July 14, 2024 • 15 mins
Guest host Richard Syrett and journalist Keith Thompson discuss paranormal activity pushing against the contemporary boundaries of the physical sciences.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Keith, I'd be fascinated to learn how your work, your
writings influenced the late great John Mac, Harvard University.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
I had there's a great question. I got to know
John Mac, a very well respected pull up Surprise winning
author from Harvard University. I had already been studying the
UFO phenomenon and had written an article that was based
on a talk I had given to UFO abductees and
(00:35):
individuals who had close encounters. I was invited to come
and share my research, and I had developed in that
talk the idea that there are parallels between what goes
on in these abductions and these close encounters and traditional
rites of passage in indigenous societies where there are you know,
the children are taken from the home, separated and taught
(00:59):
the initiat the the traditions of the culture, for example,
the mythology of the culture through initiation, ceremonies, and rights
of passage. I said, so there's a sense in which
these abductions seem to be initiatory. John Mack found that
article and he said, that's very fascinating, that are they
real are these events really happening? So he sent me
(01:20):
an email said we need to talk, and I knew
who John Mack was, and I said I'd be happy
to So we got to know each other and we
had many very interesting conversations over the years, and he
was so what he did. He went on to become
one of the leading researchers of individuals who have direct
encounters the abductions, who have the experience of being taken
(01:44):
against their will into what appeared to be craft and
various procedures are performed and then people are returned back.
He was asking the first question, are these people mentally?
Is there any indication that abductees have some part killer
psychological disorder? He was a psychiatrist. He's no longer alive
(02:06):
for twenty years now, but he was a psychiatrist, so
that was his first question. He was able to eliminate
that hypothesis off the right, off the top. So he
and I had many good conversations about what kind of
reality is involved in this, and he too reached the
conclusion that we are going to have to try to
expand to reach the data. We're going to have to
(02:28):
expand our models into the phenomenon rather than trying to
shrink the phenomenon down into our established categories. And he
got in a lot of trouble At Harvard University. There
was an inquisition looking at his practices, the standards and
practices he was using. What they were really criticizing was
(02:49):
the topic that he was covering. It's as if you
can at Harvard with a divinity school, so okay to
talk about angels at the divinity school, not so good
to talk about aliens. He said, I'm asking these as
a researcher, I'm asking these as an investigator, as an explorer.
I'm not trying to establish some subtled truth and coming
(03:10):
with answers. I'm asking questions. So I had a great
opportunity to get to know doctor mac and I certainly listened.
He he was he made a great contribution to these
round to our understanding of this phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
So had he started working with abductees prior to reading
your article or did your did your work your conversations
lead him into that work?
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yeah, I can't say. I know he'd already he'd already
encountered evidence for the abductions. He knew about them through
Bud Hopkins researcher, and David Jacobs, a professor of history
at Temple University who took up abduction research. He worked
with both of them and adopted their models for a while,
but he began to see that there were aspects that
(03:58):
had really pointed in the direction of needing to take seriously.
The parapsychological, the paranormal sense. If people are are floated
through through walls, they have the experience of being floated
through walls? Is that something that has ever been reported
(04:18):
in any other aspect of human nature. That was one
of the areas that he was interested in, and I
introduced him to evidence that in the Catholic contemplative tradition
there are credible, not confirmed, but credible reports of contemplatives,
contemplative practitioners of faith, meditation and prayer, indeed levitating, indeed
(04:42):
transcending gravity, and having other phenomena such as stigmata, the
arising on the body of craw crucifixes, and other physical
emblems that reflect deep faith. I mentioned that because abductees
return with physical markets, so he was interested as I
(05:03):
am interested in the larger patterns of mind body interactions
that are not acknowledged by our science, and that do
appear in the UFO phenomenon, that also appear beyond the
UFO phenomenon in other areas of science that show these
kinds of potentials, and we could discuss those.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
In greater length, right, because there are some fascinating parallels
between the abduction phenomenon and the ND which you've experienced.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Right, that's exactly right. When I was in my mid twenties,
I was a body surfing with friends off the coast
of Hawaii. I misjudged the waves, including the rip currents,
and this time of year people are out in the water.
Be very careful. Rip currents are the real danger. They
pull you back out. It's not the big waves coming
(05:54):
in all we swim parallel to the shore. If you're
caught in a rip current, that's Keith Thompson's advice for
the night, so that you can avoid a near death experience.
I was taken out and I was exhausted, and I
was pummeled repeatedly and taken by waves, and it came
a point when I was convinced that I had that
(06:14):
I was dying. I said, I'm I'm going to die.
