Consciousness, Intuition, and the UFO Phenomenon — with Dr. Iya Whiteley

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Looking forward to our discussion. It's good to have you on. And I've had several guests. I never said this to you previously. I've had several guests in the past bring your name up in various different conversations, including Diana Pasulka, Dr. Gary Nolan. So it's really good to have you on and get to speak to you. There's a whole load of different ways we could go in this conversation, a lot of different tangents. But I'm going to try and keep it as grounded as possible, if that's indeed possible, given what we're talking about. But first off, Ia, I want to know a little bit about you and your background. And how does someone get to become a space psychologist? My passion was to find out what our abilities are as a human being. And I was interested where our limits, what's our potential. So can we develop it? Have we have an effect on it? Can we train it? And that led me to explore this as a child, as a teenager. And then I wanted to see if I could study our extrasensory perception. So through martial art, I was exposed or lucky where I found out that I could sense things that other people couldn't. And they were not outside, I would say, scientific realm. It's just ability to observe and being aware. But, and you would rely more on your feelings of the wind, you know, as the people are moving about, you're listening, you become more audio-spatially acute as well. So, and, but then there were things of, in, when we were practicing, doing kata and also sparring, it was, you could see that you know what the person will do. And the more I studied psychology later on, the more I could explain, oh, I could have read micro-expressions, I could, you know, read their body language. But then, when I come to actual training, it's just not that. It's something more to that. And that's what drove me to explore more. And, of course, people who have, do extraordinary jobs in extraordinary environments, are astronauts. So first, I worked with pilots and military pilots as well in Australia. And then, slowly, I just chose what I could do closer to being, working with astronauts. And European Space Agency grants came up, and I bid for them as part of a UK initially commercial company, and then University College London. Yes. And you're based in the UK now, like myself, but you're from Latvia, is that correct? Yes, yes. My hometown is Riga, Latvia. I know Latvia well from being a football fan and watching many Scotland games playing Latvia in the past. So, what, growing up in Latvia, did you have an interest in the UFO topic, the paranormal, anything? You talked about ESP, perhaps from an early age, having an interest. What was your kind of grounding in growing up? Latvia actually is an epicenter for UFO experts, not necessarily the activity, but I grew up with a knowing that it exists. So, as a teenager, you choose different clubs, activities, but also you are, we had a lot of magazines that we could, or journals that we could subscribe. And they were specialized specifically on UFO as well. So, my interest was more in extrasensory perception, so I was diverted more to that, although we had people who would come to sightings, who would come to exchange their experiences, and it was sort of in the background. So, it wasn't something, I didn't grow up with it, that it didn't exist. I just knew some people were interested in that. Some people were interested in, I don't know, botanics, and some people were interested in martial art, and someone in UFO. Is there a reason for there being, you mentioned there's a lot of experts in the field in Latvia, but it's not necessarily a hotbed or a popular place for sightings. Why is that? Perhaps people who were most curious were living in Latvia at the time, because it was part of Soviet Union, but Latvia does have anomalies or phenomena of various types as well. So, I think it often, as it often is, people get attracted to a hub, and whoever creates a hub, then that what happens, I, as I say, I didn't have, I didn't attend any of those events, but I grew up knowing that that exists. It wasn't for me, like, a change in my belief system, or I just wasn't following that or attracted to that. No, that's fair. So, talk about your work, then, with astronauts and pilots, because this is fascinating, and as a layman to, you know, aviation or space psychology, explain it to me like I'm stupid, and what exactly is it you do, and how do you start to really get involved in the field deeper and deeper? Yes, of course. I began with understanding how to present information to the pilot in the way that they could process it fastly and make effective decision-making, and also making no errors, or eliminate as many as possible. We're human, so we do misinformation or misinterpret, and also make our own judgment. And at the time, right in year 2000, or just before and just after, automated aircraft came in, like there was a massive change in the way the aircrafts were constructed or built, and suddenly there were glass cockpits. So, the fleets were replaced very rapidly, because the Airbus and Boeing, two leading companies, they, of course, Lockheed Martin was doing military aircraft, they both had different cockpit philosophy, and what that means is that Airbus had removed the stick, so you have a yoke when you're flying, and they removed that all together, and they put like a game stick, just one, like a joystick, just, that's