Spectral Skull Session

How can you learn anything about external reality from an experience that takes place entirely inside your own head? Initially skeptical of psychonauts, Dane reviewed DMT user reports and found five characteristic properties that seem to be self-authenticating. DMT users say their experiences contain elements that are hyper-real, not like being intoxicated, wonderous, trigger synchronicities, and demonstrate interpersonal stability. Dane compares the inference from mystical DMT vision to the reality of the supernatural to the writings of the great French philosopher Renee Descartes. In doing so, he builds the case that we can make sense of why many people who use DMT change their spiritual and metaphysical beliefs in response to the events that take place under its influence. Whatever you may think of all this, there's no escaping from the larger cultural ramifications of a molecule that makes people take the supernatural seriously.

When Paul Bennewitz believed he had proof that alien spacecraft were buzzing

military bases in New Mexico, he went straight to the air force. Unfortunately, they sent him an agent of disinformation, officer Rick Doty. Bennewitz' life and career would be derailed as he became obsessed with a fake alien invasion, invented by Doty and the intelligence community to conceal their research programs and ferret out Soviet agents. This story from the 1980s raises questions about who we can trust in our search for answers about UFOs. At the end of the episode, Dane reports that mirage man, Rick Doty, is still active in the American UFO community. From working as a consultant for the X-files, to appearing in a recent Showtime documentary, Doty continues to sing variations on the same incredible theme of crashed saucers and UFO retrieval programs.

Has internet 2.0 been silently seized by the U.S. security services? Elon Musk thinks so. He and some independent journalists believe Twitter was once the iceberg tip of a massive conspiracy run by the American three-letter agencies - FBI and CIA as well as the Pentagon. According to Musk's 'Twitter Files' these government organizations co-opted and paramilitarized Twitter, transforming it from the town square of a virtual global village, into an unofficial wing of the U.S. national security establishment. The FBI calls the story a "conspiracy theory" whose sole purpose is to discredit 'the agency' but doesn't challenge the stated facts, only their interpretation. National Public Radio frames the Twitter Files as part of a debunked right-wing narrative about censorship, while Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt, describes the situation as an attack on the first amendment rights of his constituents. In contrast to these very partisan interpretations, Dane argues that the issues here go far beyond political bias and threaten the integrity of the United States as an open, democratic society, as well as the future of the American-owned internet as a meeting and marketplace for an interconnected and open global society.

Large numbers of people around the world share memories of events that never happened and things that never existed. Dane discusses this so-called "Mandela Effect" with an alleged CIA remote viewer, DJ Dooley. The interview focuses on Dooley's work unearthing shocking discrepancies surrounding whether the Fruit of the Loom logo ever featured a cornucopia. The company denies its logo ever had a cornucopia. Many Mandela Effect experiencers insist it once did. Dooley relates the discovery of bonafide records going back as far as 1973 that support the Mandela experiencers' position. This challenging session ends by exploring one of the more far-out theories about the Mandela Effect, including whether it was anticipated by the late Philip K. Dick.

Are UFOs passing through America's lakes and rivers on their way to hidden underwater bases? Dane interviews the author of “The Alien Colonization of Earth's Waterways A Reference Guide to UFO/USO Water-Related Activity” and founder of the Missouri MUFON Dive team, Debbie Ziegelmeyer. The conversation starts with what the MUFON Missouri Dive team is doing to advance civilian investigation of UFO activity. It branches out to some of the most intriguing water-related UFO sightings of modern times, from Shag Harbor, Nova Scotia, to Lake Baikal, Russia, to Clearwater and Piedmont, Missouri. Along the way, the interview touches on a little-known bible passage that seems to mention flying bread rolls, whether UFOs are actively camouflaging themselves as human aircraft, and how water sportsmen around the world can best prepare themselves for a water-related UFO sighting. At the end, Dane is thrilled to learn that a little-known river he personally frequents is believed to be an active UFO hotspot.

Was an advanced civilization 'reset' by a global flood 12,000 years ago? Professor of Anthropology at Kansas Univesity, John Hoopes, joins the show to critique the scientific credibility of Graham Hancock's claims to have found evidence that a pre-historic human civilization was destroyed at the end of the ice age. Hancock's work has exploded in familiarity recently after his multiple appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast and the debut of a Netflix docuseries showcasing his work, "Ancient Apocalypse," that aired November 11th. But was there really an ancient apocalypse that reset humanity back to the stone age 12,000 years ago? Dr. Hoopes argues that the evidence is slim. In his view, the very idea of humanity passing through cycles of birth, death, and rebirth belongs to an occult tradition that makes use of tools and methods that are inconsistent with good scientific practice. The conversation also touches on recent claims that the native Americans of ancient Ohio were struck by a cometary impact 2,000 years ago.

An interview with Missouri State Assistant director of MUFON, Margie Kay, about MUFON and the dramatic upswing in UFOs over the state of Missouri. Margie tells us that there has been a UFO flap taking place all over the state of Missouri since August, 2022. The conversation ranges from best practices for filming UFOs to some of the weirder aspects of recent Missouri UFO sightings, including encounters with 'birds' that reveal themselves to have machine-like properties. Dane raises the prospect of aliens disguising themselves as drones to evade detection and touches on the difficulty of distinguishing between submarines and river monsters in this informative interview. Why does Missouri have more UFO sightings and rank in the top ten states in the nation for UFOs? Margie suggests it may be that Missouri has more extraordinary activity.

Distrust and conspiratorial thinking has gone mainstream around the world. In Russia, prominent people are ranting about satanic conspiracies inside Ukraine. In the U.S., they can't even agree on what we should be afraid of. From Kanye West's dirty mouth to Putin's dirty bombs, the world's so-called elites are increasingly convinced that nefarious forces are plotting their demise. Dane counsels everyone to please take it down a notch before someone gets nuked.

Everyone knows Skinwalker Ranch is the most haunted place in America, but did you know the Pentagon spent millions investigating it and other paranormal hotspots from 2008 to 2010? The true story of a major military intelligence program to make sense of UFOs and orb attacks was detailed in the 2021 best-selling book "Skinwalkers at The Pentagon." Dane reviews this book

and its completely novel picture of certain UFO-like phenomena. Although the authors are focused on the technical details of their $20 million military intelligence program to investigate UFOs and weird phenomena, the phenomena they studied revealed itself to be more sinister than anything described in the works of John Keel or Jacques Vallee. Skinwalkers at The Pentagon describes investigators who were haunted by cancer-causing and immune-system destroying balls of light. These phenomena shook up the Pentagon brass so badly they labeled it 'demonic' and shut the research program down (although they may have done that no matter what the researchers found). While striving to be scientific and open-minded, the authors raise questions about whether their enthusiasm for creating a new science of the paranormal led them to throw caution to the wind at the expense of the health of nearly a half dozen government agents. Dane identifies the strengths and weaknesses of this challenging and important book in a critical book review.

A team of scientists in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev has published an article detailing their use of cameras to capture extremely high-altitude unidentified aerial phenomena. The researchers describe two different distinct kinds of craft, between ten and forty feet in diameter, moving close to orbital velocity in the exosphere about Ukraine. What is most astonishing, however, is the way in which these researchers were able to deduce the altitude of these mysterious objects. The researchers were able to infer the objects' altitude from their color. Dane explains how this works and validates that it is at least a theoretically valid process. The session ends with Dane's prediction that the Ukrainian conflict is turning into a re-enactment of World War I except with the addition of a lot of unnecessary fighting around a nuclear power plant.