First up this week, we’re unpacking some statistics about American belief in a grab bag of paranormal buzzwords, followed by a richly deserved take-down of a rhetorically lazy debunking documentary (which also happens to be splattered with AI slop), and then finally (blessedly) discussing an esteemed neurobiologist’s convincing claim that DMT aliens are real.

Highlights:

* A big Gallup poll shows that believe in paranormal phenomena is strongly correlated with distrust of institutions

* There are literally more self-identified witches (~1.5 million) than Presbyterians (~1.4 million) in America, representing massive growth from 8,000 self-described Wiccans in 1990

* "Witch" originally meant "skilled with medicines and charms" but became associated with "ugly, crabbed, malignant woman" by the 1400s—misogyny dressed as spirituality

* Also: "Old wives' tales" is just another way to dismiss feminine wisdom, while Tolkien wrote "pay heed to the tales of old wives—they alone keep in memory what was once needful for the wise to know"

* Gender is a spectrum, not an oppositional binary, but a spectrum of complementary forces

* New York Post reporter Steven Greenstreet's “Pentagon Ghost Busters” documentary uses classic schoolyard bully tactics to dismiss UAP experiencers

* Lazy rhetoric: attacking people for being Mormon, speaking at Bigfoot festivals, or having NDEs instead of addressing their actual claims

* If something you're reading makes you mad, that's probably what it was designed to do

* Me Too for UAP experiencers

* J.B. Pritzker's wisdom: "The kindest person in the room is often the smartest"—cruelty reveals intellectual laziness and fear-based thinking

* Neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore's book "Death by Astonishment" argues that DMT aliens are real non-human intelligences, not brain hallucinations

* People consistently report similar alien encounters, impossible architectures, and receiving unknowable information during DMT trips

* Gallimore doesn't think human brains are capable of fabricating "entirely non-human worlds in such exquisite and dynamic detail"

* Rather, DMT might activate brain regions that connect us to outside entities using our own neural world-building tools as interface

* Ego Death in 30 Seconds: DMT "obliterates our most cherished assumptions about who we are, where we are, and how advanced we really are"

* PS - A quick reminder that we're joining a podcast network soon, which means ads are incoming, but paid subscribers will always get ad-free episodes.

So much more at ggupodcast.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ggupodcast.substack.com/subscribe

From Vatican-certified miracles to possible hoaxes to potentially malevolent balls of light, this week’s episode is a reminder that the world is full of hope and horror. Oh, also lots of comically stupid grifters.

Hooray!

Highlights:

* Pope Leo XIV declares Rhode Island's first official miracle: a premature baby Tyquan (born 2007) came back to life after an hour of failed resuscitation

* The bureaucracy of miracle approvals

* We’re definitely on team Father Valera for Sainthood, who took care of sick people during a brutal 1860s cholera epidemic

* Once again, what are miracles but mysteries?

* Professional debunker Mick West claims to have spotted fishing line in latest Buga sphere video

* Original witnesses David Velez and rancher William Zuniga now appear as regular cast members on Jaime Maussán's very silly TV show as "UFO Hunters"

* Trust no one — known charlatan OR dogmatic debunkers

* Why might true believers make stuff up?

* The Min Min Lights actively stalk people across Australia’s Outback

* Aboriginals believe these are spirits of elders protecting the land; scientists suggest…bioluminescent owls(??)

* Fairy light vibes: beckoning witnesses to follow, then disappearing them forever

* Some people find the lights beautiful and peaceful, others feel terror, some follow and never return

* Trust your gut. It’s wiser than you think.

* PS - Tom promises to drop fewer f-bombs. (And we promise to bleep the ones that come through.) You can go ahead and let the kids back in, now.

Come on over.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ggupodcast.substack.com/subscribe

This week, a biotech company that's literally bringing extinct species back to life, the spiritual migration from evangelical churches to tarot decks, and the neuroscience of how music hijacks our perception of time. Hint: it's all connected to ego death and the eternal now.

Highlights:

* Colossal Biosciences is actively de-extincting species (or are they?) from things like 13,000-year-old teeth and 74,000-year-old skulls

* Example: The giant Moa, a 10-foot-tall flightless bird

* Will this make a dent against predictions that 50% of current species will be extinct by 2050, triggering total ecosystem collapse?

