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Interview explores the personal accounts of Native Americans and “Star People”.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke author of, Encounters with the Star People: Untold Stories of American Indians. During the interview Clarke talks about how a spiritual worldview affects the accounts she’s collected:

Alex Tsakiris: If we unpack these experiences with American Indians that you’re talking about, we assume going in that there’s a different spiritual orientation. I think we assume—whether this is true or not—that in American Indian cultures there’s are a different set of givens. What would you say about that? Is that true? Is that a misconception? And, how might that play into these accounts of encounters with alien beings?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: Well, I think again you have to separate tribes. There are some tribes where it’s forbidden to even speak the name of a dead person. Where in other tribes they believe that when someone dies they stay with them for a year. Their spirit remains with them for a year and then after a year they hold a ceremony to release that person. They have ceremonies where they can speak with those who have passed on. They have ceremonies where they can speak with the Ancients or where the Ancients come to them and give them knowledge and answer their prayers or their questions.

So it depends on the tribal group, and it’s difficult for me to say, as a general rule, there is this spiritual connection. But there definitely is with some of the tribes. There’s no question about it. Some of the tribes actually talk about the trip across the Milky Way. That when you die you cross the path of the Milky Way. You’ve got a common theme there that the cosmos plays so much a part in afterlife and death and the ability of the deceased that they never really die. They just move on into another dimension and that they can come back and communicate with the living.

Alex Tsakiris: See, I just think no matter what subtle differences you might have in that worldview, I think a worldview that incorporates this spiritual dimension puts you in a completely different place in terms of dealing with the UFO phenomena.

Dr. Ardy Clarke: I do, too, because Native people on a whole are accepting of it. They aren’t skeptical of it. So if you approach it from a perspective that it is part of the universe and that it’s nothing to fear, then that’s one view. But to be skeptical of it and not believe what you’ve seen or to deny that it occurs is a totally different worldview.

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Today we welcome author and Professor Emeritus from Montana State University, Dr. Ardy Sixkiller-Clark to Skeptiko. Dr. Clarke has a long, distinguished academic career working with indigenous populations and is here to talk about her fascinating new book, Encounters With Star People. Dr. Clarke, welcome to Skeptiko. Thanks so much for joining me.

Dr. Ardy Clarke: It’s my pleasure.

Alex Tsakiris: Dr. Clarke, tell us about your book. Obviously how you came to write it. Maybe a little bit about the methodology you used. You’ve worked for a long time with Native Americans and are familiar with some of the cultural aspects of that. How did you come to write this book?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: Well, when I first came to Montana State University one of my roles in addition to teaching was I was a director at the Center for Bi-Lingual, Multi-Cultural Education. What the Center did was I would write grants through the Center to recruit Native students to come to Montana State University to become teachers and principals and superintendents. I had gone out to one of the reservations in Montana and had met with a group of students.

The person who helped me out on-site invited me out to dinner. After dinner he said to me, “Do you have some time? I want to show you something.”

I said, “Sure.”

He took me up in the mountains above his village and he parked his car and he reached over and he got a pair of binoculars and he said to me, “If we’re lucky they’ll come.”

I said, “Who will come?”

He said, “Well, the ancestors.”

So we sat on this boulder and we watched the night sky and he told me stories about things that had happened to him and his wife, and his interaction with Star People. Well, I had heard these stories when I was a little girl, as well, so when I left the reservation that night, all the way back to the university I was thinking about, ‘I’ve heard these stories. He heard these stories. How many other Native people have heard stories and have stories to tell?’

So I traveled a great deal, both going to conferences and speaking at conferences and conventions, going out to do research, and to recruit. So what I did was I started putting out feelers. If I went out to dinner with people in the evening I’d say, “Do any of you have star stories? Have any of you ever had experiences with Star People? Have you seen UFOs or anything like that?”

I began collecting stories. Over time, I collected almost 1,000 stories in a 20-year period. They ranged from stories among Native Americans in the 48 states and Alaska because I grouped Hawaii with the South Pacific group. Many of their stories were very similar to what I was finding throughout the South Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand. Then I focused on the Maya in Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. Although I did have stories that came from the Zapatec, the majority of the stories came from Central America and Mexico and involved the Mayan people.

That’s how I got started. I had basically just put the research away. At the university I had other things to do and this was just my own personal interest. It was done on my own personal time. So after I retired from the university, a tribe contacted me and asked me if I would come out of retirement and do a major project for them. It was a five-year project. I had gone back to Washington, D.C. because it involved a huge grant, and I’d gone back to D.C. and been trained on what they expected me to do and then I went to the reservation.

