The Believer - (Project Book Club)
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At GMC, ignorance is the furthest thing from bliss. Bliss is research, testing, testing the testing, until it results in not just one truck, but a whole lineup.

The 2025 GMC Sierra lineup featuring the Sierra 1500 Heavy Duty and EV. Because true bliss is removing every shadow from every doubt. We are professional grade. Visit GMC.com to learn more. Welcome to Project Book Club. Your hosts, Bryce Sable and Chrissy Newt. Book of the Month is The Believer by Ralph Blumenthal.

You know, I'm excited about this. I hope you are too. It's kind of our morning show, kind of coffee book thing. It's called Project Book Club, folks. And what our thought was is that we both have pretty large UFO libraries. And we thought it might be nice since we know so many other people, including many of you who are watching or listening to this, you also have your own libraries. And you read these books sometimes and you don't know who you can talk to about.

So we feel like, well, you can talk to us. Yeah, that's true. I'm like, I have at least a hundred UFO books, but

but I haven't read a hundred UFO books. That's for sure. They're literally scattered like in my room and bookshelves and by my bed. And you know, I'm always, what I do before I go to bed and if I'm going to read a book, I put it on my bed so that I make sure that I do read it too. But I have so many of them that I use for references and like, it's, I know, but how can you not, if you love UFOs, how can you not have books? Like it just...

you know, or audio books, right? Well, that I think is also a legal way to read a book these days. It's so interesting though, because for a number of years, I just collected whenever possible, the hardcover of a UFO book. Cause I thought, oh, this, you know, this is kind of a fun thing. I need to have this for posterity. I don't know why. And then I said, okay, I've got too many. I can't be buying all these hardcovers. I got to buy soft covers. And then I got a Kindle. And so now I've got,

two giant libraries. One of them is on my Kindle and travels when I travel. And the other is, well, part of it is up there. Part of it is elsewhere. And I got so many books and I'm going to make a confession, Christy, and I hope you won't abandon the show when I tell you this. But of all these books I've got, and it's well over 100, maybe it's closer to 200. And if I'm being perfectly 100% honest,

maybe I've read 50 of them cover to cover, right? And then I've probably read another 75 of them where I've read up to 50%. But sometimes I read the last chapter first and then go flip through it. And I'm not proud of how, I'm not giving the author their due, but that's how I do it. How do you do it? That's interesting. And I don't know, I'd say like I have about 100 too, and I haven't read all of them, but...

I think there is a novelty to having UFO book when you want to reference it. Also, when you know somebody, people are accessible in this space and this counterculture, so they can sign it. You can read a section of it. You can discuss it with people. So that's how I do it. I also listen to a lot of my books because I'm traveling too. So I'm kind of on the run. But I think we should...

bring up one thing that you do that I love the most. Okay, what is that? You have, like you said, almost 200 books, but you have doubles. And what do you do with your doubles? Well, Chrissy, it's very interesting you ask that because I happen to have that book right here. I have a copy of Lou Elizondo's Eminent. And as you can see, I've used my little label maker to say loaner copy. And on the back, it even says, please return when done. So when friends basically...

say, I'm supposed to, they'll say to me, what's going on with this UFO thing? And I'm supposed to explain it all in like 10 minutes or something, which is impossible. I like to give them a book. So sometimes I'll give them a book like Luz and I tell them, please read it. And when you're done, give it back to me. But before you give it back to me,

write what you think about it in the book. So here you've got a couple of people at the beginning, there's others at the end. And then we pass this book around. It's a little like a lending library, but we don't have late fees. So it is kind of fun to do that. And maybe more people will be doing that in the future. I think it's a great way to spread knowledge because let's face it, most of us, when we read a book, we're kind of done with it. It just sits on our shelves.

I think it's brilliant. And it's a community thing. Like you're giving it to people to learn, to, you know, explore themselves. Right. And I, I think it's a fabulous idea. I remember you told me that and I was like, that's really smart. I might steal that. And I think other people might know too. But I have to tell you, it does sound semi smart or something, but it wasn't smart how it started. I was trying to order Eminent and I,

I screwed something up and I thought, okay, I didn't order it. And then I ordered two more copies of it. And when I finally realized I had three copies of Eminent coming to me from Amazon, I was about to like try to figure out how to tell them not to send me three copies. And that seemed so complex. I said, screw it. Just have them send me three copies. I'll loan the other two out. So that's how this habit really started.

I just want people to understand that we have spared no expense bringing Project Blue Book. There, see? See? You knew it. There you go. Project Book Club. And I know that we'll get this right as time goes on because we're spending so much money making a podcast that we even invested in coffee cups. Unbelievable amounts.

Yeah. I kind of hope people, Chrissy, are joining us and having coffee when they watch this. Because, you know, most podcasts about UFOs, and I know you have yours, Rebelliously Curious, I've Got Need to Know. And it always feels like it's, when I listen to it, it feels like it's going on

At night, I feel like it's a nighttime thing. And I want Project Book Club to feel like a morning thing that people can watch it and get on with their day. So we turned the lights on at least this time.

Yeah, it's light and bright. And also I think it makes sense. Like when you're doing a podcast, I usually don't have a coffee. Sometimes I have a pen in my hand because I'm writing down things that maybe the guest is saying. So I want to make notes to maybe bring back the topic that they've mentioned previously, but I never have a coffee cup and I never have a glass of water. So this is practical. It's a morning show vibe. And we're also light and bright. I think that's who you and I are in real life though, Bryce, too.

compared to what people might say about my Discovery Channel show. What are they saying? A little bit more clinical there. But I am a light and bright person, hence the shirt. You are a light and bright person. I try to be, right. I'm really happy that we're doing this book club, although it's interesting. I have been invited. I have a lot of friends that have book clubs or in book clubs or other.

And they enjoy it, right? They meet every month or two months or whatever. And I've never done that because I was afraid that I would let everybody down. I would never get the book read in time. But the idea of a book club for UFOs strikes me as slightly different because...

A lot of times when I'm reading a UFO book and I'm really intrigued by it, I think, well, who can I talk to about this? And the numbers slide. I've got kids. They don't want me to talk to them about it. I've got, you know, I got friends. Not all of the friends want me to talk to them about it.

It's not like you're reading the latest novel from Stephen King or something where you can talk to anybody about it. And so we want this to be kind of a safe space where we're going to read a book every month and then we're going to talk about it. And so we're going to do this monthly. And that means that sometimes at the end of the show, we will tell you this is what we're reading next month. And we're inviting people that are watching this or listening to it to join us.

