Gods, Ghosts & UFOs

By SpectreVision RadioSociety & Culture Philosophy

Gods, Ghosts & UFOs episodes

October 15Fact, Fiction, and Fairies with Josh Cutchin
Joshua Cutchin has spent more than a decade exploring the wide territory of the paranormal — fairy food, brimstone smells, Bigfoot, the dead.…
What do most people think isn’t real, but he does?
The line between fact and fiction is very, very blurry.
For example: stigmata. Christ would have been nailed to the cross through the wrists, but stigmatists bleed from the palms, which is where the wounds are in most paintings. Or fairies, who for centuries were human-sized and wingless, until broadly distributed storybooks gave them wings. Now, when people see fairies, they see wings.
So, uh, what’s going on here?
You might have to just decide for yourself.
Josh’s extensive bibliography

Creative pressure builds like a boil

Is writing a paranormal experience?

Academic vs fiction vs casual nonfiction

The thing Josh believes that most people don’t

Nobody is rational

Archetypes, egregores, tulpas

Ghosts slam doors, but you can’t grab one

Stigmata

Fairies

Reality is squishy

“It’s all consciousness” is a boring reduction (so is: it’s all ones and zeros)

The third space of meaning

Josh thinks space is boring, but Jordan is still obsessed

Out-of-bounds video game maps

Escapism vs. awe

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Scrolling TikTok

Jesus vs. Christ: “the source code of the universe” became flesh

Jeffrey Kripal and the human as two

The yugas

Climbing mountains and Mormon temples

Religion as the ultimate fake-it-till-you-make-it

What’s wrong with the Ark Encounter?

Jung’s Red Book: the problem is how we treat fairy tales

Faith playing footsie with materialism

Load-bearing truth claims

Virtue for its own sake

“Above my pay grade”

Discernment
And in the epilogue…
Ghosts aren’t dead people

Escapism vs awe

Egomaxxing
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1 hr
October 08Tom Maxwell and the Night Parade
Tom returns! Mostly to tell us about his new show (the one he left us for), which tbf is straight fire.
Then, honestly it’s just the three of us hanging out for like an hour, just in case you’ve been hankering for some unstructured conversation between the three of us.
What do most people not think is real, but Tom does?

Raised by Depression babies

The Night Parade on SpectreVision Radio — where extra meets ordinary

(Not Festivities in the After Hours)

The goat man and the spirit of coffee

Joseph Campbell × James Burke’s Connections

GGU calved

Aggregate experiencer data

Creative process talk

Diabolical Lies

Shelved with Emrys

“Where is my love for this?”

Mal’s elephants

Anyone who tells you you’re insufficient is out of their mind

Resistance commensurate with change

This from Autumn Christian

Unlimiting other people

Why Lady Gaga tried to be the weirdest person in the room

Jung: the unreconciled becomes fate

“If you want to know how someone feels inside, hang out with them and see how you feel afterward”

Insane people calling Mal ugly

Systems that teach you not to trust your gut

Sovereignty

“Your feelings are real, but not necessarily true”

The physiological reality of feelings, and how they start (and end) in the body

Somatic healing

Self occupies form

Charles Fort and the procession of the damned

The Hyakki Yagyō

James Baldwin

“If you take the time to look at something, it will reveal itself”

Diversity as epistemology

The 1841 Tennessee rain of flesh

Odysseus and the shade of Achilles

You are the arbiter of meaning

Meaninglessness and boredom

Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Asking to be entertained is the least agentic thing a person can do

Daniel Noah and rocks

Blake, Auguries of Innocence
And in the epilogue…(which was actually a prologue)
Does your God agree with your politics?

Potty-training your inner critic

Are you a zero-to-one guy, or a 2 to 10 guy?
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1 hr 2 min
October 01Daniel Noah on the memory of rocks
Daniel Noah co-founded SpectreVision with Elijah Wood, and then spun up SpectreVision Radio Network.
Also, he thinks rocks are alive.
This episode is full of wonderful stories.
Rocks are alive! But what does that mean?

Jordan’s first Hare Krishna chant, and meditating on a polished moonstone

Nothing gets simpler the closer you look

Empaths, clairsentience, and emotional wallpaper

Elder Joshua Tree boulders

A stone triangle revealed by moonlight

His wife felt it. So did Ryan Singer of Late Night on the Astral Plane

The Tongva: a creation myth about harmony, and elders who pass into rock

The Doors lived in Daniel’s house

The Doors of Perception and Death by Astonishment

Why did so many musicians move to Laurel Canyon at once?

