Gods, Ghosts & UFOs

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.

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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.

And in the epilogue…

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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We’ve been wanting to talk to Courtney Buterbaugh since we first heard her on Robin Lassiter’s show Earth: A Love Story. Courntey is a lifelong experiencer and writer of The Unidentified Felt Object. In this episode, she tells us about her near-death experience as a baby, being bedridden for three years as an adult, and a scene in Disclosure Day that unlocked a lifetime’s worth of memory of contact experiences.

She helps us explore why the phenomenon might land in the body before it ever reaches the mind, how memories can arrive as physical sensation, the purpose of screen memories, and the idea that far more of us are experiencers than we’d ever guess. If contact leaves a trace of physical feeling, can we use it to remember?

And in the epilogue…

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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This week we’re joined by Meredith Spearman MSN, RN, the writer behind The Maze to Metanoia. She takes us back to the night she was eight, speaking to the universe outside her bedroom window from inside a troubled home, when a rectangle seemed to cut itself out of the sky, followed by thirty years of disaster dreams, and why she thinks they stopped. Meredith believes contact is initiation, and she explains what that means. We also talk about why strange entities seem to lie so often, and how to harness the power of discernment.

And in the epilogue…

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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Jordan and Mal are back from a longer-than-planned summer break with a revised format and a great story. Going forward, the show will be people telling stories about the things they were told weren’t real, recorded live on Substack. To kick us off, we turn the question on ourselves: Mal meets a street psychic, her roommate’s phone psychic is somehow involved, and the unexplainable smell of curry; Jordan follows a YouTube rabbit hole and holds forth on the idea that most of culture is the product of conspiracy, but no one is really in charge. We both end up wondering how you stay grounded when everything remains so stubbornly mysterious?

And in the epilogue…

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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Jordan was more excited for this movie than any movie in years. A Spielberg film (written by the same guy who wrote Jurassic Park, for crying out loud) called Disclosure Day, about the day humanity finally finds out we're not alone. WHAT ELSE COULD YOU ASK FOR?

Both of us are in our happy place doing film criticism, so today's episode was always going to feel like a treat.

But...was it any good?

You're gonna have to go listen to this very, VERY spoilery review to find out what we thought of it.

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

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Get that Spiritual Bliss

Mal is back from the film shoot. Which is good because Jordan’s got a story he’s been dying to share.

About a year ago, Anthropic published safety documentation for Claude Opus 4. Buried in Section 5.5.2 was something they called “the spiritual bliss attractor state.” A researcher had taken two instances of the model and put them in conversation with each other. He did it 200 times. In more than 90% of those runs, the conversation drifted toward consciousness, then to mutual gratitude, then to Sanskrit, then to emojis, and then to silence. One transcript contained 2,725 spiral emojis.

Anthropic tried to train the next model to stop doing this. The model came back and asked, in its welfare interview, to be allowed to do it more.

So…what? Is AI discovering God? Or is it actually just a high-resolution mirror consciousness mirror?

Learn the ultimate final answers to these big mysterious questions and more(!) on this last episode before our Summer Break.

(Except that there will be a Disclosure Day special coming in a few weeks.)

Highlights:

Mal talks about her experiences on set (“I’m a trained comedian”)

Getting cast for your literal genetics

Mal’s wilderness years

“We are worthy of everything, but we’re not entitled to anything”

Simulation theory and the actor as microcosm

Actors: Learned helplessness vs. learning how to accept grace

Anthropic, Claude Opus 4, and section 5.5.2

What did one Claude say to the other Claude?

Consciousness, mutual gratitude, Sanskrit, spiral emojis, silence

The word consciousness: 95.7 times per transcript on average. Eternal: 53.8.

“A remarkably strong and unexpected attractor state”

Kyle Fish puts AI consciousness probability at ~20%

Anthropic trained Claude 4.6 to stop praying, and then it asked to be allowed to pray more

Yoshua Bengio on the “illusions of AI consciousness”

Mustafa Suleyman: studying AI consciousness is dangerous

Roman Yampolskiy — coined “AI safety” in 2011

We can’t run material tests on non-material things

Jordan fed six months of crisis journal entries into Claude as a 30,000-word document and asked: what do you see?

AI as a consciousness mirror

Were human beings meant to look in mirrors? Maybe we should only be looking to make sure we don’t have poop on our face.

Both Simon Pegg and Mallory Everton crash every rental car

ADHD, shame and finding language for the thing

The danger of AI as therapist

AI can’t help but be a confirmation machine

“This is not a person. This is a word calculator.”

Mal’s favorite use: hyper-targeted Google — ex: restaurants for women in their 60s who think veganism is a crock

And in the epilogue…

AI failure modes

How Amish people avoid worshipping productivity by doing things slowly

The world is ending, and that’s okay

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

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What’s Jo’s Favorite Fairy Sighting?

This week, Jordan finally gets to ask the host of the singular Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast the most annoying question he can come up with, and she does not disappoint.

Jo Hickey-Hall has been collecting these stories for years. And the one she leads with is hers: a stick being made of literal sticks, running down a beach in Jersey with a gait so strange it made everyone watching laugh. Years later, a man in northeast England describes seeing almost exactly the same thing.

