This week, Dan and John talk about:

The show title refers to governments disclosing only part of the alien story in order not to disrupt society, and that is the disclosure we get, not necessarily the disclosure we want.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Coronavirus pandemic, requirement to wear masks (RW184)

Everything is weird and Dan can't make heads or tails of what people are doing. John went to the grocery store last night at 9:30pm with a nice big mask on. The grocery store was full of people and nobody had any masks on, they all wandered around, just been in the store with no masks on, blocking the aisles. Everyone working at the store was wearing a mask and a lot of them had gloves on, they were all very prepared and diligent. There were signs that said: ”Please don't spray your disinfectant on our keyboards, we are taking care of that for you!” and there was a person inside that door with wet wipes and all this stuff, but then the store just had a bunch of dopes.

In Texas they did issue an order or mandate or whatever it is called that says essentially you are required to wear a mask when you are among other human beings. You don't have to wear one while you are exercising outdoors, although people do, and you don't have to wear one when you are driving, although people do. Dan saw an article this morning that he tweeted about that said specifically: ”You don't need to wear one when you are exercising!”, but everybody universally if you are out in the areas of Northwest Austin all the way down to Downtown has them on. They won't let you into the grocery store unless you do.

They have social distancing markers on the ground so that when you stand in line they are making sure you are six feet away from the person ahead of you. They don't let you walk up to a register and just get in line, but they send you up and down an aisle with people waiting six feet apart in that line before they are sent out to the individual checkout lanes. They are very serious about it here, but there are still a lot of things that that are perplexing to Dan. For one, people in their cars driving with masks on. A lot of that was probably fear-based and he did a little Twitter poll with three or four different ways of answering it, and only one of them was not a fear-based answer, and most people picked the main fear based answers.

Whatever, if people want to wear it in their car while they are driving alone, that's cool, let them do it. It is weird because there is so much that doesn't make sense in the way that people are responding because it is a fear response and fear doesn't make sense. There is a great line in the movie Men in Black where Kaye is talking to Jay and he says something like: ”A person is smart, but people are dumb!” We have this situation now where you hear different things, depending on what TV station you are watching or whether you are listening to a podcast or whether you are reading an article or where you are reading the article.

It is hard enough to people given the choice what condiment they want to put on their French fries, that right there is the big decision, and now you say to them: ”Maybe if you make the wrong choice, you might die or you might kill your family!” so they will just wear the mask all the time, even on their bicycle, one of the 58-speed bikes that exist now. When Dan and John were young they were 10-speeds. Dan sees people riding on the side of the road wearing a mask. Can you imagine how uncomfortable that would be to try and exercise with that on?

Dan read that a guy was driving and crashed his car and killed himself accidentally and the cause of death was that he was basically suffocating himself under an N-95 mask. He wasn't getting enough air, passed out, lost control of the car and killed himself. Walking around the store last night with a mask on as a glasses wearer, John was trying to get his glasses to stop fogging up and he didn’t know how to do it. Dan says you need to have a mask with a metal thing that goes around your nose and you really need to pinch your nose with it.

John is wearing a hand-crafted mask, but it doesn’t have a metal clip. Dan promises John to have Haddie send him one because every ten minutes she makes a new one. John has a big face and handmade masks have not been working for him lately because a lot of them just go to his chin and not all the way around. Haddie has made 500-600 masks, it is all she does now, and Dan will tell her to send John an extra-extra-large. Like acromegaly when people just keep growing, it is like that, except it was just John’s face that kept growing. Washington State had a fantastic response to the crisis, but it does not seem that masks are required, but only recommended.

Feeling Schadenfreude about people who are dumb in aggregate (RW184)

One of the hardest things about living in a world full of individual people who are smart, but people in general who are dumb is not succumbing to Schadenfreude, the desire to watch people who you think are making bad choices suffer as a result of those choices. It is an old enough problem that the Germans thought to make a word for it, but people on both sides of the political spectrum are always waiting for the other side to get their comeuppance because they feel like it is self-evident that the choices they are making are bad.

Right wingers are always pointing out problems that cities have and gloating that those problems are a result of bad policy or just Liberalism in general. Right now there is a lot of scoffing at social distancing and at the danger of the virus and a rush to reopen state economies while science-based communities of people who are continuing to social distance are waiting for some schadenfreude in the form of a resurgence of the virus among communities of non-science oriented people, which feels like a very dangerous tendency and not anything you should let yourself slide into. You don't ever want to wish ill on someone else and also it will never be contained among scofflaws, but it will always go out from there. Continuing to social distance really is our only option!

