Part two of an interview with alien abduction researcher Dr. David Jacobs examines alien encounters from a spiritual perspective.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for part two of his interview with Dr. David Jacobs.  During the interview Jacobs talks about abductions and spiritually transformative experiences:

Alex Tsakiris:  I keep getting this sense—are you skeptical of all spiritual experiences? Do you think there’s any legitimacy to people who claim to have spiritual experiences, be they alien-induced or not?

Dr. David Jacobs:  People react to this phenomenon in a variety of ways.

Alex Tsakiris:  No, take the abduction phenomena out of it. I get the sense that when I listen to you and old interview with Budd Hopkins, I think, “There’s a Humanist. There’s a guy who’s dedicated to an Atheistic view of things.†I’m not a religious person and I’m certainly not pushing any kind of religion or any kind of specific spiritual tradition. I just come at it from the data and I think there’s a reality to these unity-consciousness experiences.

Dr. David Jacobs:  Well, you’ve asked me a personal question that has nothing to do with the abduction phenomenon.

Alex Tsakiris:  Why do you think that?

Dr. David Jacobs:  Because all I know is when I started doing abduction research I really didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t know what I was going to hear. If this turned out to be a spiritually enlightening phenomenon, that would have been fine. That’s okay with me. That’s great. I’d like to be spiritual enlightened. That would be terrific. But I just never hear this. It’s just not part of this phenomenon.

I didn’t have any dog in the fight, as Clinton used to say, when I first began this. I was a neophyte. I didn’t know what to expect. It was just a few years before when I thought the abduction phenomena was really basically a psychologically-induced phenomenon. So you’re asking me to answer a question that does not relate to my research. If people were having spiritual experiences from this, fine.

Alex Tsakiris:  I have to push back. I think it’s relevant in the sense that we’re talking about these two camps and one camp says that they’re these spiritually transformative experiences. I think it’s relevant to ask if the evidence that you’ve amassed through not only your abduction research but your overall life experience convinced you in the reality of spiritual experiences. That seems to me to be extremely relevant because we all have our worldview.

Dr. David Jacobs:  It’s not so much relevant for me. Other people have had spiritually transformative experiences and I can agree with that. That’s fine. In other words, you’re not going to pin me down here because the way I look at it is through a social scientist’s eyes. That is to say I’m trying to find out exactly what’s happening and why. So far people have not told me about spiritually transformative experiences given the fact that they’ve been abducted since they were children, over and over and over again.

David Jacob’s Abduction Research Website

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Here is part two of my interview with historian and UFO abduction researcher, Dr. David Jacobs:

Alex Tsakiris:  But you’ve got to appreciate that you would get a ton of push-back from someone who’s trained as a clinical hypnotherapist and has worked with thousands of people. They’d say, “Hey, how would you support such a claim? How would you support such a statement as that? This isn’t really your technical training or your background. It’s just something you’ve experienced.â€

Why wouldn’t people make the same charges with you? That unwittingly you have an agenda, unwittingly you’re leading people, unwittingly your methodology is fine-tuned for you to get the results that you want. There has to be some objective way of figuring this stuff out. We can’t just take it on face value that your way is the right way.

Dr. David Jacobs:  This is a difficult question to answer because there isn’t a number of people who have come forward with the actual techniques that they use. I’m writing a book on methodology of abduction hypnosis. It’s the book that’s already basically finished. You’ll understand exactly how I work and what I do and the problem of confabulation. The problem of the first session that you do with a person, the problem with the second session, the problem with the third session, problem with the fourth session. They’re all different, etc.

Let’s just take the word “trauma,†which everybody focuses on. Let’s say this is a phenomenon that began in infancy and continued with frequency all the way through to when the person is 40 years old and they come to me and they’ve had an abduction, let’s just say, the night before. Let’s just say also a week before that and a week before that or whatever. However many it is. The question then is, how traumatic is this phenomenon that has been part-and-parcel of their lives since they were children?

