New Jersey UFO's and a Medieval monastery in Offaly

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Embrace the gander at the balcony you jangly Anthonies.

Welcome to the Blind By podcast.

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It's almost Christmas time you glorious Yuletide cunts.

Around this time when I was a small child

In the week leading up to Christmas, maybe eight years of age, my ma would bring me up to bed and then she'd leave and I'd pretend that I was asleep.

And the reason that I'd pretended I was asleep is, really what I was doing is, I'd open the curtains and I'd look out the window and stare up into the night sky at all the December stars.

And what I was looking for was Santa Claus going across the sky.

in his sleigh.

Now if you happen to be listening to this podcast with a child, some people do, I don't know why, but if you are listening to this with a child, maybe fast forward a little bit.

But when I was like eight, when I was eight and I believed in Santa Claus, that's what I'd do around this time of year.

I'd go to the window at night time and I'd look up into the night sky, I'd look up at the stars, and what I was scanning for were a series of lights, a series of lights, like beads.

Going across the sky, I was looking for Santa and his reindeers.

I used to love resting my face against the glass of the window and seeing the condensation of my breath and just the the peacefulness, the peacefulness of looking up at that sky and truly believing, truly believing, Santa Claus is up there somewhere'cause he's getting ready for next week when he's bringing presents to everybody.

But I also remember how how calming and meditative it was to look up at the night sky, just to stare at all the different stars, to look at the moon, to notice how large the universe is and how small I was.

And to experience, I suppose, the first thoughts about my own existence.

To think existentially.

As best a little child can do.

To be aware that, you know, I am me, I am alive, I exist.

I'm gonna die.

The people that I love are gonna die.

I'm alive.

I'm a person.

I exist in reality and the universe is huge.

I'm looking up for Santi.

But the majesty of the night sky did that wonderful thing that it does.

It made me consider my insignificance.

The night sky, it it felt peaceful and it felt safe and it felt okay to look up at.

And then all of that got ruined

because of a fucking TV show called Unsolved Mysteries.

So when I was like eight,

there was this American TV show on Sky One called Unsolved Mysteries.

And it had this theme music that was just chilling.

Genuinely frightening music.

And the man who presented it had a very a frightening voice.

And it was a T V show about scary things.

It was a T V show about uncertainty, anxiety, mysteries, people who disappeared, murders.

And the one that really fucked me up at eight years of age.

There was an unsolved mysteries episode about alien abductions.

Now I'm eight.

I've never thought about aliens.

I didn't really know what aliens were.

What I certainly wasn't prepared for was a TV show where adult yanks

Adult Americans

with complete straight faces are speaking about

when aliens flew their spacecraft outside their bedroom window and then shone a beam in the window and abducted them and then did experiments on them.

So when I was fucking eight years of age, it was around Christmas time, the adverts came on for this TV show Unsolved Mysteries and the alien abduction episode terrifying music, terrifying presenter and then just these these recreations of UFOs, these spinning discs with lights on them

that can shine a light into your bedroom when you're asleep at night.

The place that I felt safe, my bed, there's a program on television telling me that aliens can fly outside my bedroom window, shine a light in the window, and then my body floats out the window and they do experiments on me.

And then they showed a drawing, a drawing of an alien that a Yank had described.

And seeing that image, seeing that drawing of an alien with the big huge black eyes and the big large white head and the tiny mouth, seeing that drawing on the advert for unsolved mysteries when I was eight years of age, one of the most terrifying things that ever happened to me in my life.

My first experiences of panic, of terror, my first experiences of childhood depression.

I went from being a really happy little child to experiencing really great lonely feelings of doom.

I vividly remember the bit at the end of the advert where they finally showed the drawing.

They show a drawing of what the alien looks like.

This large white head, two big black eyes and a tiny little nose and a tiny mouth and I believe

wearing like a black dressing gown.

It hit me like a hammer.

I remember my breath leaving my body and my legs feeling so weak that I could faint and I lost the ability to speak for like two hours afterwards.

I just couldn't get that image of the alien out of my fucking head and to be perfectly honest right now as a middle-aged man I could probably go online and find that exact drawing.

or find that exact unsolved mysteries episode and i genuinely kind of don't want to to.

I'm still a bit scared.

I'm still a bit frightened, even now, as an adult, just to go and find that.

Like, I'd do it.

I won't do it right now.

I'm not doing it right now.

But I, if I was to do it, I'd need to prepare for it.

And that's not good.

I need to prepare myself for a drawing of an alien with the scary fucking Unsolved Mysteries music over it.

That's a little bit of trauma there.

