You put this shit on the accelerator But when I yell go You go Nick That's from the movie the signal where Nick and Haley along with another MIT student whose name I can't remember are on a cross-country trip to kind of work on some issues with Haley and Nick's relationship But what they don't realize is the hacking they did at MIT is following them because actually it was part of an Alien abduction government sponsored program really alternative reality simulation kind of thing Have I lost you I Hope not because as wacky as that might sound in the sci-fi and movie reality We seem to be in it might be a lot closer to the non-reality reality We're actually in and at the end of the day That's really what this amazing book by today's guest Ralph Blumenthal who's authored I think the ultimate biography on John Mack. Well, I think that's what it's all about Here's a clip from the interview What John Mack has done along with a bunch of other people has shifted the burden of proof These experiences that people are having are not in the way that we'd normally talk about them real because my read of it Is they are real. We just don't know what real is anymore. What are your thoughts? Absolutely? You could not I could not have said it better now. John often said if anyone has a better explanation I'm willing to hear it. So it's not mental illness. It's not a mass delusion because these people don't get together It's not publicity seeking because they shy away from publicity. They don't want to be known. They're questioning They wish it wasn't true. It's not books. They've read our movies I've seen because kids two years old tell these same stories. So he's eliminated all these other things that it's not So then he says, okay, so as far as I know nothing has happened to these people other than what they said Welcome to skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers thinkers and their critics I'm your host Alex Sikaris and today we welcome Ralph Blumenthal the skeptico Ralph is the author of The Believer Alien Encounters Hard science and the passion of John Mack It's I really love the title by the way Ralph I it captures so much to anyone who's read the book, you know There's some kind of you've done a lot with just a few words there even with the end the the passion of John Mack I thought was great. So thank you. Thank you a lot of work went into that title You know titles are important I know they are and you just got admire someone who's done it and I also just admire this book so much But let me tell folks for a minute, you know, Ralph is the author of many books several books But he's also a very well respected journalist having written many years for the New York Times He is the real deal and he's done some of his best work with this Amazing biography of John Mack who if you don't know John Mack is we're gonna talk a little bit about it But a lot of this interview We're gonna kind of assume that you know who John Mack is But you know before we get started one thing I want to say is I thought the book was terrific and it had just so much information about this important part of history that You know go buy this book. I bought the book even though the publisher sent it to me buy this book support This guy I can't imagine we're gonna ask him a minute How much time and effort he spent in researching all the interviews he put together to do this and then if you feel so Inclined and I did write a review mine hasn't come through yet, but right a review of the book so Ralph it's great to have you here and again Congratulations on an important Important book because it's such an important part of history Thank You Alex.  Who is John Mack? Speaking of accolades John Mack was accolated in his lifetime as well as vilified He was a Harvard psychiatrist Very eminent in his field who threw a series of circumstances that I outlined in the book Got interested in the phenomenon of alien abduction people ordinary people from all walks of life including young children who Remembered or had Images of or thought that they remembered being abducted by alien beings taken to some kind of craft for Strange bizarre pseudo medical experiments including reproductive procedures put this in a time perspective and in a cultural perspective What year is this? What else is happening around him? Okay? John Mack stumbled across this phenomenon in 1990 So, you know basically the modern era he had been a psychiatrist Since the 50s, so he'd already you know been eminent in his field for 40 years. He had written other books Before ever coming across Ellen abduction. He was an expert in nightmares So no one could ever say he you know, he didn't know what a nightmare was He was an expert in childhood development. He had written about A girl who committed suicide a teenager. He'd written about a Holocaust Survivor, so he had a wide-ranging interest again before he ever came across alien abduction So, you know, he was very eminent in his field, which is what you know, what what provided I guess the shock value to me when I Happened upon a story for the book that he was the least likely guy to be investigating alien abduction And then you know the other thing that's always included with John Mack right there in the second sentence is he's a Pulitzer Prize winner Which is is really interesting and I love the way you kind of Explain that in the story because it kind of speaks to this passion and then almost evangelical kind of part of him he won a Pulitzer for a Psychobiography really of Lawrence of Arabia Te Lawrence I mean as I say in the book and he went to the movies like everyone else in 1963 to see this long long movie Which won all kinds of every prize you could imagine best picture I believe But unlike us when he came out he didn't just say wow, you know, what a great movie He decided he was going to investigate Te Lawrence and spent the next 12 years in Oxford and England and and in the Middle East really delving into his life and Then this leads to some other amazing chapters in this amazing life. He becomes this kind of peace emissary He's Jewish. He kind of has it's kind of interesting too about his background. He kind of comes from this very kind of trust fund rich kid East Coast Jewish kind of society and then next thing you know He does this he made all these fantastic accomplishments, and then he's becomes kind of this peace emissary between Israel and Egypt and he kind of has that he kind of knows the Arab thing a little bit from writing this book I mean, it's it's again an amazing chapter in his life as well. Yeah, I mean I outlawed all the steps. There was a series of progressions really that took him ultimately into alien abduction and finally into life after death, but The result of the Lawrence Biography, which as you say won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 He was suddenly considered an expert on the Middle East, you know, that's how things work You write one book and suddenly you're an expert So there he was we called to the Middle East to mediate the Arab Israeli conflict He had an introduction through a colleague at Harvard to Yasser Arafat and he met with Yasser Arafat gave him a copy of his book on T. Lawrence called a prince of odd disorder and So he was an expert on the Middle East and that you know led to other things he Traveled widely around the world. He was you know booked for lectures He also became an ardent opponent of nuclear weapons and he demonstrated against the nuclear weapons stockpile He went to Arizona got arrested with his whole family his wife and three sons for you know for protesting so So there were I think it's very important in the development of this book to outline all the steps He took before he became interested in alien abduction. First of all, it outlines his bona fides that he was a serious guy And he'd achieved a lot and he knew you know the human mind Insofar as it's ever able to know the human mind So again, he he couldn't be accused later of not knowing what he was talking about that these people have psychological aberrations are they crazy And I think was very important to establish that I agree and to establish that just as you just said I mean, he's accomplished. I mean so he gets thrown in the Middle East thing, but He immediately Excels at it.  He's well respected within the Psychological community in the psychiatry community in general very accomplished guy and then as you describe I mean, I mean, I think it's hard for people even to wrap their head around this topic today We know it is but he just goes headlong into it this kind of Passion of John Mack. He goes, hey, you know, there's this seems to be happening and I want you to explain for a minute Why he comes to believe that this might be happening because he is a little bit not a little bit He is skeptical at the beginning, right? Should also say Alex that he was immensely charismatic the tall Really good-looking cobalt blue eyes magnetic to men and women which got him into a little bit of trouble I mean, he is Hollywood all the way. There's photos in the book. I mean, he looks like an actor He's stunning. He jumps off the page like this guy movie star and he and he knew it too I mean, that's what gave him sort of the confidence. He was but Hopkins thought he had too much confidence that he was Really, that was almost a shortcoming that he didn't think he could fail But as you said sure when he first heard about the phenomenon from from bud Hopkins and I tell the story in detail in my book He was very skeptical. He didn't even want to meet with bud Hopkins after he heard that bud Hopkins was investigating alien abduction He thought it was completely crazy So he was skeptical in the beginning and everything in his upbringing as he said he was born in a a matured scientific materialistic German Jewish household and a very secular non-observant really And very open to the world and science, etc. And non superstitious So he really was a very unlikely person to be captivated by this as I say he was captured But not by aliens. He was captured by the phenomenon But what happened is He's introduced to this phenomenon by bud Hopkins and he collects a group of so-called experiencers abductees Around us for one second. I don't want to do this too much, but bud Hopkins Remind people who he is people might people might know but then remind him who he is in terms of the UFO community But then also he's a well-known artist in New York He is kind of a guy with a certain you know a Social weight as well, right? Right well one I mean in the course of this book I deal with a lot of interesting characters and bud Hopkins was certainly one of them He was an artist on Cape Cod and New York. He was a non-objective artist. He'd been written up in the New York Times He had really some artistic credentials and on the way to a party one day on Cape Cod in 1964 he and the other people in the car spotted a UFO over the ocean and They thought that was cool and they followed it for a while and they got to the party and they told people hey We saw UFO and they all said oh, we've seen UFOs. Oh, sure.  