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Conversation Lesson

Dan: AC.

Aaron: Yo. What’s happening?

Dan: Let’s get this show on the road.

Aaron: Let’s do it,

Dan: You ready to explore new horizons?

Aaron: I’m ready to explore deep space.

Dan: To go where no man has gone before.

Aaron: Has gone before. And meet some aliens along the way.

Dan: Betty and Barney Hill, am I getting that right?

Aaron: I think so, yeah. I think that’s the couple’s name.

Dan: They apparently started this whole abduction raucous.

Aaron: Oh were they the original starters of this whole genre of …

Dan: Well I mean they would say …

I mean there are people that say that the history of mythical beings, that that’s evidence of ancient aliens.

Aaron: Oh, okay.

Dan: All these stories of fairies or gods or angels. Ancient aliens, there’s a TV show I think called Ancient Aliens.

Aaron: Mushrooms.

Dan: Mushrooms. What about them?

Aaron: Have you heard that, that mushrooms, some people believe that mushrooms are aliens.

Dan: Are from …

Aaron: From space. Like they traveled here on comets and asteroids, and because the spores are indestructible, they can survive space travel, and that because they’re so physiologically, biologically different than plants and animals on Earth, they’re their own category of being, so they think that maybe they come from another planet.

Dan: What makes you think they can survive space travel?

Aaron: That’s what I’ve read.

Dan: Okay. Fair enough.

Aaron: I don’t know if that’s true, of course I have no idea, but it wouldn’t surprise me. They’re pretty strange those mushrooms.

Dan: Yeah, there’s a lot of people that think that. You’ve heard of the stoned ape theory?

Aaron: The stoned ape theory?

Dan: Yes.

Aaron: Stoned meaning …

Dan: I think there’s some theory that human’s evolution from primates was helped along by psychedelic mushrooms.

Aaron: The ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms and other such psychotropic plants.

Dan: But we’re getting a little off track here.

Aaron: That’s true. That’s true, but it’s interesting, and in some way it’s connected to aliens I suppose.

Dan: But UFOs, you ever seen a UFO?

Aaron: Yeah, I’ve seen a UFO.

Dan: Yeah, what’d you see?

Aaron: I saw an orange, a bright orange disk in the sky with little black circles in it when I was about I’d say maybe about five or six years old. I was going to bed at night, and I was lying in bed and I looked out my window, and I saw this disk in the sky above the house across the street, but way up in the sky, it was really high. It was large, and it sat there for a couple of maybe 10…20 seconds, and then just shot off and disappeared very quickly.

I was really excited and so I ran into my parents room and I woke them up and I was yelling, “I saw a UFO, I saw a UFO!” And they told me to go back to sleep, that it was just a dream. I was really upset about that, because they just dismissed it as if it were just the ramblings of a little five year old kid.

Dan: Well do you think there was any chance it was a dream?

Aaron: No, I don’t think it was a dream, I remember it very clearly, I was fully conscious, yeah.

Dan: Right. Do you remember being really annoyed?

Aaron: Yes, I was very annoyed at my parents for being so dismissive.

Dan: Did you just drop it or did you …

Aaron: No I just dropped it. I still remember it, but …

Dan: But it stuck with you, well.

Aaron: Yeah. But anyway, that’s my UFO experience. How about you, have you ever come across a UFO?

Dan: Yeah, well I mean I came across an unidentified flying object.

Aaron: That’s a UFO, Dan. That’s a UFO. That’s, yeah.

Dan: Well there’s some people, and I thought maybe you might be one of them that are a little …

Aaron: Who thinks that there are alien space ships? Flying saucers?

Dan: Little bit slow on the uptake. Yeah, I think I’ve told you this story, and you probably don’t remember because it’s not that interesting.

Aaron: Yeah I never remember your stories, so go ahead.

Dan: I was in the Bolivian Amazon, a small border town on the border between Brazil and Bolivia.

Aaron: As you do on your vacation, yeah.

Dan: Yeah. And I think it was kind of a goodbye trip I was taking with a Brazilian girlfriend. In was gonna leave the country, and it was kind of like okay, this …

Aaron: This is when you were a young man? Okay.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. We had this three month romance and we both knew that this was the end.

Aaron: Coming to the end, right.

Dan: Yeah. So we decided to take a little bus trip into this little Bolivian border town in the jungles, like a two street town. Had one café with tables out on sidewalk. We were sitting out there, there’s a couple other tables around us, and over the treetops we saw this light that was changing colors moving around, kind of like a bee doing figure eights and different shapes. Then that light broke into two lights that started to do a dance around each other.

