 Today we welcome Dr. Diana Walsh-Basulka to Skeptico. In 2012, today's guest was at a high point in her career, well-respected professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington Research Awards, a successful book with Oxford University Press. She had even gained tenure, which as we all know is almost impossible to do these days. And then, Diana, the universe winked at you, didn't it? A colleague noted that your account of a Catholic saint and her encounter with an angel sounded a lot like a UFO story that led you to a UFO conference. You met the amazing Chris Bloodsoul, who told you about his encounter with ETs that seemed more technological than biological. Next, you're off to a UFO conference in California, where you just happened to land a personal tour of your old hometown, Silicon Valley, with none other than Jacques Vallée. So quite a journey, and that really set you off on this six-year journey, taking you from your academic religious conferences with our friend Jeff Cry Bullet Rice University to harvesting space junk from secret cash to UFOs in the New Mexico Desert, and with Silicon Valley meta-experiencers who don't think twice about ordering a $1,000 lunch from the Ritz and hopping on a private jet like an Uber, and ultimately back to your roots in the deepest walls of the library of the Vatican. Wow, what a story, what a book. Congratulations on American Cosmic. Brilliant book, and welcome to Skeptico. Thank you so much for joining me. Absolutely, happy to be here. So I really just kind of skimmed the surface, which would almost sound unbelievable to anyone who heard that introduction and think, oh, there's more, but there's like a lot more. Tell people your kind of opening line when someone bumps into you on the airplane and says, tell me about American Cosmic, what do you say? Right, okay, so people in my field of religious studies, this is kind of a well-known joke among us. We never tell people what we do when we're on airplanes because they will inevitably think we're ministers or priests in the formation or something like that and want to know that type of stuff, and that's not what we do. So we are an interdisciplinary field, we're archaeologists, sociologists, historians, and things like that. And what we do is we don't really weigh in on the reality of beliefs, of people believe in all kinds of things. They believe in Vishnu, they believe in Jesus, they believe in Muhammad, and things like that. And we don't say yes or no to those. What we do is we study the effects and practices and these kinds of things. And so if somebody asked me about American Cosmic, frankly, I'd have to figure out who they were. And because that book has so many different levels to it, that if they were basically euphologists, I'd tell them about the crash site. And I'd talk about the crash site. If they were academics, I'd say, oh, well, what I'm doing is I'm basically using the UFO belief system as a case study that the infrastructure, the changing infrastructure, that's akin to the book of the Protestant Reformation, that the book actually changed our culture. So technology changes culture, it changes everything, and religion is not exempt from that. So I would focus on that and tell them about that. If they were interested in kind of like the Da Vinci Code, I'd tell them a little bit about, you know, the kind of more unbelievable aspects of the book, which are nonetheless true. And my access to the secret archive, because of my credentials, and meeting Brother Guy Consul Manio, and he's the director of the Vatican Observatory, which of course is a giant telescope area in Castle Gondolfo, but also one in Arizona. And I just happened to ask him, he was just here to give a lecture at my university and we were hanging out. And I said, hey, you know, I do archival work. And I said, do you have a space archive? And he said, well, as a matter of fact, anything that has to do with space from thousands of years ago comes to our place in Castle Gondolfo. It doesn't go to the Vatican. And so I just happened to sit there and I thought about it. I thought, I wonder if I could get a look in your archive. And he said, of course, he said, we have a place for scholars to stay, you can stay for free. And of course, I had to take them up on that. So, so yeah, I went there. And honestly, that that's the end of the book that the book was done by then. So I didn't think that was the last chapter. So when I got to that chapter, I had I had to tell my editor that, sorry, there's one more chapter to this book that's already been taking too long to write. And and then it got edited about, Oh, I don't know, a million times, and a lot of stuff taking out. So I should actually write the real story behind the American American cosmic kind of thing. But who knows, it's already caused quite a bit of controversy. Yeah, I don't know if I'm up for that, you know, I had to get off social media. And I have to kind of, like I said, my computer's all got hacked. And like I have a university police, and we have tech police at our university. And, and friends of mine, too, who are academics that all happen to us at the same time, same kinds of things. So it's not a coincidence. I don't know who or what. So I'm just, you know, fixing my computer as I go. And, you know, I don't say anything in there that should get anybody in trouble. Basically, what I'm doing is I'm just reporting on this new form of religiosity. And to me, it changed my life. I mean, I, you know, you should be, as an academic, the best thing you want is to be surprised by your research. And like the book I wrote about purgatory, which is a Catholic dogma, you know, I found out that people actually went to purgatory caves, and that it was actually a physical kind of practice before it became an actual dogma of the church. And that surprised me. I didn't know that. I don't think anybody really thought about it. And so, you know, that's the kind of stuff we do is we uncover things. Now, I was, and still am being daily mind blown by the research I'm doing into this field for the very reasons of the, you know, the meta experiencers, the people I met who, like I say, could Uber a jet? I've seen this on a number of occasions, and I've had the hate mail about it. Like, who do you think you are? You're not, you know, the Da Vinci code person and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, I'm sorry, but I'm not making it up. This guy can Uber a jet. I mean, you know, when I say Uber, I mean, he just calls up and says, I need to be here. Can you, can you get me a jet at the airport? And they do, and he goes. And that's, I'm not making that up. That actually does happen. So I know it sounds unbelievable, but if you look at what I've written so far, you look at my CV, nothing is out of the ordinary. I'm a completely ordinary professor, you know, I move up the ranks. I'm a full professor, actually. I'm not an assistant or