Joshua Cutchin | A Smell Based Exopse’ of Alien, Crypid, & Spirit Encounters

00:05 Puppet masters almost surely have clearly made me something heavy. And until you've thoroughly tested every last course, just to know the less you really do! That's true Dr. Seuss. Without THC, could they lie and do us just a- Without THC, the higher side checks show Alright, Hiresight Chatters. I hope you have those seatbelts securely fastened your tray tables locked and your seat backs in the full upright position because today we're going on yet another one of those very wild rides we've come to love oh so much because when it comes to high strangeness encounters with spirits aliens fairies black-eyed children men in black cryptid creatures and the other slices of the paranormal pie

01:05 Many researchers have just been focusing on the big picture. They try to take everything in and come up with grand unifying theories, and if you ask me there will always be odd experiences that don't fit whatever box you try to put them in That just seems to be this slippery tricky nature of these things But researchers like today's returning guest Joshua Kutchin have instead honed it on cases that contain very specific threads And found that sometimes the smallest details can contain the biggest clues His last book, of course was called A Trojan Feast focusing on the presence of food and edible exchanges in these encounters. And he's followed it up now with a new book called The Brimstone Deceit an in-depth examination of supernatural scents otherworldly odors and monstrous miasmas which clearly covers the sense of smell in these cases. Who doesn't like a party with a theme? So let's get this one started Josh my man welcome back to The Higher Side

01:57 It is a great pleasure to be here, home of the best damn intros on the internet. You always do such a good job with those! Ah well thanks man I do try but i appreciate what you do so much more loved having ya on last time really enjoyed this book as well and actually came away learning quite a bit of practical information about the sense of smell even among all the weirdness and I really started to think about just how much we take smell for granted when it's really quite important and somewhat mysterious So to get us warmed up here, tell us a bit about smell itself. The mechanics of it and maybe why you took this smell-based approach to weirdness? I'd be happy to! You know it's one of those things as I was doing research for this I became more and more fascinated just by the history in the sociology and the psychology all these different aspects of olfaction as it were And you know its one of those things that I had noticed along time ago is that there are certain common elements

02:54 paranormal supernatural phenomena where there tend to be similar odors that are noticed. And it's one of those things where people would, you know make a note of it in a book or something maybe dedicate a chapter to here and there but no one ever really took the time to roll up their sleeves and get in there try to write along form book on this subject So I felt like in order to really do justice to that particular topic I had to take a deep dive into exactly what we know about science as it stands today And it's surprising to me how little we know. It's one of those things that sort of like sleep, like we understand why we need to sleep and we understand that when we need it but we don't understand exactly why it happens. And similarly, like we understand a lot of stuff about scent but we still don't understand exactly how it happens there are several theories that are out there as far as the actual mechanism goes But what is apparent in each of the different disciplines I looked into

03:49 Scent is intimately tied to memory so much so that for example Alzheimer's patients one of the first things that they'll notice is a diminished capacity To smell and it's not only tied to memory, but it's also tied to involuntary memory So not necessarily the ability to always remember but the inability to forget if that makes sense. Mm-hmm. So I If you ever encounter an odor that made an impression on you earlier in life, and most odors do in some form or fashion. Certain memories and certain emotions even associated with that odor will immediately be triggered. Scent is one of the first senses that actually... One of the first senses that comes online to newborn babies And it's intimately tied to our limbic system So it's like this knee-jerk reaction and when you're interested in these sort of topics of manipulation and deception It seems like it would definitely

04:37 Nice back door for some sort of intelligence or even you know on a more mundane level for you know earthbound. Organizations to sort of use this as a source of manipulation. Yeah, that was gonna be one of my first questions for you because the title the book The Brimstone Deceit I mean deceit implies some kind of trickery and i've heard You say in other interviews as well that it's a sense It's right for deception. I guess do you think that's a primary way? That smell is used in a lot of these strange encounters I would argue that it is, you know just so everybody knows. And I try to make it a point to say this every time I talk about the book The Brimstone Deceit sounds like some sort of conservative Christian like Robert Ludlow maybe or some sort of Dan Brown novel Yeah That's not what its about at all we can get into exactly why his title that later So yeah It does seem I mean if you look at a lot of paranormal phenomena in general there is this underlying

05:32 trickster aspect which i'm sure anybody who's familiar with it has run across in the past and the fact that sent can so clearly and pointedly shape our emotions and our perceptions I think is suggestive that this is possibly something that is being used to deliberately impart what is being used deliberately for manipulation one of my favorite anecdotes that came across in a book was this account of a small sort of wave of terror that went through this small Colorado town, of a spirit that was supposedly prowling the streets. And it was interesting because about half the people said that the spirit smelled like flowers and looked like a beautiful woman and half the people said that it looked like some sort of monstrous elephant and was shooting fire in the smell of brimstone from its trunk So I think that you know

06:26 Our expectations can be shaped a lot or have the potential to be shaped by the way that things smell. And if there was an intelligence, you know, be it extraterrestrial or spiritual or interdimensional or any of those things, it would make sense that this would be just another arsenal tool in the arsenal rather in order to manipulate us to their own ends. Yeah, I mean, I fully agree and so in this book you really break things down into three categories yet spirits aliens and UFOs And then cryptids another animal like creatures? And of course we know that plenty of these cases are gonna blur the lines a bit but smell wise can you break down some of the commonalities that pop up within these categories

