Gods, Ghosts & UFOs

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

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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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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

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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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

This week, we’re making fun of people who are smarter than us about simulation theory, and grousing about the art of summoning dollars from dread. Also, when it comes to a mysterious pulsing star, we’re reminded that when you can’t rule anything out, that includes aliens.

Here’s the beats:

* A better breakdown of why we’re on Substack (hint: it makes it easier to email us)

* A listener story about a miracle healing

* The real ones are anti-cringe

* Tom’s essay on the Gospel of Thomas is our first official GGU library entry

* A NASA scientist spent 1,500 hours investigating unexplained pulses from a distant star (and still has no idea what it is)

* Melvin Vopson thinks gravity itself might suggest we're living in a simulation

* Is this just ancient mysticism dressed up in modern physics language?

* Jordan argues simulation theory is not only unfalsifiable, it’s used to dehumanize people as "NPCs"

* How we keep explaining the universe through our latest technology

* An infamous haunted doll sells tickets

* Unsettling antique store encounters with genuinely unsettling items

* How selling fear undermines authentic spiritual connection

* A listener review

For best results, hit us up at godsghostsufos.com

***

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

From medical miracles to psychic powers and the enigma of consciousness, here’s what’s up this week:

* The story of Jacqueline Duffin, an atheist hematologist who helped confirm a miracle for a Catholic saint’s canonization

* What it takes for the Catholic Church to call something a miracle — think serious disease, failed treatments, and an inexplicable recovery (that lasts at least 10 years)

* Miracles as mysteries — stuff that happens according to laws and forces we don’t yet understand

* A study from the Allen Institute pitting two theories of consciousness—Integrative Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT)—against each other in an adversarial collaboration. Spoiler: Both are kinda right, kinda wrong, and consciousness is still a giant mystery.

* How “adversarial collaboration” forces competing theories to design experiments together and reduce cognitive biases. Yay science!

* A 2024 study in Cortex suggests the frontal lobe might be block psychic abilities. More evidence that the brain is a filter for reality

* How psi phenomena might peak when brain activity dips, like during near-death experiences

* Some research about earthworms and finches showing precognitive behavior

* Channeling The Telepathy Tapes, Mal connects the dots between the Cortex study and research on autism. Does atypical frontal lobe development naturally boost psychic sensitivity?

* The slow thaw of academic stigma around studying the woo

* In a slimy tangent, Tom looks up the four bodily humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Jordan’s Team Blood, Tom’s Team Yellow Bile, and Mal’s undecided.

* Oh hey, have you guys heard of YouTube?

Last time we begged…

And some people left comments, and it made us feel so fuzzy we thought we might die of coziness.

This time, here are some Q’s we legit want A’s to:

* Have you (or someone you know) ever experienced an actual miracle? If so, say more, fam.

* Is orthodoxy always bad?

* If there was a way to zap your frontal cortex offline, would you do it?

* What do you hope lab-coat wearing science nerds study next, now that the stigma is finally sloughing off the world of woo?

* Lastly, most importantly, Team Blood or Team Bile? (Make the right choice.)

And as always, if you’ve got a story of any kind, any kind at all, lay it on us at godsghostsufos.com

***

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

First off, a big welcome to everyone who found us through Kelly Chase and her truly excellent Cosmosis Podcast.

This week, we’re going to talk about what to do when your chatbot thinks you’re Jesus, then celebrate the recent neuroscience of lucid dreaming, and finally take some time to make fun of a new mathematical model of dark energy we don’t really understand at all.

Episode Highlights:

* A Reddit thread and Rolling Stone investigation reveals people severing ties with family members and dropping careers based on AI-generated "spiritual fantasies"

* Is AI designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities? Are tech companies creating "personalization loops" that transform our egos into addictive dopamine hits? Obviously yes.

