 But it is kind of interesting that the image of the alien changes, that there are things in the wider culture, in popular culture, we'll just use that term because that's the one we throw around today. But literate people, again of a bygone era, and it could be horror literature, it could be science fiction, that sort of thing. There have actually been people, again, who, academics, who look into this sort of thing, who study pop culture, where they've noticed that the way these things sort of get described align, tend to align with, again, what is being circulated in the worlds of horror literature and science fiction and things like that. And in the case of the grays, I mean, there is sort of a early 20th century kind of development of this particular image that we've all sort of become accustomed to, where that eventually gets picked up on and then it gets churned out in science fiction literature. And then when you get into the era of television, of course, you're going to see it instead of just read it and imagine it and see sketches and illustrations and books and things like that. So I actually think that it's a really good indication that, again, what we're not dealing here with an actual extraterrestrial biological entity, these are, again, in academia people would refer to these things as archetypes, or now we use words like memes, this is what they are. They are just things that sort of catch on and they work their way into the popular consciousness. And then people store that information away and then out comes XYZ experience or whatever response to trauma or something like that. And then they just, either the brain incidentally fills in the gaps or they just do it sort of intentionally. But think of the way I just said that, archetypes, collective consciousness, again, these are all areas that in sort of the academic community, again, the scholars who don't have any sort of particular theological or confessional bent, they're going to be dipping into these terms in these areas of psychology. I was going to say it's very Jungian. Right, it is. But why is that more coherent than to suggest, well, maybe what we have here is a supernatural influence. We don't necessarily know how it works, we don't necessarily know how the interaction takes place. But again, as Christians, it's not that we have to deny any good observations of a psychologist or a Jungian researcher or whatever, they might come on to some idea that's really useful. But why is it that it's okay to parse these things in really, honestly, a secularist, materialist way? And all we're suggesting is, well, maybe we ought to sort of parse these things in a spiritual way. So what tends to sort of sound bizarre, you know, talking about UFOs and the occult and, you know, the supernatural forces, that can sound really silly and crazy and bizarre. What we're saying is, well, we're not materialists, okay, we're not materialists. So we don't believe that there are aliens actually coming here, but we're not going to default to Jungian systems. We're going to ask ourselves, well, you know, could there be something in a Christian worldview that might have some overlap, you know, with this kind of thing? And for me, it's really about messaging. It's about what people are asked to believe. It's about what they're asked to redefine, okay, in terms of their faith. The messaging to me is just overtly sinister. And when you get down into the literature, you know, I agree, you see overlaps with old occult systems. You see overlaps with horror literature. You see overlaps with ancient, you know, religion. Again, is that a coincidence? Again, I don't think so. I think that there's some intelligence here that as a Christian, we would speak in supernatural terms about it. We wouldn't just talk about Jungian psychology, that sort of thing. I would say how would we expect a modern person that's used to technology and things that fly around and mysteries like that? How would we expect them to talk about ancient ideas? We would expect them to talk about it with spaceships and aliens. We would talk about the same thing, but we would do it with the trappings of what we think of as power. So I would say this is what to expect. You recently did a documentary with Faithlife TV, which is all about angels and demons, aliens. Can you explain to us the difference between demons and angels? Sure. The documentary itself really tries to, again, take a look at the UFO subject and try to inject some biblical thinking into it. So we sort of go through what the options are, like how could various things be explained, and it's more than just one bucket. It's more than one angel or demon bucket. We go through all the buckets, but eventually, again, we land on this area because of things like the abduction phenomenon and some of the real sinister aspects to what people report or claim they see or witness or experience themselves. So when you get into that, you naturally, this whole talk about angels and demons surfaces, I don't think we can draw a one-to-one equation with a lot of these things in terms of angels, demons. Those are good aliens and bad aliens or things like that. So that's kind of a simplistic approach. So we don't go down that road. But you have a situation where, especially in the more sinister aspects, where a