Did, did you wanna talk about that at all? Did you wanna say anything?

Yeah, sure.

I mean, I would, I would just say w- we were in a big group of...

Well, not big.

I mean, I guess maybe six or seven people over the course of four nights.

We were in Lily Dale, New York, which is a famous spiritualist camp in town, and some of the people we were with had been coming to Lily Dale for a very, very long time, and they had experience with sort of calling out these strange lights from this one particular patch of woods.

I...

What do you think about this term experiencer? Like, do you consider yourself an experiencer, you know, 'cause you come from this academic place where this has been a tricky, I think, kind of topic for a long time.

Sort of like

you were saying, Tanner.

It was really all in place, and Cooper claimed that he was read into UFO secrets because...

I can't remember exactly what he said, but he was...

When he was in Vietnam, he was working right alongside his naval commander.

And he observed some of these documents in a trunk in Vietnam.

And he read all these documents.

I'm curious if you have any comment on, uh, spirituality and UFOs, uh, if, and there's anything there that, uh, any specific works or things that you've found interesting that meet that intersection.

He started questioning authority and fell in with a radical crowd.

Kelpius begins associating with these groups of radical Protestant Christians called Pietists.

But Pietists were basically Protestant Christians who were really kind of protesting against this sort of bookish and orthodox form of German Lutheranism that was not only popular, but required at the time.

And they responded to it by developing their own sort of really emotional, really intense, and very kind of personal form of Christianity and relationship with God.

If this sounds like a perfectly normal way to be a Christian today, to have like a personal emotional relationship with God, that's because of how successful Pietism was.

When Kelpius got wrapped up in it, a lot of Pietist belief was outright illegal.

Political power and religious authority were really tightly coupled.

There's like a part of me that just goes, "Man, I wonder what Kelpius would think." He comes to the New World just to live his life quietly, and now he becomes this figure that is of dev- definitely a deviation from who he was and what he was about, and, like, wonder what he would think about it.