07:10 Absolutely. So one of the reasons that the book is called The Brimstone Deceit is because probably the most common supernatural smell across all those, you know that spectra phenomena that you mentioned the smell of sulfur. Sulfur-oriented smells, the smell of brimstone I would hesitate to call it a majority of smells but i would definitely say a plurality of paranormal smells fall into that category now looking at that you sort of have to parse out exactly what that means because believe it or not pure sulfur does not smell sulfur only usually smells when its burnt or in certain compounds but sulfurous smells in general

07:47 Comprised the lion's share of what you run into in these paranormal accounts beyond that you'll find recurring themes of combustion a lot of times so Certain entities and things will smell like smoke one of the most common ghost smells is the smell of smoke But interestingly enough one of the most common smells in abductee alien abductee encounters Is the smell of burning hair? So you can have this combustion motif that sort of rears its head Floral smells are not uncommon. You find those in hauntings where there's allegedly a female spirit, you'll also find them in some early contactee literature. Then you have animalistic smells that run into with Sasquatch and stuff and then you also have this sort of minor motif of ozone occurring every now and then after exorcisms people claim to notice the smell of ozone and supposedly ectoplasm manifested in seances smells like ozone

08:37 shouldn't be any surprise to anyone who really follows UFOs that ozone is something of a minor meme in terms of the UFO smells. It crops up quite frequently, so it's interesting that there's a constellation of odors that tend to rear their heads time and again in these different phenomena which to me implies that there's perhaps some sort of if not shared origin of these experiences, these phenomena Perhaps shared methodology between the vanilla. Yeah, yeah I think that's a great little overview and something that did sort of surprise me that you've kind of mentioned beyond just the smell of sulfur is That female spirit entities often have a flowery or perfume like smell and male spirits tend to Smell like smoke which is interesting but um, you know should we really be assuming gender in 2017 Josh?

09:26 Well, you know as much as I like to take the piss out of stuff like that You know It's it is interesting because it sort of comes back to this idea of being manipulated this idea of our expectations Being formed by getting these sort of odors. You know, we're noticing these sort of odors in these encounters and If you take something like, for example smoking. It was just as prevalent among both sexes during a lot of the time periods that supposedly a lot of these hauntings come from—the 19th century or whatnot. And similarly on on balance, cologne has been used since antiquity. And yet whenever people smell smoke in a haunting they go oh it's the spirit of a man or you know whenever they smell some sort of pleasant smell they say oh it's just you know it's the spirit of a woman who is searching for her long lost lover something like that so

10:14 I can't help but, maybe it is that simple. Maybe it's just cut and dry. But if there was a possibility that something behind the veil would wish to impart some sort of gender-based assumptions upon a witness, it would make sense to use those things because of the way we frame them in our culture Mm-hmm. Yeah, and even when it's not deception on the part of the entity itself I mean smell seems to be kind of an area where people's personal testimonies? I would think wouldn't be quite as accurate is what they see or feel wouldn't you say yes It's quite difficult. I mean so people will talk all day about you know certain problems with eyewitness testimony You know even in something as mundane has a car crash

11:00 But you know smell is even more rife with some problems That's one of the things that was difficult to chip away when writing this book There is a phenomena that olfactory scientists talk about quite often, which is called the tip of the nose phenomenon. It's sort of a play on the term tip-of-the tongue where you can't quite think of a word but you know what the word is well similarly people will be able to identify an odor more than they can actually put words to what that odor is so you do run into things like people saying oh it smelled like, I saw the UFO depart and it smelled like lightning Well lightening doesn't have a smell but lighting creates ozone You know specifically to the trends that I noticed in the book People would often say it smelled like sulfur

11:40 Or it smelled like brimstone. Well again, as we said you know, brimstone sulfur doesn't really smell unless you burn it and that's actually sulfur dioxide or unless its present in decomposition and thats hydrogen sulfide so you have to sort of look for other context clues that people tend to include and lump in there So if someone were to say It smelled like sulfur Like a rotten egg well That definitely means hydrogen sulfide because wherever there is decomposition of organic material And absence of oxygen That's hydrogen sulfide. So it's really more about trying to get to the heart of what people mean rather than what they say in a lot of these encounters well decomposition of organic material is such a key phrase I mean that's kind of the point of Examining things from these kind of side angles is trying to get insight into the big picture I mean, what kind of clues does this sulfuric smell?

12:31 Give us into situations of paranormal encounters. I mean it must mean something the decomposition of organic material seems like a key phrase there. Yeah, it's interesting if you try to find some sort of overarching. theme to a lot of these different odors, you sort of become stuck on the idea of entropy. A lot of people describe decaying odors like Sasquatch smelling like rotten meat or sulfur again is one of the compounds that are released when there's organic decomposition. Burning and combustion are similarly entropic phenomena as well Sulfur specifically to that exact odor and the exact problems that it entails raises quite a few questions. For example, if these phenomena are capable of controlling the way they smell and they wish to not be noticed, then really couldn't have picked anything worse than sulfur! It's mind-blowing like...

13:23 I had to sort of rein myself in because when i was writing this, I kept on finding these interesting things that I could have just written a book on smell about. Because some of the stuff I found out about human smell and the way we interact with olfaction is really fascinating but to the point of sulfur... We are more sensitive to sulfur compounds than just any other compound, olfactorally speaking That's why household gas smells like it does Household gas is actually odorless which are sulfur compounds, are actually added to the gas to provide us a warning because the detection level for these compounds is so extremely low. My favorite example that I like to talk about is hydrogen sulfide which again has that rotten egg smell it's probably the most common of this sulfur smell as this rotten egg sort of odor and we're sensitive to our detection threshold for hydrogen sulfide is two parts per billion and put that in perspective

14:14 If I took an ink dropper and dropped it in the back of a semi-truck carrier filled with water, that drop of ink would be twice the concentration of two parts per billion. So yeah... It's 0.05 parts per billion not 2 parts per billion! Yeah we're fascinatingly sensitive to hydrogen sulfide That's wild, man. I mean this kind of built-in susceptibility to the sulfuric smell and its association with spirits is pretty odd it might be a clue it's interesting from a developmental perspective evolutionary perspective isn't it? Well...

