TRANSCRIPT Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Ep. 404: Linda Moulton Howe Brings Down Carrie: Jimmy Church Disclosure Lunch Edition

[00:00:00]

Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

Carrie Poppy: Hello! Welcome to Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, the show where we don’t just report on fringe science, spirituality, claims of the paranormal. We take part ourselves.

Ross Blocher: Yep. When they make the claims, we show up, so you don’t have to. I’m Ross Blocher.

Carrie Poppy: And I’m Carrie Poppy. And we’re back at the Conscious Life Expo 2024 for a very special, very pricey lunch.

Ross Blocher: Yes, you are. I held off to the last minute like, “Meh, I could get in anytime. They’re not going to sell out.” They sold out.

Carrie Poppy: They sold out.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. What was it? 150 bucks?

Carrie Poppy: Not quite, but close. $135.

Ross Blocher: That’s a specific number. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: But for a like 90-minute lunch, and I’ll tell you what the vegan entree was, Ross. Here’s what they done did.

Ross Blocher: Oh no. Uh-oh. There’s a lot of like meat conscious people at the conference.

Carrie Poppy: Meat conscious (chuckling)—this is a phrase that’s sticking with me.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, you know, people who don’t necessarily want to eat meat for a variety of reasons.

Carrie Poppy: Like a flexitarian kind of mindset, at least.

Ross Blocher: People who would want to have legitimate vegetarian or vegan options. I guess I just wanted to denote that they are not always doing it for the same reason that others might. Okay, so what did they offer you? Because they could have just gone to the samosa house and got some excellent food.

Carrie Poppy: That would have been a better idea. They took a cauliflower, and they sliced it right down the middle. They grilled that up. They grilled it okay. And then they surrounded it with ragu sauce.

Ross Blocher: That’s it?! Just a little floating cauliflower.

Carrie Poppy: A cauliflower in some ragu pasta sauce you would buy at Safeway.

Ross Blocher: For $135?

Carrie Poppy: For 135. And the people around me were eating like steak and salmon. (Giggles.)

Ross Blocher: Oh my goodness. You had a floating cauliflower all by its lonesome? Really? No salad?

Carrie Poppy: They brought everybody salad before. Like, a little bit of like—with Italian dressing.

Ross Blocher: But this was the main entrée? Oh, they should have been embarrassed. That’s terrible! Oh my goodness.

Carrie Poppy: (Giggles.) $135.

Ross Blocher: One of the ones I love to tell the story of is the Smokehouse here in Burbank. They had a vegetable platter. And you know, it is a steakhouse. That is their specialty, granted. But I’m pretty sure I’m the first person who ever ordered the vegetable platter. And you could just tell they ran around the kitchen going, “What do we do? What do we do?! Someone ordered it. What do you have? You have cauliflower? Give me—a wedge of cauliflower!”

(They laugh.)

Okay. ‘Cause that was there. “We have carrots, right?! What do you do with the carrot? you chop it into pieces? Do you cook it? I don’t know, just put the raw carrot on there. Uh, celery.”

Carrie Poppy: “Who went to Le Cordon Bleu? Anybody in here!?”

Ross Blocher: “Maybe you’ll want—” And it was really just like a rabbit would have been really happy just, because it was like a collection of raw vegetables just kind of piled onto the plate. It was ridiculous.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Oh, that’s wonderful. How much was it?

Ross Blocher: I think it was like 35 bucks, so at least not 135 bucks. You know, it’s an entrée price.

Carrie Poppy: Still, though! You can take $35 and go to Safeway and get many more vegetables, make a whole stew for your whole family.

Ross Blocher: It was ridiculous. Anyway.

Carrie Poppy: Wow. Okay, well here’s how it was billed. “Come have lunch with Linda Moulton Howe, Daniel Sheehan, Nick Pope, Andrew Collins, Stephen Bassett, Caroline Corey, Whitley Strieber, and (deeply) Jimmy Church!”

Ross Blocher: Well, I mean, you had me at Linda Moulton Howe, and then you just kept going! Yeah, that’s pretty good.

Carrie Poppy: I know! “Each speaker will be sitting at one of the guest tables. Enjoy a three course, delicious catered lunch from the Hilton chefs with your choice of entrée—fish or chicken or veg.” Oh, okay, it wasn’t steak. It was chicken. Discuss disclosure and beyond with like-minded friends and researchers. We cannot confirm or deny what intel might be shared, but Jimmy wants you there. The Disclosure Lunch is sure to sell out, so get your tickets now.”

Ross Blocher: It did!

Carrie Poppy: “Join Jimmy Church, host of Fade to Black, and his special friends and experts as we open up the disclosure secrets to the light.”

Ross Blocher: Okay. Little old me thought I could just sneak in at the last minute. And I want to say it was $150 by the time I did go to sign up for it.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, maybe. Okay, I might have been early.

Ross Blocher: And that I could put it in the checkout box, but I couldn’t then process the order. Yeah, it was like a little messy on the website. But, oh yeah, I was so bummed, but I knew at least Carrie would be there. And seeing that description that there would be one speaker at each table was also just intimidating to me. Like, well, where do you sit?

Carrie Poppy: How do you pick? Can you believe this? I didn’t pick until I got in that room.

Ross Blocher: Really? You were just going to wait and see where the spirit moves you?

Carrie Poppy: I don’t know what I was thinking! It doesn’t sound like me!

Ross Blocher: Andrew Collins is all by himself. I’m going to go sit by that guy. Because obviously we know Linda Walton Howe is going to be of interest.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah.

[00:05:00]

That is what happened when I walked in, I saw her, and I was just like I gotta go over there. That’s where I’m headed. But once I sat, I was like, oh, should I have gone to Whitley? And I kind of couldn’t decide if I had made the wrong move. But I stayed.

Ross Blocher: That’s tough. Yeah. And I think you were telling me that people did move around a bit.

Carrie Poppy: Not really.

Ross Blocher: Oh, okay. They stuck with their speaker.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I mean probably some people did. But that wasn’t the vibe of the space.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, even choosing between those two is incredibly difficult.

Carrie Poppy: I know! I saw her name and I was like, that’s—my feet were like, “That’s where you go, Linda Molten Howe. You love her.”

Ross Blocher: A tractor beam invisibly pulled you to Linda Moulton Howe.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I had to. But it’s interesting because Whitley kind of tugs at my heartstrings more. So, I don’t know what happened exactly. But let me back up for a second and say that as I was in line, someone came up to me and said—I think he said, “I hope Golly is well.” And then kept walking.

Ross Blocher: I like how people use the pet references.

Carrie Poppy: Yes, yes. Very—

Ross Blocher: Tactful?

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. Very sly. And then he and his female companion ended up sitting at the same table with me. So, the three of us were giving knowing glances every once in a while, which was very fun.

Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) The guy wrote us later and shared a picture of you next to Linda Moulton Howe.

Carrie Poppy: And I can confirm by the angle that we’re talking about the same person.

Ross Blocher: Okay, very good. Was it a full table?

Carrie Poppy: It was a full table. When I got in—because I had lined up sort of early and made this unintentional beeline for Linda—I was able to sit down before her table was terribly full, but her table definitely filled up to the last seat.

Ross Blocher: Well, you were right next to her.

Carrie Poppy: I sat right next to her.

Ross Blocher: Or left next to her.

(Carrie agrees with a chuckle.)

And okay, I’m now seeing in this picture, your cauliflower, it is massive. It is splayed out.

(Carrie thanks him.)

And what is that on top? Did they add like olives?

Carrie Poppy: Oh, that’s right. There were little raisins, I think. (Chuckling.) I think that’s right. I think there were raisins and maybe like almonds or something.

Ross Blocher: Conscious Life Expo. Get your game together.

Carrie Poppy: It kind of cracks me up. I kind of like to be overcharged though.

Ross Blocher: You do?

(Carrie laughs.)

This podcast will be $80, please.

Carrie Poppy: Well, I guess I mean in the context of this show. Because it’s already—

Ross Blocher: Just to have a good story to tell.

Carrie Poppy: Pretty much. It’s already—like, when we go on our adventures, it’s already lost money. It’s already spent time.

(Ross laughs and agrees.)

So, you get to go into this dissociative fugue where you’re like, “Well, this is what’s happening, isn’t it?”

Ross Blocher: It’s an altered reality, an altered state.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, so you can float above it in amusement as you realize that you will be hungry in an hour and a half. Okay, so. I sit next to Linda Moulton Howe. She’s not at the table yet, though. I just know she will be. I didn’t even know that she was going to be sitting in that chair. I just happened to pick it. And when I did, the guy on my left kind of gave me a little bit of a dirty look. And I said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Was I in your chair?” But he was seated, so that didn’t seem to make sense.

And he was like, “Oh no, just—well, she’s gonna sit there.” And points to two seats over. And I was like, well, okay.

Ross Blocher: Yes… were you saving this one for Elijah? Like, who’s supposed to be in this seat then?

Carrie Poppy: Right, you just wanted to lean over this and talk to her? Because that’s not a good strategy. Take this one!

Ross Blocher: Yeah, just take the seat that you’re glaring at when you’re the first one in there.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, exactly. I don’t know! Be braver. I don’t have advice for you!

(Ross laughs.)

So, I said, “Oh, are you a really big fan?”

And he said, “Well, it’s a lot more than that.”

And I was like, “Would you like to switch chairs?”

Ross Blocher: Okay! It was very nice of you to offer.

Carrie Poppy: Thank you. And he was like, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I couldn’t. No, no, no, no, no.” I think he like realized like I’m being overbearing now. So, I was like okay!

Ross Blocher: I have no reasonable way to express my discomfort with any of this.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, right. So, I’ll call this guy Daniel. ‘Cause he will come up a fair amount.

Ross Blocher: But not Daniel Sheehan, who’s at another table.

