UFO researcher and author, Greg Bishop talks about UFOs ETs & the likeliness of truth in high strangeness and the many factors that go into data collection and analysis.
Radio Wasteland: Yeah, well the real strange ones, like a, what you were saying earlier about military, um, testing, you would think this stuff from here would be the consistent ones. So who knows, maybe all the ones with the triangular shapes and all the similar ones are actually, you know, our own government and all the high strangeness is the one that’s, that are really real.
Greg Bishop: Yeah. Either that or, and I’ve got, you know, I, I’ve written an essay about it called the co-creation hypothesis. I think that when you get to the point where you see weird stuff like this, your mind can not handle the weirdness of it. So it starts putting it in a category. That’s how our minds work. That’s how we, that’s how evolution works. You’ve got to put things in categories so that you could, you know, reproduce, get food, stay away from danger, all that stuff. And I think that when you’re presented with something that’s completely outside of your realm of experience, that your mind will throw in any category just to be able to have, you’d be able to handle it. And I think that’s, that’s why, um, some of these stories are, are similar. It’s also a problem when a UFO researcher comes and talks to a witness, they’re going to ask them a certain set of questions and you know, there’s going to be a certain expectation.
Greg Bishop: There are UFO researchers. I got to tell them that it’s a UFO and it looked like this or whatever. And that I think suddenly affects how the questioning and how the data is collected and all that, which is why I’m all for, you know, throwing a wrench in it and having weird, um, having weirdness guide you if you can. I mean some, some people can like, you know, some people were the more creative or artistic mind and probably let the weirdness guide them and, and they’re good at it and others are just probably better in data collection and, and analyzing that data. So, you know, it takes all kinds and I think we need all kinds. We need to be right. Right brains and left brains working on this.
Radio Wasteland: Yeah. So do you think that there’s an influence in the media as sort of being all about all this space and alien stuff, you know, into not only how many people are involved in this, but into it? If we could mentally when it happened to us and would we be less apt to put it in a box, do you think?
Greg Bishop: Yeah, I mean, we’re a product of our culture, our genetics, our upbringing, what our friends tell us what happened, you know, which ate for lunch, all this other stuff. That all goes into what happens when a sighting happens, I think. And people don’t really think about that. Um, it’s a traumatic experience too. So there’s, you know, there’s a, there’s a psychology of trauma in there where you were a witness will, you know, they’re in shock. And so what can your mind handle? It’s like, well, X-Files said it was this. Okay. And that’s what it is. Bang, it goes in that box and that’s what you remember at that point. And that’s not, that might not be what happened, but it’s what your mind wants to have happen. So you know, you’re already a step two or three away from the actual experience. I’ve talked to people and they’d say, why do you say people make things up?
Greg Bishop: I said, I never said that. I said that their mind, in an attempt to, to handle the situation will grasp on to things that it knows, even if it’s disturbing stuff, just because at least it’s something that it knows, even if it’s a dream, somebody had whatever it is. So you know, when people give us reports about what’s going on, I don’t know. You know, even if there’s a camera there recording it, I think that whatever goes on in somebody’s mind is much different than a camera would record. And in many ways, a prep camera can’t record these things. And is the instrument that’s recording this, these sightings are people, and that’s the instrument we ought to concentrate on. And also know how that instrument works and what kind of errors or whatever you want to call it.