what they've done. And there was a lot of debate about what is good and not good for the pilot, how difficult or not difficult. And as we all grow up with our own wants and needs, or habits that we don't want to change, there was a host of pilots that did not want to accept Airbus. And there were those pilots who, you know, would embrace, especially a new generation, would be very interested in flying Airbus. And because of that rapid change, they had to train a lot of people to fly this completely novel display that no longer had clock dials, because it used to be just mostly clocks, and also primary flight display, which was also round at the time, or sometimes it would be square, but inside the display would be round. And the problem was, is that what the person was used to look for information, or understand the logic of how the aircraft would fly, suddenly changed, because it was designed by engineers from ground up, like a novel system. And there was no incremental entry, like we had with our phones, for example. Like, I grew up with no mobile phone, and then there was Ericsson, Nokia, and then suddenly there were many others. And you kind of learned slowly of what the, how to operate different models, and what Android and Apple and different systems. But here, there was a sudden jump. And because of that, there was a mismatch of what was expectation of what I'm doing and what the aircraft would do, because it is a partnership. So my degree or part of my work was actually called human-computer interaction. Or, and the problem at the time was that the pilots misunderstood what automation mode or what automation functions the aircraft was performing. And that was presented on the displays. And some of that, the presentation was not intuitive. And intuitive is a tricky word, but basically the pilots were not seeing it. And hence, we had aircraft crash nearly every week, commercial flight, which is horrific because of that. And some of them were tragic, and some of them were incidents. And there were many more incidents. And pilots were afraid to talk about this because they thought that, because they excelled their job beforehand, they passed with flying colors all of their training, and suddenly they have problems. They felt and named the problem, Ghost in the Cockpit, because they couldn't understand who was changing the aircraft from what they've put it in. But what was happening, the light would go off as the way of informing the pilot, instead of changing the color, for example. So the button will go off automatically when the mode would change to another way the aircraft would fly. So managing the aircraft was becoming difficult and unclear. And so that's when I came in, and that was my expertise. I was interviewing pilots. I was on all of the forums that pilots were reporting this because they were afraid to speak up. Because if they speak up, it meant that they're not good at their job. And also, pilots were punished, meaning they lost their job, they lost their flight hours, they would go into retraining. But people did not know how to retrain. They didn't understand. And even pilots who were captain, they're called, just trying to think what was the name, but it's the captain who would train the rest of the fleet, for example, of the pilots, our training captain. I think that was just that. And so they also had problems. So it's not just the pilot who is junior. It's the pilots who are meant to be representing the system. So the discussions in the pubs and behind start taking place. And the words start getting out, saying, it's not the pilot error, it's something else. And after every flight, pilots would record what was happening. They would literally memo of what modes were happening, studying it together in flight while they were flying. And then started to report that this mode switched off, that shouldn't have happened. And then the aircraft behaved that way, and they will take over, you know, with a full manual. But the problem is that some airports would only accept in some approaches because of low visibility or because of how it would accept the flight for safety, because they would be too close, for example, landing after each other. There will have to be automated landing. So all of that was happening, and I was fascinated to understand what pilots are thinking. And the problem was the pilots were under-reporting the problem. They did not know what was happening in a way. They understood, but they couldn't explicate correctly. But also they couldn't articulate what was the problem because they couldn't fault themselves and they couldn't fault the aircraft. And I was lucky enough that I was working with Mary Omidy and Jim McLennan, who at the time was studying decision-making in extreme environments in firefighters in Australia. And they decided, what if we put a camera on a firefighter because some firefighters are successful and some firefighters, you know, would lose the crew and themselves die or unable to save some people. But some would stay right into the last minute. And as soon as they walk out, let's say there is a catastrophic collapse or the fire will change its behavior and so on. And what they found out is that the firefighter wouldn't actually give them any more information that would help another, you know, train another firefighter. So I took their methodology, modified it because pilots have very limited time and don't want to spend too much time debriefing because how did the landing go? Fine. You know, we've