Then it eventually ended up fading out.

Aaron: That sounds like fireflies.

Dan: It did, it was kind of moving like that. It was very high up and it was quite bright and changing colors, very vivid colors.

Aaron: What if they were giant Amazonian fireflies?

Dan: Whatever it was, the weirdest part was all of the people’s in the tables around us, nobody was looking at.

Aaron: It was just you two.

Dan: We were like, “Whoa, what is that!” They were just like, you know.

Aaron: Maybe they didn’t see it, maybe it was just you two that can see it?

Dan: Or maybe they were pod people and they didn’t want to upset the overlord fireflies.

Aaron: That could be it. It is possible. It is highly unlikely, but it’s possible.

Dan: Or they’re just used to, they’re just used to seeing whatever those lights were.

Aaron: Yeah, okay, interesting. How about that.

Dan: I remember a group of friends here in Japan saw a UFO, and then I went, I started, it just didn’t sound right to me. I didn’t think they were making it up, but these are the kind of people that I just felt are a little prone to fantasy, so I started interviewing them about what they saw, and it was amazing how different. Some were saying circular things, one guy saw a pyramid like flying structure.

I don’t know what kind of mass delusion that was.

Aaron: Highly suspect. Highly suspect.

Dan: But Barney and Betty Hill … I feel like I’m getting that wrong. Just doesn’t sound like a real name.

Aaron: Well, regardless, the couple that, yeah, that they were abducted right?

Supposedly.

Dan: The Hills. I know it’s the Hills.

Right, well that’s the story. That’s the story. They were coming back from a long road trip, and apparently they had very stressful lives, they were an interracial couple at a time where that was very taboo, and apparently they had very stressful jobs where they were commuting hours a day, each of them, and they were trying to get some downtime, so they took a trip. They ran out of money, which maybe also added to their stress, and then they ended up having to do a long drive back.

I think they saw something some kind of UFO, and then all of a sudden they woke up and it was hours later. Then I think they didn’t know what happened, and then under hypnosis the story of being abducted came out. That was made into a movie, and coincidentally a couple months later after that movie came out, Travis Walton claims he was abducted by aliens.

Travis Walton, that one at first I was really interested in the story, and then I, you know. Apparently it was him and six coworkers, they were all loggers, and okay, they had this story, maybe it’s BS, but over the course of decades they’ve all stuck by their story. Usually somebody’s gonna break, and I think they’ve all had lie detector tests.

Aaron: Right, and they’ve passed them all, right.

Dan: Something like 16, no they haven’t passed them all.

Aaron: Oh they haven’t?

Dan: But they passed most of them. Combined they passed like 16 lie detector tests. I think there’s one or two tests are questionable.

Aaron: Well maybe. Maybe they do really believe that this happened to them, and that they experienced it somehow in their minds. If you experience something, you believe it’s true.

Dan: But six people, that’s where it … Well actually I just told you a story about a group of … But when I quizzed them separated they had different stories.

Aaron: They said different things, right.

Dan: And they’ve been holding the same story for decades now. I mean if it’s just one person … It’s interesting, I was listening to this podcast not with Travis, but with two of the other loggers, and the podcast host who went down to their town to interview them and went camping on the site of the abduction, and one of the ex-loggers, they’re in their 60s now, this happened when they were probably in their 20s. One of them said, “I’m a really skeptical guy, and if it … I wouldn’t even believe myself if it was only me having this experience. I depend on my friends that they have that same memory, so it gives me some confidence that what I’m remembering is true, but I’m skeptical even of my own memories.”

I thought that that was possibly just a really clever thing to say. Or the truth.

Aaron: I wonder if that happened on the 37th parallel.

Dan: What’s that?

Aaron: Oh you don’t know about the 37th parallel?

Dan: Is that like Bermuda Triangle?

Aaron: Well, when it comes to talking about aliens, yeah. The 37th parallel is obviously one of the lines running east to west, like coordinates, and it runs through the United States, and apparently the large majority of alien UFO sightings and other strange phenomena have taken place on the 37th parallel, including cattle mutilations. Have you heard about cattle mutilations?

Dan: I have.

Aaron: Where they find these cattle, and they’ve found thousands and thousands of them over the years. They’ve had all their organs removed with surgical precision. Some of what they’ve found is almost impossible to do with today’s technology. All the blood gone and no blood around the area. Just incredible, and it’s happened so many times, and I guess back in the 70’s, the FBI launched an investigation into it, and they sent out a hundred different agents to investigate this, and they could find no cause for it. They couldn’t find a single perpetrator of these mutilations. This is also occurring along the 37th parallel, and some witnesses have seen bright lights in the area around these mutilations before they happen.