associate. I'm at the top. I'm a chair of a department. And like you said, I've won researcher awards. I've won grants. And, you know, I'm a very typical boring professor. And all of a sudden I come out with American cosmic. I mean, that's not because I wanted to do it. It's because that's what presented itself to me. And I felt it was my obligation to present it to the, to an audience. I honestly presented it to an audience that I thought would be academics mostly, but it crossed over into the mainstream and people are fascinated. So I've been pretty much doing on average for interviews a week. And let me just comment on that because you were just super welcoming about doing this interview. And at this point, I think you would reach interview fatigue. You've done just phenomenal interviews. I've listened to a half a dozen of your interviews in addition to reading the book. And they're all great. You're so just unpretentious and welcoming. And I'd like to talk more about you just touched on this transformation. Folks, this is just a super important book. It's one of the most important books I think you could possibly read about the current state of consciousness research, UFO research, the whole interplay with technology, all the stuff you've hit on. And it's also just this wonderful, well written story of this personal transformation that you've gone through, that you let out a little bit. And you, in the book, you hint that it's been deeper than that, which I can only imagine. I mean, you were born in a born again Christian kind of house in California. You're not religious in that way anymore, but you still attend Roman Catholic services. And again, I mentioned that because that is not always the case when you talk about a professor religious studies. Most of those people I've come across are pretty hectic when you really kind of get down to it. So you go through this, and then you go through this just amazing, amazing. I can't stress it enough. The stories that you're alluding to are literally the tip of the iceberg. I mean, the Uber jet thing is so minor to the story because really the guys in the field showing you how to get aliens, crash chips from a 1947 craft. And then you're meeting the people that he's saved lives with because he's taken that and reverse engineered it into some bio tech stuff. And he's made a million billion dollars doing it. And this is true. So I don't know how you go through that without being transformed, but it did transform you, right? It did. Okay. So the thing is, is, and I thought, and I hoped that I conveyed that at first I was very suspicious. And to the point of being frightened really of a lot of the people that I met, because they were not at a level that, you know, these were not people that I never met before. And there were some who were professors and who were studying this as well. And I kind of bonded more with them, like James in the book, I bonded with James a lot more and he's a good friend of mine. And so the other people that are, you know, way out there and doing that space program, can I just interject something? Because the weirdness never stops. Yeah, that's James, right? James is also an experiencer who's had multiple experiences with AT, if you want to call it that, for simple terms. And his main driving ambition research project is to kind of counteract this ability that ET has to seem to just bump into us in the extended consciousness realm wherever he wants. And he wants to have greater control of that. So even when you, when you blow past that, which you shouldn't be allowed to do because your story is so huge, there's a lot of depth there that just would blow people away, totally change our paradigm, change everything we think we know about this stuff. So I'm sorry, please continue with your transformation. Oh, sure. Yeah. So again, so I put off the meeting. I became a very good friend with Christopher Bledsoe and his family. We actually happened to live about an hour and a half away. And one of his kids went to my university. And so we would see each other very often I would go to his house and bring my kids and he would come to my house and we eat dinner and stuff like that. And he met several of the professors in my department and he would come and talk to my students. And what a sweet, nice man, you know, and what an incredibly hospitable family. And so what happened was that he became surrounded by the meta experiencers and people that were affiliated with like government programs. And that was something I didn't actually want to get into at all. I was afraid of it, frankly. I was like, I'm just a normal professor mom going about my business. And, you know, I was worried about Chris, frankly. And so I had to kind of step away. And then I met Tyler. And Tyler was a person who I was agreed to correspond with over email for about a year and a half before I ever met him. And when I did meet him, he wanted to take me to New Mexico because he said that he wanted to know what I knew about consciousness and the religious experience and mysticism. And he said, you don't believe in the physical aspects of the phenomenon, but I'm going to show you the physical aspects. And I thought, I'm not sure I want to know about that. But he kind of insisted. And then I met him in Atlanta at one of our conferences, the American Academy of Religion. And I asked Jeff Kreipel, who is a friend of mine and an academic at Rice University, and he has an amazing body of work. And I asked him to meet him with me. And so that was funny because here's, you know, here we are at this giant conference of religious studies scholars. Oh, they're all like wearing black, you know how the scholars, you know, they're like shuffling around and like looking for food and tables and everything. And in comes this guy completely cool, wearing Gucci, you know, and I immediately knew that was Tyler. I was like, oh, okay, this is not a scholar of religion. And he comes in and we introduce each other and he looks around and he says, we can't eat here. He said, let's go to my hotel, the Ritz. And so Jeff and I said, sure. And so he just phoned and he said, hey, I need a table for three. And when we got there, it was just like, he was incredibly charismatic. I had told Jeff to I had said, don't give into his charisma. Like, you know, he might and Jeff completely did by the end of the lunch, Jeff was inviting him to his house in Houston meeting his wife and everything. And I was like, what are you doing? Like, you know, you need to be more suspicious. So he again, Tyler reiterated his invitation to go to the the quote unquote alleged crash site of these artifacts in New Mexico. And I was not going alone. And so I said to Jeff, why don't you come with me? And Jeff was like, that's a little outside of my comfort zone. And I said, I know. And so then I decided to ask James the scientist and James of course was all over it. So James went with me. We had to