lot of the messaging is, for lack of a better term, demonic. It's just sort of a demonstrable fact that when you get into abductee and contactee testimony that not coincidentally, a lot of what is targeted in what they tell people tends to be very anti-Christian, very anti-gospel. And again, is that a coincidence? I don't think so. And so in that sense, we've got something sort of running in the background, kind of like a computer program running in the background of these experiences. And so it can take on kind of a sinister flavor there. And what people experience in terms of abductions, there are a lot of good explanations for that. I think some of them, at least a few of them, are explainable by demonic oppression. For me, that's on the table. I believe in the supernatural, and I think there is some overlap there. But I don't think that we can say angels and demons are extraterrestrials. The Bible doesn't really portray them that way. They're not finite life forms. They're not biological life forms. They don't have determined lifespans. They don't have to reproduce. They don't have to eat and drink and all that sort of thing. It's very natural for people to think of a spiritual being when they think of the UFO phenomenon. And that presents a lot of opportunity for conversation as a Christian in this community. And so what I try to do is I try to get people to think about biblical overlaps with these things and how to sort of process them maybe in a way that doesn't undermine the message of Scripture. Can you tell me why you decided to use fiction to teach? Yeah, fiction, faction, it's sort of that kind of thing. I like to use fiction to sort of piggyback theology on fiction. So some of my non-fiction material, like divine counsel stuff, is going to work its way into fiction in these books. I also think it's really, it's not only useful to sort of get people to the table for a spiritual discussion. But in this case, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to take lots of factual material. It's not just sort of marketing shtick. I'm really serious that everything in the book, every data point, every government document, every ancient text, everything in the book is actually real. What's fiction about the book is how I connect those dots and then, of course, the characters. But I'll confess, even some of the characters are sort of people I know or composites, that kind of thing. If a historical figure in the book says something, they actually said that. And so I think it's useful to present not just sort of interesting material to people, but also to alert them to the fact that even though this is kind of a fringe, you know, crazy subject, there is actually a lot to think about here. And in the course of what I do in the book, I'm trying to get people to, again, say, hey, there's something to this, and there are spiritual components to this as well. And so the characters have to struggle through spiritual implications of a variety of things, in this case, related to the UFO subject and all the alien talk that goes out there. So it's a good vehicle for, you know, what might be, again, how do we connect the dots? Because the dots are real, what might be, and then what are the implications of all that? Your novels, the facade and the portent, do you, at any point in there, explain what the delusion is all about and how it connects to Gnosticism and the New Age movement and all that? The facade, just think of the title. The facade really is about messaging and deception. And the portent, you know, picks up those threads and just think about it. You've got, if there's disclosure, however that comes, however innocuous it might be, you know, NASA owns up to, oh, there's microbes out there that are living, you know, organisms. Even something as innocuous like that, people are going to extrapolate. They're going to mentally fill in the gap. Now we've got alien races everywhere and we've been visited. I mean, the culture is prepped for that sort of thing. But you've got really a fundamental decision to make. There's sort of can serious Christianity comment intelligently and in that sense frame the discussion in light of or in the wake of disclosure. Or are we going to get sort of somebody else's version of this that's going to fill that gap? And what I do in the facade and the portent is I really focus on, I focus on both. In the facade, the centerpiece question is what would the impact of a genuine disclosure be? Something incontrovertible, what would that be to the faith? But then the reader, again, and to some degree, the characters, the reader always knows more than what the characters know. You're suddenly hit by this notion of, OK, there's something going on here. There's a greater intelligence here that is going to target people of faith. And essentially the game plan is we're going to give you exactly what you expect. We're going to give you everything you need to keep your Bible, to interpret it literally, to continue to have faith in it, to confirm it. But what's being confirmed isn't what you think is being confirmed. And so it's really about the control of a narrative so that we can capture the imagination of, in this case, the believing community. And then when we have them thinking a certain thought, we move the herd from A to B. And