Aliens, God, Prayer & Stephen Spielberg

0:00Very much looking forward to finally having a reason to visit a movie theater soon with the release of Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day on June 12th. And apparently critics are already raving about the film. It looks incredible from the trailers and it couldn't have landed at a more interesting time in world history when UFOs and aliens have never been so widely covered by mainstream media without the skepticism. Too many credible people have come forward in recent years thanks to incredible, brilliant journalists like Leslie Kane, who wrote that groundbreaking book back in 2011, UFOs, generals, pilots, and government officials go on the record.

0:39From my perspective, it was her book and her book alone that started a chain reaction of other credible officials coming forward and admitting that there is, in fact, something going on in our skies that is beyond understanding as human beings so far. And ever since Leslie Kane released that book, not only have public officials started lowering their guard over the issue across the globe even further, but regular everyday people have become much more comfortable in speaking about it as well. But before Leslie Kane, it was mostly just late-night talk show hosts like Art Bell who were the only ones willing to approach the subject with an open mind.

1:16I mean, I myself had the pleasure of talking to Art Bell a couple of times on the West to the Rockies line back in the 1990s. It was what started my long career in talk radio back then when I went to go work for the same radio syndication company that had produced his show for all those years. From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning, and welcome to another edition, a Friday night, Saturday morning edition of Coast to Coast AM. Live talk radio throughout the nighttime. Now the largest, fastest growing all night program in America. Period.

1:52And then, as some of you know, I had my own terrifying close encounter experience deep in the woods of Southern Oregon back in 1999. And for those of you who are new to the show, I'll give you the short version where what I thought were headlights outside my bedroom window one night turned into a hot orange mist light that filled my entire room, accompanied by a low, powerful drone frequency and a powerful vibrating that I could feel in my chest more than I could hear with my ears. And it felt like the thing was about to pull me through the wall itself as something was communicating with me telepathically.

2:26And I have never been nearly that terrified of anything else ever since. But you know what the funny thing is? And the only reason I'm kind of telling you this shorthand version of the story today is the fact that I started praying. I was that scared. And I tell you what, the thing slowly went away because of it. But I still, to this day, don't even necessarily believe in the power of prayer. So I guess the lesson I learned here is that seeing doesn't always mean believing, because this happened to me, and I'm always going to remember it like it was yesterday, and yet it still remains impossible for even me to believe to this day.

3:09So I'm not going to get offended if you don't believe me. I have zero reasons to lie to you. And even though I called out for protection from God in prayer at one of the darkest moments in my life, and it seemingly caused the problem to go away rather quickly, I still struggle with the idea that prayer is capable of doing anything at all. And what's interesting is that I'm at a point in my life where I'm once again beginning to at least wonder if prayer might actually work on some level, even if we remove religion, religious deities, and religious doctrine from the picture. College speaking things into existence, if you'd rather.

3:48I'm starting to wonder in real time, I guess, if I've been wrong for all these years. I mean, as a kid, I used to believe in the power of prayer growing up in the 80s as a church kid that went on Sunday morning and Sunday night and Wednesday night forever. And then I grew out of it like many of us do when we get a little older. Almost became an atheist because I was so disgusted by how ugly the world gets. And the idea that there must not be a God because what kind of God would allow all these terrible things to happen? Then I discovered the faith of our American forefathers and deism. part of that being that I can only assume to learn the true nature of God by using my God-given senses rather than relying on the interpretations of what God is from other people, which is all religion has ever represented to me in the first place.

4:32And I found peace in that, I still do. A reconnection to the Creator that I had almost lost. But I was, and still am to some degree, fixed in my observation that God must not intervene since he or it allows so many terrible things to happen to people. Kids who get cancer, people who watch their family members get hurt or tortured or killed. It is an ugly, ugly world if you look in the wrong places. But I wanted to let God off the hook for all of it with this idea that these terrible nightmares are simply the price we must pay for being given the gift of free will. That God created humankind and intentionally set back and refused to intervene so that we might learn how to get through these atrocities without its help.

5:16Or his help, whatever. And now, lately, I've been questioning my own perspective because of all the news surrounding UFO disclosure and this Spielberg film coming out in a couple of weeks, it just keeps reminding me of that terrible night and how, even though I don't think I currently believe in the power of prayer, I would be lying to myself and my listeners if I didn't say that prayer seemed to have at least worked that night and caused whatever it was to go away. I do not know what it was. The experience gave me far more questions than answers and continues producing more questions with time.

5:58But as more and more information about whatever this phenomenon is comes out, consciousness continues to be a recurring through line that I keep seeing everywhere. and how many who have experienced a close encounter report this kind of telepathic connection to whatever the hell these things really are. And no, I don't care if you think I'm crazy for talking about these kind of things so openly when our own vice president of the United States recently said on camera in all sincerity that he thinks that they're demons when he was asked about Obama recently admitting on camera that aliens are real.

6:33I don't think they're aliens. I think they're demons anyway, but that's a longer discussion. Well, I can't let you go without a follow up on that. Because Barack Obama is on this podcast and he goes, yeah, aliens are real, but like here's where they're not.

6:44Jesse:They're real, but I haven't seen them and they're not being kept in, what is it? Area 51. Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States. Well, look, I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people, I think that the desire to describe everything celestial, everything is otherworldly, to describe it as aliens. I mean, every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there and there are things that are very difficult to explain.

7:30and I naturally go, when I hear about sort of extra natural phenomenon, that's where I go to is the Christian understanding that, you know, there's a lot of good out there, but there's also some evil out there. And I think that one of the devil's great tricks is to convince people he never existed. Look, a lot of deists like myself believe that God built the machine and turned it on and let it run. Instead of jumping in every five minutes to change the outcome, the universe operates according to natural laws for the most part. Our job is just to understand those laws and understand ourselves and use reason to figure out how to live, not religion.

8:04And that's why I'm having such a personal struggle over this one. Because if God did really interact on my behalf to scare away the UFO that was trying to suck me through the bedroom wall, then why doesn't he help those other millions of people who cry out to unanswered help in life or death situations? Yeah, maybe the aliens left me alone because they thought I was a weirdo for praying to God in the first place. What's wrong with this guy? Maybe that's the real reason this experience bothers me all these years later. Not because I think I have any sort of special insight into UFOs or that I think I've figured out God.

8:39It's quite the opposite. Because the older I get, the less certain I become about both. And all I know is that something happened in that room. If there is any silver lining here, it's that people can at least talk about these things now without being laughed out of the room. And in some ways, we've already had an incredible amount of disclosure from our own government and many other world governments now. It's not science fiction to say out loud anymore with authority that there is something happening. And while we have far more questions than answers about whatever that phenomenon really is, we are long past the point of pretending there's nothing there because something is happening.

9:19Something has been happening for a very long time. And whether that eventually leads us to aliens or consciousness or God or another dimension or all of the above, one thing is increasingly obvious to me. We are clearly not alone.