wear a blindfold because it was it's a place that can't be known apparently. And there are apparently like seven crash sites that happened in that time period. Now remember, I'm speaking as a scholar of religion. So I don't actually believe or disbelieve that there are actual crash sites of UFOs. What I'm doing is I'm going to document this extremely elite group of people who believe that they're getting these artifacts and they're engineering them into biotechnology. And back to the idea of the transformation, what I picked up on and I totally understand it, but only from a person who is really uniquely open to following the data in a way that you don't care if it makes you uncomfortable. You did say you were cautious about, Hey, I'm tenured. So maybe I can do this. You weren't like totally foolish about it. But you just kept following and following the data in a way that most people just don't do. So that first step is interesting. You know, the first step is like, somebody says, wow, Diana, that sounds your angel story sounds a lot like a UFO story. And you dig into it. You go, Yeah, it does. Let me go to a UFO conference, which is, you know, pretty out there for people in your position. But then you do and then you take the next step and the next step and the next step. Is that in your history? So I guess what I've been interested in religion since I was 11. So I'm not the kind of person who is going to follow the, you know, the kind of theory about it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna look at it. And I have actually thought a lot about the religions I studied. So like Zen Buddhism, I credit with getting me a good grades in math and calculus because I'm serious because, you know, it taught me how to actually look at something without frameworks, you know. So if you if you actually utilize some of the techniques that religious traditions have taught us, you know, they've been around for a long time and they can actually teach us things. And so I've learned those techniques and that's helped me in my research. One of the things that came through, I couldn't think of it any other way than this idea of breakaway civilization kept popping up. Breakaway academia, where there's this fight club, college, they know stuff, nobody else knows. I think it extends into politics. I think it extends into technology as you document. Is that what you're documenting here? Is that the, is that one of the stories? Is there the distance between where these folks are that you're talking about in the book and where the rest of us are? And even us being like we're kind of reading American cosmic, we're in the minority anyway, you know, in this tiny little tribe of community that's willing to accept what you're saying. What about the rest of the people? Have we reached that breakaway civilization kind of point? Okay, I know the theory, okay. And from my perspective, the people that I interacted with were, now this is where it gets really weird. I know that I, you know, it's already weird enough, but this is where it gets really weird. It, and this is where I think that at the Vatican, when we went to the Vatican, Tyler and I, we learned a lot and we learned a lot because he said, what should we do? And I said, the only thing we should do is keep quiet and listen. That's all we do. And that's how we learn. And so we went and we met people that were the people we should meet. And what I learned was that let's theoretically suggest there's this breakaway civilization within our within our species, okay. And they are at the forefront of discovery. And by the way, I don't know if you know about this author, Ted Chang. His book was the basis for the movie called Arrival, which is a great movie about the phenomena. And he wrote a very, very short story in nature about 20 years ago called Picking Up the Breadcrumbs. And it's basically about the breakaway civilization, but about scientists who hack into their own bodies and become superhumans and are so far removed from humans that we have to just study them. But just let me be clear on this, because some people take the breakaway civilization and they take it in a whole other direction and kind of a sci-fiish direction, which may be the future reality. But what I thought was amazing about American cosmic is that's my literal read of your book, not extrapolating, it's just you're chronicling a breakaway civilization. You're chronicling an academia that is, you know, there's the people who know and the people who don't. And James is passed a card, you know, like out of a movie and says, call us. And then the kind of men in blackish, not real men in blackish, but guys who just know stuff say, okay, you're invited in the invisible college. And it's real. And you've been there and you've seen the fight club kind of thing, the secrecy. It's a whole different world. And again, this is what you're documenting in the book. And then when you go and meet Tyler, he is in a different world, not just because he ubers planes, but because he just knows stuff that is way beyond what other people know or would ever be willing to accept will ever make it on the news. Again, I'm emphasizing the point maybe too much. Diana, you're documenting a breakaway civilization. It's not a sci-fi one, but aren't we already there? Okay, I hear what you're saying. And I didn't know I was doing that. I just was amazed by what I was discovering. And the things that were happening, even with Jacques, Jacques Valet, you know, his trust in me, he's got a whole library of an archives of information. And I'm one of two people who have access it for 10 years. And so I was being given a lot of access, which I didn't understand why. Well, now I understand a little bit more, but still don't know the full story. Nobody knows the full story here, Alex. Even so, that's why it's not an invisible college anymore, because at least they used to talk with each other. And I want to convey the tragedy of this for these people. Take Tyler, I wanted to convey that place in the story where he sees, you know, G.D. Resnick, you know, in the whole situation of the challenger blowing up. What I want to show is that this guy leads a tragic life. I mean, hey, it's all cool. He can, you know, order this Uber and he's really awesome. He wears Gucci, you know, and this kind of thing, but he's not a happy person. And he, you know, the things that he knows, it drives him crazy. He doesn't know how he knows these things. Don't you know, I'm glad I'm not Tyler. I'm glad I have this kind of more ordinary life. So the kind of, in fact, I don't even know if I ever want to get back into this thing again, because of the pain and suffering of that group and that when you bring it out, look what happens to you. You know, you get targeted as a crazy person and this and that. And so, you know, who wants that? And so, you know, and it stops academics from actually trying to study it, because once they