That's a very good question. With the whole thing we understand about ect contact, and we see the undeniable connection with intergenerational. Yes. Why? Absolutely. Genetic manipulation. Where are you going? Soul journey. Where are you going? Pre-cognition. Choose your path. Choose your, you know, you had to have thought about some of these things. At a young age, I would say no. That was not a primary question for me. However, now, of course, the question arises. But I have to go back to the larger question. What is this reality comprised of? What role do we play? Here's the reason. I'm not skirting the question. Just understand where I'm coming from here. I have a sense that experiences of all kind are ubiquitous. I don't believe that anyone is necessarily singled out. Now, clearly, there are people that for whatever reason have more of a proclivity toward these experiences. I've asked the question myself. There are people, it seems, that tend to magnetize these sorts of anomalous experiences. Where is that coming from? I've asked the question, but I do not have an answer. My sense, however, is that there may be some sort of a symbiotic relationship between us as the experiencers and those, and that which we are experiencing. And that's what I'm exploring right now as a researcher. I don't know. I joke with people all the time because I get so many questions. What does this mean? What does that mean? And I will happily say, not happily, but I will definitively say, I don't know. And that is the thing that I think we must bless our hearts as human beings that want answers to so many things. Be okay, certainly ask the question, but be okay with the possibility that you may not get a definitive answer in the way you want it to be. I say, if I may add this, because this is very important to me, and I've been kind of rocking this lately, if you dare explore the true nature of reality, humility is a universal mandate. Humility means saying, I don't know and being okay with it. But it also means, go ahead and ask the question and maybe universal meet you halfway eventually. Now that's a roundabout way of answering your question, but that's how I'm approaching it right now. I don't know, but I'm going to keep looking. Awesome. I don't know why me. Awesome. Totally, totally awesome. Let's so switch gears because journalism is also something you're very much about. I mean, you are extremely gifted at interviewing. You get things out of people. You package it in a way, you ask questions that are deep and penetrating and don't just fly at a very high level. Also, you're a skilled journalist and a writer. Again, I'm not just singing praises. It's like, go listen, folks. It's a unique experience to listen to higher journeys and to listen to these interviews. They're excellent. Tell us about that sensibility, that talent that you've developed and obviously worked at. What's that about for you? Well, I trained as a journalist. I'm an old school journalist, man. I'll start with that. I started in this business in 1986. Don't tell anybody in sports broadcasting. So I was trained. Mass Communications major, Northeastern University, went through all the rigors of that. Suffolk University School of Journalism, blah, blah, blah. Interestingly, went into, right into the mane of entertainment. You know, got bit by the Hollywood bug, did a stint in cable television, directing and writing and a lot of voiceover work at Al. So my beginnings, I cut my teeth in mainstream journalism and was fortunate enough to work with some of the best of the best, though I didn't work in hard news journalism. It was primarily music and some news, but not heavy news. I got to work with some amazing people and really had some wonderful mentors and really got a chance to sort of decide if I were going to take this side of the microphone, how I would hone my craft. Now, many years later, and I've had, I would say, several professional incarnations since those beginnings, working in areas that had nothing to do with journalism, that marrying the journalistic background that I've been trained in with the subjects that I adore, that's why I think it works for me. I just love it. I just love what I'm talking about. Now, if you had me talking about politics, as an example, Eek, no way. And it's funny because I was involved and very politically involved at one point in my career, but I think the key is how the thirst for the subjects for which you want to discuss, have a natural curiosity, again, be willing to not know the answer, be inquisitive. We couldn't be talking about things more exciting. So that's what drives me and the guests, of course, and the opportunity for discovery. That's awesome. Let me put a little bit of an edge on it. Do you ever sit back and look at where mainstream media is, where journalism is? I mean, you just gave kind of an example that, hey, you're following your passion, you're following these stories because they are your passion. But another way to look at it is you're in an eyes-wide shut kind of world. I mean, who turn on Good Morning America or the Nightly News? Who could cover the topics that you're covering even if they were an assignment? If they were told to go out and do it, they couldn't do it. And that's really a stark contrast that we have to kind of fully swallow. I mean, it's awesome that you bring the skill set. But mainstream media is just out completely out of the loop on this stuff. You know what M stands for? Muzzle. Yeah, right. Right? You want to go there? I mean, come on, Alex. I think we all know there's no secret here that and Mike, having come from the mainstream media, although it wasn't hard news, clearly there is some semblance, I'll say, conservatively of an agenda to keep the stories where they want them, keep the narrative tight. I noticed something interesting. Maybe I'm digressing a little bit, but I do think this is important to understand the architecture or the infrastructure of mainstream media, certainly as long as I've been in it and how it is not designed, what they purport for it to be designed to do, to inform people. It's doing anything but informing. Something kind of interesting and just my being