Carrie Poppy: I just realized that! As I was looking at it, I was like, “Why did I give this guy the name Daniel? We’ll be talking about a speaker named Daniel.” But I refer to him as Daniel throughout my notes, so we’re fucked.

Ross Blocher: Okay. No, that’s fine. We’ll call the speaker Danny, because goes by Danny Sheehan.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, perfect. He goes by Danny, perfect. Okay, so Daniel, whose name is not Daniel, says to me, “So, have you had any experiences?” So, we are off to the races!

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: The answer to that is yes.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) And I said “yes”, and I just got up and walked away. I’ve been asked and answered!

Ross Blocher: It’s just a very wide-open question. Have you had any experiences? Yes.

Carrie Poppy: Have you had any visitors? Mm-hm.

(They laugh helplessly.)

So, have you had a communion experience? Mm-hmmm.

Ross Blocher: Have you had any encounters? Just now.

(They giggle.)

Carrie Poppy: Have you seen aliens? Yeeees! 1990—yes! That’s me, recalling the movie, Aliens.

Ross Blocher: Okay, I thought that’s where you were going. A great instance of the original film being Alien and a sequel being Aliens.

[00:10:00]

Carrie Poppy: Oh, right. The Love Boat was based on a book called The Love Boats.

Ross Blocher: I love it.

Carrie Poppy: Good call to knock off that ass.

Ross Blocher: Yeah.

Carrie Poppy: So! I’m sitting at this table. The guy leans over. He asks me about my experiences. So, I say, “Oh, no—nothing I attach to aliens. What about you?”

And he says, “Yeah, I’ve been having experiences my whole life, but especially in the last few years. And my wife thinks I’m crazy.”

Ross Blocher: Oh. Okay, this is already telling a story.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Linda hasn’t sat down yet. He’s already on “my wife thinks I’m crazy”. So, I was like, “Oh, wow, okay, she’s worried about you?”

And he was like, “Well, I don’t care what she thinks.” Okay. Okay.

Ross Blocher: Oh. Ooh. Not good for the marriage, but.

Carrie Poppy: Touché.

Ross Blocher: And I’m also feeling like maybe he should also be at the table with Whitley, but clearly he’s even more than a fan of Linda Moulton Howe.

Carrie Poppy: Of Linda. She’s the one who proves all of it true. So, he says he remembers being interested in UFOs as an eight-year-old. So, he’s like, “So, maybe I’ve been having experiences my whole life, but I’m only starting to put that together now in these last few years.”

Ross Blocher: Okay. And that immediately makes me want to ask questions about have you undergone hypnosis? How recently have you been expanding this timeline?

Carrie Poppy: Well, I have answers for yoooou!

Ross Blocher: Oh, good, yay! Okay, I’m so excited.

Carrie Poppy: So, he started going on Stephen Greer’s outings, where he does these special, sort of hypnotic meditation things called the CE5. And now Daniel can kind of induce this state, but the state started coming on its own. And it’s interesting. I’m taking this psychosis class at Harvard Extension School, and one of the studies was about how, you know—while there don’t appear to be—there doesn’t appear to be anyone yet who can just like think their psychosis away, you know, be so rational with it that it stops. But there are people who gain the sort of control over when and how it happens and sort of are able to identify safe places to release it and make it more of like a natural part of their lives.

So, anyway, I was wondering, oh, I wonder if he was already having these experiences, but then when he went to the CE5 meditation, he developed some strategies around like when and how to have them.

Ross Blocher: Okay. To instigate events, which seems to be the MO of the CE5 program. A listener recently told me about this.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. I hadn’t heard of it until this guy.

Ross Blocher: Yeah! We’ve talked about Stephen Greer on the podcast many times before.

Carrie Poppy: UFO guy.

Ross Blocher: Fascinating character in this world.

Carrie Poppy: Divisive.

Ross Blocher: Yes, divisive. And we have debates about who’s more well-meaning versus who’s more cynical about, you know, how they’re peddling their wares. And I find Stephen Greer to be on the cynical side of things.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. I don’t know too much about him, so I’ll defer.

Ross Blocher: But a listener just recently let me know about this app that he has now called CE5 Contact. And it’s $10 to get the app, but then it “provides instructions and tools to assist you in making peaceful contact with extraterrestrial civilizations, as well as locating others in your area who are interested in making contact.”

So, yeah, he talks about these different contact types. Close Encounter 1, sighting of an E.T. craft. We’re familiar with these. CE2 is Close Encounter of the second kind: physical evidence of an E.T. aircraft. Close Encounters of the third kind, CE3—sighting of an E.T. life form. CE4, experience onboard an E.T. aircraft. And he’s created, I think, his new category: CE5, human-initiated contact with E.T.s.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, yeah, where you do it yourself. You’re not waiting around.

Ross Blocher: So, with him, you can join this community where you learn techniques to initiate contact.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, well now I kinda wanna download that app. Ten bucks? I meet some E.T.s?

Ross Blocher: Ten bucks! I mean, cheaper than cauliflower.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, by a lot, apparently! So, now Daniel goes out into the forest and lies there and intentionally has these contact experiences. And now that you’ve read me that app, I’m thinking he probably does it with his iPhone next to him.

So, I ask Daniel if he’s read Communion, and he nods at me like, “Lady. (Chuckles dismissively.) Okay.”

Ross Blocher: “Who do you think you’re talking to? So basic.”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I feel like I walked into—yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Like, I walked into The Amazing Meeting and said, “Do you know who James Randi is?”

Ross Blocher: Right, right. You heard of flimflam?

Carrie Poppy: A reference that now still only 10% of our listeners follow, but yeah.

(They chuckle.)

So, it’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” And so, then like to, I don’t know, prove myself, I’m like, “I have it with me!” And I like pull it out of my bag and show him.

And yeah, he’s like, “Yeah… there it is.” (Laughs.) So, I put it away.

Ross Blocher: “You still have not won my approval.”

Carrie Poppy: Well, I spent $8 on it. I don’t know.

[00:15:00]

Ross Blocher: “You sat in the seat that I had no clear plan for! I don’t like you.”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. He and I don’t know what our relationship is anymore.

Ross Blocher: I just wanna note that you’re wearing a smoky bear hat.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yes, I was.

Ross Blocher: Which is fantastic.

Carrie Poppy: I love that hat.

Ross Blocher: Also, we should mention this was held in the restaurant that’s just off the lobby of the LAX Hilton. So, you always see—as you’re walking in, and you’re distracted by people playing pan flutes and hitting vellum covered drums and dancing around—

Carrie Poppy: These are reasonable examples if you can believe that!

Ross Blocher: And you know, the course of people heading up the stairs into the various rooms. There’s a nice restaurant to the right that is usually pretty empty.

Carrie Poppy: Yes. Drew and I went there and shared a meal one time. We shared an entrée and a salad, and it was $70!

Ross Blocher: (In quiet disbelief.) Oh my goodness.

Carrie Poppy: We were like never again! Let’s just not eat!

Ross Blocher: Yeah, and it’s trying to look upscale, but also it’s, you know, in a hotel. So, yeah, I wouldn’t choose to go there, but that’s where they were holding this lunch.

Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. And you still wouldn’t choose to go there, but the company was worth it. So, speaking of the company, Jimmy Church jumps on the microphone around this point. And Linda sits down next to me, and we barely get to sort of acknowledge her presence. Of course, a hush goes over the crowd when she sits down. Oh my god, she’s here. You never know what will come out of her face. But Jimmy Church, who is a character we refer to in a lot of episodes—this UFO radio host guy, who’s just such a social butterfly and quite a character himself—he walks around the room with his microphone trying to get our attention.

“Hello, everybody. Hello, everybody.”

But of course, we’ve been already sectioned off into these little tables where we’re having separate conversations. It’s the hardest environment to get everybody’s attention.

Ross Blocher: Oh, yeah. Leave us alone, Jimmy.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, so he’s going like, “Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello! I have free moneeey!” And that made like maybe five more people go quiet, and he was like, (smugly) “Oh, the room falls totally quiet now!” But it wasn’t really; he continued to try to get our attention.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: He wanted the payoff to his line. That’s funny. I was just thinking of something similar. There’s a Simpsons moment where Professor Frank is trying to get the attention of this large auditorium of scientists, and they’re all chattering and won’t listen to him.

“Excuse me, please listen to me!” And they won’t do it. And then finally he says, “Pi is exactly three!” And everybody stops (gasp!) and looks over at him. He said, “I’m sorry I had to do that.”

(They laugh.)

Carrie Poppy: Something too offensive not to become quiet. Okay. So, Jimmy starts walking around, and he is pointing out all his buddies. And I had so much affection for Jimmy when I was re listening to this. I was like Jimmy just loves hanging out. He loves having friends and telling you about all his hangouts! And he could do that all day, couldn’t he?

Ross Blocher: Yep. There’s a certain type of person like that. He and Alan Steinfeld, I think, both fit that mold.

(Carrie agrees.)

And that’s why they introduce almost everybody at this conference.

Carrie Poppy: Yes! And they have something delightful to say about every person because they are delighted by every person. So, Jimmy walks around and he finds his buddy, Nick Pope, who we have covered on this show before. He’s like, “Oh, Nick Pope! Oh, Nick! Wasn’t that crazy that one time we hung out? You know, we were like hanging out with Caroline over there and you and I? And Danny! Hey, Danny!” He gets Danny Sheehan’s attention. “Danny and his wife, Sarah—that’s Sarah, we’re friends too. Sarah and I one time—”

(They laugh.)

“We were at a hotel in Nevada somewhere, and I don’t remember specifically, but Sarah and I—we were hanging out. And I say to her, ‘We gotta have some fun tonight!’

“And she says, ‘Let’s go.’

“And I say, ‘Let’s go!’ And we get tequila shots, and we sit by the poolside. And it’s gotta be—what?—two in the morning? Two in the morning? Right, Sarah?”