There was just the recognition and suddenly I was rising up,
I thought, from the bottom of the ocean, from the
sand where I had just been whacked pretty hard. In fact,
I was rising above the ocean, Richard, I was. In fact,
I had never heard of the out of body experience.
(06:36):
But I found I left my body through the back
of my head, and I saw the swimmer named Keith,
and I saw the friends on the shore who had
not gotten into the trouble I'd gotten, and I had
the absolute certainty that I had died. I went through
the tunnel. And by the way, this was all before
(06:57):
the near death experience had been made famous by the
research of Raymond Moody in his book Life After Life.
So I'd never heard of these stages. So I wasn't
confirming something I'd already believed or heard about, in fact,
coming back and telling people that I'd had this because
I survived. Obviously, there was one key here's one key element.
(07:18):
We could say that the near death experience of seeing
at departed relatives, which I did, seeming to be in
a celestial place that resembles reports of heaven or the afterlife,
which I did. And I'm not from a deeply religious family,
but those can all be explained in principle. You know, well,
that's just brain systems and enacting patterns that can be.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Explained of m and doorphins.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Right, that's exactly right. And one of my friends on
the shore, I was two. The body called Keith was
two hundred yards out according to witnesses, and it was
flailing in waves and the sound of the waves was deafening.
So one of my friends, speaking at the volume of
tone that you and I are talking right now, named
(08:03):
Mary Payne, turned to her friend a front another friend
of ours, who is on the trip, and said, why
didn't he listen? I told him it was too dangerous?
Why did he go out anyway? And I told her
from wherever I was, of a kind of vast space
of awakened mine, I said, I'm fine, I'm okay. Dead
(08:27):
isn't dead? I remember the recognition that dead isn't She
couldn't hear me, So long story short, I survived. I
was carried into a cove. I was surrounded by two
dolphins that accompanying accompanied me in. I noticed them and
it was confirmed by my friends later. Turns out dolphins
are very often part of this. The next day, after
(08:49):
I had survived and had recovered with aches and pains
and scrapes and scratches. I asked Mary, could we go
for a walk. She said sure, she knew I wanted
to talk to her, and I said, I heard she
said yesterday on the beach. Said what are you talking about?
I said, I heard you say that. I why didn't
he listen? Why did he go out? I told him
it was dangerous. Richard, I watched the blood bringing out
(09:12):
of my friend marriage. We both knew what it had meant.
We've never given any thought to when consciousness is on
and when it's off. I had told her the day
before I had died and come back, but none of
my friends had heard of it either. So one of
the things that near death experiences and UFO experiences have
in common is they find that when they tell others
(09:34):
about their experience, there's disbelief. There's often scorn and scoffing.
I learned it very quick, as the German poet Garretta said,
tell a wise person or else keep silent, because the
masses will mock it right away. I learned very quickly
that talking about seemingly having died, experiencing death and coming
(09:55):
back was not something to talk about casually at parties,
So that gave me a deep affinity with UFO close
encountered people.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
You mentioned something earlier in your conversations with the late
John Mack, and that is something you also you write
about in the book, and that is that the UFO
the abduction phenomenon has to do with or or is
(10:25):
similar to some of these well known rights of passage
where in human societies, where where you know, young boys
are taken from the family and they have to survive
in the woods on their own, or what have you.
So what is the suggestion here that that this UFO
phenomenon is part of a a initiation ritual to help
(10:46):
humans transition from what from what good?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
To what? Very good question, Very good question. Certainly, I'm
talking about it in two ways. One is that is
the effect it is like an initiation in that sense
that the children at the Zimbabwe School one of the
best cases in the nineteen nineties sixty sixty some children
saw a craft during recess one day. One of them
(11:13):
was a young girl named Emily Trim. She came from
a conservative Christian family. She had a direct interaction with
a luminous being with dark eyes, they locked eyes. She
it had deeply touched her soul. So that was the beginning.