aware when I was in radio, this was back in the early 90s. And I recalled we had something called stop sets back in the day. Maybe they still call them stop sets. Stop sets are essentially when the music ends, you go into a set of commercials, maybe three or four, 360 second commercials, two, 30 second and a couple of what we call liners. And I would recall that the stop sets, the commercials that were running, well, not so much the commercials that were running, but if you go from one station to another to another to this day, they all take stop sets at about the same time. Have you ever noticed that? This still happens. If you peruse your television, your TV, let's say it's a six o'clock news, and you go from NBC to ABC to CBS, I guarantee you more times than not. Sometimes there's some exceptions. They're all taking breaks at the same time. There's a pattern that's inherent throughout the spectrum of these channels. Why is that? Now, I'm sure they could give you another explanation, technically speaking, why they have to be in sync, timing, and how long the broadcast lasts. But I noticed that there was an agreement, I realized many years ago, that there was some sort of an agreement that everyone must follow the same pattern, not only with the stop sets, but with the content. Right. And then dig a little bit deeper and you find that the content is predicated on on an agenda, essentially. I don't know if I want to go any deeper than that, but what I implore people to do whenever we're getting into the big C word, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. I try not to say it, but you know what I'm talking about. The machinations of our media. I implore people to be aware of patterns. Whenever you question something, don't go listening to me or anyone else saying, this is what's going on, that's what's going on. Be aware of patterns. You start to see patterns of things happening and things are revealed. Something's going on here. And for me, it was many years ago and something is benign, is looking how stop sets were organized between channels. You take that all the way to now and other patterns that are really quite transparent to me. And you know that invariably, you're getting something that is constructed for a reason other than what we're told. This is why those journalists, bless their hearts, couldn't or wouldn't cover this sort of thing. They can't. And there's a muzzle. Yeah, I mean, I think that's really interesting and a bunch of people, as we know have done, have exposed this. You can go on YouTube videos of the story that's coming out that's being constructed. And then you'll see it simultaneously being played across the country at local stations. And they're just parroting these talking points throughout. And you're like, oh my god. It's so obvious. It's your point though. It's really quite brilliant what you're saying there of, if we are responsible for being our own researchers, our own investigative journalists, you've given us a great tip there in terms of, look at the pattern, start on that pattern matching thing. So you know where to go and you know where to dive deeper. So let's apply that then because we've just kind of jumped into the, into the soup here and said, no one is covering this. And it goes twofold. Like I was saying, one, there's twofold part of it. One is the muzzle. But the other is at this point, they couldn't cover it. You couldn't assign one of those people, whoever you want to pick out of the group there. They couldn't cover it. They wouldn't. Yeah. Not only wouldn't they cover it because they're muzzled, but they couldn't cover it because they don't have the capability. It's a different skill set, Alex. It's a completely different skill set. Again, be aware, look at the individuals. Take your typical local news. And let's say you're looking at, we used to call them on the beat reporters, people that are out in the field. You will notice that everything from their posture and the way they sort of bounce, there's certain things that you can look at their appearance, the way the cadence and their voice, we have a station here. I'm going to say if anyone's listening from the Boston area, we have a local station, NECN. And I'm so funny as an old school journalist. I'm so harsh with these people and I'm cheering for them. I want them to do their best. Now I'm just talking about things that are, these are completely benign, but everything that they do is it's not only scripted. There's a certain style that they're told to exactly. So there's this woman that says, so we'll call her Lisa Jones. This is Lisa Jones reporting from NECN versus NECN. So, and you can tell that she is being coached in every aspect of what she does, including the way she delivers the story and certainly the content of the story. So these are script readers, Alex. These are not, God bless them. There are some good mainstream journalists out there, by the way. I'm not saying at all that they're all just hopeless. I think they're few and far between, unfortunately, because I think the criteria has changed drastically. But what we're talking about here, the subjects that we are attempting to understand ourselves and to articulate to our larger audience are hard enough for us. You have to have skin in the game to be able to do this. I don't think you can just report this out of context. So I will repeat, I think it's a completely different skill set. I'm just going to say there's a skill set, but there's also this base of knowledge. At this point, Alexis, you have accumulated this huge base of knowledge that you can draw from and you do in your interviews and you are comparing and contrasting and sharing that with your guests. You're saying, well, I understand that's your position, but are you aware of meeting the hybrids and are you aware of this research or that research? If you don't have that knowledge base, you can't conduct the interview that way. I think so much of what we're seeing when we see mainstream media and the crossover from me is in science journalism, because I interview a lot of scientists, and they're hamstrung in the same way. They're locked into talking in a certain way to a certain