All language subtitles for Beyond.UFOs.and.The.Unknown.S01E03.eng

[soft music]

[Hal Puthoff] Scientists
are beginning to realize

that there appears to be more
to this than we thought.

We have such excellent
sensor systems

that have been developed.

You've got the pilots' tracking,

the infrared radar system,
the detection of the events.

♪ ♪

[Jacques Vallée]
But what the military sees

with their devices is only
maybe 10% of the cases.

♪ ♪

What about
what Whitley Strieber saw?

[Whitley Strieber]
What I wanted to do

was to find out that there was
some explanation for this,

that was normal.

A rational,
rational explanation.

♪ ♪

Whatever it is,
it's part of being human

and part of our world
that, for whatever reason,

we are very reticent
to face head-on.

♪ ♪

[theme music plays]

♪ ♪

[birds chirping]

[tranquil music]

♪ ♪

[indistinct chatter]

[Jeffrey J. Kripal] Welcome,
everyone. Welcome to Rice.

My name is Jeff Kripal,
and this is

our Archives of the Impossible 2
Conference Symposium mash-up.

It's great to see you all here.
I know a lot of you.

So let me begin by saying
that we are doomed...

-[laughter]
-...in a good sort of way.

What I mean is
that there is no way,

no way at all we are going
to wrap our heads

around this thing.

What some have called
the phenomena

and what I wanna call
the impossible.

Jeff Kripal's really one
of the world's foremost thinkers

on weirdness and the paranormal.

His Archives of the Impossible
conference was one of the first

UFO conferences that I went to,

and it was transformative
for me.

[camera clicks]

I think that he's really
created a space for people

who have had
strange experiences

or who study kind
of the outer fringes

of human experience,
and so as soon as I walked

into Archives of the Impossible
I was like, "Oh, my gosh,

I found my people."

[Greg Eghighian]
Going first here,

I feel a little bit
like the opening band

-for a weekend music festival.
-[laughter]

You guys get the Beach Boys.

You're really here
to hear Janice Joplin,

Jimmy Hendrix.

And knowing a few of you,
probably the Grateful Dead,

but you got me.

We've definitely undergone
a kind of renaissance,

if you will, over the last
two to three years.

♪ ♪

Primarily because
the U.S. government

has shown a lot more interest
in this topic,

and that, I think,
has kept things alive

and kept people
really interested.

♪ ♪

The second part of this, though,

is that the academic world

has really stood up
and taken notice.

This is something
that we really haven't seen

on this scale before,
of mainstream academic science,

mainstream academic scholars,
saying, "This stuff needs to be

looked at
in university settings."

♪ ♪

Jeff Kripal
is one of the chief forces

within academia today
fostering this change.

♪ ♪

His academic credentials
are impeccable.

Jeff was formally the chair

of the Department of Religious
Studies at Rice.

Today, he's an associate dean.

And Jeff has opened up
a whole intellectual landscape

within academia which previously
was very, very limited.

♪ ♪

[Kripal] The first thing
I want to say or claim

is that the impossible
constitutes

the deepest secret
of human creativity and culture.

[music intensifies]

The Archives of the Impossible
is named after a book

I wrote called
Authors of the Impossible.

I was in Berkeley, California,

with a gentleman named
Jacques Vallée,

and Jacques asked me to help him
place his papers

and case studies
in the University archive

because he was becoming
concerned about their future.

[Vallée]
You know, we live in a world

where all computer data
is fungible.

I have correspondence
with a thousand people

around the world
studying this problem,

going back over 50 years.

Shouldn't we save it somewhere?

[dramatic music]

[Whitley Strieber]
Jeff Kripal sent me a letter...

I guess about 10 or 15
years ago, at least.

And I thought,
"How interesting,

a professor from the big,
prestigious University

on the level of Harvard,

and suddenly in there, there is
the Archives of the Impossible?"

♪ ♪

[Jeff Kripal]
Ed May donated a lot

of the remote viewing material,

and Whitley Strieber
donated about 5,000 letters,

and it just kind
of sucked things in from there.

♪ ♪

Will this collection help future
researchers connect the dots?

♪ ♪

Well, so, first of all,

the Invisible College
is an old term.

[upbeat music]

It arises in the 17th century

among British Protestant
intellectuals

who are studying science,

and they know darn well
that if they say out loud

what they're thinking,
they're gonna be in big trouble.

♪ ♪

Science as we know it

really came out of a group
of enlightened scientists,

most of them noblemen,
because they had

the luxury
of their own opinions

and their own fortunes
behind what they did...

who essentially
took a position

that was somewhat antagonistic
to the church position.