So that experience, that completely, that was the end.

That was the end of looking out my bedroom window at night time to search for Santa Claus in the stars.

That was the fucking end of it.

I started sleeping with the light on.

It didn't matter how much my parents explained to me that alien abductions weren't real, because I'm going, they are real.

There's a documentary on television, there's a documentary on television called Unsolved Mysteries, and there's people talking about they were abducted by aliens.

I think one night my parents had to literally just go, look, we're gonna stay up with with you and all of us are gonna watch unsolved mysteries together.

I think it was the Bigfoot episode and the problem was with unsolved mysteries

you'd have like they'd do like three or four unsolved mysteries an episode so maybe two of them were legitimate murders that had happened or disappearances actual crimes that have occurred in real life in America that haven't been solved.

Unsolved mysteries would choose one case and recreate it.

And then at the end of the episode, if you had any information for the unsolved mystery, for the person who was murdered, the disappearance, you could contact the show and tell them.

So you'd have that.

And then immediately afterwards, a story about a ghost or a story about Bigfoot.

And that's what was so frightening for me at eight years of age.

I'm trying to navigate.

the concrete reality of being alive and fantasy.

Eight years of age was probably the last year that I'm going to be believing in Santa Claus.

You know my parents aren't going to keep that up after eight years of age.

But one of the most frightening things about this TV show Unsolved Mysteries was they would present real things and fantasy alongside each other with the exact same scary music and seriousness and it was all presented as real.

And I remember the night of sitting down watching it with my parents because this was driving them insane as well.

I wasn't fucking sleeping.

And my parents sitting down watching it with me.

And my ma saying things like if someone was murdered on screen, my ma's there going, that's red sauce, that's not blood, that's red sauce.

And then my dad going, fucking Yanks, Yanks, Yanks, fucking Yanks.

Because my dad hated Americans and he hated America.

He was a communist.

He hated America.

And he hated that there was a society that existed where this was presented as entertainment and that you had grown adults talking about aliens and ghosts.

So my dad becomes very frustrated by the absolute silliness of this TV show Unsolved Mysteries and he's screaming, they're all lunatics, they're all mad, which didn't help the situation to be honest.

But I became deathly afraid of alien abductions, terrified of being abducted by aliens.

Couldn't get the image of that drawing of the alien out of my head.

I refused to look out windows at night time.

There was no way.

The night sky went from being a wonderful, safe, curious place where I used to daydream, night dream to being something I simply wouldn't look at.

Instead of searching with curiosity for Santa Claus's reindeers, I refused to look up in case I saw a UFO and then it came down and beamed me up.

And even now, as a grown adult,

it's the one thing that will kind of test me it'll test if I'm if I'm in bed at night and I'm doing some reading or I'm on a little Wikipedia hall with my laptop out if I start going down a UFO rabbit hole

I might just leave the light on I might just leave the light on when I sleep but something I do something I

try to examine is

Seeing the UFOs and the aliens and unsolved mysteries, it wasn't just a scary thing I saw on TV that spoke to me.

It was a significant event that triggered childhood mental health issues that lasted more than a year.

And I now realize that like the UFOs and aliens, they were a way for me to

understand

deeper anxiety and terror.

Like the summer before,

When I was seven, I'd had an operation.

I had a hernia.

So when I was was seven I went onto an operating table and I went underneath anesthetic and I remember the feeling at seven years of age of being under anesthetic staring up at a light above me and the sergeants heads blocking out the light and going all wobbly because I'm going under anesthetic and that exact image was present a few months later on the alien abduction episode of Unsolved Mysteries.

When the American was describing being abducted by aliens and being brought into the spaceship, they were put down on an operating table and experiments were conducted on them.

And on the TV, they showed the point of view of the person looking up at the light and the aliens' heads coming over them, doing the experiments on their body, an operating table.

So that definitely triggered a memory of my operation.

And what also used to terrify me about alien abductions when I was a little kid,

It was a sense of loneliness, a sense of I'm in my bed by myself and these aliens can just fly this UFO outside the window, shine in a light and beam me out and there's nothing my parents can do to save me.

I feel so alone, there's nothing.

My ma can't stop it, my dad can't stop it.

This feels so lonely and frightening.

I feel abandoned.

And that was the sad feeling I used to feel in bed when I was thinking about being abducted by aliens as a child.

It was that sadness of there's nothing my parents can do.

But when I was seven getting an operation for my hernia, I wasn't really scared of the operation.

I wasn't even scared that they were cutting me open.

But what I didn't like,

what did upset me was

when I went into the operating theater and they said to my ma, you can't come in.