do, they get ridiculed and, you know, things like that happen. I mean, things very, very bad that I don't actually want to have in my reality. And, you know, it sounds glamorous and everything that those, those lives, but they're tinged with pain and suffering and constant anxiety. So I mean, does that kind of give an indication of it's, it's out there? Yeah. And maybe somebody will take the banner and go and do the next American Cosmic Two or something like that. But it most likely will not be me because I've been burned by it. I mean, it hurt me. The realizations that you see are amazing and you'll never be the same. And maybe that's what life is really about is to open up and see the, you know, not just the amazingness of it, but also the pain and suffering of it. I saw a lot and I just kind of want to go back into my cave again for a while. I do do the interviews because my book just came out. People want to know about it. And I do like the book. I mean, I've read it a couple times now, you know, you read our books and by the time, academics, by the time we've read our books a couple of times, we're sick of our books. I actually still like my book. When I read it, I go, yeah, you know, I remember that experience. These are experiences I had. These aren't theoretical kinds of things, you know, these are like, I went through all these experiences. I retain excellent relationships with James and Jacques Valais and Jeff Kreipel, um, Whitley Strieber, um, you know, and the others of the Fight Club. I'm just like I was before. I want to retreat from that because I don't want to be involved again with that. Well, wow. I mean, you just said a tongue right there. And I guess that's one of the topics I really am most interested in. I mean, people who have to buy this book. I mean, if you're not already so tempted, then you're listening to the wrong show because we are scratching the surface of a much, much broader painting of a landscape, which we don't, we can't fill in all the pieces, but at least someone has stepped out there and has tried to map the territory. You know what I mean? Because the map isn't the territory, but all's we're ever going to have our maps. And one of the things that kept coming up for me as you were talking about that, and as I was preparing for the interview, was this idea of religion versus spirituality. And that's a huge question for all time, you know, but it all sounds so left hand path-ish to me. So much of the stuff that's described in the book, materialism is cool, but, you know, tech is cool, but it's still materialism. It's not consciousness. If there is a spirituality, then it's not that. I don't think it is. So, you know, what are your thoughts in general? You laid out some of them, but what are we looking at? Because also in the book, and I can't help but jump around, the book is about a spiritually transformative experience as well at the end of the day, not even your own, but one of the key characters in the book. And what are spiritually transformative experiences tell us about what's going on? Is that closer to a real spirituality? Is there such a thing as real spirituality? Does it make sense to talk in those terms? A lot of people point at religion, particularly Catholicism, and say, hey, was that ever real spirituality, even though there's no doubt that people who experience spiritually transformative experiences through it as the vehicle, but please, rescue me here. Tell me how we begin to pull that apart. Right. Okay. So I think what you're getting at is this idea of, is there some kind of objective reality of what is called, you know, when we talk about religious language, are we actually talking about something that's objectively real, right, outside of ourselves? And if we encounter those things, are we, are we having genuine experiences or are we having subjective experiences, right? So it's this kind of problem of other minds, it's called in philosophy. And so what I look at is that, and you also mentioned Jeff Kreipel with respect to this, who says that it's all us, you know, it's all kind of us. And I'm actually not of that opinion. And I think that there could be, I mean, what are religions, but experiences that expand who and what we are, you know, Heidegger, one of the philosophers that I talk about in the book says, the age old philosophical question, which is not asked in philosophy anymore is, why something rather than nothing? I mean, once we start to contemplate, wow, we're here, and that's a little bit strange. And so once we start to think about those things and think about these experiences, so, okay, Jacques Valais had made a great point at the UN in the 70s when he said, regardless of whether UFOs are real or not, there's a huge belief system around them. And that's why we should study them, because they could be real, or they could not be real, it doesn't really matter. But we study them anyway. Jesus could have walked on water, or he could not have walked on water. It doesn't really matter, because a lot of people believe that he walked on water. Okay, so the belief system exists, regardless of their actual reality of the thing that is the object of the belief system. Okay, so that being said, I think that we have to then get into, if we're going to really go down that field, we have to get into some serious philosophical metaphysics. And being the chair of my department, I've had the honor actually of interviewing, we just hired a metaphysician in our department, who's incredibly talented. And I had the honor of hearing the job talks and research of about four different young metaphysicians who are at the top of their field in philosophy. And every single one of their job talks was basically saying that there's, you know, when you get into the physicality and the objectivity of things are actually just the physicality of things. There's nothing there. So if we're talking about there's nothing there, then you know, what kind of language do we use to describe that? And each of them, you know, their dissertation was basically about the different languages to describe the nothingness, right? And it sounds a lot like Buddhism, frankly, to me. But isn't that somewhat a product of the system? I tell you, one of my frustrations at this point is interviewing academics who are paralyzed by having to talk out of both sides of their mouth, you know, like really, really good academics who are on the cutting edge who say, well, here's what I have to say professionally, which fits into this kind of materialistic, bullshit dialogue. And then here's what I really think about extended consciousness and all the rest of it. You know, I passed along to you a couple of links, and I want to kind of bring these up and just throw them on the table, because I'm not totally down with what Jacques Filet is saying, because I think it's somewhat, again, another version of the shut up and calculate. We can't really know for