Yeah, I agree. I'm like, I always want someone to talk UFO stuff if it's not at the debrief or just some friends. We have a mutual friend, Dan McClure. Shout out to Dan. Shout out.

it's, there's not many people. And I guess I would say people that like this topic live all over the world. So sometimes you're on phone calls with people, but you're not always reading the same book at the same time, unless it's like a really big book, like Lou Elizondo's book that came out, Eminent. But it's not happening all the time because there's so many books. I wonder, there's has to be at least, I don't know,

over 5,000 UFO books or maybe like 10,000, maybe more. I don't like, I can't even imagine what the UFO literature canon is and the amount. It's astonishing. And I don't know. It might be because I don't know if this is true and I'm sure I'll be corrected in comments if it's not. But I remember reading about Jackie Gleason when he passed away, had a collection of 5,000 UFO books. And that was a long, long time ago.

And we've been writing them faster than ever these days. So the sheer number of you. So I guess what we're saying is, A, we'll never run out of things to talk about. But B, we'll never get to them. You know, if you have a favorite UFO book, we may never get to it because there are so many and we do it only once a month. We're going to get to 12 of them in a year, but there'll be 12 good ones, we hope.

Yeah. If we do this podcast for a decade, at least we know that I've read a lot of UFO books. You know, I'll go through my, all of my UFO books in my house. There's one book I do have and I should grab it as well. If I can show it, give me a second. Sure.

Okay. Now we need some, uh, clock music. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And there she is. I keep this in my kitchen out of all of the places. And there's two of them, but it's a reference book of UFOs, the UFO encyclopedia. Uh,

It's fantastic. It has literally from A to Z, there's two versions of this or two books of this from A to Z. And it's literally, it says the phenomenon from the beginning and hopefully maybe to the end, but it's unbelievable. And I...

Think people, if you like UFOs and you're like, want to click like a quick reference to something and you need to look it up or you're working in this topic, this is what I recommend. Micah Hanks actually was the one who told me about this and I went out and bought them. You can go buy them on Amazon and we will have an affiliate link. I'm going to plug that.

because why not at the right time? Where you can buy it, I think for like 10 bucks for the digital version. These are 200, but anyway, enough about that. Well, that's a pretty good recommendation for a book. We should do that, but that's not our book of the week. Our book of the week is one that we both have a copy of and it's not even the book of the week. Frankly, it's the book of the month club. Thank you for your Vanna White there. Love that. This is from Ralph Blumenthal. It is The Believer.

It's a book he wrote about John Mack. And before you know who John Mack is, let's talk about who Ralph Blumenthal is. Ralph Blumenthal is the co-reporter of that famous December 16 slash 17, 2017 article in the New York Times. He wrote it with Leslie Kane and...

Why am I blanking the third reporter's name? Do you remember it? Let's say it again. I know. I was just thinking her name, too. We're going to run that in a crawl across this right now, so we're fine. We'll let people see what her name is. Anyway, Ralph has been writing about a number of things for years and

Prior to even breaking that story, he had written a wonderful article about John Mack and Vanity Fair, which is a great read in its own right. But then he brought it all together into a book that came out in 2021 as the pandemic was ending, The Believer. So I enjoyed reading it. What's your take?

I loved it too. I like Ralph. I've gotten to know Ralph over the years personally. I think he's an amazing journalist, first of all. A really interesting part that lends very well with Ralph and knowing about him and a little bit about outside of UFOs, what he writes, he focuses a lot on World War II. And so you see these like undertones of World War II in the beginning of the book.

but that really does, that's that interconnection between John Mack and Ralph Blumenthal, which is kind of intertwined throughout this book at times, especially in the end. But, you know, for anyone who's reading the book, you would know that, or if you've seen it, you would know that or listen to it, I say, or read it. But I really do think that like,

You know, Ralph Blumenthal really captures John Mack. And I think he did a fabulous autobiography and he took years to understand who this man was and the journey that he went through. And I think it's fascinating. And I have a lot of respect for Ralph for doing that. I'm pretty sure that Ralph Blumenthal's journey was to write this book while he was in the pandemic because it came out right after the pandemic. So I'm glad to see he was using his time wisely.

Blumenthal wrote the story of John Mack, and John Mack, of course, is the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Lawrence of Arabia, basically. He did a psychological study of Lawrence, and it became...

a big hit around the world. And he was a psychiatrist teaching at Harvard and he was having a relatively successful career. And then in the middle of that career or toward the end, he got turned on to the alien abduction phenomenon and he started, he fell full force into it. And, and

And complications ensued is how I would say it. It's a fascinating story in that it's really a story of obsession. And a lot of people who have fallen into UFO world will tell you and use that word obsession. They feel like they didn't start out to be obsessed by it, but they were. And that's certainly what happened to Mac. And Chrissy-

I think what's interesting, though, is here is a biography of a guy who most people have never heard of. I mean, maybe 20 years ago they did, but Mac ended up dying in 2004 in a car accident.

He literally was in London. He stepped out into the street and he looked to his left, which is what you do in the United States. But he should have been looking to his right because there came a drunk driver and killed him. And so maybe his star has been in decline a little bit for those 20 years in terms of public knowledge of him. But this book certainly put him back on the map.

Oh, it did for sure. Ralph did it. Ralph Blumenthal did an unbelievable job. And you're right. Even psychologists, a friend of mine that I saw recently is a psychologist. And I asked her and I said, you know, have you, have you ever read, you know, anything about John Mack? And she said, I don't know who he is. And I said, outside of the UFO related stuff, I just said, he's an unbelievable psychologist that was at Harvard. And I'm just reading his autobiography right now. So I think that John had,

And you see this real part, and this is actually not what I was expecting. I actually didn't know if I really had so many expectations for this book, to be honest.

I was like, I don't know what I'm getting myself into in the context. Right. And I'm, I'm happy about that. It's like watching a film. Sometimes you don't want to know, you just want to know the general gist of it, but you don't want to have these expectations because sometimes they don't live up to it. So when I read it, I was like, wow, there's so much history that Ralph puts right off the hop from World War II, from just the, the underpinnings of where John Mack was influenced just by history and

And then you get into these like really solid narratives about him and how he became the man who he is and this personal struggle that he had. There's this inner struggle that's throughout the entire book that makes John Mack such a real person. And there's moments in the book when I went, I'm so mad at him, but I'm also, you know, so saddened for him. And I'm also so proud of him because he was an honest man.

And there were so many moments in that where you kind of go through these ups and downs where you're like, wow, did he... He was trying to do his best, but he was flawed in many ways, like we all are. And so...