And my ma had to say to me, I can't come in with you now.

I'm not allowed in here.

You're going to have to go with the surgeon here and they're gonna take you in.

And at seven years of age that concept was alien to me.

What do you mean someone can tell my ma what to do?

My ma minds me, she protects me, that's what she does.

What do you mean she's not allowed in to the operating theatre when I get my operation?

You mean my ma's not gonna be here with me when someone cuts me open?

And up to that point I'd been calm.

But when that happened, Then I started to cry.

Then I started to call out for my ma but there was nothing she could do because I'm being taken into the operating theatre.

And I start to feel very frightened because someone's taking power away from my ma and then suddenly there's a gas mask on my face and I'm going under, looking up at that light with the blurry black heads above me.

So looking back, that's what my alien abduction fear was.

I was eight years of age.

I didn't have the

emotional intelligence or language.

or intrapersonal intelligence to understand the trauma of the operation.

And then a couple of months later, this TV show Unsolved Mysteries comes on TV and there's these aliens that can abduct you from your bed and they put you down on an operating table and do experiments on you.

And the aliens looked really scary.

So alien abductions, that was my brain's way of making sense and trying to understand.

The terror of abandonment.

The terror of

these men who I don't know can tell my ma to stay outside, stay outside the room while they put a gas mask on me and cut me open.

And then I wake up in a completely different room in a daze and I'm really sore and all my legs are covered in blood.

That was another theme on the Unsolved Mysteries UFO episode:

this concept of missing time.

That when you're abducted, you don't remember any of it and you just you arrive in it in a different location and several days have passed.

And that's what it felt like when I got my operation.

I remember going under, don't remember anything in between and all of a sudden I'm somewhere else hours later with this great sense of confusion.

Aliens and UFOs have become a perfect avatar for me to project my fears onto.

A simple story to make sense of what I can't understand.

One of the biggest stories in the news this week is coming from New Jersey over in America.

For the past two weeks, people living in New Jersey are really panicking because they're looking up into the sky and they're seeing UFOs

or they're seeing drones.

They're seeing objects that they can't identify.

There's hundreds of videos online, all over TikTok, of people in New Jersey pointing their cameras up to the sky.

and there's strange lights floating around.

The military are investigating, the FBI are investigating.

The people in New Jersey are ringing the police and they can't get a concrete answer.

When the people of New Jersey look up to the sky, they experience terror.

What are these strange objects in the sky?

Are they aliens?

Are they UFOs?

A local New Jersey politician spoke out.

His name was Jeff Van Drew.

And Jeff Van Drew told the people of New Jersey that he heard from a very authoritative source that there's a giant Iranian mothership

just off the coast, the east coast of America, and this gigantic mothership has unleashed thousands of small Iranian drones and they're flying all over New Jersey and now people in New Jersey are shooting guns up at the drones.

And still nobody has an answer.

Looking up at the sky is a frightening thing for the people of New Jersey because

New Jersey is right across the way from New York and a lot of people in New Jersey around 2001 when the when those planes hit the Twin Towers on 9-11 the people of New Jersey they witnessed it from a distance.

They saw the towers on fire with the smoke going up.

So the sky of New Jersey

There's a folk memory of terror in that sky.

And also something I find fascinating about New Jersey in particular is they have they have a folk monster called the Jersey Devil.

From the late 1800s all through the 20th century, people in New Jersey reported looking up into the sky and seeing this absolutely terrifying creature flying around called the Jersey Devil.

It had giant wings like a bat,

and this strange long, slender, horse-like body, legs like a bird with claws,

and then a very evil head, a bit like a goat's head.

And it's this really frightening creature that flies through the sky at night time and screams and attacks people.

By nineteen sixty, so many people were seeing the Jersey Devil flying through the sky that there was a ten thousand dollar reward for anybody that could shoot the Jersey Devil or capture it.

So people took this really fucking seriously in New Jersey, this modern American city just across the way from New York.

Is there actually a fucking

a horse, a winged horse monster with the head of a goat flying around New Jersey for the entirety of the 20th century scaring the shit out of people?

A lot of people say there is.

Of course I know about the Jersey Devil because of the fucking

Unsolved Mysteries episode when I was a child.

But if you look closer at the story of the Jersey Devil in New Jersey, there's an area of forest called the Pine Barrens.

And during the American Revolutionary War, which would be the late 1700s, and this is when the colonies of America, which is mostly the east coast, the area around New York and Boston, this was a British colony.

And then Boston Tea Party, George Washington, all them cunts,

they fought the British and America got its independence.

It's a very very short statement there on the American Revolution.

