Podcast Stuff
This is the inaugural episode of the podcast version of Dispatches from Inner Space. If you like the newsletter, I think you’re gonna like the podcast.
In each episode, I'll read something of mine to a friend, and then we'll talk about it. That's it.
Today, I'll be reading “Gods & Aliens” (see below) to
, my longtime co-host over at .Stick around to see if you dig it.
By the way, the music for this show comes from the truly inimitable Muira,.
Gods & Aliens
I always wanted there to be aliens. Of course I did. Didn't we all? Who doesn't want there to be aliens? Raise your hand. You're lying. Or your broken, and there's nothing I can do for you.
One of the greatest existential dreads human beings have to face is the potential non-existence of both God and aliens. And that there's no such thing as ghosts. No unseen world. Just here, and now, and then no more. No afterlife, no alternate universes, no heaven, no hell, no once upon a times in any galaxies far, far away.
Just us, on this heavy orb of iron, crusted with some dirt and water and air and us, its microbiome, crawling around and telling stories.
Don't get me wrong. I love the stories. I love the fictions and the aspirations. I love that everything we build and do starts with a fantasy in some crazy person's head, then spreads like a virus into the brains of enough other people to start reshaping the material world accordingly.
We're a miracle. You can see that, right? It's amazing.
But it's also lonely. Really lonely. So lonely that we might die of it.
I'm not exaggerating. Take away religion, take away faith in Jesus or UFOs, and what you get is despair. Argue all you want, but the evidence is overwhelming.
Nietzsche was right. His assessment of the so-called enlightenment, and declaration that "God is dead" was not good news. It was a disaster. The realization of where the world was headed in the absence of religion drove him to madness and death.
That was, by the way, in the year 1900. If he could have seen what would happen over the next 45 years, he would not have been surprised. This is what he predicted would happen if you replaced God with State, or anything else.
I've been reading a book called American Cosmic that makes a case for UFOs being, basically, an emergent religion of the 20th century. Another version of faith in a higher power -- both literally and figuratively. Not the Judeo-Christian God, or the Islamic one, or any of the ones from the eastern traditions, but rather a God of technology and futurism. A God of galactic frontiers and scientific progress.
What do the believers say? The aliens are here, in possession of technology that could save or doom us.
I grew up Christian. It is an inheritance of faith that I have interrogated exhaustively, and continue to do so. It is also a faith I choose, every day, to keep. I don't know if Jesus did and said all the things the Bible claims, but I sure hope he did and said those things. And without a way to settle the question with certitude, I choose the side of belief.
But despite all this, I've lived most of my life not “believing” in UFOs, let alone aliens. I've even explored the case for my disbelief a handful of times in Arch/Eternal.
An example, from Chapter 22 (paraphrased for clarity):
All of the best theories we have suggest that if there’s other intelligent life in the universe — if life on Earth wasn’t some singular cosmic fluke — that if evolution has happened, is happening in other places, it would follow its own unique trajectory. To the point that we would be lucky to even be able to recognize it as life, let alone be able to have conversations with it.
And that’s assuming that there’s any overlap in terms of time, because astronomical timescales make all of human history from the apes look like a blip. A blink. Not even that. All of recorded human history happened in the time it takes light to travel one tenth of the way across the galaxy. I mean, some planets take a hundred years to orbit their sun.
What I’m saying is that, in a sense, it is absolutely ludicrous to assume that there are any other intelligent races even approximately close to us in either time or space.
And yet...here we are.
Writing this novel was, in large part, a way to incarnate some of the mystery I felt is innate to the experience of being human -- a conscious being stranded in the vastness of a universe as cold and dispassionate as a stone.
Because the world's leading scientists of the past hundred years have fairly well convinced most of us (including me) that the chances of us visiting any worlds outside our solar system anytime soon are vanishingly thin. And that if we do ever visit them (and "we" of course doesn't mean you and I, but our children, or their children's children's children), we will be surpassingly lucky to discover that there is anything that even sort of resembles life there. And that the chances of holding some kind of conversation with any of that life are basically non-existent.
And yet…here we are
I wrote that chapter in Arch/Eternal long before I went down the UFO rabbit hole, which happened when my company got contracted to develop a podcast about it.
And since then, what I’ve read and heard on the topic has been systematically deconstructing my assumptions about reality one paradigm shifting shock at a time.
And then, last Wednesday, on July 26th, 2023, three highly credible witnesses testified in front of Congress that:
Various intelligence agencies have been in possession of craft and biological material of non-human origin for decades
Commercial airline pilots have been specifically instructed not to report UAP
Many current and potential whistleblowers have been threatened, attacked, harmed, and potentially killed for their efforts to go public with what they know
These are not the kinds of things reasonable, rational people say. These are not the kinds of things you go around claiming if you “believe science.”
This is the domain of the radical counter narrative. The lunatic fringe rebellion.
"Keep your slow time and hopes for exoplanet fungus," they say. "The aliens are already here, and the government has been hiding their ships."
You can almost feel your eyes cramp with the eye-roll, can't you?
Except, I watched that whole hearing, and you know who wasn’t rolling their eyes? The Senators and Representatives asking the follow-up questions.
The congresspeople who are really pissed at getting stonewalled by their own intelligence agencies.
The federal legislators who are rolling up their sleeves to pass laws that will force disclosure.
My own brain is sus af
At this point, I have encountered what can only be described as a preponderance of evidence that something is going on here. Something that is not, as they say, prosaic. Whether what we’re talking about is extraterrestrial, interdimensional, extratemporal, or some totally other thing, what it isn’t, is nothing.
And yet, over the course of my nearly four decades of life, I have developed a very strong cognitive immune system. The thing that sets it off faster and more strongly than anything else?
Wanting it to be true.
So, in order to answer my inner knee-jerk skeptic in his own language, here are some points to consider.
This is all either the most robust and hysterical example of mass delusion/deception in modern history, or it’s the beginning of the greatest apocalyptic shift in all of history.
Every week that goes by, the former seems less likely.
As the number of whistleblowers and witnesses swells, fitting them all into a narrative of delusion or deception becomes harder and harder to do without straining the limits of rational plausibility.
In either direction now — belief in radical UFO claims or disbelief in those claims — a person must accept coordinated deceptions and wild conspiracy theories.
So the only question left is, which narrative actually makes more sense now?
As for myself, I am left with the wide-eyed, head-shaking conclusion that we are not alone in this universe after all.
Gods & Aliens