group that has to tow a certain line. Absolutely. You get into talking about, well, of course, this ridiculous consciousness is an illusion. You are a biological robot. Of course, that doesn't make any sense. Of course, everything you've said about that is ridiculous and absurd, and we know it. Just because you go to your conferences and everyone at the conference is nodding their head, it doesn't mean that all the rest of us think any of that makes any sense. We all think it's totally absurd. I think the same thing happens with journalism, and you don't have that opportunity to say that directly to these journalists, but I think you're saying it almost indirectly in these interviews in terms of we know that no one else can handle these topics, that we're never going to be able to see these topics on anything approaching a mainstream perspective in any way that makes any sense. You said a lot there, and as I'm listening to you, we're doing a contrasting comparison. We're looking at polar opposites in terms of content proliferation. You've got to look at this larger subject that we call the consciousness movement. There's that other C-word, consciousness, right, of which none of us fully understand what it is, and we need to be humble in that. But as all of these subjects falling under the broader umbrella of, I say reality, I prefer to say the true nature of reality, as these subjects burgeon and continue to burgeon with which they have, what I'm seeing and what I get a sense of is a slow decline of mainstream media, period. I wonder if there will be mainstream media, as we understand it to be in another couple of decades, maybe less. So I'm less focused on the polarity of all of this, that them versus us, and I'm looking at a paradigm shift, I think, slow but definitive. So I think the conversation is going to change completely. I think they're just becoming less relevant, frankly. Now obviously we know, particularly in so far as the UFO, the field of ufology is concerned, we're starting to get what we're calling the slow drip, drip, drip of media coverage a little bit in the mainstream. First it was with a heavy dose of tongue-in-cheek, now it's a little bit of a pinch, if you've noticed. It's starting to get a little bit more serious. So it's interesting, something is trying to creep its way in and perhaps acclimate a larger group of people to this reality. So that's interesting too. What's going on there? I don't know. Well, I think there's a lot to talk about there and let's dive into it since you have that topic area. Because one of the challenges, and I actually want to talk about UFO journalism and I want to talk about consciousness journalism because I think there's parallels but I think there's some huge differences too in terms of how we talk about these subjects and these are two subjects that you dive into with your interviews. So just to let people know, when I talk about consciousness journalism, you talk about near-death experience, you talk about consciousness transformation, you talk about all these things that people who are not interested in UFOs but are interested in consciousness would find interesting. But then you also do cover more or less, you can't say a mainstream UFO thing because it's not mainstream, but you're over in that area too. So if we were going to talk about UFO journalism, I guess one of the things that I wanted to put on the table and get your thoughts on is, you have a unique challenge in that area in dealing with the whole disinfo-misinfo thing. Again, it's interesting to compare it and contrast it with mainstream media because really the difference is that's all misinfo there. I mean, they don't even know it, they're just reading the scripts. You, at least it's on the table, at least you're like, hey, am I being used here to send out a particular message because this is certainly the history of UFO community, UFO reporting. How do you sort through that? What are your thoughts on that and how do you deal with it? Well, first of all, I wanted to say for the record, I've said so many times, Alex, I load the labels. I mean, I don't like using them. UFO is one of them. It's another. All of these words that have connotations that I think are broadly misleading. My entry point into what we call the field of ufology is based on the experiential, the human consciousness aspect. I've made no bones about that from the beginning. In fact, out of all the subjects that we could broadly call, and I will say it, paranormal or metanormal, the UFO subject was probably, I had the least interest in until I began to explore the experiential aspect when it has having to do with our own contact experiences. And that's the journey began. I'm still trying to recall when I even entered, what was the specific impetus for my wanting to discuss this on the show? And I can't recall. I don't know that there was. Maybe it was a request. I don't know. So can you interject something? I want to just frame this up for people because sometimes we kind of get into inside baseball without even meaning. So the UFO community is kind of, as it's formed, is kind of bouncing along in this kind of you move on centric. You know, what are the landings? How fast did they move? What were the sightings nuts and bolts? Mechanistic, absolutely. Exactly. And it's dominated by a lot of men who are kind of engineering oriented. Nothing wrong with this. It's just who they are. And it's engineering oriented. And it's Air Force military and shoot them down and stuff. And then there starts to be this second flank, if you will. And it's the Jacques Valais. And I interviewed Jacques Valais and Stanton Friedman. And I think even Stanton Friedman has recently passed, who's an awesome guy, but was always associated with the nuts and bolts. I think there were a lot of people that were always crossing over. But the dominant message was always we have to look at the physical engineering kind of part. And then this recent wave that you have been very much a part of and have brought some tremendous guests forward to talk about has been this second, Hey guys, maybe we ought to talk to the people who are having the experience because there's even