That's stage one of an initiation ceremony. Ever, write a passage,
a separation from reality as you know it, and you
(11:36):
were suddenly placed in a middle ground psychologically, speaking of
the middle ground betwixt and between your marginal you tell
people what you saw that didn't really happen, so your
own existence, You question your own sanity, your own existence. Finally,
the final stage is when you complete it and in
(11:57):
some sense find the resources you need. Joseph Campbell talks
about this in his marvelous book The Hero with a
Thousand Faces. So young Emily Trim, eight years old, finally
completed her right of passage, even though she didn't know
that it was a right of passage. That language wasn't
available to her. But it was only by returning to
(12:18):
the Zimbabwe School in Africa after her parents had taken
Emily and her brother out of the school taken them
back to Canada. She only finished her right of passage
when she came back to Zimbabwe met with a local shaman,
a spiritual elder, who said, you must speak of what
you have seen and in doing that, she was able
(12:41):
to complete the process. So in that sense, they like
a right of passage, a separation, an initiation, and a
return with wisdom for the rest of the community. But
in another sense, I'm arguing that it may be that
reality itself is calling on us, calling on humans metaphorically literally,
early or both to say, expand this is a call
(13:03):
from the cosmos. I continue to say, it's as if
we're getting news from the universe that there is more
to reality than we have acknowledged, and that we are
being asked, are we ready to join that? Are we
ready to become bigger? Are we ready to behave as
if we are part of the larger, larger cosmos, meaning
(13:23):
right here and now, are expanding our maps of science
and even religion to become consistent with the capacities that
we already have. I think the answer is yes. And
you know, a call from the cosmos is only a
one way trip. It's a monologue until we respond. Then
(13:45):
it becomes a dialogue. And I'm trying to invite a
dialogue with the phenomenon on some new levels, including a work.
I strongly believe that the abductions are already happening in
some common ground we have with the aliens. We can
call them aliens or beings, whether they are the same
(14:07):
beings that the philosophies in other cultures. Indigenous cultures, for example,
have always described humans as being in interactions with such beings.
So they may not be from outer space, but in
any case, there's already common ground that shaman shamans in
the sap shamanistic cultures have worked with. The shaman is
(14:29):
that figure in indigenous cultures who works with the beings
in the lower realm, the middle realm, and upper realm.
So I bring that kind of material into the book
that takes it beyond the saucer frame of reference only,
which is in some ways confusing for people who think
the UFO phenomenon is nothing but et It may be extraterrestrial,
(14:51):
but even then the craft certainly don't behave entirely as
solidly physical, or they are only physical in some of
their spaces. They trans they transfer, they move between physical
and paraphysical with equalities that our science has a trend
(15:12):
us to expect. So we're learning on the fly with
this phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Listen to more Coast to Coast, a m every weeknight
at one a m Eastern and go to Coast to
coastam dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Keith, I'd be fascinated to learn how your work, your
writings influenced the late great John Mac, Harvard University.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
I had there's a great question. I got to know
John Mac, a very well respected pull up Surprise winning
author from Harvard University. I had already been studying the
UFO phenomenon and had written an article that was based
on a talk I had given to UFO abductees and
(00:35):
individuals who had close encounters. I was invited to come
and share my research, and I had developed in that
talk the idea that there are parallels between what goes
on in these abductions and these close encounters and traditional
rites of passage in indigenous societies where there are you know,
the children are taken from the home, separated and taught
(00:59):
the initiat the the traditions of the culture, for example,
the mythology of the culture through initiation, ceremonies, and rights
of passage. I said, so there's a sense in which
these abductions seem to be initiatory. John Mack found that
article and he said, that's very fascinating, that are they
real are these events really happening? So he sent me
(01:20):
an email said we need to talk, and I knew
who John Mack was, and I said I'd be happy
to So we got to know each other and we
had many very interesting conversations over the years, and he
was so what he did. He went on to become
one of the leading researchers of individuals who have direct
encounters the abductions, who have the experience of being taken
(01:44):
against their will into what appeared to be craft and
various procedures are performed and then people are returned back.
He was asking the first question, are these people mentally?
Is there any indication that abductees have some part killer
psychological disorder? He was a psychiatrist. He's no longer alive
(02:06):
for twenty years now, but he was a psychiatrist, so
that was his first question. He was able to eliminate
that hypothesis off the right, off the top. So he
and I had many good conversations about what kind of
reality is involved in this, and he too reached the
conclusion that we are going to have to try to
expand to reach the data. We're going to have to
(02:28):
expand our models into the phenomenon rather than trying to
shrink the phenomenon down into our established categories. And he
got in a lot of trouble At Harvard University. There
was an inquisition looking at his practices, the standards and
practices he was using. What they were really criticizing was
(02:49):
the topic that he was covering. It's as if you
can at Harvard with a divinity school, so okay to
talk about angels at the divinity school, not so good
to talk about aliens. He said, I'm asking these as
a researcher, I'm asking these as an investigator, as an explorer.
