Share
The Paranoid Strain
New: Secret Societies I, Part 7 - Cathars 2
Season 4, Ep. 7
•
I know that most of you woke up this morning and had that same thought you do every time you open your eyes. "How am I going to face the day without a podcast about a medieval French heresy, its violent persecution by the Church, and its eventual passage into legend and conspiracy?" Well, today is the day you've been waiting for. We're gettin' all Cathar up in this bitch, and it's gonna get toasty. By which I mean that the Cathars mostly got burned to death on pyres by their theological enemies. But that's pretty awful, so let's focus on how interesting the history is! Plus, we'll cover all of the misapprehensions and nonsense that conspiracy theorists have attached to the Cathars since they were stamped out. Next time: The ridiculous Da Vinci code gets the lightning round treatment. See you in two weeks.
More episodes
View all episodes
67. New! Unidentified--Diane Pasulka and the Bigfoot on Mars
28:53||Season 6, Ep. 67Yeah, the title is weird, but trust me, it's in there. We transition this week from talking about Jacques Vallee to dig into DW Pasulka's American Cosmic, a book that's equal parts fascinating and frustrating. Plus, you know...Bigfoot on Mars. What more do you want, for god's sake.PS: Sorry it's a day late, but Willem UFO needed an extra day, and I didn't want to post without his art. I think it was worth it. Hope you agree.
66. New! Unidentified--Is the Lady of Fatima also a UFO?
37:24||Season 6, Ep. 66This time, we consider how our three authors (Jung, Vallee, and Pasulka) think and talk about the overlap between the Venn diagrams of religious revelation and UFO encounter. There's a surprising number of similarities between the two, and we have a lot of fun considering that. Hope you like it. See you in a couple of weeks.
65. New! Unidentified--Uri Geller pretends to talk to UFOs
29:27||Season 6, Ep. 65We trek back to the 1970s, a ridiculous time when people believed all kinds of frivolous nonsense--not like our thoughtful, fact-based era, no siree! Anyway, a guy back then claimed to bend spoons with his mind. He also claimed to speak to aliens who were visiting Earth from UFOs. Our author Jacques Vallee believes some of this, which isn't great. But he doesn't believe all of it, which--thank goodness for small favors. Let's learn how to pretend to bend cutlery with psychic power!
64. New! Unidentified--Jacques Vallee's control thesis
36:44||Season 6, Ep. 64Vallee is an interesting guy, and he has one of the most fascinating takes I've heard on what UFOs might actually represent. I mean, I don't buy it, exactly, but it's at least semi-coherent, and unquestionably interesting. Enjoy!
63. New! Unidentified--UFOs as Jungian archetype
39:27||Season 6, Ep. 63We're finished with the mirage men, and now we'll spend a few episodes considering what it all means, you know? And by "it all", I mean "UFOs". We'll start with one of the first books published about UFOs by a major cultural figure. Carl Jung's Flying Saucers--A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky was first published in 1957, at the height of the first UFO craze. He has some interesting things to say, and also a bunch of cranky diatribes and paeans to nonsense, so we'll have a nice time taking a closer look.
62. New! Unidentified--The translator spills the beans on CIA "UFOs"
30:27||Season 6, Ep. 62Thanks to our interviewee Tanner Boyle, we wrap up the story of the fascinating Mr. Nedelcovic and the CIA mission that may have turned into the first modern alien abduction story. Next time, we get philosophical.DON'T MISS: I was a guest on this excellent video--watch it, and I encourage you to subscribe. It's a great channel: Mirage Men - The Real UFO Coverup (it's not what you think)
61. New! Unidentified--The CIA, the Translator, and the first modern abduction
35:04||Season 6, Ep. 61For this episode and the next, we're covering a story I thought we were going to skip. But then, I found out that a very mysterious figure may, way back in the 1970s, have explained this even older story in a way that can shed light on the full extent of CIA-funded UFO fuckery, well beyond the borders of the U.S. Featuring a fantastic interview with perhaps the world's foremost expert on Bosco Nedelcovic. What more could you want? (I promise this will all make sense shortly).
60. New! Unidentified--Project Serpo is disinformation, but can we blame Doty?
31:43||Season 6, Ep. 60As we keep peeling away the many lies of Richard Doty and his Air Force handlers, we come to Project Serpo, a wild and essentially unbelievable story that nonetheless riled up the UFO world in the 2000s. Was Doty behind it? Hart to be sure, but the evidence seems strong.
59. New! Unidentified--The disinformation agent versus Art Bell
41:51||Season 6, Ep. 59In an event that, for our tastes, amounts to Richard Doty's disinformation chocolate landing in Art Bell's kingdom of weirdness peanut butter, we dive deep on a 2005 episode of Coast to Coast AM where the supposedly former disinformation agent faces the music under the intermittently pointed questioning of the normally gregarious host. Next time, we wrap Mirage Men with more evidence that (all? most? a great deal) of the key events of UFOs in the Cold War period were deliberately engineered by government agents.