♪ ♪

The position of the church
was that many of the phenomena

of nature belonged to God,
and you're not capable

of understanding
those phenomena.

♪ ♪

You're not supposed
to open somebody's body

to look at how their heart
is beating,

and you're not supposed
to ask questions

about the stars because
the stars are a mystical thing.

♪ ♪

These physicists and biologists
in England

conspired to study
those things together

and to put money
behind the research

and to start publishing
that research,

independently of the church,

and they call themselves
The Invisible College.

[suspenseful music]

It was essentially
a group of intellectuals

who thought and studied things
that were not supposed

to be thought or studied.

♪ ♪

In the 1970s,
Jacques wrote a book

called The Invisible College,
and it was about a group

of intellectuals and scientists
who were studying UFO topics

and parapsychological topics.

♪ ♪

So that was
the new Invisible College

because they were a college
of researchers

that were not, uh...
publicizing their work,

and Dr. Hynek thought
that by then they were...

You know, maybe 12 or 15 of us
in different countries,

suddenly some of the leaders
in French science,

biologists like Dr. Chauvin,

physicists like
Gustavo Beauregard,

who worked with Einstein,
were vitally interested

in the UFO reports,

and we were
discussing it together.

Most of them would not admit
publicly to a TV station,

and so wouldn't come forward

and say they were interested
in UFOs.

♪ ♪

Invisibility is just
a kind of code for,

"We're gonna do this
in a secret fashion

because we can do more."

These extreme
anomalous experiences,

which are not supposed to happen
but do all the time,

lie somewhere close
to the well springs

of human civilization
in its various modes.

[playful music]

I consider the project here
to be the Visible College.

I want to make
the invisible visible.

I wanna mainstream it.
I want to do it

in a much more public
and much more explicit way.

Today more and more philosophers

recognize that... [sighs]
there are aspects of the mind

that even if they are correlated

with things that are happening
in the body

or happening in the brain
that they're...

They're not reducible
to these things.

There's something more.

It's amazing to me, honestly,

the way that academia
has evolved

in the last 10 or 15 years.

This conference
is setting the tone

for how people engage with this.

One of the really
valuable things

that Jeff Kripal is doing is
providing this very safe place

to explore further
beyond the bounds

of current science
and current explanation

and try to figure out
what is going on.

♪ ♪

I'm very grateful
that I am still alive

at my advanced age
to see a transition.

♪ ♪

You came on my radar
when Oumuamua,

which is an object
that we detected in space

that you believe could possibly
have been extraterrestrial.

We had a seminar,
a lecture, about this object

at Harvard, and a colleague
of mine,

after the lecture, said,
"This object is really weird.

I wish it never existed."
You know, that...

I was really appalled by this.

How can you say something
like that?

You learn something new.
It's a learning experience.

We learn that we have
to revise the way we think

about reality, you know?
That's a good thing.

♪ ♪

Yeah, as somebody
who covered national security

for so many years,
it's fascinating to watch

how this issue kind of moved
off screen

into the middle of the screen.

A former military
intelligence officer

of 14 years, as well
as two former fighter pilots,

appeared before Congress
this week

to blow the whistle on UFOs.

The question is,
"Do I think we're up

to the task of handling this

based off
of the hearing yesterday

and the way it's been
performed?" I think we are.

♪ ♪

[Bender] I think
what's most remarkable is,

no matter what
your viewpoint might be,

if you believe the government
is hiding aliens

or you believe, you know,
the government knows more

than it's revealing,
we now have U.S. senators

stand up and talk about UFOs
as a serious policy issue.

Can you just give us
some raw numbers

of how many UAPs
you've analyzed,

how many have been resolved
and sort of in what buckets,

and then how many are still
left to be resolved?

[Bender] It's opened
the floodgates for scientists

and sort of, you know,
the academy, so to speak,

is to take this topic
more seriously,

and not just marginalize it

as, you know, "Oh, that's...
the tin foil hat crowd."

You know, this is
a real scientific question

that maybe with all
the technology we have today

we can answer.

Whether the government tells us
what they know or not.

[tranquil music]

[Kripal] I had no interest
in this early in my career.

I was interested
in very typical things

that historians
and scholars of religion

are interested in.

♪ ♪

In the early part
of the millennium,

I wrote a book
on the California counterculture

and a movement
that focused at Big Sur

around a place
called Esalen Institute,

and I met a lot of people
and these people told me

some really,
really strange stories

that I knew couldn't have
happened, but I knew happened.