crossover there. You know, I just interviewed Kevin Day, who was one of the Air Force men or was he a Navy, one of the Navy guys who was part of that tic-tac disclosure thing that came out in December 2017. And he has an experience just by observing the phenomenon. Absolutely. And he has the Valais Davis kind of effect. So, you know, bless the people like you who've said there's an experiential part of this and the experiential part even crosses over with the observational part. No question. It's cool that you've drawn us into that conversation. So, please pick up and continue. Okay. Well, you know, it's interesting you were talking about the individual. You said was it Kevin Davis you just said. Well, there's the Valais Davis effects where they say, you know, if you like Kevin Day was the guy. Kevin Day. He was the guy who was on board, you know, the Nimitz thing. Yes, yes, yes. That's the tic-tac UFO. Right. And he was the guy who was the top gun guy. And he goes all he does is go up on top of the deck and say, let me see if I can see these things through the big binoculars. And he goes on and he raises them up to his head and he has an experience. And after that experience, he has, you know, a lot of experience or kind of things like he's going to the VA and they go, oh, you got PTSD. And he goes, ah, not really. Something's going on. And then somebody tells him, well, there's this guy, Jacques Valais and Davis. And they discovered that, you know, people who have experience have a lot of these symptoms. And he goes, boom, boom, boom, you know, pre-COC or normal experiences, boom, boom, boom. All these things are being checked off. And again, I just, I brought that up because I think it's a classic example of where we've developed these two camps. You know, the, that's the important thing. Go ahead. Let me bring something up in that regard because this is some information that I recently procured from a colleague of mine. And maybe we can talk about the lecture that I gave in Australia having to do with contact on a much broader scale. But interesting that you mentioned that this gentleman feels that he has, he had an experience in addition to just citing or seeing something. But here's some statistics that I think your audience may find very interesting. And we're hoping that these are accurate. But essentially worldwide now, Alex, sightings are reported about every eight seconds. In addition to that, now this is worldwide, every eight seconds, so these are just reported sightings. Here's the interesting thing. Sightings that last a minimum of eight minutes may actually be more than just sightings. I don't know what the criteria was for developing this, but it is said that sightings that last a minimum of eight minutes may actually be abductions as well. These are sustained sightings of craft where individuals may, and I stress may, actually be having an interaction with the occupants of the craft, not just visually seeing it. 36% of the key witnesses that were taken in this sample saw a craft more than eight minutes, 2% within 150 yards. This was all calculated based on 2018 specs. What is telling me here is that, now maybe I'm gonna use this as a crafty pun intended segue, but some things happening were more people, I think maybe having experiences directly with non-human intelligence than we think. This is interesting. I wanted to pick up on this because of the individual that you mentioned in the context in which his story came up is that famous tic-tac video. Of course, there's more that's been coming out as we know recently. The convergence between the mechanistic aspects of the field of UFOs and the experiential is in your face right now. What once just looked to be a craft sighting, maybe more than a craft sighting, there is an experiential aspect that I don't think we're long going to be able, much longer going to be able to ignore. Thus the convergence of the two must eventually happen. As hard as some in the camp may try to keep the focus on unearthing and reverse engineering alien technology and either trying to keep this, as my friend Linda Moltenhouse says, the policies of lies and secrecy alive or tear them apart. There is more to this story than that and we've got to get our arms around that. That's not to preclude the things that are being discussed here in terms of the mechanistic lights in the sky and dead alien bodies, et cetera. This is not my daily work, by the way, and I have no problem saying that I try to stay on the periphery of that so I can at least know what's going on. But there is no doubt an intersection point between the experiential and just the observed that has to be dealt with. And I think we're seeing that by default just in the people that I talk to who are experiencers that thought they were just witnesses at one point. Does that make any sense to you? Oh, well totally because I'm totally in that camp. But even as an observer, I think you're carrying the day. I mean, I think that's where the dialogue is going whether anyone wants to go there. That's right. Let me return because I do want to just ping you on this and I don't know how far you want to go in or if you want to respond at all. But I do think when we talk about UFO journalism, there is that difference that I want to draw. The disinfo miss info. You know, it's baked into the thing. And in a lot of ways, it reveals more about the mainstream media and the pattern that you're talking about there because it seems to me that they, being whoever these social engineers are who are controlling this message, have a lot more skin in the game when it comes to UFOs. So they're out there in a way that most people who are not tuned into this, they couldn't even believe to the extent that the stuff has been disclosed. You know, like, oh yeah, I went and tried to drive this guy crazy because he had revealed the UFO secret. And you're like, we're admitting that this happened or, you know, we're admitting that we falsified all these records or that we changed the story. I mean, and then or we admit that we're in the crowd at the MOFON meeting and we're observing, the level of disinformation and misinformation that has been acknowledged