(Distantly.) “Right.”

“Yes! See, that was the most amazing night. That was the most amazing night. Danny! Danny, was that right? And I’m not saying I’m your competition. I am saying I’m friends with your wife. Okay.”

Ross Blocher: That’s funny. I was just hanging out with someone from the animation community who fills that same role in that peer group. It’s so funny. It’s just a certain personality type.

Carrie: (Laughing.) It’s very cute.

Ross Blocher: And I like how, as you’re telling me his story there, I don’t doubt a single aspect of it. I bet all of that actually happened. I am sure it’s all true. It’s not an extraordinary claim. People do sometimes hang out at two in the morning.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, it’s like someone just telling you about their bike ride, but they’re just so into it that you’re like, “Yeah, okay! I’ll listen to this! But oh, and then you went there. Okay!”

Ross Blocher: Yeah, I’m following your passion.

Carrie Poppy: Good. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so then he tells us a little about his producer, Sid Goldberg, who’s sitting in the room and comes to him. And he’s like, “This is Sid. he’s a troublemaker.”

[00:20:00]

“He’s a troublemaker. He’s the producer on my show. Yeah, okay.”

Ross Blocher: Oh, Jimmy. What a crack up.

Carrie Poppy: Then he comes to someone named Andrew who made a documentary. Are you familiar with this guy?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, well, you kind of warned me that we should clarify some of his deal. So, I’ve spent part of the day reading about Andrew Collins.

(Carrie thanks him.)

I know more than I did before. So, yeah, oh, Andrew! Of course! Yeah, Andrew Collins.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Okay, so he says, “Andrew made a documentary,” and then as he’s saying that, he just gets distracted by Whitley and just keeps walking. So, poor Andrew gets hardly any introduction after all of this fanfare.

(Ross “aw”s.)

But he sees Whitley, and he says, “And this man! And this man—everyone wouldn’t be here without Whitley Strieber. He has been rolling a rock uphill every day!”

Ross Blocher: Whitley Sisyphus.

Carrie Poppy: Whitley Strieber, who we talked about in our last episode, and the one before. And next there was someone named Stephen Bassett sitting nearby. He said, “Stephen Bassett, fighting the good fight.”

Okay, then Jimmy is like, “You guys I never wanted to be hypnotically regressed.” This is pretty much out of nowhere. Pretty much out of nowhere. “I never wanted to get regressed, because I didn’t know what might happen to me.”

Ross Blocher: Non sequitur. Yeah, where are we going with this? Alright.

Carrie Poppy: So, to pause in the way that Jimmy did not and tell our listeners what’s going on in the UFO community, people recover their memories of being abducted by being hypnotically regressed. That’s the word for like hypnotizing is remembering their memories. So, he’s saying I never wanted to do that. But he finally decided to do it, and he wanted his friend Sarah to do it. I think she’s a hypnotist?

(Chuckles.)

Now again, we were all in the middle of conversations. We all have forks in our mouths; we’re all waiting for like—Jimmy is just like overtaking the room with this, and now for some reason we’re hearing a story about his friend Sarah. But okay! Okay. He finally did it with his friend Sarah, and he did it in his studio, and it was filmed! And he’s like, “And just the craziest stuff happened! Well, anyway.”

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: Such as?

Carrie Poppy: No examples. Nothing! Alright. So, now what are you and I supposed to do?! We go through every Jimmy Church video? We try to find this? Come on! We’re not gonna do that. Anyway, if you find this, let me know, listener.

Ross Blocher: It’s a mystery.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, so then he says, “So, who in the room has been regressed?” And many people raise their hands. And I notice That Linda Moulton Howe raises her hand. I had never heard this!

Ross Blocher: Oh, okay! Yeah! What regression has she undergone?

Carrie Poppy: Have you ever heard her mention this?

Ross Blocher: Not that I recall.

Carrie Poppy: Me neither!

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Usually she’s all about collecting information about other people and their stories and whistleblowers. But yeah, I don’t think she ever really focuses the spotlight back on herself.

Carrie Poppy: Exactly! So, I see that and I kind of—you know, I have this just immediate kind of jerk reaction. Not like I’m a jerk, but like my body jerks. I like look at her like “oh!”—kind of startled. And she kind of bounces her hand back down a little bit. Seems to think about something. Okay. So, the moment passes. So, this will come back. Okay.

Ross Blocher: We’ll regress to this.

Carrie Poppy: So, Jimmy did say that during his regression he lost time. There was like a period that he thought was 10 minutes that turned out to be an hour, but that’s kind of—

Ross Blocher: I like that it’s all on film though, so we know time was proceeding.

Carrie Poppy: Right, right. But it was the most incredible experience. He’s still unpacking the crazy stuff. Mm. Alright, anyway!

Ross Blocher: The crazy stuff we’ll never mention! So crazy though.

Carrie Poppy: This is not how to tell a story, Jimmy.

Ross Blocher: Definitely worth interrupting your meals, your conversations.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Gotta order your stories, Jimmy. Okay. But he did say if we want to know more, we can ask Sarah. Didn’t point out Sarah in the crowd. No idea who she is, but we can ask Sarah if we want to know more about that.

Ross Blocher: Sarah, reach out to us.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, then Jimmy sets up this game that he’ll return to, and I’m just going to tell you from the beginning that it’s a game, so that you don’t go through what I went through. He’s like, “By the way, there’s a fed here. Everybody try to figure out who it is.”

Ross Blocher: Okay. And you’re like, alright, have we just gone really like conspiratorial? Have you been tipped off?

Carrie Poppy: I thought it was just gonna be some cute little like “Well, Angela’s here, but she works for the Library of Congress.” I thought it was something like that. So, I really was like, okay, let’s see who’s—oh, who’s that? Okay!

Ross Blocher: Who’s wearing like an NSA shirt or something?

Carrie Poppy: (Giggles.) Yeah. And then it turns out this is just something he does. Like, Daniel, the guy sitting next to me, was like, “Oh yeah, he does this at all the events. It’s just like a weird thing. It’s a fun game he plays.”

Ross Blocher: Ah. Is it a fun game, though?

Carrie Poppy: Or does it just—is this where Linda Moulton Howe is getting all of her feds? Believable. Sincerely believable.

Ross Blocher: All of her highly placed, operative whistleblowers are people that at lunches have stood up and said, “Yep, I’m the fed.”

[00:25:00]

Carrie Poppy: Uh-huh. That is more believable to me now than it was before this launch.

(Ross “oh no”s.)

Okay. So, he says this thing about the feds. You know, who’s the fed? And jokingly, I like do the hitchhiker’s thumb at Linda like “Meh, I’m sitting right next to him, right?”

And he’s like, “No, that’s too obvious.” And then he looks right in my eyes, points at me, pushes his elbow back and says, “You could be a fed.”

Ross Blocher: Oh no, you pointed the finger, and now you have the finger pointed at you.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) And I was like, oh, could I? Hahahahahaha…

Ross Blocher: I have no deflection for this!

Carrie Poppy: I hopefully am not! So, I probably sounded more guilty than I needed it to.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, you didn’t handle that well.

Carrie Poppy: When the real answer is like I have a medium sized podcast.

(They laugh.)

But I still felt outed for a second. Okay, so we all start chatting. The people across the table from me talked to her at length about something I couldn’t hear well enough to report it to you well. But I could tell that this one woman had some sort of personal experience that she was trying to make heads or tails of. She was extremely lucid as she was telling her story, and the one thing that I heard her say was that she thought she had predicted the death of someone she knew. And she said that person was old, but not so old that you’d expect them to die any day and didn’t have any preexisting conditions. I think she eventually said 60s.

But she had worried that this person was going to die suddenly, and then they did. And she somehow, I think, was connecting that to aliens. And of course, Linda was more than happy to help her do that.

Ross Blocher: Okay. Yeah, that sounds interesting.

Carrie Poppy: Then Linda eventually turns her head back to our side of the table. And I say, “So, Linda, you raised your hand when Jimmy asked who’s been hypnotically regressed. I’ve never heard you say that. So, why did you get hypnotized?”

And she said, “Oh, yeah, it was to help me recall one of the documents that my sources showed me.” So, one of her sources shows her documentation. Doesn’t give it to her. She, crackerjack journalist, must fact check. How does she do it? How will she do it, Ross?

Ross Blocher: Oh no. Oh nooo. Oh noooo.

Carrie Poppy: She goes to a hypnotist and recalls the document itself in order to verify the claims of the source. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Oh no! That’s… worse than worthless.

Carrie Poppy: I know! I was thinking—

Ross Blocher: Counterproductive.

Carrie Poppy: I thought, “I can’t believe it’s worse than I thought!”

Ross Blocher: It’s worse.

Carrie Poppy: I can’t believe it.

Ross Blocher: That’s so bad. Okay, Linda.

Carrie Poppy: My bar was so low. Like, I’ve been pranking this woman as a source for three years. My bar was so low.

Ross Blocher: Oh yeah, for anyone who hasn’t been following along, Carrie’s been spinning this narrative about cats and dogs being well placed aliens.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Which she doesn’t seem that interested in. But she also will, you know, reply to me as if I really am a government agent and, you know, ask me for documentation and then accept it. It just seems to not interest her very much, this cat/dog theory.

Ross Blocher: Hypnotic regression, because this person wouldn’t even let her photograph the original thing that he/she showed her. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: I guess. Uh-huh. Yep. I too would retract my raised hand when I involuntarily raised it to Jimmy Church’s question.

Ross Blocher: Oh my goodness. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: I feel so lucky that I was sitting next to her when he asked that!

Ross Blocher: I wonder what that information was.

Carrie Poppy: So, then Daniel, on my left, starts telling Linda about how he travels out the top of his head and sees aliens. And she’s just nodding at this, yep, absolutely; I’ve heard this a million times. And that’s when he explained to her that he learned to do it consciously at Stephen Greer’s event. Which I kind of glanced at her to see if Stephen Greer would have a reaction.