Ralph Bumenthal really, really does show that. And I respect that. He didn't just put out some UFO book about a guy that likes UFOs and tried to push the extraterrestrial or abduction narrative. It was about a man that was really going through struggles in life and then along with the journey of coming across this and then integrating it into his own life. It's really beautiful. I'm going to run with that in a moment. But first, some breaking news. I actually figured out what the name of the book is.

that John Mack wrote was, it was a groundbreaking psychological study of the person we all know as Lawrence of Arabia. The title of that book is Prince of Our Disorder, The Life of T.E. Lawrence. Okay. And it won the Pulitzer for biography back in 1977.

So I want to say that long before this man became involved in alien abductions, I mean, he was obviously a person of great academic merit and scholarship. But to your point, Chrissy, I got to tell you,

I mean, I knew something about Mac. I'd read Ralph's Vanity Fair article years before, almost maybe close to 10 years before. And I enjoyed it, but then I promptly forgot about it and went on with my life like many things happen in our lives.

So revisiting this, I kind of went in, like you said, I kind of went in and said, well, you know, I don't really know that much about him. It's going to be good to get to know this guy because he was an important player. And wow, the accretion of detail. You're being kinder than I would be about him. And look, I don't want to encourage, you know, Mac advocates to hate on me or anything, but I really didn't like him that much as the more I read about it, because he

Look, he was impulsive and magnetic, of course, and he was attractive to women and frankly to men. I mean, he was just the kind of guy that would walk into a room, I think, and command the room. And we all know people like that. But he was also cheating on his wife with a regular girlfriend. He was cheating on his girlfriend. Give him the smutter now. I mean, this...

And listen, it's not my job to judge his morality or lack of it. It's just that I felt bad for the people who were dealing with him. And this is sort of separate. I mean, let's face it, as we analyze this book, there's two ways you can go. One is, well, let's talk about the book itself. How was it written? Well, let's face it. I think we both think Blumenthal did a pretty good job of writing the book. Okay, but then now you're talking about Mac and you've got two sides to that. You've got

Mac, the academic who...

I somewhat courageously put his career on the line to say, I'm going to study alien abductions and you people at Harvard be damned, I'm going to do it anyway. But then the other part is because it's a biography, it's trying to put John Mack into context with the times and tell his personal story. Now, frankly, I hope no one ever writes my biography because I would not want to see some of those stories

mistakes of my past put out for the world to see. But let's face it, he was a very public figure and the treatment that Blumenthal gives him is necessary. It seems like in many cases, he acted before he thought.

He was impulsive. He would take on fights that maybe he could have thought a little bit more before he jumped into it. I don't know. I mean, and I know that's a strong take, but I throw it at your feet. What are your thoughts? No, I think that's fair.

So as a woman, I think I texted you this and I was like, gosh, he has some female issues. Like, it's just like, it was riddled in the beginning with it, right? Riddled with this like mother trauma, right? That this core wound of losing his mom when he was younger and then not having a mom, which, you know, you realize, which is so important. But on the flip side, you know, you have this psychologist that is dealing with that and he, and rightfully so, he's a human. So I did the same thing. I was like,

I don't know if I like this guy. Like I wouldn't hang out with this guy and I would never date this guy. And I would, this is not the type of person or I have dated that type of guy before and I would never do it again. But at the same time, I, I thought about it about, um, I think it's, it was about a week now since I finished reading it and I went, okay, you know, he is a real person, but there are these honest moments. So I think the,

For Mac, this as a female and as a person, you know, that wants to have and tries to practice much as high integrity as possible in my life. And I would say you're the exact same type of person, right?

I was proud of him and his honesty. And he did these horrible things. You would never as a wife and as a partner that you would want anyone to do to you for years, but he was honest about it. As a woman, you would never want anyone to do anything like that to you as a partner, but he was honest. But it doesn't mean it's right. You don't get a gold star because you were honest. So there was a lot of deep flaws, but

I really respected, again, Ralph Blumenthal for showing that deeply flawed side of him, which is interesting because...

You almost see like, again, I think I was mentioning this off the mic to you, this hero's journey. I'm not calling him a hero. There is a name for this as a hero's journey. And you see this call to action that he initially has. And then he goes through this whole journey of self-understanding and self-understanding of others to some degree. I think more understanding of maybe himself. But the alien abduction is almost like a mirror to him where he's seeing the reflections of how

he is, and I would hope John Mack saw that, to looking at all the travesty and the hardest things that he's had to go through, and then looking back at him and seeing these abductions that people are going through really hard things and getting messages about how flawed humanity is. So it's fascinating. Do you recall, as you were talking, I was trying to think, how did he first, how did John Mack first tip to the alien abduction phenomenon? And I can't remember. What made him first...

start thinking about it. I can't remember too. I was actually, it's funny you're saying that because I was trying to remember what, I think it was an experience or I think it was hearing one experience and it might've been. I literally, here's the joke though, folks. I literally made a note about that because I knew I would want to talk about it. And I'm sitting here surrounded by 40 pages of notes and I couldn't possibly find it. So I

I will say this, though, and I think we both agree. Ralph has written a fine book and he's a terrific journalist, but there is a bit of

of structural interest in the book. He starts with the chapter on Mac, then he goes to a chapter on sort of the phenomenon, then another on Mac, then even a chapter on Betty and Barney Hill in their case, then another thing with Mac. And I was wondering as I read that, I mean, I enjoy it because I'm a junkie for that kind of stuff. And I love to see, I really enjoyed reading Blumenthal's take on the history of UFOs and his take on Betty and Barney and all that.

But I wondered if it was because there's a thinness to what you can really find out about John Mack, that if he had actually more information about John Mack's personal life, he might have, you know, he might have been able to make more of it.

Yes, I felt like John Mack wasn't the world's greatest human being, even though he was, as we've discussed. But I really didn't feel like I really knew him that well. And what I want to make clear is I'm not necessarily faulting Ralph Blumenthal for that. I think John Mack was probably a mysterious guy that he had...

things that he thought that he shared with some people and not with others. And there was just a lot of that. And so I did find one note that I wanted to put out here, though, because we need to make clear what we're talking about. John Mack is cruising along, doing the things he does at Harvard,

He started a hospital, I think, even, or a treatment center. His students adored him. He graduated cum laude from his own college. I think it was Harvard even though, wasn't it? Where did he go to college? Yeah, I believe. This is another one of my notes.

Yeah. And he was a cum laude. And so he, obviously a brilliant man. And what I took to heart was that he had always assumed, as frankly I had when I started down this road, that anyone claiming to have been abducted by aliens was crazy. I mean, that tends to be most people's default position on this phenomenon. And he also thought at that time that anyone who took

People who claim to have been abducted seriously, they also were crazy, right? You had to be crazy to claim it, crazy to believe it.