is just staggering. So that's kind of part one. And then part two is how do you deal with that as a journalist? I don't think I do. I think I'm not being facetious, Alex. I just feel that this part, now we know that there is disinfo and misinformation that is largely based on the agenda of what we call, I call them the goo makers, the reality makers, the reality creators, the social engineers. But I don't focus on that because I think that that, I think that focusing on that aspect will likely lead us farther astray. I have never been able to get my arms around the fact that people are more interested in, and I'm repeating the mechanistic, that the material, this right here, and how it can be manipulated for good or bad, but just the material as being the primary motivation for discovering what may be, quote, out there. There's something quite interesting. You talk about social engineering. Let's take those social engineers and let's assume that whatever it is they're doing, whatever it is their agenda, whatever their agenda is, is not for the good of mankind. Maybe part of that agenda is deflecting or concentrating the masses' attention on the material when they know full well that the immaterial, that which can still not be quantified in human terms, is the most powerful, the most fundamental of our human traits that absolutely, positively, cannot be discovered by us. Does that make sense? And it comes down to a very fundamental playbook, once we get that game over, once we get that, the power game is over, the power structure annihilates. So if we keep the focus, I don't care whether it's misinformation, disinfo or accurate, it doesn't even matter. It's not where the juice is here, the juice is with us. If we go back and if you recall, I said, I have a sense that we have a symbiotic relationship with whatever we're communicating with at whatever level. That means we have skin in the game. That means that there is something to be discovered about us that is here to for not been discovered, that we may be getting close to. Hence the reason the social engineers are working 24-7 to keep that from happening. You know, that's really interesting and we are gonna have to dive into that. I was gonna say, you know, move on to something else, but there's so much there. And I'm gonna pull it down to a concrete example so people can get an idea of what we're talking about and then maybe explore the differences. You know, the other day, I was kind of forcing my wife to watch one of the UFO shows on the History Channel. I was forcing. No, she's, you know, I've beaten her down over all these years now where she'll finally relent now and then. But we're, you know, we're watching Ancient Aliens and then we're watching the show that they're now doing on the disclosure, the Tom DeLong show that he's put together. And it's just, to me, it's complete disinfo, misinformation, and I'm watching it with her and I'm just kind of pounding the table. You know, can't you see this is an obvious sigh up? This is completely politically driven. Every other word is, you know, those bad aliens and now we have to shoot them out in the sky and defend these overlays of the Pentagon. And the narrative is just like so obvious, so clear in terms of the message that gets repeated over and over again. And I thought as soon as the December 17th thing rolled out, I said, this is a complete sigh up. The narrative from the beginning was just completely crazy. You know, oh, they've lied to us for 60 years. Peter Lavenda, who's an awesome guy, but you know, they've lied to us for 60 years. So Tom and I decided we had to get to the bottom of this. So let's go to the intelligence agencies. You know, right? Oh, right. Well, tell us the truth this time. The whole thing just seemed completely fabricated. I love Leslie Cain had her on the show. You know, she's the one who broke the deal. Did you? Yeah. Good for you. I gave her a pretty hard time. I said, you know, I'm going to hear that one. Doesn't fit this just why would we, you know, what I told Leslie, I said, you know, go Google New York Times UFOs and put in the date range of last 10 years. There's nothing. And then it comes out December 17th. I go, why weren't they there covering your fabulous UFO book? Why weren't they covering the disclosure press conference? You know, I mean, come on. That is the mouthpiece of a certain branch of this political group. So I don't want to go too far because I want to get your opinion on this. But to me, that is just obviously a disclosure wrapped in a political sigh out. Now, not that there's anything particularly wrong or upsetting about that, but it does beg the same kind of question that that that you are raising in terms of what is the pattern? What is the agenda? And then I want to roll that in. I want to give you a chance to respond to that. But then I want to talk about the consciousness as being the the the out path, you know, the the way out, because I'm not sure that is either. But let's start with, let's start with that PSIA political agenda. Right. Let's look at the broader activity that's going on right now. Obviously, the most recent is this so-called leaked document that's been circulating that I frankly haven't haven't perused in a total don't know that I even want to. But what I find fascinating, and I hope I'm at least touching, attempting to answer your question, trying to, when we look at all of this activity, again, much of it may be disinfo. We don't know. And I'm not going to say that I think it is or isn't. But it's something significant right now that's driving this activity. My question, now I'm going to go. I have not heard anyone talk about this. And I don't know. This is just a pondering of mine. What is driving this whatever it is coming out, the shows that are coming out, the leaked documents that are coming out. In fact, I'm planning on talking to Grant Cameron to see if he can give me the lowdown on the latest because I know he's kind of finding himself in the center of this. Why now and who's driving it? Or what is driving it? Now, Alex, look, I'm always going to default back to my original position, what brought me here to begin with. And that's