landed, we've parked. Yeah. And so it had to be very brief. And they started telling me things that they could recollect to the point that I forgot to tell my wife that somebody will come into the house today and they would be, you know, sitting sweating because they should have told their wife something and they would remember this in flight. So their recollection would be so good that they would remember every consecutive thought that happened in flight. And that was flooding me with so much information and help. And I understood that what we have in cognitive engineering books saying of how we think and how we make decisions is actually not at all like that. We're not following decision tree. There is no logic, straight logic or linear thought. And they were, I could also understand what information they were picking up and what they were losing. And then the ghost in the cockpit started to disappear in a way because they started to understand what they were processing, what they were missing, and we could unravel the puzzle. And I, of course, I was not the only one doing it. It was the team across, you know, in the United States, in Europe, in Australia, they say English speaking because I was working in the English speaking. And, of course, other languages in Europe would have worked. And I'm sure in Spain, sort of, you know, Spanish, Portuguese. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you are drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more. No more app overload. No more juggling logins. Just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. 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But I like that idea that you've mentioned of the incremental technology through mobile phones. So I remember 25 years ago, my first mobile phone was... I got a mobile phone quite young. I was really keen to have a mobile phone. I had a pager when I was a child. I don't... You know, a pager, yeah? Like, I wanted a pager. My dad had one. I thought it was cool. And I was a weird kid. But I had a mobile phone really young. And it was big brick with buttons. You couldn't text message. I remember getting a notification one day to say SMS messaging was coming soon. No idea what it was. You made a phone call and that was it. And it was really simplistic technology. And that obviously reminds me, you're talking about pilots who had loads of clock dials. I think we can all imagine some of those really old aircraft we may have seen inside in the movies or TV shows. And it's just all lots of little circular dials, little arrows flicking about. And you don't know what any of it means. But with mobile phones, like you say, we had 25 years of changing. So the buttons going away, the buttons moving about, phones starting to get bigger, then starting to get smaller. And we adapted to that along with time. And then you have a pilot, like you say, who overnight almost goes from those old clock dials to this brand new technology. It screens everywhere. There's color. There's flashing lights. There's a whole new way of working. And that must be incredibly difficult to do. I mean, my mobile phone is very unlikely to, on a daily basis, decide whether I live or die. Whereas a pilot literally has the lives of not only himself, his crew, the people on board, the people potentially on the ground to think of. That's a lot, a lot to risk. So let's get into some of this then. So I wonder, let's talk about astronauts at the moment, because that's been a part of your job. And they are trained to operate in probably the highest stress and highest stakes environments we know, going out of orbit into space. How do you prepare them for the unexpected when you're speaking to astronauts? And also, I'll include dealing with unusual or unexplained phenomena. Of course, these people choose this job because it is that, because of this novelty, because of challenges, because they could learn a lot, because they can operate novel technology. Actually, novel, not everything in space. Some of it is very archaic because it's reliable. But the circumstances and technology surrounding it or people who are thinking forward and contemplating of potential scenarios that may go wrong is what on your mind all the time, such as with pilots as well. They always consider what could possibly go wrong. So that mentality is absolutely true in space domain or airspace domain. So all engineers and all the pilots and all the mission control always think, you know, what could go wrong? How can we prevent it? And with astronauts, the idea is that you, well, part of work that I was doing is looking how to assist them in creative problem solving. And we were preparing a program for creative problem solving on the missions to the moon and Mars. And the concept is that you have very minimum resources. So you cannot take supplies, nor can't you plan for all possible errors to go. So you had to be using your own resources. And at the time, I had colleagues from, they were working in Novosibirsk in this amazing, I would say, hub of academics in Soviet Union. And they happened to travel in the same city as I was. And we were just met because we had Russian language in common. And I invited them to work on this project because they were biologists, but also they were working on theory of innovative problem solving. And that was developed by Atschuler, who used to work in the patent office and similar to Einstein. And he saw that people filing patents have solving the problems in the same way, but in different