Having said that we should never indulge in schadenfreude John cannot stop indulging in it, searching for data suggesting that states who have not followed aggressive social distancing have higher rates of infection, but that connection is never clearly made, although Nebraska and South Dakota now have unexpectedly high rates of infection and of course it is hurting poor people more. One guy was talking shit about the virus on Facebook, saying it was a conspiracy, and then he died. The prevalence of that story suggested some unspoken schadenfreude and it made the rounds far in excess of what it would have if people weren't gloating about it.

But there hasn't been a devastating explosion of infection somewhere among spring-breakers or Megachurch virus-deniers or people that are talking about social distancing as though it is all a fraud. John is working every day not to look for evidence that you reap what you sow because it is psychically and spiritually unhealthy, but he can't quite exorcise it from his daily news following. There is the expectation, short of saying hope, that the wisdom of social distancing is borne out (proven). It doesn't matter, it doesn't affect John because he is going to stay home no matter what the news says, he shouldn't even be reading the news. If the crisis abates, Dan will tell him. John is reading about coronavirus more often than he is reading about UFOs and that is a pretty significant switcheroo.

Defense Department Acknowledgement of Navy UFOs (RW184)

How much does Dan feel like the recent Defense Department acknowledgement of those Navy UFOs is a longtime plan to release that kind of information in times where everyone's attention is distracted elsewhere (see here), gradually laying the groundwork, as they have been doing for a long time with the movie Frozen and the Bratz series of dolls, to accustom us to thinking of implausibly skinny beings with giant heads and enormous eyes, thinking of them as friends and companions to our children?

The first really good illustration of what is nowadays considered to be a gray alien was on the cover of the book Communion by Whitley Strieber. It was the first time that Dan saw that image in a what very mainstream way because this was a best-selling book that was on the bookshelves for everyone to see. So much has happened over the last 10-20 years in creating that shape with a thin body and big eyes and that head. It is now in every aspect of our culture. It is the logo for Alienware computers. It is literally everywhere.

When Dan was a kid, aliens were very much little green men from Mars, they were something in movies, and if you asked most people and showed them that picture, even just a very rough sketch of it, they would say right away that is an alien. It is very much a part of our society and a part of our world-think now. That is definitely from the media. How does this go back to disclosure and the recent acknowledgement from the Pentagon of these videos that were already acknowledged by the Navy as being real, but now we have the Pentagon declassifying them and in that sense saying: ”They are real and we don't know what they are, but this is a thing we have seen!”

That is interesting and unprecedented, and the timing of it is also very interesting. People in the UFO community always say that they release something like that to distract from the other bigger story. They are trying to not get you to pay attention to subject A, so they will show you some UFO stuff. Dan doesn't subscribe to this, but a lot of the time they are saying that this is because of this other thing that is going on and pay no attention to this big story! Dan’s take on it is that maybe they are using the UFOs in the opposite way right now and they want you to pay attention to this thing that pretty much was already out there and that everybody in the UFO community has already known about. Pay attention to this and not this other stuff. It is definitely a distraction of some kind!

Dan is not sure if their acknowledgement really does anything. There is so much information out there that is not released. Our government and the governments of the world absolutely know a lot more than they are sharing. There are people who would insist that there are downed vehicles that have been retrieved from a crash. There is so much out there that people would insist this is real, there is tons of information, all the way up to and including that they got live EBEs (Extraterrestrial Biological Entity) and they got bodies in storage and they got UFO technology that has been completely reengineered.

Whether or not any of that is true doesn't matter, but our government certainly knows a lot more than they are sharing. Dan was talking to somebody about this offline and they were asking why they don't they just release it, but look at the chaos that has been caused to our entire world, our global economy because there is a virus that it seems like the majority of people would be okay if they got it. The potential threat of some kind of virus that you might get and if you got it, it might make you sick, and if you got sick, you might get really sick, and if you got really sick, you might die. From that to: We are not alone in the universe, and by the way these beings are here and they are flying around, we can't see them, and there is definitely nothing that we can do about them, and by the way, they can disable our nuclear warheads easily if they want to, and they move in vehicles that are not affected by gravity and travel at thousands of miles per hour, through the air or water, and by the way: They have been abducting us for about 50 years. That is a lot more than: ”There is a virus that might make you sick!”