Ross Blocher: To see her reaction to Stephen Greer, yeah.

Carrie Poppy: She didn’t really—she went poker faced, I’d say.

Ross Blocher: Didn’t bat an eye. Okay. Okay. But she wasn’t like enthusiastic. Like, “Oh, Stephen! Yeah.”

Carrie Poppy: Right. Exactly. Yeah. It just seems like just a detail in his story to her. Oh, I should also say that at one point Jimmy made us sing happy birthday to Linda Moulton Howe. And I was like, “Oh, it’s your birthday!”

And she was like, “Not really.”

And then I went and looked it up, and no, her birthday was like two weeks before. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Yeah. January 20th or something. And here we are in mid-February.

Carrie Poppy: Jimmy Church! He’s just like, “These are all my friends! Sing them happy birthday! We hung out at a hotel!”

Ross Blocher: That’s so funny, because later on I’ll tell you about this talk she gave on cattle mutilation. And he had the whole audience wish her a happy birthday there as well.

(Carrie laughs.)

So, I went to look it up, and I’m like it wasn’t her birthday!

Carrie Poppy: I guess he just has that policy of like around a month before and after your birthday, it’s basically your birthday. Yeah, okay.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. But we should mention she’s 82.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, chugging along.

(Ross agrees.)

So, then the woman across the table, I could make her out a little more.

[00:30:00]

She got Linda’s attention again. And she was still trying to make sense of her own experiences. And she eventually said, “I don’t think I was contacted by aliens, but I think maybe.”

(Ross “hm”s.)

And I noticed this that in a few of the conversations around our table, I just felt like everyone was saying like, “Well, I haven’t made sense of this. I’m asking you to make sense of this.”

And then Linda would turn back to them and say, “But I haven’t made sense of it. Can you make sense of it?”

And then we turned to the third person. “Well, I haven’t made sense of it. Have you made sense of it? Well, how do we—okay, how do we combine that with the last person? Okay, can we combine that with the next person?”

And then it comes to me and I’m like, “Uh—well, I actually have a coherent answer, but I’m not going to say the coherent answer in this environment!”

Ross Blocher: I feel like it would deflate.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah, it’s going to come off really rude. What do I do now? I guess my answer is, “I don’t know,” which is technically true, but I’m getting by on a technicality!

Ross Blocher: I’m going to be participating in a SkeptiCamp soon in the area. Anyways, the talk that I want to put together for this is about how various purveyors of fringe science and these various conspiracy theories and fringe religions, how they all just kind of shield themselves from criticism. And so much of it, I think, is just decorum. Like, it’s just rude to call people out when they’re wrong.

(Carrie agrees.)

And you have to do that very carefully, and you want to like praise publicly and criticize privately. And it’s not just purely being cowardly or anything like that. It’s like just understanding it would be completely ineffective as well. So, not only do you ostracize yourself and make yourself a pariah, but you’ve also—in that act, you’ve removed yourself from the conversation altogether, and maybe even the room. So.

Carrie Poppy: Right. Which is sometimes our job. And sometimes not.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, and you have to make that call kind of in the moment, and then maybe later regret it, maybe not. But I know that feeling, and it’s so frustrating. Like, “I feel like I have a useful contribution here, but—”

Carrie Poppy: “Is this the moment? Is this the moment to dump the entire other shoe?”

Ross Blocher: I’m gonna let y’all just do what you’re doing. I’m here to observe.

Carrie Poppy: But the other shoe will drop halfway in a little bit. Okay. So, Linda starts to ask the table, “What types of aliens are people having experiences with?” So, she’s now just kind of assuming that most of the people at this table have some kind of experience.

Ross Blocher: And buy into her whole cladistics of aliens, the various kinds of families and relationships.

Carrie Poppy: She’s sooo into taxonomy.

Ross Blocher: Oh, no kidding. A preview from this talk that I reviewed, she mentions that there are nine species of tall, blonde aliens.

(Carrie “wow”s.)

Yeah. And maybe only three of them are positive toward us. Collaborative.

(Carrie “wow”s again.)

She loves the tall whites. She talks about the tall whites so much. It’s so uncomfortable. You would think that we’re—

Carrie Poppy: Yep. Yep. The whole system of separating any species into their like races—I mean, it’s always going to be—kind of got a big question mark under it from the second you begin!

Ross Blocher: Right. And there’s reptilians and all kinds of other things to feel antisemitic with. But the focus on the tall whites, and I could see how someone from the outside might think that we’re just harping on something that’s uncomfortable-sounding, but that she doesn’t say it that much. No, she talks about them a lot.

Carrie Poppy: Mm-mm! Mm-mmmm! Titles of talks!

Ross Blocher: Unashamedly. Just—“Oh, by the way, I have the microphone for a moment. So, the tall whites—they worked with us in World War II to da-da-da-dada.” Anyway, so, okay.

Carrie Poppy: It’s like that though.

Ross Blocher: The conversation went there.

Carrie Poppy: To the tall whites?

Ross Blocher: Or to the alien factions.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, yeah, what types. Uh-huh. No one could really give her a clear answer. You know, everyone’s just telling her these vague experiences. They’ve had nothing so specific as she wants. She wants them to be like, “A red man came down from the sky, and he was reading this book, and he dropped these types of seeds on my front lawn and then took off after 33 seconds.” It’s like, Linda, that was one person’s experience that you’ve spreadsheeted in your head. That may not have even been how they told it to you.

Ross Blocher: (Sighs.) Yeah, or you may have hypnotically recovered later. Goodness. I hope that was a one-off that she did that.

Carrie Poppy: Did what?

Ross Blocher: Oh, the hypnotic regression thing.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, who knows!

Ross Blocher: So, okay. So, everyone’s telling their kind of vague alien stories, and then I can just picture her getting to you like, “You’ve been quiet. What is your alien experience?”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, kinda! Oh, you mean Linda?

(Ross confirms.)

Yes. She does eventually come to me, but the way she comes to me—that’s a very apt thing to notice—she comes to me soon, but it’s right after Jimmy Church has just stolen the microphone again. So, I am off my game.

(Ross “oh no”s.)

And it destabilizes me and something veeery interesting happens.

So, okay. So, Jimmy grabs the mic again. Gotta talk about stuff. Gottaaaa talk about all his friends. Talks about Caroline Corey. She is so pretty. Ah! She is so beautiful! She, you know, one time he was hanging out with one of his other friends.

Ross Blocher: She did the crop circle film, I believe. Am I thinking of the right person?

Carrie Poppy: I don’t know. All I know about Caroline Corey is she believes she’s an alien.

[00:35:00]

Ross Blocher: Okay, I think I’m thinking of someone different. Anyways.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. You know, she’s like a young woman who believes she is an alien.

Ross Blocher: Oh, we had a few of them at the conference. Interesting.

Carrie Poppy: So, he clearly has a crush on her, and he’s flirting with her in a fairly polite way—except that there are 150 onlookers, so it puts her in an awkward position. So, she’s going like, “(Laughs awkwardly.) Oh, Jimmy. Ha-ha-haha.” And he keeps talking about how beautiful she is. She’s so beautiful! So beautiful.

Ross Blocher: “Caroline Corey is an energy healer and teacher of spiritual studies and metaphysics.” Okay, well.

Carrie Poppy: You gotta lead with alien, Caroline.

Ross Blocher: And an alien. Okay! Amazing.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, put that on there. More important. Okay, so he’s walking in the lobby, apparently, at one point with one of his other friends. And he says to his friend, Jimmy says, “There’s Caroline Corey; she’s so beautiful.” And then just as he was saying that, Caroline whipped her head around and looked right at him. And he was like, (whispering) “See, and she reads our minds.”

Ross Blocher: And he’s telling this story out loud to a room full of people? Okay.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. To all of us, including Caroline Corey.

Ross Blocher: Hoping this is gonna buy him some time with Caroline Corey.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Oh, very polite of you to use the word time.

(Ross giggles.)

Yeah, so he looks around the room, and he’s like, “Isn’t she so beautiful? She’s so beautiful.” And like, uh, mm-hm. Mm-hm, yeah, there’s a pretty lady. (Laughs.)

Okay. And then he asked her, “Do you remember that? Were you reading our minds?:

And she’s like, “Oh, maybe!” She kind of tries to be like, cagey about it. I’m playing along, but I’d like this to end. Maybe!

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Which response would provoke fewer follow ups? Maybe!

Carrie Poppy: Exactly. “Maybe!”

Ross Blocher: Maybe it’s Maybelline, but maybe it’s maybeee!

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) So, then Linda turns to me as I’m still looking at this. She turns to me, and she says, “And have you had any experiences with beings of light?”

Ross Blocher: Woah! So, she just like focuses on you, and you say, “Maybeee!”

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) No, my whole system crashes!

Ross Blocher: Beings of light! That’s so—wow.

Carrie Poppy: BOOM! Every system fails! Poker face, down! Plan, gone!

(Ross cackles.)

No idea what to do! Everything’s out on the table! And I say—

Ross Blocher: You glitched Carrie!

Carrie Poppy: And I say something that I haven’t said—I’ve said to you, but I’ve never said on this podcast. I say, “Well, I don’t think so, but my brother thinks that we were raised in a mind control program run by the government!?”

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Okay! Well, relevant.

Carrie Poppy: And the whole table, including these two listeners, all fall silent, all looking at me like, “Wow!”

Ross Blocher: Now you’ve broken their defenses!

Carrie Poppy: Wow! Every single person here has new information that is relevant to them in very different ways! Okay! So, she—Linda—is like, “Oh, okay. Okay, so he thinks you were in this program?”

And I said, “Well, yeah.”

And she’s like, “And what do you think?”