But anyway, not all Americans wanted revolution.

There were Americans who supported the Brits, who were loyalists, who wanted America to stay a colony of Britain.

So when America got independence, those loyalists, they're stuck in America, but they've just lost the war.

They weren't very popular.

So what did they do?

A lot of them fucked off into the forests of New Jersey, into the pine barrens, outcast ex-soldiers who had to hide that to hide away in the forests of New Jersey.

But they made the forests a very terrifying and dangerous place to travel through.

They became outlaw gangs that would violently rob people who traveled through these forests.

So the people of New Jersey became terrified, terrified of traveling through this area of forest known as the Pine Barrens.

And it's around that same time

that sightings of the Jersey Devil first start to appear.

The people in New Jersey they'd just witnessed gigantic fucking war with the British revolution they might have seen massacres they're a traumatized population and now when they go through the forests they can be violently robbed at any time by an enemy that they can't see and they don't even know if it's there.

So this weird folk monster starts to appear.

the Jersey Devil.

A horse with the wings of a bat and the head of a goat that screams through the night.

Fuck that.

Now nearly 200 years later, you're looking at the news and the people in New Jersey are firing guns into the air because there's all these unexplained drones and UFOs flying around and they're all looking up and they're all seeing them.

Some people are saying it's aliens, other people are saying it's it's an Iranian mothership from Iran.

full of these Iranian drones.

There are things floating around.

You can see them on on video.

There's strange objects in the sky.

And then finally today

an official answer was given by the FBI and the answer from the FBI is yeah there is stuff in the air over New Jersey.

There's airplanes, there's lots and lots of commercial drones, unmanned drones and there's satellites up in the sky.

But what's happening is that for some reason, the people of New Jersey are collectively panicking.

They're noticing things in the sky that are always there.

They're pointing up and they're looking at airplanes and everyone's frightened and everyone's riding themselves up and they're looking at airplanes and pointing and the airplanes are now UFOs.

And there's drones up there.

There's hundreds of drones all the time that people just don't notice and now they're noticing them.

In the way that, I don't know, if you buy a fucking Ford Fiesta, all of a sudden you notice every single Ford Fiesta on the road and you think there's loads of Ford Fiestas you're just noticing them so the people in New Jersey for some reason they're freaking out they're freaking out and they're all looking up into the air they're freaking each other out and they're all seeing UFOs

and I think I think the source of anxiety is America's just going through a great change right now So first off, it's New Jersey.

So like I mentioned, you know, they saw the twin towers blowing up from a distance.

There's a culture of seeing unidentified flying objects that are terrifying in the sky.

That's part of folk culture in New Jersey.

And as well,

Donald Trump is about to be president in a fucking month and he's doing mad shit.

He's appointing Elon Musk to a high government position.

He's appointing Robert Kennedy wants to get rid of the polio vaccine.

Vince McMahon's wife from the WWF is going to be running the education department.

America right now is facing massive uncertain change.

Elon Musk says he wants a recession.

Elon Musk says he's going to deliberately do a recession.

America sees how much of its weapons and how much help it's giving Israel.

And American people have phones the same as me and you.

They're watching butchered Palestinian toddlers.

It's a very overwhelming, frightening, confusing period of change.

So of course the people in New Jersey think that there's an Iranian mothership floating off the coast of New York, ready to unleash thousands of drones that are floating around their head.

What a simple, what a lovely simple story that lets you take out your gun and fire it up into the air to give you a sense of control.

Just like 200 years ago,

newly independent country just after a war can't go into the woods or you get robbed by bands of outlaws that you don't know whether they exist or not.

So you invent the flying horse coat.

America has farmed for this shit.

The greatest example, of course, is 9-11.

So, America.

The strange thing with 9-11 is that

the American collective consciousness willed 9-11 into existence.

Now, I'll explain what I mean by that.

America had defined itself in the second part of the 20th century as being one of two superpowers.

It was America, capitalism versus the Soviet Union, communism.

So America was good versus evil, one of two superpowers.

Then in 1989 the fucking Berlin Wall falls and America is left as the only global superpower.

America doesn't have an enemy anymore.

It effectively won.

And then The millennium is 10 years away.

Everybody was afraid of the millennium.

It was just kind kind of freaky.

No one felt good about the year 2000 happening.

There was a queasy feeling that the world was gonna end.

It's just like, I don't wanna be entering a new fucking millennium.

2000 years after the birth of Christ, why do I have to be that generation?

Surely something's gonna happen.

And then the early 90s, people start talking about the millennium bug.

I remember the millennium bug, this was a huge fucking deal in the fucking 90s.