Because I knew these people,
and I knew they weren't lying.

I knew they weren't doing this
for any kind of ulterior reason.

♪ ♪

and I realized that we had
no way of thinking

about those stories.

In the quiet Mississippi town
of Pascagoula,

two local men
confronted authorities

with a rather bizarre story.

Charles Hickson
and Calvin Parker

told of a strange craft
landing near their fishing site

and of being taken aboard
by three unearthly creatures.

[Hickson]
When they carried me inside,

they seemed to...
just leaned me back, you know,

and, um, this eye,
it moved up in front of me

about this close,
and it stared right at my eyes,

looking me right in the eye,
and it seemed to have

hesitated there
for a few seconds

and then it just started moving
over my entire body.

[reporter] Sheriff Diamond,
can you tell me

just what happened that night?

No, sir, I can't.

All I can tell you,
it was two men

came in the sheriff's department
approximately 8:30 or 9:00.

They were all excited and upset.

[reporter] Tell me
about the lie detector test.

[man]
These men, in my opinion,

believe that they saw this,
and that they were being honest

in reporting
what they have reported.

[Kripal] Back then
our only way of thinking

about these stories
was not thinking about them.

"Oh, that's--that person
drank too much alcohol"

or "that person was on LSD"

or "that person
was hallucinating."

I mean, it's just
this easy kind of explanations

that actually explain nothing.

[dramatic music]

And so I got really interested
in why intellectuals

don't think about
those experiences,

which presumably lie at the core

of a lot of basic
religious beliefs.

♪ ♪

[Bender] I actually liken
a lot of this topic

to religion, because it is
very similar to me.

I mean, I think there's
a lot of commonalities.

For many people,
the truth is out there,

and it's very emotional,

and it's part
of their belief system,

just like if you're Hindu
or Christian

or Jewish or Muslim,
I mean, you have a belief system

and I think some people
have experienced things,

and whether you and I think
it's real, it's real to them,

in a real way,
and so we can't just dismiss it,

especially since it's not just
like just a few people.

You know, there's a lot
of people...

A lot more coming forward now.

[Travis Craemer]
It was right up there,

and then it flew like, right
across over and down that way.

[Kripal] I think paranormal
phenomena are essentially

the building blocks
of what become religion.

So things like belief
in a separable soul

or immortality or divination
or the ability to know

what's going to happen
before it happens.

I mean, all these are kind
of classical religious ideas,

but they're also really common
paranormal phenomena,

and I think these beliefs
developed because people

have always had
these experiences.

I think that's really
the bottom line.

Up there, I saw a UFO,
and it went down the river,

turned right
at the United Nations,

turned left
and then down the river.

[Interviewer]
And you looked what sort of--?

Silent and it looked dark,
like...

black or gray
in the middle, and...

it wasn't a helicopter
and it wasn't a balloon

and it was so near.

♪ ♪

[Kripal] I teach at Rice.

Rice is a very
STEM-oriented institution.

Most of my undergraduates
are gonna be engineers

or chemists or maybe doctors.
They're very science-oriented.

And when I started to teach
comparative religion here,

I was using kind
of classical religious texts,

and I realized they were
dismissing all of them,

and they were dismissing them

because they would say
to themselves,

"Oh, this person
doesn't know science."

Well, let's say this Twinkie

represents the normal amount
of psychokinetic energy

in the New York area.

According to this morning's
sample, it would be a Twinkie

35 feet long, weighing
approximately 600 pounds.

[coughs]

That's a big Twinkie.

So I shifted, and I started
to use the anomalous experiences

of scientists and engineers
and medical professionals.

♪ ♪

Yeah.

Yeah.

A scientist or an engineer
is trained

in a very
materialist worldview,

where there's only matter
and the mind or consciousness

is some sort of accidental
by-product of dead matter

behaving in very
complicated ways in our brain.

So mind is essentially not real.

What the flip is
is when a scientist realizes

that, "Oops. Actually,
mind is fundamental,

and matter is actually some
kind of expression of mind

or consciousness,"
and so they have

this complete flip
of orientation,

usually from
a near-death experience

or a psychedelic experience
or an illness.

I mean, there's a lot of things
that will flip

an intellectual or scientist,
but once they're flipped,

they're flipped.

It's hard to get them back

to the earlier
kind of materialist perspective.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

My own flip I was living
in Kolkata in 1989.

It was the fall of '89.

It was during a festival
called Kali Puja,

which occurs in late October
around our own Halloween.

[exotic music]

You have this goddess
with cutoff heads

and cutoff hands
and goat sacrifice.

I mean, it's our Halloween,
only way, way more.

♪ ♪

There's a whole elaborate
kind of religious worldview

wrapped around this as well,
that I was very familiar with,

and I was in fact studying.

One night I came back late
from visiting

all these temporary temples
in the city,

and I fell asleep...

and I woke up,

but my body didn't wake up.

It was what...
You know I think a doctor

would call
a sleep paralysis event,

and this energy just kind
of came out of nowhere,

came out of me,
out of the room,

out of somewhere,
and started to interact with me

in very conscious,
very intentional ways

that were not me.
It was not me.

And it was not subtle.

I thought I was
being electrocuted.

I thought I was having
a heart attack. Maybe I was.

I mean--But it was--
it was powerful,

and it resulted in the--
It kind of imploded

into my chest region,
and the experience was

that I left my body
and I floated to the top

of the ceiling
in a kind of dream landscape.

♪ ♪

I just felt like...

to use a later language
that did not exist in 1989,

I felt like, you know, something
had been downloaded into me.

It was just like, "Oh, my God.
There's something in me now."

♪ ♪

I grew up in a religious
atmosphere as a child.

I had an orthodox bar mitzvah.

There was always
an unspoken quality of faith

in the household,
and I think probably

from a very young age,
I had an instinct

that there was reality
in the extra physical.

I had occasional
experiences myself,

involving things
like prayer or astrology

or tarot readings.

And I suppose
that my chief interest

was in discovering how
some of this ancient material

had endured across centuries
and even millennia.

[upbeat music]

The Neanderthals themselves
quite literally

had their own system
of spirituality.

They had talismans.
They had figurines.

They had devotional practices
and paintings.

And we're talking
about the most primeval origins

of humanity, so this is
obviously something

that goes far beyond what we
today would call credulity.

It's baked into
the human experience.

♪ ♪

When people claim
they know what this is about,

whether it's some kind of fraud
or it's some kind of mechanism,

I'm like, my eyes just roll.

I'm like, "You either don't know
what you are talking about,

or you're lying."

[dramatic music]

For me, Jacques Vallée
is the barometer.

I love Vallée's work
because it combines

the sciences and what I would
call the humanities

in really effortless ways.

♪ ♪

[Puthoff] Jacques Vallée
has a broader viewpoint

that maybe it isn't just E.T.'s

coming from some galaxy
far away.

The idea that,
"Well, it's just a spacefarer

"wandering around
through the galaxy

and happens to take
a look at us."

That doesn't really quite
match the data.

♪ ♪

There are hundreds of sightings
every year,

going back millennia,
which is a point

that Jacques really
goes out of his way to make.

♪ ♪

[Kripal] I think Jacques flipped

somewhere in the late '60s.

I think it actually happened
in libraries in Paris,

and he was reading folklore
around fairies

and demonology and sort
of medieval folklore,

and he realized
that these stories

were essentially
about what we call UFOs today,

that there was definitely
a connection

between the old folklore
and occultism

and the modern mythology
that's really developed

around the UFO
in the modern world.

[Vallée] Open your Bible.

I mean, what is it
that Ezekiel saw?

[dramatic music]

I mean, Ezekiel describes
a craft, you know,

a material craft with entities

that made a tremendous
impression on him

and abducted him.

He woke up on top
of a mountain, you know,

some miles away

and he didn't know
what had happened to him.

And he described
wheels within wheels.

Ezekiel gives us this account

of the engineering,
the architect-tonics

of this object are unfathomable

and enigmatic,
and suddenly we're required

to interpret
what the hell this means.

The Bible has preserved it
as a religious experience.

♪ ♪

Well, what was it?

♪ ♪

[Santos] In the early books
of the Old Testament,

that's really
the critical first framing

in terms of the story of
imagining ourselves into a time

when our ancestors understood

extraordinary experiences
as every day.

♪ ♪

And Jacques Vallée and his, um,
Wonders in the Sky

gives us a great chronicle,
for instance,

of aerial phenomena
through the ages.

♪ ♪

[Puthoff] There's some
excellent events from Egypt,

millennia ago, where, you know,
two armies are fighting,

and sudd enly
there's craftin the air

that come down and help
one side versus the other.

[upbeat music]

They imagined
that they were the gods

coming to save their skins.

The evidence for that kind
of thing is scattered

throughout our literature
in all different countries.

So it isn't just
a Western thing.

♪ ♪

[Vallée] We don't have
the complete map, you know,

but we have 19th-century
observations by astronomers,

and in those days there was
no stigma attached to it.

This was, you know,
the waters of science,

with everything documented,

including some
wonderful engravings

from Germany and from England
and from France and so on.

Of tic tacs!

♪ ♪

You know, that's straight
out of a fairy tale.

I mean, if you read this
without knowing the context,

it's another fairy tale.

It turns out fairy tales
come from folklore,

and they are based
on real observations.

♪ ♪

In the 17th century,

if you were to tell
a story like that,

the priest would say you are
in contact with the devil.

It could only
have been the devil.

♪ ♪

And you would suffer
the consequences.

So people in those days
would filter into folklore,

into cute stories
you tell the kids.

This has been very deep
in human history.

We just don't pay
attention to it.

[dramatic music]

[Santos]
We're at the very beginning

of a time where it's going
to be feasible

to ask these questions
seriously,

without the giggle factor,
without the discomfort,

without what must be, for some
people, spiritually unsettling.

The idea that some
of these scenarios may defy

our conventional understandings
of our religious traditions.

♪ ♪

We have a bigger tool kit now
than we ever had before,

in terms of both the empirical
end of the studies,

the kinds of instruments
we can use

in terms of examination
of the physical world.

♪ ♪

[Vallée]
I also brought a few things,

you know, in terms
of what samples look like.

Pieces of things people have
picked up after a UFO case.

♪ ♪

Jacques, in discussing,

he started talking about
some of these materials

that he had from UAP.

Wait a second.
I never knew about this.

There's actual materials
that people have?

I can look at those.

That's something
that a scientist can do.

These are materials
that I have collected

with different teams in Brazil,
data from 50 years ago.

♪ ♪

The Ubatuba materials,

those two vials that have
Muestra A and Muestra B,

"sample" in Spanish.

What's good
about these materials

is that they have
a chain of custody.

♪ ♪

So I said, "Okay, well,
as it turns out,

some of the instruments
that I've developed

in my laboratory
for the biology that we do,

are actually designed
to look at metals."

♪ ♪

I had all this instrumentation
available to do the work.

And no, I'm not a metallurgist.

I'm not gonna claim things
about metal structure

that I don't know, but I can
at least tell you what's there.

♪ ♪

One of the samples
showed isotope ratios

of magnesium, which were
way off Earth normal.

Now, that doesn't mean
it's from an E.T.

It just means
that somebody altered

the isotope ratios, but at the
time these things were found,

that would have been
a multimillion-dollar operation,

and it doesn't sound
like something you would go

throwing around a beach
in Brazil.

I just admire
Dr. Nolan and his work.

I mean, obviously his work
in biology and medicine

is exceptional,

but I admire his willingness
to jump into this

and assemble
a new generation of scientists

to look at the academic data.

We've already published,
as you may know,

the sophisticated analysis
of data

from an unidentified UFO case.

♪ ♪

[Nolan]
Council Bluffs, Iowa, '77.

[reporter] At Council Bluffs

on Saturday, December 17th
at 7:45 p.m.,

three people traveling
towards North 16th Street

noticed a reddish object
about 600 feet in the air,

falling straight down.

[Nolan]
An object was seen hovering.

Multiple people saw it
from several different vantages.

Something bright
seemed to drop from it.

[reporter] It disappeared
behind the trees

of Big Lake Park,
followed by a huge flash

of blue-white light,
with two, quote, "arms of fire

shooting into the air,
as if it had crashed."

They thought
it was a plane crash.

[reporter] One eyewitness said,
quote,

"It looked like
a great big sparkler

with lava-like
material dripping,

appearing to slow as it cooled."

Now, another young couple
saw, quote, "A big round thing

hovering in the sky,
below the tree tops,"

and they called
the fire department.

Upon arriving, they found
a pool of liquid metal.

The police arrived,
took Polaroids, which I have.

[camera clicks]

And then large pieces
of the material

were recovered
by some of the witnesses.

There are a lot of potential
explanations for it.

You know,
all reasonable things

like thermite, et cetera,
and they were all discounted

based on the evidence.

It wasn't a meteor crash
because meteors

don't leave pools
of molten metal behind.

They leave holes, you know.

♪ ♪

Again, there's a story,
there's witnesses,

there's police validation
that at least the stories

all comported, and then
there's material evidence.

[Vallée] As you can see,
this one comes

from Council Bluffs in Iowa,
which is a paper we published.

[Nolan] Jacques brought me
the material evidence.

Now, I analyzed it
with one of my machines.

We published a peer
reviewed paper.

The only thing we found about it
was that it was inhomogeneous.

It's a fancy way of saying
incompletely mixed.

The material shows
no sign of technology.

The material
is clearly the result

of an industrial process.

And it was incompletely mixed.

Okay, so why?

Again, that's the question
you ask all the time

when you see data.
It's like, "Why?"

Why would you do it?
What could have generated it?

And why would you dump it
in the middle of a field

in a small farming town in Iowa?

Yeah.

Right. Well the purpose
of the Sol Foundation

is to legitimize
the subject matter

and to bring a level of
discourse that's professional.

Academics, for all of its flaws,
has a methodology

that it uses,
which involves proving something

to a level of acceptability
through peer review.

Now, peer review
doesn't mean it's right.

We're saying,
"Here's the kinds of questions

we need answers to.
We need a white paper on this"

or "we need something published
in the literature

that examines this problem."

Just in the year
and a half or so

that I have become active

and have started
interviewing people,

I have met dozens
of people who--

commercial, military,
Coast Guard mariners

and submariners
who have had observations.

This is several dozen people
that have seen phenomena

in our oceans in the tropical,
Eastern, Western Pacific,

the Gulf of Mexico,
the Caribbean,

the Mediterranean
and the Indian Ocean

and the North Atlantic
and Eastern Seaboard.

So... this is happening.

♪ ♪

I love my job in the Navy
because every part of the Navy

needs to know something
about the physical environment.

The Marines or the Army,
they use a term--

They talk about high ground
and taking high ground,

because high ground
gives some advantage over--

tactical advantage
over an opposing force.

There is a high ground
in the ocean,

and that's what I gave
the U.S. Navy.

Having knowledge
of the physical characteristics

of the sea surface
as well as the ocean volume

will help determine
how well your sensors perform,

whether they be acoustic
or optical or radar.

And so knowing where we can
basically see the adversary

and they could not see us,
giving detailed information

about the ocean structure was
basically providing high ground

to the Naval forces I supported.

Do we have
any sensors underwater,

uh, to, um, detect
on submerged UAPs,

uh, anything that is
in the ocean or in the seas?

So I think, uh,
that would be more appropriately

-addressed in close sessions.
-Okay.

July 15th, this thing
dipped into the water

and that sent the crew
into sort of a routine.

They announced
something to the effect

of splash, splash,
which marked the spot

where the thing went in.

They conducted a search,
looking for wreckage.

There was none there.
It disappeared

from sonar and radar
and this thing was just gone.

[tranquil music]

♪ ♪

That's a term people are using
for UFOs in the water,

that, uh,
Unidentified Submerged Object.

I think USOs have been observed
since at least the '60s,

and there are
some books and reports

that have been published
since then,

and now we're seeing
more attention

towards the topic.

Carl Fint is one of those who
has published a book on that,

and now, more recently,
Richard Dolan

is publishing a compendium
of all the reports of USOs.

He's letting me review that
for him.

[dramatic music]

We're seeing in the oceans
the same kind of phenomena

that's in the atmosphere,
in our skies,

where different types of craft

in different shapes,
like triangles and discs,

and, uh, elongated cylinders.

We're seeing different
lighting configurations,

like you see with UFOs,

and we're seeing basically
activity and characteristics

that defy the laws of physics
as we know them.

And when I say we're seeing,
these are the reports

that eyewitnesses
have come forward with.

Multiple witnesses report
seeing a large blue object

fall out of the sky
and into the ocean.

[woman] Oh, it [bleep] went
and landed in the water,

whatever it is.

[reporter] She described it
as being larger

than a telephone pole,

and said she never heard it
make any sound.

[suspenseful music]

The idea of the space and ocean
comparison is interesting to me.

There is a famous astronaut
named Scott Carpenter,

who I got to meet,
and I asked him,

"How do you compare the two?"

And he said,
"Oh, space is just glorious.

It's bright, it's shiny.

You go... You launch on the top
of a rocket

and it's, you know,
it's very fast

and you get these missions
done quick,

and they're brilliant,"

and then he kind of paused
for, like, a dramatic effect

and he said,
"The ocean is cruel, it's cold,

everything breaks in it,
and it's just difficult."

We've only explored
about 5% of the ocean's volume.

Think about that.