Instead they introduce it to society slowly over many, many, many, many years, like they are doing now so that you can turn on TV and see a cartoon of a grey alien and be like: ”I know, that is the alien guy!” In another 10 or 15 years it is going to be such a part of our culture that maybe when it is revealed that there is a real thing to it maybe people will be a little more receptive to it. The Greys would absolutely have to be colluding, that is the theory. The government would whatever reason work with them or be in communication with them in some way.

Dan believes that there is something going on, but he doesn’t know what it is and he wants to know what it is, which makes him different from a lot of the people in this space, because a lot of the people are insistent that it is real or that they know that it is real or they know that it is not real. Dan can't say whether it is real or not, he just wants answers. If it turns out that we have alien technology, then Dan wants the alien technology. He wants zero point energy, he wants an anti-gravity vehicle, he wants cures to things that ail us.

There is something going on and now the Pentagon has said: ”Yeah, there is some going on! That is all we are going to tell you! Those videos are real, it is not us up there!” and that is something. It is not the disclosure that we want, but it is the disclosure we got. John starts singing: ”I know there is something going on!”

John asking the cruise ship captain about weird things (RW184)

One time John was on a cruise ship and asked the captain what the weirdest thing he ever saw in the ocean was. It came down from up above that the captain of the boat was a big Star Trek fan and he learned that Wil Wheaton was on his boat and he wanted to meet Wil Wheaton. The officer class of these cruise ships that run the JoCo Cruise is all Dutch because it is a Dutch enterprise. There is still a naval sense of decorum on cruise ships. For the most part they are just like: ”Hey, how many Dockery's can you put in yourself?”, but then you watch the officers walk around and there is not any saluting, but a lot of heel clicking and you are not allowed in certain parts of the ship and the captain is treated with tremendous deference.

The opportunity to go to the bridge of this ship was a great opportunity and Will asked a small group to come with him because he was not sure he wanted to just go up on the bridge with this captain. Let's turn it into a tour! The bridge of a big ship like that these days is a big open space with five ATMs with big screens and people standing at them. The ship is doing a lot of steering, like a jumbo jet, the pilots could let that thing land on its own. They are just there to make sure nothing bad goes happening.

They got up there and the captain was a big jovial Dutch barrel-chested red-nosed 60 year old Dutch guy and as someone with a long history in in this space John assumed he was a heavy drinker and he clearly relishes being the captain of the boat and you can tell that the crew is intimidated by him. Once they are not pretending to be nice people walking around the dining room, saying hello to everybody, when they are just with one another there is a lot of naval formality and the young ensigns do not look the captain in the eye type of thing.

He was showing them around the bridge and over here is the azimuth and over here is the navigator bot and so forth and so on. They were all eating it up, the rest of the people, Will and a small handful of them, and there was an interest in it for its novelty, but no-one in their small group was a nerd for this kind of thing. There is no typical JoCo Cruise nerd, but among John’s performer nerd friends, most of them are not gearheads or machine heads, but they are performers and they are media heads. A lot of the music they make or the stuff they make refers to other media, other movies, games they like, TV they like, books in particular, foundational media properties.

They like that those earlier works generated ideas that they think are interesting and a lot of them were computer programmers, but they weren't wiring the office for LAN or anything, but they were sitting, working there, tinkering, making apps. John doesn’t know what programmers do, clearly. John on the other hand is a machine head. He is a nerd about big boats and trains like a five year old and he was asking all these questions.

The executive officer and the staff on the boat were aware that the captain wanted to talk to this one person, Wil Wheaton, and Wil was there with his wife and that is fine, but who are these other people? In particular, why is that that big hairy one in the back asking all these questions about the ship? It was just making people uncomfortable, but it was not making the captain uncomfortable. He loves talking about his his craft.

They were wrapping it up and: ”Thanks for coming up. It has been a pleasure having you!” and the captain didn’t want them to go, but his staff wanted to get back to doing the job of staring out at the ocean, and the captain said: ”Are there any last questions?” - ”Yes! What is the weirdest thing you have ever seen on the ocean?” and his staff, you could just see their shoulders hunch up, they all stare down at the floor, the exec who was masterminding this was like: ”Well, thanks for coming! Everybody out!” and the captain got this excited look on his face.