14:52 To be fair, hydrogen sulfide which we can detect at half a part per billion is a very toxic gas. Theoretically any gas that you get more of than oxygen can be toxic but hydrogen sulfide is something that's actually quite dangerous and has been linked to some mass extinction events as well But then you have also look at the other things like sensitivity to sulfur compounds allows human beings to do. I mean, it allows us to avoid spoiled food which might get us sick It allows us to know when you know an aspect of our particular biome might be contaminated with something like feces or corpse or something So it's more about preserving hygiene in humans than anything else

15:34 That's fair. And let's step back to UFOs smelling like ozone. Ozone is a smell, I don't even know if i could identify that smell but... Is it different enough from sulfur that it could almost suggest we are dealing with two different categories? Well there's there's a real problematic history between ozone and sulfur. Ozone is one of those smells that I don't think anyone knows until... They recognize it, but they don't realize that they recognize it. That's the best way to put it There is a contentious history between sulfur and ozone specifically So in terms of classical literature, you know ancient Greek literature It was thought that The divine would hurl thunderbolts from the sky

16:17 the resulting smell was that of sulfur. Nowadays we know that's ozone, but this connection was so close that the terms for The Divine and Sulfur were actually linked — pheos in terms of The Divine and pheon in terms of sulfur which is where we got that term thiol that I mentioned later. You also see this echoed in Abrahamic thought where a lot of times in the Bible For example, whenever God seeks to cleanse something he uses sulfur. He uses fire and brimstone because sulfur was actually one of the first fumigants it's an antimicrobial agent so It was the idea of God wanting to cleanse away sin. It's kind of interesting that when Satan was supposedly cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, it had less to do with Satan smelling bad because he is evil and more this was God's attempt to cleanse Satan with the purifying essence of brimstone, of sulfur So you have this conflation between sulfur and the divine

17:10 and ozone coming from lightning bolts. And this conflation continued to the fact that even such people as Benjamin Franklin actually sort of conflated the two, talking about the smell of sulfur after lightning strikes. There was even some Victorian literature that used to say that the reason people would seek the sea air to be healed is because of the ozone in the air. Well, ironically enough it's actually dimethyl sulfide that we associate with the smell of the seaside so sulfur and ozone have been switched around quite a bit over the years I have a tough time believing nowadays that people would mistake ozone for sulfur you know if that's why i like to have those additional clues like saying it smelled like sulfur like a rotten egg because

17:52 If anyone has ever been near a lightning strike, it doesn't smell like a rotten egg. Ozone has more of a peppery quality." So you'll find a lot of people in the UFO literature who want to say well witnesses are just smelling ozone and mistaking it for sulfur. But you know, I kind of have a problem with that because if you're wanting to take their testimony on face value as it is, if you walk that logic back far enough, you're going to be saying that they saw a weather balloon. You're going to be saying they saw Venus because you're gonna constantly be casting doubt on them to discern what they are actually experiencing so I think it seems more likely to me that perhaps there is two different odors going on, both sulfur and ozone. It's interesting hydrogen sulfide and ozone are actually reactive together so it makes sense that perhaps

18:41 there would be some sort of interaction. For example, if you take hydrogen sulfide and ozone they react to form water and sulfur dioxide so again another common smell in UFO sightings is sulfur dioxide it's that sort of fireworks gunpowder smell we associate with sulfur And then you also have a lot of UFOs sighting near water So every aspect of this equation Hydrogen Sulfide Ozone Water and Sulphur Dioxide seen in a plethora of UFO encounters Yeah, man you're becoming quite the smell expert. It's pretty awesome but I hated chemistry in high school That's the ironic Well, I mean smell is definitely probably my most finicky sense because i have terrible allergies but again that age-old question is if a lot of these things are like aliens bigfoot encrypted are they physical creatures or something multi dimensional in nature and at least in that case because you talked about you know Bigfoot and some of the animal like cryptids having a terrible musk

19:41 Does this help in maybe separating flesh and blood cryptids from dimensional stuff? Well, you know I'm sort of reminded of the way a previous guest that I admire of yours Mike Cleland has sort of structured his research around owls So if you talk to someone like Mike You know a lot of what he talks about are how owls tends to appear around synchronicities around UFO events but at the same time Like sometimes the Owl's are weird and sometimes owls or just owls. Yeah, Mike was definitely admitting that Well, similarly I look at something like Bigfoot which even though a lot of the cryptozoologists out there don't want to admit it has a lot of weird stuff surrounding him. His eyes glow at night in some cases you know you find sets of tracks that disappear in the middle of fields people see big foot in conjunction with UFO sightings

20:34 So all these things sort of add up to me to suggest that we're seeing something that may not quite be a flesh and blood primate, even though I'm very sympathetic to that. But what's interesting is if you look at the sorts of smells that are encountered in these run-ins with Bigfoot they tend to roughly line up to being more sulfurous smells or more, you know non-organic sort of smells when a Bigfoot is seen in some sort of high strange capacity. When big foot has glowing eyes when big foot seems impervious to gunfire that's when you get these odors that aren't like animalistic odors and when you know bigfoot seems like a giant monkey running around the woods that's when you get people saying oh he smelled like ammonia or he smelled like urine he smelled like well