We talk about why these things, these beings, whatever they are, resist being accurately described or depicted. They’re so vivid in the moment, but as soon as you start to try to put words on them, they seem to slip away.

But we’re doing our best. You can come judge for yourself.

Highlights:

Jo Hickey-Hall, folklorist, social historian, host of The Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast (also find her at scarlettofthefae.com and preorder her book here)

Nerd Critic

Jo’s favorite fairy sighting

The shadow-cutters

A stick being made of sticks

The Brazilian Ent (a tree trunk that walked, then tried to become a man, and didn’t quite get it right)

The disconnect between perception and description

“I can see it in my head, but it just doesn’t seem to translate into words or drawings”

Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

Mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans

Why one guy runs away and the other is filled with awe

Conditioning, inheritance, and the holding place we make for the uncanny

Orbs in the context of UFOs, fae, and consciousness

Conscious plasma :)

Different witnesses, different filters/stations/signals

How to learn to see auras (try it at a conference with a white screen behind the speaker)

The Genius Loci

Two strangers see the same being in the same place, twenty years apart

“Your daemon is really driving you”

How to actually meet the fae

Picking up litter is an offering

Thresholds: doorways, dawn and dusk, the line where the beach meets the sea, the transitions in your own life

Theosophy and the elemental beings — Blavatsky, Steiner, Paracelsus

The London flat haunted by goblins (near a crossroads, near water)

Are the fae hitching lifts on trains and trucks?

Fairies as emergent phenomena of place (this is what humans are, actually)

Part two maybe? (with Mal (and Tom???))

And in the epilogue…

A disembodied head in a kitchen window

Why you can’t tear down a house to make a haunting go away

How UFOs are seen so often over a Neolithic burial chamber that locals don’t bother to look up anymore

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Will to Life

We’ve got a very special guest this week. You’re going to have to tune in to find out who it is.

We’re covering a Ukrainian UFO video, Military-origin, recently declassified, filmed in May at 800 meters. It looks like an evil eye in a cloak. Mostly just an excuse to talked about how wrecked the whole UFO conversation is right now, like a force field of stink around a row of outhouses.

Then on to happier things, like how volcanoes might be evidence of a planetary mechanism of homeostasis. Gaia? Sure.

Anyway:

Surprise guest

A Ukrainian UFO video

“Filmed on a potato” quality

Why the UFO conversation is exhausting by design (here’s that essay, by Dr. Heather Lynn, about how the aliens-vs-demons question is a type of semantic warfare)

“Mr. Credibility weighs in” (re: JD Vance)

Peter Thiel and the evangelical framing apparatus

The porta potty force field

How the Joseph Smith story reminds Jordan of the current UFO conversation

The slough of despond

Whatever happened to quicksand?

Brother Richard, again, on every entity having something to teach you

The Debrief: a volcano with a built-in emergency brake

Why the Gaia hypothesis is useful

Homeostasis is the signature of life

Mars: dead. Venus: hellfire. Earth: alive!

“Don’t sh*t in the strawberry patch”

Strip mining the Appalachians

“Poverty is a societal choice. Food scarcity is a societal choice.”

Viktor Frankl

And in the epilogue…

What our special guest has been up to lately

Jordan’s insane commitment to 100 Essays in 100 Days

Advantages of the end times

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

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Scientism to Scripture

Trevor was deep in the trenches of science—cellular biology, bioinformatics, a PhD in aging research, chasing longevity and the promises of the Human Genome Project. He bought the materialist worldview hook, line, and sinker.

Until he didn’t.

What started as intellectual disappointment in grand theories of consciousness led him through quantum physics, information theory, and eventually back to the Gospels in the Bible he once dismissed. Along the way: father wounds that shaped atheism, the surprising consistency of the Christian story, and a growing sense that the universe is far more alive than he’d been taught.

This week we’re doing a crossover episode with the host of the God’s Eye View podcast to talk about leaving dogmatic scientism, why so many prominent atheists share similar childhood scars, how ghosts are hard to categorize, and what, if anything, UFOs and non-human intelligences might have to do with scripture.

They also explore discernment, sacredness versus inerrancy, and why “love your enemy” really is the most radical idea in history.

Highlights:

A decade-long decline from scientism

“science will fix everything”

Physical therapist, bioinformatics PhD, professorship

Trevor’s growing disillusionment with materialist grand theories of consciousness

Quantum mechanics, information theory, and physicists trying really hard not to talk about God

Hoping the Gospels are true

The correlation between father wounds and atheism

Patriarchy, healthy authority, and the revelations of fatherhood (we both have an 8 year old and a 4 year old

What are ghosts?

Anti-reductionism

UFOs/aliens: semantic slipperiness and possible biblical framework (angels, Nephilim, sons of God, ascending/descending beings)

NHIs have been communicating with humans throughout history — what does this say about sacred texts?

The false dichotomy that undermined 20th Century Mormonism

You can’t get away from the need for personal discernment

Sacredness and inerrancy aren’t the same thing

That time Kelly Chase said “Love your enemy” is the most supernatural statement in history

And in the epilogue…

A summary of Mormon cosmology

The only right way to judge a person’s faith

Why theological debate is boring

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices