Original subtitles

[intriguing music playing]

[McCabe] Peterborough in the U.K. in 2014, late September or October.

I'd gone outside into the back garden to smoke a cigarette before bed.

And it was a completely cloudless night.

And I was looking up at the stars in the sky,

thinking how beautiful they were.

And all of a sudden, there was a double flash

of pure, brilliant white light in the sky.

And I thought, "Well, that must be lightning, surely."

And as I was thinking that, there was another double flash of pure white light.

And I looked straight up, two balls of pure white light traveling side by side.

And they broke off at a 90-degree turn so fast that they left visible trace lines.

Instantly amazed, ran through the house,

hoping to see them or more, whatever they were.

Uh, and there was nothing visible.

At the speed they were traveling, not surprising.

But I hung around for a little bit longer, hoping to see something else.

And it was at this point that I checked the time on my phone.

And it was 11 minutes past 4.

So I gave up waiting, extremely tired at this point.

So I simply came in the house to go to bed.

And as I was walking up the stairs...

I was struck by an extremely powerful feeling

that put the hair on the back of my neck up

and, uh, what I can only describe as an instruction.

If I were to describe in words how perfect this instruction was, it was...

It told me, "Don't close the door, go outside and look up."

And so I did.

I was shocked and confused and curious all at the same time.

So I turned around, I opened the front door

and stepped outside and looked up.

And as I did so...

[majestic music playing]

The most beautiful, huge golden object.

I instantly became aware of an incredible amount of what felt like static electricity,

an absolute silence, complete lack of sound.

All I could hear was myself breathing.

But also, there was an intense feeling of love, intimacy,

a kind of connected feeling as if it could read my mind, as odd as that sounds.

So beautiful and magnificent, but shocked as well.

And there was a moment of awkward silence

because I didn't know what to do, what to say, what to think.

So I waved up at it.

And then I started to have a realization that this could be dangerous.

I suddenly started thinking, "Well, somebody else needs to see this.

This can't... Nobody's gonna believe this."

I couldn't believe it myself.

I remembered that I had my phone in my top left breast pocket.

The moment I thought that, it felt like I'd messed up.

And this thing immediately starts to move left.

I didn't want it to go, so I started to walk under it, and it started to speed up.

So it went from a walk to a jog to a run,

that I just stood back and just watched it for maybe 30 seconds or something

as it just went up higher and higher and higher off up into the atmosphere

until it was such a small dot and then out of sight completely.

I didn't realize how shocked and stunned I was until I came back in the house

and I noticed that something odd had happened, but I kind of dismissed it,

that the dawn had broken and that I was missing maybe 20, 30 minutes.

I couldn't place how that seemed so out of sync

because the whole thing only seemed to last a couple of minutes,

a few minutes at best.

[man] Do you remember what you were thinking about

just before you first saw the UAP in the sky?

[McCabe] At the moment that I was looking up at the stars,

thinking how beautiful they were,

I was actually thinking about and talking from the heart

to my recently deceased grandmother.

So I was thinking of her at that moment that it all began.

I was hoping that she was with my grandfather and happy, if such a place exists.

And it was at that very moment that it all began.

[mysterious music playing]

[King] The year was 1917,

and physicist Albert Einstein found himself facing the impossible.

As he worked through his equations for general relativity,

the math was telling him something that couldn't possibly be true.

For centuries, science had accepted that the universe was static and unchanging,

yet these equations suggested a different story,

that the universe was rapidly expanding.

Believing this couldn't be the case,

Einstein introduced a solution he called the cosmological constant.

This constant was a way to adjust the numbers

by adding a hypothetical force

to balance the gravitational pull of matter,

allowing for a stable, static universe.

Problem solved.

That is until 1929, when astronomer Edwin Hubble,

using the most advanced telescopes of the time,

studied the light from distant galaxies.

He discovered this light was shifted toward the red end of the spectrum,

a redshift that indicated the universe was, in fact, expanding.

Einstein later called the cosmological constant

the biggest blunder of his career,

as he had trusted the conventional wisdom of the day

over what the math was truly revealing.

[Chase] The mental trap that Einstein fell into was a very human one.

Despite the fact that we don't have working scientific explanations

for things as fundamental as time and gravity,

we humans tend to assume we more or less understand the nature of our reality.

When faced with evidence that contradicts this belief,

we're quick to dismiss it because we "know" that it can't be true.

Progress in science, however,

comes from paying attention to the data points that don't make sense.

When the planets didn't follow expected paths,

we discovered the true structure of the solar system.

When photons behaved as both particles and waves, depending on observation,

we unlocked quantum mechanics.

The path of scientific advancement has always been paved

by the things that we thought were impossible until we knew better.

[King] Understanding the UFO phenomenon is profoundly challenging

because it defies our expectations of what is possible.

Much like Einstein's initial rejection of the expanding universe,

our reluctance to embrace the full spectrum of UFO-related experiences

stems from deeply ingrained assumptions about reality.

These phenomena don't just stretch our understanding.

They shatter it, forcing us to confront the limits of our knowledge and biases.

This discomfort often leads us to reject the most bizarre and inexplicable accounts,

often dismissing them as too strange or unbelievable.

[pilot] Look at that thing!

[Kripal] I think it's easier to talk about the physical craft.

I think it's easy to do the science.

That's within our grasp and that's within our methods.

I think it's very difficult to talk about the strange stuff,

precisely because it's so strange.

It's absurd. It doesn't... Again, it doesn't make sense.

And so it's very difficult to talk about that

and not get embarrassed or not fail in some basic way.

So I think that's why the conversations go the way they do.

I mean, people... People want to...

[soft laugh]

They want to have some kind of authority or they wanna know something.

They don't wanna stand up and say, "Well, I

don't know," or, "Wow, this is really weird."