And I’m like, (flustered) “Well, I mean, I wouldn’t think so, but—but we were both labeled as gifted when we were kids. And so, he has this whole idea that we’re both wunderkinds and—well, okay. So the government bred us, and the government wanted to see if they could make wunderkinds. So, they took the actor—(laughing) so, they took the actress Jessica Tandy and David Geffen, who’s like a movie executive from DreamWorks, I think.

Ross Blocher: DreamWorks SKG stands for Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, yes—that guy is my real dad.

(Ross “oh!”s.)

So, so I’m saying—now, of course, I’m just repeating the things that my brother, who the listener is now realizing is very mentally ill—my brother has said to me. So, I’m saying like to Linda, “Okay, so the actors Jessica Tandy and the film executive David Geffen, apparently they’re our real parents, and we are the wunderkinds that they made. But they aren’t actually smart. (Trying not to laugh.) What the government had to do was take them and give us to our parents who bought us, and then it was to see if they could program us to be wunderkinds. And it worked. And so, we were both in this gifted program—”

Which, this is true. We were labeled gifted as kids.

“We were in this gifted program. So, my brother says this means that the program worked, but he kind of has seen through it, and now he talks to like beings in the sky. And you know, he has all of this like psychic insight that I seem not to have.” Um.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: Wasn’t planning to say any of this, but here we are!

Carrie Poppy: No! The correct answer was no.

Ross Blocher: No Beings of Light.

Carrie Poppy: I have not.

[00:40:00]

(They laugh.)

I have not had that experience.

Ross Blocher: She got you at the right moment with the right question.

Carrie Poppy: It turns out Linda Moulton Howe can break me completely.

Ross Blocher: Well, she is an investigative journalist.

Carrie Poppy: (Wheezes with laughter.) Fuck.

(Ross chokes on a laugh.)

I’ve been bested at my own game!

Ross Blocher: By an 82-year-old.

Carrie Poppy: Who turned to me and just said, “And how about you?” Well, so.

Ross Blocher: Did the table try to quickly change the—

Carrie Poppy: Oh, no! We were on this for a while! So, then she’s like, “Okay. And how does your family interpret this?”

And I say, “Well, it’s interpreted by the family as him having schizophrenia.”

And she’s like, “Okay. And—but if he doesn’t have schizophrenia, then would he have seen any tiny little flies?! Did he talk about any tiny—” (Dissolves into laughter.)

Ross Blocher: Oh! Oh, this is highly specific, and clearly a reference to something!

Carrie Poppy: Like, the blindness on this woman! Like, she’s got those horse goggles on.

(They laugh.)

“Did you see any flies?! They’re tiny flies. And they come in like this, and they make a little beep-beep!” And I’m like what the fuck, Linda? I just laid my heart out to you. No, he hasn’t mentioned any flies. Good lord.

Ross Blocher: I mean, it’s not really a loaded question because—

Carrie Poppy: It’s an unloaded question. It is an improperly unloaded question.

Ross Blocher: Clearly if you’d answered in the positive, there was some hay she was ready to make of it, but no recollection of flies.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, no. But she was clearly sitting through this whole story like, “Get through all this so we can get to the damn flies. When is she going to mention the flies? That’s what we’re all waiting for.”

Ross Blocher: Oh my goodness. And you didn’t find out what the flies were supposed to signify?

Carrie Poppy: I said, “Oh no, that’s not triggering anything for me. I’m not remembering anything he’s said.”

But she said, “Do you have any recall of something like that?” And I’m like no, no. She’s like, “Okay. So, tell me more about what your brother claims.”

So, I continue telling her about this program. I’m like, “I think Jerry Seinfeld and Ellen DeGeneres are involved somehow.” And that kind of makes—it seemed like it was those two names that made the table kind of—like, everybody shifts just a little bit like oooh.

Ross Blocher: ‘Cause like Jessica Tandy we could see doing this, but…

Carrie Poppy: Jerry?

Ross Blocher: He’s just a comedian.

Carrie Poppy: Jerry Seinfeld? He would never do that! I felt like, for whatever reason, that was the—like, everyone has this little marker of like, “Ooh, that sounds too far gone. Oh, we just hit it! We hit the third rail. There it is!”

Ross Blocher: Yep. For everybody at the table at once.

Carrie Poppy: For some reason, Jerry Seinfeld was that wave that like the whole table’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry. You are not as funny as Jerry Seinfeld, lady. He is not involved here.”

Ross Blocher: Oh, okay. Tom Hanks is buying children in online furniture sales? The Wayfair conspiracy.

Carrie Poppy: Right, right. This is one of the conspiracy—yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. There’s just like a point at which your gut goes, “Ooh, that’s not…that’s not right.”

Then Linda says, “Okay, so what’s your brother’s connection to aliens specifically, if he doesn’t have schizophrenia?”

I say, “Well, okay, he hasn’t mentioned aliens specifically, but he does talk to the sky. So, he carries around the this like—or at some point he carried around this piece of wood that he believes was magical, and he could speak to the sky through the piece of wood, ask questions, and there was some being in the sky who would validate the answers.” So I’m like, you know, “Not aliens specifically, but he would say that whoever was talking back was in the sky. So, Linda Moulton Howe, what do you think?”

Ross Blocher: That’s enough for her! Linda Moulton Howe has this expectation. She wants the final product and will find the path to get us there with her questioning, yeah.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, or try. But she is so fundamentally honest that she stumbles her way through the path. You know, she won’t force it. So, she’s saying this to me, and she looks at me, and then she looks at everyone else. And you know, it really felt like she’s saying to all of us, “Explain it to me.”

Ross Blocher: Help make sense of this.

Carrie Poppy: And everyone’s saying, “You’re Linda Moulton Howe. I paid $135 for you to explain it to me!” You know, but she doesn’t actually know. So, she’s turning to the table. She’s looking for this coherence from the rest of us. She’s like, “Well, how would your—” And she starts to sort of label different people’s experiences. “I mean, you had that experience with the insect like creatures, but so-and-so had the weird experience with the light that didn’t seem to have any creatures. Isn’t that crazy?” And she’s looking around at all of us. “Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t that crazy? So many contradictions. Isn’t that crazy? It’s so crazy. It’s so crazy. It’s so crazy. It’s so crazy. It’s so crazy. It’s so crazy.”

Ross Blocher: One of her refrains. We’ve identified the disparity here. Isn’t that wild? Oh, well, let’s continue going on doing what we do.

[00:45:00]

Carrie Poppy: Right. Okay. So, then Jimmy gets our attention again by saying he’s giving away money.

(Ross giggles.)

And then he’s like, “Have you figured out who the fed is?” And so, I—

Ross Blocher: Oh, yeah. We’ve been working on it the whole time.

Carrie Poppy: So, I keep pointing at Linda, which he is starting to find not funny at all. Too easy, too obvious. Not a funny joke.

Ross Blocher: Oh, she doesn’t like that?

Carrie Poppy: No, no, Jimmy. Jimmy’s like, “This girl keeps making the same joke over and over and it’s not Linda.” And then he starts picking on all the vegans in the room. So, I guess Sid is—

Ross Blocher: As if you haven’t suffered enough!

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) I know! And I’m not bringing it up! But Sid, his producer I guess, is vegan. And Caroline Corey, the love of his life, is vegan! So, he’s like—Jimmy says, “Sid is one of the most respectful vegans I know, because vegans don’t do this. When we work, Sid makes sure that he takes me to the best steakhouse in town, and he’ll order salad, because he loves me. And I bet everyone’s gonna applaud at this.” And then everyone… applauds that.

Ross Blocher: Dutifully applauds. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: And then he says to Sid, “I love you more than anything in the world.” (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Wow.

Carrie Poppy: And Sid says, “I love you too, Jimmy.”

Ross Blocher: Could he be on something?

Carrie Poppy: I don’t know! I feel like he just gets like a real like hypomanic kind of rush from like being in the room with a bunch of people and being in charge and (incoherent, intense mumbling).

I think he just gets so fired up by it. Very social guy. Veeery social.

Then he tells us another hanging out story about him and Caroline Corey. She ordered vegan food, and he ordered steak tartare. And then he realized, oh my god, is she a vegan? Is she offended? But she was so nice about it! And so, now he knows that she wasn’t offended. And two hours into their meal, she was answering questions before he even asked them! Like, he was looking at her eyes through the candlelight, and she would just answer the questions before he’d even asked them!

Ross Blocher: Jimmy, this is weird stuff you’re doing. This is weird.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) And then he says to her, “You know you have a gift, right!?”

And she says, “I do.”

Ross Blocher: (Meekly.) “Maybe?”

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) Same energy, for sure.

Ross Blocher: I think this also speaks to kind of this hookup culture at conferences in general. This is our chance to see these people that we’ve had little crushes on, see if we can make it happen. We’ve got hotel rooms!

Carrie Poppy: And maybe send the signal to her proactively so she can respond without him having to, you know, get to a room.

Ross Blocher: If you’re interested, I’ve telegraphed that I’m interested.

Carrie Poppy: Right. To everyone, for a long time.

(ADVERTISEMENT)

[00:50:00]

Promo:

(A timer ticks down. The speakers take turns laying down chess pieces and stopping their time.)

Speaker 1: MaxFunDrive 2024.

Speaker 2: MaxFunDrive? What about it?

Speaker 1: It’ll be the best time for someone to support the podcasts they love.

Speaker 2: Oh yeah, drive exclusive gifts, special events, and of course all the amazing—

Both: Bonus content.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: So, what’s on your mind? (Clunk.) Check.

Speaker 1: Well, it starts March 18th and it’s only two weeks long.

Speaker 2: And? (Clunk.) Check.

Speaker 1: Well, what if they miss it?

Speaker 2: Well, they should follow MaxFun on social media. Or sign up for the newsletter at MaximumFun.org/newsletter, so they don’t miss it. Otherwise, (clunk) checkmate.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. So, Jimmy does his closing number here, which is—since this is the disclosure lunch, he does not want us to leave without some secrets being revealed.