So he starts to study it but Hopkins and he teaches himself hypnosis He said I'm an artist and nobody cares what an artist does he couldn't suffer any loss of reputation but Hopkins research these people and Wrote a book long before John Mack ever got involved called Missing Time where he identified the phenomenon of people who remember spying a UFO and then sort of losing track and then later in hypnotic regression or even in conscious memories recapture Memories of having been taken aboard a craft and subject to pseudo medical experiments and and meeting, you know a short Gray being so-called the grays and all that so So but Hopkins was already well into this when a when John Mack meets him and as I said John was very skeptical in the beginning but then he gathered his own group around him and Was absolutely enthralled and be bewildered And captivated by their stories. He could not believe this is happening in any kind of recognizable reality I mean reject something here Ralph because as this story is told and is repeated over and over again There's kind of a couple of different ways to interpret it I think anyone who encountered such a kind of incredible paradigm shifting experience Would be evangelical So I think sometimes when we talk about bud Hopkins and we go wow bud Hopkins just jumped on this thing Hell, yes, he jumped on this thing He was living in one reality the reality that we all live in and then suddenly that reality has turned upside down And then suddenly he starts talking to these people who are all confirming it over and over again and then when we talk about the evangelism of John Mack as you said a guy who's supremely accomplished supremely confident and he is basically confirming Top-to-bottom everything that bud Hopkins is finding and you want to say bud Hopkins is self-taught in hypnosis John Mack sure a shit ain't self-taught and he's getting the same thing and he's not even putting these people a lot of times under deep hypnosis He just sang relax a little bit and start telling me what you believe so you're not shading that one way or another I just want to make there's a difference between, you know Just kind of reporting this matter of faculty, but also kind of putting a spin on it You know that there's a reason that these guys were so excited Everybody who everybody who has come across this phenomenon is Completely blown away by their minds are blown almost literally so But Hopkins was and John Mack was so yes They become evangelistic because they want to tell the world that they discovered this phenomenon, you know And and not many other people were out there, you know telling these stories Bud was one of the few David Jacobs who came along around the same time a professor at Temple University who studied UFOs and then became an ardent advocate of you know, the whole abduction phenomenon But other than that there were many people spreading the word and evangelistic is exactly right John Mack I couldn't wait to tell people about this including a Harvard audience before he was really ready to I mean He had almost only heard about it before he was you know lecturing on it too And that's one of his shortcomings as I point out in the book. He was he was a passion but passionate for sure over enthusiastic perhaps but So he so what convinced him well first of all he noticed very quickly that the people he was talking to were not insane I mean he was a psychiatrist and as he often said, that's what I do, you know that you know, if you're not You know evaluator arts a conservator, you know when a Rembrandt is a Rembrandt and he said I'm a psychiatrist These people come to me. I know they're not crazy He also said that they were not deluded. They were not, you know, reading off some Playbook or so the stories were basically consistent but different enough so that they're not You know told by rote these people came from a Wide variety of backgrounds. They were young and old Both genders different ages and And children as young as two who said, you know, little man take me into the sky I fly in the sky and these kids were not reading books on UFOs And you know, they were not, you know, playing back movies that they had seen So this all convinced John also he found that There was a very often a place outside the house where they remembered a UFO coming down where the grass was Sort of tamped down or branches were broken And sometimes they had marks on their bodies afterwards that they couldn't explain And in one case was a quadriplegic who could not have inflicted the marks on themselves. It was totally paralyzed so all these things were sort of fragmentary evidence and yet They convinced John that he was on to something that was happening in some kind of reality It wasn't just all make-believe and it wasn't Easily provable. It was somewhere in between. It was in some, you know, liminal world But it was true enough so that he thought the people were telling the truth So let's talk some more about Two things about harvard And about naivete, you know, because before we even rolled tape I One of the things I really appreciated about the book, although it kind of was a little bit hard to get over is it's Awards and all kind of honest telling of the account. So if you just kind of Like I wasn't not aware of some of these things, you know, you don't come off Seeing John Mack is quite the hero you might have if you didn't know everything But I want to know everything. So I appreciate that in the book but I particularly want to focus on the fact that He's naive because I think that has a couple of really really important elements to play in the overall story as well Right He as I said, he he couldn't wait to tell the world about this thing. He had discovered I thought he had discovered And he was naive about the reaction that there would be a you know Very negative reaction from parts of harvard which came back to bite him when they Investigated him, but for example, he told he told a woman friend of his as soon as he You know was it started looking at the phenomenon. This is what I'm doing. I'm all excited and she said well john You know, I know you're excited about this, but the rest of the world, you know May not be right there with you on this. So he didn't see that And when he gave interviews on the subject to you know, newspaper people Um, he was very unconscious. He would say, uh, I don't know. Should I talk about astrology? No, maybe I will you know, uh, or, um He just Spoke too much sometimes he should have should have said said less until he knew more and he'd been warned about this but that was his nature and um And you know, and if we're talking about his character and in wards or so this is not necessarily character failure But it's an important element of the story as I point out his mother died when he was eight and a half months old Um, she died of appendicitis a penicillin had you know already been discovered but wasn't really in use And so suddenly eight and a half months old. He loses his mother And he never gets over it. He spends his whole life searching for this absent figure in his life um and I and and other people I quote in the book Make the point that this was part of his search for what's missing in the con in the cosmos some intelligent life or some missing entity or god or whatever you want to call it intelligent life in the cosmos so Uh, that's also part of his character Maybe I mean that's a little uh Psycho analytic and you can kind of go take it or leave it if you want But what is true is he kind of uses it for an excuse for a a lot of bad behavior In his marriage and in his relationships that most of us Just don't think is very honest or what we'd expect from a guy of the Standard or caliber that we see he just he just looks he has frailties He has human flaws the way that the rest of us do but I really I don't want to get off on that on the personal Stuff because who cares the part that really interests me about the naive part Is that I think it plays so well with so many of the the things I've investigated here is we kind of have a sense that a guy who is A Harvard psychiatrist a world renowned psychiatrist Pulitzer prize winner. I think a lot of us are a little bit Surprised to hear that he's naive about kind of how the how the world works and where that really comes through is in The Harvard trial. I mean this guy By the grace of god Well, really not by the grace of god by the grace of a couple of good attorneys that kind of turn up the heat Escapes what would probably be a career ending what they intended to be a career ending right then walk us through that I think it's a real important part of this history Well, let me also say that you know, uh, his naivete was also a strength I mean it was a freshness that he brought to the subject and everything he did and That was not just a negative But it was a positive too because people sense that in him He was brimming with enthusiasm with confidence and he was he was a likeable person So Harvard was not happy with what it was hearing about his appearance on opera to promote a book he had written He had tried to get a peer review peer-reviewed article Several times and was rebuffed. Let me set this up a little bit We'll introduce correct me if i'm wrong John Mack writes a book abduction human encounters with aliens as you mentioned He's already been on the circuit at Harvard in terms of making presentations doing this stuff But now he really goes public Oprah Winfrey Larry king. He's out there in this way that you're talking about just open like hey This is what happens aliens are abducting people and having sex with them in order to hybrid humans You know that that's the newsflash here from Harvard, you know So Harvard doesn't like that So Harvard doesn't like that now I make the point in the book Alex that Harvard is no stranger to anomalous research I mean William James You know was talking about seances at Harvard a hundred years ago and they were okay with that They don't disown William James But there was something about John Mack that rubbed them the wrong way And I think it was as you mentioned his appearance on opera He was all over the media and he was a kind of an open guy about it and Maybe that that disturbed them Apart from the subject of alien abduction being associated with Harvard and a Harvard professor So anyway, they convene the secret inquiry which I call and they call at one point they mentioned As an inquisition now they said to him this is not an inquisition But he's a Harvard psychiatrist. He says well, it's not an inquisition Why do they use that word to describe what it isn't so it's not it's not about the money This is not about the money, right? Right Um So, uh, it was an inquisition it inquired into his finances and inquired into his mental processes That he believed in UFOs. I mean all these things that really should not be part of an inquiry of a professor Uh, you know enjoying academic freedom at a major university Uh, so they uh called in his his experiencers. They called in his colleagues A lot of people they called in colleagues who were not particularly friendly to him because He took some of their patients and treated them when they're when, you know, fellow psychiatrists wouldn't deal with the abductees So there were some people who had an ax to grind and the committee Spoke to them and the committee was also a very weighted towards scientific materialists If you can't touch it, you know measure it taste it and ain't it ain't there it doesn't exist and John Mack was trying to tell them That there are things that we don't understand in the universe and even physics is beginning to grapple with these now Spooky action at a distance and all the things that are supposedly impossible Uh, so he was trying to explain to them that things we don't understand But it doesn't mean that they're not real and they said well, what's your proof? And he said I don't really have any proof because this phenomenon doesn't lend itself to to proof as we usually understand it so they had this Standoff, but as you said John Mack had the benefit of two outstanding lawyers. One was Danny Sheehan a Jesuit lawyer who had um investigated, you know, the Uh, I ran contra armed scandal of the Reagan administration Karen silkwood case he represented the the family in that famous, you know plutonium poisoning case um, and the other was Eric McLeish who had just Uh, exposed a priest abuse scandal in Boston. I think it was interesting in the book and it's interesting here And i'm not at all against it when you say Danny Sheehan, then you say Jesuit lawyer Which you know like a lot of people aren't cluing into what you're saying there.  It's very very interesting that these two guys do it and there's also a dynamic here that I heard your excellent interview with um Whitley striber, you know, and I've spoken with Whitley a couple of times on this And there's just a slightly different flavor here that I wanted to ask you about because Both Whitley and if you watch like the presentations that uh, Danny has done like on youtube on this It doesn't conflict at all with what you're saying. It just puts a different light on it What they paint is a guy being john mack who's completely out of his league Completely lost in the weeds walks into this thing Basically takes the attorney that the harvard board gives him so oh you need representation Here's the attorney you should use and this guy's just setting him up for failure And danny says I got in there and I was like To heck with that stuff No, we are going after these guys and we're going to take them on But until then john mack it's not his doing he he kind of goes along He's smart enough to get a good attorney and go along, but he's not smart enough He thought it was just going to be a a conversation among collegial You know a fellow faculty members at harvard So he goes in first without a lawyer and then his nephew who's a Doctor at the harvard medical school said what are you crazy? Are you you know trying to channel laurence of arabia be a martyr like him? You need representation. So he gets representation when he gets a lawyer who worked for harvard And that what that didn't work out so well because the lawyer that lawyer's first advice was cooperate with the committee See what they want to cooperate with him and then where that didn't work out and he gets danny she and danny She says what are you crazy? This guy gave you bad advice and And you need a firebread now danny tells the story of course Centering it on danny And you know, so that's an interesting dynamic. He's a very charismatic guy and and he was very gung-ho And I read his legal memos on the case and they are funny.  I mean they are recently Well, they have a ufologist basically. I said they've always been interested in, you know, strange things in the heavens and Marian apparitions and if you you know, if you're trying to tell people that there was a miracle You know a virgin birth with jesus then you can't start saying well These other miracles don't count or these other Paranormal things don't count. I mean, that's my take on it and john met with the vatican cosmologists Cosmet cosmologists not a cosmetologist and it was very interesting. He took that very seriously so But you're right to to to highlight that aspect of it was very interesting and danie sheen by the way As a really firebrand lawyer with jesuit training. So he had even more of you know, prosecutorial Zest Knew something about ufos. He was interested in them from the beginning. So there was a good matchup You know one other thing to just touch on and I don't know if you got there But the one thing that kept playing in the back of my mind is Oh, harvard, you know, we have to keep to these standards But what about the whole mk ultra stuff that's going on at harvard, right?  That's not just conspiratorial banter That's just true. Ted kazinsky was in his class was part of a program. So I don't know if this harvard board was aware of Some of harvard's darker connections, but it seemed kind of strange to me Especially when you look into mk ultra and again, I don't know if this is your this is your bag or not, but I've heard it. I've heard it on some pretty good authority that one of the aspects of mk ultra was Hey, we might know something about the mental phenomenon associated with et and Therefore let's start looking at the mental aspect of this more broadly because mk ultra had a lot of tentacles And was looking at a lot of different directions and et might have been one of them so do you think there was any awareness there of I don't think harvard was trying to cover that up, but I do get into mk ultra a little bit in the book because the woman who Connected mac to bud hopkins. It was a psychotherapist who had come across an abduction case in her You know medical career and you know became aware of the whole phenomenon of You know alien beings appearing to people and she sort of told And she knew about hopkins and she told john to see but but this woman whose name was bland shavo st Who's not much information available about her. She's died since but She identified herself as an mk ultra victim and Horrendous stories and I looked into mk ultra for the book and it was all true I mean the church committee investigated this was a Dastardly plot by the cia To You know administered mind-altering drugs to ordinary citizens to see how they react And it was a terrible scandal when it came out people died people committed suicide. They were driven insane and And then all the records were lost Quote lost so it reads like a you know a q anon conspiratorial You know screed, but this was true and it was horrendous And so I know cornell was involved. I'm not sure about harvard, but a lot of you know top institutions Allowed their facilities to be used by you know mk ultra the program and the cia so But the one thing that the committee said that was that john mac picked up on that was interesting The committee said we want to see if you've been adhering to a proper scientific procedure And he said what the hell is proper science? I thought science You know is supposed to break you know boundaries of procedure not you know adhere to certain I'm sure you have to have scientific you know science protocols But there's no boundaries to what you can look into and what you can't look into in science So that was something that the committee thought that this was somehow inappropriate For harvard and john mac to be looking into this alien abduction You know ralph one one of the things that struck me right from the beginning of your book is I got the sense that from this kind of uh academia standpoint that How much times have changed because despite everything we're saying about the kind of Deep dark secrets there. I got the sense that these guys harvard guys were sensitive to academic freedom And that was really something that they did not want to be perceived as Standing in the way of and it really did carry weight. I don't think the environment is quite the same today I think Just people are squashed a lot more than they were and I wonder if you have any opinion on Well, this would all play today interesting, you know, we are in what they call cancel culture now and um It's true that um There's a lot less tolerance given the ubiquity of social media To any mistakes or missteps and people are quashed, you know, they step outside the line, whether it's me too Or, you know, any any utterance that made in their lives that now appears controversial um Comes back to haunt them So I think you're right that if this had come up today, that probably would have been Less time john mac would have been swamped with complaints and I mean On the other hand, I think society is more open now to the paranormal The stories we did in the new Navy videos of UFOs, which the Pentagon now acknowledges as authentic Have woken people up to the fact that you know, there is this phenomenon out there That is that is a genuine for them. I mean these things exist. We don't know what they are We don't know where they come from But but they're not, you know Mental delusions, they're not, you know, spiritual constructs. They are physically real whatever they are. They're real Um, let's let's pursue that society has moved forward Well, let's push that a little bit further because it's always tricky, you know These things are real like even that Simple point that in the book I have to say You know anyone again Please get this book and here's another reason to get it at the beginning is I don't know 50 60 pages of just A summary of the whole UFO thing Of from beginning to end and very factual accounts of this account this account and that led to this account and they're chronologically laid out as is the abduction phenomenon. So I walk away from that saying, okay, this guy Ralph Blumenthal is just Telling it like it is about the reality of this But by the time you get to the end of the book There's also this kind of same shift that John Mack does and that so many people do of like, well How real is it in terms of this consensus reality materialist go out and drive my car kind of Thing Do you feel any need to kind of play in that little space there or is this just real in the way that we think that it's real? No, it's not real. I mean bud hopkins and david Jacobs together thought it was real And that it was happening in in everyday reality people were really getting abducted by really evil beings for really You know traumatic and horrendous experiments And john who john mack who who started off basically agreeing with that Came to think that it's got to be happening in some more Marginal realm because it's not everyday. We don't see it. There's no proof of it. You know, we never capture it It's never kept the abductions have never been captured on film Unlike UFOs, let's say whose images have been recorded on radar and and film, but let's just talk about alien abduction No, there's no pictures of an alien of no pictures of an alien that have been authenticated So john more and more thought that this has got to be happening in some other reality It penetrates our reality was the way he put it from time to time in certain ways but It is not everyday reality and more and more he thought it was Linked to other paranormal phenomena, it's not just alien abduction that's standing alone But there's all kinds of other things like fairy, you know, irish fairy tales and crop circles and cattle mutilations and bigfoot and lockless monster and Old hag syndrome where you know the evil creature climbs on your chest at night and tries to strangle you and The guy who wrote the book about that the psychologist that happened to him So um, so there's a whole range of paranormal experiences that uh, he realized are Equally mysterious and may be related in some way to another dimension that that Impacts our own somehow and in the end, of course, he was most interested in in life after death and what happens after bodily death Because that's the ultimate mystery You know the the only thing that always gets me about that perspective is what I call backdoor materialism, you know It says okay, I understand there's this larger conscious reality that extends into these other realms of consciousness That you just talked about but now let me now switch to my limited By all accounts of those other realms my limited understanding of this time and space reality and let me talk about all those others it it seems kind of Handicapped in kind of a way that doesn't really make sense I mean it seems to me that if we're going to make sense of this stuff from this Time and space continuum Then the original path that he was down is the path that we have to follow You know, I had a interesting series of interviews on this topic like with david jacob's I had him on the show a couple times and also kind of interleaved those interviews With a woman named mary rodwell. Have you ever heard of mary rodwell? Sure. Sure. Okay Well done. Yeah Nice nice very nice person So they're kind of going back and forth on this issue that you explore in the book of the good et versus bad et You know evil et versus spiritual loving here to bring transformation kind of et and david jacob's who is It's important to know. I think if I can interject. I think david jacob's and But hopkins have to be understood from an atheistic perspective.  I mean there's not any of it any way So why even talk about it? And that's how they see it But they also Have some pretty solid evidence that they bring back that that says that I mean like david jacob Some people criticize him that he's not a professional hypnotist. Well, I gotta tell you he's a pretty smart guy I think he trained well enough and it sounds like his protocol was pretty good He tried to intentionally mislead people, you know, he would say okay now go over to the corner of the craft and they'd go Okay, wait a minute. There is no corner of the craft. He goes, okay. Yeah, that is confirming what you said Anyways, I don't want to go on in this story, but I'm interviewing david jacob's. I'm interviewing mary rodwell They're going back and forth Once saying evil baddie tea sends people back rapes people which comes through again and again. I don't know how How we understand that inside of our culture is anything other than the ultimate intrusion of our Personal space and that is reported and then go to mary rodwell. So look deeper, you know, there's a spiritual thing But here's the point David jacob's goes the one thing i'm sure is this is a project.  