What I’ve found is that yes, it is traumatic but the trauma oftentimes comes not just in it happening. Otherwise these people would be wrecks. It comes in remembering what happened. That trauma tends to leave relatively quickly after the second or third session. There are psychological ways of putting into effect barriers to that. Let’s put it this way: helpful suggestions to avoid that.

Consequently, the word “trauma†has become a watchword for the abduction phenomenon as a whole. In fact, when people come to me for 10 sessions, 20 sessions, 30 sessions over a period of months—I’ve been fortunate enough to work with people for years and years and years. They understand what’s going on. They get it. They know how long it’s been going on, from when they were children and adolescents and now they’re 60 years old.

They become like scientist observers in a sense. They’re reporting back. They know what is happening. Now they’re trying to figure out exactly the reasons. They’re trying to be more precise in what they’re thinking. I do things on a logical and chronological level so that I’m not injecting anything into them.

In fact, I’ve done experiments with them. I say to them, “You know, what you just told me sounds like a dream. This really sounds like a dream. I don’t think this really happened.†Then just before I do hypnosis I’ll say, “This is a dream.†It’s a direct command. When I do the induction, which is a simple relaxation induction, and I start asking questions they couldn’t care less about what I just informed them of, that this is a dream. That doesn’t mean anything to them at all. All they know is what happened to them.

I start chronologically. I also know that areas of confabulation are all over the place. There are two #1 areas of confabulation. #1 is the description of aliens. I don’t ask people what they look like anymore. Not until later. Not that I’m not interested—I am interested. I will ask certain key questions that don’t have to have them confront the face of an alien. I know they’ve confronted the faces of aliens all their lives. But they tell me, for example, “I remember he was wearing a mask or a hood over his face so I wouldn’t see him. He didn’t want me to be frightened when I saw him.â€

I’ve heard that a whole bunch of times. It doesn’t make any sense to me. They’ve seen these beings hundreds of times perhaps. “You mean to say the one thing you remember is when they had a hood?†I work around that. Eventually I’ll ask about the hood and then they realize that the person isn’t wearing a hood and yet they thought he was wearing a hood all these years.

This a regular hypnotist cannot do. They’re not trained in this area. This is a different area of questioning. You have to be thoroughly knowledgeable in the abduction phenomenon to do this. You have to understand the role of confabulation.

The other main area of confabulation is recounting alien dialogue. “The aliens told me blah, blah, blah.†Well, yes and no. Nine times out of ten the following event happens. All communication is telepathic onboard a UFO. Everybody’s used to this; everybody knows this is what happens. That in itself is astonishing because if this were psychological people would not be saying that. They’d be saying some of it’s telepathic, some of it they hear through their ears, it would be all over the map.

But if all communication is telepathic and you ask them, “What do you mean by telepathic,†they say, “I hear thoughts that I can pick up, words so I can understand it.†Sometimes they say, “I hear syntax. I hear actual words,†and all that. The question then is, what’s to prevent them from hearing their own thoughts and then telling me that the aliens told that to them? The answer is that nothing prevents that at all. They do it all the time.

It’s up to me to understand that this is confabulation. A lot of people who do this kind of work don’t get that. They don’t understand that. There’s no training period for this. There’s no standardization methodology. What I do is logical and chronological, that’s all.

Alex Tsakiris:  I think it’s fantastic that you’re writing a book on this and that you’re going to be publicly open about your methodology because I’m sure a lot of people want to see that. I think you’d have to realize that anyone looking in at this from the outside would say, “That’s great but why does this guy think his methodology is so air-tight. Why is his methodology, which hasn’t been subjected to that kind of scrutiny that we’re talking about, the only way to go?â€

Let me, if I can, just re-introduce this part about the spiritually transformative experience. I appreciate where you’re coming from in that that’s not your thing. Fine. I’m not so willing to accept Janet Colli or Mary Rodwell in Australia who’s a nurse and does alien abduction work with people and stumbled into it because people came in. There are a lot of people out there that experience life trauma around these issues and are seeking help. It’s great that you’re out there and it’s great that there are as many people as possible out there.