And then he started looking into it and he found all these people, students. I wrote this list, students, homemakers, secretaries, writers, business people, computer technicians, musicians, psychologists, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, a gas station attendant. And they were all reporting these experiences that Mac could not begin to fathom. Things that he reflected, he said, well,

reflected a reality that simply could not be. And I think that's his quote, that simply could not be. And I found that to be very authentic because, and I don't know about you, I'm curious for your take, but I do remember I've gone, I've traveled,

a distance on this topic. When I was much younger, I was willing to think, well, you know, maybe there are things flying around in the sky. You know, I'll probably never know. But and then I started to say, yeah, it looks like there really are these things. But then people would talk about crashes and bodies. And I'd say, no, no, that's

that's too far out. And then people would start talking about abductions. And I was like, no, no, no. You know, now you're, and yet now these things seem to be taken for more reality, partly because of the work of John Mack, partly because of the work of Bud Hopkins, who really got it started and was very influential in Mack's life, partly due to David Jacobs. So between, um,

Bud Hopkins, David Jacobs, and John Mack, you really have the trio of researchers who brought this to the forefront. And of course, Betty and Barney, back in 1961, gave them all the ability to say, that seems like a good case. Are there others? And it turns out there are a lot of others.

Oh, there's so many of them. The one thing I thought was interesting of a parallel, and if anything in science and soft science and hard science, you have a type of analytical structure, like a classification. And we see so many classification guides now, right? With objects and we look at Arrow, we look at Skywatcher, we even look at SEUs. We look at all these classification guides for that. But then we also look at

okay, there's a structure of how do we analyze this? And John Mack had one for experiencers that's not talked about that much. So I think just to parallel J. Allen Hynek's work with a classification guide and a framework, right? Then we look at his and his five elements to analyze was one, consistency of the reports, two, physical signs like scars or witness-backed reports of absence of time,

for children to young from psychiatric syndromes or symptoms, association with witnesses of UFOs and lack of pathology, so former mental health issues. So that was something that he used as a framework when he was analyzing and speaking to experiencers. And I think that that's not talked about a lot anymore. Yeah.

And I think that we forget that it wasn't just a psychologist. He was putting a science behind it and rigor behind it to understand it better and to have a classification guide. You know, Chrissy, there are still a lot of people who do not, who believe in the UFO topic. They believe that, yes, well, I always say,

Do I, if people ask me, do you believe in UFOs? I go, well, of course I do. They're unidentified. They're flying in their objects. Right. So I turn it on the other person. I go, you must believe in UFOs too, because on that definition, something real is happening.

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are a lot of people who are willing to believe that UFOs represent a non-human intelligence, who still are not ready to take the leap that people who we used to call abductees, but now we call experiencers, are authentic. And that is kind of the crux of this issue. Our

Are these things really happening? So I dug up one quote from Mac that I want to read now. So I'm going to put on by what you mentioned, J. Allen Hynek. These are my J. Allen Hynek glasses. I think they make me look more knowledgeable about UFOs. I'm wearing them. This is a quote from John Mac. It's a long one, but I think it's kind of interesting. He said,

These individuals reported being taken against their wills, sometimes through the walls of their houses, and subjected to elaborate, intrusive procedures, which appeared to have a reproductive purpose. In a few cases, they were actually observed by independent witnesses to be physically absent during the time of abduction. These people suffered from no obvious psychiatric disorder except the effects of traumatic experience and were reporting with powerful emotion.

what to them were utterly real experiences. Furthermore, these experiences were sometimes associated with UFO sightings by friends, family members, or others in the community, including media reporters and journalists, and frequently left physical traces on the individual's bodies, such as cuts and small ulcers that would tend to heal rapidly and followed no apparent psychodynamically identifiable

pattern as do, for example, religious stigmata. And this is his conclusion. In short, said Mack, I was dealing with a phenomenon that I felt could not be explained psychiatrically, yet was simply not possible within the framework of the Western scientific worldview. And so I guess, Chrissy, that is...

what he stepped into. He started to look into this thinking, I've got a psychiatric thing going on. And then he began to say, it's more than that. It's sometimes physical, maybe, but sometimes not. And he came to the conclusion that I think I share, which is,

Okay, I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but something is going on because I don't believe that many people, that many credible people are going to claim that kind of experience. So it's possible it's a physical experience.

But if it's not a physical experience, it's still a real experience to the people who are experiencing it. And that would probably make this phenomenon we're talking about one of the craziest phenomenons in human history ever to be explored, even if nobody was being abducted by aliens. You're right. If it was something to deal with consciousness or it had to deal something with how our brains work, right?

You know, there was something that I wanted to bring up and I have my note here too. I want to go back to the Betty and Barney Hill conversation because I think that that's important when we look at all of these different... And you know this case so well. You know it better than I do. And so...

When we look at it, there are these experiences where two people are having right now, right? And, and he, and Ralph Blumenthal really gets into a pretty elaborately, I would say, about Betty and Barney Hill and their experience. And he breaks it down so well, but how it was real for them and then how they recalled it later on. But there was something that I was thinking when we were bringing this up about modern science, this conversation about elusive dreaming, like

I know everyone's yelling at me right now. They're like, it's not lucid dreaming, Chris. I'm not yelling at you. No, it's not sleep paralysis. I can hear UFO Twitter and everybody else screaming at me right now. But why I bring this up is that this form of us understanding how it is a human experience, if it's actually happening to us or happening to people, or is it actually part of something that we're experiencing in our consciousness or our mind? Because this understanding now of a lucid dreaming is so powerful.

wild. And there's so many moments where I wonder if Betty and Barney Hill, while I was reading it and had been, you know, doing so much research myself and writing about lucid dreaming from the debrief, I wondered a couple of times was I'm like, was this a lucid dream? Now, why I say this is because now we're understanding, um,

and this is from like REM space, which is a company that's based in California. That's researching lucid dreaming that they're saying that two people can communicate now in their elusive dreams. And they've been able to document it. It now has to get peer reviewed. Let's remind that. But I think it's an interesting thing because they shared the same connection and they were communicating in an elusive state. So,

I would imagine if the memory recall could be that, but if it is something that's happening and people are getting abducted out of their houses, it's horrendous. But if it is part of us, we are on the right journey, I think, to starting to understand it from what I'm seeing on a science perspective.

You know, certainly the Betty and Barney, you're right. I could, we'll have to do five other shows later about Betty and Barney because I'm that much. I don't know if that's true, but I do have cared about that case because frankly, I remember being a kid and this dates me, but I remember being a kid when To Tell the Truth came on.

And they had three people on who all claimed to be Barney Hill. And it was a game show. And so they asked them questions and it came down to, will the real Barney Hills please stand up? And the real Barney Hill stood up. And I remember as a kid looking at that going, whoa.

