The UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast

Today we welcome James Madden back to the show. As “spooky season” draws to a close, I didn’t want to miss the chance to explore some of the darker themes that have been inspiring both Jim’s recent work, and our ongoing conversation about the nature of the UFO phenomenon—specifically the paranoia that comes from our uncanny encounters with things that lie just beyond the limits of our own personal caves.
You can find Jim’s most recent musings on his substack in a piece entitled Specters of the Thinking Machine: The Uncanny Suggestion of the Non-human within the Human, which I have linked up in the episode brief. In this episode we’ll be exploring the themes of that article, as well as exploring a work that has become something of a touchstone for me in my exploration of the darker contours of the UFO phenomenon, the phenomenal docuseries, Hellier.

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In the first episode of this series, we dive into the mystery of the ranch and plot our path forward. We discuss:
🛸 What John Keel saw as the biggest blunder of ufological investigation (and how to avoid it)
🛸 The conversation that convinced Jacques Vallée that science will never provide the full answer on UFOs (and how to proceed anyway)
🛸 The reason Brandon Fugal says there may be a “precognitive, sentient, non-human intelligence” on the ranch
🛸 The 6-Layer Model of Anomalous Phenomena (Vallée & Davis)
🛸 The Control Mechanism (Vallée)
🛸 Window Areas (Keel)
🛸 The UFO as Hyperobject (James Madden)
🛸 And much more

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I’m so excited about today’s episode because I think it’s been a long time coming. This episode isn’t about UFOs, per se, but it is about something that often happens to people when they begin looking into this topic—or other topics that challenge our consensus reality—which is the sudden appearance of profound synchronicities.
I hear from dozens of listeners of the podcast everyday, and one of the things that people reach out to me about most is to tell me that after they started listening to the podcast they suddenly started encountering strings of bizarre and improbable synchronicities in their lives. I’ve heard that exact thing from more people than I could ever get back to—and if you’re one of those people, I just want you to know that I’ve heard you, and I wanted to do an episode about this very phenomenon that I hope can serve as sort of roadmap in beginning to understand and integrate what synchronicities are and how you can best ride the wave of the improbable in your own lives.
And I couldn’t think of anyone better to join me in this conversation than today’s guest—the woman who literally wrote the book on strange coincidences—Sharon Hewitt Rawlette. I’ve been lucky enough to meet Sharon and hear her speak at two different conferences in the last year—both December’s Inquire Anomalous conference in NYC, and Rice University’s Archive’s of the Impossible in May—and both times I was blown away by the depth and ingenuity of her thinking. Sharon has the ability to make complex ideas easy to grok, and every time I hear her speak I walk away with a new perspective and understanding. I’ll link up both of those talks in the episode description if you’d like to check them out.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette is a philosopher who writes for both popular and scholarly audiences on the topics of consciousness, anomalous experience, ethics, and spirituality. Before launching her career as an independent writer and researcher, she earned her PhD in philosophy from New York University. She currently serves on the board of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies as well as being a supporting researcher for the International Centre for Reincarnation Research. She has published four books and in 2021 was named a runner-up in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay contest for her essay “Beyond Death,” on the best evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.
The book that we’ll be referencing today is Sharon’s book entitled The Source and Significance of Coincidences. And if you have any interest in this topic, I really can’t recommend this book enough. Sharon attacks this topic from every conceivable angle, and the extensive table of contents makes it an invaluable reference tool when you want to dig a little deeper into strange coincidences that occur in your own life. [links in episode brief]

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Today we welcome Christopher Sharp back to the show. Chris is the founder and editor-in-chief of Liberation Times, and has been one of a small handful of independent journalists who has been doggedly pursuing the UFO disclosure story in Washington D.C. over the past few years. While most of the mainstream media is asleep at the wheel, Chris has been churning out high-quality journalism analyzing all aspects of this profound and historic story.
Over the past several weeks since the historic hearing in front of the House Oversight Committee, I’ve seen a lot of confusion and a lot of concern in the community about the status of disclosure, with many worrying that all momentum has been lost. The revelations by David Grusch were so shocking and so incendiary that I think many have been baffled by the relative quiet that has followed. I think for those who aren’t familiar with the vast complexities of how revelations like this are processed through the massive, multi-trillion dollar organization of the US government it’s easy to fear that this lull means that disclosure is dead.
That’s why this felt like the perfect time to bring Chris back on the show to help to frame all the latest regarding disclosure, what’s going on behind-the-scenes, and what still might be on the horizon. Chris is working this story day in and day out and as you’ll hear directly from him—reports of the demise of disclosure have been greatly exaggerated.

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Today, we have a very special guest on the show, Dr. Jeffrey Kripal. Dr. Kripal is an esteemed scholar and author in the study of religion, focusing particularly on the esoteric, mystical, and paranormal dimensions of human experience. He serves as the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is the author of several phenomenal books including The Superhumanities , Mutants & Mystics , Super Natural (which he co-authored with Whitley Strieber), and The Flip .