I'm not trying to establish some subtled truth and coming
(03:10):
with answers. I'm asking questions. So I had a great
opportunity to get to know doctor mac and I certainly listened.
He he was he made a great contribution to these
round to our understanding of this phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
So had he started working with abductees prior to reading
your article or did your did your work your conversations
lead him into that work?
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yeah, I can't say. I know he'd already he'd already
encountered evidence for the abductions. He knew about them through
Bud Hopkins researcher, and David Jacobs, a professor of history
at Temple University who took up abduction research. He worked
with both of them and adopted their models for a while,
but he began to see that there were aspects that
(03:58):
had really pointed in the direction of needing to take seriously.
The parapsychological, the paranormal sense. If people are are floated
through through walls, they have the experience of being floated
through walls? Is that something that has ever been reported
(04:18):
in any other aspect of human nature. That was one
of the areas that he was interested in, and I
introduced him to evidence that in the Catholic contemplative tradition
there are credible, not confirmed, but credible reports of contemplatives,
contemplative practitioners of faith, meditation and prayer, indeed levitating, indeed
(04:42):
transcending gravity, and having other phenomena such as stigmata, the
arising on the body of craw crucifixes, and other physical
emblems that reflect deep faith. I mentioned that because abductees
return with physical markets, so he was interested as I
(05:03):
am interested in the larger patterns of mind body interactions
that are not acknowledged by our science, and that do
appear in the UFO phenomenon, that also appear beyond the
UFO phenomenon in other areas of science that show these
kinds of potentials, and we could discuss those.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
In greater length, right, because there are some fascinating parallels
between the abduction phenomenon and the ND which you've experienced.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Right, that's exactly right. When I was in my mid twenties,
I was a body surfing with friends off the coast
of Hawaii. I misjudged the waves, including the rip currents,
and this time of year people are out in the water.
Be very careful. Rip currents are the real danger. They
pull you back out. It's not the big waves coming
(05:54):
in all we swim parallel to the shore. If you're
caught in a rip current, that's Keith Thompson's advice for
the night, so that you can avoid a near death experience.
I was taken out and I was exhausted, and I
was pummeled repeatedly and taken by waves, and it came
a point when I was convinced that I had that
(06:14):
I was dying. I said, I'm I'm going to die.
There was just the recognition and suddenly I was rising up,
I thought, from the bottom of the ocean, from the
sand where I had just been whacked pretty hard. In fact,
I was rising above the ocean, Richard, I was. In fact,
I had never heard of the out of body experience.
(06:36):
But I found I left my body through the back
of my head, and I saw the swimmer named Keith,
and I saw the friends on the shore who had
not gotten into the trouble I'd gotten, and I had
the absolute certainty that I had died. I went through
the tunnel. And by the way, this was all before
(06:57):
the near death experience had been made famous by the
research of Raymond Moody in his book Life After Life.
So I'd never heard of these stages. So I wasn't
confirming something I'd already believed or heard about, in fact,
coming back and telling people that I'd had this because
I survived. Obviously, there was one key here's one key element.
(07:18):
We could say that the near death experience of seeing
at departed relatives, which I did, seeming to be in
a celestial place that resembles reports of heaven or the afterlife,
which I did. And I'm not from a deeply religious family,
but those can all be explained in principle. You know, well,
that's just brain systems and enacting patterns that can be.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Explained of m and doorphins.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Right, that's exactly right. And one of my friends on
the shore, I was two. The body called Keith was
two hundred yards out according to witnesses, and it was
flailing in waves and the sound of the waves was deafening.
So one of my friends, speaking at the volume of
tone that you and I are talking right now, named
(08:03):
Mary Payne, turned to her friend a front another friend
of ours, who is on the trip, and said, why
didn't he listen? I told him it was too dangerous?
Why did he go out anyway? And I told her
from wherever I was, of a kind of vast space
of awakened mine, I said, I'm fine, I'm okay. Dead
(08:27):
isn't dead? I remember the recognition that dead isn't She
couldn't hear me, So long story short, I survived. I
was carried into a cove. I was surrounded by two
dolphins that accompanying accompanied me in. I noticed them and
it was confirmed by my friends later. Turns out dolphins
are very often part of this. The next day, after
(08:49):
I had survived and had recovered with aches and pains
and scrapes and scratches. I asked Mary, could we go
for a walk. She said sure, she knew I wanted
to talk to her, and I said, I heard she
said yesterday on the beach. Said what are you talking about?