domains. And he started to pull principles together. And these principles then allowed to be applied cross-domain. And when these, my colleagues, Olga and Nikolai Bogatyrevy, they were, thought that what if we look on how nature solves problems versus how we, human, think. So this is two different mentalities, if you wish, or consciousness, if we go into that domain. And they started to distill on if, let's say, there is a contradiction in lifting weight. Yeah. For example, it's one example. How would a human do this? And, or how many ways the human can do this? And how many ways nature would do this? You know, even considering ants, how much weight they lift. Or you think of how elephants are lifting weight is very different, or how the tree lifts the weight. It also does lift the weight. And this principle became so different. I believe it was something like 75% of solutions were different in nature on how it resolved it, using only resources available. And that's why it was much more applicable to space. We don't discount how we make decisions, or how we do creative problem solving. But if we consider how nature solves problems and help us, because through this methodology, which they've called biotrees, because it's biology, it's not quite biomimicry, but it's using nature as principle. It's not mimicking it, but using principles. Then, we've put this into a software and a prototype and gave it to work with pilots, or sorry, with astronauts, with European astronauts. And we happened to be at NASA when we were doing this prototype testing, because, of course, although these are European astronauts, where do they train? They train for missions to go at NASA mostly, or a majority of their time. They're actually not in their home, which is Cologne, the astronaut center. And what we found that all of them had, because of their background, so one of them was a shuttle background or learning. They were all pilots and engineers. The other pilot, the other astronaut was trained on Mir. It was that far along. And the other astronaut was younger, and he was trained on Soyuz, because that was, for a long time, the only way to go and come back from space. And all of them had different ways of thinking. So when we gave them a problem, they all came up with different solutions. And that's a beauty, because in spaceflight, you want to have all the options and then to choose, because you will be limited by resources, by time, by how effective, how long, and how many other systems it will affect. So that was also then spurred into training programs, you know, as part of thinking of how to creatively problem solve. How often does a subject of unexplained phenomena come up when you're speaking to pilots or astronauts particularly? Is that something that you can have a conversation about? Are you expected to have a conversation about? You mentioned, obviously, being there at NASA as well. Do UFOs come up? No. So the idea is that you have to find an explanation to what the cause might be. And because my work was mostly on the ground, so it was mostly in preparation rather than supporting in flight. So perhaps that's my, if you wish, limitation of exposure to some of the stories. But because I'm also a psychologist, and for that, even a clinical psychologist, it is a very, it's threatening, similar like I have explained when I spoke with Ryan Graves, that there is this expectation that if you say that you can't or think in the way that it is expected, you might be grounded or lose your license to fly, medical license. And people talk, unfortunately, you know, unfortunately, there's still that, not always protection of each other, but competition. But pilots are found, and anyone in aerospace are more camaraderie, you know, like they're more helping each other rather than going against each other. So people are very quiet if they're struggling with something, if it might affect them. So they will talk either hush-hush or to their friends and colleagues. And that's how, why I was comparing the problem where we had ghosts in the cockpit, because they were afraid to speak up because they would have lost their job. But once there were more of them, and they've started to describe the problem, they had something to work with themselves, but also to go back to manufacture. How would you approach that difficult conversation? Then you mentioned speaking with Ryan Graves and other pilots on this. And there's a huge stigma, I believe, that I think we know is still there when talking about the UFO topic. And it's interesting you hear, obviously, pilots being scared to report it. They don't want to lose career progression. They don't want to have their colleagues diminish them. They don't want to be laughed at. An interesting idea would be, on occasion, pilots may use that against colleagues. Well, you know, I want a promotion and Ea's going for the same promotion. Well, Ea's seeing UFOs when she's up there. Do you really want her progressing through the ranks? And that can be used against them. How would you approach that conversation with a pilot or an astronaut to say, what would you ask them to say, actually, or what would you recommend? I just want to go back just for a second to say that I have actually not heard a story where the pilots would do this backstabbing to each other ever. Not in my experience, just to say, but I'm just saying that if other people might hear it, I don't know, because it's a conversation you don't know who listens. There's a potential for that to happen, yeah. Yes, exactly, yes. 