25:34 concretizes that process of the supernatural experience. I have a good summary for it, so the authorial event is the highly improbable experience, a fairy or cryptid sighting maybe even a brush with death that is an integral and crucial part of human development Even 150 years ago, nearly everyone had such experiences. The less time children are exposed to the full range of probabilities, the more coddled and sentimentalized the fewer chances they have to exercise their sense of the supernatural and write their own narrative." What I mean by that is that any kind of liminal exploration that children get into...I think one of the more popular ones for boys was like exploring the underground like going into sewers and things in crawling around
26:26 or exploring an abandoned house or construction site and finding a weird bug, you weren't sure if it really existed. And you would go home and look it up in a book maybe couldn't find it like was that a monster? Did I actually see that? That actually happened to me a few times so these kinds of things are formative events that really change us. In the more extreme examples I give are sort of ufo visitation that's why i start the article with that experience yeah i was actually gonna ask you to lay out the details of the charles hewitt encounter did you cover because it's just a fun case study and also represents a lot of important things that usually come up in these reports.
27:14 Yeah, it's a pretty typical case. So you've got Charlie Hewitt he is home alone during vacation time like around Christmas he is up at 2am probably past his normal bedtime so everything is very highly liminal His parents aren't around they are on vacation in Florida and if you remember how that felt its kind of almost magical space right? It's very strange even when your 15-16 years old it's a very special time being left to your own devices with parents in another state, maybe halfway across the continent. Right you're doing what you'd always do but the net is gone Yeah and you can feel that it's very palpable so he starts to feel this impulse to look outside He goes up to the blinds and then he sees this police car just sitting there with lights off just sitting there in front of his house And this is a quiet neighborhood There's no reason for their to be a police car there So he gets another impulse to go outside
28:14 He opens the door, he walks down the driveway and while he's walking he feels like he hits this wall or that he just crosses into this bizarre dream world. He describes it as he suddenly felt half awake. He calls it like he was in a virtual reality like in The Matrix and this can be related sort of to The Oz Effect but its very extreme instance of it so you get that sort of hyper real and unreal at the same time contrasting opposites of these little zones that are created during high strangeness encounters. So all of a sudden he sees, he looks under the car and he sees that both officers are grinning at him with these really like big sinister grins identical, he calls it a really weird smile an insane smile like crazy and dangerous so at the moment he's staring at them and then the car disappears it fades out there was this egg-shaped object
29:10 He tries to run, he freaks out. It's like a dream time starts to slow until you can't move until it is completely frozen everything goes dark now using the backyard suddenly and then the two policemen are now the men in black stereotype not the ones from the movie but the real one weird like no eyebrows they look kind of like golem little bit very pale they barely look human And so they take him up onto what now looks like a UFO. So the egg-shaped object, whatever that was is no longer there. There's an actual classic UFO waiting for him. He gets shackled to the bed, surgical scrubs put on him and then you know the three classic small hairless figures come in with large black eyes. They touch them and they give him this vision of post World War III where it's complete extinction
30:05 And then another vision follows where it's Earth millennia later, everything is reclaimed by nature. There is wildlife everywhere, animals living in harmony and you can even see human pets are thriving as well and that left him with this very distinct sentiment that he now has like as a person. It's that an Earth without humans wouldn't be so bad Like even though he like senses it's a tragedy, but he has been completely alienated from his own sort of default alignment with humans. This isn't a depressed goth kid that is cutting himself this is you know normal kid right? So the kind of harrowing depressing experiences like four years just being an outcast in high school or I say like four years being at university
30:57 where you become completely alienated, you know, you become a vegan or something and you become guilty about being human and fantasize about the world being taken over by animals. That kind of self-degradation occurred in maybe 30 minutes highly condensed individuation period where he's now transformed and he's got these really depressing thoughts in his head but he feels good about them right? He has positive emotions about a world without humans. So that kind of rapid catastrophic adaptation or mutation to a person, those kinds of things often happen in paranormal experiences and they're not always like that there some of them are very positive people come out of them with new abilities sometimes they become more productive so some of them are very positive I point this out because i believe that before like the wall of childhood amnesia
31:57 everybody has sort of similar experiences. Very, very strange experiences are happening like an imaginary friend that maybe sometimes they can actually move objects on their own or very I would say surprising things like things that if you could remember would just sort of shake your adult mind to its core. Like you would not really the sort of overlapping world of imagination over the real kind of all the time and I do think those experiences we derive a lot of our sense of the supernatural from those pre-childhood amnesia, like basically it's around five years old for most people. For some people it's about three but when those things occur later on in life they're almost like an update to that. They have that same effect where its alters or enhances our sense of supernature, our sense of higher reality and sort