sure. But meanwhile, Jacques has the trace elements in his rear pocket, the same as you do. I don't know how someone can go, and you're not saying this, you are so not saying this. But I don't know how you can walk through that New Mexico Desert crash site and find that stuff and say, well, maybe there's a reality to all this, and maybe there isn't. I mean, you kind of answered that question. There is a physical reality to it. The question is, how does that relate to the extended reality of it, which we know is real too, because all your religious reports have chronicled it throughout time. Let me throw this on the table. So Dr. Gregory Shishon comes along and he says, okay, I'm going to take a fresh look at this. First of all, I'm going to look at the near-death experience, because in a lot of ways, the near-death experience, and you're well versed in all this stuff, so we can just jump right in the middle of it, is somewhat of a clean data set in that we understand, at least we think we understand from a neurological, physiological, medical standpoint, we understand that consciousness can't be happening in that thing that we call brain. So people can get all sideways about whether you're dead or last gasp of a dying brain. But no, if you go talk to, you know, Sam Parnia, who's one of the top resuscitation experts, physicians in the world, he'll say, no, these people are dead, the brain should not be producing anything close to what we call consciousness. And yet it is, and it's doing it from the top of the room, which we wouldn't know, you'd be at the top of the room looking down. So NDE is real, it suggests survival of consciousness. Again, I'm not saying that this is what every NDE researcher, you know, radiation oncologist, cardiologist, world famous, Dr. Pimban Lama, everybody says that, right? So Gregory Shushan comes along and says, hey, you know what, what does that have to do with religion? And then he looks at this cross-cultural, cross-temporal kind of view of all these religions, right? As far back as he can go, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, you know, the whole thing and even more modern ones, Buddhism. And he says, wow, all these people in one way or another sound like they're having an NDE. Now, it doesn't fit perfectly and there's obviously this cultural overlay and then there's the social engineering overlay because religion is used to manipulate and control people. He says, but the core of it is be a good person. You will be judged, ultimate love. These things come through and they form religion. And that is a totally different spin. I'm not saying it's true. I believe it's true. I'm not saying it's true, but that would be a completely different way of looking at the religious experience rather than this kind of academic. Isn't it crazy that people have these weird experiences? Why people believe weird things? That's what I always think of. When I think of religious studies, they ought to just label it, why people believe weird things? Because that's what I hear. Yeah. I also want to point it out though that you just talked out both sides of your mouth too, like in academic. You said the NDE, I'm not saying that it exists, but I believe it. So, I mean, that's kind of how we talk too. So, you know, in a sense, we can't help it because we're at a crossroads in our culture where it's almost like a paradigm shift, right? A CUNY and paradigm shift where on the one hand, we can't prove it in the old way of proving it. And on the other hand, we actually can, but we're too afraid to say it. And so, I think that, I think with the NDE's, I mean, I was actually just talking about this with a couple of people yesterday about St. Paul, you know, who was Saul, and then he had this experience in the Christian tradition and it looked very much like an NDE, right? And so, he goes up into the out of his body into these heavens and he meets this man of light who then he believes is Jesus. And then he becomes Paul and he changes his name and he has the classic NDE transformation. And then he's a good person after that, right? And so, yeah, I mean, I agree with you. So, are you asking me about the UFO experiences being kind of like NDE experiences because I can say something about that. I'm going past that and asking this question because in the book, you devote a chapter to my buddy Ray Hernandez who has, you know, done some really cool research. And I'm always putting up against Ray for folks who don't remember Ray Hernandez has this incredible experience encounter. Really his wife does, but he kind of tags along. And it's so cool because it kind of reminds me of James's experiences. Ray is walking down the stairs and his wife goes into this like hyper space ball along with her dog who is dying, who is healed through the process and Ray goes down and follows him and then is told there's nothing going on here. Go back to bed. And he marches back upstairs and goes back to bed, which suggests, you know, let's jump ahead in the story. We're talking to a different crowd here. E.T. has this ability to just screen our brain and control consciousness in the same way it does in the Tic-Tac flight or fighter pilot thing where it says meet at this point and no one's supposed to know where that point is. So there's all this crazy consciousness stuff going on, but this is Ray Hernandez. And then Ray goes on to do the first academic survey of E.T. contact. And his big takeaway is guys quit calling them abductions. They're not abductions. They're moral spiritually transformative experiences. Now your buddy James has something to say about that. And that's, I guess, the part that interests me is if we're talking about a non-human intelligence that has that degree of control, certainly we should be very skeptical when we enter into the spiritually transformative experience territory. But the first thing I think to answer is as we map this extended consciousness realm and we say there's this God realm and this heaven realm and that seems to be where NDEs are. And then recently there's been this very pronounced move within certain aspects of the UFO community, including Jeff Kreipel and including Ray, you know, with the multiple contact modalities saying, hey, no, no, no, it's all one. There's just different ways of contacting and accessing these same extended realms. And I guess I want to pump the brakes on that a little bit and say, do we know that? Or do we maybe want to consider more of a traditional religious perspective, if you will, what's always been tallied is that and say, no, there is a pure form of that extended realm where God is. I mean, I framed it up as the question, who does E.T. pray to? You mentioned, you know, in the book, you're so open, but you're going into this crash site, this UFO crash site the next day. And you say, I prayed because I didn't know what was going to happen. And I, you know, I could only expect the worst. So you prayed. You