UFOs, the Afterlife, and Near-Death Experiences

Identifying historically the connections between, um, you know, afterlife or death and U- UAP. Um, now, okay, it's, it's just kinda strange that for a good portion of, of my career as an academic, I've been studying death and afterlife. Like purgatory is literally an afterlife destination for souls. So I've been studying the ascent of

souls in the Western Christian tradition, even Dante, right? And so, um, now it's odd that I then go into the study of UFOs. What the connection is, honestly, I don't know. Um, can I speculate about the connection?

I can probably speculate about it, and this sounds just... You know, the, the book that I just wrote honestly was truly the weirdest experience of my life, even weirder than American Cosmic, because I went into the deep dive of this connection and also the connection of Catholic visionaries who predict a form of, you

know, it looks like AI in the 21st century.

But they were suppressed because the Catholic Church didn't know that AI was gonna come around in the 21st century back in the 20th century. So, um, but there's this, this, um, you know, it goes back to...

And by the way, we also had a couple questions about, uh, uh, PK Dick, Philip K. Dick, and his science fiction, which is incredible and also visionary. And he also talks about this, okay? And I don't know if people know this about his work, but he was also fascinated with early Christianity.

So we're talking about early Christianity, like the first church before it becomes institutionalized, and I'm also obsessed with that. I've t- I've, you know, given, um, I talk about it, I teach about it. Um, and there's an idea of this m- this, this new way of living that's post, that's post-death.

Um, and the early Christian Church had an idea about this.

The Apostle Paul did, too. And it wasn't that y- you become a spirit. It was that you become a new form of being a human, basically. And, um, you can see this in the Torah, was the Hebrew Bible, uh, which is the Christian Old Testament. You can see a lot of the, like Elijah, and a lot of these prophets who actually just get-- They don't

even die. They just go directly into the, the higher realms, into heaven. Um, you see this in the early church with the Virgin Mary. You know, she, she goes, her body goes directly into heaven. Um, in some cases it's interpreted that she dies, and in some cases she doesn't.

Her body just goes into heaven. So, so there is this connection with this form of being human which is different than what we know of.

Right. And I think the c- in the contemporary world, the near-death experience, it sort of makes me think of what you were just talking about, um, of people just dying going to heaven.

I mean, the near-death experience, and we've had, you know, thousands of these reports from all over the world of people who are literally, they're like clinically dead.

They leave their bodies and go into this other realm, and then they are revived, which is something that didn't used to happen.

So it's fairly recent- Mm-hmm ... that people can be dead for quite a while and then be revived, and in the meantime they, they've left their bodies and gone into the afterlife realm and come back. So what's incredible is they're able to return and tell us what it was like. Um, and there are many

similarities, which is that's what makes it exciting from a research perspective, is the similarities that occur within, from different cultures, from people with different walks of life, from different countries, that are, you know, there are certain characteristics that have been documented

that are, are similar. And so it makes you think, "Well, maybe there is some kind of objective reality there." There are also differences where people's cultures do impact how they interpret what they've experienced.

But there's a lot of literature on the near-death experience and, um, I think, uh, we're talk- supposed to be talking about the relationship between UAP and this, but that isn't really about UAP, but it's about, um, sort of the being able to evidentially,

uh, through evidence kind of document the reality of an afterlife, which is what I was trying to do in my book, Surviving Death.

Um, and that's one of the really striking ways that I think people relate to very strongly and, and is the near-death experience.

And a- as I mentioned, sometimes there's people encounter deceased, uh, you know, m- or people might even say they see alien beings when they're in this near-death state, when they go- Yes ... into this other world.

Absolutely. Yeah. So, and another person who studied that a lot is Whitley Strieber.

Um, he's done a lot of work on what that relationship- Mm-hmm ... is between the afterlife, which he's had a lot of experiences with his, his, with his an- wife Anne who died, and the, uh, whole universe of, of the close encounter witness.

So he's another person people can read up on and see what he has to say about it.

Mm-hmm. But, um- Mm-hmm ... I think it's, it's just such a fascinating question.

Uh, we know it's there, but we can't really pinpoint it, right?

Mm-hmm. I mean- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm ... and that's what makes it all so interesting.