95% of the ocean's
never even been examined,

and so when you think about it,

if we're just seeing
a little bit in the areas

of the ocean
we're looking at now

in terms of USO activity,
what might we be missing?

Could be quite a bit.

[dramatic music]

We're gonna have
to somehow wrap our minds

around the fact
that the scientific method

that is directed toward
the physical world

isn't complete.

[dramatic music]

There has to be
another level of methodology

that somehow enables us

to accurately address
this numinous level of reality.

And that is going to be
a very interesting journey

because I have a feeling
it's not going to involve

detection with instruments,
as we now understand.

♪ ♪

I think that those instruments
will be as much part of us

as they are part
of the world around us.

And I don't want to speculate.

I was a science-fiction author,
but I'm not now.

♪ ♪

[Mitch Horowitz]
The accounts of experiencers,

from my perspective,
are testimony.

And, over time,
testimony becomes a record.

People will sometimes
dismiss testimony as anecdote,

which is actually a term
that's intended to be disabling.

But we use testimony
all the time.

We use it in medicine
to try to understand

under what conditions
a person experiences pain

or under what conditions
is that pain alleviated.

Therapists and patients use
testimony commonly to prescribe

psychopharmacological drugs
and so forth.

We use testimony to measure
the efficacy of those drugs.

So testimony is a common source
of information in the sciences

as it is elsewhere.

Over time,
testimony becomes record,

and that's a part
of what's happening in our time.

♪ ♪

Most people that have had
anomalous experiences

don't want to talk about them.

They don't want to shout
about it from the rooftops.

They're not looking
for publicity.

They just want to talk
with other people

that have been
in similar situations,

and they want to do the research
so that they can figure out

some more clues
to these enduring mysteries.

♪ ♪

The Experiencer Group
is a community site

for people that have had
anomalous experiences

of any and all kinds.

So that can mean people
that have had UFO encounters,

encounters
with non-human intelligence.

There are people that have had
out-of-body experiences,

near-death experiences,
and precognition.

We find that folks that have had
one type of experience

sometimes, you know,
the quiet secret

is that it's more
than one modality

that they have
actually experienced.

[Strieber] You sit down
and you read letter after letter

after letter, you realize
that this is something marvelous

that we've discovered
about ourselves.

People will sit down
and write a detailed long letter

about something
that really happened to them

that is the central question
in their life.

[dramatic music]

[Jay Christopher King]
There's a strong association

with fear and the shame
and the hiding

that people feel when they can't
talk about anomalous experiences

and then it's also important
to remember that there are

other experiencers that seem
to have lucked out,

and it's just all
cosmic high fives

the entire time, right?

Just in the last
nine months alone,

we organized
three hybrid conferences

that happened online
and in New York City,

featuring people
like Garry Nolan,

Leslie Kean,

Ralph Blumenthal,

Christopher Mellon.

That has been
incredibly fruitful

for small group work to be able
to have luminaries like that

coming into the situation

and engaging
with other experiencers.

♪ ♪

One situation that I recall
that really helped

unlock recognizing
that I needed to deal

with my history
with anomalous phenomena

was a situation
where I was in Miami

for a wedding, with my ex-wife,

and we had a shared experience

where I was looking
out the window of this high-rise

that we were in and there's
an illuminated swimming pool

down below.

I was looking at it,
and for some reason

about five or six stories down

between where I was
and the pool,

there was
this ball of electricity

that just appeared
out of nowhere

exactly where I was looking,

and I just thought,
"Uh-uh, oh, this is not good,"

and, seemingly, this ball,

maybe it was about the size
of a basketball or so,

it started slightly moving
and growing in size

towards where I was.

I called my wife over
and she saw it out the window,

and right as she saw it,
it moved very quickly

towards our position,

and she turned around
to run away from it,

and as she did, she was
seemingly rendered unconscious,

and I had to move
to grab her head

so it didn't hit the floor
on her way down.

And when I turned around,

there were
two non-human entities.

[dramatic music]

And strangely--
I know it sounds very weird--

they were standing
outside the window in some way,

as if there were
some overlapping realm

that they were on.

And, as had happened
at other times in the past,

I was somehow moved over
to kind of an operating theater,

and I was--
I was laid down on a slab

that was seemingly levitating,

and there was some kind
of medical procedure happening,

and I woke up in the morning
with part of my suit still on,

on top of the covers in the bed

and my then wife
was just staring at my face.

She had already woken up.

And I was like,
"Can we talk about this?"

And she was like,
"No, we can't talk about this."

♪ ♪

And I realized
that that relationship

was not going to work.