While I was on the reservation, I had lunch with a group of women. I was still trying to decide whether I wanted to take this job or not because a five year commitment is a really long time. It involved a lot of travel and a lot of time spent away from home. So as I was having lunch with this group of women, we began to talk. I don’t know how the subject of UFOs came up, but I began to tell them some of the stories that I had collected.

One of them said, “Well, what are you going to do with this?”

I said, “Probably nothing.”

She said, “Well, you can’t do that. This is a part of our oral history. You have to put this down so that people will know.”

So on my way back home I got to thinking, ‘Do I want to spend the next five years of my life doing research and evaluation, which is what I’ve been doing for 30 years at Montana State University? Or do I want to write this book?’ Obviously I chose the latter. I decided to write the book, and not only to write this one but I hope to do two more. One on the Maya and the indigenous people of Central America and Mexico and one on the indigenous people of the South Pacific.

Alex Tsakiris: It sounds like you certainly have a lot of material. You know, before we jump too far ahead I thought the first part of that account you just gave was rather interesting. That’s that these stories immediately resonated with your own personal history. Again, if we pull that out of context I don’t know that most people in the United States today or in Europe or in the Western World would at all relate to the idea of being connected to the Star People. What do you make of that? What did that stir up in you? What had you done with that?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: As I was growing up as a child, my grandmother told me a story that the Star Men came to Earth and they lived with the Sun Women. The Sun Women were the women of Earth. A time came when the Star Men had to leave the Earth and the women of Earth were very upset. So a council was held and it was decided that those who wanted to stay could stay behind and those who wanted to return to the stars could return to the stars.

So my grandmother would say to me, “You are a descendent of those Star People and the people of Earth.” And that all of us have a special plan for us on this Earth for that reason. So for me it was a story that I was told and as I grew older, of course, I put those stories away. They were the stories of my childhood. When I became an adult it had no impact on my life until I met this individual who told me his personal story. Of course, that brought back all of these stories of my childhood.

Alex Tsakiris: And I think that gets at something that’s right below the surface of this book because one of the reasons we get excited about this book, that is to hear the stories from Native Americans, is that we think as non-Native Americans that there’s something different about this culture. Something different about their orientation to the world, to their worldview. And maybe that’s true; maybe that’s not true. I’m sure it’s both.

But I think we have to be careful with how we unpack that, don’t we? Especially you as someone who has spent your professional academic career in both worlds at Montana State University in academia but also in working with indigenous people. How do we approach that with sensitivity but also with a desire to gain the benefit of the cultural differences, as well?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: I think that’s the thing I was always sensitive to. First of all, I didn’t want to be branded at Montana State University as some psycho professor who was out there advocating belief in UFOs. But at the same time, in the Native community I wanted to be credible. I think that was the key to my success with Native people is that what I did is I just put feelers out.

I didn’t go and attempt to coerce anyone into telling their stories. Some of the people, as I revealed in the book, I’d known for 25 years before they ever told me their story. It was that waiting and watching and even though I was part-Native myself, there was that credibility test that I had to pass before the stories came forth. I hope that that shows in the book that the people who confided in me were people who trusted me.

Alex Tsakiris: Do you have an example from the book where that was the case? Where someone didn’t come forward for a long time and then came forward with a pretty amazing story?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: Well, I think the story that Harrison tells of the craft that crash-landed on his grandfather’s ranch in a remote section of the reservation and the survivors lived there until they were rescued sometime later. He took me to the ranch; he showed me where the event occurred. He told me about how when he was a boy he had boarded the craft and what he saw and what he felt. His grandfather, he wanted to remove things from the craft and his grandfather wouldn’t allow it because he said it was sacred.

Then having the Corps of Engineers come in at a later time and build a dam which literally destroyed any evidence of the craft. His grandfather always believed that as they were excavating the land there that they had discovered the craft and had taken it away. Now this was back in the ‘40s and obviously when I talked to him about it he said there were very few cars on the reservation at that time. He said people would stand beside the road and just watch this equipment go by because they were so enthralled and fascinated just by the size of the equipment and the vehicles that were passing by.

So he said they could have removed anything. His grandfather always felt that was what had happened. But his grandfather was also very pleased that he had kept it a secret, that he had somehow protected them from the outside world, and that they had lived there free of observation and free of detection on his land and he was the one who had done that.

I had known Harrison for 25 years. I had gone onto the reservation as a consultant, sent there by the university because the school district in the community was attempting to get a bi-lingual education grant funded from the Federal government. They had a number of children in the school district that did not speak English. They spoke only the Native language.