The boy who collects rocks on The Telepathy Tapes

Autistic kids don’t feel less

Daniel shows us some rocks

Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor

Stone tape theory (and the 1972 BBC film The Stone Tape)

“Pseudo” science

Mystical traditions are soul technology (thanks Kelly Chase)

“Unintelligible intellectually but fully resonant emotionally”

Animism

Negotiating with the spirits of a haunted house

Things vanish, some of them reappear

The trickster gives you enough to keep you guessing, but never enough to convince a skeptic

Robin Lassiter’s Earth: A Love Story and the synchronicity addiction

We are attractors

Hellier and Operation Trojan Horse

Book encounters

Daniel’s books are pulling themselves off the shelves

Attention as magnetism

Alters

One-downing

Jordan’s experience at Old North Bridge 20 years ago

Attention must be trained

Meditation before “cosmic encounters”

High Strangeness
And in the epilogue…
Daniel’s stories of contact with NHI

What are “aliens”?

Deceit and biological envy
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48 min
September 25Can consciousness exist without a body?
We discuss a recent claim by a prominent scientist that consciousness can't exist outside a flesh-and-blood body, whether uploading your mind would capture you or just a copy of your cognition, why we understand death about as well as we understand sleep (barely), and whether the first person to live to 500 would be lucky or cursed.
Jordan makes the case that immortality might be monstrous. Mal says death is the salt of life.
A scientist claims consciousness can’t exist outside a body

“You are more than your body” — but you are also your body

“How the hell do you know what happens when you die?”

Prize goes to the first person to die, turn to mulch, then come back and tell us what happened

The pharmacy of the body

The kids in The Telepathy Tapes

Energy bodies, astral bodies, and the limits of Western materialism (round and round we go)

If we don’t understand sleep, how do we understand death?

Uploading cognition vs awareness

Every human project is an immortality project

BJ Miller on why we treat the disabled as angels or monsters

Dracula is a class narrative

People have been saying the first person to live to 500 has already been born

Immortality is monstrous because death is what makes us human

Adam Miller on the unexpected spiritual consequence of “transhumanist” longevity

Oliver Burkeman on the freedom of limits

What the body knows, and the risks of resisting resistance

Mormon stuff
And in the epilogue…
How to protect the part of yourself that creates

Rebecca Black (yep)

Not the Bible (oops)
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55 min
September 21Is certainty a type of psychosis?
This week we’re joined by a bonafide listener! Elliott Chadwick emailed us a story about a young man on anti-psychotic meds who turned out not to be psychotic. We had to know more, so we invited him on the show.
Mal also tells us about her brother, and the strange and beautiful world he inhabits, and we talk about how to tell the difference between numinous experiences and psychotic episodes.
It’s a doozy.
Elliott is a psychiatric nurse practitioner turned bodyworker, and co-host of The Glimmerance — a show about creativity and spirituality against the materialist overculture

What do most people think isn’t real, but Elliott does? “Not all hallucinations are psychiatric symptoms”

Nearly an atheist a few years ago

The dark figure in the young man’s room

“Have you ever tried to ask this guy to go away?”

What antipsychotics meds do to a brain that isn’t psychotic

Trauma, fight-or-flight, and the brain filling in the corners

“Magical thinking”

What’s the difference between people like Robin Lassiter and Kelly Chase and psych patients?

Mal’s brother, and the mind he calls “Chuck” (Charles Bonnet syndrome)

“Sometimes I swear he’s connected to something beautiful”

“Certainty is a kind of psychosis”

Too much certainty about death, poverty, or God is delusion

Maturity is the capacity to hold two opposing truths at once

An arsonist who believed he owned the building

Thin places

A case against absolutism

“dead with daddy” (from Taylor Tomlinson’s Netflix special)
And in the epilogue…
Drugs

Anti-materialism conversion story

A story about telepathy between his grandparents
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46 min
September 14Mike Clelland on Owls and Death
Mike Clelland is the owl guy. For fifteen years, people have been sending him their stories — owls and UFOs, owls and meditation, owls and mushrooms, owls and shamanic initiation. “That’s my research,” he says. “I get up and open my email inbox.”
And now he’s writing a book about owls and death.
We had Mike on the show over a year ago, and this is his long overdue return to Gods, Ghosts & UFOs.
Mike’s novel The Unseen

How mythic, archetypal symbolism wells up in the world

Death by Astonishment by Andrew Gallimore — how the brain builds worlds out of noisy sensory data

“All points in time and space are connected”

Thank God for filters

The five owl symbolic relationships: UFOs, meditation, psychedelics, shamanic initiation, death

The owl isn’t connected to UFOs, it is a totem of transformation

“I took a truckload of mushrooms and saw a 30-foot glowing owl in my bedroom.”

Mike’s story about his mom, Alzheimer’s, and a black-footed ferret

“I know there’s an afterlife, and I know because of an owl”

Sometimes an owl is just an owl

What makes a sign a sign?

A stranger’s prayer

Mechanisms vs. magic

Mallory’s owl story (which happened very soon after our first episode with Mike)

God speaks in a language you understand

Resist firmly defining the meaning of synchronicities

Awe pushes us toward bravery and hope

How Mallory got the fire back for writing

Owl biology

Can you invite mystical experiences?