prayed. Does E.T. pray? Who does E.T. pray to? That's the question. No one's asking that question. No, no, other people are. The Catholic Church has asked that question. Oh, the Catholic Church. That's who I, that's who I trust, believe me. I'm just saying that they did, they've asked that question. So Brother Guy Consolmano asks it in his book, would you baptize an E.T.? And, you know, he says that he would if she wanted to be baptized. I mean, even when you read the Old Testament Hebrew Bible, God is referring to God's self as plural. Okay. So I always like to go back to Socrates as, you know, that the person who was given the honor of the smartest person is the person who says they knew nothing. So I think we have to approach this with the perspective of, gosh, those are all good questions, and we should follow through on them. But I have no conclusions. I've been criticized for it. You know, well, she doesn't give us any answers. Well, who can, you know, I mean, who's going to give you an answer? Yes, there are Martians and they're on Mars. Okay. No, no, sorry, I can't give that answer. I'm not going to, because I'm responsible in terms of, I'll present something that I say, okay, yes, this is the source for it. I know this to be true. But within this realm, I think what we have to do is we have to open up our minds to it. I mean, I honestly think that we're just at the beginning of understanding it. And I think that we've made a shift in the culture in that people like Robert Bigelow and people that have, you know, the means are believing it and being very open about it now. And it's no longer so secretive or stigmatized. And that's a huge step forward. And I also think that I have a tradition, and I'm a believer in my tradition. Now, my tradition is not perfect. I'm not like, if they knew what I actually thought, I'd get excommunicated. But, you know, I'm still a cultural Catholic who believes in social justice. So there are different types of Catholics, just like there are different types of Buddhists. So, you know, what can we say, let's put it this way, and I'm going to say, I'm not reflecting my university and I'm not reflecting my book Oxford, you know, the press. But if there are these non-human intelligences, there are different sorts and types of them. And this goes back a long way, like in my purgatory, in the book that I wrote about purgatory, the one previous to this, I go back to about 1100 nice, and I read some of the original sources by Aquinas and those guys. And, you know, they're talking about planetary intelligences and things like that, and different forms of non-human intelligences that are spatial. They're stellar. Okay? So, it's not a new concept. It's been around for a long time. I mean, Emmanuel Swedenborg wrote a best seller in the 1750s called Life on Other Planets. And he was a very intelligent person, right? And so I think that we can't just lump it into one category, because there are also, of course, as you know, like Howard Storm's NDE was terrible. Yeah, we just did a whole show. Yeah. I mean, when you say you don't come to any conclusions, certainly great, you know, you hold to that. But your book is more revealing, I think, than just about any other book I've read in this field. And in terms of delivering the goods, you do it over and over again. The one thing that I'm left with from the book is that it forces a complete paradigm shift in terms of burden of proof. The burden of proof, if we accept your book at all, and there's no reason not to, it shifts on everything. We can no longer talk about whether there is ET. That's answered. If anyone doesn't believe that, the burden of proof is on them. We can't ask whether or not they're traveling in these unbelievable tech crafts from other places far away. That's answered in your book. The burden of proof now shifts to someone else. And I'm not saying you're making these claims. I'm just saying if someone just follows your stories, they do. And I guess I'm asking similarly to the question of the data that comes back. And it is relevant to your book because it's James. It's James, your experiencer who has been traumatized by the experience and whose life is not made better because of it. I mean, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But he is very invested in stopping ET contact or having the ability to control ET contact. And I just take it back. That's my read of the data. That's my pushback on my friend Ray Hernandez. I say, just take your survey data of contact experiences. And you have 10 to 15% that have my lab. Military abduction or military presence is part of the abduction. Go read the NDE literature. Go read Dr. Jeff Long, 3,000 accounts. Tell me how many my lab accounts you found in there. Zero. You find none. We have to start mapping those extended realms. And I'm frustrated with the multiple contact modality thing that says, oh, it's all one. I'm frustrated with Jacques Filet, who I love and has been on the show and talk about a pioneer who's just completely, you know, all the respect in the world. But this whole idea of absurdity, well, he's got it all wrong that, you know, all this stuff is absurd. We are from a position of absurdity. Once we realize that there is this extended consciousness, we occupy a very small bit of it that's been, as my friend Gordon White says, has been smeared into a 25% time space reality and all the rest of it is out there. Well, everything is going to look absurd because we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. But if we are going to look and we are going to follow the data, we got this major divide here between what people are reporting as God and what people are reporting as ET. And I'm okay if they're the same, but I'm not convinced. Yeah. So there's a point in the book where we're coming back from the site in the very beginning with James and Tyler. And James is kind of thinking about it. And he's telling me about, you know, his research. And by the way, part of the reason I prayed that night was because James actually showed me a presentation he had done about his research and it terrified. I mean, I couldn't sleep that night. I had terrible dreams in nightmares. And so he said, you know, Diana, he said, if we were doing this research 100 years ago, we would call these angels and demons. And I thought, yeah, that would be the framework for sure. Because a lot of them are pretty nasty and they do nasty things. Now, do they do that on purpose? I don't know. And so, you know, the experiences are nasty for a lot of people. And I think that a lot of people won't accept that. And, you know, in religious studies, we get this all the time. In fact, I tell my students, there's a time when I'm going to have my blood drawn, you know, it's my annual physical and the nurse and she says, oh, what do you do? And I say, I study religion. And she goes, do you know what I think about religion? And I say, no. And