He said: ”Once, years ago when I was just a lowly first lieutenant on Nightwatch on a ship named the Santa Maria, in the middle of the night we saw lights under the water, and while we watched the lights surfaced and it was a craft in the dark and it rose up out of the sea and flew off into the sky and disappeared.” The exec at that point was like: ”Okay, tour over! Let's go!” They were just afraid that he was going to pull a flask out and start spilling booze on everybody, one of them was probably a representative of the cruise line and this is not the story that they want told that the captain of this enormous boat also has UFO stories.

John scanned the faces of all of the other sailors on the bridge and none of them were smirking. They were all just staring at a spot on the floor or on the wall, at attention, just trying to have this nightmare be over, get these people off the bridge, and please let the captain stop talking about it. John wanted to stay and talk to the captain about it all afternoon, but they were shooed off the bridge and back to the world. John was just tingling, but weirdly the other nerds, John’s fellow entertainment nerds, none of them really jumped on it.

John was surprised that it was not more popular, it just felt like a glimpse behind the curtain and that is the one you always want to ask the Navy pilots. Don't say: ”Have you ever seen a UFO?”, but say: ”What is the weirdest thing you have ever seen?” because everybody got a weirdest thing they have ever seen and if it just happens to be a UFO, that is their opportunity to answer that question.

Dan’s friend telling an alien abduction story in college (RW184)

Dan did see a UFO once. His friend in high school and early college, whatever is going on when it comes to things like alien abduction, there is something going on, there is an experience that many, many, many, many people, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people, maybe more, have had, whether it is a real experience that happened in the real world, the way that going grocery shopping happens, or whether it is something that happens in their mind or something else, maybe it is a mental disorder, maybe it is an actual real thing that is happening, but something is going on in this phenomenon that we call alien abduction.

Every single person is reporting a very similar experience around the world, regardless of age, culture, language, or prior experiences in their life, social status. All these people report essentially a very similar thing, regardless of what media they have been exposed to or lack of media they have been exposed to. It might be the same thing that when people describe a near-death experience: A lot of the things that people describe… they have done tests and studies that have showed that those are similar things to what happens when your brain starts shutting down, whether you are dying or close to death or whatever.

For many people, those are spiritual experiences, they feel like they are connecting with things, a feeling of love, of joy, of being reunited with something, etc. People are much more willing to believe in a near-death experience than they are in an alien abduction experience because people want to believe that there is an afterlife, people want to believe that they will see their their loved ones again, and who wouldn't? Generally those near-death experiences, and because we don't know what happens when you die or after you die.

We want to have something positive and something that you hope for and an experience that seems good. ”When I die I get a tunnel, there will be bright lights, my loved ones will all show up, they are all still alive in this other place, their spirits are there, they are welcoming me and maybe I will get to meet the big guy up there!” All of that sounds pretty good while the alien abduction stuff sounds pretty horrible and that might be why people are less willing to believe it. Also, it just sounds farfetched. It sounds crazy. There is something about that experience that has been reported consistently for so long and by so many people that Dan feels confident saying something is going on. We don't know what it is very clearly.

When Dan was in college, the book Community had already come out and Dan had been researching this and his friend started describing that she didn't sleep very well last night because she had a dream where three very thin Siamese cats were just standing there staring at her with huge almond-shaped black eyes. It was a terrifying dream and the next thing she knew was that she woke up and it was morning. Dan had a crazy imagination at 18-19 years old and he had also just read this book, so he was very intrigued by this.

He would ask her more questions, as much as a 19 year old cannot lead someone down a path he was doing his best to ask as open-ended questions as he could, but after talking to her a little bit about it, so much of what she was telling him was lining up with abduction experiences that he had read, whether it was the stuff that Budd Hopkins talked about, all of his stuff that he wrote and the stuff that Dan was reading from Whitley Strieber and all these other things that he was aware of.

She was not into any of that. She was into going to the beach and getting her tan. She was into makeup. She was beautiful. She read a lot of Sylvia Plath, she was really into Kate Bush, she had a very active nightlife, social life, she was not reading this stuff, this was not interesting to her, but as much as Dan believes it was happening to anyone, it was happening to her. After they talked about it, she very quickly started talking about it more openly and she started to think there were aliens.

It took her a while to admit to herself that maybe it was like that and it took her longer to talk to Dan about it. Dan was really intrigued and at the same time terrified by it because it was a terrifying experience. To hear the things that she talked about and the detail that she went into, she had the experience with them, putting little operating tools, long needles into her nostril or into the corner of her eye and there would be like a little item on the end of it as it would go in and as it would come back out the item wouldn't be there anymore, lots of other really disturbing things that she would talk about.