So then I go man and say mary. What about that? And she does a big long pause and she goes Yeah, well it is definitely a program I mean they they are doing some kind of genetic manipulation. I don't know what that means They are doing something. There is an intentionality to it. There is a directive to it And so I guess I'd throw that out there and and what do you think about that? Because I think when we jump into that other space of other, you know, other dimension stuff you know Well, listen as jack valet and other Experts have said if that's the case they're very bad scientists because they have to keep doing the same experiment Over and over again. They want to know how reproduction human reproduction works So they take they abduct a man and a woman sometimes People who know each other and make them have sex in front of the the alien beings so they can understand reproduction So as one anthropologist told me from my book, you don't need to do that You just get a hygiene manual reproduction is not that hard to figure out And to make people go through that again and again and again And to you know examine the bodies again and again through all these medical procedures that you know the The experiences detail at great length to the actually describing the instruments used So why do they have to do it again and again? So when they asked John So when they asked John Mack that same question He said, you know what? I'm not a good alien psychologist He said I don't I can't explain why they do what they do And but it's clear that they do the same things over and over again So and and Jacobs and Hopkins, you know found that in their research that It was very highly traumatic.  At a and their eggs and the sperm from men and they made hybrid babies And then they would re abduct the people later and say these are your children And you know this was happening in absolute reality You know well John more and more said I don't know it doesn't you know I can't prove it. It it may be happening, but not in any recognizable You know dimension that you know that I can point to so And then he saw that as you say he started to drift off into other things and he said well, let me look into Crop circles and let me look into viking runes Are you any you know the stones that tell the fortune of the future? So You know, it's it's an endless mystery. Yeah, what can I say? It is and I always I always kind of remind people, you know, I talked to Jacques Valet too and I love and appreciate you know all the things that you're saying that he brings But he also carries around that slag from the alien ships in his pocket too And when he goes and analyzes it with a spec You know the best microscopes we have we oh, gee, we don't know how to make that shit here on earth so there there is this crossover as you're alluding to between These different dimensions if we want to call it that or these different realities and our reality. I'm just always a little bit uncomfortable when we Speak from the primacy of our reality as I well, it's well obviously not true because they're not getting raped I don't know Whitley Strieber has said from the beginning. He was he was raped And uh story. Yeah And he's got the implant and and there's plenty of people have the implant and some of them turn out to be not implants And some of them turn out to be that same kind of material looking stuff That Jacques Valet walks around with and likes to collect and says we don't know how to make this stuff here Well, Jacques Valet said one of the quotes I especially like from him He said I'm probably the only ufologist who doesn't know what they are Because everyone else is very ready to you know, alpine on exactly what these Crafts are or aren't And he goes back and forth some days. He's he understands it some days. He doesn't some days He says it's real some days. He says it isn't so he exemplifies the the ambiguity of the field Um, you know, I have a quote in my book from Charles Ford the great anomalous Who said the whole thing is like looking for a needle. No one ever lost in a haystack that never was The it's it's it's bottomless. I mean and that's what you know, obviously it Captivated John Mack because he wasn't finding any answers and he just kept getting drawn more and more into the mystery Beautifully put wealth. Let's talk a little bit about the media You've spent a good deal of your life Hey belly of the beast kind of media guy, uh, you know, new york times Tell us about how mac Was treated by the media both good and bad Um, yeah, both good and bad is right. Um Certainly he was a darling of the media because he uh, he was a subject of countless stories in psychology today in the new york Times time magazine um On all the networks as I said Oprah Winfrey a lot of the talk shows he went on with his experiences often to his later Chagrin and disappointment because he said we got sandbag because he you know, again, there's naivety You don't go on a you know tv You know talk show reality show And think you're gonna And think you're gonna be well treated, you know because they're looking for blood Um, they're looking for a story, right? looking for a sensation So, uh, so in many ways he was treated badly with with great, uh Skepticism he said the times never wrote me up in a way that wasn't snide was his his take on it Um, on the other hand, he was constantly being written up and not all of it was negative Um, and he was a darling of the media in many cases because he brought his Harvard, you know, bona fides with him And um, you know, he was such a exalted figure. So whatever he said, you know made news Plus, as I said, he's so good-looking and so charismatic that he presented a wonderful picture of the Harvard psychiatrist, you know waiting into this Very difficult area So the media treated him both ways Most famously in my book I talk about how he was hoaxed by a woman who pretended Or said she pretended to be an experiencer Told John Mack a fantastic story about being aboard a spaceship with Nikita Kusheff If it would Ralph go into that in a bit of detail because it's time magazine It is sensational in a lot of ways and it also has, you know, a little bit of this kind of Project mockingbird kind of hit piece The guy aviation weekly. I remember you and Whitley Striever talking about that. It sounds very fishy on that other level as well beyond kind of just Uh, the the snarkiness of the new york times It's it's it has if you want to spin it that way you could as well So set to kind of tee that up what type what year was it written and then you actually know the guy who writes it So you have an extra inside uh insight about Synchronicity and we can talk about that alex because so many ways In the course of this book my path crossed with john mac. He was already dead, but With his family and with other figures So it turns out that the guy who wrote this hit piece For time magazine on john mac was a guy. I knew a fellow correspondent in in vietnam when I was there for the times It was there for time magazine Jim willworth and we were colleagues who were friends. So and then he crops up writing the story for time magazine and this was the story There was a woman An experiencer who came forward to john mac about 1994 I believe around that time maybe 93 And he was meeting with a lot of people with strange stories. I mean, that's what he wanted. He was collecting as many of these Experiences stories of alien abductees as he could And he would interview them at length and he put 13 of them in great detail in his book Anyway, this woman came to him and said she was an abductee and she remembered being on a spaceship during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 When we you know the u.s. Detected missile russian missile installations on cuba and it was the closest world war three ever came They're wiping out the whole world Um, anyway during the cuban missile crisis She remembered being on a spaceship with the soviet premier nakita khrushchev and john f kennedy and khrushchev sat in in her lap and was crying and and and and mac again Sort of naively was lapping this up. I mean this was an amazing story But it wasn't that much crazier than the other stuff. He was right, right, right? So it you know, it was not that outlandish I mean it was crazy now. It sounds but anyway so she tells him this story and and other stories and Um, she becomes part of his experience a group And then time magazine finds out about her interviews her And she tells time a very different story that she made up the whole experience of things She was trying to expose john mac as a charlatan And she was not really an experiencer And she hoaxed him with the story about kennedy and khrushchev on the spaceship and he you know aided up And time magazine used that as a symbol of why john mac was you know grossly naive and You know should not be a harvard professor and questioned his credentials and all. Anyway, it was a very very Oh So john mac later determined when this when this came out in time magazine and very very damaging to him as that he was hoaxed He countered that he thought she was actually an experiencer and he provided the reasons from interviews with her and interviews she gave Before she contacted john mac with wittly striba and others that indicated to him rather convincingly. I thought in the book That she really was an experiencer and that she had some acts to grind against mac and her husband worked for aviation weekly Why did you and wittly think that that connection with a without getting into too much detail because we'll never know the answer But there is this ongoing misinformation disinformation campaign by the United States government which is just well established as part of your whole rollout in you know december 2017 with lesley I mean they've denied this shit up and down for 60 years just vigorously and vigorously fought anyone who said it and one of their mouthpieces was This aviation weekly where they would kind of disseminate this this can't possibly be true You would be a fool to believe any of this stuff just if you would Right. I mean I I never I I didn't look that deeply into his Can I his his role in this affair her husband's? A role in this but it's true that aviation weekly was part of the defense You know press and it took a lot of leaks from the federal government and was quite negative on the reality of ufo's But There was a very telling incident. I mentioned in my book where sometime after this woman at donna bassett rice hoaxed john mac Um Or didn't hoax him but whatever after this affair came out. We're one of john mac's Confidence approached her at a meeting and said, why did you do this? Yeah, why are you so bent on destroying john mac? And she said according to this friend who wrote a memo on it uh donna said Because that's how hitler started Which made absolutely no sense to anybody.  