Awakening the Hero: Transformation through Unexplained Encounters

This chapter examines how unanswerable questions can reshape personal narratives and challenge belief systems. It highlights the Hero's Journey in encountering extraordinary phenomena, like UFOs, and explores the balance between personal empowerment and the risks associated with ego inflation.

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In this episode, Kelly shares her recent paper Unfurling the Myth, presented at the University of Exeter during a workshop on Process Philosophy, Plasma Cosmology, and Transpersonal Psychology. This gathering brought together scientists, philosophers, and researchers—including Robert Temple, Jeffrey Kripal, Bernard Carr, Massimo Teodorani, and Nick Cook—to explore the possibility that plasma, the fourth state of matter, could serve as a substrate for non-biological intelligence.

Kelly’s paper argues that the UFO phenomenon is not just an anomaly in the sky but a relational event—an encounter that engages the psyche through the deep structures of narrative. Rather than delivering answers, the phenomenon generates mystery, catalyzing transformation on both personal and cultural levels.

Drawing on thinkers like Robert Temple, Jacques Vallée, and Eric Davis, as well as research in narrative cognition and the psychology of curiosity, Kelly explores how UFOs may function as mythic initiators: destabilizing our categories of knowledge, activating curiosity, and compelling us to tell new stories. These stories are not just interpretations but mechanisms of reality-making—reshaping our understanding of self, world, and cosmos.

Plasma cosmology and the possibility of plasma-based intelligence
The UFO as relational event, not just object or craft
Narrative as a generative interface between psyche and field
How curiosity and myth catalyze transformation
The “Call to Adventure” in experiencer narratives
Cultural and personal shifts documented in experiencer research
The UFO as evolutionary function, seeding new myths and meanings

Whether you’re new to these ideas or steeped in the mysteries of UFOs, this episode invites you to consider the phenomenon not as something to solve, but as something to participate in—a story in which we are all co-creators.

Resources

Robert Temple, A New Science of Heaven
Jacques Vallée & Eric Davis, Incommensurability, Orthodoxy, and the Physics of High Strangeness
George Loewenstein, The Psychology of Curiosity
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling
Stanislav & Christina Grof, Spiritual Emergency
Hernandez et al., Beyond UFOs