Then there were a few times where she would be pregnant or late by an extended period of time, and have one of these disturbing dreams that would turn out that the owls were looking at her or the cat was in her room again, staring at her with the giant eyes, and then the next morning she wouldn't be pregnant anymore. That happened several times and that was really creepy. Could she have been making it up? Absolutely! But Dan knew her for years and she just wasn't that kind of person.

The Greys harvesting her babies is a known thing in this, they are making hybrids. She had other experiences that were interesting. One time Dan came over to her house, picking her up to go somewhere, he knew her parents from having met them before and her younger sister, and her mom and her sister were sitting there at the table and her mom showed him pictures she had drawn. She just had a weird dream and she had this dream a bunch of times before and here was what the inside of the ship looks like and here is a table where they put you, here is the thing that they bring down over top of you, it has the lights in it, and and they stand around here and this is what the top the ceiling of the ship looks like and here is where the lights are.

She was talking about this the way you would describe a doll house that you had when you were a little kid, very nonchalant. She described it as a dream she had before, but Dan knew from the research he had done that this is a generational thing. If you are being abducted or whatever the phenomenon is, then your parents and probably their parents were, too. This is a multi-generational thing and if you have kids, they are going to be abducted, too. The theory goes that this is part of a program that they have with the goal to create a human/alien hybrid that from appearances is human, but in its mind is alien.

She had experiences like this all the time, she would always tell Dan about it, it was very creepy, he was absolutely fascinated by it, but she hated it, she did not want to talk about it, she didn't want to discuss it, she did not want to remember it, when she would remember it it was recounting a very traumatic experience. Dan heard people talk about being attacked or mugged or worse, he heard people recount stories being in bad accidents. That is the way she talked about it, this was not someone playing a game, and eventually they stop talking about it completely because it was too upsetting for her to talk about.

Once she told Dan about a story about when she worked in a women's clothing store in the mall and during the day when it was not very busy someone came in and she didn't want to look at the person's eyes, and this person seemed to be very older and frail and of course larger head, thin body, not totally alien, but not quite human, a little weird, a little different. The person asked for thin white sweaters or something like that, and she was so chilled by this person that she just said she was going to check in the back and she was too scared to come back out.

Dan seeing an alien at Publix and seeing an UFO (RW184)

Dan saw an UFO and didn't think much of it because he is generally very skeptical even of his own perceptions, back when he was working at he Publix grocery store. He started out as a bagger, a thing that Publix prided itself on, which was a good job. They were not allowed to take tips, but everybody took tips. You were required to say: ”No, I'm sorry! I can't accept that!” - ”Just take it!” - ”All right!” Dan worked very hard and got promoted to part-time stockman, first he did dairy, then he did frozen food, then he was in bottles, which meant Coca-Cola and all the soft drinks.

Those things sold crazy, people came in and they bought their two liters of coke and it was a constant business and you always needed to restock. One day the store wasn't too busy and Dan had his little notepad in his pocket and had written down what was missing, three cases of this, one case of this thing and you go in the back and load it up and bring it out and stock the shelf, and by then half the other things would be gone and you would write that down and go back.

Dan walked by one of the aisles and there was a person who at first blush seemed to just be older, but they didn't look like a regular person, it didn't look like this was a person with some kind of deformity, but they looked like they were supposed to be this way with very thinning minimal hair and solid almond shaped black eyes, smaller than the pictures of the aliens that Dan had seen, but legit. You would think that somebody like Dan would have been like: ”Okay, let's get a closer look here!”, but it absolutely chilled him to the bone, it freaks him out to talk about it now, he only talked about it one other time, it is absolutely horrifying, thinking about it is scary.

Dan wasn't confused, he wasn't under the influence of anything, he wasn't ever looking for this kind of thing, but it was legit and there was something here, there was something different. Dan stopped in his tracks when he saw this person, looked at him for a second, and they looked at him, and the only other experience he ever had where being looked at felt this terrifying was when they lived down Illinois Street in Downtown Orlando one night really late at night 3-4am Dan came back from something and he walked up to the door and they had an outdoor porch with little sconces (light fixtures) by the door, Dan was unlocking the door and something caught his eye and over to his left there was an owl just staring right at him in the dark and you could only really just see its two wide bright eyes looking at him. These two giant yellow eyes staring at him scared the crap out of him.

