Hi everyone and welcome back to that UFO podcast. My guest today is an aviation and space

psychologist with more than 25 years of experience. She is also a former director of the Centre for Space Medicine at UCL.

She's worked with astronauts, pilots and surgeons to understand how humans perform in extreme environments.

And she brings a fascinating perspective on both outer space and inner space.

Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Ia Whiteley.

Ia, welcome.

Thank you, Andy. I'm delighted to be here,

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 Pusulka, 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, 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. 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-spacially acute as well. But then there were things of

in when we were practicing, doing kata and also aspiring, it was you could see that you know

...