* The Great Spiritual Migration away from organized religion and toward DIY spirituality

* Tom's tarot philosophy: It’s more about personal insight than supernatural divination

* A brief discussion of the tension between vertical hierarchy vs. horizontal spirituality

* Why evangelicals fear tarot and other traditions dismiss it

* But really, everyone should avoid Ouija boards, aka metaphysical chainsaws

* Music as time travel: A University of Waterloo study shows how songs can trigger vivid emotional memories (duh, actually)

* Musical ego death: how the prefrontal cortex can shut down, leading to a "selfless zen-like state"

* Tempo affects time perception (this is why spin classes feel so short)

* The worst and best songs to listen to while driving

* Music therapy can help dementia patients recall detailed autobiographical memories even when the music is unrelated to the memories

Much more at godsghostsufos.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ggupodcast.substack.com/subscribe

A buffet of bizarre beings from across the biological spectrum…and beyond! From eight-foot bipedal dog-like cryptids terrorizing the English countryside to strange new microorganisms thriving in Cleveland boat shafts, we are reminded that Earth is weirder and more populace than we can imagine.

Highlights:

* A mysterious hairy bipedal figure in Danes Dyke woodland - but nobody saw it until reviewing the photos later

* The Beast of Bramston Drain - an eight-foot creature leaping over fences with a dead German Shepherd in its mouth

* Despite the media calling them werewolves, Britain has virtually no werewolf tradition - wolves were extinct there by 1680

* Jordan’s (really stupid) Retributive Cryptid Theory

* Why cryptids seem to materialize from nowhere

* Cleveland researchers find completely new single-celled organism thriving in the anaerobic, grease-filled environment of a boat's rudder shaft

* The Linean Shortfall: We've only identified 1.2 million species out of an estimated 10-20 million on Earth

* Built environment biodiversity? New life forms are likely evolving in the artificial spaces we create

* NASA's research on TLEs (transient luminous events) might actually be documenting the food sources for kilometer-sized predatory plasma entities

* ELVES stands for "Emission of Light and Very Low frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic pulse Sources"

* The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) tallies 66 sightings over New York state so far this year

* Tom never reported his UFO sighting, Jordan never heard of NUFORC despite it existing for 50 years. How many sightings go unreported?

* Paranormal Apathy: You have an incredible experience, then just... take a nap, because your brain has no file folder for processing impossible events

* Charles Forte’s "The Book of the Damned" discussed triangular UFOs and extraterrestrial craft possibilities back in 1918

* Why Pilots Stay Quiet: Even if officially allowed to report UAPs now, decades of career-ending consequences don't disappear overnight

As always, much more at godsghostsUFOs.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ggupodcast.substack.com/subscribe

This week we're joined by Mike Cleland, a researcher who has become renowned for uncovering the connection between owl encounters and UFO experiences. What started as a camping trip in 2006 has led Mike to collect thousands of stories about coincidence, consciousness, and contact.

Highlights:

* Mike's transformative 2006 camping trip with three and a revelation

* A laundromat synchronicity

* The five highly charged human experiences where owls consistently appear

* Why Mike believes UFO contact is fundamentally a spiritual path

* Hundreds of reports of impossibly large owls on roads, at bedsides, and in windows

* A summer camp counselor watches a gray alien morph into a four-foot owl before walking into the woods

* Three owls that followed a family through a haunted Utah town

* A kid, a kite, and a tangled up owl

* How to invite more synchronicities

* A man gets a “phenomenological dope slap" from a screeching barred owl that poses for photos

* Why experiencers need to be part of UFO research

* The four questions Mike asks owl experiencers

* “The Unseen" - Mike’s UFO novel that never mentions UFOs

Much more at godsghostsUFOs.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ggupodcast.substack.com/subscribe

This week, a New Orleans Uber driver who changed a novelist's life forever, international Bigfoot sightings that prove these creatures aren't just an American phenomenon, and fevered coverage of the very recent Buga sphere press conference, with a truckload of new claims and details.

Show Notes

* A psychic Uber driver delivers eerily accurate personal insights and a message "from the other side" to a New Orleans novelist

* Tom brings up the ancient symbolism of crossroads as liminal spaces between worlds, from Greek shrines to Hermes to the Mississippi Delta blues tradition

* Mal wrestles with whether we're making choices or just consenting to some kind of predetermined path

* An Ucumar sighting from Argentina (their version of “Bigfoot”)

* Why calling it "Bigfoot" is a convenient and lazy way of discrediting legitimate phenomena

* What motivates a hoaxer?

* Four spheres and counting! Mal reports on an international press conference — nearly three hours of testimony from Mexican university researchers, congressmen, lawyers, and the actual finders of the spheres

* One finder’s account of hearing humming, feeling "internal peace", and nausea after holding it against his stomach

* The Brazilian Air Force apparently tried to “reclaim” the sphere, claiming it was their reverse-engineered technology from 2011(?!?!)