my interest, not in the exoteric, but in the esoteric underpinnings of everything that we think we see in this 3D world. We and our left brains are saying the what, why, who, when, why are they doing this? How is this happening? Disinfo, misinformation. When at the root of this, there may be something else that is trying to force whomever to play their hand to get this to come out. Could there be a non-human intelligence factor in all of this quote unquote drip, drip disclosure right now? I don't have an answer to the question. This is a question that I plan on serving some of my colleagues later to see there is something. I just have this knowing feeling that there is something that is undergirding all of this activity that may not be at all what we think. May not be at all what we think. I don't know. I want to explore it. I want to explore it too. And I really want to explore it with you because you're not only thinking about it with these musings, but it keeps coming up in your interviews over and over again. And one of the things I want to do today is draw that out and give you some space to talk about it because take like Mary Rybill, very interesting person. And of course she is a UFO contactee facilitator, counselor, helper. She's a therapist. Correct. Through hypnosis and regression. But that a lot of times turns people off because sometimes her technique isn't even quote unquote hypnosis. It's just creating a space where people can deal with their contact experience. And she's extremely gifted. And at this point, extremely knowledgeable and having dealt with thousands of cases. Just a fascinating person. And we could spend an hour talking about her discoveries. And I'd like to... I love Mary. I was just with her. Love her to pieces. That's my friend. She's also part of this organization, this free organization. We just interviewed Ray Hernan. Ray, that's right. The first scientific survey where they really went and said, okay, let's study this in a scientific way and let's ask people who've had these contact experiences. And what falls out of that immediately is stop calling them abductions. Most of these people who have these contact experiences, they're not calling them abductions. They're calling them in some cases spiritually transformative experiences, healing experiences or just contact experiences. But most of them are not calling them abductions. But here's where I'm sitting that I want to get your point on. I really came into the UFO thing through the consciousness thing. So I'm over there talking to parapsychology researchers. That was where I started. And then I went, okay, if the game really is this ridiculous materialism, you're a biological robot in a meaningless universe and why is that message being propped up in such a silly way? Well, that led me to near-death experience because that kind of definitively puts an end to that discussion. These people no longer have a functioning brain and yet they're having these consciousness experiences. But when you delve past the science of it and get into, and you know this because you've interviewed these people, you get into that experience, that near-death experience and what that means, it's challenging because there are parallels to the contact experience. Yes, absolutely. There's also differences. And I'm a little concerned like Grant, I love Grant to death. He's been on the show multiple times. I consider him a friend. But this idea of the multiple contact modalities and just kind of smoothing it all over and going, the paranormal is the paranormal and it's popping up all these ways. And you'll hear that from Jeff Kreipel. You'll hear that from Whitley Straber, too. And in this, I'm not so sure. I looked through all the near-death accounts and talked to the scientists and I just had a guy I thought was a fantastic guest. And it's like, you know, the number of incidents of a near-death experience where someone's being raped by a reptilian is zero. The number of my lab near-death experiences are zero. So, you know, when we're going to go, I'm open to the spiritually transformative experience as part of the contact experience, but I want to pump the brakes a little bit and say, do we really understand the nature of what we're calling a spiritual experience? And how does all this fit together? Okay. Obviously, I'm not only well aware of free. I consider myself a friend of free. That would be the foundation for research into extra... Well, they've changed it now. Extraordinary experiences and extra free. Wonderful organization. Ray is also a friend and has done some stellar work. He and Mary and Dr. Rudy Shield, et cetera. Kathleen Martin's a part of, on their board, et cetera. Here's my zoomed-out postulate for the moment about, I think, what you're talking about. I'm going to go back to a philosophy that I have that's very broad. I have always said, quote, it is not this or that. It is this and that. People get stuck in one or the other. The et's are bad. The et's are good. The experience was malevolent. It was benevolent. It was a spiritual experience. It was a hellacious experience. This or that, you're talking about a phenomenon that could be striking the masses. And I don't know if we have time to talk about it, but I could tell you a little bit about the presentation that I gave in January in Australia about this is a mass phenomenon. How on earth, Alex, can we take a phenomenon that I know is ubiquitous and put it in two nice, neat little boxes? My sense has always been and will remain until further, until I learn any more that there is a spectrum of experiences. I know that Ray has got some great numbers. I believe their count now for their survey over at free is north of 4,000. So there's clearly a solid sample there. But we've got to look at a couple of factors here when judging the experience broadly. First of all, these are still subjective experiences. I mean, heck, it has been said that according to the way our brains work, you can have an apple in the middle of the table, you on one side, me on the other, and we're seeing two completely different things, even though fundamentally it's an apple. So the experiences are subjective. They're subject to interpretation because it's still going through the human channel in terms of trying to capture what it was. And I think we do ourselves a disservice by taking a side. It's been out the phenomenon. The aliens are, well, what aliens? Which ones are we talking about? Do you know how many species it's been said that have been identified? In some cases, 3,000 is a number I've got. Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but I think the inference here is that we're dealing with a very large, complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon with virtually every aspect of experience from the most hideous to the most euphoric and everything in between. The entities themselves, the most benevolent, loving to the most hideous we can imagine. I refuse to take a side here. I, again, want to just stay in an act of observation and know that this sucker that we call reality and all these things that are happening within it are just absolutely too broad to want to put a label on. I don't know if that at all answered your question, but I am absolutely so determined to get that message out and we would do ourselves, we would do so much better if we would start to take our foot off the gas pedal of that a bit. That goes for Ray as well. Ray, if you're listening, and Ray and I will talk about that. I have no problem, you know, we have to stop making proclamations about things we still just don't understand. That's where that humility comes in. We're out of our league here. It is, you know, you're speaking of Whitley Strieber. There's something that I have, I actually just introduced him, his speech, his talk rather, at Contact in the Desert. I love Whitley and he's been on the show. He said something, though, you probably know that the love of his life, Ann, who's been gone several years now, according to him, remains in contact with him. And I've listened fervently to the stories that he's told, regardless of what's happening there. Whatever messages he's getting are worth hearing, whether from Ann or some other source. It's not the point. But one thing he's told before, and he told me again in our interview, that Ann came up with something based on a question that he had. And he said that Ann said to him in response, humans would be better off not believing, but in asking questions, not in adopting a belief. Take your foot off the gas pedal. We'd be better off with questions. There's a lot of questions that we need to be asking. And it seems like we're putting more emphasis on adopting a position rather than asking a question. If that makes sense, I botched the quote. I'm going to see if I can find it, but... I think I understand where you're coming from with the overall point. And yeah, I get the humility of asking questions. I mean, the tagline of... One of the taglines of this show is, inquiry to perpetuate doubt. I think doubt is the thing. And as your certainty goes up, I think you're closing off to more things. But I want to pull you back into one part of that question because I'm interested in your opinion, and I maybe didn't frame it upright. I'm curious about the nature of these extended realms and whether we're seeing a hierarchy and whether what we're getting so worked up about in terms of the contact experience is much more familiar to us because it is us in this middle ground, in this time-space continuum that is probably, by all measures, a tiny part of the overall consciousness. Absolutely. We look at our lesser reality, which is our time-space reality, and we extrapolate out of that and we make all these conclusions. And people slip out of that either through contact experience, but what I really want to focus on is the near-death experience. They slip out of the time-space continuum, and they come back saying a lot different things. I contrast the near-death experience and the spiritual transformative aspects of that to the ET contact experience, and I just have a hunch that something doesn't exactly jive there, that we're trying to equate those in a way that we maybe are misguided in doing so. And I don't want to make any conclusions about that. I don't want to say one's demonic or satanic or any other rest of that. I just want to sit back and go back to Alexis' pattern thing, and I want to say there's a difference in this pattern than that pattern. And yeah, we can go all excited about the similarities, but what about the differences? So what you're really, you're questioning the, are we looking at apples to apples? If I could just break it down, right? Are we looking at apples to apples here? Is a near-death experience, can you equate that to a contact experience? Can you equate that to an OBE? Can you equate that to a shamanic journey and ayahuasca trip at Al? Apples to apples, the answer in my humble opinion is no. It is not apples to apples. However, there are, in my, from my perspective, and what I have seen and studied, particularly with out-of-body experience, out-of-body, OBEs and so-called abductions, there are common threads inherent in many of these experiences, crossovers, if you will. Enough in my estimation to beg the question, what is the common denominator here that is allowing for these experiences to happen? Alex, I'm very conservative in any proclamation on any of this. This is a position I refuse to relent on. I don't know, but I do have a feeling about certain things. Is there another level on this stuff that is completely different? Is there a God's spiritual soul path that doesn't really, it's completely different than your alien contact? DMT. Listen, let me tell you something that I find interesting. Maybe I'll answer with a question. Are we living in a simulation? And that's another, maybe I opened up a can of worms there, I don't know, but these are the questions I've asked myself. What, if anything, is triggering all of this? Now you're bringing God into this. The question is, what is God? What role are we playing in the God force overall? Forgive me, but I'm the questioner, man. I don't have an answer. I have thought about these things, but I absolutely have no idea. Now you mentioned one thing that's interesting. You talk about hierarchy and all of this. I've