[00:55:00]

So, he goes to all of his friends, one at a time, holds a microphone in their face.

Ross Blocher: Oh no, and says, “Reveal a secret!”

Carrie Poppy: Exactly correct.

Ross Blocher: (Laughing.) Oh nooo!

Carrie Poppy: That is exactly correct.

Ross Blocher: That’s like when someone hears you’re a comedian. Like, say something funny!

Carrie Poppy: Exactly. That’s exactly what happened!

Ross Blocher: I know you’ve like published books, and you’ve got a prepared talk, but give us some extra bit of unrevealed information! Here you go! Mic!

Carrie Poppy: And let me define it as a thing that you have chosen not to say before. Right? So, whatever—

Ross Blocher: Oh yeah. If you were saving it, you were saving it for something.

Carrie Poppy: Let me get past that defense and really quickly get you to open your mouth and say something!

Ross Blocher: Jimmy, what are you doing?

Carrie Poppy: So, he walks up to Caroline first, obviously. Because she’s so beautiful, Ross. She’s just so beautiful.

Ross Blocher: So beautiful.

Carrie Poppy: He walks up to her, and he says, “Caroline, I want you to tell us a secret. Is there an alien in this room?”

And she says, “Besides moi?”

And he kind of steps on that reply. He’s like, “Tell us, tell us, tell us!”

And she’s like, “The alien is me.”

And everyone’s like (disappointedly) ooh. Because we already knew that. And Jimmy is not impressed by this. So, he says, “How long have you known that you were an alien?”

And she says, “Since I was five years old.”

(Ross “wow”s.)

Yeah! So, that’s an interesting answer. I was like, okay, Jimmy. Good question. Good answer.

Ross Blocher: Alright. Move along.

Carrie Poppy: Then he hit on her for a little while longerrr. And then he gets to Nick Pope. And Nick Pope—do you know anything about his family? Have we talked about that?

Ross Blocher: No.

Carrie Poppy: Okay! I felt like he actually took this moment to be like, “Okay, this is the thing someone should have asked me by now. “

Ross Blocher: Is he like related to Alexander Pope or something?

Carrie Poppy: I don’t think he says actual names, but it is about is about—okay, here’s what he says.

Ross Blocher: Is he related to the Pope?

(They laugh.)

Carrie Poppy: says. He said, “I’m the Pope!”

Clip:

Nick Pope: Okay. How do I do this one? I’ll do a family secret, because this is maybe relevant. The secret is that I do come from a very well connected and influential family in the United Kingdom. My paternal grandfather was General Manager of the Times of London. And my father was Deputy Chief Scientific Advisor at the Ministry of Defense and was actually awarded the US Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service for some things that he did in collaboration between the US and the UK. So, there you are. Some family secrets revealed here, I think, for the first time.

(Chuckles and applause.)

Ross Blocher: He rose to the challenge! Okay.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, so yeah, we gotta look up those people.

Ross Blocher: They must be so proud.

Carrie Poppy: Perhaps. Then Jimmy gets to Linda. But first, let’s all tell her happy birthdaaay!

Ross Blocher: Of course, yes. Happy birthdaaay.

Carrie Poppy: So, we all have to sing her happy birthday. The entire song. Then later I look it up on Wikipedia, and I’m like it’s not her birthday. And then you have to double check, since it’s Wikipedia. Anyway, it wasn’t her birthday. Then Jimmy brags about hanging out with Linda again. You know, they can hang out for hours at a time, Ross! This lady just loves to hang out, and here’s a bunch of stories about them hanging out.

Ross Blocher: And again, I believe it!

Carrie Poppy: And they are friends!

Ross Blocher: I don’t question this at all.

Carrie Poppy: You know, some people might think they’re not friends, but they’re friends! And they’ll hang out for two, three, four hours at a crack, right? You know, he could call her anytime, and she will answer.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Part of this is him loving the connection and the warm fuzzies. And part of this is just him filling time. He’s good at that too.

Carrie Poppy: Perhaps. The disclosure at this lunch has been low. So, then he comes to Linda, and he says, “Linda, you’ve got something burning inside of you. You gotta get something out, right? You’re holding something back? Come on! Let the wheels turn, come on. Let me give you an opportunity to cleanse yourself. Tell them a secret, tell them a secret!”

So, first she tells us all to read her books and watch her documentaries. So, I give her snaps. (Snaps.) Yeah. Great promotion. Great.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. I’ve already produced lots of material that answers to your question. Go find it.

Carrie Poppy: Without being forced to tell, quote/unquote, “secrets”. But his strategy is clearly working somewhat. So, then Jimmy starts complimenting Linda’s impressive episodic recall. He’s like, “When I’m hanging out with her, she—I can say, ‘Oh, this person had this experience,’ and she’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s exactly like so-and-so on May 7th, 2013.’ And then she can go to her Rolodex, and she can pull it out, and she like has this amazing archival.”

Ross Blocher: Okay. Yeah. That’s a skill.

Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. Very Whitley Struber. So, he’s like, “But you must have something else to tell. You must have something else to tell, Linda. You’ve got—you’re so amazing. You remember everything.”

And Linda says, “Okay, everyone follow Danny Sheehan’s work.” Okay! So, Danny Sheehan is a different UFO guy sitting across the room.

[01:00:00]

Ross Blocher: Danny’s at another table, and he’s like, “Oh, thanks! You took my thing!”

Carrie Poppy: Exactly! (Laughs.) He’s like across the room. She’s getting rid of Jimmy. Jimmy is like oh yeah, Danny! And he like walks over to Danny.

Ross Blocher: Clever. She broke you. She broke Jimmy.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Yeah, kind of!

Ross Blocher: Linda wins the day.

Carrie Poppy: She also won the predictions one year. She’s a magical woman.

Ross Blocher: She’s also a former beauty champion for the state of Idaho.

Carrie Poppy: God, she’s really something. So, he goes to Danny. He’s like, “Yeah, I was going to go to Danny next. Danny, do you have any secrets to tell?”

And Danny says that JFK was assassinated by a team that Nixon had put together to kill Castro.

Ross Blocher: Sounds like Danny Sheehan. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: Like, thank you, Danny! Rose to the occasion. Okay!

Ross Blocher: So far, he and Nick Pope understood the assignment. Not that it was a fair assignment, but they get an A.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Well, what if Linda interrupted and said, “Can I follow up on that?”

Ross Blocher: Yeah, usually that would be her thing. Like, Please pay more attention. I like the limelight!

Carrie Poppy: Which is what she does. Hey, can you come back over here?! No, no, I’m saying—

Ross Blocher: Yeah, I know we’re all done and we’re eight minutes over, but actually I just had another thought that I could totally have saved for another talk or time, but I have to say it here and right now!

Carrie Poppy: And that did happen.

Ross Blocher: Oh, okay.

(They laugh.)

Alright. Nobody’s letting us down.

Carrie Poppy: So, she’s like, “I have a question about that. I have a question about that.”

I’m like the JFK assassination?! You have a question about the JFK—? Why noooow? Okay, she has a question about the JFK assassination.

Ross Blocher: It’s been 60 years!

Carrie Poppy: So, he comes over. Jimmy’s coming back. It’s the disclosure lunch. We’re talking about JFK. Okay! He comes back. Linda gets the microphone. She’s like, “Listen, I’m just saying, one of my sources said that he saw JFK’s brain in a metal bowl right next to a different brain in a metal bowl, and one of the brains had the bullet coming in this way, and one of the brains had the bullet coming in that way. And I said you gotta take a picture, and they took a picture. And then there was a third guy, and it’s just—have you heard anything like that, Danny?!”

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Oh, this falls so firmly under you never know what’s gonna come out of her face.

Carrie Poppy: And I was just staring at her, just enraptured!

Ross Blocher: She’s a marvel.

Carrie Poppy: What!? Okay, he brought up JFK, and you’re all the way here! Wow! Okay.

So, now Jimmy Church, he’s following it somehow. He runs back over to Danny Sheehan. “What do you think about the two brains?!”

(They laugh helplessly.)

“The one was in the bowl, and the other was in the bowl, and there was the bullet! But it was from the one way but not the other way! What do you think?!”

And Danny’s like—and then Danny’s like, “Well, Linda, you’re close to right. But not quite!” And then he goes on for 10/15 minutes more. Just junk about JFK! Why are we talking about JFK at all? It’s alien lunch, and this goes on for 15 minutes. Oh my lord.

Ross Blocher: Mm. Well. Alright. I mean, if there were truth there, you could disclose it, so.

Carrie Poppy: Well, that’s true. I guess in the sense that like I could have stood up and been like, “I have IBS!”

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: Then you could disclose your lunch.

Carrie Poppy: Well, I did do that at the wedding, so.

(Ross confirms.)

Yes. In my vows. Okay, then Jimmy asks, I think, a well-articulated question from the opposition. He says, “You know, a lot of people say, how can these conspiracies happen when conspiracies are so hard to keep secret?” Basically. Here’s how Jimmy put it.

Clip:

Jimmy Church: But if you can cover up, when people go, “No, you can’t cover up stuff. You can’t keep a secret!” Hold up. You have the Manhattan Project; you have the Kennedy assassination. Something like Operation Northwoods. MKUltra almost didn’t make it public, right? They did everything. They shredded every document in the country. Now, it turned out, Church and—not (inaudible)—Senator Frank Church, and the Church Committee. And if that didn’t happen, we would have never known about that program, would we? And people would say, “No, that’s just crazy talk.” But now when Linda brings this up, if we can cover up these things, we could cover up something like a joint mission to the moon, and the Russians and the United States working together, and the UFO question, and the UFO hypothesis, and contact, and everything else. And so, let’s address Linda’s questions first, but is it possible to cover up something like E.T. contact? When they say—most people, a skeptic—would say that that’s impossible.

