Joshua has written A Trojan Feast, a singularly amazing and insightful book about food offerings in UFO and other paranormal encounters. For me, reading it was one of those “Why hasn’t someone thought of this before?” moments.
We began by comparing experiences of meeting authors and researchers we admire and how they turned out to be pretty friendly. Everyone who is interested in these strange subjects learns and builds on the work of those we admire and respect. At about 28 minutes into the program, we actually started talking about the book!
Echoing the words of one my favorite researchers, the late Karla Turner, Josh says the weird details of paranormal encounters are probably where a solution, or part of a solution, lies. A Trojan Feast is full of stories that are strange even for a UFO book, all centering on the subject of food and drink during encounters with “aliens, faeries, and Sasquatch,” as the book’s subtitle indicates.
Significantly, Cutchin has found that much of the food and drink that witnesses claim were given to them adhere to the Hindu “sattvic” diet, which is recommended for seekers of spiritual truth. Also, although we tend to eat a lot of both in North America, meats and candy are virtually never reported.
As we got deeper into the discussion, we talked about the idea of UFO abductions as a form of shamanistic rite returning to a technological society. We also compared “soft” (feelings and impressions and effects on witnesses) vs. “hard” (“just the facts”) research and the value of the qualitative vs. the quantitative. We also agreed that paranormal researchers need to consider how the witnesses and indeed those who talk to them are interpreting the experience and how that may give a false sense of what may be actually happening. He brought up the example of the dress color that people argued about on Twitter and how it shows that perception is individualized.
In a first and exclusive for Radio Misterioso, Joshua is a professional musician who plays the tuba in a brass band, so we ended the show with a private solo on the Sousaphone.
Above: Joe Simonton, who was given flax cakes by UFO occupants in 1961.
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