Rejected Religion Podcast RR Patreon Tier 3 Garden of Arcane Delights | Free Content Mike Fiorito - UFO Symphonic: Journeys into Sound
*This is the Free Content version of my interview with Mike Fiorito. To access the entire episode, please consider becoming a Tier 3 'Garden of Arcane Delights' member, or you can purchase this episode for a one-time fee.
My guest this month is Mike Fiorito. An Adjunct Professor of English at City Tech (CUNY), Mike is a freelance journalist and author of several books: For All We Know, Mescalito Riding His White Horse, Falling from Trees, The Hated Ones, Sleeping with Fishes, Call Me Guido, Freud’s Haberdashery Habits, and Hallucinating Huxley.
Mescalito Riding His White Horse received the 2024Independent Press Distinguished Favorite Award in Spirituality.
Falling from Trees received the 2022 Independent Press Distinguished Favorite Award in Short Stories.
For All We Know, his UFO themed science-fiction novel, published in May 2024.
Mike’s new book, UFO Symphonic-Journeys into Sound, was published February 1st, 2025.
UFO Symphonic: Journeys into Sound explores the profound connection between music and the mysteries of existence. The book delves into music as a form of complex communication and a potential bridge to other realms. Through personal accounts and stories from experiencers, Fiorito examines the symbolic language of sound, dreams, and high strangeness. It invites readers on an extraordinary journey into the unknown, raising thought-provoking questions about the role of music in connecting past, present, and future.
In this discussion, Mike and I talk about his latest book, and Mike shares several anecdotes from different people that Mike interviewed. Some highlights from this conversation include:
- the concept of “The Harmony of the Spheres” that emphasizes the interconnectedness of the cosmos and the spiritual journey of the soul; the main idea of which is that the cosmos is ordered by mathematical principles, and that planets and stars move in harmony with these principles, producing a kind of eternal music;
- How the stories Mike shared bring up a lot of ideas related to the notion of ‘tapping into’ a larger system (that we might call consciousness, or cosmos; additionally, it seems to be suggesting a type of mind-universe alignment;
- Joshua Cutchin’s story about creating a new narrative that combines folklore and UFO phenomena; and the connection between paranormal phenomena and death (which lines up beautifully with a book we read for our prior Patreon book club meeting -- Dr. Jeff Kripal and Whitley Strieber’s book, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained. In the Dedication, Whitley Strieber notes that his wife Anne said, after carefully reading and organizing the numerous letters that they received, that the UFO experiences all had something to do with death, too.);
- Sebastiano De Filippi’s section, who also discusses similar ideas to Joshua’s about music in his work as a conductor;
- Concepts such as entanglement and tulpas; and much more!
PROGRAM NOTES
UFO Symphonic-Journeys into Sound : https://a.co/d/g1vsfHa
Music and Editing: Daniel P. Shea
End Production: Stephanie Shea