Dan: Is that where Area 51 is?

Aaron: I think so. Yeah I think it is. Furthermore, on the 37th parallel, that’s the largest concentration of underground military bases in the US. Government military bases.

Just an interesting coincidence that the 37th parallel, these mutilations. Of course we know about crop circles, which some people claim are caused by aliens, whether that’s true or not who knows, but some of the designs certainly are symmetrical and pretty amazing. But yeah, no I, yeah.

Dan: They’ve shown that those are easily produced by people with strings and very minimal technology.

Aaron: Yeah, I’m sure that you can produce those.

I was just curious if these abductions had occurred along the same parallel or not.

Dan: Well it was … Actually I can’t remember where it was, but yeah I wouldn’t be surprised. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

I get really interested in these stories, but the more I looked the more it made me feel like maybe doubt. Again like you said, maybe they do. I imagine they probably do believe that they have been abducted. But when they cite lie detector tests as the main evidence …

Lie detectors tests, there’s a reason that they don’t allow those in court rooms, because they’re not reliable. They’re not trustworthy. It’s measuring heart rate, perspiration, and those things. One they could be

Aaron: Yeah, but they can be gamed. They can be gamed.

Dan: They can be gamed, and even if they’re not being gamed, people have weird different reactions to all these things that are not according to whether you’re telling the truth or not.

Aaron: To different things.

Right, it could be plenty of other causes for that, yeah.

Dan: I had a friend whose father, he was either in the FBI or the CIA. My friend, he was like a troubled guy, he got into a lot of trouble as a young guy, and I think he wanted as he started to get into his early 20s, he wanted to get into law enforcement. I think he actually did end up becoming a cop, and I remember him telling me about how his father was training him about how to beat a lie detector test.

There’s all these different techniques from holding your breath so you create some tension, and that maybe allows you to sweat or allows your heart rate to rise so that you’re giving a stressed physical response when you’re telling the truth. So if somebody says like, “What’s your address,” and then you show stress, and then that just screws up all the results.

Aaron: And that’s your background right, lying?

Dan: Or they’ll put a tack in their shoe and they’ll prick their toe to make their body freak out to confuse the test, and then it’s like the guy running the lie detector test, he’s like, “I can’t tell anything about this guy. He’s getting nervous when I ask him what his name is.”

Aaron: Interesting.

Dan: But there are … The last story was about the US military program that recently was big news in the end of last year. The head, Elizondo, he recently resigned in protest because he felt like UFO research was not getting enough attention, and that he felt the evidence that they had of UFOs was being ignored because nobody wanted to look like the UFO nut. Nobody wanted to look like a crackpot.

Aaron: Yeah, there’s a huge stigma attached to people who come out and talk about UFOs as if they’re perfectly legitimate topics of discussion in the US anyway, maybe it’s different in other places.

Dan: I think you can be, it could really harm your military or government career.

You’d be ridiculed and sidelined, and so even people who believe in it, you’re just like, “This is not gonna help me to talk about this.”

Aaron: Who’s this guy Bigelow, this billionaire like. I read something really interesting about him that apparently a lot of pilots in the military and commercial pilots that fly commercial jetliners, you know they’re up in the skies a lot, and they see UFOs with some degree of regularity, and apparently if you are a pilot and you see a UFO, you’re not supposed to report it to the FAA. In the pilot’s manual, and this is what I’ve read, I don’t know if this is true, but you have to report it to this company, a private company, that’s run by this guy Bigelow.

They’re doing all the research. They’re collecting all the evidence. They’re doing all the research on cattle mutilations and UFO sightings. That’s the entity that’s gathering all the data these days, or has been in the recent past, yeah.

Dan: Yeah, I did read that the government was outsourcing some of their research to his company.

Aaron: To his company, that’s exactly right.

Dan: And he, this billionaire, guy Bigelow, I think he’s friends with Harry Reid, a senator, and he’s one of the few senators in congress that knew about this secret project and got it funding.

But yeah, we’ll have to embed a couple of those videos and interviews from the pilots talking about their experiences, and it is pretty interesting, and I think a lot more credible than a lot of these abduction stories.

But those are interesting too, who knows.

Aaron: Yeah, yeah, yeah, who knows. It could be tonight, Dan.

Dan: Right, the truth is out there.

Aaron: You could be abducted.

Dan: Keep your mind open.

All righty Aaron, until next time.

Aaron: All right, well talk to you then.