Computer scientists came out and said the computers that were designed the internal clocks the calendars in these computers they don't go to the year 2000 so when the clock strikes 12 and it turns into the year 2000s all the computers might stop working and planes will fall from the sky.

Planes are gonna fall from the sky when the millennium bug kicks in at that when the clock strikes fucking 12 and this was discourse.

People believed planes were gonna fall from the fucking sky.

Life support machines were going to stop working.

Electricity was going to stop working.

The entire world would be descended into disaster, chaos and Armageddon as soon as that clock strikes 12 on the millennium because we've relied on computers too much.

And this was in the fucking news for years.

Billions were spent trying to stop the millennium bug.

Of course nothing happened at all.

But America in particular found itself by 1990 as the only superpower.

and then this general feeling in the ether of the world is going to end something's going to happen in the year 2000 so what you begin to see in American culture in the 90s disaster movies there's a fucking insane amount of disaster movies from about 1994 onwards and also computer graphics started to get really good special effects started to get really good in the 90s so you have films like Independence Day Will Smith one of the biggest films of the 90s, and

it's a film about America, it's America, and then aliens come down and they blow up American skyscrapers and famous buildings and monuments.

It's a terrifying visual spectacle of American skyscrapers being blown to bits and people falling from buildings.

You die hard with a vengeance about blowing up a tower.

Fucking Armageddon, another film.

Cities being blown to bits.

You had Godzilla 1998, a big lizard kicking the shit out of New York City, Deep Impact, another film about a meteor falling from the sky,

crushing the shit out of New York City.

The siege.

The siege is a film that's so fucking accurate, no one even talks about it.

The siege is Bruce Willis and Denzel Washington, 1998, and it's...

It's literally a film about New York and a bunch of Islamic terrorists blow shit up and then

the army come in and they put all the Muslim people into camps and this was 1998 predicting Guantanamo Bay and it was so accurate they just stopped showing it and no one talks about the siege anymore.

Six months before 9-11 happened the biggest film in the cinema was Pearl Harbor directed by Michael Bay a fucking film about the only other time that America was attacked from the air.

Pearl Harbor happens six months before 9-11.

Now am I teasing at some absolutely batshit mental conspiracy theory saying that they knew 9-11 was going to happen in advance and they were warning us through films?

No, what I am saying is that the Cold War ended, America found itself in a state of anxiety because it didn't have an enemy.

It defeated the Soviet Union.

It started to get paranoid.

Who's going to come next?

Like when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, what it meant was for America, nobody's gonna nuclear bomb us now.

The only power with the capability to destroy us with nuclear missiles is the Soviet Union and now that's gone.

And America had spent since about 19 fucking 50 terrified of nuclear bombs and now that's gone.

There was a strange comfort in knowing that's what the threat was.

What's next?

Is it going to be an asteroid?

Is it going to be Islamic terrorists?

Is it going to be Godzilla?

Is it going to be aliens?

Is it going to be the Millennium Bug?

It has to be someone.

The entire...

the collective consciousness, the culture of America, which had been built around the Soviet Union are the enemies and they're just as strong as we are.

As soon as that went away, America was left with a sense of anxiety.

What do we do now?

Who are we supposed to fight now?

To take it back to the pine barons and the Jersey Devil.

America won the the revolution.

Britain was gone, Britain left, now there's no more war.

So the Americans who are walking the forest in New Jersey, they're terrified of terrorists effectively.

The loyalist soldiers that had lost, they had to disappear to the forests and they effectively became terrorists, hit and run terrorists.

The people lost the comfort of the big bad British enemy.

and now they didn't know where their enemy was.

So they started to invent the Jersey Devil.

But in the 90s America started to express its irrational fears through disaster movies.

Loads and loads and loads of disaster movies.

So when 9-11 happens and you have this massive spectacle, this spectacle of two jumbo jets crashing into the iconic Twin Towers and other ones heading for the Pentagon and other ones that were heading for the White House.

This event that takes place on television.

I remember it happening.

It felt like Independence Day.

It felt like Godzilla.

It felt like deep impact.

It felt like all the films we'd been watching for the past five fucking years.

It felt so much like those films it didn't feel real at all.

There's a quote at the time from the director Robert Altman, filmmaker, and he said, nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie.

We created this atmosphere and taught them how to do it.

That's what I mean by America willing 9-11 into existence.

Like that was was that was Bin Laden's second time attacking the World Trade Center.

He attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 with a car bomb.

Didn't do much damage.

But Bin Laden was smart.

You know when they killed him they went through his hard drive.

He studied Western culture.