It was her point or whatever, but it was so outlandish And there were other aspects of this case that you know got really Tangled and entangled But the basic thing is it was a low point in john mac's career It hurt him terribly because it fed into misconceptions of people that he was pursuing A fraudulent agenda, which he was not it was there was ambiguities to it But it was it was always straightforward and honest. He never lied about that. He never Uh, you know hid anything he found in order to make it come out differently as a matter of fact If you read his his first book, which was uh abduction human encounters with aliens which came out in 1994 It's 13 incredibly detailed case histories He doesn't use the actual names of the people but some of them came out later under their real identity So I I knew who some of them were for sure But uh, you read that book and you are amazed at the thoroughness of his Research and how he went into these cases and looked for alternate explanations and dissected the cases. I mean extraordinary work And uh, and the book was a bestseller. I mean it deserved it. It was it was rightly sensational Ralph, how do things? And for john, I mean both You know at the very end of his life, but also it's the whole second book is so interesting from uh From so many angles from he changes his position But it's also interesting kind of as a As you explore from a kind of social media that we're all familiar with it's like he's old news He comes out with what he thinks is going to be the bombshell second book and everyone's like Oh john mac, you know forget him. We're under the next thing Yeah, so it's so maybe just that well, how's that? Yeah, it's kind of sad. So after When an abduction came out his first book, which was the bestseller people critics picked it apart and said oh, he should have related it more to You know ancient Anals or show, you know mentioning ufos and other cultures and irish fairy story He should have put it in a much more of a context. He was too credulous, you know, they everybody had a reason to to You know pick it apart Although many critics really like the book. I mean it got very good reviews and negative reviews together But they pointed out certain shortcomings in the book that john mac did not put it in enough of a context So he when he wrote a second book called passport to the cosmos five years later He took steps to address those criticisms he Very deliberately put the story into more context He softened some of his certainties that he put in the first book about abduction being real happening in this reality Uh, it could be in a more liminal reality, etc And um, he said boy, this book is really going to do it second book So he put that out and big silence big yawn Maybe history had passed him by Um, maybe, you know, as you said media had The mea had moved on Uh, so, you know, he wasn't the same big news. He was five years earlier for whatever reason It didn't and he was disappointed. He thought this was the book that would establish him now It's a better book than the first book. It has the nuances. I didn't do the first time around Now actually the second book is what connected me to john mac Because I came across that when I was a correspondent in texas For the new york times and I you know, I found this book used paperback somewhere And I said wow, you know harvard psychiatrist who's writing about alien beings and Uh, I said I got interviewed this guy Now I was naive because he was already famous He'd been on opera. He'd been, you know, a bestseller with his first book I had written up in the new york times. I didn't know. I didn't even know his name So I said i'm going to give him a call. Maybe I can interview him Um, and then I picked up the paper one day and I saw he'd been run over in london. Um, I drunk driveway. He was dead And uh, it was so weird talk a little bit about That last year or so Of his life you explore it beautifully in the book I just don't know how you put all this together because it really feels like you were Right there, which is a great feeling for someone who's reading the book But he's interested in crop circles. He goes to the uk He's kind of has this relationship thing going on in his personal life But he's moved on I guess is one of the things I said He's not somebody who's sitting there singing at home kind of waiting for the phone to ring That's not that guy He is and that's not who he is in this point and then also any rumors that you know You don't explicitly say this but any rumors that there is any foul play just look like they just don't have any merit to me But talk about that last year Okay, so the last year was life. He was really exploring Other aspects of the paranormal. Uh, he had branched out. He realized i'm over simplifying now But basically he realized that his focus on alien abduction was too Too narrow and that there were whole there's a whole other world of anomalous experience that may be tied into it That he had to look into so He was reading books about you know, the flight of 9 11 4 11 I think I was at 4 11 About a mysterious flight that crashed and the people came back the the dead later reappeared And he read books about the conspire so-called conspiracy behind 9 11 And he wrote a he got interested in a rock called the mole molda bite Which might have been on the holy grail that has you know, magical properties that Allows the rock to migrate So he heard so he was interested in all these things and crop circles. So he went to london and he went to england to You know the place where the crop circles are very prevalent and he laid down on the field and he soaked up the energy And he said there's no way this could be man-made. You know, this has to be You know supernatural so he really widened his perspective and And to the point where He was really got interested in in life after death of survival of consciousness What happens after we die does the does bodily death mean the complete end of the mind? or The it's the end of the brain But does the mind so-called continue and does it connect with other parts of the cosmos and All these questions sort of haunted him and and like laurence his idol He thought he he was he was getting tired of life. I mean Associates noticed that he was weary as he as as john mac wrote about laurence and it applied to him as well His death was an accident, but it wasn't entirely accidental So, you know, he was he was getting weary. He was interested in What would happen to him after he died? He told friends, maybe I can do better work from the other side things like that so So he was he was ready for another experience. You could say I'm not saying he committed suicide when he stepped out of that, you know underground station in london and looked the wrong way And that would be a mistake But he was tired enough and was Incautious enough to look the look the wrong way and got mowed down Now immediately at the time this was in 2004 just before his 75th birthday And just before I picked up his book where I learned about him, but There were rumors at the time he was Run down that it was an assassination. He was so prominent He was such a thought in the side of harvard and You know that there were a lot of people who wanted him dead Things like that, but I got the police reports. I had access to all his records all the official records in his entire archive his Journals that he kept and all the information, you know surrounding his life that I had complete access to thanks to his So I am satisfied a hundred percent that it was an accident The guy had too much to drink. We know who he was. He's in the police reports Etc. Now at the end of the book I talk about him appearing to friends and associates After he died and I say I'm not investing this with the same Credibility that I I give to the rest of the book But there are stories that people tell and I think they should be part of the record because It's it's just you know, what people said happened after he died And there were you know, a number of stories of him appearing With various messages That I found interesting again proof of an afterlife not really but They're hard to shake off. They're just stories, but they're they're anecdotal I thought those stories at the end of the book in the in the uplog were Extremely powerful and the one thing I guess I'm kind of going to maybe return to what I said before Boy, I really feel personally that we have to kind of shift our language about that It's like it's not proof. It's like if if this whole body of Information says anything to us. It says that we have to really Re-understand what we mean by proof and I always kind of think of it in terms of the burden of proof And it's like where does the burden of proof shift? When does it shift? And in this case like after death communication to me the burden has clearly shifted If you don't believe in after death communication Then the burden of proof is on you to show that the thousands and thousands of verifiable accounts from all sorts of different sources From the best medical evidence we can find from leslie's Excellent series on netflix and all the rest of it the burden of proof is really on someone else to show that that is somehow Shouldn't be taken seriously. I'd even say that the same is true with Abduction, you know if someone wants to say It Which you raise very very valid Questions and I love the way that you frame it up, you know that do we have to consider Interdimensional do we have to consider whatever that means? We don't mean when we say interdimensional, you know, it's like, oh, well that solves it We have no idea what that means Or other realms or fairies But it would seem to me that that what john mac has done Along with a bunch of other people has shifted the burden of proof to someone else to say Okay, these experiences that people are having are not in the norm Then the way that we'd normally talk about them real because my read of it is they are real We just don't know what real is anymore. What are your thoughts on that? Absolutely You could not I could not have said it better. You're absolutely right that it shifted the burden of proof Now john often said and this is in the book that Um If anyone has a better explanation I'm willing to hear it. Uh, he said it can't be it's not mental illness You know, I say that in the book that I have at least ruled out What it isn't what the phenomenon isn't so it isn't according to john mac. I mean, I didn't do my own Investigation. He's the psychiatrist, but I looked over his shoulder as he did his You know his experiments and his research.  They don't want to be known. They're questioning. They wish it wasn't true It's not books they've read or movies they've seen because kids two years old tell these same stories So he's eliminated all these other things that it's not so then he says, okay, so as far as I know these people Uh, nothing has happened to these people other than what they said Because I have no other explanation if you have a good explanation. I want to hear it. So I start the book with this conference at mit In 1992 that drew atomic physicists and theologians and folklorists and psychologists and psychiatrists Experts in their fields who all came to mit Uh to wrestle with this story of alien abduction You know what this could be and everybody had their you know way of looking at it And at the end of course, they didn't solve the mystery But they all came away saying that everything we have brought to it doesn't explain What what happened to these people? So we're left with the mystery But at least we know what it isn't and it's not any of these other you know, it's sleep paralysis Oh, yeah, but it doesn't always happen at night. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that So, you know one by one they sort of attack these things and I I got to say Alex that if the so-called skeptics And I don't mean skeptical. I mean the skeptics and the debunkers Are so intent on knocking this stuff down as myth and you know fabrication if they would do some of the research And read this material that's available at the mit conference put out a thick volume of transcripts There's a lot of literature out there of accounts not only by by people The experiences themselves which are anecdotal but scientists and Psychologists that kinds who have studied this if they if these so-called skeptics would read that and then say Okay, but and then have an argument, you know, why this is not true and that's not true But just to say, ah, this is crazy stuff. Of course. It's crazy. Of course. It's ridiculous You know, I have the epigram to my book So William Crooks who said I never said it was possible. I only said it was true So, uh, that's my big beef with the with the skeptics so-called skeptics and uh, because I spent 16 years looking into this And looking to every other explanation and if there was one I would have you know, I'd be happy to say it That here's the answer. John Mack was completely wrong. Here is the answer which I alone have found Okay, well, you know, I I'd add to that that rather than go look through all the Scientific studies and all the rest of it. Go look at this book Again, uh, our guest has been Ralph Blumenfall in the book the believer Alien encounters hard science and the passion of John Mack And I just wanted to add to this because I think I just really believe this is true is that this book is so personal that it brings you through The history through the eyes like you said looking over the shoulder of a guy who lives through this and it's a guy that you're really going to be interested in exciting Excited about meeting if you don't know all the details about John Mack and no one could have known All these things so it's it's just a really really great book and a great accomplishment Ralph, what else do we need to tell people About what you've done here or about anything else that you're working on Well, I mean, I'm still in touch with Leslie Kane My colleague who wrote the series along with lane koopa in the times that brought this whole phenomenon um, I'm not saying to light, uh, but that That that that broke the story of the secret pentagon unit Investigating UFOs because officially the government was out of the UFO business with project blue book in 1970 Unofficially it was continuing to investigate as we know And there was this you know secret unit operating with the funding from the you know senator harry reid's office 2007 to Today the name has changed. It's now the uh uap unidentified aerial phenomenon task force, but it's the same as when we wrote about it was called at the advanced aerospace threat identification program So we're continuing to you know to monitor things is supposed to be a report coming out fairly soon later this year You know, I was hesitant I was hesitant even going there, but you brought it up December 18th 2017 The day that will live in infamy You guys broke that story in the new york times But this is the one i've gone back and forth with leslie canaan. I mean to me Political psi up from the beginning. That's how it plays. That's how it plays out over time Does it mean that it's real does it mean that you guys didn't report on it in the best possible way that you could But this thing has such a political feel to it It's one side of the political spectrum talking as if there isn't another side You know at that time donald trump was the president of the united states He is nowhere to be found in that story and and there is no Anyone in the administration is nowhere to be found. I think that's very curious I don't know what you want to make of that, but then the way they've spun that I mean the whole thing of uh of lou Elizondo coming out and saying well, it wasn't really classified Well, if this isn't fricking classified, well, why do we have a system of classified and top secret?  This is the the great threat. This is the new world order threat You know, we all have to join together as a family, you know verner von brawn You know, this is the last thing they're going to use kind of thing. I'm not saying that is true I'm just saying you cannot go there go to this topic and not Start pulling apart what the agenda is here because it doesn't look like it's What's being presented on the surface to me? What are your thoughts on all that? Oh, that's uh, you're handing me a lot to deal with there, Alex But uh, let me say first of all that I know the way the story emerged and it was not fed to us Leslie through a good connection. I get it. It was I get it You know, so she went down to washington She heard about she said it on the meeting when lou Elizondo disclosed that he was quitting We had the letter, you know, he was quitting and they were afraid to show it to madis at the time I mean, you know, a lot of weird stuff there but So, I mean the first thing is that we dug that story out. It wasn't that we got no sense This is a story the government wanted us to write for any reason of its own. We pulled it out she had good connections and They didn't hand feed us these Uh, videos that came out the three navy videos. I think what I think what happened however I saw I'm totally with you on all that. I would not question that in the least But the video like the first video is like what 8 10 12 years old It's not like a new video.  So Yeah, it was floating around. I mean that we didn't have them all but The pentagon later authenticated the videos And they were absolutely real and people did try to pick them apart and say oh if you're looking at from this angle And this is but it's not fabricated.  That's another thing we did that, uh, you know shows that We found these people Dave Fravor and and ryan I've got his last name and daniel coin pilot who told us that they eyeballed these things And Dave Fravor said he watched this thing as it was underwater, you know And this is a highly decorated, you know, navy jet fighter pilot Who's saying these things so they I don't think they they had a script written for them that they were supposed to tell us this stuff so but I do think that the the stories we wrote Convinced the government to come out more and maybe they realized it's not something that they can contain anymore that People are demanding answers. So it's it's pushed the process And um, you know, uh, there are people in the government who want to see Much more come out. Uh, you know, we know that But there's also a lot of secrecy still involved. A lot of stuff is classified that May not need to be The a tips as you point out wasn't for some reason Um, it's strange The the navy videos were not classified because if they were we wouldn't have put them out We couldn't we don't want to go to jail and we wouldn't be dealing with stolen You know a leaked classified material that's not that we've never been accused of that You know, you know, one of the things that was super interesting During my interview with kevin day And it relates back to your book and it relates back to what we're just talking about and john mack is so kevin day Again, he's the guy who from aboard the ship is orchestrating all the communication So he's telling where the pilot the pilots where to go and all the rest of this Two interesting things come up from his story One is that he says These objects like 20 30 whatever were in the air had been trailing the ship for like seven days I said kevin, uh, do you find it strange that you didn't report that to your ceo before that? And he paused and he goes Yeah, that is kind of weird again mental aspect of this but the real clincher is he said finally On the day of the event I decided to go up topside and I looked through the the glass And I looked at it And it changed something in me and he says he experiences what they call valet davis effect from jack valet and davis I don't know who davis was but the of this Kind of transcendent experience similar to what you're talking about In the john mack stuff is that there's some kind of extended realm in which he feels like He has some experience for him. It's kind of traumatic. He has post traumatic stress disorder, but it's not really post traumatic stress disorder It is to kind of textbook valet davis effect. So I just think it's interesting when we start talking about videos and we start talking about encounters with the craft Again, it's this kind of Huge soup of we don't know how we're being How we're interacting it's it's really no different than the abduction thing is it? Yeah It's I say I mean I I end the way I began with the mystery And we have to acknowledge that that you know and what gets me again other people who come forward and say Oh, it's no mystery. I know what this is this is You know and then they spin some theory. This is uh anthropological you know, uh, this is The same, you know, mythical stuff that you know people deal in aboriginal societies have been dealing with its myth It you know, they have the answer But as I say you got to read all the material before You know you offer the answer so I guess we're back at the starting point, but it's been you know, it's it's been a fun journey It has been an awesome journey and again Required reading folks required reading. It's been absolutely terrific having you on Ralph Best of luck with this book. I know it's already been super successful And I know you'll you'll have more and more success with it. What what's next for you after this? I you just said that you're going to continue Pursuing this field any books that you're working on that you'd like to talk about or I know you authors Sometimes like to keep those close to the vest Well, I don't want to talk about what's next of mine, but um There's more to be done on this subject for sure and considering that I spent seven 16 years 17 till it came out on this I'm not so eager to plunge into another subject from scratch But there's so much to this story and the people I've continued to meet, you know I keep getting more information now that the book is out and I heard the other day from A colleague of john max Who said and I wish I'd had this for the book. She said, uh, you know, I was uh The last one or one of the last people he saw before he left for england where he was killed And uh, I asked him, you know, john, where are you going? You know, what are you doing? Uh, and he he went like this He pointed to the ground She said and she didn't realize what that meant till afterwards and she found that he'd been killed I wish I'd had that story at the time. So I keep hearing from people, you know, the subject is certainly endlessly fascinating There's more, you know Coming out obviously on the on UFOs There's a lot more to be people ask me all the time.  I don't know. Um, there are groups of experiences who are meeting, you know but, um Considering the wealth of scientific knowledge Uh available today and I end my book with the story of the hadron super collider And the image of the black hole 58 million light years away that you know, the Scientists caught a picture of 58 million light years away and they can't figure out if people are being abducted Because the science is not you know, the government is not giving money for that They're only giving money for you know, seddie and you know telescopes. Come on There are serious questions here. There's brain research as to what What parts of the brain are activated when people go through abduction experiences? So You know, there's a lot to be You know, research still clearly it's only at the beginning, but it's disreputable still So we've got to get beyond that ridicule fact that and try to figure out what the hell is going on Ralph it's been absolutely terrific. Thank you so much for joining me Alex had been great to be on your program. Thank you Thanks again to Ralph Blumenthal for joining me today on skeptico The one question I tee up from this interview And it really really is a fundamental question I keep bumping into in a bunch of different ways is What do you make of our reality? It is in many ways the only game in town in terms of a rational scientific logical approach But what do we do with the fact that it may be a severely limited perspective from which we Launch into all that logic and rational thinking What do you think let me know track me down Plenty more to come stay with me for all of that until next time Take care and bye for now