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And as that part of Human Factors effort, we wrote a paper, which has only just been approved. It took that long to get it done. We did have some conference papers, but this is an official white paper that's published on the website. With our suggestions, as a team of experts, we even have a medical professional as part of that team, we have also aircrew as part of that team, who had had their own experience of UAP while flying and were told not to do. So, the people who actually went through the process themselves as aircrew, and that paper is widely accessible if you go into either via Ryan Graves' American Safe Airspace, I think Americans for Safe Airspace, or AIAA, and look for UAP effort. And that provides recommendations of what could be done and what kind of problems pilots face as well. And so now to answer your question, how do you start the conversation? Did you say? Yeah. So, how do you have that conversation to say, you know, if they do see something, should they report it? Would you recommend they do? Do you help them deal with an experience or something unusual that they maybe are wrestling with? Yes. So, we do touch that in the paper as well, as in terms of recommendation for the organizations, but also, so if the pilots read it, they can also talk about this as an option. First of all, I would recommend to speak with colleagues that they feel comfortable with, because by sharing that experience, it makes you more confident you're not alone. And that's why then you don't have to remain in that thought, did I see it? Did I not see it? And often people dismiss that experience because they say, well, you know, I'm so busy, and it kind of falls into the foreground or background, and people only remember it if somebody else saying it or says, oh, yeah, you're right, I completely forgot. And often you do come across those experiences when people hear somebody else's and they say, oh, that makes sense. Yes, now I can relate to what has happened. And, but also our mind is very protective of us, and it would also, what we couldn't put into our construct of reality, it will just almost dismiss it. It's actually blindness, it's blindness to the situation. And we do have this, there are many type of blindness that, like attentional blindness is one, is sort of, if you don't want to see it, you will not see it. And there are many experiments related to that in psychology. But because the pilots are so alert, and they're trained to watch more than you and I, I don't know if you fly, but if we are bound by Earth, we actually don't see objects when we get into the aircraft or when we are passengers, we scan like that. Our vision is almost like a horse. If you, if horse has blinkers here, we have blinkers here. But the pilots don't have blinkers. They see, you know, the sphere, they see the objects right round. So when I'm flying with an instructor, the instructor more often would spot something before I do, because they have much more experience. And this has happened when we were filming for the PBS, the public broadcasting system, they were filming about the UFOs in the UK. And we went up just to discuss and to show how it might, might not, you know, appear. And the pilot flying with me, who is also not just the aircraft pilot, but, or fixed wing, he's also a helicopter pilot. And he saw objects way before, you know, I would have even looked. It's because of his professional scanning. And I am just a private, you know, pilot license. And I'm also not, is away as responsible as he is for the flight. And, and so we were discussing what we would notice and not notice. So the pilots definitely would notice, but whether they will file it as unusual or threat is different. So you could see objects, but you would dismiss them because they're too far away. You're too busy doing calls. You're too busy planning, or you've got crew coming, asking something. Depends on which part of the flight. But if you are cruising, for example, you know, cross Atlantic or Pacific flight, you have time. So that's when you could look, you know, towards Big Dipper, which is a lot of activities, apparently. It could be happening around the Big Dipper. So it's, it's that first aspect. You know, people might not see it at all. Second is that whether once they mention it, what happens with their crew that they're sitting with, are they able to discuss it or not? And then if they say, you know, I don't want to talk about this, you know, where do you go from there? And they often change so they don't fly with the same person. Some, you know, they rarely often fly with the same person, depending on how big is their company. And, and so that, all of that, that cascades, whether that you begin the conversation or forget it about, you know, talking about it at all. So, but speaking to people who have already experienced it is better or speaking to friends, you don't even have to speak to colleagues just to, for you to feel comfortable to say that this has happened, just to be acknowledged. But also there is an aspect of when we tell the story, it gets modified every time in our mind. Not the way we tell the story, the way, the details that we're able to tell or not, and not everyone able to retain their original story, not because they have bad memory, it's just the way we are wired. So, and so choosing the person that you can tell authentically is the key, or maybe not even tell the story and write it down or record