So this guy claimed to be abducted by aliens and everybody's just sort of saying, there he is. I thought that was really revealing. What you're talking about, though, the lucid dream certainly is a possibility. Dr. Benjamin Simon, though, who was the psychiatrist who regressed Betty and Barney in those famous hypnosis tapes, he came to the conclusion something very similar, but not a lucid dream per se, as much as,

he felt probably that Betty was leading Barney, that Betty wanted to believe Betty had dreams that she told Barney about. And he made it almost the way his brain wanted to organize this was he didn't think that they actually were abducted by aliens, but he did think they both thought they were. And he thought that Barney had probably shared that dream state, if you will, with Betty.

For myself, though, I got to say, I give it 60-40 that they were actually abducted the way they said they were. But I am not crazy enough to say that that's 100% because the more I've learned about the phenomenon, you know, the more chances there are.

That there are things out there we simply don't understand. And when you just said that somebody in a lucid dream can end up in somebody else's lucid dream, I'd like to option that for my next movie. I'm going to lucid dream me. We'll send you the article link. They can communicate. It's a researcher at a REM space that's doing it. It's unbelievable. It can be recreated? I mean, is that a scientific thing where you can get two people recreating something

passing. I don't know if they're recreating, but they're communicating within the dream. So they're having the first type of, we know lucid dream communication. So you would see after this hasn't been peer reviewed. So I think, you know, this, it should be a peer review. It's going to take about a year. I believe when I spoke to him, I've interviewed him previously on my podcast, but

it's, and lots of people are doing right now, lucid dreaming studies. It's ramped up so much since the 1960s. I think 1967 was a big time. And then now it's, it's had its resurgence. So, which I think is really interesting because when I'm reading about lucid dreaming and writing about it, I realized how much it parallels to the UAP conversation and to the abduction conversation. But with that said, I don't think,

some things could be lucid dreaming. Some things could not be. Some things potentially could be sleep paralysis. But I do think that there's something going on. You know, you're having, for example, it was the Brooklyn incident.

at Bridge, wasn't it? I believe the abduction where people saw her like being beat, like there was witnesses that watched her body. So to me, I'm like, what? Like I remember hearing about that and then it's mentioned in the book too, where I was like, I haven't watched that doc yet, but I was like, this is insane. Like to me, when you have witnesses coming forward that are very credible, watching somebody levitate into some form of ship, like, you know,

And let's not hope they're lying, right? Let's put this out there, though. The case you're talking about, supposedly this woman, Linda Cortile, I think was her name. She used another name. And supposedly the UN Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, were both abducted. Now that's become very controversial. This documentary you mentioned really was made by, I believe, partly made or at least included...

Bud Hopkins' ex-wife, who was ruthless toward him in it. I will say that there is something that we should put out there, which is John Mack and certainly Bud Hopkins. I mean, Bud Hopkins wanted to believe, you know, and he has been accused of leading people in hypnotic sessions. He's not with us anymore, but he's the guy that wrote that powerful first book in 1981, Missing Time.

Um,

And so I've always known that about him, that that was something that you had to put an asterisk a little bit by Bud Hopkins because he wasn't the perfect person. And he also wasn't a psychiatrist. You know, he was a painter. You know, he was an artist. And so I thought, all right, this will be interesting because Bud Hopkins is not the guy that you want to be looking into this per se if you've got a John Mack.

You got a John Mack, you got a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who's teaching people and is brilliant. Okay. It isn't just that he tipped off to the people who were saying that they'd been abducted. He was...

Also, searching for consciousness elevation throughout his life. This was something that the book makes clear. He's taking LSD to expand his mind. And I don't say that in a goofy way. I'm saying he was literally searching. He was a searcher. And so he had a lot of things going.

He was using breathing to allow him to sort of escape the mind-body connection

And I recall one of the quotes, and I'm sure I'll butcher it a little bit, but he thought he was some kind of 16th century Russian peasant or something. Okay. Now, this is before he ever became the guy who was hypnotizing people and taking them back to learn about their things. But he was having his own experiences where he thinks he's a 16th century Russian peasant. Now,

I don't know where our audience fits on that. I don't know where you fit on that. But I know some of my friends that if I were to tell them about that and say, and by the way, and then list some of the things that he had been involved in prior, they'd say, well, there's your problem.

Right. And I was wondering, did it hit you that way as you were reading this? Did you did you say, boy, he is really he this isn't just a fresh experience. He's he's been getting ready for this experience. Oh, for sure. He's prepping himself for it. He was doing a lot of hallucinogenics.

He was doing, I think it's called a holotropic breath work. And that's actually something that you can do. That's not a hallucinogenic, that is a natural hallucinogenic because people do it a lot. He was very influenced. John Mack was extremely influenced by the East. And I find that interesting. You know, the Beatles were really interested, you know, influenced by the East at one point. So I think of the time, right? And there's something, actually, I went to lunch with a friend of mine, Saad, recently.

And we spoke about how India and so many other countries within the East, you know, have this framework that is so acceptable within their entire culture for the longest period of time of entities or UAPs. And it's not really thought differently compared to like how John Mack would say this Western framework. So I think John Mack, you know, really subscribed and he would have done very well if he lived in India where he lived in the East as well. Um,

But I think at that point in time, the East and the West were so much in conflict. And, you know, we could say consistently today too at times. But I think with this ideology was not adopted into the West because the West was very, you know,

based on materialistic science and that was in Harvard and everyone was like materialistic science. This is, that's it. There's nothing open for the unknown. There's nothing open for another conversation outside of materialistic science.

So, and the East is, so you see this real representation of him, of him, you know, in trying to embody that type of lifestyle, even with the women he dated and the people that he surrounded himself with. So he was very much, I would say, influenced by mentors like Bud Hopkins and so many other people and experiencers. You know, we know he was friends with Randall Nickerson and also one of his, one of his clients in that. So when we've met Randall, I've known Randall for years now, uh,

And I think that there was so much of this understanding other people's experiences, but for sure he took the East and applied it to his philosophies of life and to how he understood the experience of experiencers. Which is a good transition for us, but I want to do one throwback. You mentioned Bud Hopkins. We both talked about him. Bud Hopkins once called Mac gullible. Yeah. Oh, yeah. If you think about that.

what's the knock on Bud Hopkins? That he was gullible. So you got a gullible guy calling

uh, Mac gullible. Maybe they both were a little gullible. I mean, I think I am sometimes I have, you know, you, you, you're, you're moving along through this topic and you accept something. And then later you realize, wait, I didn't give that enough time. I should have researched that a little bit more. And, and I think that's good. I think we do need to do that, but Mac got caught. And this is the part of the book that I thought was pretty fascinating because

I think it was some 37-year-old Boston writer that came to him, and she had this tale about being on a spaceship with Nikita Khrushchev and John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And Mac believed her.