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In this episode we welcome back my dear friend and friend of the show, Dr. James Madden. This is the third episode that we’ve done together, and I’m sure that it won’t be the last. My interviews with James Madden have become some of my most downloaded episodes, and so I know you guys love hearing from him. And I love talking to him, so we’re just going to keep doing it.
The deeper we dive into the phenomenon, the more necessary it becomes to not just interrogate what we think, but how we think—and to find new frameworks to help us do so. A philosophical approach gives the means to do that. And I’ve been so grateful to Jim for how generous he’s been with his time and his thoughts as we navigate these deeper waters.
As you all know, over the past several months Plato’s Cave has become a central touchstone of this podcast. It’s an idea I keep returning to, again and again, because as my own trip down the rabbit hole continues, I continue to find new insights within it. And so today, with Jim as our guide, we’re going to return to the Cave, armed with the new ideas we’ve developed over these past several months, and see what new revelations might reveal themselves.
With this episode we’ll also be returning to our discussion of Whitley Strieber’s groundbreaking new book, Them, which we discussed in the last episode. Strieber’s decades of deep research and thinking on the topic of non-human intelligence as well as his own ongoing contact experiences have led him to develop a nuanced, challenging, and at times unsettling, understanding of “the others”—including how they operate at the fringes of our awareness and what they might ultimately be trying to tell us.

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Today’s episode is an important one, because it’s going to lay the groundwork for a lot of the things that we’re going to be discussing moving forward. In the weeks and months to come, this is an episode that I’ll likely be referring back to often.
And that’s because today we’re diving into an article written by two heavyweights of ufology that serves not only as an essential framework to support our understanding of the complexities and nuances of the UFO phenomenon, but that also—in a very real way—helped to lay the foundation for the recent push for UFO disclosure. In short, it’s not only important that we take the time to really understand the ideas presented in this article—but to understand where it fits into the history of modern ufology.
The paper to which I’m referring is Incommensurability, Orthodoxy, and the Physics of High Strangeness: A 6-Layer Model for Anomalous Phenomena written by Jacques Vallée and Eric Davis. Most people will already be very familiar with those names, but just in case they are new to you, you can find links to their bios and other work in the episode brief.
What is so significant about this paper is that it seeks to create a framework by which we can begin to analyze and integrate the parts of UFO encounters that rarely make it into sci-fi media, and even more rarely make it into serious discussions about the phenomenon itself—which is the undeniable and pervasive occurrence of events and effects that are traditionally relegated to the realms of high strangeness and the paranormal.
If there’s nothing else that you take away from this episode it should be this—encounters with UFOs and non-human intelligence are much, much weirder than you've probably been led to believe.
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Featured Song: Jacques Vallée by _ship
TIMESTAMPS

00:00:32 Introduction
00:06:53 Problems with the SETI and UAP Paradigms
00:07:25 —SETI & The Assumption of Mediocrity
00:12:19 —Anthropocentric Bias in SETI
00:14:54 —Anthropocentric Bias in Ufology
00:16:27 The Need For A Unified Approach To UAP Studies
00:20:01 The Six Layers of UAP Analysis
00:20:30 —Layer I: Physical
00:21:45 —Layer II: Anti-Physical
00:23:00 —Layer III: Psychological
00:29:53 —Layer IV: Physiological
00:32:19 —Layer V: Psychic
00:34:19 —Layer VI: Cultural
00:37:10 Possible Nature of UAP Technology
00:39:48 The Incommensurability Problem
00:45:42 Semiotics
00:51:35 High Strangeness & The Abduction Problem
00:54:12 Conclusions
00:56:23 Garry Nolan and Talking To Ants
01:00:26 Whitley Strieber and “The Visitors In the Trees”
01:12:42 Jacques Vallée by _ship

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Featured Song: Jacques Vallée by _ship
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This week’s episode barely felt like work because this week I sat down with my dear friend, and one of my favorite people, Jay Christopher King. Jay is the cofounder and director of The Experiencer Group, a private online community dedicated to support, curiosity & community for people who’ve had anomalous events of all kinds. He is also the co-founder of the phenomenal Inquire Anomalous conference series in NYC along with James Iandoli.
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In the third and final chapter of the Waking Up Inside The Cave series we explore emerging theories with regards to the nature of reality and consciousness that have the potential to fix what’s broken with “the official story of everything”. Specifically, we’ll be looking at the work of Jefrey Kripal, Robert Lanza, and Donald Hoffman.
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TIMESTAMPS
00:00:30 Introduction
00:04:33 A New Paradigm Emerges
00:09:52 The Flip
00:13:41 —Triggering The Flip
00:14:18 —The Impact Of The Flip
00:14:56 —Where the Traditional Materialist View Fits
00:15:46 —Full Disclosure
00:17:17 Biocentrism
00:20:35 —The Goldilocks Universe
00:22:42 —If A Tree Falls In The Forest Does It Make A Sound?
00:29:55 —Where Is The Universe?
00:34:58 —The Participatory Universe & Quantum Mechanics
00:36:21 —Space-Time Is Not Fundamental
00:43:13 The Case Against Reality
00:44:06 —How Evolution Hides The Truth
00:46:33 —The Interface Theory of Perception
00:48:22 —Objects As Mental Constructs
00:49:48 —Space-Time Is Doomed
00:50:42 Putting It All Together
00:50:55 —Recognizing Our Uber-Umwelt
00:57:29 —Consciousness—Not Space-Time—Is Fundamental
01:00:59 Conclusion
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In this episode, we do a deep-dive on the historic UFO hearing held by the House Oversight Committee featuring witnesses David Grusch, David Fravor, and Ryan Graves.
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TRY BETTERHELP
This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/ RABBITHOLE and get on your way to being your best self.
TRY HELLOFRESH
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