Let’s step back for a minute. What has been the usual situation is that somebody walks in and seeks help or counseling or a therapist on this and begins to tell them that they think they’ve had this encounter with another and are told, “Hey, you’re crazy. That doesn’t happen. Take these drugs and go away.â€

So let’s put this in context. At first, we at least need therapists and counselors who are open to hearing these people’s experiences. Now we’re really hashing out the details and the methodology and what we get out of that. But what I want to bring back onto the table is when I look at near-death experience science like I was talking about, I really have to separate it and say, “Okay, what’s the hard science, published work that we have that suggests that consciousness survives death?†You just have to look at that separately. You say, “Okay, that’s pretty substantial.â€

Then you look at the actual experiences that people have as they report these near-death experience encounters. Man, let me tell you David, they are all over the map. They’re crazy. They’re Jesus, Buddha morphing into this leper, all this crazy stuff. The problem with blowing past all that is that these are hyper-lucid, most important experiences these people had at a time when they didn’t have a brain. So I wonder as I take that kind of sensibility and I look at the alien abduction phenomena, there’s something that is appealing and also kind of rings true about some of the spiritual aspects to that.

There is also a certain bias I have when I hear you talk. Some of that I really buy into. I like the hard methodology. You just give me the facts and try to ferret out, try and—I don’t want to say deceive people—but try and trick people into a not tricking themselves kind of thing. I also say, “Wow, is that somehow shaping the experience into something that is more digestible for us and easier for us to understand when in fact we can’t really get all the way there in trying to bring it down to our reality?†Any thoughts?

Dr. David Jacobs:  Let me answer that in this way. When I was young and dumb and I started doing this research and I started accepting everything that people told me, I fell into traps. I believed what was not true. I learned it was not true later on from the same person. I had believed it to be true and once I realized that people say things that are not true in the abduction phenomena—and I’m not talking about near-death experiences. As you know, near-death experiences have their own problems in that they are near death and you don’t know when the person had the experience. Was it after death or just near death?

Alex Tsakiris:  That’s just not true but that’s okay because you don’t know about it.

Dr. David Jacobs:  I certainly don’t know if that’s the case. The fact is that…

Alex Tsakiris:  Let me just interject to get it in the broadcast. The reason that I say that’s not true is in the same way that alien abduction and the famous “white swan†thing. It doesn’t matter if you have some kind of wild, really medically unsound explanation for 95% of near-death experiences. You have enough that clearly there is no brain activity and yet there’s a hyper-lucid experience. All you need is one to prove this idea that consciousness is purely biological and ends at physical death has been falsified. So that’s where I was coming from but please continue.

Dr. David Jacobs:  Okay. The fact is it’s not that I was tricked. People said things that were not true to me and I believed it. When I realized that this had not actually happened as the person later on in doing the same event again told me, I realized that I was an idiot. I was accepting things as facts that were not facts. I had to put in a set of controls into my methodology to try to ensure to prevent this as much as possible. I’m not interested in hearing the inner workings of a person’s mind. I’m interested in finding out what is going on in the abduction phenomena.

I am obviously interested in hearing the inner workings of a person’s mind as long as it relates to it but the problem here is that their minds are altered. They’re not thinking properly. Their reactions onboard the object are themselves blunted. There’s not a normal sense of the world, so to speak, that’s going on.

I’ve told this example many times and I’ll tell it again because it’s so stark. This is a nighttime abduction. The majority of abduction events—I guess it’s 1,150 or 1,200 that I’ve done—take place when a person’s not asleep or during the day and that sort of stuff. I don’t want to bring in sleep paralysis into this argument.

The point is that this woman woke up one night and there was Abraham Lincoln standing at the end of her bed. And he was Abraham Lincoln. He had a beard and he had a stovepipe hat and all the rest of that stuff. She gets out of bed and Abraham Lincoln takes her up to this UFO and then they take her clothes off. Abraham Lincoln starts to walk with her down a hallway.

I said, “Well, your escort, Lincoln, when you’re walking down this hallway where is he? Is he in front of you? Is he beside you? Is he behind you?â€

That might sound like a leading question because I didn’t say, “Is he on top of you or on the bottom of you,†but that’s a nonsensical question. He’s got to be somewhere.