Right. And then it turns out, of course, the woman made it all up, sort of thought of herself as she was going undercover to expose him. And to that extent, she sort of did. He he bought into it. It's not.

You know, I don't feel good about the woman that did that, but it was an event that happened to him. And yet, here's what's interesting. It didn't derail him. As soon as that's over, he ends up on the Oprah Winfrey show. Yeah. Right? And he brings on a bunch of these other abductees that he's hypnotized. And he says on Oprah Winfrey's show, every other culture in history except this one,

in the history of the human race, has believed there were other entities, other intelligences in the universe. And he said on Oprah, why are we so goofy about this? Why do we treat people like they're crazy, humiliate them if they're experiencing some other intelligence? And to the extent that that is really what's happening, it's a really good point. I've never felt that

Anybody who is an experiencer deserves the ridicule that our society has sometimes put on them. Even though I think the Saturday Night Live abduction sketch is ridiculous.

very funny when they do it. It's still basically making fun of people for something that might really be happening to them. And even, you know, our mutual friend, Whitley Streber, who wrote Communion and was the first person to really popularize this after Betty and Barney,

You can just tell he is a pained man. He's pained because this thing that happened to him, which is extremely real to him. So I don't care whether you believe him or you don't believe him. You should at least believe that he thinks it's extremely real. And I think it did happen to him.

by the way, but I'm just saying you got to be, have your humanity about you. The guy's in pain and what happened? He became a national joke. All the talk about rectal exams and things like that. And it, that is not the scientific method. The scientific method does not call for making fun of people for reporting what they think really happened to them.

them. And I'm sad that our society has chosen to take this in that way. And I think that's why I respect Mac. At least he was tough enough to say, I'm not going to make fun about this. I'm going to look into it. Yeah, I agree. First, I'll say the point to the Oprah Winfrey interview. I've watched that in its entirety.

About two years ago, I watched it and Oprah does not stand well. She ridicules, she makes fun, like she contributes to that. And I remember thinking, gosh, Oprah, like this is Oprah before Oprah, you know, has just, and her claims probably feels that she became more in lane. This was very more tabloid Oprah, but.

She does have a more popular book club than we currently do. That's true. We're going to take her. We're going to take her one of these. Yeah, we are. Wait until she joins UFOs and then she'll give us a ring. Yeah, exactly. She'll be like, I need to be part of this book club. Exactly, Oprah. But it doesn't... We're not going to let her in easily. That's all. No, no, no, no, no. She has to read every book before she comes in. At least 200. Exactly. Yeah.

But you need to watch every podcast you need to know and Rebellious Vicarious. I'm sorry, Oprah. Listen, we have gotten to the point where we need to get to the big story first.

of The Believer. First of all, we haven't given you the, you know, everybody loves a subtitle in the book world because it gives them more keywords, right? So the subtitle, by the way, of The Believer is Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack. All right. And what I think is so fascinating and that we have not yet mentioned to people is in June of 1994,

Harvard basically said, enough is enough. You're making us look bad. And they convened what amounted to an inquest, a confidential inquest into John Mack. Think about this. We've always talked about UFOs on trial. Well, this was abductions on trial for a long time with lots of witnesses. They put the guy through the ringer and the guy who ran it was a guy named Arnold Relman. And

When he first convened this inquest, he wrote to Mack, if these stories are believed as literal factual accounts, they would contradict virtually all of the basic laws of physics, chemistry, and biology on which modern science depends. And he accused Mack of ushering in a new dark age of superstition and magic. Now, what I find fascinating about that is

I don't disagree with realm. I mean, if indeed these things are true, they do stand apart from modern science and all of that. And at least Mac was courageous enough to say, yeah, they do. And,

That's why those of us who are in academia should study it. That's what we do. But that didn't help him. He ended up in this long trial. And there's a couple of interesting names that pop up. Danny Sheehan, who everybody seems to know about these days, was his lawyer and got fired by Mac during this. I'd like next time we if we ever have Danny Sheehan on for anything, we've got to ask him about being fired by John Mac. And

Anyway, I just...

Well, then he also got reinstated though. He did get reinstated as his lawyer later on. Yeah. Oh, he did. Okay, good. Good. I didn't mean to... Well, I guess they patched it up and made up. Or it was like, yeah, they came to some agreements because I think what happened was there was two different perspectives on strategy. You know, Janie Spoon, which we know and we see currently is very much in the public and wants to get press and is very loud and very... He's an activist, right? He was working on like Watergate, which I think is amazing. The stuff that...

But Outside of What Danny Sheehan Has Done Outside of UFOs has been very interesting. And it's outlined very well in the book as well. Sheehan, by the way, I want to give him his due though, Chrissy, because I don't want everyone to write me and say, how dare you attack Danny Sheehan?

Danny Sheehan worked on the Iran-Contra drugs for arms deal. He was part of the Karen Silkwood case. He helped investigate the sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Boston. I mean, the guy's got some Pentagon Papers and all of that stuff. So he's a major guy. And of course, Mack wanted him because he felt that his story was just as important and possibly more so.

Yeah. And Johnny, Danny Shannon's an activist. And the thing is, is that it was two ways of going about it. Mac was just very much like, I'm, I don't want this to be public. I never want this to be public. I want this to be quiet, even going through the Harvard review and them saying, Hey, you know, let's look at your work and your tactics and your strategy. And is this on the up and up, uh, the way that you're doing your science, um,

And there was a couple of questionable things. I think that Harvard for sure was questioning about how he was billing. Let's be honest, right? I would ask the same thing if I was running an institution. So I think some things were fair, but who was doing the analysis of his work wasn't always that, wasn't that fair. And so I think that when Danny Sheehan came in, he was an activist. He was like,

you know what, let's call the media, let's get this done. We know that Danny today has not changed, still the same man, you know? And then we look at...

We look at John Mack, who was just very much insular at that point and wanted to be quiet and didn't want the media to get involved and wanted no one to know that this was happening to him, which is kind of interesting because sometimes that parallels his own, you know, abduction experiences, right? So I think that there's so much mirroring

in this, in the world of life of John Mack, I think with the ridicule that he went through and that experiences. And I think what Ralph Blumenthal tries to express is that he believed his, and could relate at points, I think, to his experiencers because of the life that he lived.

One of the things I wish Ralph had done even more of in his book, because I find this in this. And by the way, folks, yes, we are keeping you in suspense as to what Harvard did about John Mack. We're going to tell you that in a moment. But in the meantime, the thing I thought that was I was actually hoping there'd be more about this in the middle of this inquisition at Harvard. What happens? The Rwanda child.

