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The Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. Today we begin a three-part series exploring the complex,

and, if we're being honest, utterly bizarre UFO lore that has grown up out of the ashes of

World War II. But before we dive into that, I think it's important to take some time to

understand both the emergence of UFO lore and how belief systems emerge in general.

And I'll be honest, this episode is probably the most challenging thing that I've ever had to

write. I'll warn you now that there are no easy answers in what follows. There's no way to wrap

it all up neatly with a bow. This topic is both full of tantalizing patterns and frustrating inconsistencies.

It's messy and incomplete, absurd, and impenetrable.

Studying the UFO phenomenon reminds me of looking through a kaleidoscope.

With each twist in turn, new colors and structures

emerge before falling apart to form new ones. It's a riot of both randomness and symmetry.

And through observation of these ever-shifting forms, we can begin to guess at the internal mechanism

that creates them. But until we can bust it open and see what really lies

beneath, we have no way of knowing for sure how closely the models that we form in our mind mirror

reality. We may never be able to bust open the UFO phenomenon. We may never know what really

lies beneath its utterly baffling manifestations. But it's important to our understanding

of it that we absorb as much of it as we can and allow ourselves to sit with the disquiet

of not being able to fully resolve what we see into one consistent narrative. But before we begin,

I'd like to take a moment to give credit and express gratitude to Dr. Diana Walsh Basolka for her book, American Cosmic.

I really struggled as I began to work on this series. In thinking about things like the rise of Nazi Germany and the emergence of modern UFO lore, I found myself coming back again and again to the idea of belief

systems, both how we shape them and how they shape us. I felt instinctively that there was a larger

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