She said, “He’s in front of me.â€

I said, “Well, when you look at him are you looking down at him? Are you looking across at him? Are you looking up at him?â€

“Oh, I’m sort of looking down a little bit.†Or maybe she said, “Across,†or whatever.

I said, “Can you see his stovepipe hat?â€

Then she looked and she said, “No, I don’t see his stovepipe hat.â€

That’s a perfectly logical question to ask because that’s what she told me.

I said, “Well, can you see his hair? The back of his head?â€

She said, “No, I don’t see any hair on the back of his head.â€

Then she said, “I don’t think this is Lincoln.â€

That’s confabulation and that’s logic put together. I’m just asking her to describe Lincoln, is what it boils down to. She is volunteering that it’s not Lincoln. She thought it was but it wasn’t. That’s confabulation. That simple little thing, you’d be amazed how many hypnotists out there can’t do. It’s amazing to me.

Alex Tsakiris:  What’s coming back to me from some of the extended consciousness work is you first establish the phenomena. Rick Strassman established that DMT not only creates these hallucinogenic experiences but put people into another realm where they’re interacting with free-standing beings.

I think it’s Dr. David Nutt in England who recently published experiments with Psilocybin contrary to what everyone was expecting, that if you do an FMRI on somebody’s brain while they’re tripping on Psilocybin, they’re having these hallucinogenic experiences. Their brain must be firing all over the place. Just the opposite shows up. There’s a suppression of firing. Again, this fits into the overall idea that consciousness is somehow outside of the brain and interacting with the brain.

Once you get there, though, in the same way that you’re talking about presupposing or imposing somebody’s will on it, you understand that consciousness then becomes this very funny, strange thing outside of the human brain. We might not be able to pin it down in every sense, although we have to try because it’s the best consensus reality technique we have. We might not be able to pin it down to this hard-and-fast reality.

So that’s what I keep pushing up against when you’re telling me this. I don’t know whether it’s real or not. One of the questions I have is, put on your researcher hat, your academic hat. How would we devise some simple experiments to test this?

Let’s say we had a willing abductee who’s willing to publicly subject themselves—maybe they keep their identity and do it in shadow or whatever—but they subject themselves to hypnotic regression using your techniques, either by you or by someone that you tell how to do it, versus comparing it publicly with somebody else’s techniques. Would that move us any closer to understanding what’s going on? And would you be willing to somehow or other—I’m just making this up—participate in helping that happen if I was to set it up?

Dr. David Jacobs:  I don’t know. It’s harder to set up than you can imagine. First of all, if you set up somebody who’s heavily into the New Age world, for example, and is going to be seizing upon any modicum of what they consider to be spirituality in the phenomenon and a person who does it correctly, that’s to say just asks logically and chronologically then you’re going to get two different types of accounts. The question is, what is an accurate account and what is not an accurate account?

Alex Tsakiris:  Doesn’t that all come out in the wash? If someone is…

Dr. David Jacobs:  No, it’s doesn’t.

Alex Tsakiris:  But if it’s public someone can say, “You’re trying to interpret that as somebody saw Jesus and they should have asked this and this and this.†In that sense it comes out in the wash because the whole thing is video-recorded and transcribed and someone can say, “That’s the mistake. Here’s what you should have asked.â€

Dr. David Jacobs:  Well, I suppose something like that might be helpful. I’d have to think about doing something like that.

The thing is that when you do this kind of research there are two things, 1) a person who is heavily into New Age and 2) the controls.

Let me do #1 first. I once had a person who was extremely New Agey and she traveled on the national plane and she’d done this and done that. She talked a New Age sort of lingo that was difficult for me to understand. She was abducted a couple of times that she remembered. We did two sessions and both sessions happened in New York City. She remember this and that and it was all pretty standard stuff. We just went from A to B to C to D and all the way through to the end.

Then she wrote me a letter saying she was never going to come and see me again because she didn’t remember what she wanted to remember and how spiritually uplifting this was and consciousness-raising and all the rest of that stuff. That’s not what she remembered and it was my fault because I was leading her chronologically through her event and asking logical questions based on what she was telling me.