Ross Blocher: You know, it’s not a bad point. As he was saying that, I was thinking of Edward Snowden revealing this, you know, massive surveillance.

(Carrie agrees.)

[01:05:00]

And yeah, we could have not known about that.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. I agree with that point, but I would also add: once you have one Edward Snowden, there’s no need for a second Edward Snowden. We don’t know about all the percolating Edward Snowdens who are noticing problems and saying, “Do I speak up? Do I? I don’t know.” Once that guy steps forward, the rest of you don’t necessarily have to.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, and we don’t know about the programs we don’t know about. Always open to being shown evidence, but you can’t just let rampant speculation fill the void there. You can only talk to the things you know about.

Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm, mm-hm. Yeah, you don’t want a government of the gaps.

Ross Blocher: But the point is the general human desire to speak about these things and reveal secrets. So, he’s got a good point there.

Carrie Poppy: Well, Danny Sheehan took this beautiful question and said, “What if I just start talking about JFK again? What if I—?”

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) You know, while you were saying that, I was thinking about JFK still.

Carrie Poppy: And I think if I try hard enough, or even barely at all, I can connect this to what you just asked me. So, I will now attempt.

Ross Blocher: Okay, appreciate the effort.

Carrie Poppy: Well, now that you say that, I’m like did he attempt? Because the connection is not terribly clear. But anyway, so then Danny goes on about JFK for another—let’s see—four minutes. Yep. Yep.

Ross Blocher: Wow. That’s a long time.

Carrie Poppy: That’s a lot of time to talk about JFK. By the way, JFK was a president here, if you’re from another country or from the future. I don’t know.

Ross Blocher: There’s a member of my book club who occasionally will just go off on these long stories. And occasionally, I’ll need to just start the timer on my watch, because I’ll tell myself, okay, we’ve already been going for a while. If it hits another minute, I need to step in.

Carrie Poppy: If I’ve hit my fatigue point—

Ross Blocher: As a moderator here, I need to make sure everyone gets a chance to speak. Because it’ll just be one thing slowly bleeding into another. So, I’m excruciatingly aware of how long one minute can be even in that context, let alone four minutes. So, yeah, that’s something.

Carrie Poppy: I have a classmate in one of my classes right now who does that a lot and just isn’t reading that anybody else is sending her any signals that it’s time to move on.

(Jokingly, speeding up as she goes.) Anyway, I wouldn’t know what that’s like, but like some people, they just like keep talking. And it’s just like, wow, they’re still going! And it’s like helloooo? Hellooo!

Ross Blocher: Weird. Yeah. Can you imagine people who talk and aren’t aware of other people that are listening to them? Just bloviate.

Carrie Poppy: It’s like, shut up! Are you going to talk about something you did months ago for hours!? That’s so stupid.

Ross Blocher: Can you imagine being so self-unaware that you would just keep talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and talking—so verbose!

Carrie Poppy: I would never. I would neverrr. I would never.

Anyway, so then Jimmy gets over to Whitley and tells Whitley to cleanse himself by sharing a secret.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Dirty, dirty Whitley! Cleanse yourself.

Carrie Poppy: And Whitley responds—

Ross Blocher: I feel, okay, I’m just—I’m picturing the moment. I’m seeing Whitley taking this as a very serious opportunity and directive, like, “Oh, well, geez. I need to—okay, then I must cleanse myself. If—if I can take it.”

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) If I can take it! Okay, interesting. I mean, he does give probably the most philosophical response. Okay. He responds with a Zen koan. Yeah.

Ross Blocher: A question that’s not meant to be answered, but to get you thinking deeply. What is the sound of one hand clapping; or if the tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I would call them IFCs—Intentionally Frustrating Questions.

(Ross laughs.)

That’s how they read to me.

Ross Blocher: IFQs?

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Well, fuck! Yep! Yes, I’d call him that too! Well, okay. Intentionally frustrating for Carrie. Can I save it? No, no. IFQs it is.

Ross Blocher: I was just reading a book where whenever the guy would ask a rhetorical question, he wouldn’t put a question mark on it. And it was really distracting.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, I do that sometimes. And I have to go back and correct it, because I’ll be like, “Oh, the reader won’t get that I’m—that this is tone instead of—yeah.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Then I went back and forth thinking, “Okay, if he’s choosing to do that for a reason, ’cause he wants me to read this sentence—” Anyways. Apropos nothing you were saying.

Carrie Poppy: And I think I know what he’s thinking even. Alright, so this intentionally frustrating question—

Clip:

Whitley Strieber: I said, “What is the secret of Zen?”

And he said, “Why are you asking me that?”

And I said, “Because you’re the greatest scholar of Zen in the western world.”

And he said, “Then you know.”

(Laughter.)

(Chuckling.) No, no, no, no.

Carrie Poppy: So, you can hear the rooms like, ah-ah! Ah-aaah!

Ross Blocher: That was a clever evasion!

Carrie Poppy: Uh-uh! IFQ!

Ross Blocher: I don’t like it.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I, find it unfollowable in a way I don’t even—I try to tell myself like, “Well, follow it for fun, see what happens.” And I’m like no.

Ross Blocher: Doesn’t compute. Yeah, I don’t even see the slick move there. It just feels like a—

Carrie Poppy: It feels like, oh, you’re using language against me?

[01:10:00]

Like, oh, we all learn syntax. And now you’re like, “Look, the syntax works, but there’s no content!”

And I’m like, “Wow, good for you! That’s amazing! I can babble also.”

Ross Blocher: (Giggles.) So, Jimmy’s not happy about this?

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, Jimmy was like, “Uh-uh! Uh-uh, Whitley.” So.

Ross Blocher: Okay, he didn’t take the assignment as seriously as I would have thought.

Carrie Poppy: Not at first, but then Whitley wows Jimmy with what he wanted: a detail neeever before released about how the material from UFOs can look back at you!

Ross Blocher: Oh, wow, like the physical material that they make the UFOs out of? You grab like a side panel or something. It can see you.

Carrie Poppy: It monitors you!

Ross Blocher: Okay. That’s true for some cars now. They have cameras facing out. Yeah. Sure.

Carrie Poppy: He was like, “I’ve always said for many years that any of these UFO materials should be in the Smithsonian, but I want to say there should be warnings. Because if you go and look at it, you’re involving yourself in something. Because now it’s monitoring you.”

Ross Blocher: Interesting. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: And Whitley also—because this was the disclosure lunch, also mentions disclosure directly. And he kind of argues that there isn’t this big disclosure moment coming. There’s not going to be some satisfying final thing that appears that makes everybody agree about what’s going on. And I kind of agree with that.

Clip:

Whitley Strieber: There’s no secret that we’re going to reveal that will finally put the question to rest. It isn’t going to happen. We always talk about disclosure, the moment of disclosure. But it could be that eventually the bodies and the materials that are in the possession of the defense industry and the government will become public knowledge. I’ve said for years that one of the intact discs should be in the Smithsonian’s collection as well.

(A mixed reaction from the crowd.)

And believe me though, that isn’t something that you would just go and gaze at. And this is a secret. Because when you look at those materials—and never even forget this for a second—they’re looking back at you. Because this is something very different from what you’re used to. This is a—when you say a flying saucer in the Smithsonian, how cool? It would be another aerospace—” You would have there a level of consciousness that we have never before experienced on this planet. And that’s why they’re here.

Jimmy Church: Now see, that’s what I asked for! Whitley Strieber!

(Applause.)

Ross Blocher: Wow! I feel like that’s a point that I would want to make to this crowd, that there’s not going to be this moment of disclosure. Fascinating.

Carrie Poppy: Interesting, right? Yeah. Whitley, get in touch! I get you!

Ross Blocher: Yet again, Whitley says all these things where I nod along like, okay, okay, yeah. And then wait, what is this now about the materials in the Smithsonian?

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Whitley, I can hang out with you.

Ross Blocher: By the way, they need to have some kind of sensory equipment or materials to actually do that. You need to point to some mechanistic explanation of how they do it.

Carrie Poppy: Ross and I are having two different conversations right now.

Ross Blocher: Sorry! Sorry, yeah, I’m fixated on—

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) No, no, I’m fixated too. I was noticing us both staring out in different directions still talking, as though—

Ross Blocher: That’s what Whitley does to you!

Carrie Poppy: That’s so Whitley. (Giggles.)

Ross Blocher: But yes, Whitley, reach out to us. I’ll be a friend.

Carrie Poppy: Yes, please. Okay, what were you saying though? Something about materials?

Ross Blocher: Oh, because he’s talking about how these materials can sense. I’m thinking, well, they have to do it somehow. You know, you can say, “Okay, it’s sufficiently advanced technology.” But are there light sensitive cells? Is there a memory bank? Is there an antenna that’s transmitting this somehow? It has to work somehow. You can’t just say, “That piece of metal can see us.”

(Carrie laughs.)

I need more than that.

Carrie Poppy: Ross is pointing over at his couch.

Ross Blocher: Then the couch can’t see us! It has no method of seeing us!

Carrie Poppy: Or if it does, that’s a big claim. And I should have to be like, “Look, here’s the hidden camera.”

Ross Blocher: Exactly. And then I’ll be like, oh, didn’t know that. Be careful about sitting there.

Carrie Poppy: And then I’ll be like, “I spy on you all the time!”

Ross Blocher: It’ll be creepy, but it’ll make sense.

Carrie Poppy: But yeah, then you’ll believe the things I say. Then Jimmy asked, “By the way, who here was afraid of the alien on the front of Communion?” Okay. Yeah! So, you find that image scary. Definitely did as a kid. So, there’s no response. So, I have the book with me. As you know. So, I hold it up to see if I’ll get a big rise. Nothing happens. Jimmy looks around. He says, “Just me?” Silence. He says, “Really, just me?”

And then someone said, “Just you!”

