It’s been a minute since we featured a tale or two of high strangeness on this blog.
The work of bigfoot expert Bob Gymlan has been featured here before. As far as YouTubers go, Gymlan is refreshing for keeping an open mind and doing his homework. So I was delighted when a patron brought word of Bob Gymlan on The Joe Rogan Experience.
Related: Lost Boy-Finders Connection?
You can watch the full episode here:
My comment:
Bob handily won the bigfoot mini-debate. Rogan ceded the intellectual high ground with his “No one I know has seen a sasquatch” dodge.
Gymlan could have played the pro-bigfoot trump card of “Scientists didn’t imagine the dermal ridge casts,” but he clearly wanted to be gracious.
And Joe frankly beclowned himself with those “Kodiak grizzlies and orcas are scarier than sasquatch” arguments. Gymlan’s informed opinion that bigfoot has human-level intellignce seemed to go over Rogan’s head. So what’s scarier: an 800-pound predator about as smart as a dog, or an 800-pound predator as smart as Ted Bundy?
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Joe must have sensed he was out of his depth on the sasquatch topic, so he did what he always does: start talking about drugs.
The push from some quarters to ascribe human intelligence to purely physical causes, and the desire of others to attribute consciousness to psychedelic drugs, both spring from the same common human need. Human beings are worshiping machines, and we inevitably credit creation to our gods, whether those gods take the form of personal deities, blind physical laws, or magic mushrooms. It’s almost like we were made for that purpose …
As for the alien question, we’ve been over that, too. One question “I want to believe!” school UFO buffs have never been able to answer is “If we’re being visited by an extraterrestrial race with technology advanced enough for interstellar travel, why isn’t their tech sufficiently advanced to hide all evidence that they’re here?”
TV-addicted members of the Baby Boomer through Y generations might say, “The aliens aren’t hiding it. The government is covering it up!”
But the natural follow up question is “If we’re being visited by an extraterrestrial race with technology advanced enough for interstellar travel, why isn’t their tech sufficiently advanced to keep our government from hiding their presence?”
It makes no sense either way to claim that the rulers of a Kardashev type 0 civilization could expose more advanced aliens that wanted to stay hidden or hide aliens that wanted to go public. So UFOs’ open secret status points to some kind of psyop–probably a diversion–perpetrated by the government, demons, or both.
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Now, to address the 800-pound gorilla in the room, Mr. Gymlan comes across as pretty based. Hearing him and Rogan brutally roast Stephen King was worth the price of admission by itself.
And I think it speaks to Bob’s awareness of his audience and himself that he’s hesitant to mention his fantasy novel. Just like Joe injecting his obsession with mind-altering substances into everything, shoehorning one’s spiritual affliction into one’s means of artistic expression is a shopworn meme. Still, Bob’s willingness to acknowledge the reality of spiritual being and the afterlife is an encouraging sign.
I like Bob, I thought he held his own on Rogan, and I’m praying for his healing. If you’re the praying kind, consider putting in a word with the Man Upstairs for him.
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Glad my IQ is too low to trust everything my senses perceive and it’s higher than anyone who wants to attribute high strangeness to drugs.
“Be neither closed-minded, nor so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
-Charles Fort
I just recently went through Dr. Jacques Vallée’s book Messenger’s Of Deception, and boy has that one aged well. He called all of the UFO worship and cultism happening before it happened.
I’ve grown very skeptical of explanations of the paranormal reduced to pure 20th century materialism and half-thought out rebuttals backed by “sources” that are anything but. Fact of the matter is I think the key to our current predicament of dry belief and lukewarm living would be smashed open if we reassessed how we thought about and dealt with these subjects. Little grey men who are simultaneously geniuses and retards and want a convenient One World Government just isn’t going to cut it anymore.
One thing’s for certain: The fedora euphoria crowd bungled their shot at a post-belief world. The future will be defined by faith; the only question is faith in *what*.
What I like about Vallee is that he realizes that the root causes of the phenomenon are took tricky to nail down easily. Instead he looks for commonalities between encounters, especially in terms of the effects that they had.
Vallee will note the similarities of modern encounters to various phenomenon throughout history, note that the events seem to be inherently deceptive, and that the most notable effects are the changes in the attitudes of the contactees. So for example, take a case where someone encounters a broken down UFO when driving by night, gets taken on board by the aliens, subjected to cruel experiments, and then told about how the Earth needs to have a one world government so that it doesn’t destroy itself with nuclear weapons. Many such cases. The average UFO researcher will take it for granted that these really are aliens from another planet that are doing sophisticated science and are deeply concerned about our violent nature.
Vallee instead asks questions like: was this really a chance encounter, given how many of these events happen when people ‘just happen across’ a UFO in apparent distress? If it was a chance encounter, why were the aliens so prepared with the experiments and the speech? Why were the experiments so crude and seemingly more geared towards terror than extracting any useful data? Why does the whole encounter have so many similarities to non-alien events like encounters with faeries or phantom airships? Why would they conduct such experiments if they understood us well enough and were altruistic enough to want us to reform our government? And why do so many of these contactees act like cultists spreading the same message?
Thus Vallee can conclude that the events are intentional manipulation whose purpose from the start was to get the contactee to adopt a certain viewpoint. Who the manipulators are and how exactly they operate is a thornier question, but the effects of their manipulation are clear. Like you said Messengers of Deceptions in particular has aged well because throughout the book Vallee keeps saying “it looks like the manipulators want society at large to adopt beliefs A, B, C and D” and sure enough society now embraces all of those beliefs.