9-11 wasn't just a terrorist attack to kill people.

It was a deliberate visual spectacle to put terror into the heart of America in the visual language that it understood.

If you literally spend the past 10 years and all your biggest films contain gigantic CGI scenes of the fucking White House being blown up by a UFO or scenes of downtown Manhattan getting blown to bits, skyscrapers getting blown to bits

by fucking meteors, then you're letting you're letting your enemies know exactly exactly the thing that frightens you most 9-11 terrorist texts utilized the language of entertainment and I don't mean that in in a disrespectful way but American entertainment in 2001 was giant skyscrapers getting blown up and cities being torn to bits that was American entertainment so that's what 9-11 was the goal of terrorism is to strike terror into the hearts of a civilian population.

The reason it seems like it might seem a bit far-fetched to suggest that bin Laden put that much or that al-Qaeda put that much thinking into the attacks is because after those attacks we were led to believe that these are mindless animals, these are raged, crazy lunatics.

No they're not.

Some of them are military strategists that know exactly what they're doing.

I mean the IRA, the IRA in the 1970s, the IRA would plant a bomb in a car in London and they'd put a timer on the bomb and then they'd ring the police and they'd say there's a bomb in this car on this street and it's gonna go off in one hour and then the police would cardon off the area try and get everyone away then the BBC would show up with the cameras and the car would explode on camera and then that would be in the news later on that evening.

And sometimes nobody was killed with the car bomb.

But what mattered for the IRA is that it's on television, it's on television and the british public can see this and there might have been someone there and then after the bbc started showing ira bombs like literally going off on the television then the ira used to start they used to throw barrels of petrol into the back of car that they were blowing up just so the fireball would look massive on the television So that there,

that's using acts of terrorism as entertainment.

It's using the language of entertainment.

It's understanding the visual medium of television.

And 9-11 was that.

It was visual spectacle.

The terrorists had learned the Americans' fears through the disaster movies.

And whoever wants to freak out the Yanks next,

they just got to use drones.

Look at what's happening in New Jersey.

People are shooting guns into the air.

Shooting guns at airplanes.

They're shooting guns at airplanes because they think there's either UFOs or an Iranian mothership in the sky.

But just like me, when I was eight years of age and I had that operation and I wasn't able to verbalize that fear and that anxiety, so I became terrified of aiding abductions.

This is what we do as humans and sometimes we do it collectively.

We agree upon it.

We amplify each other's fears until we all see what isn't there.

The people in New Jersey are seeing what isn't there.

They're all sitting around together pointing up into the sky at an aeroplane and they're all agreeing that it's a drone.

Agreeing so much that people are taking out guns and shooting airplanes.

And we did this in Ireland too.

In the 7th century, the 7th century in Ireland.

There's multiple reports of UFOs written in the Irish Annals.

Written in the Annals.

There's multiple reports of UFOs.

in the 7th century around the monastery of Clan McNuys.

There's so many reports of UFOs in Ireland in the 7th century that

there's evidence of this in Viking, Viking mythology at the time.

The Vikings spoke about how the Irish were seeing UFOs in the 7th century.

So Clan McNuys

was a very, very important monastery in Ireland in the 7th century.

Books were being written there.

Ireland was a very, very important site of Christianity in the world.

And the monks of Clam McNuys written down in several sources they were plagued by UFOs in the 7th century but they're UFOs

they used to see ships in the sky the monks could go outside and they would see sea ships like fucking ships but they're up in the clouds and sometimes all the monks would go outside

and they'd see men jumping from the ships so they're looking up into the air and they see these ships floating in the clouds and men would jump out from the ships and appear to swim down to the ground to the monks but the men were drowning in the air and the monks were terrified there's these men drowning in the air in front of them and this used to scare the living fuck out of the monks but what you have to realize about the the anxieties of the time is that

christianity christianity had arrived in ireland by the 700s christianity was in ireland only 200 years years

and Christianity is an eschatological religion which means that it's very much concerned with the end times.

When Christianity reached Ireland with Saint Patrick the Roman Empire was collapsing right so the known world was completely collapsing and what that looked like is that the Roman administration which had kept like towns and fucking roads and kept shit together that collapses so you end up with lordism so Europe becomes frightening and destabilized and violent and unsafe it felt as if the world was ending but within Christianity this is what's predicted the world is supposed to end and then Jesus Christ comes also within Christianity the world ends when Christianity reaches the farthest part of the world and in the 500s Ireland was the westernmost part of the known world.

When Christianity reached the monks in Ireland, they truly believed we are at the edge of the world here.

There's nothing beyond the Atlantic.