it or draw it. Different people have a different way of capturing it because there is granularity of the experience that's much reacher than what we can capture in words or transfer to anyone. And that richness actually is where the key is held. It's not just that we saw the light. There is multi-layer experience that some of it is very hard to put into words. So from a cognitive psychology perspective, how reliable is human perception when observing or reporting extraordinary phenomena? I'd say very reliable because these are experts observers. We're not talking about somebody who don't know how to describe the flying objects, don't know the characteristics. They're very reliable. You could have, so they have experienced all possible something that could fool their perception. They have experienced that in their flying career. You know, the glare from the window, the lights that are in the cockpit reflecting in the actual glass and so on. So everything that you could explain or weather balloon, I mean, they've seen it all. Unless you're absolutely novice flying, they would have come across in their flying career because they approach, you know, airports, they fly across. Some of them have come from military aviation or different type of aviation. Some of them, like I have come across pilots who fly a helicopter. They see things very differently in how they move. They're just perception. They're clued differently. So I think we are very gifted, I would say, or we're very lucky as a community to have these experts sharing what they're seeing or experiencing because it's not only seeing. An interesting aspect of your role, and again, I'm going to use the astronauts here because pilots would be a little bit less likely in this scenario. You're preparing astronauts for different challenges for like the mission to Mars, which would be like 500, 520 days. There's a lot that would go into that, you know, physically, psychologically. But is there any element of preparing? This is very speculative, but what if they did come into contact with something non-human? Yes, that's my favorite topic because I think that contemplation, just thinking about it, what would you say? How would you act? How would you anticipate you would be contacted? All of that comes into play. As far as I am aware, at the European Astronaut Centre, that was not discussed nor trained for. So perhaps individually, people, whether they allow for that possibility or not, they discuss that either with colleagues or contemplate on that level. So to say that, no, we don't train for that. Do you think that's a... Would you recommend that should be trained for? Because that seems like, while it's an extreme circumstance, given what they're doing, it would seem logical to at least entertain the notion. I think so, because we've... So if we think of safety, for safety, we train pilots to such a degree that this is actual words of astronauts, is when they walk up to the rocket, they feel they're superheroes. They're better than superheroes. And that's not just their, you know, I don't know, ego speaking or... Yeah. But, or, you know, that they're superior. No, it's because the team on the ground and previous crew have designed so many potential safety training scenarios of what could go wrong. They have tested for all of that, you know, over and over and increased their speed reaction and increased the potential ways of resolving that error. So we train, we give them this, an amazing, gorgeous, something like to fall into during the crisis. And during crisis, most important is not to freeze because it's not flight or fight, it's freeze first. And by having that experience of having, knowing what to do, at least first three steps or at least even one step would be sufficient to walk out from that freeze zone. So if you know what to do first, then the rest, your mind will get into its efficient mode of operation and it will be able to work with you to come up with what resources are available, what I can do and how I can best respond. Not just respond, but be effective in that or efficient. And so I think if you haven't thought of what to do, then you don't want that freezing face, especially in a situation like that. So I'd imagine in a way we've been trained through Hollywood and film industry on what possibly could happen or, you know, if you watch or grow up on Star Trek and a variety of there was a Stargate, you know, all of those programs. I guess there is this element of knowing, but unless we go through the motion ourselves, it is slightly further in our processing, if you wish. It's not as a foreground. Just like in martial art, some things you do because it's just the natural thing to do because that's what you've done thousands of times. And that's the same thing here. So if you know what to do, you don't need to think about it in the first instance, meaning that you are faced and you're not shocked. That's, you know, it is a reaction. You don't go through that reaction or it's minimal and it's time and impact on you and you can walk from there. So absolutely, I would think it's very helpful to, as a minimum, to put it on the table as a question and go through the people you will be trusting, each of you are trusting your life to and mission control and, you know, see what people would say, see what kind of interaction there could be, what kind of questions they would want to ask, what kind of questions they anticipate, how will they be communicated, will there be questions at all, you know, what