* Mal saves us from our doomerism by pointing out the bell curve of engagement - not everyone will fall victim to AI's dark side, and this crisis could push us to better define our humanity

* Some neat new research on lucid dreaming that reveals it's a distinct state of consciousness with its own unique neural signature

* Are dreams allergic to ego?

* Mal shares insights from keeping a dream journal and how she discovered patterns in her dreams that correspond to her stress levels

* Tom shares his experience of being visited by dead loved ones in dreams, knowing "it was that person and not some product of a closed system"

* CS Lewis's metaphor of science as the gaze of the basilisk - "everything it looks at dies" - and how isolation is literally fatal. (Here’s a link to that quote from Basilisk by Paul Kingsnorth.)

* Is there a meaningful difference between the study of dark energy and Harry Potter fanfiction?

* Tom closes with the perfect dark energy dad joke.

Talk to us! Please! We’re so lonely!

Your hopes, your fears, your anti-materialist screeds…we want to hear it all.

As Jordan says, "We need something else to talk about other than the freaking headlines."

Find us at godsghostsufos.com

***

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

After recording without Mal last week (which she graciously calls her "favorite episode yet"), we’re pleased as peaches all three of us could be back together to run through a bunch of headlines that promised more than they delivered.

Oh, except for the giant squid. That thing was awesome.

Episode Highlights:

* Tom declines to share details about his past life (and promises to tell us off-air, which he did by the way — in case you needed a little envy on your way in)

* A clickbait article called "Is This The Tomb of Jesus?" about….some pollen

* So we take a detour into the history of Jesus's purported burial sites worldwide, including claims in Japan where locals believe Jesus fled across Siberia, became a rice farmer, and died at age 106. No, we’re not making this up.

* The first-ever footage of a living colossal squid, captured 600 meters beneath the sea by a research vessel — actually as cool as it sounds

* We know nothing about our oceans

* Mal worries we’ll get bored by all the fantastic discoveries. Jordan suggests that “boredom is a choice”

* A comically underwhelming story about "strange writing in the desert"

* This inspired a conversation about pareidolia — our tendency to see meaningful patterns (like faces) in random stimuli

* Has the balance shifted in the West? Are the materialists now in a shrinking minority?

* How to face difficult times with spiritual centering

* Developing "cosmic trust" even when life feels like being a fish "ripped out of the water, tagged, and thrown back in" (a metaphor courtesy of Kelly Chase, friend of the show)

* Tarot's Tower card: sometimes structures must fall to make way for something better

For best results, join us on Substack!

***

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

Today it's just Tom and Jordan, bromancing their way along a philosophical journey through reincarnation, the nature of consciousness, and what life might lie beyond this mortal coil.

Normally, we like to cover some headlines, but with Mal unable to join us this week, and considering the pretty big personal headline for Jordan (another baby!), we decided to forgo the typical format, and instead spend some quality time on the eternal questions of existence, rebirth, and unconditional love.

Episode Highlights:

* The birth of Jordan’s third kid — Sylas — nine days old at the time of this recording

* Tom suggest's a discussion on “the transmigration of souls"

* Jordan’s confidence in the "cosmopolitan nature of life" that awaits us beyond our physical experience

* Tom is convinced reincarnation is real, referencing research from a Virginia professor who documented compelling cases of children with detailed memories of past lives

* The story of Tom's daughter Evelyn making a Buddhist-like hand gesture as an infant

* Tom believes he knows who he was in a previous life and plans to visit England to "reconnect" with this past identity

* Jordan explores whether memories of past lives might actually be a form of telepathic connection to the Akashic record rather than literal reincarnation

* By the way, what even is the Akashic record?

* The world is a school

* Overlap between Christianity and Buddhism, with a reference to CS Lewis's dimensional metaphor in "Mere Christianity"

* How having a baby reminds us that we are all God's babies

* Unconditional love is the birthright of every human being. It cannot be lost.

We’ll be back next week with the whole team, and no more baby talk. (Well, less anyway.)

In the meantime, if you haven't yet, come talk to us at godsghostsufos.com

***

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