There is something about seeing predatory eyes looking at you in the dark at night that is freaking terrifying. This thing startled him, but then of course he laughed because it was an owl looking at him. Dan is not saying that this person in the store was predatory, but there was the same feeling of being seen and knowing that person knew that Dan was seeing them and they were seeing him seeing them. He started walking again and walked a couple aisles down and thought: ”Is that what you think that was?” and his heart was racing, he was breathing really fast, and he decided to go back and look again, but when he got back to the isle they were gone.

Did Dan hallucinate that? Was it just a person? Did he see them wrong? He will never know! That was the freakiest thing that he has ever seen in his life and it has haunted him his entire life ever since then. Was it just some weird looking person? His gut says it wasn't, but it was weird. It was the Publix down between Boca and Delray Beach, on the corner of Palmetto and Powerline, which is not a hotspot for alien activity, but you never know. John has been to a lot of Publix because they have great roast beef sandwiches. Dan was down visiting family down there and they redid the outside of it, but the inside is exactly as he remembers it. Mr. Sands, his old boss, still works there.

The UFO that Dan saw was when he was sitting at a stoplight at night, probably 1-2am. Maybe 30 yards away Dan saw an object, vaguely triangular shaped, it looked small, but that is hard to tell when it is up above. His windows were down and there was no sound and usually if you see a small plane or something like that you hear it. Planes have engines in them! It was just situated there and when a plane is coming from the distance, heading straight toward you or passing over you, sometimes it looks like it is not moving while it is actually moving very fast, but it looks like it is stationary.

Dan sat there watching it and thought that pretty soon it will start to look bigger and he will start to hear it, but that never happened. The bottom of the object was illuminated very brightly, not so bright he couldn't look at it, but it was very bright, almost as if there was a spotlight shining against the bottom surface. Typically when he has seen planes at night they are hard to see, you often only see the little lights on the wingtips, but this didn't have wings and it had a bright illumination on the bottom as it sat there. For as long as the light was there it never moved. It definitely wasn't a drone, but it didn't freak him out or scare him or anything.

John doesn’t like being scared (RW184)

John has not read extensively within the UFO community for two reasons: He doesn’t like to be scared and this kind of stuff spooks him. He doesn’t like the feeling of hair on the back of his neck raising up, he doesn’t like scary movies, he doesn’t like things jumping out from behind things at him, he doesn’t like gore and he doesn’t like being alone in the house at night and feeling spooked. Many people that love being scared and love horror movies!

A long time ago John figured he knew enough to know what he wanted to know about the UFO stuff and he didn't want to spend a ton of time reading abduction reports or whatever. He just wanted to stay out of that space. John spends a lot of time alone at night and he likes that time to be relaxing and groovy and not to feel like something is looking at him through the windows or that beings are able to paralyze him and erase his memory.

This the first time John ever heard the idea that abductions would travel in family. Within the context of this space, this is universally accepted.

John’s mom’s view on UFOs from the 1950s (RW184)

In the 1950s John’s mom came to the conclusion independently… UFOs were in the news, they were a fairly new phenomenon, the ones that were sighted over Mt. Rainier was 1947 and she would have been in her teens, and in the early 1950s she devised a theory that she has been with her the rest of her life, which was that human beings were a product of alien experiments on Earth. The reason that there weren't clear archeological records of human forebears, at a time when Lucy had been discovered and it was all the rage that this was our earliest ancestor, but there were all those questions, like it seems like there would be a lot more humanoid fossils.

Now there are surely some paleontologists listening who are saying: ”There are plenty! Herp-derp!” It seems like we can trace the evolution of birds pretty easily through fossil remains, maybe there are just a lot more birds, but it seems like there is so much mystery around the evolution of humans, we see humans arrive on the scene and then we see some some forebears that are the first monkey to walk on the ground.

John’s mom's theory is that they were using our world as a petri dish and they would come down and monkey around and we had a hand in the game. It is not like they were farming us or anything like that, but they were just showing up periodically and making minor tweaks in the same way that you would show up and make minor tweaks if you were growing an orchid or if you were making a bonsai. From the time line of a Bonsai it probably seems like people are monkeying with it all the time, but from the standpoint of an orchid, somebody comes in, comes along every once in a while, snips off something, maybe breeds you with a with another beautiful orchid.

