The Believer - (Project Book Club)
Need To Know
Bryce Zabel
4.7 • 548 Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2025
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to the first episode of Project Book Club, where hosts Bryce Zabel and Chrissy Newton launch a fresh kind of conversation around the books that shape the UFO and consciousness landscape. This isn't your typical late-night podcast. It's a morning-show-style book club made for readers who want to explore the unknown with a hot drink in hand and curiosity on full blast. In this episode, Bryce and Chrissy dive into The Believer by Ralph Blumenthal, the biography of Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack. Mack rose to prominence for his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, but his legacy shifted dramatically when he began studying alien abduction phenomena. Bryce and Chrissy unpack the book's layered portrait of Mack, exploring his courage, contradictions, and the firestorm he faced from Harvard when he chose to publicly validate the experiences of abductees. The discussion touches on the emotional depth of Mack's journey, including his personal flaws, academic brilliance, and the spiritual and philosophical questions that guided his work. They examine how Mack challenged the limits of Western scientific thought, his interest in consciousness, and how his openness to Eastern philosophies influenced both his worldview and research methods. Bryce and Chrissy also reflect on some of the major events in Mack's life, like his involvement in the Ariel School incident in Zimbabwe, and his controversial interviews on national television. They take time to discuss his critics, his supporters, and the legacy he left behind when he died unexpectedly in 2004. Through thoughtful insights and a bit of morning humor, this episode sets the stage for what Project Book Club is all about: digging deep into powerful stories, asking big questions, and creating a community where readers can explore the unknown together. ProjectBookClub.net
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Project Book Club. |
| 0:07.0 | Your host, Welcome to Project Book Club. |
| 0:23.6 | Your host, Bryce Sable and Chrissy Newt. |
| 0:28.6 | The Book of the Month is The Believer by Ralph Blumenthal. |
| 0:34.2 | You know, I'm excited about this. I hope you are too, where it's kind of our morning show, |
| 0:40.3 | kind of coffee book thing. It's called Project Book Club, folks. And what our thought was |
| 0:46.8 | is that we both have pretty large UFO libraries. And we thought, it might be nice, since we |
| 0:54.0 | know so many other people, including many |
| 0:56.1 | of you who are watching or listening to this, you also have your own libraries. And you read |
| 1:00.3 | these books sometimes and you don't know who you can talk to about them. So we feel like, well, |
| 1:05.1 | you can talk to us. Yeah, that's true. I'm like, I have at least 100 UFO books, but I haven't read 100 UFO books. That's for sure. They're literally scattered like in my room and bookshelves and by my bed. And, you know, I'm always, what I do before I go to bed and if I'm going to read a book, I put it on my bed so that I make sure that I do read it too. But I have so many of them that I |
| 1:28.5 | use for references and like it's, I know, but how can you not, if you love UFOs, how can you not |
| 1:34.3 | have books? Like it just, you know, or audiobooks, right? Well, and that I think is also a legal |
| 1:40.9 | way to read a book these days. It's so interesting, though, because for a number |
| 1:45.2 | of years, I just collected whenever possible, the hardcover of a UFO book, because I thought, |
| 1:50.7 | oh, this is kind of a fun thing. I need to have this for posterity. I don't know why. And then I said, |
| 1:57.5 | okay, I've got too many. I can't be buying all these hard covers. I got to buy |
| 2:01.3 | soft covers. And then I got a Kindle. And so now I've got two giant libraries. One of them is on my |
| 2:08.1 | Kindle and travels when I travel. And the other is, well, part of it is up there. Part of it is |
| 2:14.4 | elsewhere. And I got so many books. and I'm going to make a confession, |
| 2:18.5 | Chrissy, and I hope you'll, you won't abandon the show when I tell you this. But of all these |
| 2:24.3 | books I've got, and it's well over 100, maybe it's closer to 200. And if I'm being perfectly |
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