You know, that doesn't get very far.

[Iandoli] I think that experiencer accounts are generally marginalized

in the UFO conversation because they're dangerous,

they're direct, they're to the point, they're personal.

It's easy for somebody to hear about a UFO encounter or a UFO report,

and it's some kind of object that's up in the sky, and it's over there.

But once you hear an experience account,

especially from an experiencer themselves, it's very personal.

And when something is very personal, it becomes very real.

You now have to deal with it.

You now have to face that level of reality.

[pilot] There's a whole fleet of them, look on the ASA.

My gosh.

[Chase] If we're going to make genuine progress in unraveling the mysteries of UFOs,

we're going to have to be willing to include these unconventional narratives.

These stories shared by individuals who have experienced UFOs

and non-human intelligences firsthand

hold valuable insights that are crucial to a

comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.

By forcing experiencers to take a back seat in the conversation about the phenomenon,

we're essentially ignoring a significant portion of the data

that could provide the breakthrough we need.

Embracing these narratives, despite their strangeness,

is essential if we're going to move beyond our current limitations

and gain a deeper, more accurate understanding of the UFO phenomenon.

You know, me personally, I mean, I've seen UFOs,

I've, um, had precognitive dreams.

I've had near-death experience, I've had out-of-body experience,

I've had, uh, remote viewing.

Precognitive dreams, out-of-body experiences, seeing UFOs.

UFO sightings, precognitive events.

I lived in a couple of haunted homes,

or what people considered to be haunted homes, when I was a kid.

So apparitions, shadow beings.

Poltergeist activity, things moving.

And some synchronicities that really stretch the bounds of credulity.

[King] It's actually incredibly common for people to experience

more than one type of anomalous phenomena.

It's a giant secret within the paranormal community, an open secret at this point,

that if you experience one modality,

you're likely to experience another modality later down the line.

[Lassiter] I believe that

experiencers have experiences

that are actually common to humans.

I don't think that we experience anything that

is inaccessible for other people, actually.

I think that this is a very human thing.

I think that our culture and consensus reality as it is

has made it very taboo to talk about these things.

But if you scratch the surface with most people

and ask them, "Have you ever had anything?

A weird dream, a strange experience, a precognitive dream,

something that you can't explain,"

usually, people are able to come up with it.

I think that it's a part of being human that we have lost.

[Kripal] So, you know, I have this notion that I call the impossible.

And what I mean by that is that things are happening and appearing all the time,

and that we're slicing off or we're pushing off the table things we don't understand

so that we can claim some kind of understanding

or some kind of explanation of what's left on the table.

And so the impossible is actually not impossible.

It's very possible. It happens all the time.

But it's impossible because we say it's impossible.

We say, "Oh, this can't happen," therefore it doesn't happen.

But it does happen.

[Finley] I'm confident that these kind of things, these anomalous experiences,

happen much more broadly than we might think,

but that people's relationship to institutionalized religion

and sometimes other orientations like science

keep them from recognizing them or cause them to deny them,

often because they don't have a language

or a legitimate frame in which to understand them.

[Chase] There are a lot of aspects of anomalous experiences

that can make it hard for even the most open-minded people to accept

because they're just so different from the experiences we have in our everyday lives.

These are the kinds of things that just sound crazy to your average person

because we don't have any other way to make sense of them.

And so when these things happen to people,

most people instinctively know that talking about it publicly would be a bad idea.

And even when they do talk about it,

the story that they tell is usually not the whole story.

[Strieber] I think there is potentially a lot of stigma about

talking about human interaction with the visitors

because the great majority of people have only a vague knowledge of UFOs,

and no knowledge of or awareness of

the possibility that people may be interacting

with someone who apparently is associated with them in some way.

So there's a lot of stigma, and it can be very disruptive in families

when one member of a family has a close encounter and no one else does,

and they talk about it.

People have been put into mental institutions for that

and been divorced and had their children taken from them.

It's very dangerous. So the situation is quite fraught, even now.

[King] There's a lot of pathologizing about these issues.

Going to a therapist and just saying that you saw a ghost

could make somebody question your sanity.

But people have seen ghosts in all world cultures, going back centuries.

So why can't we talk about this stuff?

[Bishop] I think UFO witnesses hold back some of their stories

because they want people to believe them.

And if you say something completely unexpected,

there's less likelihood that somebody's gonna believe you.

They're gonna say, "Oh, well, you know, you must be nuts

because I wanna hear about a UFO.

I don't wanna hear about your dead relative,

and I don't wanna hear about strange phone calls,

or I don't wanna hear about something you saw leaping through the trees a week later."

This just doesn't make any sense to people.

So I think people do talk about what they experience,

but they leave out a lot just to protect themselves.

[King] The thing that's so insidious

about stigma around anomalous experiences is that it's self-reinforcing.

We tend to not talk about these situations.

And when we do, we rarely include all the details of what actually happened.

And the result is that we don't have a good understanding

of how complex and nuanced these experiences are,

which makes it more difficult for people to speak up about what happened to them

for fear of sounding crazy. It's a vicious cycle.

[Chase] If we're going to move past the stigma

and start to make real inroads in understanding the UFO phenomenon,

we're going to have to stop being so squeamish

about the details that make us uncomfortable.

As much as we may want to ignore all the weirdness

and high strangeness that goes along with these encounters,

the reality is that we can't separate those things out.

And in some ways, you could even argue that that strangeness is the UFO phenomenon.

If we're going to be objective,

we're going to have to be willing to consider all of the data,

especially the data that's most challenging.

You know, my first sighting, I was 6 years old

in elementary school in Port Arthur, Texas.

And that was my mother taking us to school, my sister, and myself.

My mother just says, "Look, flying saucers."

This most strange statement I've ever heard in my life.

And there were the three most beautiful saucer-shaped craft

with pods on the top of the saucer,

sitting in position only maybe 50 feet in the air,

right over those steeples of that church, just right over it.

And they sat there for a good 30 to 50 seconds, I would say.

But I looked at the school building,

and I remember people hanging out the window

and I saw hands and fingers pointing out windows.

Every window was up,

and there were hands or heads sticking out of windows looking at these things.

And then across the street in the playground was dead quiet.

People in their cars were all looking up

and some were getting out of their vehicle.

Every eye and hand was pointing towards the sky,

and these objects. They simply just, at one moment in time,

they all just went straight up, and they were gone.

And everything went back to normal in that timeframe

and nobody talked about it the whole day.

Isn't that weird? How can that even be possible?

[Chase] Something that's really common in UFO encounters is that

multiple people will report seeing something strange,

but they won't agree on what they saw.

So, what's going on here?

Could there be something about the phenomenon itself that plays with our perception?

[Madden] I think it's certainly possible

that non-human intelligence could hack our perception

because human intelligence can hack our perception.

And we know that. Today, think of all the ways that video can be faked.

Think of all the ways that audio can be faked.

Think of all the ways that projections could be produced

that would trick lots and lots of people.

So I don't think it's hard to believe that

non-human intelligence could hack our perception

because we can and do hack our perception.

In fact, I would expect that if they're non-human intelligence,

that they probably would hack our perception.

[Kripal] I personally am not just of the opinion,

I'm of the conviction that a lot of the UAP or UFO phenomena that we see is deceptive.

And by that, I don't mean human beings are deceiving other human beings,

although they're doing that too.

That's all overlaid over this.

I think the phenomenon itself is, um, staged and deceptive.

[Bishop] I was first introduced to that trickster hypothesis or the idea of it

with George Hansen's book The Trickster and the Paranormal.

And the trickster is an archetypal image entity idea that runs through many cultures,

even the Western cultures.

I mean, the Fool is basically the trickster in

a lot of ways, or the Joker in the card deck.

And it was a revelation to a lot of people

because it looked at the issue as something that was disruptive,

which it very much is for the witness.

[Cutchin] A trickster is one of many archetypes

that you might see manifested across various times and cultures.

And in a lot of indigenous cultures,

these were characters who were guardians of the threshold.

They would often play pranks on people

but their role was to upset certain norms that the society was embedded in.

And sometimes tricksters were good or bad.

Most of the time they were mischievous,

and they would sort of reveal one's own failings.

And it's very prominent in both the paranormal and the UFO literature.

[Bishop] And the reason they're there is to stir things up

and to show people that they don't understand everything

and that there is more to know and that there is a lot of humor in it too.

And if you can mix all those things together,

a better understanding of something comes up.

I mean, when somebody tells a joke,

that is a source of healing, and it's a source of understanding.

That's what the best comedy is.

And the trickster, I think, does that.

It throws this absurdity up in front of us, so we start to question things.

And I think that that's one of the roles of the UFO, in, uh...

In, at least in our culture.

Other cultures have integrated this kind of stuff into their cosmologies.

We haven't.

So until we do, maybe it's just gonna keep being a trickster.

Certain aspects of the--

- [car horn honking] - [Cutchin and crew laugh]

This is the trickster. This is the trickster right here.

Certain aspects of this trickster archetype

tend to manifest themselves in all sorts of paranormal activity

from traditional hauntings to UFO sightings.

And oftentimes, these will be ways that are subtle

and sometimes they'll be ways that are really creative.

But it is this aspect that seems to mire the phenomenon in unbelievability.

A lot of times it seems to have a sort of prankish or impish quality to it,

where it sometimes undermines its own existence

or lives in this realm of non-falsifiability

that you see time and time again.

[Leffall] We were driving back home.

We decided to take the long way, kind of the back roads.

And we're driving, and we're probably about halfway back,

and we see a light in the sky.

It's kind of out of nowhere, just appears.

And then it stops and moves over to the other side of the road.

We see it stop again, go up, go back down.

And we're saying, "Did you see that?" She's like, "Yeah, I saw it. I saw it."

We're kind of tracking it, but we're inside the car.

It would seem like whichever way we tried to go to get a glimpse of it,

it went the other way, made it hard for us.

And it was almost like there was some intelligent

control of whatever it was we were seeing.

You know, when we kind of compared notes about what we saw,

the interesting thing was we both saw something,

-but we both also kind of described it differently. -[Finley] Very differently.

We both saw something luminous. We both saw something that had structure to it.

It was nighttime, so it was kind of hard to make it out.

But she said she saw something that was more cylindrical in shape.

I thought I saw something that was more triangular in shape.

What shape it was, I don't know if that really matters.

I think what matters is, you know, we're leaving here

-and we saw something that didn't make sense to us. -[Finley] Sure.

[King] There are so many fascinating questions that come from this particular account.

Why is it that two different people who saw the same thing

also saw it differently?

This is something that actually happens a lot.

And it makes you wonder how much of what we perceive is objectively accurate.

And could there be things going on in our own immediate environment

that we're not aware of?

[Madden] Let's introduce a concept.

Umwelt in German literally would mean

"around world" or "nearby world."

So, what's the umwelt?

Well, the umwelt comes from this notion that

an organism creates an environment for itself.

It creates an "around world" for itself.

So the idea here isn't that the organism thinks the world into reality.

What the idea is, is that the organisms have to be able to

sort what is relevant to their well-being

from what is irrelevant to their well-being. All right?

And that world of relevance is their umwelt.

So let me give a simple example here.

There's a certain kind of tick, and this tick has a very limited perceptual system.

It can sense the amount of butyric acid that's in its immediate environment,

which is the acid that mammals release from our skin,

and it can sense slight differences in heat on surfaces,

and it can sense when indeed it has made contact with a surface, and that's it.

With a limited set of perceptual tools,

that tick can sort of time so it can drop on you

and very quickly find where there's a good blood source

and, you know, go ahead and start the process of stealing your blood.

But even though effective, the tick's perceptual apparatus

leaves behind far more than it brings in.

So if that tick were to, you know, encounter me right now,

it would get something right about me.

I am indeed emitting acid from my skin.

There are indeed differences in surface temperature on my skin, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay, but think of how much it misses about me,

all the attributes I have that it misses.

We should then note humans are no different.

We have a certain perceptual apparatus

that was evolved to perform certain very specific tasks

that were good for humans to perform

and that work though mostly probably by ignoring lots of other things.

Well, I think then, that should lead us to say, "Okay, what are we missing?

What else might be in this room?"

In the same way that the tick is aloof to the very blade of grass that it hangs on,

we could all be aloof to the very "blades of grass" that we're hanging on right now.

And there might be things that are actually very interesting out there,

maybe very distressing out there,

that we're just not picking up on.

[Strieber] When we first start out in the world, we're atabula rasa.

And what the brain begins to do is it begins to make comparisons.

It builds an image of reality over the first few years of life.

When you're first born, you probably see very unformed symbolic images, if anything.

But by the time you're 3 or 4, you know a door is a door, a house is a house,

and you have an immediate awareness of what's around you.

But when something that isn't from this reality enters into it,

the brain suddenly has trouble.

An adult in confronting an unknown phenomenon

has a lot of trouble forming it into what it actually is.

So there's a gap between what's out there and what we're seeing.

But we don't know how that gap works because we can't tell the difference.

[Madden] So if there's anumwelt,

there's got to be anuber-umwelt, a super "around world."

So the idea is organisms carve out a space of relevance to themselves

from a much broader space that is the sum total of the world.

And the idea then is we walk around in anumwelt,

but it doesn't mean that we couldn't possibly bump into things

that were in the uber-umwelt. Now think of it.

If indeed we were to encounter something from theuber-umwelt,

it would be something that literally does not make sense to us.

It would be something uncanny. We might even say alien to us.

We shouldn't be surprised then that we bump into things that we call ghosts,

that we bump into things that we might call fairies,

we bump into things that we might call spirits,

we bump into things that we might call Sasquatch,

we bump into things that we might call UFOs.

[Chase] The idea that our senses don't give us an objective window into the world

can help us to explain why some of these encounters are so weird and uncanny.

And it could also help us to explain

one of the other odd aspects of anomalous experiences,

which is that they often happen in the wake of trauma.

And this idea is called the filter theory.

[Kripal] So when I say that paranormal phenomena are about trauma,

I don't mean that reductively, by which I don't mean that the UFO or the ghost

or the precognitive dream or the telepathic communication

is nothing but a memory of something really bad that happened in the past.

What I mean is that the traumatic event or the

suffering poked a hole in the human being,

and the human being is now more porous, more open to reality in a way.

That's not necessarily a good thing

or not necessarily a healthy thing,

but it does, I think, render human beings more porous,

and it allows other things to come in.

And behind all those comments is what I call,

or what other people have called, the filter thesis.

And it's essentially the idea that the body and the brain do not produce consciousness,

but they mediate it, they filter it, they actually reduce it.

That consciousness exists everywhere, it's essentially cosmic,

and that what happens with a human body and a brain

is that consciousness gets filtered or reduced down

to Jeff or to whatever your name is.

And it's a fiction, and it works for a time,

but then what happens in trauma is that something punches through Jeff

or punches through the ego,

and suddenly you have access to this broader awareness.

Talk about therapists, my therapist said I had hypervigilance,

-[Finley] Oh, okay. -that's the term that they used, um,

which I know has a negative connotation at times,

but I think what one person may call hypervigilance,

I think another person might call survival skills.

- Sure. - Right?

And I think in order for our ancestors and for us to still exist today,

given all the challenges that, you know, we faced historically,

not just from, you know, racism and, you know, lynchings and segregation,

but, I mean, we're out in the backwoods of East Texas,

you've got mountain lions and wild hogs and snakes

- [Finley] Very much. That's right.

and, you know, coyotes and, you know, all kinds of other, you know, dangers.

Most African Americans in Texas

trace their roots back to East Texas because of the slave trade.

So you had a region where there were, call it natural threats,

and then you also had a host of unnatural threats.

So I don't know how you could survive in a scenario like that

without having some form of hypervigilance

or some form of heightened awareness of your surroundings

and being able to navigate those circumstances and situations.

And maybe that trait, whether that's the cultural trait,

whether that's a genetic trait, whether it's, you know, a learned behavior,

maybe some of those things contribute to why you might be more aware

when you experience a phenomenon that, you know, is anomalous.

Like maybe you're just more tuned to the anomalies than the average person.

[Kripal] I think human suffering and trauma are really important

to paranormal phenomena in general.

I think Courtney's story is about human beings and about human suffering.

It's about the world of the dead.

It's about social justice. It's about a lot of things.

And I think these are the themes that come up again and again when you really look at

not just UFO phenomena, but paranormal phenomena in general.

You need some kind of deep emotional trauma to invoke these processes.

These processes are a kind of cry for healing,

they're kind of a cry for justice,

they're kind of a cry for other human beings to pay attention.

So that's what I hear in that particular story.

But it's also what I hear in a lot of these stories, by the way.

I think it shares that.

[King] The reality of the UFO phenomenon is far more complex and nuanced

than it is portrayed in the media.

These experiences are often wrapped up with other high strangeness events.

They tend to operate by a dream-like logic

that makes them hard to make sense of later.

And the experiences themselves are often felt to be deeply personal

and sometimes even spiritual experiences for the people involved.

And because we don't have a good way of talking about these things,

these are the aspects of encounters that are mostly ignored

in the larger conversation about UFOs.

[Chase] What's clear is that if we're going to understand UFOs,

we're going to need some new models.

And one of the best models that we have is called the Six Layer Model

which was developed by Jacques Vallée and Eric Davis.

After looking at thousands of cases,

they identified that people have all kinds of effects from these encounters

that just simply can't be explained by the nuts and bolts paradigm.

They broke down these effects from these encounters into six different categories.

Physical, anti-physical, physiological, psychic, psychological, and cultural.

[Elizondo] So the Six Layer Model is really a way to sort of talk about the phenomenon

in a way that does it justice, right?

It doesn't just narrow it down to the physical,

where you have, yes, nuts and bolts craft seemingly

that leave physical impressions on the ground.

There are people who have been able to touch craft,

and there are all of the signs and symbols there of a physical object.

But then you also have this weird that comes along with it, right?

Where you walk into something, you walk into one of these crafts,

and it's much larger than it looked on the outside.

Um, or maybe it's the opposite, where it looks really huge,

but you go in and it's a really small room.

You have that too.

And so there's sort of these other aspects to it that make it feel very dreamlike.

It doesn't feel like objects in space-time necessarily

when you're actually interacting with the craft.

[King] With UFO reports,

you often have people reporting things that sound contradictory.

On the one hand, we have indications from many reports

that UFOs, at least sometimes, are physical craft.

If we take David Grusch at his word,

physical craft have been recovered by various world governments,

and attempts are being made to reverse engineer them.

All of that suggests something solid and tangible.

But on the other hand, UFOs do things that shouldn't be possible for a physical object.

They can pass through other solid objects.

Time seems to move differently around them.

They seemingly appear and disappear at will.

These things seem to indicate

that UFOs aren't operating in the physical world as we understand it.

[Iandoli] Some of these experiences are so strange

and so extraordinary, so liminal,

that it doesn't seem that they're confined to typical physics

the way that we understand it.

Some of these experiences happen in liminal states

that exist mostly within our consciousness,

even if after those experiences, there's some

kind of biological or physical effect afterwards,

the experience itself seems to transcend our typical physical reality.

[Elizondo] You also have the effects these craft have on people.

And the first area of that is obviously physiological effects.

Just from being near these craft, people have had pretty serious injuries

that seem to be radiological, like exposure to non-ionizing radiation,

where they've literally been microwaved.

They come away with red skin and puffed eyes, right?

And so that's been something that's been studied for a while.

It's not well known, but it's a pretty serious aspect to this phenomenon.

[King] This is another area where we seem to see UFOs operating

in a realm that is both physical and non-physical.

Because while we have many reports,

including reports from highly credible members of our military,

of serious injuries like severe burns and brain trauma,

there are also other effects that people experience from proximity to a UFO

that are much more strange and much harder to explain.

[Strieber] Interestingly enough, being in the proximity of a UFO, being close to a UFO,

very often causes disruptions in the normal flow of consciousness.

And a person will have experiences

such as apparent movement through time,

uh, become psychically active in ways that they weren't before,

and other sort of phenomena, epiphenomena, will occur.

And if they do become psychically active, that may last.

It may become part of their lives.

And so proximity does indeed affect the psyche very profoundly.

[Chase] The psychic aspect of the UFO phenomenon

can be really hard for people to accept.

Things that happen typically include telepathic communication,

precognitive events, and levitation.

These are all things that most people don't even accept to be real.

And so it's really hard to factor it into our understanding of UFOs.

And yet, when we go to the experiencer data,

these are the things that are reported all the time.

[Kripal] I don't think there's any way to separate the UFO or UAP and psi phenomena.

I think they're not the same thing, but they're very much integrated.

The one is often an after-effect or a result of an encounter or a contact experience.

I think to slice that off is a huge mistake.

If you want to understand what's going on,

you need to take into account the human effects

and how human beings are changed by these encounters.

Because that might, in fact, be the phenomenon. That might be its intention.

Um-- And I think, of course, this is what a lot of people want to do.

They wanna focus on the nuts and bolts,

but they don't wanna focus on the weird and the strange, which is how they frame this.

Or the woo, as they say. I think that's just a cop-out.

[Elizondo] Then there are other effects as well,

right, that are a little bit more personal.

And this happens to especially people who have

close encounters with not just the craft,

but also sometimes the entities that are usually associated with these craft.

Where after this exposure, it sort of starts to set you down a path

to rethink who you are, to rethink how your life is unfolding.

[Masters] Ontological shock is when something happens to you

that challenges your notions of ontology, epistemology.

What is our role in this universe?

What is the universe? What is reality?

I've personally experienced that on a number of occasions, and many people have.

Something happens where you might have missing time, or you see a UFO,

or you get abducted into a UFO,

or you have telepathic communication with beings.

All of those things aren't normal

in the way we conceptualize day-to-day life,

so it challenges our notions of what is real,

and that causes a shock response.

[Strieber] A first encounter is extremely stressful,

especially if it's a physical encounter with physical beings.

It can't-- There can be nothing more stressful.

But the stress doesn't stop with the shock of the encounter itself.

It is the even greater shock of what happens to your mind and your consciousness

when it comes into contact with a consciousness that is so provocative, so active,

and can actually enter your mind and enter your consciousness,

something that you're not used to ever having happen.

The stress level is extremely high, and it can be devastating.

[Finley] I think for those who have experienced the phenomenon,

or even those who are just compelled by the data,

it forces us to think of ourselves as connected to something bigger

than what we experience in our material reality

that seems to appear as our primary reality,

that we're connected to something beyond that.

And it forces us to think about what that might mean,

and what it might mean in the social and historical realm,

that is to say, how we live in this world, our ethics, how we treat others,

what we do with our lives, how we treat the environment, and so on.

For me, it pushes us to consider all of those kinds of things.

[Elizondo] When you have an experience like this,

there's this thing that happens where it takes you from your present context.

It takes you out of your everyday reality,

and it forces you to look at a new one.

It's not just an observation, it's an experience.

And it invites a sort of participation, and it demands a participation.

You really don't have a choice. Some people do, but many don't.

And there's just something that happens when you're put into that kind of a place

where you're forced to surrender.

It's almost like pain, right, where when you have a pain in your body,

you have to attend to it.

And if you don't, the pain gets worse and worse and worse.

And when we have these experiences,

it's almost like it's forcing you to pay attention.

[Bishop] I think when somebody sees a UFO or has an experience of one,

it kind of forces you to confront what your belief systems are,

how you feel about things, how you feel about other people,

your place in the world, and how big or small it is.

And if people can integrate it properly,

I think it's often a good thing, even if it's traumatic.

[Strieber] A new reality is what happens when it touches you in any way.

When you realize that it's real, even if you've never had an experience.

When you have an experience of close encounter, either physical or non-physical.

When a UFO comes into your proximity,

close enough for you to know that it's something

other than simply a moving star that could be

a satellite, these things are devastating.

They cause you to reconstruct your understanding of the world.

[Chase] One of the most fascinating aspects of anomalous experiences

is how they impact the people who have these encounters.

While these experiences can sometimes be extremely stressful and even traumatic,

many people come out of these situations

with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in their lives.

Asking questions about what these other intelligences and subtle realms might be

seems to help us clarify who we are, what's important to us,

and how we ought to be living our lives.

[Leffall] I think it starts before the UFO sighting.

So my worldview, I think, is really shaped really a lot by anomalous experience.

When I was 3 or 4 years old, I got run over by a horse.

The horse was trampling over the top of me, but somehow didn't step on me.

If you ask my grandmother about that story, she has her own take on it.

But I think everybody agrees that a 4-year-old getting run over by a horse, you know,

and walking away from that incident, you know, kind of unscathed

is pretty miraculous.

And then when I think back to that experience,

I just remember seeing the scene after the horse was about to hit me.

The horse is coming, I see the horse's chest, everything goes black,

and then I see the scene from a different

vantage point, almost like 10 feet in the air.

I never thought about it. I didn't know what a near-death experience was.

I never heard of an out-of-body experience. I didn't know

about any of that stuff, really probably until more recently. Um...

I just remember after that experience,

I felt like I had this knowing that, you know, my life was spared,

and that my life was supposed to be lived a certain way,

and that I should conduct myself in a certain way,

and that effectively, I was given a second chance,

and I should make the most of that second chance.

[Chase] It's really interesting to consider that

the psychological impacts of these encounters

could translate into more widespread effects as well.

As these ideas and stories work their way into our folklore and our media,

these are things that can begin to affect us on a cultural level.

And people like Jacques Vallée have gone so far as to suggest

that this might actually be the purpose of the phenomenon.

[King] Jacques Vallée proposed that the UFO phenomenon might be what he referred to as

a control mechanism that influences and guides human beliefs and behavior.

This control mechanism works at the level of myth,

feeding certain belief systems while undermining others.

It's been compared to a thermostat

where the goal is to guide humanity

by keeping our beliefs within certain parameters.

But why this would be done,

or what the ultimate goal of the control mechanism might be, is a mystery.

[Kripal] I'm articulating a position

that Jacques has articulated in a much fuller fashion,

and it is manipulating us, and it's manipulating a worldview

or a mythological system that's much deeper than we're aware of,

and we're running our cultures on that operating system,

but we're not really looking at the operating system.

And I think the UFO or the UAP phenomenon

has been at the core of the history of religions for millennia,

and I think the religions have been running the systems.

So absolutely, I think this is a big, big thing

that has gone on for thousands of years and is behind human culture.

[Chase] People can sometimes be surprised or even uncomfortable

about the fact that a lot of the leading voices in UFOlogy right now

come from the world of religious studies.

People don't always love that comparison.

But at the same time, if we're talking about something

that can impact and change people's belief systems,

that operates at the level of myth,

and that can even give people a deeper purpose in their lives,

then we need to talk to people who are experts on those things.

And that's exactly what religious studies scholars explore.

[Pasulka] If you look at the history of humans,

you're going to see that it's a history of engagement with non-human intelligence

because a lot of people believe in non-human intelligence.

A lot of people who are in different religions believe in non-human intelligence.

They could be angels, they could be God, bodhisattvas,

and these beings, they believe, exchange information with them.

[Kripal] My joke is, when a god comes down out of the sky

and does something to a human being in the ancient world,

that's called religion.

But when that happens in the modern world, that's just crazy.

And so we draw this distinction between what can happen today

and what happened in the past,

and I think it makes us comfortable.

And I think it preserves our religions too, you know.

So I think there's a lot of reasons why we resist this notion

that anomalous or impossible things happen today.

I think there are religious reasons, there are political reasons,

there are existential reasons, there are all kinds of reasons people do that.

A good portion of what I do is I look at the historical record,

I look at these things that we call ascent narratives.

You find them in every single culture.

So I've been studying this in the Christian tradition and in the Jewish tradition.

And what happened was that I was writing a book about the ascent narratives

regarding purgatory, which is a Catholic doctrine.

It's about what happens to your soul after a person who's Catholic dies.

Do they go to heaven?

What happens if they are not, you know, good enough to get into heaven?

Well, their soul goes to purgatory.

And I had to do a lot of archival research,

which is basically archives are libraries for really old books.

A lot of times you have to be really careful with the pages

because if you touch them, they'll disintegrate.

I'd look through these records and I would find these ascent narratives.

And what happened was I had so many of them.

And a lot of them had to do with objects that would come down from the heavens

and greet people or meet people, and people would have engagement with them.

And I thought this was different than your normal ascent narrative.

So I continued to write these down.

I had a big log of these, and I asked a friend of mine about this.

And he said, these really look like modern day reports of UFOs.

And I rejected that at first. I thought, "No way, that's pretty crazy."

But then what happened was there was a experiencer group, a group of UFO experiencers.

They had a conference in my town, and I attended it.

And when I attended it, I listened to people basically talk about what was in my log.

And that was the first time that I actually made the connection

that what had happened a thousand years ago, 2000 years ago,

was still happening today.

And people were using almost exact language.

[Chase] The similarities between modern accounts of UFO encounters

and the kinds of mystical events that form the basis of world religions

are hard to deny.

But as Diana herself argues, we need to be careful not to take this comparison too far.

It's really easy to assume that angels and demons are actually UFOs

or that UFOs are actually angels and demons.

But UFOs and angels and demons are just ideas that we've attached to this phenomenon.

And the fact that these things are so similar and yet also so different

should give us a hint that we don't have the whole picture.

[King] One of the many similarities

that the UFO phenomenon shares with religion is that

it seems to be inextricably linked with our beliefs about the afterlife

and what happens to people after they die.

Dead friends and relatives often appear or convey messages to loved ones

during UFO and contact experiences.

Religious texts are filled with stories about

people being taken to the afterlife in ships

or in bright balls of light that sound a lot like modern UFO encounters.

This relationship between the UFO phenomenon and the dead is perplexing.

And yet it's difficult to deny that there does seem to be some profound connection.

I first encountered it on my first abduction in 1985

when a school friend who I did not know at the time was dead

was there in part of the experience, which was very extraordinary.

And, uh, then about three months later,

I found out he was dead and, boy, that was, floored me.

But later then, when my wife started to get people

to come up to our cabin to have close encounters,

they would always be announced by someone finding that their dead friends or relatives

had showed up either during the experience or a few hours before.

And whenever that happened, Annie would say to me,

"You'll see the visitors tonight." And we always did.

This is part of it.

And is it that they are in the world

in such a way that they don't have a barrier between the living and the dead?

Or do they bring kind of an illusion of our own dead with them

in that we don't have any dead?

There's no real dead.

We don't know the answer to these questions.

But we do know this, the relationship between the visitors and the dead

in some way exists and is quite real.

And exactly how that all works, I think we're fairly far from understanding.

[Pasulka] Today, people talk about NDEs, near-death experiences,

and these people in my field will call ascent narratives.

Because even a thousand years ago, 2000 years ago, you go back,

people have always had these narratives of ascent,

what happens to people after they die.

A lot of cultures believe that people ascend places, maybe to heaven.

Different cultures have different names.

[Cutchin] Well, psychopomps are figures

that historically have been charged with leading human souls

from this life into the afterlife.

And these sometimes come in the form of deities,

and they sometimes come in the form of folk figures or even ancestors

or highly placed members of a society, including shamanic practitioners.

And in the case of their similarities to UFOs,

there are numerous aspects that you can sort of pick out of the UFOlogical literature

that seem to suggest qualities similar to that.

Like psychopomps, the UFO is a transportation-obsessed phenomenon.

And it does the exact same thing that psychopomps did.

They transport people to other realms.

[Finley] You're talking about an ancestry that you have continued to experience.

Can you say something about that?

Because I think that's-- A lot of times when we talk about ancestors,

African Americans and others, we're talking in the abstract.

- Right. - But you believe that

- you're really connected to your ancestors. - Mm-hm.

- You've heard from your ancestors. - Mm-hm.

- They led you to this land. - Mm-hm.

- Which you bought, which you now own. - Mm-hm.

- That's really powerful. - Right.

And here's my thing. If it wasn't them, who was it? You know?

- Whose ancestors was it that led me here, right? - [Finley laughing] Right, right.

So I do believe they're here. I believe that they watch over us.

I think they guide us. I think they teach us

if we're willing to listen and we're willing to learn.

So they're not abstract concepts to me.

They're individuals that had life experiences,

that had lessons that they taught.

And I believe that they continue to teach.

I'm discovering this as I'm talking.

I think there's probably an element of this, which is, you know,

because you're open, you still honor and respect them and you want to learn from them.

I think they might be more inclined to communicate with you.

- [Finley] Sure. -Because you're willing to listen.

I don't know how it works, but I just know what happens.

You know what's happened to me.

How does all that come together in a meaningful

way for you that helps you moving forward?

And what does all that mean moving forward?

Yeah. Well, I think a couple of things. Number one,

if you don't know where you've been, you don't know where you're going.

And, you know, I think a lot of us have lost sight of our history and our heritage.

And I think that makes it hard for people to know, you know, what to do next

because they don't fully recognize what's happened before.

And so when you think about, you know, slavery, think about Jim Crow,

you think about all the things that our ancestors had to go through,

but we're here.

You know, my grandmother did the tree of 10 generations going back.

And that meant those people overcame those things in spite of those things.

And that, you know, they have a legacy, you know.

And so when I talk to my sons and they're, you know, cutting up in class,

like, "No, no, we don't do that."

No, you come from this. This is the history. This is the legacy.

This is what this is about.

And this is how we have to steward and shepherd that legacy.

Your grandmother's experiences, these visions you've had,

the voices you've heard, the UFO phenomena,

all have sort of pushed you in a certain direction in life.

Is that what you mean? Or is that related to

when you say you've been asked to be a steward of this land?

Yeah. You said, that's what I'm implying.

That's not what I'm implying. That's what I'm saying.

That's what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm saying.

I didn't wake up one morning and say, "You know what I'd like to do?

