Welcome back to The UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast. I’m your host, Kelly Chase.

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.

Before we begin, I want to preface all of this with a disclaimer—or perhaps it’s more of a challenge to the listener. In this episode, Jim and I briefly end up in a place that I tend to avoid going on this podcast which is into the realm of political and economic commentary. I usually avoid these topics for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, in our current political climate, there are certain words that immediately shut down all thinking and discourse. Words like “left” and “right”, “capitalism” and “communism”, have lost all nuance and depth in their meaning and have come to embody grotesque caricatures that are used to fuel the 24/7 outrage cycle of the news media.

So the challenge I want to issue to you is this. If you feel your hackles going up at the mention of some of these words, give us the benefit of the doubt and hear us out. I promise you that if you are able to separate these words from the script we’ve all been so rigorously trained on, that you’ll see that we’re not advocating for or against any of these particular groups or ideologies.

Rather, we’re engaging in a kind of discourse that rarely happens these days, especially not out in public, which is an attempt to release our own personal political opinions and proclivities in order to have a deeper conversation about the stories and ideas that shape the walls of our cave.

I hope you’ll be willing to go there with us, because—as loathe as I am to discuss anything even somewhat adjacent to politics, and it’s not something that we’re going to do often or perhaps even ever again—I don’t think that we can have a complete and honest conversation about the nature of our own Cave without acknowledging these things.

So with that in mind, let’s get into it. Here is my latest conversation with my friend, Dr. James Madden.