always taken issue with hierarchy from a broader perspective. You think of, you know, we toss this term around ascension and ascended masters. I just had a conversation with someone about the ascended masters and what it means to ascend. And I've always had a little bit of an aversion to terms that denote hierarchy, including ascension. Is there, maybe the question is, is there some aspect of intelligence that we would think to be more evolved than us that is sort of orchestrating or architecting this perhaps game that we're in? That's really what I've come up with. The reason I go towards the hierarchical stuff is, I feel like I'm just following the data. So if you go look at the NDE accounts, to a lesser extent the alien contact accounts, but the NDE accounts are clear. There is a hierarchy. There's a hierarchy. There's a hierarchy. Not my words. It's just what they say. I felt that there were realms, and then I felt there were realms above NB. Oh, I see what you're saying. Oh, okay. Oh, I see what you're saying. You're talking about the, yeah, sure. Look, so here's how I would come back at that. In terms of the description of a hierarchical, so you've got the astral, then you've got the causal plane. They're different planes. All of these have come through our ancient texts in some form or fashion. Here's the common denominator in this hierarchical explanation. Human beings. And what rules do we live by? We live in a linear timeframe, and we live hierarchically. So no matter whether we've experienced these, whatever it was ourselves, or we're just reading the literature, we still process information hierarchically. As long as the experience is coming through the human filter, it has to be an interpretation. It cannot be pure, because we're still corporeal in form. That's kind of limiting, because then why are we even having this discussion? But we are having this discussion. Yeah. Because we are trying to find these patterns. It's back to finding these patterns. I love not getting too attached to it and having humility, but I don't want to shy away from the data. And I'm not coming at this at all from a religious perspective. And I get bashed on the show all the time for being anti-religious, which I guess I am. But I'm just following the data, and the data is saying God. You know, it's saying God over and over again, and not a guy on a cloud with a white beard. But in terms of being this organizing principle, could it be that E.T. is tied to this time-space continuum and is playing that game in a way that we don't fully appreciate, and that there is a bigger game outside of that, the spiritual game, the God game, and that E.T. isn't totally in that game either? Here's the question. Is E.T. having a near-death experience? Is E.T. having a soul journey kind of life review? Hey, you know, you really shouldn't have abducted your family. Let me stop you there, because I don't want to lose the thought. It could very well be. This is where it gets mind-twisting, and it is really, there are no words to really describe what you're contemplating here. Again, I go back to this idea of the possibility of a simulation. Implicit in this model of a simulated reality, not just this reality, but other realities are simulated, that they are nestled one within the other, so that one reality is created by, let's, you're calling it E.T., let's just say, let's say our reality has been created by another, we'll call it E.T., I don't like that term, I like N.H.I. But within that, where E.T. lives, so to speak, I'm speaking figuratively, of course, they are having an experience of which they're nestled in a reality that's been created by something or someone else, and on and on it goes. It's been described as the Russian dolls. You know, Linda Moulton-Hau and I have had this discussion before in the context of a simulated reality, so I think your question's noble. I don't know, it could very well be. All I know is that what we are trying to parse is nearly impossible to do so appropriately in human terms, and I think it can be futile. We want to make sure we're asking the right questions as well. You know, so. As long as we're going to play the game of the illusion of moving towards an answer, we might as well play it the best we can. That's what we can, of course. Well, I say never, ever, ever stop asking the questions. Never be shy about exploring the mystery, you know. I love Richard Feynman who says it does no harm to the mystery to know a little bit about it. Hopefully we're getting a little bit closer. I love that. I love that. Alexis, again, I do hope that people check out your work, Hire Journeys Radio, hirejourneys.com, which is awesome. They'll also find you at the Consciousness Life Expo a lot of times, but you're at a lot of other events, you're doing a lot of things. Tell folks how is the best way for them to connect with what you're up to. Sure. Well, again, as you said, hirejourneys.com is my home online. As much as websites are these days, it seems like people are spending more time on social media, but in that regard, I do have a Facebook page as well where people can reach me and learn about the events that I will be showing up at, and one's coming up actually next month, July 18th and 19th or 19th and 20th, I'll be in Manchester, England with my buddies Richard Dolan and his beautiful wife Tracy and Linda Moulton-Howe and David Childress. I believe Grant Cameron is coming as well for the Awakening and Conscious Life Expo UFO and Conscious Life Expo in Manchester, England. I'll be going back to Australia to lecture more about this great stuff. My second time there, so I'm really excited about that. And I see you've got a visual of my book that I cannot believe. It's been five years since I put this out, Conscious Musings, but that book is still available. Available in I believe in all fine bookstores, but of course, Amazon as well as Barnes & Noble, etc. and my website. Well, it's been just awesome connecting with you and I just so appreciate your work and appreciate you joining me today on Skeptico. And I appreciate you and what you're doing. Keep it up. I love it. And I love your line of questioning. You're wonderful.