then when they're at B, we'll move them to C. But in so doing, again, since I'm the author of this, again, I put, this is like writing a dissertation for me. Writing a novel is like writing a dissertation, just thousands and thousands of pages. You have a novel with footnotes. Yes, peer-reviewed stuff. It's no different a project for me in terms of research than nonfiction is. And I get to put myself into the seat of the evil mastermind, OK? And for me, when I get asked questions about, well, how does the supernatural world really affect us? Again, I don't gravitate to the bizarre. I don't gravitate to the weird, it's kind of spooky contact event. What I gravitate toward, and this is how I think the spirit world actually works, is that you need to move the herd, you need to capture thinking. You need to control thought because a divine being isn't going to work hard. He's going to work smart. The more people I can get to embrace what I want them to think, I don't have to work because it'll spread through media or conversation, those sorts of things. And so the evil mastermind, this is what it's really about. How do I use this thing that, again, that the villain is entrenched in this world of UFO stuff and the military and paramilitary and all this? How do I use this environment to change thinking, to move the herd? And so deceptively that you really believe that you're embracing the right thing. What's really disturbing is there are people in the Christian community, even among researchers, that what they're saying is really a baptizing of ancient alien theory. And that in turn, you wouldn't have ancient aliens if the 19th century had never happened. Because all of that, the whole narrative comes out of occult literature, theosophical literature, again, this other kind of speculative literature, pan-Babylonianism, all of that. All of that feeds and creates and propels the ancient alien narrative. And when you come along and you say, well, we need to accept a lot of this stuff, but we're going to sort of baptize it now and make it biblical, again, people don't really realize what they're doing with that. Sanctified bad ideas are still bad ideas. That's really what you're dealing with. But that's the thing that kind of alarms me the most. So I wanted the narrative and the novels to sort of drop into that. Again, confirm expectations. I mean, you're going to get to keep your Bible. It's not really what you think. I mean, even when you get to like ancient Egypt where there are things you can read there that sort of feel like an uncreated creator somewhere along the line, it's like, well, we don't really know how he got here. Or that the primeval elements had something to do with this. And even the elements themselves, pre-existed, well, who made them? I mean, you don't get this, and I hate to put it this way, but you don't get this sort of ontologically neat package. I would say ontologically coherent package like you get with Israelite thinking. Yeah. I'm kind of interested in what they're going to do with the guardians. Yeah. And marrying that with Avengers now. Again, I did read a lot of comic books when I was younger, and it was Avengers and Spider-Man and it was Hulk and all this kind of stuff. The thing, I never got into guardians, but for those of you who saw the movie, at the end, you know, the alien, for lack of a better term, the alien enemies, again, who are chasing the guardians around. The leader, she gets mad, and then they create this other thing, this other entity. And at the very end, she says, well, I think I'll call him Adam. This is going to be Adam Warlock. You know, if you're familiar with the Ark, again, in the guardian story, with the Infinity Stones and whatnot, Adam Warlock is very clearly a Christ figure in the comic books. So I'm kind of interested to see what they're going to do with that. Because, you know, right there, you have this backstory of, you have an extraterrestrial creation of this Christ figure. So this is what you run into in comic books a lot. On the surface, I think most people, when you sort of alert them to the fact that, hey, a superhero is either a modified human or a deity, or an extraterrestrial. This is what you're playing with. This is the playing field. And then how you can either retell old, you know, religious, you know, epic narratives, or you can play with them and modify them to create some sort of modern form of those things. But they transmit worldview. They transmit belief. And when they filter over into touching Judeo-Christianity, again, that's where it gets really interesting if you're Christians. What's the messaging there? It's the truth. I mean, I'm interested in pop culture, you know, just for that reason, because there's so many fundamental links between, you know, pop culture, comic books, TV shows, movies, whatnot, that they're popular because it's good storytelling and good storytelling is really about these, you know, archetypal narratives and these big picture questions. And so it's sort of a natural playground, you know, for creators. But in terms of the biblical literacy thing, the real problem there, as I see it, is when you're not sort of taught to think well about biblical theology, but you have a pretty deep knowledge of, we'll just say, you know, cartoon, you know, sorts of