Tales From The Rabbit Hole

Jan 26 2024 58 ep. 66 mins 5k

Tales From The Rabbit Hole Podcast artwork

Tales from the Rabbit Hole is an interview-style podcast focusing on people whose lives have been affected by the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Guests will include both former and current believers in a variety of conspiracy theories, as well as debunkers, skeptics, and the investigators of those theories. I’m Mick West, a debunker. I wrote the book Escaping the Rabbit Hole – How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories using Facts, Logic, and Respect. This book came from my experiences running Metabunk – a debunking forum. Over the years I realized simply presenting corrections to people is not enough. We need effective communication, and we can’t do that if we don’t listen to and talk with each other. I’m hoping this podcast will help bridge that gap.

Society & Culture Education

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Episode 58: Peter Bergen – Kirkpatrick, UFOs, and the Pentagon

Jan 26 2024 30 mins

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen.” He recently interviewed Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of the Pentagon UFO investigation office, AARO. We chat about UFOs, National Security, Self-licking ice cream cone

Episode 57: Alex Dietrich, Clouds, Critical Thinking, and UFOs

Aug 25 2023 95 mins

Alex Dietrich served a 20-year career as a Naval officer and fighter pilot with two combat deployments. She was also deployed to Afghanistan as an Infrastructure reconstruction engineer. She then transitioned to academia, serving as a Naval Science Instructor and then a Military professor, teaching, among other things, Critical Thinking, Leadership, and Ethics. Alex is best known

Episode 56: Robert Bartholomew – Havana Syndrome and Mass Psychogenic Illness

Oct 22 2021 57 mins

Robert Bartholomew has a PhD in Medical Sociology, and is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He’s an expert in Mass Psychogenic Illness and the co-author with Rober Baloh of the book “Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria̶

Episode 55 – Professor Avi Loeb: The Galileo Project

Aug 10 2021 65 mins

What is a University professor doing investigating UFOs? Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University heads the Galileo Project, which seeks (in part) to identify the nature of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena by establishing a network of telescopes and instruments with the goal of obtaining the first unambiguous clear photos of UFOs. We talk about the demarcation between science and pse

Episode 54 – Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko: Pastels and Pedophiles

Aug 04 2021 71 mins

Mia Bloom is Professor of Communication at Georgia State University with a PhD in political science from Columbia University. Sophia Moskalenko is a research fellow at Georgia State University and a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. Together they wrote the book Pastels and Pedophiles – Inside the Mind of QAnon. We di

Episode 53 – Jason Colavito – UFOs and the Invisible College, How Did We Get Here?

Jun 24 2021 62 mins

Jason Colavito is an author and journalist with a focus on “alternative archeology” and, more recently, the UFO cultural phenomenon. In May 2021, he wrote the article: “How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers” in the New Republic, describing how “a collection of well-funded UFO obsessives are using their Capitol Hill connections to launder some out

Episode 52 – Luis Elizondo – UFOs, UAPs, AATIP, and TTSA

Mar 11 2021 61 mins

Luis Elizondo is a former senior intelligence official, a disclosure advocate, a national security expert, and the former director of the Pentagon’s UFO/UAP Program (AATIP). We talk about his work in those capacities and also discuss the history and analysis of the three US Navy “UAP” videos. Interview conducted on March 11, 2021

Episode 51 – Michael: Post Inauguration QAnon Catchup

Mar 10 2021 107 mins

Michael is a “follower” of Q, in what is commonly known as the QAnon conspiracy theory. I first talked to him one year ago, February 2020. We met on Twitter discussing UFOs, but had a long discussion about QAnon. Michael thought for sure that Trump would win the election, and was quite hopeful about the prospects of a massive wave of arrests of the supposed child-abduc

Episode 50 – Alex: Raised by Conspiracy Theorists

Mar 08 2021 78 mins

Alex was raised by conspiracy theorists. This makes him different from most people who end up down the rabbit hole in that assuming nefarious plots were going on was never a surprise to him. Indeed, it was the default. We talk about growing up in a conspiracy theory family, how his perceptions shifted when he went out into the real world, and how he ended up going even deeper down

Episode 49 – Georgina: A QAnon Friend in the UK

Mar 06 2021 55 mins

QAnon is a very American conspiracy theory, focussing upon a supposed plan by a mysterious entity named ‘Q’ who was working with Donald Trump to rid the US of a corrupt elite. But despite this American focus, it has adherents around the world. One of those adherents is a friend of this episode’s guest, Georgina. Georgina and her friend were both fans of documenta