21:15 wet dog, he smelled like skunk etc. So perhaps we have some sort of phenomena that not unlike Mike Cleland's owls is using the iconography of a flesh and blood animal for whatever reason to present itself to witnesses on some occasions. That's the way I like to try and make everybody happy. I don't know if it will or not but you know... That's my take. Yeah, well you mentioned earlier entities inducing smells too and you do have a story in the book about A woman in England who claims she smells fish just before negative events in her life And that she considers that a warning from the spirits and that's obviously a nice thing to have but it also is a bit of an indication That they can induce smells if they so choose

22:02 I mean, yes. You do see incongruous smells popping up from time to time. Sometimes there are mundane explanations for it. For example, there's some people who claim to have noticed the smell of peppermint around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and as it turns out, peppermint was one of the things that they used to hang outside just sort of prevent the stench the battlefield, reaching the doors. So sometimes you have really easily explainable odors like that but then you do have stuff like the smell of fish or there's tales of for example Sasquatch supposedly changing odor mid-encounter being able to sort of self select what it smells like so it does suggest that there is some sort of

22:42 consciousness-based level at which these sort of odors are interacting with us. There was another example in the book of a pair of ghost hunters in Michigan who, one of them... they both could smell this particularly pungent body odor smell and the site that they were working at which was supposedly haunted but what's interesting is that one of them was anosmic. They actually couldn't smell this individual couldn't smell it all yet somehow this one odor was able to get through to them and was confirmed by their companion. So it's interesting, it seems to me that perhaps we're dealing with something that can sort of bypass a lot of these things and use this sort of olfactory information at a more intimate level. That's interesting man! And when it comes to other cryptids besides Bigfoot I mean of course bigfoot when it is thought to be a flesh-and-blood creature in that again when a person has an encounter if you kind of get to there

23:35 the category they want to put it in, they could maybe identify a smell that would fit there like a dank musk for Bigfoot if they think it's a real thing. But when it comes to other cryptids do we get that same dank musk smell reported? That would indicate something physical? Sometimes I mean on hairy hominids of all sorts or hairy humanoids is probably more accurate term of all sorts you do run into that so suppose the tales of goat men suppose the tales of dogmen you'll find that. But you also find, in equal parts this sulfur odor rearing its head with stuff like water cryptids like the Loch Ness Monster or Champ from Lake Champlain You tend to find more animalistic smells and the fishy reptilian sort of odor So it's interesting because the farther away you get from phenomena that could be explained in a materialistic flesh-and-blood sort of way The more this sulfurous odors creep into the picture

24:33 You know a lot of people hear that and I don't necessarily think they're wrong. It's not the path that i go down in the book but it's, I don't necessarily think they're wrong That implies some sort of demonic activity Where I come from is I'm not entirely sure we know enough about what demonic activity really is to even say you know oh its demonic well okay thats great What does that mean? Yeah it's a loaded term Yeah, it is. But you know it's interesting there definitely seems to be that the farther you stray from possible scientific explanations in a biological sense for a lot of these entities the more you do encounter odors that you wouldn't normally associate with these things. For example the chupacabra flap in Puerto Rico. A lot of times people say that the chupacabra not only smells like sulfur, but can also smell like paint thinner which isn't something you'd ever expect an animal to smell like so yeah the farther away you get from rational explanation the more these really odd outlier

25:22 Or odd non-organic smells creep into the picture. Yeah, chupacabra is a weird one I don't even think i know exactly what a chupacabra supposed to look like let alone smell like because The description seemed to range from a doglike creature To something more reptilian or even insect looking with spikes all over it It seems like a hard one to pin down yeah, it's kind of interesting you know the chupacabra in its current incarnation didn't really, I mean there was vampiric lore in Puerto Rico but it didn't really like completely congeal in the way that we think of the chupacabra until like the 90s in Puerto Rico and it was originally depicted as basically a little kangaroo-legged gray alien with spikes along its back. And would run around exsanguinating livestock specifically goats Chupacabras, the sucker of goat is what comes from

26:14 But unfortunately sometime suppose around like 2003 2004 someone shot a Canine with mange in Texas. Yeah, and saw it some pronounced canine teeth on it and said oh It must be you know that this must be the chupacabra so now people will refer to chupacabras as as being these sort of dog like creatures that are found in the Southwest. It's interesting, you know that a lot of these things are being shot in the southwest and being claimed to be chupacabras don't quite line up to coyote or or domestic dog or coyote domestic dog hybrid morphology, it's interesting to note that. But in terms of its connection to the Puerto Rican phenomena yeah and name only but you know let's go ahead and pursue this a little bit these Texas blue dogs is interesting some people have claimed that perhaps there is some sort of mutational

27:03 factor impacting these dogs on an embryonic stage and they're actually citing sulfur dioxide emissions from coal plants in South Texas. Again, sort of a tangential sulfur connection there even though the blue dogs don't smell there's still that sulfur connection that you can look for if you look hard enough Mm. Yeah, man And I also love this other slice of sightings that I guess could be called phantom animals or these big black cats and big black dogs Things you see at the crossroads which is a real provocative subject to me They say if you perform certain rituals at the crossroads You know you go there the first night To do the thing you come back the second night and it's common to see some Phantom animals lurking around and if that doesn't scare you out of coming back the third night

27:46 Then you meet the man himself and you can make some type of deal to be able to play guitar or whatever you need. But again, that sulfur smell comes up in some of these cases which helps indicate it's not some type of hallucination that there is something happening in these instances Yeah, I mean that's the other thing that I found really compelling is you know? I'm definitely one of these people who thinks that there is some sort of objective reality to Hallucinations quote-unquote hallucinations that are seen in altered states. I think sometimes I think it's like dreams You know, I think this sometimes you have big dreams and little dreams and your little dreams are like, you know I was walking down the street And a dog came up to me and shook my hand, you know and put a cream pie on my head, you know Just silly nonsensical dreams. I think sometimes they're big dreams that are profound that say something that has some sort of