I treasure that letter because it shows how this phenomenon can become embedded in a person’s consciousness or unconsciousness, I should say, and they’ve built a core way of understanding it that comforts them and allows them to cope with it. What I had done was I had not tapped into that coping mechanism and reinforced it for her. So she never came again. It showed me that I was on the right track, that I was doing something right.

Now here’s the controls. My world has devolved into listening to abductees talk about their abduction experiences over and over and over again. I’ve heard many, many, many people and they all say the same thing. It’s in certain detail. I start at the beginning.

Where were they when this happened? How did they get inside this object? Whether they were alone or not when they did it. What’s the first thing they see when they get inside? Is it bright or is it dark or is it dim? What is the size of the area that they’re in? Are they wearing their clothes or are they not? If they’re not, they skipped the portion where they took their clothes off, so we see if we can go back there. What happens next? They go down a hallway and they go into a room or whatever it is. Then what happens? And then there’s tables.

I can only talk about what they say and then ask more questions later on. So every once in a while somebody will tell me something I’ve never heard before. Now that’s rare in this day and age. It is rare. But when they tell me something I’ve never heard before, that’s not evidence. That goes on the backburner. I’m going to wait to see if anybody else ever tells me something like that or close to it that I’ve never heard before. If nobody ever does, it’s not evidence. It still stays there.

If other people begin to say the same thing and I’m not aware of this testimony it becomes, in my world, evidence. This becomes suddenly something important. The more people who say it the better. Then I know I’m on the right track. At the same time, I will ask purposely misleading questions to see if these people will be led. This is especially true for the first and second sessions, to see if they’ll take the bait. I won’t go into all the tricks of the trade but I will do other procedures and try to lead them off the track. I try to get them to obey what I’m  saying as opposed to what they’re actually seeing. And 99.999% of the time they say the words that I’m looking for—“No. It wasn’t like that.â€

Every time there’s an abduction people see a yellow alien who stands on the side of the room watching. You would say, “You can see this yellow alien, can’t you?â€

Alex Tsakiris:  I think I heard you mention a parquet floor.

Dr. David Jacobs:  That was another one that I used to ask. I had one person who said yes to that. It was the only time I ever heard that. The answer for him is, “No, there’s no yellow alien. Huh?†In other words, you have to do that. Good hypnotherapists, good researchers will do that just to try to make sure that the anecdotal evidence they’re getting, and this is anecdotal evidence just like all the other types of evidence, is as solid as it can be. It’s still the basis of our criminal judicial system to a large extent.

Alex Tsakiris:  One thing that strikes me is that for all this hashing around we’ve done, the protocol is not that complicated. So when we talk about…

Dr. David Jacobs:  No, it’s not. It’s common sense.

Alex Tsakiris:  One person I spoke with before I spoke with you is Mary Rodwell who has actually published some very public regression therapy work that she’s done with abductees and all that. As I mentioned, I also spoke with Janet Colli, although I don’t know that she’s published anything.

Here’s my thing: I like getting to the bottom of things if possible, just for no other reason than no one else is doing it. There’s a vacuum here. No one is approaching this. It seems straightforward to me that if someone was to listen to this interview and basically understand the protocol and put down the protocol and say, “Here’s basically what I understand the protocol to be. We have to go in chronological order. When there’s gaps we have to fill those gaps. We have to steer away from meaning and steer towards concrete data.â€

Then if they did such a session and got the person in advance, did the questionnaire so we know it’s a person we would normally engage with in this kind of thing, I would think we’d be able to quickly see if what you’re saying bears out. Or see if spontaneously they’re talking about some kind of spiritual experience like some of these other researchers are talking about. Shouldn’t that be pretty easy?

Dr. David Jacobs:  One would assume that if they followed the protocols that I follow they would not come up with anything spiritual. They would come up with something that has nothing to do with humans and has everything to do with aliens.

Alex Tsakiris:  One final question as we wrap this up. I keep getting this sense—are you skeptical of all spiritual experiences? Do you think there’s any legitimacy to people who claim to have spiritual experiences, be they alien-induced or not?