would they do? We know now some of the phenomena interacts with us in feeling sense. So what do you do with that? We're not trained how to deal really with our experiences that flood us chemically, you know, the emotions that we only train that ourselves throughout our life. You know, how do you deal, let's say, a lot of astronauts and pilots have the fear in a way that fear that freezes you doesn't come up as often but it depends what circumstances we come with or come up with but maybe fear is not even a problem. You know, what if you're overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude and love and connection and we know that with Jake Baber who described that and he felt that he's actually maybe not fit to fly. You know, why? You know, like why why do we have to deal with this on our own and why can't we share that with colleagues and contemplate about that? Running a business is hard enough so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. 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One of the interesting ideas I've heard you discuss, and you've touched on it here a little bit, is the idea of when a pilot becomes so, I don't know if intuition's the word, but there's a connection between them and their aircraft. And this is something we hear about when people are talking about non-human intelligence, UFOs and aliens, that perhaps entities are connected psychically, telepathically to a craft, and that's how they operate it. However, you're talking about it in terms of pilots of helicopters or fighter jets. They have a connection to their craft, and do you believe it goes beyond skill and just, well, I've got 10,000 hours of flight experience. There's something there. There's a real connection to the actual craft itself. I think that's a beautiful way of putting it, and pilots do describe this flying by the seat of the pants. So they are feeling the airframe, and a lot of pilots who love flying, they would go to fly the lighter aircraft, so they could actually feel the air, you know, feel the airframe, and work with that. And often, when you're driving the car, I mean, we can compare that when we are cycling, you know, it doesn't matter. You, or when you are, you know, a child, they don't have to be a child, but when you are roller skating, you are so much above the ground suddenly, but you still connect to the ground, and you still feel your feet, or those little wheels, still part of you connecting to the ground. So the same is that if you get into the car, or change the car, buying it smaller, or bigger, you do have that perception yourself, or at least I do, and people I spoke with, we often talk about that, you know, some people cringe if they come too close to a bush, or another car, and their wing mirrors are too close. So, same thing here, when you are flying, that's one sense about landing, for example, that you are learning not about how you are coming to the ground, which is a very different perception, it's a perspective, but you are watching how fast the ground is coming up to you, and that's very different. And by that rate, and you're not watching it, you can't see that rate forward, you have to watch it with your peripheral vision, and you almost, you do know, well, maybe you, what our eyes are actually seeing in black and white in peripheral space. But if you, if I look, I can see that my sweater, you know, is colored the same way, although I'm looking through my peripheral vision, but it's my brain coloring it. it's not actually physically possible. So, and then what you're looking for is you're looking at the wings as how fast they are approaching the ground, because that's the reference. You can't see it again from your eyes on how fast the ground is coming up, but you're almost feeling it with your feet because you're, I don't know, you're feeling the airframe moving. and that feeling makes you feel as if you are an aircraft. But people have, as we now know, people have feelings of synesthesia and synesthesia is when you have one sense interpreted through the other. So, for example, I hear a sound but I see color or I see a shape but it represents to me in color. So some, and there are now 150 pairings that are discovered which before was discounted as abnormal. So, you shouldn't be seeing that or hearing that or feeling that. so people would for example take the glass and they would drink the liquid and they will have sensations that are that we're not used to describing but they are internal you know, down to their toes and they would be able to to say what's inside this drink for example. and all of that allows you to perceive space not in the same way for all of us. So, if there are 150 pairings of, you know, mixing of how we see, how we hear, how we taste, proprioception, you know, thermoception and so on then we possibly can feel the vibrations that other people don't and that could be from, you know, a tail, from the wing, I don't know, from the nose or some people how they perceive the airflow might interpret this in a certain way that we don't and that you can't learn in the office. You have to go sit down and go through these touchdown landings, make, you know, let them go wrong, you know, get the crosswind and slowly you will be coached and if the pilot is also having those extrasensory but synesthetic pairings, they will start telling you, can you feel the ground coming up? They don't say, can you see the ground? Can you feel the ground coming up? And can you see the wing, let's say, shifting or