28:34 That's sort of been a bump up against reality a little bit. Mm-hmm and similarly I think you know, you have little hallucinations in big hallucinations I think sometimes some of the things that people see an altered states are You know completely inconsequential, you know silliness and their byproducts of the brain But sometimes I think there is legitimate entity encounter in those States what's interesting to me? Is that? Hallucinated smells are not often if ever encountered Under the influence of psychedelics, for example. Yeah You do find it as you know as a neurological disorder But you don't find it as something that is produced As what we would you know assume an hallucination to be so it implies that as weird as these things get and as far out as I would like to Suggest the reality these things are there is an objective component to what they are Mm-hmm

29:29 Yeah man and you mentioned water monsters a little bit earlier and something that I thought was weird in the book is people refer to them as smelling like a snake which i don't even think is a smell I could identify either. You know, it's interesting. Have you ever been to like a pet store that specialize in reptiles? I'm sure I have at some point but not really that I recall. Well if you want to find out what a snake smells like just next time you see a reptile pet shop like just go in there and you will not forget it because that's a nasty smell! Again, It's one of those things when you look at the way people try to describe it

30:05 they tend to compare it to other things that it doesn't really quite smell like. People will say, you know, it's skunky They'll say it's musky or they'll say its musty which are terms that are really problematic in a completely different way because you normally associate Must with dust and musk with animals but at the same time You have male animals who are in must who are releasing musk so It's this complex thing. But whenever people try to explain that like something like the smell of reptiles, in the case of these water monsters like Champ from Lake Champlain they really do tend to grasp at straws which makes the whole thing you know more difficult to parse out exactly what they mean so a lot of this is best guess

30:47 Yeah, and it's kind of funny. It reminds me of a Lewis Black comedy bit where he talks about marketing in foods and he's like He talks about the word tangy and he's like they use this word tangy And it doesn't mean anything. It's a it's kind of a bullshit thing that marketers made up and kind of terms Like musty weird smells have kind of that same quality. It's like there's common words we use for them But when we get down to it, it's like well those are kind of Descriptors yeah, and it's I mean sometimes they're accurate but what they could possibly mean is that's a really wide margin. Yeah so and also obviously you have a lot of great encounters with cryptids peppered throughout the book is there a particular cryptid story that you like that you could tell us about?

31:37 Oh man, um well you know I so the primary part of this book is dedicated to spirits which i say spirits because that you know I wanted a lump demonology and you know supposedly being kind of with Satan stuff in there too. UFOs and Sasquatch, but you know there's an entire last chapter that's just sort of the catch-all. And I think one of my favorite cryptid encounters from that would have to be some of these really really strange cryptids that people see like flying cryptids? Yeah You know it's something that... It's easy to write off

32:17 Sasquatch is perhaps some sort of relict hominid, or it's easy to supposedly say that maybe Nessie is a plesiosaur or something. But you know, it's interesting to see these flying things and these sort of flying creatures. One of the interesting ones that I really always enjoyed hearing about was the Van Meter Visitor which was supposedly this gargoyle that descended upon this Iowa town in 1903 And basically for a couple of days I think it was just people were seeing this thing and there was the town doctor like shot at it with his shotgun and they were, I think there were even you know two of these things that were running around town. Everybody claimed that it just smelled awful. It smelled putrid, it smelled overpowering Of course frustrating for somebody like me They don't exactly say what that means because that could mean a lot of things Yeah But it's one of those weird stories that really doesn't seem to have a resolution I mean according to local lore They ran these things down in old mineshaft

33:11 But it's one of those things that I like because it doesn't fit into anybody's box. You know, there are people who come along and say oh that's all take that but i'll put that on my alien box but no it doesn't sorry yeah that's not it doesn't fit there you know i'll put that in my cryptid box nope doesn't fit there nothing in the fossil record like that i'm with you man yeah i love stuff like that The things that continue to stump people i-i love mm-hmm flying creatures are great because they are kind of the most epic and In a weird way they almost seem I mean, obviously there's not much of a fossil record but they almost seem more possible because they could get away quickly. They could hide maybe easier but there is one in the book that you talk about that i loved it's a sighting and uh chilean copper mine again mine associated with a flying creature but seen by multiple people which of course always like and when we're talking about mines were also talking about deep passages into the earth which is another sweet spot for me but they had this thing that flew over their heads

34:12 And it was described as having wings with brownish feathers, long snake-like body with bright scales and the head of a lobster. It smelled like burnt arsenic which you know good job identifying burnt arsenic. Yeah exactly let me try to remember what that smells like right? I love that one because it is one of those things the ufologist will come along and grab those and try to throw into the UFO basket but If it was a spaceship, I think people would have been more inclined – this was 1868. So the ideas of Jules Verne and dirigibles and things like that

34:48 they're kind of in the consciousness. And to say that it had a head of a lobster is just wonderfully... Apparently, it was a lobster-headed flying snake with thick hair and these brownish feathers and it was Chilean copper mine that appeared out in front of them. People thought it was the devil. Supposedly some people had remembered that years past it had appeared again but I No idea what to make of that no idea what to make it up Yeah, and almost sounds like they drilled too deep and unleashed some kind of Lovecraftian horror the elves do The dwarves rather delve too deep