presentations of theology, comic books, okay? When you have a pretty deep knowledge of that, it's very understandable that when you get into a conversation with someone who that's their knowledge base and you start to talk about the nature of God and you try to talk about things like Trinity or the deity of Christ or how Jesus can be God and man at the same time, they're naturally gonna filter those questions through the categories they know. In other words, how those sorts of ideas were presented to them in a comic book or in a movie. And, you know, it's not that they never hit anything right, but typically it just veers off somewhere, theologically. And so the person might wanna have the conversation, you know, because it's interesting. But the way they're able to process points of biblical theology, it really creates sort of a barrier to thinking well about some of these things. And as academics, you know, we like to insist on precision when we talk about, you know, the two natures of Jesus and the Trinity and deity and all this sort of stuff. But if your touch point are these imprecise analogies, that affects the way you're able to comprehend theology and that makes you susceptible to any number of aberrant theological systems. So I think there's a real problem here, you know, other than the fact that maybe they, you know, it would be great if this would help us think better about truth, okay, that would be wonderful. But at best, it helps people think in imprecise ways about truth and then they wind up in untruth. And in some cases it's very antagonistic to truth. It's a deliberate inversion or perversion of some point. So it's an important thing to be thinking about as Christians, you know, pop culture in these areas because you just get into all these big picture theological questions. You just almost can't help but do it. Well, you know, the propensity is going to be on the one part, it's going to, there's going to be this generated interest. The adults of course are going to say, oh well that, you know, none of that's real, none of that's real. And unfortunately that notion that, well, if it's not, this is going to sound really kind of awkward, but if it's not scientific, then we know it's not real. And to have someone who supposedly, again, embraces a supernatural worldview like a Christian, that's actually where they're at, that these things are impossible, these things can't be. If I can't quantify it, then it's not real. If I can't put on their microscope, use empirical data, then it's not going to be real. And so, you know, that can really cut both ways. It can sort of say, you know, to the child or to the teenager, well, you know, well then, okay, I know this isn't real, I can sort of process that, I get it, but I like it. And now you're, you know, it cuts them off from perceiving what's in scripture as real. And since it's not pyrotechnic, you know, if I can use sort of an antiquated term like that, okay, if it's not that, then it's even less interesting. And so you're asking me to get into something that's less interesting and still not real, like this other stuff, it just, it really works against, you know, trying to generate interest in the reality of scripture. I mean, when God says, you know, to Moses, you know, in connection with the Passover this night, I will have victory over the gods of Egypt. Okay, if that isn't real, if it's not a real victory, if he doesn't have a real enemy and a real conquest, okay, then what have we got there? And he calls them the gods of Egypt. God's just sort of putting on a show or, you know, he's winking at the same time, but you can't have a wink, you know. If it's just idols that they invented and they weren't anything real behind it. Then the claim is a sham. So, you know, I think we need to get our young people really better theology and then talk about, okay, here's why your comic books similar to this story over here from ancient Egypt or this thing over here from Mesopotamia, there's a reason why the people you like to watch now drew on those stories. They're not only cool stories, but those stories are the ones that the biblical writers are interacting with. And to them, these characters were real. This was a real spiritual warfare kind of issue. So the stories, you know, are part of, you know, not only teaching people about these entities and about spiritual realities, but also shows, you know, it separates the black hats from the white hats and that's important to sort of pick up on. I think as Christians, we need to realize that we have the truth of scripture. If there was a genuine extraterrestrial disclosure, again, that doesn't need to harm our faith in any way. We need to be thinking more intelligently about what it would mean, but it's not gonna change the fundamental points of, you know, theism or our faith as Christians. So we need to be prepared for that. And again, what I'm trying to do in the facade and the portent is to get people to think seriously about it to kind of frame the issue again and then also, you know, take people's minds over, well, we would have an answer, but what if we're being given this information by an intelligence that just frankly doesn't like us a whole lot? And we're sort of being led to conclusions that are not convenient for us in any way, but are sinister.