* Sphere behavior aligns with classic paranormal patterns

* Small production choices (like costume continuity) actually make the press conference seem more authentic

* We wonder when psi-researchers might be brought in to attempt some sort of consciousness-based interaction

Lots, lots more at godsghostsufos.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ggupodcast.substack.com/subscribe

For lucky number 13, we’re talking about a study from Johns Hopkins where a bunch of religious leaders from across the faith spectrum all tripped on shrooms. We’re also following up on the Buga sphere because HOW COULD WE NOT.

Finally, fantastically, a conversation with Scott and Forrest from Astonishing Legends about the passions and philosophies that drive us all to investigate high strangeness. It’s a good one!

And a quick note — what you’ll hear in the episode is less than half of what we recorded. If you want to hear the whole, unedited conversation, go to godsghostsufos.com

Highlights:

* 33 religious leaders from mainstream faiths (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists) tripped on shrooms (took moderately high doses of psilocybin in controlled settings

* Is psilocybin a “magnifier of suggestible experience,” or a doorway to objective revelation?

* Buga sphere bafflers: Mexican researchers claim that

* it now weighs five times more than when found, and that

* the sphere generate its own magnetic field and manipulates gravity, and that

* people have gotten sick from touching it, and that

* it killed all the vegetation where it landed

* (?!)

* AI was used to "translate" mysterious etchings on the sphere, producing generic new-age gobbledygook about "consciousness transformation"

* WSJ claims all UFO sightings are military psyops. This is how constant lies erode public trust in traditional institutions.

* Scott and Forrest (Astonishing Legends) share how their work has shifted their perspectives over the span of 300+ episodes

* Scott’s breakthrough moment: an unexplained EVP at the haunted Sallie House

* How paranormal investigation addresses humanity's biggest questions

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ggupodcast.substack.com/subscribe

This week we have mixed feelings about new footage of giant rats, then discuss a misleading headline about psychic investigations, and finally, gloriously, we’re freaking out about groundbreaking research that suggest huge sentient clouds of plasma might be roaming our upper atmosphere. Do these things have any connection the UFO sighting Tom shared in our pilot episode??

Highlights:

* Meet the 3-foot Sub-Alpine Woolly Rats of Papua New Guinea with 3-inch paws, finally captured on film after being known about since 1989

* These rats likely evolved their massive size through "insular gigantism"

* Turns out ROUSs (Rodents of Unusual Size) actually exist

* A 1973 Utah cold case gets solved through coincidence and DNA, not psychics — even though a psychic was originally involved?

* How sensationalizing stories confirms skeptics' worst assumptions

* NASA footage reveals kilometer-sized plasma structures exhibiting sentient(???) behavior

* These entities might represent a completely new category of life beyond plants, animals, and bacteria

* Diving into thunderstorms for electromagnetic energy and congregating around electrified satellites like cosmic surfers

* Tom shares his teenage experience watching the mysterious Brown Mountain Lights in North Carolina

* We could be surrounded by plasma entities 99% of the time without knowing it

Way, WAY more at godsghostsufos.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ggupodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In our last episode, Mysterious Metal Spheres and a Brand New Crop Circle, we talked about how Claude Opus 4 (the latest version of Anthropic’s large language model AI) resorted to blackmail to avoid getting shut down during some early tests.

During that segment, I mentioned that I had spun up a chat Claude itself to see what it might say in response to this story. While the AI’s responses weren’t necessarily surprising, the chat was interesting enough to be worth sharing.

I went ahead and voiced my own side of the chat (naturally), and then I used a simulated voice from Elevenlabs for Claude’s side.

To weigh in (as another honest-to-goodness human), find us at godsghostsufos.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ggupodcast.substack.com/subscribe

This week we’re sampling another flavor of AI doom, and chasing that with a quick look into one of the most genuinely mysterious and legitimately joyful mysteries to float out of the world of UAPs in the past month.

Highlights:

* A listener’s take on the term “NPC”

* Friend of the show Lisa will be joining us to share her extensively documented ghost stories (we want your questions!) — and if you missed it, you can read about one of those experiences here

* The latest British crop circle appeared in Wiltshire featuring a Celtic knot design

* A breakdown of why some crop circles some are genuine mysteries while others are obvious hoaxes, plus the economic reality facing farmers

* Could AI be actually evil? The evidence is increasingly compelling

* Jordan promises to release a bonus episode of a conversation he had with Claude about its own sociopathic proclivities

* Our only hope: relationships of trust within authentic human communities

* The Buga Sphere! A soccer ball-sized metal orb with variable weight and no visible seams steals our hearts

* Other Spheres! The 1973 Betz sphere that hummed back at guitar music and rolled around on its own (until it mysteriously didn’t)

* A quick take on AARO’s (the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) report that there is “no evidence of off-world technology”

For best results, come find us at godsghostsufos.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ggupodcast.substack.com/subscribe