Dr. David Jacobs:  People react to this phenomenon in a variety of ways.

Alex Tsakiris:  No, take the abduction phenomena out of it. I get the sense that when I listen to Budd Hopkins, both you and he, I don’t think we can adequately thank you enough for doing this work. Hard work. Sure, you’ve sold some books and maybe you’ve stood up there behind the podium but I think you’ve survived a lot more arrows in both the front and the back than anyone will ever appreciate.

Back to my point:  when I see Budd Hopkins I say, “There’s a Humanist. There’s a guy who’s dedicated to an Atheistic view of things.†I’m not a religious person and I’m certainly not pushing any kind of religion or any kind of specific spiritual tradition. I just come at it from the data and I think there’s a reality to these unity-consciousness experiences that people have reported throughout time in every culture. In every way we can measure it there seems to be a reality to it.

I get the sense that Budd Hopkins and people from that Humanist side either haven’t looked at the data—it’s a kind of willful ignorance thing—or are just really closed-in to a worldview that doesn’t allow for that. I guess I have to ask where you’re coming from on that.

Dr. David Jacobs:  Well, you’ve asked me a personal question that has nothing to do with the abduction phenomenon.

Alex Tsakiris:  Why do you think that?

Dr. David Jacobs:  Because all I know is when I started doing abduction research I really didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t know what I was going to hear. If this turned out to be a spiritually enlightening phenomenon, that would have been fine. That’s okay with me. That’s great. I’d like to be spiritual enlightened. That would be terrific. But I just never hear this. It’s just not part of this phenomenon.

I didn’t have any dog in the fight, as Clinton used to say, when I first began this. I was a neophyte. I didn’t know what to expect. It was just a few years before when I thought the abduction phenomena was really basically a psychologically-induced phenomenon. So you’re asking me to answer a question that does not relate to my research. If people were having spiritual experiences from this, fine.

Alex Tsakiris:  I have to push back. I think it’s relevant in the sense that we’re talking about these two camps and one camp says that they’re these spiritually transformative experiences. I think it’s relevant to ask if the evidence that you’ve amassed through not only your abduction research but your overall life experience convinced you in the reality of spiritual experiences. That seems to me to be extremely relevant because we all have our worldview.

I just shared with you why I’m convinced of the reality of that but then I’m going to look at things in that way and can be expected to. You can push me away from my thing but show me the evidence that that isn’t true. So I don’t know. I think it’s important because I think if we’re talking about are these spiritually transformative experiences, if someone’s coming at it saying, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a spiritually transformative experience. I don’t think those things happen,†I think that’s relevant.

Dr. David Jacobs:  It’s not so much relevant for me. Other people have had spiritually transformative experiences and I can agree with that. That’s fine. In other words, you’re not going to pin me down here because the way I look at it is through a social scientist’s eyes. That is to say I’m trying to find out exactly what’s happening and why. So far people have not told me about spiritually transformative experiences given the fact that they’ve been abducted since they were children, over and over and over again.

Alex Tsakiris:  I think you make a strong point with that. Let me add that I also think you make a very strong point when you talk about the inherent deceptiveness of the phenomenon. I think we have to appreciate that because I’ll tell you my position. I see a lot of disconnect between the idea that these are spiritually transformative experiences with the experiences that are more in the realm of what we generally associate that with, like somebody having a near-death experience or some kind of spiritual awakening that have been reported for a long time.

I don’t see the parallels that a lot of other people see. One of the things I focus on is this idea of deception. You really don’t find that in the spiritual literature or the unity-consciousness literature. There isn’t someone who’s deceiving you in that way that is clearly part of the alien abduction phenomenon. That might not be something that you’re interested in but I do want to make that point because I think that clearly comes out of this. There’s this mind-altering aspect of it but there’s also this deceptive aspect of it that you talk about.

Dr. David Jacobs:  Yes, there is that. We’re talking about a few different things here in a way. We’re talking about how people take the information away from their abduction events and what they do with it. That has to do oftentimes with hypnosis and the quality of hypnosis and with the lack of concern for confabulation. That will obviously affect people.