And I realized that the way
that I was handling this stuff

was not going to work,

because denying
that it was happening

or acting
like I wasn't an experiencer

didn't make it go away,

and so I separated
from my wife

and I started researching
these subjects,

and now here I am
about 12 years later.

♪ ♪

[Kripal] Here's the thing
people don't understand.

When I talk about revelation,
for example,

which is a religious notion,

what I mean is the person
doesn't make up the story.

The story appears to the person.

It's passive.

The person is shown something.

It's not--It's not the dreamer
or the visionary

or the near-death experiencer
that's making some shit up.

That's not what's happening.

Something is happening
to the experiencer,

their person
being shown to them,

and that's why they'll say
it was a revelation.

They're not sitting around
daydreaming, you know,

making up something,
you know, fantastic.

That's not it at all.

[dramatic music]

The first time
that I encountered

Whitley Strieber's work
was the film adaptation

of Communion.

I was probably
14 or 15 years old,

flipping channels,

and then shock and amazement

that I saw a being
on television that was--

that was close enough
to what I had seen

when--when I was younger.

And I remember being perplexed,

a sense of panic
that I couldn't really identify

the source of, and I remember
the visual of seeing

Christopher Walken
playing Whitley Strieber

and him being severely troubled,

working with a therapist,

and I remember turning off
the television at that point.

I think I wasn't ready
to engage with the idea

that, as an adult, I would have
to be doing similar work

as what I was seeing
in that scene.

I didn't want to engage
with that yet.

♪ ♪

People really responded to that

because they thought,
"Well, wait a minute.

This is very much
like what happened to me."

And the face on the cover,
I sat beside the artist,

Ted Jacobs, who drew that face,

and described my memories
in great detail,

and that face is pretty much
what I remembered.

It's a very complex
human experience,

and like so many other people,
couldn't let it go.

♪ ♪

What I remember
is that through my wall

came some beings around my bed,

and I ran between them
and ran out of the room

into my mother's room
to hide from them.

And what happened is, um,
they followed me in there,

and that's the last
I remember of it.

Um, however, it's interesting
because after that,

uh, I never told anybody
about that,

and I just buried it
in the back of my mind,

and me and my brother,
we never even spoke about it.

[Strieber]
The abduction process,

which is what I experienced,
is only a small part

of our relationship
with whatever they are.

[dramatic music]

[King]
I think Whitley is a hero.

I think Whitley Strieber
is such a brave, courageous,

and an important figure
in this field.

♪ ♪

It can be hard to figure out how
to approach Whitley Strieber.

[camera clicks]

The gravity around him
in interpersonal situations

is very strong.

I remember meeting him
for the first time

and having to walk away...

[clearing throat]

[tranquil music]

[sighs]

♪ ♪

[clears throat]

♪ ♪

I remember the first time
in meeting Whitley

that I actually had to walk away
and go to the bathroom

so that I could cry
and come back.

♪ ♪

He's used to people
saying "thank you" to him.

But I can't thank him enough.

[Strieber]
Annie put it one day.

She was reading
all these thousands of letters

we got pouring in,
and she comes out of her office

and says, "Whitley, this has
something to do

with what we call death."

And, you know,
we were way beyond

the alien abduction idea
at that point.

[dramatic music]

I can't tell you
what's going on,

but I can tell you this.

If we ever figure it out,
it's going to change the world.

♪ ♪

[Eben Alexander] Probably
every two or three months,

I would hear fairly
compelling stories

of near-death experiences
or shared death

or after-death communications
that should have gotten

my attention,
but I kept dismissing them,

thinking, "No," you know,
"That's wishful thinking."

"We don't have any way
of proving that."

"No, we don't seem to have
memories of past lives."

I don't know that I believe
in reincarnation."

Certainly having
my own personal experience

went light-years
towards opening me up

to accepting and admitting
this beautiful kind of expansion

in our knowledge of ourselves
and the universe.

♪ ♪

There came a slowly
spinning white light,

and this white light had
fine silvery golden tendrils,

and it came towards me
very slowly, spinning.

And as it did so,
I realized that it came

with a perfect musical melody.

♪ ♪

Then in the Core realm
I was told,

"You're not here to stay."
"We'll teach you many things."

You'll be going back."

So why was it
that I had the most profound,

rich, detailed
spiritual experience

when my brain
was most demonstrably off.

That was part of the mystery
I was to answer

over these 15 years
since that time.

♪ ♪

[closing theme song plays]

♪ ♪