Hi, I'm Alyssa Rothenzweig, and this is a talk on the Open Graphics stack. I'm a graphics developer at Collabra, leading the open source panfrost driver for the ARM Mali GPUs, and in my spare time, I'm helping out with the ASAHI Linux project, porting Linux to Apple's M1 processor, and I'm excited to talk about the Open Graphics stack here in the embedded Linux conference. My goal for this talk is to help understand what is involved on the Linux stack for 3D graphics nowadays, because there are quite a number of moving parts, and I hope by the end of this talk you'll understand each of the parts involved and each of the different layers. And I also want to talk about how open source fits into this, and why it matters. So first of all, before we can even talk about open source drivers, or drivers, 3D drivers at all, we have to ask the question, do embedded systems need 3D acceleration? Since this is the embedded Linux conference, the answer is yes, they can, sometimes. If you're talking about an 8-bit microcontroller, no, you're not going to want 3D acceleration for that, but for the more complicated embedded systems that we would be interested in running Linux on, we absolutely can sometimes need 3D acceleration, need GPUs. There's a tension here. On one hand, you have the embedded devices whose life cycles can be up to 20 years out in the field, just working as they should, total stability. On the other hand, you have these very complicated user space graphics drivers, and the closed source drivers have end-of-life, often as soon as five years after the product is released, which is quite a tension, even if it's 10 years, it's no hardware vendor wants to support their driver 20-year-old hardware. With open-source drivers, you don't have to rely on the vendor, and that's one of the big perks for embedded systems that need 3D acceleration. If we convince ourselves that open-source drivers are a necessity, both because the drivers themselves can be updated and also because they will work smoothly with mainline kernels, and allow up-repping kernels, allow using the LTS releases of the kernel, all the things which are greatly complicated, if not prohibited, with various downstream proprietary graphics stacks on Linux. Even if we convince ourselves we need this, we have to ask them, are open-source drivers here, are they ready, can we use them in our products today, can end-users go use them, and the answer is an affirmative yes, and I'm happy to say yes because so many of these open-source graphics talks over the years have been coming soon to you, and this year at all the tops I'm doing, I'm giving a bull's yes, and I feel confident with that answer, and I feel very glad that we've gotten to this point. For any vendor you can think of, whether that be Intel and AMD on the desktop side, Broadcom and ARM on the ARM side, or defaulting to reverse engineering on the ARM side, Qualcomm, Vivalta and Apple, there are credible reverse engineering projects in the latter cases, and credible drivers in all cases, and all open-source, and that's a beautiful thing to me, is that covers every GPU that matters nowadays. Something about imagination, well last I heard, there was a job posting about hiring Linux graphics people, and I said relevant, so the bottom line is that open-source graphics is the status quo, and that's a good thing for us, and it's a good thing for embedded Linux. So what does this open-graphic stack look like? As promised it's rather complicated, but hoping we can break it down. At the very top of the stack you have the application trying to do some high-level rendering. This might be a game, or it might be a desktop, or a web browser. These are sort of the more traditional applications you think of. In the embedded space this might be a user interface of some kind, might be an instance of Weston running for your Weyland compositor on a closed system. Closed is contained, not proprietary, hopefully you can have an open-closed system. At any rate, it's going to talk to a graphics engine, which is going to mediate to the high-level APIs. There are quite a few graphics APIs, but the most common on Linux will be either OpenGL or Vulkan. In both cases, the engine will provide programs to run on the graphics hardware, known as Shaders, and these will pass through the API down to the compiler. The graphics compilers are themselves very complicated stacks, going through multiple representations of the program, multiple essentially compilers within the big compiler, but the net result is going to be a binary that can run on the hardware. Separate from this, rather in parallel with this compiler stack, we also have the commands being sent to the hardware themselves. These can take two different forms. In OpenGL, you're presented with a state machine, which some common infrastructure called gallium has to then deconstruct into much more rigidly defined states with descriptors and more functional-style programming levels, or you can specify those descriptors in those state objects directly, which is how Vulkan would work. In either case, these state objects get passed to the backend driver, which will translate them into commands specific to the hardware, and then pass those commands off into the kernel. A driver in the Linux kernel will then just simply pass those commands off to the hardware, and you have your 3D rendering on screen. In terms of which software does which pieces, the applications and the engines are going to vary tremendously, and there are plenty of open source examples of both. For the hardware, obviously there's no software there, for the kernel, that's obviously the Linux kernel, and then everything else on the slide is happening within the Mesa umbrella project. So let's talk about Mesa. Mesa, at its core, is a user space library for writing graphics drivers and for providing a graphics driver. It implements a number of different APIs, OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan, to name the most important three, and it has tons of common infrastructure used to implement these APIs. Most importantly, it has the gallium infrastructure, as I mentioned. This consists of common code for dealing with the OpenGL and OpenCL APIs, and translating them into something more amenable to hardware drivers, as well as all of the gallium-based drivers themselves. Separately, there's the NUR compiler, where NUR stands for the new immediate representation. Well, it was a new one when we came out with it. And NUR is our common form for shaders in the middle of Mesa, and then of course we have compilers that translate from NUR into the hardware construction sets for all of the different hardware you can think of. And the net result is that Mesa provides the user space component of the driver. The net build will be libgl.so, or an equivalent for Vulkan. And on the front end, Mesa will implement this API, OpenGL or Vulkan, and then in the back end, after doing all of this compiling and all of this translation, it will talk to the kernel using the standard system calls, which are different graphics flavors of IOCTL. Mesa consists of the most complicated part of the 3D graphics Falcon Linux, and it's become a sort of umbrella project. You can pick out several distinct subprojects within the Mesa monorebo. But this is the whole of our user space drivers. I'm a Mesa developer, and I'm quite happy to be in the project. Of course, this is the embedded Linux conference, and the 3D graphics picture is not complete without talking about Linux drivers because Mesa has no direct access to the hardware. Any access that Mesa wants to do to the hardware has to be mediated through an appropriate kernel graphics driver. And this is simply, first, both security and performance concerns and just stability. There was a time when user space display drivers ran the show and the kernel could sit back, and that didn't pan out so well. Ask any X11 developer. So we have very small, well, in the embedded space, we have very small kernel graphics drivers that provide the common interface for the much more complicated, much larger user space Mesa driver. So the kernel drivers are built on a large body of common code. Most importantly, the direct rendering management, DRM layer, and the graphics execution manager, Gem. And these are common libraries within the kernel, essentially, they're within the GPU subsystem used to implement all of our 3D rendering drivers. As an asset, these are also used in conjunction with kernel mode setting to implement display drivers. In the x86 desktop world, 3D rendering and display are intermingled into a single driver because they're implemented on the same hardware. Oftentimes, this is also mixed up with video decoding and video encoding, all on the same thing that consumer would call a GPU. In the ARM world, in the embedded world, we don't see the same sort of cohesion of the part. Instead, you have separate blocks on the system on chip for 3D rendering versus for display versus for video codecs. And as a consequence, you have different drivers for each of these, and there is a sort of plug and play aspect at the system on chip level, which brings some unique challenges into the graphic stack. So my point in this whole digression is saying that this talk is really focused on the 3D rendering side, which is about DRM and GIM, not KMS. So the next segment, I'd like to talk about the bird's eye view of what happens at each of these layers of the stack. I showed you the big picture, but let's go a little deeper, try to understand each layer separately. At the top, again, we have our application and our engine, which are using some API. And these are thinking in terms of drawing triangles and in terms of programmable shaders. Generally, there are two types of shaders, and you need both. The first is the vertex shader, which calculates positions for all of the vertices in your geometry. And the other is the pixel shader or the fragment shader, which calculates the colors. And this is the programming model that most APIs are implementing and that hardware has native support for. It's not perfect. It doesn't map perfectly to all hardware. It's not necessarily the most comfortable programming model, which is why people often will use an engine instead of using these APIs directly. But it is a good trade-off between the requirements of every different piece of hardware and the requirements of every different application, which might want to use the GPU. Of course, there's more to it on the hardware side, because hardware nowadays is not working in terms of this high-level abstraction. Instead, there tends to be a more descriptor-based setup, either literally with descriptors and memory pointers everywhere, in the case of the ARMology GPU, or less literally in terms of state objects that can be bound at will, which is a much more typical design on the varying sizes all the way down to just register rights for user space. The bottom line is, though, there has to be some translation from the OpenGL concepts to what hardware actually wants. And we have our frontends for this. This is Gallium helping with this. Our drivers were helping with this.  And you can bind these and unbind these. And this is a much more natural interface for the hardware. And of course, you still draw triangles. The triangle's all the way down the snake. In parallel, we have our compiler, which is organized the same way that any compiler is organized, even for a CPU. You have your source code that gets parsed into an abstract syntax tree. The abstract syntax tree gets translated into some intermediate representation, which can be optimized with common code. And then once all of your common optimizations are applied, you can translate that into something hardware specific, which, again, can be optimized and finally translated into a vinyl binary. We'll talk a bit on why we have so many layers and why that's a good thing. The driver itself is doing all this translation, as mentioned. And it also has the added wrinkle of having to deal with memory allocation, at least for OpenGL. For Open, this is not so clear cut. But really, the user space driver has three roles. Compile shaders, translate states, and manage memory. And if you can get away without doing any memory management, you're down to only 2-thirds of a driver, which is part of the buzz for what can I suppose, pushing that off into the application instead of having to do gymnastics in the driver to infer what an application would have meant to do in order to use the memory resources effectively, which is one of the big challenges with OpenGL. At any rate, all of this is feeding into a kernel, which has really two responsibilities only. One is implementing this memory application. This user space is just making a system called allocate memory when needed. It's up to the kernel driver to actually do the memory allocation, typically by programming a memory management unit for the GPU in order to map chunks of graphics memory for particular use. In the embedded world, we're using unified memory, so the same physical memory can be used on both the CPU and the GPU simultaneously, and with a shared mapping, which can be made very efficiently. And this is just a matter of programming memory management unit in the correct way. Then the other piece is to, of course, actually execute the job, which in the most simple case