Ross Blocher: Weeeird! Now this is a self-selected group, but that’s interesting. We had quite a few listeners chime in and say, “Oh man, yeah, that really stuck in my mind as a kid, or I was really afraid of it, even though I knew it wasn’t real.”

[01:15:00]

One person had a great response about that, how it was a strange sensation being afraid of something that you also knew at the same time wasn’t a thing. Interesting.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah. I mean, I’ve had that experience, of course. I think of YenSid from Fantasia, a very scary fictional character.

Ross Blocher: Sure. The wizard and Disney spelled backwards. Or I should say the sorcerer, because it’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”.

Carrie Poppy: But for whatever reason, this just doesn’t do that for me.

Ross Blocher: Doesn’t do anything to you? Okay.

Carrie Poppy: No. It’s just a shape. So, there you go. Then Jimmy turned to that documentarian I mentioned to you—Andrew—and got him to talk about something that’s underneath a pyramid. And it was just so much so fast. And Whitley was leaving, and I was like, “I gotta follow Whitley!” And I got a little bit of it on my recorder. But I was like what? Pyramids? Giza? We’re talking about that now?! This was the UFO lunch! We spent so much time on JFK, and now pyramids?! I can’t. I can’t. So, I sent it to you to say, “Do you know what’s happening here?”

Ross Blocher: So, I had to look this up. But Andrew Collins, I guess his claim to fame in this community is that back in—well, 2009 or earlier, ’cause I think he published this in 2009. He claims to have found a series of natural caves under Giza. And it was at this like smaller tomb to the west of the pyramid, he had seen some earlier description from an Egyptologist. This was 1817, and they described that they had found in a tomb this entrance to a deeper cave system and traveled quite far into it before running out of time or light or something.

So, he says he had, while trying to retrace the steps of this guy from almost two centuries earlier, that he had found the entrance to this deep underground series of caves. And he made a book about it called Beneath the Pyramids and has been giving talks about it ever since. But every time I see him talk about it or like be on an interview, there’s images that he shares. And they’re all either of what look like human structures or like something that looks like kind of a roughhewn piece of rock that leads into the darkness. It looks like it might be the opening to a cave, but that’s it. And he talks about like there are all these spiders down there.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) Well, that sounds right.

Ross Blocher: And something else that would make people hesitant to go in there. He’ll make all these references to this massive cave system, but apparently no one’s ever followed up on it. I tried to look for like any legitimate outlets talking about these discovered caves under Giza. And nope! He did get a quote from like someone who was like a head of archeology saying, “No, this is nonsense. We know the plateau very well.”

(Carrie laughs.)

And as far as I can tell, they’ve had 15 years to actually follow up and go find these caves or show them or do something, but it’s never appeared on National Geographic. As far as I can tell, he’s just made this up! And no one’s really called him on it, other than this like head of antiquities or whoever it was.

Carrie Poppy: Oh no. Oh nooo. You know, he should do a hypnotic regression and see if he can get the details back.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: It’s just so weird in this community that you can make a bold claim like this, that I’ve discovered this massive network of caves under Giza that nobody has talked about in the modern era. And then just let that sit. Nothing happens with it at all. So bizarre.

Carrie Poppy: Did the stairs go up or down?

Ross Blocher: Down, I guess! And interestingly enough, I was reminded as I was looking for any kind of corroboration of the story of this that like just maybe a year ago, there was like a long ramp discovered in the Pyramid of Giza that—and I’m sorry, I don’t know if it goes down or up. Depends which side you’re on. (Laughs.) But that was a big piece of news that this was discovered using, you know, like methods of seeing through the rock.

Carrie Poppy: (Inaudible.)

Ross Blocher: So, that is something that would be newsworthy if there was a massive network of caves. As far as I can tell, he found like an interesting looking impression and decided to tell a tall tale about it.

Carrie Poppy: Oh my goodness. Or thinks it’s—could he think it’s real? I can’t—

Ross Blocher: I don’t know. He’s talking about like going like hundreds of yards in it. And then like wanting to come back later to explore more. And he keeps talking boldly about what we need to do with this cave. And you’ve had time. Nothing’s come of this. I think you’re BSing us. Of course, I’d be open to evidence to the contrary, but sounds like there’s nothing there.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, it’s one of those things. I start thinking like, okay, we got to go there. And then I’m like, Gizaaa? Ross and I are going to go to Giza? We’re probably not going to go to Giza.

Ross Blocher: We could go to Giza.

Carrie Poppy: You want to go to Giza now?

Ross Blocher: At some point. Yeah. Well, think of how many of these people we investigate fixate on the pyramids.

(Carrie confirms.)

From Gene Scott to Andrew Collins. And TwinRay!

Carrie Poppy: Yep. To David Wilcock. Oh, and TwinRay.

Ross Blocher: Ooh, that fat Wilcock joint.

Carrie Poppy: Yep. Let’s see who else is into pyramids. Oh, oh, of course! Pyradyne, Dr. Bell.

[01:20:00]

Ross Blocher: Yes! Oh, Big time.

Carrie Poppy: Yep. Whitley Strieber, triangles.

Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. Yeah. The whole space crowd, who feels that they have found pyramids duplicated on Mars. And you know, there’s this alignment with the Pleiades. Giorgio Tsoukalos, of course, and everyone from the Ancient Aliens crowd talks about pyramids. Oh, Billy Carson. We covered him. Anyways, I wasn’t planning on a trip to Giza, but maybe at some point.

Carrie Poppy: We’ll have to do another poll.

Ross Blocher: We’ll see how MaxFunDrive goes.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And speaking of, that is coming up! But I don’t want to tell you too much. By the way, anybody who is hearing for the first time about my brother, which I guess is most people—we’re going to have some bonus content in MaxFunDrive that we’ll tell you about where I’ll talk a little more about the connection between mental illness and these experiences. And yeah. You can find that if you become a member.

Ross Blocher: And a little bit more of that story.

Carrie Poppy: So, that was my experience. I was completely outdone by Linda Moulton Howe.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Amazing. And shout out to Josh and Taylor, who joined you at the table there.

Carrie Poppy: What’s up, guys?

Ross Blocher: And I love the photo that they sent. Also, I think it highlights a good point about Linda, and that is that she wears a lot of jewelry.

(Carrie confirms.)

She’s got multiple bracelets on each hand, rings. She’s got big, droopy earrings.

Carrie Poppy: You can see how far in I had to lean to hear her, because she talks so softly, and this room was so loud.

Ross Blocher: Oh, and you had the fortune of being right next to her! It must have been tough for everybody else.

Carrie Poppy: Oh my god, I felt so bad for Daniel on my other side, because he had a hearing aid.

Ross Blocher: Oh my goodness. Why didn’t he take that seat?

Carrie Poppy: I know! And I was like I can barely hear her. How are you going to hear her?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, what a fun character. And she really does strike a pose as well. Like, she stands out. She’s just turned 82. She keeps her hair dyed auburn. She has kind of a big pompadour going on and then long flowing hair.

Carrie Poppy: Petite woman.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, petite, thin, and biiig glasses usually. These look more kind of like reading glasses, but she’ll often wear those kind of giant glasses. My mom wore them for a time. The first leader of our book club wore the big glasses. There’s certain ladies that you think of as the bug-eye glasses ladies.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. No offense to bugs. We love all of you.

Ross Blocher: No. No offense to ladies who wear giant glasses.

Carrie Poppy: No offense to glasses.

Ross Blocher: Except the bugs that are actually aliens! We’re against them.

Carrie Poppy: Has anybody heard of this!?

Ross Blocher: (Giggles.) Alright, well, I guess that’s it for this episode.

Carrie Poppy: Our theme music is by Brian Keith Dalton.

Ross Blocher: Our administrative manager is (sing-song) Ian Kremer.

Carrie Poppy: You can support this and all our investigations by going to MaximumFun.org/join, but don’t you fucking dare! Because MaxFunDrive is coming up!

Ross Blocher: Wait! Wait for it! (Singing.) It’s the most wonderful time of the yeeeear!

Carrie Poppy: Jimmy Church.

Ross Blocher: MaxFunDrive, yeah, coming soon.

Carrie Poppy: March 18th?

(They chuckle.)

Ross Blocher: Oh, you got it. March 18th through 29th.

Carrie Poppy: Yes! And we will be announcing some freaking exciting stuff on this feed. So, stay tuned.

Ross Blocher: And we’ll have some bonus content. We just mentioned one of them, but look out for that. And yeah, we’ll be telling you all about why it’s the best time to support our show and all the other amazing content on MaximumFun.org.

Carrie Poppy: And remember:

Clip:

Linda Moulton Howe: Because I think, without any question—if I had any reservation, I wouldn’t say this. I really think it is true that tall whites that can be up to 12 feet and might explain the so-called giants in Genesis—that the tall whites and the Nordics that are extremely human-like, they are the key to why we are here. That we would not have survived as a Homo Sapiens sapient experiment if they had not been here.

Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

Promo:

Jordan Morris: Who guests on Jordan, Jesse, Go!?

Jesse Thorn: I mean, we could just list Patton Oswalt, Kumail Nanjiani, Maria Bamford, whatever.

Jordan: We couldn’t remember all of them.

Jesse: So, we asked my kids.

Kid 1: Uuuh, famous people?

Jesse Thorn: How famous?

Kid 1: I don’t know, pretty famous.

Kid 2: Uuuh—uuuh, really tiny celebrities who would go on this train wreck instead of like a big talk show. (Giggles.)

Kid 3: There’s just a bunch of people on your show. (Giggles.)

Jesse: Jordan, Jesse, Go!.

Jordan: A comedy show for grownups.

Transition: Cheerful ukulele chord.

Speaker 1: Maximum Fun.

Speaker 2: A worker-owned network.

Speaker 3: Of artist owned shows.

Speaker 4: Supported—

Speaker 5: —directly—

Speaker 6: —by you!

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