So now that we have Christianity, we're here to usher in the apocalypse.

The end times are fucking coming.

And we're here to usher this in.

We're just waiting for it.

The strange thing with the ships in the air in the 700s in Clan McNuys,

it's a weird little mix of Christian belief and then indigenous Irish folklore.

So Christianity believed in the firmament, that basically up above the sky God had put a second sea.

So if you were to sail too far off the edge of the world, beyond the coast of Ireland, you might find yourself up in the sky.

But within Irish pre-Christian belief,

we had...

we didn't have heaven and hell or end times.

We had the other world.

We had a parallel existence.

There's a parallel world where the fairies live and you can enter this through the mist.

But in the Irish monks writings about these ships floating through the sky and the the lads drowning in mid-air in front of their own eyes there's a fella drowning in front of me.

So basically for the lads in the ship and for the man drowning he's literally underneath the ocean.

But for the monks they're in this world so what you're seeing there it's a blurring.

of the two parallel dimensions.

Like when the fairies present themselves as animals You think you're looking at a deer but what you're seeing it's really a fairy and that's how the fairy must present itself in this reality.

Or the belief that a sacred well, that at the bottom of a sacred well was the mirror to the other reality or the mist, the morning mist, was the blurry line where you could cross between dimensions.

And this is Irish indigenous folklore, pre-Christian belief.

But there's a beautiful story.

I think it's written down in the Book of Invasions.

But there's one story about the monks of clan mcnoise seeing these ufos these ships and and it contextualizes it a bit and it's a beautiful example of the the inventiveness of irish storytelling when it takes in the the batshit world of pre-christian mythology so the story goes is that there's a group of monks and they're on a ship and they're sailing to Rome.

So these monks, they're on a fucking ship, they're on the sea, they know what they're doing, they're going to Rome.

But then a storm hits, a bad storm.

So the monks on the ship say fuck that.

So they throw the anchor over the side.

So then the storm passes, everything's okay.

And the monks go, right, let's go on our way now to Rome.

Let's pull the anchor back up.

But as the monks on the ship pull the anchor back up, It's stuck on something.

They can't pull the anchor back up.

So they get one of the monks, the youngest fella, and they say, jump overboard there and swim down to the bottom and get the anchor and pull it out of whatever the fuck it's stuck in.

So he jumps down and swims down, follows the chain and goes to the bottom of the anchor.

But he discovers an underwater monastery and he sees that the anchor of the fucking ship is stuck in the bell tower.

of an underwater monastery and all the monks are underwater too and they're pointing at him.

They're pointing at him, but they don't seem to be behaving like they're underwater.

They're not swimming.

They're underwater, but they're on solid land.

Now the story flips to the perspective of the monks in Clan McNoise.

And now it's the monks in Clan McNoise, and they're there in fucking Ophaly, and they're looking up, and they see an anchor in their bell tower, and there's a man in the sky swimming, drowning.

So they climb to the top of the bell tower and they rescue the monk who's drowning and bring him to their land.

Meanwhile, back on the ocean on the way to Rome, the monks that are in the boat are like, ah fuck it, he's dead, he's after dying.

And they take their ship and they fuck off to Rome having lost a crew member.

Meanwhile, your man, he's actually in the parallel reality of Clan McNoise and now he's living with the order of monks that he swam down to.

And he spends the year learning learning the rules of their order, their prayers, their artwork.

One year passes, and now the lads who are in Rome they sail back to Ireland and exactly on the spot where your man had died a year ago, they now see him at the surface asking to be rescued.

So they bring him back on the ship and they can't understand.

It's like you drowned a year ago, what's happening?

And he tells them all about the underwater monastery that he visited and teaches the lads on the boat the prayers and the artwork and everything and then the lads on the boat go fuck all that shit we learned in Rome that's bullshit we're gonna take on the rules of this new underwater monastery so that's a story there from the 11th century that's an Irish story from the 11th century like unbelievably inventive dealing with parallel realities and universes it's a Christian story that isn't tied down by the constraints of linear time instead it has weird Irish parallel circular time that you find in pre-Christian mythology.

That's otherworld fairy shit.

But that story written in the 11th century, it was the monks in the 11th century trying to figure out why the fuck were the monks in the 7th century?

Why were the lads in Clan McNuys writing all these stories?

about UFOs, about ships floating in the air.

And then you have to look at the world, the world that they lived in

the monks of clan mcnoys in this in the 7th century the viking raids hadn't started yet

the monasteries in britain and ireland come the eighth century i think the vikings used to raid and pillage the monasteries they'd kill people and steal everything the seventh century monks in clan macnoise

They were aware there's this huge threat out there on the oceans.