More amazing stories

One owl, two completely different synchronistic experiences
And in the epilogue…
Mike’s new book (and a sequel to The Unseen)

Mallory’s screenplay

Jordan’s novel
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.

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48 min
September 07Do religious people actually believe in the unseen?
Kelly Chase (Inquiry with Kelly Chase) is back, which makes her the default president of the GGU returning-guests club. This week, we ask the question we’re asking everyone: what do most people think isn't real that you do?
She gives a spicy answer. She claims that most people behave like materialists, even if they go to church.
From there, we talk about what the evidences of belief actually are, and how it relates to “conversion.” Kelly explains how her own experience rewrote her whole value system in a matter of seconds five years ago.
As usual, we figured everything out and solved all the world’s problems.
You’re welcome!
Most people behave like materialists, even the religious ones

Religion as lava that cools into obsidian

The reemergence of the feminine

“Tell me what music is.”

“The greatest evidence it happened is me”

Great evidence for an individual, terrible evidence for the collective

The old version of Kelly is horrified, tied up in a back room somewhere

Molly Drake — “I remember firelight, and you remember smoke”

Conversion is what you do, not what you say

All behavior is downstream of belief

“I think my job is fake”

Is everyone waking up?

AI is literally sociopathic
And in the epilogue…
Kelly tells us about how she recently maybe saw fairies
(possibly our best paywall-bait yet)
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Email godsghostsufos[at]gmail.com

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51 min
September 04Scientism Is Anti-Science | Robert Frederick on Francis Bacon
Our guest today, Robert Frederick, studies Sir Francis Bacon — the Elizabethan lawyer, spy, and philosopher usually credited as the father of modern science. Robert claims that Bacon is the father of both modern science and scientism.
If you’re thinking, “What the hell is scientism?” then this is the episode for you.
We talk about why saying “trust the science” is motivated by the same thing that makes people say “trust in God,” and how Francis Bacon was both a once-in-a-generation polymath, and also a pompous idiot who stripped culture of metaphysics.
Jordan also contends that true religion and real science should be the same thing, but that they both get corrupted in basically the same way.
Guys it’s a good one. (Isn’t it always?)
Shout out to the God’s Eye View podcast

Science and scientism

Bacon vs. Aristotle

Deductive vs. Inductive reasoning

Scientism is anti-science

How Bacon got rid of metaphysics

Bacon might have been Gnostic (and what that means)

You can’t build a government out of data

Effective altruists are “a special kind of stupid”

We’re already post-scarcity

Yuval Noah Harari is the latest and greatest Bacon booster

We’re definitely coming back for a Part 2, in which Robert will explain how he knows Bacon was actually Shakespeare

Find Robert Frederick’s work at The Hidden Life is Best

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37 min
August 31Are soulmates real?
Mal asks: Is there such a thing as soulmates, or love at first sight? Are we doomed to magical thinking on the subject of love? The conversation turns toward revelation, relationships, and the perils of privilege.
“Hopeless” (the essay)

Love as both particle and wave

The point of marriage is to make divorce expensive

Cate Hall, “You Can Just Do Things” (again)

Logan Ury, “How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love” — loganury.com

“No matter what you choose, it will be wonderful and you will regret it”

Were you a victim of your soulmate?

“If you want to touch the stove that badly, maybe you’re supposed to”

The Book of Humans

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1 hr 7 min
August 26Richard Hatem thinks therapy is real
This week, the return of Richard Hatem, the screenwriter behind The Mothman Prophecies and host of Richard Hatem’s Paranormal Bookshelf.
In response to THE QUESTION (what’s something they said wasn’t real, etc), he gives us a couple of answers nobody expects from a guy who runs paranormal podcast: therapy. Oh, also, the wacky idea that you can make your dreams come true. From there we explore the typical human ping-pong between self-loathing and grandiosity, why so many great artists get better after they get sober, and Richard’s pretty slick grand unifying theory of paranormal activity.
The returning-guest club

Richard has never had a supernatural experience

Therapy is real (according to him)

Jordan is a “maximalist realist”

“You don’t need to take the conservative route in the career of your life”

The Magellan of his family

You Can Just Do Things by Cate Hall / Useful Fictions

Vascillating between self-loathing and grandiosity

Does sobriety kills your creative edge? (NO.)

Tom Waits and the Sex Pistols

Belief vs. faith :: Salieri vs Mozart

Richard’s theory of psychokinesis

The writers’ room is actually the same thing as a séance

Why writers can’t bill for hours

Richard Hatem on tour with a secret episode +

The Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, WV
And in the epilogue…
The root causes of Hollywood’s ongoing implosion (shop talk)

Why AI can’t replace storytellers

Streaming service endgame
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Email us: GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com

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43 min