tipping? Can you see the color change? And so all of that gradation that will be describing to you and you will start picking your own cues because you're seeing they're not relying just on forward, you know, keys on the runway and so on. so you're starting to sense. So I think it's very much, we could describe it, it's not like we can manipulate the airframe by our body but then there is, you know, there are people who can affect matter, I don't know, but I haven't come across this myself in aviation but there are pilots who describe if you read stories that it felt like they were able to, they did not, they had no other explanation of why the airframe done or the aircraft managed to pull that far and they shouldn't have. So something was happening. I wonder when they get to that stage where you can fly a helicopter, a fighter jet and you can pilot a spacecraft or whatever it may be and you have that level of connection does that change who the person is and then that must go into their daily lives that when they come off the aircraft or they land a helicopter they don't just jump for a coffee, go home and have a normal life, that must change them and how they just perceive everything round about them. Yes, that's also a very good observation. Absolutely. The way we think our profession or our experiences modifies our cognitive processing and also our perception and it's neural wiring so it's specific paths in our brain that let's say we use more often and they become highways and we rely on them more on how we think and a pilot or people in extreme environments or professions that we don't even have to say surgeons, you know, police, paramedics, there are many professions that builders, you know, they have to think about what could go wrong, you know, when the building site and they think of safety and the same thing is here. So we have the pilots often and astronauts as well, they would be, for one, which is quite interesting, with astronauts it's almost like nothing is impossible and no job is too small because they have to be a tradesman of, well, they have to be, what's the expression, being able to do all the trades. Jack of all trades, master of none. Yes. Well, I think they are master of maybe. They have to be a master. Yeah, I was going to say, but they have to also be a master of them. Yeah. Yeah, but they are also humble, meaning that if it doesn't work or they don't know, they'll go find out, but they are able to multitask. So if the washing machine broke, they'll take it apart and put it together. They would be more fascinated about the process of how to fix it because that's how their mind works. They are fascinated to find out. If they've got the time, they will always engage and they engage fully. There is almost like there is none of them outside of working with that problem. But of course, they are very much aware of the environment at the same time. And they are learning how to use resources. So it's a skill. And I would imagine, to me, it's, I guess, maybe a little bit of humor that I find that when we become parents, it's a really good trading for a space mission because you have to multitask in so many ways. You don't sleep, you stay hungry, you have to organize an entire household and sometimes many more other parents. And you still have to perform in an problem-solving and, you know, this little alien beings that start asking you very unusual questions. For a major part of their early life, they don't talk either. We're going to get to that as a topic in just a little while. But just to take the previous idea a little bit further, so from the human to the non-human, the idea that humans, when they're trained to be pilots, and they go through these changes and they have these states of hyper-awareness, hyper-vigilance, intuition, gut-feeling, whatever you want to call it, all kind of becomes like a thing, a oneness for them. If you want to imagine Neo in the Matrix when he finally clicks and everything goes slow for him and he's got this kind of control of his environment, if you take that to a non-human place, would it be likely, do you think, to speculate that pilots of craft who perhaps are visiting the earth or based here, would behave differently to the native beings wherever they are from because they would have similar experiences, similar levels of skill control, or could we not apply that? Are we talking right now about the potential pilots of these unusual crafts? non-human craft, would they have similar attributes, do you believe, then, that their behaviours would be similar to our pilots who behave in a different way once they have those skill levels and that awareness of their environment? That is all for part one. Part two will be out in the next couple of days. You can listen to this episode already in full, ad-free, and with no sponsors, for less than the price of a coffee. If you head on over to Patreon or Apple, you can subscribe to the podcast for less than the price of a coffee, or take up the two weeks free trial that are available on those platforms. You can head on over to Spotify and search That UFO Podcast Premium and get access to this episode in full, no adverts, no sponsorships, and also with some extra bonus content as well. Thanks for listening, folks. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you're drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more. No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process, so you can focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you.