Last Thursday was the 74th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s historic sighting of nine Chevron-like, shiny objects flying over Mount Rainier. So what better way to celebrate the event that officially started the modern flying saucer era, than with the release of my latest conversation with my friend Chris Ryan, host of the podcast Tangentially Speaking.
Chris is very interested in the UFO phenomenon, like many intelligent people –even if most are afraid to admit, it due to the stigma still surrounding the topic. And since UFOs have started to proliferate in American mainstream media, Chris wanted to see if I could explain to him the reasons behind this sudden shift (which IMO is 100% ‘astro-turfing’, meaning it is artificially provoked by certain agents working behind the scenes; but let’s not get into that now).
This episode was recorded in late April, hence why we don’t get to discuss some of the latest and freshest news in UFOland. Regardless I think you might still find it interesting, especially because we made an effort to touch upon subjects and ideas that you will NOT get to hear in current mainstream discussions about UFOs –namely, how human consciousness seems to be deeply intertwined with the phenomenon; something that is very hard to reconcile with the facile assumption that these objects are merely structured spacecraft piloted by extraterrestrial interlopers.
We also spent the first minutes talking about other topics, like the current situation in Mexico with regards to politics and social issues; so if you don’t like your UFO hobby mixed with political issues, then I suggest you skip the first 20 minutes or so. Then again one could easily argue that UFOs *are* a political issue, inasmuch as the belief of UFOs has been regularly manipulated by government agents over the years for numerous reasons –see Adam Gorightly’s book ‘Saucers, Spooks & Kooks’— not to mention the fact that lately UFOs have become the favorite subject of a lot of right-wing extremist pundits, like Tucker Carlson.
So if you want UFOs that are completely devoid of political undertones, may I suggest you stick to ancient sightings like Ezekiel’s wheel or such –but once again, some would suggest the ‘Ancient Aliens’ argument is ALSO tainted with political and racist ideologies…
Oh and if you’re wondering about the image above, that’s one of the illustrations for Greg Bishop’s ‘It Defies Language’, which I thought was very fitting since another thing Chris and I covered in this episode were crop circles. The image is quite crude for my current illustration standards (you can’t say I learned a thing or two in the last 6 years!) but the gag still makes me smile.
Anyway, here’s the link to Chris’s podcast. Enjoy!
Absurd by Design 