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where there was this mass sighting of all these school children. And that happened literally in the middle of it. He ends up flying over there, talking to everybody, and he comes back for the ending of the whole thing. And that, by the way, just so we... I don't know as much about it. Maybe you can fill us in. But I will say this case, you got to give Mac some credit. He hears about it and he schedules...

a plane. I mean, he gets on a plane and he flies there instantly to look into it. And the, the only knock you can make on Mac is he brings his girlfriend with him as his, you know, assistant or, or co whatever. Um,

But he goes there and he's all involved in it. And there's been a couple of documentaries that have been out that have used clips from some of that. And that's John Mack, folks. If you see the person interviewing these kids at the time, it's John Mack.

Maybe I'm thinking, are you speaking about the Zimbabwe experience when he flew out? Yeah.

I'm going to, I'm butchering Cynthia's name, you know, please forgive me, Cynthia. She's an amazing female UFO researcher that was documenting throughout Africa, UFO experiences. She was really, there wasn't many at that point in time. But the interesting part is that I think that again, like we look at even African influences and their folklore too, this really, you know,

is pretty consistent with what they, what they feel they believe in, in a folklore and religious context in some countries in Africa. And so I think John Mack was very much called there to go. And it was perfect because when all this stuff was, you're right, was going on, it was like, you know what?

let's just have this flyover and have this massive experience with children, which is immensely embedded in John Mack's analysis is how do children and children should believe. And now, you know, the universe gives him, you know, I think it was over a hundred people. I remember when speaking to Randall and it could be more, it could be at least 200, but I believe it's documented as 60, but I know Randall has said to me, it's at least over a hundred.

children and people that saw this UAP and then children seeing this experience. Now, we don't know if any child ever really got abducted. We don't know that and it's not connected to it. But the idea of seeing something that's related to a craft and a being is very much of John Mack's work. And Tim Leach, I think I...

I love Aerial Phenomenon. If anyone's never watched it, please watch it. It is one of my, it is my favorite UFO film, to be honest. And that is John Mack in the film. And it's John Mack in the film. Yeah. And you really see his essence. But the one thing I will say within John Mack's work that you see a little bit that I noticed, and again, a flaw as maybe as a psychologist, there are leading questions. There are some leading questions to the children about their experience and which is not,

something you're supposed to do in psychology, especially with children. So I will say that that's a flaw. And I noticed that when I did watch Errol Phenomenon, but it doesn't change the fact that these kids drew these pictures before speaking with John Mack and everybody else and all saying the same things. Yeah, you're so right about that. We have flawed heroes sometimes, and that's a great example. You know, it's so strange about that. And then we'll get to tying up what happened to him.

As I recall, these children told him on tape that these beings have large heads, two holes for nostrils, a slit for a mouth, or no mouth at all. I'm moving along. I'm going, okay, gray's got that. Understand. Then at least I think several of them said they had long black hair. I thought, okay, what's up with that?

Where did long black hair slip into the conversation? Just like, you know, Betty and Barney didn't initially describe gray as they described something else. They, you know, Barney was talking about them. They looked like they were in military outfits. Yes. So it is if anything, it goes to prove the phenomenon is a little weirder than that.

than we can make sense of because just when you think okay i've got a little basket that i can put this phenomenon in and try to make sense of it then along comes long black hair and you're like okay i hadn't heard that i've heard of nordics i've heard of greys i've heard of reptilians long black hair where's that from um so that's strange but back to mac he returns okay and

And he does get accused of what you were talking about, failing to do systematic evaluations to rule out psychiatric disorders. They said he was putting persistent pressure on his experiencers to convince them they actually had something happen to them and preventing them from obtaining the help that they were really needed.

that they needed. That's what they accused him of. Of course, he rebutted that. And in fact, he pulled in another big name and a lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that said, will the next professor who was thinking about an unconventional research project be deterred by the prospect of having to hire a lawyer to defend his ideas? So I think what's great about the Mack case is it's an academic freedom case at its heart. It's not necessarily a UFO case.

or an abduction case. It's really about, is there unpopular research that you just can't do? And if you do, we're going to throw you out. Well, that makes me nervous because almost everything about the UFO phenomenon could be ruled as unpopular.

You can't do that here. And in fact, academia has been very rough on it over the years. So the fact that he stood up for it, do you want to give us the ending to this lovely little story though? Of John Mack? Yeah. Tell us what happened at Harvard. Yeah. Well, I think, well, we know that within Harvard, he was, well, first of all, I don't think this is mentioned in the book, but I know that in real life that they ended up like moving his office off campus, right?

really, and put him in this small, tiny office where he did his work. And then later on,

He ended up winning this case. And again, this hero's journey I go back to is like, you know, him going through the struggle, meeting his mentors, going through struggles. I'll even say like he was taking elixirs, which were, you know, his psychedelics connecting to the East and then finding himself this mirroring of a man, you know, with himself, with, with experiencers and believing them and connecting with them and advocating for them. And then he moves into the struggle with Harvard and, and,

you know, you think at the end, you're like, this man is never going to make it through and Harvard is going to destroy him. And they almost did, but he ends up winning and prevailing and now becomes one of the leading psychologists in this and is taken seriously and brings on another team of lawyers where they fight for him. And it comes to a place where now John Mack becomes a

I will say lightly hero, but a hero in the mind, I think, of experiencers. Just to wrap on top of what you just said, when Harvard released its, I guess, conclusion, its decision, the first thing they said is they cautioned him. They said to not in any way violate the high standards for the conduct of clinical practice and clinical investigation that had been the hallmarks of this faculty. So he got a slap on the hand, basically saying,

you know, clean up your act a little bit. And I think even Mac aficionados would agree that he probably, and even he agreed, actually, I think he thought that he was getting smarter about it as he went on. So, uh, he probably would have said, okay, that's fair comment, but here's the part that makes for the heroic ending to the story.

Harvard said, and this is their quote, they reaffirmed Dr. Mack's academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment. Dr. Mack remains a member in good standing of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine. So in the movie version, you know, that's pretty close to the end of the story where he wins. In reality, though, again, about 10 years later, he dies of that car wreck. Yeah. And it's...

It's sad too. I think it's really sad because I would love to see what John Mack would have said now with, with all of this, with the UFO experience when Lou Elizondo came out, uh, you know, in 2027 and spoke about the black op projects and, you know, the earmarks, um,

the $22 million block project to Myanmar. I would love to hear what he said. I would love to hear it too, but he was 75 when he died. So he'd be- Oh, right. I guess good point. Oh, I guess you're right. He was 75. I thought he was in his 60s. He would definitely be, you know, if he was still alive, I don't know what he'd be saying. You're right. I thought he was younger. For some reason, you're right. He was 65. So you're right. Might've been at the- I think that's right.