She came to this in the 1950s and has just been unwavering in it, despite all of her weird Buddhism that she picked up along the way and despite her love for Methodist hymns and her radical anti-war politics and all the things that a person would come to between the ages of 16 and 86, the idea that UFOs were playing some part in the game she never deviated from. John always felt a special connection to UFOs, even as he is dubious and doubtful. he is not seeking it. Ever sense that Brady Bunch episode where it was clear that Greg was playing a prank he had been very aware of all the Frisbees that get thrown and filmed on Super-8 cameras.

John’s agnostic view on UFOs (RW184)

And yet John is always thinking, even yesterday he was walking along, thinking about when the UFOs finally make themselves known, what his reaction is going to be, what an exciting day that is going to be, how hopeful he is about it, and a lot of it feels like a job program, because when that happens they are going to call him up, but maybe his confidence that the UFOs want to talk to him and have a job for him is because they have been grooming his family for all these many years, not as abductees, although his pillows have turned to owls, but then he didn't feel any fear and hey never went anywhere or touched him at all. It felt more like a council, like a board meeting or a Zoom meeting, except they were all there and they were his pillows.

It might be that they were working with John’s mom and they were not asking a ton out of her, but just asked her o tell her kid about them. They are taking farmers and stealing babies from pretty girls, but with her it is something else and there is 10% awareness and the next generation hey are going to give 25% awareness or something.

The lives of the people who have these experiences are pretty disrupted by it. This isn't just a casual thing and for the rest of your life is just fine, but it affects those people deeply in their lives. You would know if there had been things over the course of your life that didn't line up and if John hasn’t experienced these things yet, then he is not being abducted. The likelihood is almost nil that people have a one-off experience where all their life they have no encounter of any kind and then at 53 years old and they get abducted, that is just not how it works, meaning John doesn’t have to worry about it.

John is not worried about being abducted, but he does feel like they are watching him. Dan is sure they are. It is comforting to John to know that they are not going to take him, he doesn’t want to go anywhere. If they asked if he would like to come on board their ship and take a look around, he would say: ”Well, sure!” and if they said if he would mind if they communicated with him via telepathy or Psionics, but they were not going to monkey with his thoughts, they are not here to implant thoughts in his brain and make him think that he had them, but they just wanted to be able to converse with him and not have to show up and stuff, John would be fine with that.

John would also want them to teach him how to do it and it not be a one-way call. If the ships appeared over the city tomorrow, or if there was a sighting that was just like: ”Well, the jig is up! It is not some weird infrared footage from a Mach-2 jet of a 40 foot long tube behaving strangely and all we have is some black and white footage of it and an audio recording of a pilot going Whoa! No way, dude!”, but if there was something that was clearly a craft and these is color film of it taken by multiple people and this craft is being crafty, but not so crafty that they are clearly aware now that they are being observed, the day that that happens, it will be a very exciting day.

Most people will say: ”Well, darn! Isn't that fun?” If it doesn't happen in our lifetimes, then John is just a skeptic. It is the same way he feels about God. He got no dog in that race. He is not going to stand here and tell you there isn't a God! What a load of hubris he would have to have to tell you there wasn't one! John is not going to say there are not UFOs and he is not going to say there are UFOs, but when they do show up and fly around for the first time and everybody's like: ”Okay, let's stop pretending! Now, what do we do?”

It would be clear to us that our army is kind of not any match for these guys, Will Smith or No, maybe we should not think about it in terms of how we are going to fight them. The military has contact with them primarily because the military is the one that is making the craft that are equipped. An F 18 if there were UFOs flying around and we were like: ”They are here!”, you would still have to use F18s to go look at them. It is not like you are going to repurpose a 737 and have it chase them.

John is excited for it. He doesn’t think it would cause mass panic, maybe for an hour. All the people who believe in God are already totally prepared to believe in somebody riding a golden chariot across the sky. They are primed for supernatural stuff. Dan doesn't agree, the more religious the person is, at least Judeo Christian, the tougher it would be for them to except something like this because it goes directly against most of the things that they have been taught, for example that human beings are God's special creation, that we are unique in the universe, we are created in God's image. If there were aliens showing up, those people usually think that they are demons or a spawn of the devil. They are real, but they are demons and they are bad.