she said, I think that it's all about love. And, of course, I'm thinking in my head, no, you know, it's not all about love. Have you actually read the books? There's lots of killing of children. And, you know, and so he's just about to stick me with the needle to get the blood. So I just look at her and I say, yep, it's all about love. I mean, you know, what can you can't argue? You know, these are people who want it to be all about love, but it's not. They want it to be all about like cultural evolution and, you know, us all getting along and stuff like that. But it's a lot more complicated than that. And I get into the complication of it in the last chapter with sister Maria Vagrada of Spain. And she's a 16th century nun who's she bilocates, which means she can be in two places at once. Like this is the belief that she was she believed she was bilocating from her cell in Spain to New Mexico, strangely. And I've known about her, but I had not I was there to read some of her manuscripts. And her first book, by the way, was a cosmography, which is a kind of scientific analysis of the earth from space. So she's traveling in space and she sees the earth spinning. And so she goes to New Mexico. And she's supposed to evangelize the I forgot who mono Indian tribe, I think I can't remember the exact tribe. But I mean, there are like monuments out to her back if you go to New Mexico to these places. And so I think to myself, wow, what a really weird coincidence. In fact, I call it a synchronicity. And so I start to think about her with respect to Tyler. And I start to think to myself, you know what, that was a pretty horrific thing that happened to her because she did not want any of her experiences to be put into the political ends of the Catholic Church in Spain to colonize the indigenous population. But that's exactly how they used it. And I was thinking, you know, what if they do the same thing to Tyler? What if they're using him in this way? And I wrote a big part of the section that was edited out completely. And probably I wasn't able to convey it correctly or eloquently. And that's why it was edited out. But a few people have asked me about it, not very many. But I think that, you know, some people have said, well, if you would believe in ET, do you want them to come and be here? And I'm thinking no, because it doesn't, you know, like Stephen Hawking said, why would we be advertising? Hey, you know, advanced civilization, come get our stuff, come colonize us. You know, I mean, not a good idea. So if they're here already, of course, as how are they, how are they not here? Well, I mean, I mean, this is back to the ancient alien things. I don't know how we put together a story that doesn't have them here for a long, long time in our past. I don't know how we really put together a story that doesn't have them working with us as part of a genetic engineering kind of program. I mean, again, this is where I think American Cosmic takes us. Because all this stuff becomes not just on the table, but the burden of proof I think shifts. You know, it's like, I always remember Richard Dublin wrote an excellent book years ago at this point called After Disclosure. Well, they've already begun the disclosure, the drip drip disclosure, you know, December 2017, the New York Times, CBS News, Fox News, you can't get more disclosed than that. And they're still running the reruns on history TV. They're disclosing and no one's asking any questions. So I think your book brings us to a new level. American Cosmic answers those questions. But I think it shifts the thing of, well, of course, they've been here forever. How else do you explain how the pyramids are lined up with the stars and that all the ancient tribes say they came from the sky? I mean, all that becomes accepted until it's falsified, in my opinion. I mean, there's two really different interesting ways to take that. One is that we're being led in the way that, you know, Ray Hernandez is walking down the stairs and he's told to go back upstairs and go to sleep. And the other way that we're being led is that God is leading us in some way. And I really wanted to return to that because I'm not a religious person, you know, and I don't know how far you want to go down this path. But to me, I'm talking in shorthand here, I go, do ETs have NDEs? And I'm really, really talking in shorthand because I feel like I can do it with you. And the point is that these near death experiences that we're talking to are of a different ilk. We don't know how or we don't know why I'm not saying that. But I'm saying if you do the content analysis on them, one, these people are meeting God consistently. Again, Dr. Jeffrey Long, who's compiled at largest database of it, his last book, a New York Times bestseller, he says, Hey, I'm sorry to report this, folks. And it's way underreported by NDEs scientists. But overwhelmingly, these people say they're meeting God and they're not meeting a Christian God or a Buddhist God, but they're meeting something that they call God. And he says, this seems important. This is more often reported than the tunnel is reported yet all we hear about is a tunnel. We don't hear about God. And again, like I said, with the thing with Ray Hernandez, there's no my lab. And you mentioned Howard Storm and the hellish NDEs, look into the hellish NDEs. They're always this kind of two sided, you're judging yourself, you're the one keeping yourself in hell. God is always there. God is always, you know, follow the light. Folks, I'm not a religious person. I don't have a religious agenda. I'm just following the data. And when I look at the data on the other side of ET, isn't that clean? Yes, people are having spiritually transformative experiences and raised dog is healed. But at the same times, like your buddy James, they're saying, No, this is traumatic. And other people saying that the reptilian alien raped me. Again, there's no stories like that in the ND literature. I'm pushing for some precision here, some more granularity, some drive to understand these extended consciousness realms. And I want to put the brakes on the multiple contact modality thing, like, Oh, it's all seems to be the same. Whether you access it through spirits and demons, or you access it through ET and DMT or ND, they all seem to be going to the same place. Maybe yes, maybe no. What do you think? So gosh, I mean, you know, I'm wearing actually my this is my stranger things t-shirt. And I don't know if you've seen that show. It's really great. They have the upside down, right? So are these people all going to the upside down? I mean, that's kind of like the question, right? And I don't, I don't know. I don't think so. This is why I call James master of the multiverse, right? What if there are multiverses? And then of course, you have, you know, people like Rizwan Burke, who are writing about the simulated realities, you know, which is kind of like a multiverse