Yeah, it doesn't actually say his age. I don't think Ralph mentions the age that he dies, unless I obviously missed that if he did. But I'll say one thing that I think is interesting, how Ralph, at the end of the book, there is this, you know, again, he is then given, you know, this achievement and is respected again, I think by Harvard, I would say. But then Ralph Blumenthal is...

has this interesting parallel how he comes across his work, you know, doing all this research and writing about World War II. And then, you know, comes across John Mack's work and then finds these parallels throughout his life, you know, and in writing his autobiography. And so I think there's something that we are missing and I'm going to jump back quickly because it just reminded me.

the spirit of John Mack, right? Which I think lived on after he died in which he was very obsessed with, was his afterlife. You know, and we see Leslie Kane actually, you know, is very deeply embedded into that type of research.

But John Mack, and I wonder if it's inspired her, but John Mack was very deeply concerned and interested about afterlife. And then you find allegedly, like we don't have any proof, but allegedly he was speaking from the afterlife to people that he was working with. And then you find these inter, you know, these interconnections later on with Ralph Blumenthal and John Mack. So you wonder if destiny has laid itself out for Ralph to write it, but

There was this really interesting theme, which I didn't expect, and I maybe should have, you know, him loving UFOs, but I never thought that life after death and his search for it would have been embedded in that story. I always just thought it was experiencers. But it's very wild. Very, very wild. You know...

That is a fast. Here's a guy with all the things we've just talked about who dies in a car wreck that he actually predicted shortly before he died. He said, you know, anything could happen. None of this is guaranteed. We could die. I could, I could be hit by a car. And then he was, here's what's interesting when he was in London where he died, he

He was staying with a family friend, someone named Veronica Keene. She was a widow who said that she had been receiving messages from her dead husband. Okay. So she, when Mac's body got took to the morgue, as I understand it, Keene was there sort of sitting with the body. I'm not definitive on exactly how that, it wasn't made clear, but she said that he materialized and talked to her.

Okay. And she said, this is what he said. It was as if I was touched with a feather. I did not feel a thing. I was given a choice. Should I stay or should I go? I looked down at my broken body and decided to go. So I don't know if those count as his last words, since there's no way of knowing if he actually said that. And then finally, one of his research associates, Roberta Colasanti,

said she communicated with him later after that. And he said, quote, it's not what we thought. Now, of course, that's just what people say. They, you know, there's no way of for sure knowing that. And by the way, if at the end of all of this, the abductions and the life after death talk that all Mac left us with is it's not what we thought.

I'm pissed off. John, you should have told us more. I mean, come on. He could have settled all this if he if he was speaking from beyond. But that's how it went down. So that's our John Mack. That's the believer. Yeah. And by the way, let's just say this. The title is apropos. He didn't start out to be a believer, but he became a believer.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I, yeah, he believed, he believed the people that were telling him what was happening. He truly believed them and he advocated for them in the beginning. Yeah. I wasn't a believer and really became one more and more, but a fascinating man, very, very fascinating, you know? And I think,

most of us, I think you and I would have loved to spend some time with him and asked him questions for sure. And, and I think that, you know, we get to live vicariously through others that we know where we can talk to Randall Nickerson. We can talk to Danny Sheehan. We can talk to Leslie Kane. We can talk to Ralph Blumenthal, but Ralph didn't get to meet him. I believe, I'm wondering, I believe Leslie might've, um,

But there are a few people in there that we can reach out to and say, what was John like? And like, you know, what was your feelings of him and just live vicariously through that too. But he was a fascinating man with all of his own traumas and tribulations. It's an interesting thought. You know, there's that song Rock and Roll Heaven or whatever, you know, they've got a hell of a band.

If there's a UFO heaven, I'd love to sit at the table with John Mack and Stanton Friedman and J. Allen Hynek and James McDonald and all these great investigators and hear what they had to say at the end of it about where we are now and all that. Anyway, that's it for John Mack. What do we got next week?

We next month. I was like, well, I was like, we can do this next. You're going to have to read fast. No, it's every month, folks. We're doing this every month. Go for it.

So next month we have Lou Elizondo, who we all know. There is some controversy recently that has happened with Lou. So I think that this is a time for sure where the book Eminent that he wrote will be coming up into discussion. And I think it's very timely. We'll be speaking about our thoughts, our opinions, and maybe we'll look at some facts and maybe not all facts within it. But, and I will say I have,

I listened to this book before I have not read it. So I don't own the copy. I listened to it and I'll re-listen to it again, obviously for this podcast. But, uh, I would say it's, it's a great listen because Lewis is a, is a wonderful narrator. Like he really is. To be honest, I, I thought he did a brilliant job. It's very interesting. Um, first of all, I just want to say to anyone who's listening, uh, we urge you to read it so that next month when we talk about it, you'll have your own opinions that you can share. Um,

And I think that would be very useful. There is no right or wrong way, folks, if you want to read the book. You can listen to it. You can Kindle it. You can get the hardcover. And what was fascinating for me is, as I already told you, I have three hardcover copies that I bought. At the same time, I also bought it on Kindle and I also bought the audio version. And I had no idea that it would actually do this, but I was listening to the audio version.

and I get through a couple hours of that, and then I open up my Kindle, and it opens straight up to where I just stopped listening and vice versa. I love how they sync it all together. So it's like an effortless thing. So we just urge you to do that. And just for myself, thanks, everybody, for joining us. And we'll take you on a ride over the next year over these 12 years

episodes that we'll do. We don't have all the books picked out right now, but we're looking at them and we'll try to pick some that are fun and that we all learn something from. Chrissy, it's been so cool doing this. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. It was fun. I agree. And I'm looking forward to doing more shows and reading more books and also just even having those side chats where like, oh my gosh, like those are those moments where you're like, wow. And it's nice to read a book with somebody and then everyone else who's watching this too. So leave comments,

please do let us know what books you might be interested in. You know, let us know how we can communicate with you to bring you in on this journey with us as well, because we want to be able to connect with you. And then I will throw in the website. It is projectbookclub.net. You can see what books we'll be reading and there'll be an Amazon affiliate link there. So you can also go and buy them and look at other books that we're reading as well. But

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. And I'm really excited to hear how other people say they want to get involved and how they want to connect with us while we're reading this book. You don't, by the way, have to drink coffee to be a member of Project Book Club, but it helps. It does help. You can drink tea. All right, see you all later. Chrissy, have a great time. I'll see you next month. Sounds good. Bye.