- I'd like to go own a slave plantation. - [laughs]

And I like to see, you know, I like to have my child

have dreams about their dead ancestors communicating messages.

Like nobody asks for this type of phenomena to appear.

But when it happens to you and you believe your great grandfather is asking you

to purchase this property and you don't know what the property is,

you know, if your great grandfather asked you to do something, you do it.

I mean, that's just how I'm raised.

My mom asked me to do something, I do it.

And I think I've been asked to do something,

and I've been able to see the positive attributes that it's brought to our family.

You know, we started back having family reunions

like we used to have when I was a kid

and we hadn't had them for 20 years, you know, and now we're having them again.

And so I don't think I've been asked to own property and raise cattle.

I think I've been asked to preserve our family history

and to preserve our family stories and to share with the world

that there's more to reality than just materialism and nuts and bolts

and that there's things that happen that lead you.

And if you listen to those little voices, it can lead you

to a place that you might not have ever thought you would be,

but probably is the right place for you to be.

For many African Americans and people in general

who are Christian or otherwise religious,

they allow those ideas to pathologize and demonize these experiences

that probably more people than not have. That hasn't happened to you.

Can you say something about that?

You've been able to hold those intentions

where one doesn't cancel out the other.

Right. Well, let me just say, I think a lot of Christians don't read their Bible.

Just start with that. A lot of people claim to be Christians,

but they don't really know what the word of God says.

Trust me, I'm aware of scriptures like Deuteronomy 18,

where it talks about not consulting with, you know, necromancers, right,

which are people who talk to the dead and that kind of a thing.

Um, and we can get philosophical on this,

but I don't know if I wanna go down that rabbit hole, but...

when you read the Bible, it's full of anomalous experiences.

That's why they wrote it. That's why it was so impactful.

That's why so many people followed. That's why so many people believed

because there were things that were impossible that happened,

- and they were impossible, but they still happened. - [Finley] That's right.

And so we have this view that miracles only happened 2000 years ago.

Miracles don't happen today. God doesn't give visions to people today.

You know, he only gave visions to people 1000 years ago.

People only saw stars in the sky, you know,

2000 years ago when Jesus was born. They don't see them anymore. You know?

Ezekiel saw the wheel 2000 years ago. We don't see that anymore.

But who's to say that that's the case?

You know, I think in a lot of ways, you know,

the Bible is, you know, living and breathing.

And I think it's given us a lot of context about what happened historically.

I think it has given us a way to look at the world.

But by no means do I think that the miracles are over, you know,

and that God can't perform a miracle tomorrow

and can't speak through someone, you know...

- You know, the Old Testament says God spoke to a donkey. - [Finley] Yeah.

So why can't he speak through a 5-year-old?

You know, like, come on, like, what are we talking about?

[Finley] This idea that miracles happened in the past,

or that sacred figures are ensconced in the past and not today

happens across all kinds of religious traditions

and not simply ones that that Courtney decries.

The flip side is he's able to connect miracles

in his own tradition to anomalous experience and the paranormal today

in a way that for him is empowering,

because he can see miracles happening, hearing from ancestors,

through a child, including his own,

as something that makes perfect sense.

Why should revelation, why should miracles using those "religious terms" cease?

Is the world so different now? Is it not so enchanted?

Not so for Courtney. He sees this all as coherent.

There's no break between the past

and seeing the divine as active in the world

and speaking through people and doing fantastic things

as different from what he and his family have experienced today.

And I agree with them. Why should we just see these kinds of things in the past?

[Madden] I think one of the virtues of the UFO phenomenon is it's showing us that this,

the miraculous didn't seem to just, like, end in the first century AD,

that it's always been around and maybe suppressed or controlled,

or, you know, like we're only allowed to think of it

under certain politically safe circumstances, stuff like that.

But it's actually been around. I think this is important for us

because it's a re-enchantment of the world, right?

It's allowing us to live in a world that maybe has something to say to us

that isn't indifferent to us for good or ill, okay?

But it's re-enchanting the world, what we've been told under the sort of...

the weight of physicalism and materialism since the enlightenment,

that we live in a fundamentally indifferent and boring world.

And even though sort of founding events of the religions didn't happen,

that's always the story.

Well, now it seems like the world may indeed be enchanted after all,

and reports of its indifference to us have been grossly overstated.

Re-enchanting the world isn't about relinquishing our objectivity

in favor of fairy tales.

It's about seeing the world as it truly is, in all of its magnificent complexity.

Upon seeing the Earth from space,

many astronauts have described it with newfound wonder, beautiful,

heavenly, shining like a jewel.

That view from orbit allows them to see a reality

that can too often be lost on us in the course of our everyday lives,

that the planet that we call home

is infinitely precious and incredibly rare.

Travel hundreds of millions of miles in any direction,

and you're unlikely to find anything like it.

In the cold vacuum of space, the Earth is a solitary beacon,

a flame around which life gathers.

[King] And in the staggering abundance and

diversity of life that calls this planet home,

there are seemingly infinite ways of being.

Bats fly through a labyrinth of echoes,

their sonar painting vivid pictures in the dark.

Elephants speak across miles of silence,

their low rumbles of language felt through the ground.

Butterflies flutter through a garden of polarized light,

flitting through colors beyond human imagination.

Spiders spin through a web of vibrations,

every tremor a whispered message from the silk.

Even species that are familiar exist in a world

that would be unrecognizable to us,

one might even say alien. And yet each of these fantastical worlds

is a real one that exists alongside our own,

intersecting it in some places while remaining entirely apart in others.

Which begs the question, could there be entities on this planet

that, like infrared light, exist outside of our human ability to perceive them?

What strange intelligences might be lurking in the shadows

at the edges of our own perception?

And what might a greater understanding of who they are

teach us about ourselves?

[inspiring music playing]

[dramatic music playing]