35:25 I just love that one. And, you know there's other flying dragon-like sightings in the book too. Oh always thought dragon stories were interesting because they're so cross cultural and they could have possibly been survivors of the dinosaur era. As out there as that is we do have a history of an era that was dominated by large reptiles but what are your thoughts on the category of dragons? Do these sightings carry on today or do they seem to be like hundreds of years old in most cases You know, as much as I want to endorse the idea of possible dragon sightings. I do kind of love the idea of dragons being an amalgamation of what we feared as primates you know? We feared hawks and lizards so in our primitive ape brains we mashed those together into dragons these talon flying beasts as like the ultimate terror but yeah if you look hard enough people are still seeing things like dragons from time-to-time

36:20 I think Lon Strickler over at Phantoms and Monsters had something just as recently as maybe six, seven months ago where somebody in New Jersey or somewhere out in the Northeast supposedly saw this dragon flying through the clouds. One of my favorite stories from the book because it's sort of a direction that goes is supposedly in 1895, now of course these old newspapers you have to sort of take with a grain of salt. But supposedly in 1895 the newspaper around San Francisco mentioned that these children had been frightened by this dragon that was dwelling an abandoned mine and if you look at what the kids described they said that they smelled this musky odor coming off the dragon and they were gathering poppies so I kind of wonder if this isn't a thinly veiled maybe this was some sort

37:04 code for a drug pickup or something. San Francisco poppies, musky odor. Yeah but You know, you do find these stories and it's like anything that I talk about. Like i'm sure that 90% of the stories in this book are garbage but if there's even you know If there's even one percent Of the stories that I have in this book That have some sort of real truth to it then that's a huge deal Yeah So, you know you have to sort of... You have to get out your big interesting-if true basket and carry it around with you And chuck stuff in there as you go Yeah, I mean you might not see lobster headed flying serpents all the time But you only need one

37:41 Flying spaghetti monsters, I guess amen so to dig deeper into the aliens and UFO category You do say that a lot of thought has clearly gone into spirit smells But a lot of science has gone into the subject in the UFO category. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah So, I mean I love ghost hunters. I know some ghost hunters and I think that they have some of the best They have the most easily replicable job in terms of, you know The easiest wall to climb in terms of proving something because a lot of people are open to those ideas yeah but at the same time they have a tendency to take things and I think sometimes even worse than ufologists, which is kind of a thing that I wouldn't think I'd say but I think even you worse than UFO ufologist they have a tendency to Half grasp a scientific concept and run with it. So there I mentioned neurological You know experiences there is in your logical condition called phantasmia Which is the smelling of Phantom smells often associated with some sort of you know brain disorder

38:41 It's usually the harbinger of something worse in terms of someone's health coming down the pike But you know a lot of ghost researchers sort of latched on to that and said Oh phantasmia So whenever you smell a spirit, it's fantasma. No no no Phantasmia is smelled by one person if you have five people in a room smelling a smell that you can't identify That's not phantasmia I don't know what it is maybe as some sort of shared hallucination and maybe a spirit whatever but it's not phantasmia but But, you know, ufology on the other hand has had an interest in UFO smells for some time. There were some articles both in the early MUFON journals and in the Flying Saucer Review publication that really did try their best to break apart exactly what it could mean again this is

39:20 a couple of articles that were dedicated to this. I think that somebody should have written this book, but they wrote it long time ago because it seems like a good starting point. But you did find some people talking about it. But the best work that I have personally found on the subject is something in more recent years was an essay that I believe was completed in 2000 by a ufologist by the name of Antonio F. Rulan and a lot of what he did was sort of foundational to this work And he determined that a lot of the symptoms, he was one of the first people to really categorize a lot of the symptoms that people had in terms of the way the smell would interact with them. Watering eyes, feeling ill, feeling nauseous, these sort of things. He came to the conclusion that in at least some cases that sulfur compounds were indeed at play as well which runs counter to a lot of old guard ufology and a lot of old guard ufology

40:09 Felt that there were more, you know Machine based smells like the smell of burning hydrocarbons again The smell of ozone John Keel was one of the few people who really said You know It smells like it smells like sulfur but yeah So I have to take my hat off to Antonio on that because it was one of those things where I'm like this is This has got to be you know Referenced with due reverence in the book because of the great work that he put forward. Yeah and The alien thing is just so interesting because last time we talked about aliens possibly being a modern technological skin on the long history of fairy-like encounters. But this book kind of does look at aliens more from the standard ET hypothesis perspective, I guess i'd ask you if the study of smells did it objectively move the needle for you at all in this question or are you still right there in the middle? I mean yeah yeah it did anybody that

41:03 listens to me on any of my shows, knows that I'm still pretty sour on the ETH. But the extraterrestrial hypothesis is treated much more kindly in this book than it was in A Trojan Feast and honestly some of this stuff kind of does sort of suggest more of an extraterrestrial solution even though I still don't think that's the case. It opened me up to it for example One of the compelling things to me is that meteorites and moon dust are often compared to gunpowder smells. Some astronauts said that whenever they would return to the lander, that the moon dust on their shoes smelled just like someone had fired a carbine in the capsule

41:45 That again lines up with some of these tales of you know sulfur dioxide which we know We haven't really talked about too much But is is that sort of firework gunpowder smell that you do find with some UFO cases? Mm-hmm You can also look at the fact that, you know If we had not become carbon based life forms in terms of you know abundant materials It's highly likely that we could have become sulfur based life forms. What sort of implications would that have for odor? In terms of extraterrestrials from other star systems So it made me more sympathetic to it Still doesn't mean I'm on board. You know, I'm still very much of a spirit world fairy kind of guy if you were to hold my feet to the fire but it did definitely warm me up a little bit