If people find comfort in that, fine. I’m not about to disabuse people by telling them they’re wrong or anything like that. This is a personal phenomenon and it happens to people inter-generationally. It goes through the generations. It’s not like what other people have seen. To me it’s not unusual for people to ascribe all sorts of different meanings to this who don’t fully understand what is happening. That’s the only way I can describe it.

Now, I know that there are people who have done even more hypnosis sessions than me and they still find spiritually enlightening events and all the rest of that stuff with abductees but they came from a different position than I did. They didn’t come from a more objective position; they oftentimes came from the New Age world or have New Age proclivities, which is fine if people want that. If they want to cope with the phenomenon by dealing with that, that’s fine.

My world is the world of finding out exactly what’s happening and why. That’s my world. If I were to find that this is happening because they’re spiritually enlightening people, that’s fine too. I have not found that.

Alex Tsakiris:  Well, Dr. Jacobs, I appreciate this time. We’ve spent over an hour-and-a-half on the phone. Tell folks a little bit more about these upcoming books. When can they expect to see them? And as much detail as you care to share on what’s going to be in them.

Dr. David Jacobs:  The first problem is getting a publisher. The prospectus that I had for this book that I’m writing now several years ago was rejected by my publisher, Simon and Schuster. So I’ve got a new prospectus that I’m just about to write as I finish this whole damned manuscript that I’ve been writing. Usually a person doesn’t write a manuscript until it’s sold. But I figured that this would be a better way for me to go right now because then I’m in a position to publish it in different ways. I do have a publisher that’s basically waiting in line for it but we’ll see. I hope within this next year it will be published.

The book on methodology, which is virtually done, I figure that the audience for it is in the tens of tens so I’ll probably have to self-publish that book.

The third book, which will be my truly crazy book, is still in the back of my brain so that’s going to be a few years down the line.

Alex Tsakiris:  We’ll look for all that. In the meantime, folks can keep up to date on your work through your website. Can you give that to us?

Dr. David Jacobs:  It’s www.ufoabduction.com. I haven’t diddled with it in a long time. I haven’t added anything to it so I’ve got to revamp it and redo it and put some more stuff on it. But there’s still quite a lot of information on it, I must say.

Alex Tsakiris:  I appreciate you joining me. I know you’re a busy guy. I do hope that you leave open the possibility of maybe collaborating in a way that doesn’t take a lot of your time but maybe some kind of review or some protocols. I’d love to try and put a little bit of time and a little bit of money toward doing some honest research, objective research, and see where we come up. I just hope you’ll stay open to that and I’ll try to stay in touch and see what we can come up with.

Dr. David Jacobs:  I’ve been there, done that myself. This is what I call a “negative cash flow business.†The money just flows out of my bank account every time somebody walks into my home office.

Alex Tsakiris:  I hear you. That’s the name of the game. It’s been great talking to you. Thanks again.

Dr. David Jacobs:  Talk to you later, Alex.

Alex Tsakiris:  Okay, David. Everything good?

Dr. David Jacobs:  Everything sounds good.

Alex Tsakiris:  Great stuff. I think we…

Dr. David Jacobs:  Sorry you couldn’t pin me down on that stuff. It’s just not in my world. My world is, as I said, “just the facts, ma’am.â€

Alex Tsakiris:  I think you handled it well. Again, I come at it as those are just the facts. Consciousness survives death. Anyone who doesn’t believe that just hasn’t looked at the data. Now what that means in terms of whether you believe in God and all that, you can have your own place. But consciousness surviving death is just a fact.

Dr. David Jacobs:  Let’s put it this way:  I hope you’re right. I’m 71 years old now and I sure hope you’re right.

Alex Tsakiris:  Well, all the data is out there. I think we can go with it as is, right? No problems with any of that that we talked about?

Dr. David Jacobs:  No, no. I didn’t say too many things that were ridiculous and stupid. Just my normal amount.

Alex Tsakiris:  No, on the contrary. I think it’s great and again, I appreciate it.

Dr. David Jacobs:  Okay, Alex, it’s all yours. Talk to you later, then.