I said, I heard you say that. I why didn't
he listen? Why did he go out? I told him
it was dangerous. Richard, I watched the blood bringing out
(09:12):
of my friend marriage. We both knew what it had meant.
We've never given any thought to when consciousness is on
and when it's off. I had told her the day
before I had died and come back, but none of
my friends had heard of it either. So one of
the things that near death experiences and UFO experiences have
in common is they find that when they tell others
(09:34):
about their experience, there's disbelief. There's often scorn and scoffing.
I learned it very quick, as the German poet Garretta said,
tell a wise person or else keep silent, because the
masses will mock it right away. I learned very quickly
that talking about seemingly having died, experiencing death and coming
(09:55):
back was not something to talk about casually at parties,
So that gave me a deep affinity with UFO close
encountered people.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
You mentioned something earlier in your conversations with the late
John Mack, and that is something you also you write
about in the book, and that is that the UFO
the abduction phenomenon has to do with or or is
(10:25):
similar to some of these well known rights of passage
where in human societies, where where you know, young boys
are taken from the family and they have to survive
in the woods on their own, or what have you.
So what is the suggestion here that that this UFO
phenomenon is part of a a initiation ritual to help
(10:46):
humans transition from what from what good?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
To what? Very good question, Very good question. Certainly, I'm
talking about it in two ways. One is that is
the effect it is like an initiation in that sense
that the children at the Zimbabwe School one of the
best cases in the nineteen nineties sixty sixty some children
saw a craft during recess one day. One of them
(11:13):
was a young girl named Emily Trim. She came from
a conservative Christian family. She had a direct interaction with
a luminous being with dark eyes, they locked eyes. She
it had deeply touched her soul. So that was the beginning.
That's stage one of an initiation ceremony. Ever, write a passage,
a separation from reality as you know it, and you
(11:36):
were suddenly placed in a middle ground psychologically, speaking of
the middle ground betwixt and between your marginal you tell
people what you saw that didn't really happen, so your
own existence, You question your own sanity, your own existence. Finally,
the final stage is when you complete it and in
(11:57):
some sense find the resources you need. Joseph Campbell talks
about this in his marvelous book The Hero with a
Thousand Faces. So young Emily Trim, eight years old, finally
completed her right of passage, even though she didn't know
that it was a right of passage. That language wasn't
available to her. But it was only by returning to
(12:18):
the Zimbabwe School in Africa after her parents had taken
Emily and her brother out of the school taken them
back to Canada. She only finished her right of passage
when she came back to Zimbabwe met with a local shaman,
a spiritual elder, who said, you must speak of what
you have seen and in doing that, she was able
(12:41):
to complete the process. So in that sense, they like
a right of passage, a separation, an initiation, and a
return with wisdom for the rest of the community. But
in another sense, I'm arguing that it may be that
reality itself is calling on us, calling on humans metaphorically literally,
early or both to say, expand this is a call
(13:03):
from the cosmos. I continue to say, it's as if
we're getting news from the universe that there is more
to reality than we have acknowledged, and that we are
being asked, are we ready to join that? Are we
ready to become bigger? Are we ready to behave as
if we are part of the larger, larger cosmos, meaning
(13:23):
right here and now, are expanding our maps of science
and even religion to become consistent with the capacities that
we already have. I think the answer is yes. And
you know, a call from the cosmos is only a
one way trip. It's a monologue until we respond. Then
(13:45):
it becomes a dialogue. And I'm trying to invite a
dialogue with the phenomenon on some new levels, including a work.
I strongly believe that the abductions are already happening in
some common ground we have with the aliens. We can
call them aliens or beings, whether they are the same
(14:07):
beings that the philosophies in other cultures. Indigenous cultures, for example,
have always described humans as being in interactions with such beings.
So they may not be from outer space, but in
any case, there's already common ground that shaman shamans in
the sap shamanistic cultures have worked with. The shaman is
(14:29):
that figure in indigenous cultures who works with the beings
in the lower realm, the middle realm, and upper realm.
So I bring that kind of material into the book
that takes it beyond the saucer frame of reference only,
which is in some ways confusing for people who think
the UFO phenomenon is nothing but et It may be extraterrestrial,
(14:51):
but even then the craft certainly don't behave entirely as
solidly physical, or they are only physical in some of
their spaces. They trans they transfer, they move between physical
and paraphysical with equalities that our science has a trend
(15:12):
us to expect. So we're learning on the fly with
this phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Listen to more Coast to Coast, a m every weeknight
at one a m Eastern and go to Coast to
coastam dot com for more
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