People with a strong faith are the people who would be unwilling to accept it and it would really affect people's world view in that regard. Dan doesn’t think that it would be good for society or anything if that were to come out. John’s take on that is just that religious people are capable of dramatic and radical shifts in perception in the sense that they have taken every single bit of science and found a way to make it either not conflict with their belief or found a way to mold and shape it to confirm their belief.

Religious people are incredibly adept and adroit at processing any information and seeing it as… A hurricane can come and destroy a Megachurch and kill everyone in it and all of the other religious people will say it was God's doing. If you had said it a week before, they would have said that God would never do that to his faithful, but then it happens and rather than say it was a random act or rather than say it was a retributive act, they would say God works in mysterious ways.

The people that would have the hardest time with it are the people that are convinced that there aren't any and those are people that are science people, typically or doubters, and people who say: ”If there were UFOs and they were here, we would have detected them with our magic detection boxes!” and those people, because they are science people, as soon as there was evidence for it, they would go: ”Huh? Well, looks like I was wrong!” They are not going to be the ones that are saying: ”My faith is shaken to the core!” and people of faith are just going to call it whatever they want to call it. They are going to say that God is doing it to test us or that they are angels.

Human beings are not prone to lasting mass-hysteria. John has tremendous faith in humanity, it is why he gets up every day. It is intrinsic to being a progressive thinker that you have faith in humanity, that you are a Lockean rather than a Hobbesian. It is at the foundation of the idea that human beings can improve. The idea of Liberalism is that we are making progress and conservatism is the idea that a lot of progress is progress in the wrong direction and we need to hunker down and we need to preserve the ground that we have gained and not get too crazy with this future looking. It is intrinsically pessimistic about what our prospects are.

The more progressive you are, not in the sense of its current usage as an angry radical progressivism, which is extremely pessimistic in that they are always looking for the thing that is the worst about any situation… John’s whole life has been colored by both of his parents’ belief that technology, social growth, psychology, philosophy, all those things are ongoing and forward-looking and hopeful. John’s take on aliens is that this moment of arrival, this announcement is a hopeful one. They are not here to farm us and use us as blood bags for their spawn. They are not coming here to mine all the Floridium out of the Earth's core and are going to cast us off into space.

Stephen Hawking and others have said we should not be communicating with them. We don't want to broadcast that we are deeply in our infancy when it comes to technology, space exploration and communication and it is almost an invitation for a potentially non-benevolent being or planet of beings to pass a visit, and we are not ready for that yet. That is a funny remark and it is true and it is all the more reason that you hope that the Greys have been here all along and are farming us like orchids, and when the dragon people come, maybe the Greys will fight them off out by Alpha Centauri.

What if one day we all woke up and there was clearly a space battle happening out around Mars and you could see it from Earth, like explosions and C-beams glittering and star destroyers. What the hell would you say then? It is happening here, but it seems completely unrelated to us right now, The Grays are holding the reptilians off, out there a couple of planets away. There are a lot of people who would say that the Greys are actually engineered beings and hey are not alive in the way that we think of life. They are alive in that they can think and move and interact, but they are not alive in the way that human beings are alive.

They are almost like biological robots, they are created beings, and they were created by another alien species in order to basically do the grunt work. They are the ones who come down and bring people up into the ships, they are the ones who are handling the people and moving them around and doing things, operating things. Someone makes a mess on on the ship, they clean it up, they are not at a higher level, but they are running procedures, they are drones.

The reptilians are the officer class? It depends on which philosophy you take. There are some that would say that the Greys, this created race, are enslaved by them, but there is another that says that the mantis aliens, the insect alien beings are masters of genetics and they took just a little tiny bit of humanity DNA and used that to create the Greys so that they could exist here on Earth in order to come and get us and to do that work and interact with us because the mantis are very different, look very different, and are never seen in the actual doing of any actual abductions. A lot of the time they are off in the background.

They are overseers, they don't get their hands dirty, they have the workers to do that and the workers of the Greys. There are two different kinds of Greys: The very short ones and the taller ones. The taller ones have a more of an overseer type of a role, the smaller ones are doing a lot of the more basic tasks, but above the Greys, even the tall Greys are the mantis, but interestingly sometimes they are called Archons, they have a very different agenda and there is a potential that maybe they have also taken control of or enslaved or in some way have the Greys doing things for them as well.

Dan doesn’t really go too far into the reptilian space because it just seems like it is a whole other thing. Maybe it will be the next thing he studies. Dr. David Jacobs is a well-known researcher in this space and the best information about him is in interviews that he has done.