We haven't seen it yet.

We've heard about it.

But ships of foreign men are going to come up that fucking river and one day they're going to kill us all.

So, just like the people in New Jersey.

Of course, those monks in 7th century Ireland are going to look up to the sky.

And someone's going to point at a cloud and go, does that cloud look like a ship?

The fear and the uncertainty is going to be so great.

that they'll collectively hallucinate.

They'll hallucinate fucking ships in the sky.

Let's have a little ocarina pause now.

I'm gonna play an ocarina and you're gonna hear an advert.

I've got my ceramic otter this week.

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You check your feed and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

In this economy, next time, check left.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

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Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

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Unruly fucking ceramic otter of the blow into his tail.

While a thumb has wrecked him.

You'd have heard an advert there for some fucking bullshit.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you entertainment, distraction, mirth, relaxation, whatever this podcast brings you, please consider paying me for the work that I do.

Because this is my full-time job.

This is how I earn a living, it's how I rent out my office, it's how I pay all my bills, it's how I have the time to put the research and writing into delivering this podcast each week.

All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month.

That's it.

And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it.

You can listen for free.

You can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free.

So everyone gets a podcast, the exact same podcast, and I get to earn a living.

Wonderful model, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

and please if you're becoming a new patron don't sign up via the iphone apple patreon app or patreon app because apple are our greedy bastards and they take 30 percent right so if you're if you're becoming a patron

whip open your desktop or your laptop and go to patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast and become a paid subscriber please it keeps this podcast independent too means i'm not beholden to any advertisers.

I'm going to go through my 2025 gigs now because I'm conscious that some of you want to get tickets as Christmas presents.

January the 27th, I'm in Vicar Street in Dublin.

That's very nearly sold out now, right?

My Dublin Vicker Street gigs are wonderful and fantastic.

This is a lovely quiet Monday night gig.

Then in February, I'm up in Galway.

in Leisureland.

I've got a great guest for that gig.

That's on the 9th of February.

Then on the 21st of February I'm up in Drahada in the Crescent Hall.

28th I'm in Belfast Waterfront Theatre.

March I'm in the INEC they are down in Killanne.

And then Cork Opera House on the 13th of March.

Australia and New Zealand in April that's sold out.

And then on the 23rd of April my biggest ever gig in Limerick.

My biggest ever gig in my home city of Limerick in the fucking University of Limerick concert hall.

And then what have we got?

Big giant tour there of England and Scotland in June.

And this one is setting out quick now because of Christmas tickets, right?

So if you do want, I know you might think June is fucking ages away, and it is ages away, like June is fucking six months away or something like that.

But while you're thinking that, someone's buying the ticket as a Christmas present.

So these are selling out fast.

So if you definitely want to come to one of these UK shows,

don't wait until June, basically.

And I'm in Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, York,

London, Edinburgh, East Sussex, Norwich.

Go to fane.co.uk forward slash blindboy to see all those gigs.

I hope I mentioned them all there.

Hope you enjoyed this podcast.

I didn't want to

interrupt that that hot take with the ocarina pause so I just went straight straight long hot take

and then the ocarina pause at the end which is a slightly different structure but I hate fucking sometimes I don't like splitting the hot take in two you know but I wanted to explore

anxiety.

I wanted to explore collective anxiety this week and how it can induce mass hysteria and mass panic.

It's just a part of the human condition.

Whether it's in New New Jersey right now, seeing drones in the sky

or Ireland in the seventh century seeing ships in the sky, the same shit we're still human beings.

I most likely will be back next week.

Next week is Christmas Day.

Next week is Christmas Day and

The temptation is to not put a podcast out next week, you know, to take the time off.

But at the same time,

this is seven years of the podcast

and I'm just very grateful that this podcast is still here after seven years that it's still going strong still with a fuckload of listeners so I think I will put out a Christmas Day podcast

I'm doing it because I know there's a lot of ye that

Christmas isn't crack for everybody you might want to get out of the house you might want to go for a walk you might want to treat it as just a Wednesday So I'm going to try and do a podcast for those people.

I might do something a bit festivy.

This was not a festivy podcast.

As you can tell, my voice is fucked again this week, by the way.

I've had my third, my third cold of the season, so my throat is a bit county.

I'll catch you next week on Christmas Day, you glorious pricks.

In the meantime, rub a dog, genuflect to a robin,

tug at the pubic, tug at the pubic hair of Santa Claus.

Dog bless.

You check your feed and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

In this economy, next time, check Lyft.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.