thing too. So I mean, there could be a simulation of what I always say simulation of what are of our hokey tech that we have here are a sim city. I mean, I the similar. No, no, that's okay. I mean, it is a multiverse type of model. And so I guess my question is that, well, okay, remote viewers, when they go, they report something similar to the when I'm just going to call it the upside down, you know, they report something similar to the upside down too. And you know, they go out and they feel like they go and they're able to get this non local information and bring it back and say what they saw. And then NDE people, you know, they go out and they also see stuff, you know, the original book was it what's his name, Richard Moody. Yeah, I mean, I read that when I can't I think I was 11 when I read that or 12. And that blew me away. I was like, really? This happens. You know, this guy went out and he actually saw stuff that was out there that he could corroborate. So again, that's the same kind of thing as the remote viewing, you know, you're seeing things that you shouldn't see and you're corroborating them into our reality, which by the way, there's a really excellent book by Leslie Silco called ceremony, which basically is the same thing. It's about a Vietnam vet who comes back and he has PTSD. And he's trying to get the ceremony of his tribe. He's a Native American. He's trying to get this, I think was he Lakota? But anyway, he's trying to get the ceremony. It doesn't work for him. So he has to go to a new ceremony, basically, that's going to heal him. And the new ceremony basically shows that the vision that he has is actually corroborated on the outside world. And that heals him. Now, what does that mean? You know, there's something pretty profound about that. And so, you know, we've got a lot of that going on here. And by the way, that's that's part of the reason I wrote the book and the style that I wrote it in was because I had all this data. And I said, I can't write this data in the traditional way of an academic book. I just can't do it. So I went to a couple different presses, and they wanted me to change it. They said, you can't write it like this. And I thought, well, I can't write it like that either. So my wonderful editor at Oxford, she said, Diana, write it in any way that you think the data will come out. And so I did. And she helped me, you know, she edited it. So it was cleaned up. And I think that that story, which by the way, another Aussie Oostwalt, who is a professor of religion at Appalachian State University, he basically said, this is the hero's journey. And I thought, wow, it is. And I hadn't occurred to me. And then somebody got in contact with me, and I wish I knew his name. And he basically said, do you think that information at a very symbolic and unconscious level is passed on through us through the hero's journey? Because look at Star Wars, you know, Star Wars like has changed our language even. And, you know, we have idioms from Star Wars that people all over the world. And there's also, you know, I write about it in my book, there's this idea that Star Wars is real, right? I mean, it's really this very interesting kind of thing where the stories we write become the reality we live. I do want to emphasize that last point, because people, another reason you have to read this book, it's beautifully written. And it just brings you along these stories. You actually cover this point. And it's pretty remarkable in the way that you do it is that you are now living an ex files reality. And you call into question, whether or not you would have lived that reality if ex files was never created, which is kind of an interesting thought. The one last thing I did want to talk about is how can people find this book? It's on Amazon, you can get for Kindle, very reasonable price, you can even get a hard copy at a very, very reasonable price, and they were sold out for the longest time. So people need to take advantage of that. So tell us about where they can get the book and also what projects you're working on, which we haven't even touched on all the tech stuff and where AI might be taking us and how all that fits in. So there's so much more to talk about. But I'd love for you to tell us how people can connect with you. Sure. So I do have a website called American Cosmic.com. And what I try to do there, I'm trying to keep it up, but I've been so busy once the book came out that I haven't been able to update it. But I'm updating it with a lot of different things, like some producers are interested in doing some type of TV series around it. And so we're kind of talking about doing that. I have another book that I'm considering doing, which is called The Language of Angels, where I talk about how synchronicity fits into this all. And it's kind of like the engine of religious belief and religion and spiritualities and even New Age spiritualities. I also have an ongoing project with the Vatican about the kind of going back into the Vatican and looking at some of those sources of quote-unquote angel encounters and actually doing the analyses of them from their language, kind of doing a literal analysis and then a contextual analysis side by side. So I've got like a bunch of different projects that I'm doing. So I'm fairly busy doing all of that. And I do want to update my American Cosmic website because people keep going there. And it's been the same for a long time. And I want to bring the information because a lot of things have happened. And the last thing I wanted to say was you could get it on the Oxford University Press website. You could get it at Barnes & Noble. You could get it at Amazon. And there's an audio version, but that's not me speaking. And I am going to do an audio first chapter and some of my friends are going to help me put it up on their site. And if you want to put it up on yours, you can too. So I'm going to do that too because I think that I want to say some things in that audio version. It's just not going to be an audio version, but it's going to be me also saying a couple of things about it and what's happened since then. So that's where I'm at right now. And I have to admit, I'm also recovering from doing that book. We certainly do hope there's more coming. It's absolutely, again, a whole different world that you're opening up to us. And we want to know more about it. So thank you so much, Diana, for joining me today on Skeptico. And I certainly encourage everyone to check out your amazing book, American Cosmic. Thanks so much, Alex. I had a great time talking with you. So thanks for watching this video, but there's more videos out there as well. But please check out the Skeptico website. You can see it here. We cover a lot of different stuff you might be interested in relating to controversial science and spirituality. A lot of shows up there. Over 350 of them are so all free, all available for download. So do check it out.