42:25 I'm right there with you, man. It's been a while since anything has pulled me back towards looking at these encounters with beings as actually aliens from another galaxy but the data in the book did a little bit because when people say aliens smell like ozone or other types of chemicals it's got to make you wonder is this some odor related to the crafts they're using? Usually UFOs are described as some kind Electro gravitic technology maybe that order is a byproduct of it or maybe pop in and out of dimensions are portals if they're using that for travel puts off that smell. It's a curious thing yes its one those sort of things where,

43:06 If you look at these sort of possibilities that are opened up, it's impossible to really catalog and go down each of those roads. I try my best to say okay well conventional aircraft, unconventional aircraft, natural phenomena...I think there is something to be said that a lot of Earth flights happen around earthquakes and people say that a lot of earthquakes release sulfurous volcanic gases And then, you know the extraterrestrial hypothesis maybe it's that but you know there's only so many hours in the day. You can only devote so much time to each of those different possibilities and then who knows? Maybe the black budget world has discovered a way to run unconventional aircraft on rotten eggs and they just release a stream of fart across the sky as a chemtrail. Maybe that's something... Just stuff we can't even comprehend could be the explanation for this. So it makes it a little bit more frustrating than I thought it would be to begin with

43:57 Right, it's always more maybes. But in terms of stories you have one that I thought was really interesting took place on November 11th 1987 so in my lifetime I always like the ones that don't have to go back You know hundreds of years but this guy Ed Walters and Gulf Breeze Florida I guess he saw a UFO is trying to get closer to it And he was stopped by a beam that he said smelled like cinnamon mixed with ammonia That's a weird one It is. It's interesting because if you look at... So the Ed Walters case is a pretty famous case, it's sullied a little bit because

44:34 Apparently, someone who moved into Walter's home later found a model of the UFO that looked suspiciously like some that were seen in some photographs that Walter had taken. But if you look at that description cinnamon and ammonia... The cinnamon sort of lines up with some of the things that Whitley Strieber said but also, you know, that cinnamon and ammonia both have this interesting quality that I noticed with a lot of odors which is they are both strong stimulants of the trigeminal nerve So if you look at sort of the odors in a lot of these paranormal phenomena, it's really does sort of... A line falls down the middle where it's either sulfur odors and non-sulfur odors. And what was interesting is that when you look at the non-sulfur odors, a lot of them seem to be strong stimulants for the trigeminal nerve. Now if anybody doesn't know what that is, go to your kitchen open up your jar of vinegar and take a big whiff and tell me how you feel. Well that's your trigeminal nerve! It's what makes spicy food spicy and cold food cold

45:29 It's actually one of the largest nerves in the face. It actually controls a lot of facial movement So I thought that was sort of an interesting avenue to look into is what are some implications of the fact that some these odors tend to be strong stimulants of the trigeminal nerve and it seems to me there perhaps could be some sort of stimulating quality Might be essential to the experience. I don't know how coy I should be about About my conclusions, but um, I think that's a not inconsequential detail Yeah, I was gonna get that I do love that part That the sense the trigger that nerve in our nose are the same ones associated with these strange phenomenon I mean that can't be an accident

46:13 Yeah, I don't think so Again like the things. I find it. It's always really compelling to me whenever this is my second book but Whenever I'm writing the most compelling things always just fall into my lap, you know One of the most compelling things I think about the last book was this idea that a lot of these entity foods Corresponded to this sattvic diet. This diet that was favored by Hindu mystics and holy men Yeah And this whole trigeminal nerve angle was again one of those things is completely found on my lap and I said oh That's it. That's an interesting connection. And yeah, I think that it's even more interesting when you view how

46:49 Those particular odors, you know a fall on the spectrum with what certain sulfur odor specifically hydrogen sulfide You know can do in terms of well you if you want to get into that we can't yes. That's fine Well, absolutely. It is something we sort of all know but overlook this connection between altered states and smell because we've seen movies where an unconscious person has woken up with smelling salts And there are also smells that can knock a person out? And it's interesting that certain odors can almost act as an on-and-off switch for waking consciousness! Maybe there's a clue there because the connection between psychedelics in these contact experiences

47:29 Really resonates with me and this could just be a natural parallel. Maybe instead of eating mushrooms certain smells can be released that facilitate these weird contact experiences Yeah, I mean it's really interesting because smell is again... It's also a good metaphor for the paranormal. You know it surrounds us but we can't always see it but we can sometimes detect it and influences us even if we don't realize it. But specifically in terms of what we're talking about here yeah you talked about smelling salts all these trigeminal stimulants are actually stimulants in that capacity. The reason that smelling salts work is because they are strong trigeminal stimulants, so they sort of end up shocking you awake there's sort of like an emergency button but your body is able to press whenever their hit with it and it's interesting if you compare that to sulfur smells the most common of which is hydrogen sulfide and about well seven years ago now this 2017

48:24 Some researchers were actually able to induce suspended animation in mice by using carefully monitored amounts of hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide, which again is a poisonous gas so don't go home and do this... Don't try this at home kids! But they were actually able to induce suspended animation these mice they basically rendered them cold-blooded if I recall correctly they actually dropped their breathing to 10 breaths per minute from, you know 120 breaths per minute as mice and they brought their body temperature down all the way to 51.8 degrees Fahrenheit so I mean basically it's a suspended animation By definition would be an altered state of consciousness This isn't to say that hydrogen sulfide is you know a hallucinogen? It's not which is the reason again don't try this at home kids