is a matter of pointing the hardware to a particular place in memory to tell it to start executing commands or start reading descriptors or however it's set up. The other wrinkle here is that there can be many processes rendering at the same time using the same GPU. And if the hardware can only run one process at a time or two processes at a time, it's up to the kernel to schedule how the GPU's time is allocated. And this is, again, a classic kernel responsibility, not just for graphics, but on the CPU, one of these mere common kernel responsibilities mapping memory and scheduling processes to CPUs. So there's some sense to which graphics feels like having an operating system within the operating system, which is a lot of fun for some definition of fun. So with that bird's eye view, we can talk about what Vulkan brings to the table, because there's a lot of buzz about Vulkan, both for high-end games to very low-resource embedded systems that need 3D rendering. And so what is the point of all of this? Ultimately, it's about lowering CPU overhead with the big idea that OpenGL drivers have to do all of these gymnastics to maintain this stack. If you can pull out some of those responsibilities from the driver and make them the responsibility of the application, then the application has the potential to be more efficient, because it has more knowledge about what it's trying to do than the driver, which at best has to fall back to custom heuristics, which, as you know, heuristic in computer science is a euphemism for wrong. So that's kind of the point of Vulkan. The other change is that the GLSL parser is eliminated. Which should excite the security people in the room, because parsing text is one of the most error-prone tasks in terms of subtle buffer overflow type bugs. And remember, the user-based graphics drivers are giant chunks of C code. And at one point, you could say, well, they don't have any privileges, so it's fine. But now in the era of WebGL, there is a real privilege escalation path where driver bugs can turn into security vulnerabilities and take over a system, which we don't want happening. So in theory, getting rid of this parser and using just pre-compiled vendor neutral shaders could be more secure and simply surely makes for simpler drivers. So there's a lot of excitement around Vulkan. It's very clearly an improvement on OpenGL. But there's no need for me to do two separate presentations, one on the OpenGL stack and one on the Vulkan stack, because beyond this surface level, they are essentially identical in terms of what's required from the kernel compiler and so forth. Speaking of, what's the deal with these compilers? Why are there so many levels to them and layers and what's going on here? And this is essentially a response to a very deep tension in our compiler stacks, and especially in the open source compiler stack. And this is a unique challenge for us. On one hand, we want to have separation of concerns. We want to have different pieces of our compiler to be hardware agnostic so we can share them across all of our different pieces of hardware. And believe me, there is very little in common between a modern Intel chip and an old ARM chip. But they share the same compiler in Mesa, at least for a big chunk of it. So we want to be able to do this code sharing. And there is this fundamental tension of how do we have our cake needed to? And the answer is just having turtles all the way down the stack. We have different intermediate representations, different representations of the program for different purposes. We have the representation of the GLSL code itself at the start, which is there to facilitate the parsing and very early error checking. All of your syntax errors are all handled here. So we have one GLSL compiler that can be used essentially identically for every piece of hardware ever. And this is one of the complicated parts of Mesa. So it's a good thing we only need one of them. We have our common intermediate representations, for example, neural representation, being the most important at this point, where the goal is not to represent the original program faithfully. The goal is to be easy to optimize. And so where is the GLSL intermediate representation? It's a tree-based representation, modeling what the source code of the program really looked like, and preserving all the variable names and all of that. Neur is a flat intermediate representation that that's completely static single assignment form. So translating from GLSL to Neur destroys the source level of the program. But it puts it into a form that's much easier to optimize in the same way that translating from Clang's abstract syntax tree into LLVM IR is required for all of the common LLVM ops positions if you have experience on that compiler side. And finally, you have all of the different IRs for the different back ends. For example, I maintain the Bifrost intermediate representation, which models Bifrost and more recently about Hall of Hardware, both GPUs from ARM. And the Bifrost intermediate representation is much more difficult to optimize for doing the sorts of general purpose optimizations that Neur concerns itself with. But it models faithfully all of the different quirks about the ARM Bifrost hardware, which means it's possible to write optimizations on Bifrost intermediate representation that take full advantage of the Bifrost hardware without having to pollute the common code, so to speak. So having this tree of intermediate representations that chain together is really important. And this composability is essential to being able to maintain a compiler stack that can handle multiple different APIs of input and a dozen different instruction sets of output and be able to share code in the middle. And this is something that Mesa does really well. LLVM for the CPU also has the same challenges with the same sort of solution, although LLVM in some respects is very different. For example, what this actually looks like, here's a diagram of all of the different compiler paths that you would take with the Panfrost driver targeting the Mully hardware. In the simple case that I keep talking about, you start with OpenGL, you pass in a GLSL program, that gets parsed into a GLSL abstract syntax tree and translated into Neur. The Neur gets optimized and translated into a Panfrost specific intermediate representation, for example, the Bifrost intermediate representation, and then that gets translated into the hardware specific code, fine. Vulkan is just as simple, except instead of inputting GLSL and translating GLSL to Neur, we input Spurvy and translate Spurvy to Neur, which is a much simpler path. But again, Panfrost is completely agnostic to GLSL and Spurvy because it just sees Neur input and the GLSL and Spurvy front ends are all handled in completely common code, shared across every driver, which means there is a considerable simplification and cost reduction for developing open source drivers in Mesa as opposed to proprietary drivers. The OpenCL path is unfortunately much less nice. You have essentially C code input, OpenCL C code, which means we have to go through Clang and have Clang output LVM and then translate the LVM into Spurvy, which is complicated, some would say it's over complicated, but you really don't wanna write your own C front end if you can help it, especially not a C++ front end because yes, OpenCL C++ is a thing. So it's, you know, it struggles all the way down, but we do get Spurvy at the end of the day and from Spurvy, we can use our common code path to translate into Neur and once we have Neur, well, we can feed that into the back end and our back end again remains completely agnostic. So this is a very nice way of seeing everything compose. Unfortunately, looking at the diagram of every Mesa compile path or at least everyone that I could fit on the screen, there are more, believe me, there are more. It's not so nice, but you can see the same sorts of code paths coming up. You have the common direction going from OpenGL to DLSIL to Neur to the driver to the GPU, but there are other ways to input programs, including a number of legacy front ends that get handled totally transparently to the driver, which allows us to implement legacy OpenGL features with no added work per driver, because it's all just common Mesa code. And there are older drivers that require older intermediate representations, for example, TGSI, which predates Neur, and then there are drivers which really want to do their compiler in LLVM instead of in Neur and will end up translating from Neur to LLVM, and then use an LLVM compiler as opposed to directly implementing a Neur compiler. This is fine. It's not going to come up in the embedded world, but I felt it's important to mention that we do have a diversity of stacks even within the common code or within the common Mesa tree and common code is not imposed with an iron fist. It's there for your own benefit, and it's a lot of benefit. And in total, you get a functional somehow graphic stack compilers with very little code objectively that can target any of these different APIs, any of these different hardware. You can add APIs with very little work because of the joy of common code, and you can maintain this very easily including long term. And this is a very nice value proposition for a very nice way to throw up in source and for Linux. And I'm very thrilled to be part of this and to see this through. So thank you for listening, and I would love to answer questions. Thank you.


It was integration day today for the first grades of two New Orleans Elementary schools. And under pressure of the federal point, my mother told me where I was going to a new school.  And it was the US Marshals.  So we arrived and we came up the front stairs and we entered into this area and was asked to take a seat on a bench. That was sitting on that wall right there. We sat there for hours. We played hopscotch on towels at the floor because we were bored just sitting there, the three of us. Finally, they came to give us places in the classroom. Now, mine knew that was a full body of students when we got here. And once we entered the classroom, all their parents came in, pulled all the white students out. So they left just the three of us in this entire building. And that lasted for a year and a half. The impact on November 14th, 1960, was something that I don't think our families expected. It went national. It started a domino effect, really. Katrina was horrific, of course, to everyone. I think I stayed away two years. When we were allowed to come back into the lower ninth ward after Katrina, they were, let's go ride by, let me see what the school looks like. They had put a for sale sign on the building. They had no idea what had happened at the school. It was still standing. And I kept saying, something's gotta be done in this night ward to energize this community. We got to do something down here. And I already was trying to see what was gonna happen with this building. And I said, well, I can't let them tear it down. I felt like this is the energizer for this community right now. The first time I came in, it was, oh, Lord. It was horrific. And then when Benjamin Moore donated us all this paint, I was really special. I was just amazed because I never thought it would look this good. I think I'm still walking in her dream sometimes. I just don't believe this. It's done. My vision has come to a reality and it's done. When I first said I was gonna do something with the building, I just wanted exhibits.  So we have 25 affordable units on the second and the third floor, and we're 55 or older. Our first floor, the bottom level will be an interpretive center, a place where people come in to do things, to learn about racism, to learn about the history that we had here, to learn about the civil rights. If you don't know the history, you're not gonna know. And I feel like that's what's so important about us doing what we're doing here. Next level is to undo racism. I want this to be the place for racial healing because I feel like even though we didn't understand what racism was, we were introduced to it here, and I wanted to end here.