I'm your host, Kelly Chase. Today, we welcome James Madden back to the show.

As spooky season draws to a close, I didn't want to miss the chance to explore some of the

darker themes that have been inspiring both Jim's recent work and our ongoing conversation

about the nature of the UFO phenomenon, specifically the paranoia that comes

from our uncanny encounters with things that lie just beyond the limits of our own personal caves.

You can find Jim's most recent musings on his substack in a piece entitled Spectres of the Thinking

Machine, the uncanny suggestion of the non-human within the

human, which I have linked up in the episode brief. In this episode, we'll be exploring the

themes of that article, as well as exploring a work that has become something of a touchstone for me

in my exploration of the darker contours of the UFO phenomenon, the phenomenal

docu-series Hellier.

If you haven't seen Hellier, I really can't recommend enough that you do.

Continuing in the tradition of John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies, this genre-bending work

is a fearless and unflinching immersion into the experience of encountering the phenomenon,

the authenticity of which only resonates more deeply for all the ways in which it unfolds like a fever dream.

Hellier is challenging and nuanced and unselfconscious in a way that few other explorations of the intelligence

behind the phenomenon managed to be. And perhaps we owe this fresh take to the fact that

the team behind Hellyer, Dana and Greg Newkirk, Carl Fifer, Connor Randall and Tyler Strand,

don't come from the UFO community, but from the paranormal world. And though I'd argue

that this is what makes Hellier so good, it certainly has also made it divisive within the UFO

community, which isn't surprising. The fact that UFOs seem to be, at least some of the time,

technological craft, grounds the phenomenon just enough into the materialist paradigm

...