49:12 But if you are in that state, it would by definition be an altered state of consciousness. So what my suggestion is is that perhaps this is sort of a way of setting the stage for something else to come in and do its thing And then when I want one wants to pull you out of that You get hit with the trigeminal stimulant and it brings you out of that facilitates a quick rapid return to your normal State of wakefulness Yeah I think you're really on to something there. And, I loved that suspended animation portion because that data is just so interesting clearly there's some relationship that we just don't understand yet Oh absolutely what's fascinating to me is that it's something that you know was literally used as a chemical warfare agent

49:59 If you're really careful with it could, you know possibly be the secret to unlocking You know trips of the stars. Mm-hmm. You know It's amazing that something that volatile can be that useful at the same time I love it Man, so again kind of trying to wrap this thing together. I mentioned this in the intro but it does seem like focusing on these little details does give us clues into the big picture we talked about a lot of the insights in both areas you know over the course of these two shows We've done But are there any other ways in which you think about? These phenomenon differently after writing these two books that you have then rather than way You thought of them before

50:41 Yeah, I mean. I was always aware that there was a level of theater and Manipulation involved you know the idea that we are allowed to see these things in a lot of these cases especially in you know the Especially in the UFO phenomena and the ghost phenomena And I think that's just really been strengthened but even more so to the point that I think that We're allowed to see it end Things are specifically made to resonate with us because I think we are inextricably a part of these things.

51:17 we are connected to these particular phenomena in a way that I think is, um...that shares the burden of the way that we see it. And what I mean by that is I think that—to quote my good friend Greg Bishop—I think we bring things to the dance when we see these things. I think we see something that is so alien in the dictionary sense of the word, in terms of being foreign to us, that we try our best to understand it and we draw upon Whatever clues that we can to sort of fill in the missing blanks be they pop culture be their culture of our you know Of our own ethnicity, uh, be they um You know be they something from perhaps from a collective unconscious whatever is happening is We are meeting this thing halfway and that has been really strengthened by by what I've been seeing over the past couple years. Mm-hmm Great point

52:08 Right on, man. Well fascinating stuff as always before we go do tell the people about anything else you got going on or where they can keep up with you in this mad mad world Well, you can hop on to joshuacutchen.com I keep a list of every interview i've ever done there You also can find links there to both books A Trojan Feast and The Brimstone Deceit If you don't want to navigate my website you can just hop on over to Amazon or Barnes & Noble It's available... Both books are available in paperback and kindle formats So Trojan Feast is actually available in hardcover as well

52:43 And you can catch me on more or less a weekly basis at the where did the road go podcast? Which is where did the Road go calm and I'm on there frequently with red pill junkie and Micah Hugh and Micah Hughes Mike Hughes and Soraya as cat doing a bunch of roundtables, and I get a chance to rattle on they're so It didn't like to thank you Greg for having me out here. It's always There are interviews that I do where I'm like, okay. I'm gonna do this and I'm just gonna find my way through it And then there are interviews that actually get excited about this is this is one of those so thank you for having me back I really appreciate it awesome man You are too kind It is my pleasure your the man keep doing what you do and take care out there Thanks so much Greg take care

53:28 There we go, Hireside Chatters. Joshua Kutchin, the sensation, sensation! A lot of people have been asking me to go back to paranormal and cryptozoology and I do love that stuff but it's hard to find new angles in stories that most enthusiasts haven't heard before but Josh, JC Johnson, Lyle Blackburn, Linda Godfrey those are some great episodes but it is just tough Mike Clelland and the owl angle was good recently, and Josh's food-based and smell based approaches are also interesting. Smell does get a bit more vague and broad but there were some aspects that really clicked for me the smell of decay and decomposition in certain situations I guess it might be sort of expected but it also kind of speaks to the mechanism behind those accounts

54:16 Maybe the clues around odor and the abduction experience do actually suggest that it's its own phenomenon. Personally, I've started to think of those things more as occult or magic based but i still like to come back to the traditional angle once in a while because I would never try to be so arrogant as to say I figured it out! I just lean towards long-standing maybe earth based encounters told through different cultural lenses Either way, Josh is a great guy who clearly works hard and does like to bring new things to the table. Rather than the way some people can phone it in and just churn out a bunch of paranormal books his are both really in-depth

54:59 And the suspended animation stuff that we ended the first hour with is really fascinating, isn't it? Of course smells and their connection to altered states. Also got to get a kick out of that! Kinda weird because obviously we know we can ingest something or smoke something and reach an altered state but just an odor... I mean its clear when you think about it but definitely something I often forget Again, all these sorts of sightings from goat suckers to lobster-headed angels. I think altered states are a big part of these things Maybe the endogenous DMT dumps aspect is in play? I hear these things and I do take people at their word but critics do say well Where's the physical evidence where is the fossil record for Bigfoot and you're just not gonna get anywhere like that It's not gonna fit in the materialist box But that doesn't make it any less valid

58:09 Might as well get plus now so you're locked and loaded. Anyway, I've done my part your move smelly spirits aromatic aliens and odorific entities Your fucking move. Woke up this morning with light in my eye And then realized it was dark outside It was like coming down from the sky I don't know who or what Must be those strangers that come every night Whose saucers shaped light put people uptight Leave blue-green footprints that glow in the dark

59:14 I hope they get home. Hey, Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along? I won't do anything wrong Hey, Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along the high side Woke up this morning

59:54 I was feeling quite weird, I had flies in my beard My toothpaste was smeared. I opened my window they'd written my name Said so long we'll see you again Hey Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along? I won't do anything wrong Hey, Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along the higher side Hey, Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along

1:00:58 I won't do anything wrong Hey, Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along the higher side?