Harrison resented that. He was a cultural person and the one that everybody turned to, so he resented what he considered university interference. So it took time to gain his trust. Over the years we became close and became friends but it took him 25 years before he told me this story. And I have no doubt whatsoever that what he told me was true.

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s get to that. I think that you have a certain credibility that comes through, not only with Native American tribes but in your work, a longtime, highly-regarded academic who is not only familiar with the university but is working with government programs and has the credibility that goes with that. I do think it’s interesting in a couple of ways. It sounds like you were the only person who really could have written this book. I mean, it takes a certain tenacity to stay with this thing for that long, but also the kind of trust that’s required.

What comes through is that these folks who you collected these stories from don’t fit the normal profile of people who are putting forth a UFO story either because it was the most traumatic thing in their life or because they have some other kind of ulterior motive. It sounds like there was a different agenda here in terms of these people. A lot of them have incorporated it into their life just fine and brought it out because you probed, right?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: Right. It was a story that they had shared perhaps with family and friends. Some of them had never told anyone. I think just my presence and when they told me the story I never tried to interject any personal opinions into what they were telling me. I let them tell the stories without judgment. I’m a social scientist; I’m not in the hard sciences so I wasn’t demanding in terms of, “Well, where’s your proof? You’ve got to have some kind of proof.” I wasn’t looking for that. “You tell me your story. You tell me what happened and I will listen.”

Alex Tsakiris: You did something that’s much more valuable. You just gathered a lot of these first-person accounts. When we really sort through them and sift through them we can start looking for the same kinds of patterns that let us know whether they’re reliable accounts. I think that’s a lot better than tracking down some ticky-tacky photos or little remnants that someone has of it. I don’t want to say that, because both can be valuable and you do have some first-person experience that you had with trace phenomena and all the rest of that. All of it’s good.

Dr. Ardy Clarke: I think both approaches are valuable but I think that hard science often criticizes social scientists. I’ve had some of that. I didn’t set out from the perspective of trying to attack or criticize or delve into motivations or “Where’s your proof that this happened,” that kind of thing. I just recorded the stories. I think because of that I got some very honest, open accounts of what occurred.

Of course, I think the trust that came along with that was the guarantee that I would not reveal the identities of the individuals. Down the road, if some of them want to come forward and say, “Hey, I’m the person in Dr. Clarke’s book,” that’s fine. But I committed to anonymity and I intend to honor that. Many of the people who actually told me the stories have passed now. These stories go back 20 to 25 years.

Alex Tsakiris: What’s been the reaction from within the Native American community about the book?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: Nothing. I haven’t heard anything from the Native community.

Alex Tsakiris: Anything positive like they want more stories or negative like, “Gee, I wish you wouldn’t have brought that out?”

Dr. Ardy Clarke: I haven’t heard anything from the Native community. I’ve had a couple of emails attacking me because I used the term, “American Indians” in the book instead of Native Americans. They were saying, “If you were really a Native American you wouldn’t call Indians American Indians.” Although the book, in the very front of the book, I explain why I used the term “American Indian.”

Several years ago, back when I was still in academia, there was a group of us who were Native researchers who decided that we were no longer going to use the term “Native American” in our discussions in general about Native Americans because we based it upon the fact that the term “Native American” was increasingly being claimed by those individuals who were born within the United States, regardless of their ethnicity. So when we would say we were Native American, somebody who was not of American Indian heritage would say, “I’m a Native American, too. I was born here.”

Alex Tsakiris: I’m six generations Native American, right.

Dr. Ardy Clarke: So what we decided to do, along with the award-winning journalist Tim Giago, who was the founder and editor of The Lakota Times and Indian Country Today and Native Sun News, we decided that even though Indian is a misnomer, for generic purposes we were going to use the term “American Indian” because any politically-correct thinker who believes “Native American” is the preferred identification tag for any tribe is wrong.

We prefer to be called “Lakota” or “Northern Cheyenne.” By our names but if not, “American Indian” is an acceptable term because of the Native American. And I think rightfully so. People who are born here have the right to consider themselves Native Americans. So there have been some attacks along that way toward me but obviously the people who attacked me hadn’t read the book, or at least not my explanation of why I used that term.

Alex Tsakiris: What’s been the reaction from within the UFO community?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: If you talk about the UFO community, the people who are in power and the people who you see their names at conferences—total silence. Whitley Strieber has certainly been positive but I’m not sure he’s a part of that community as such. My leaders have been just absolutely unbelievable. The accolades and the reviews and comments and emails I get have been not one negative one from any of those.

Alex Tsakiris: Where I’d like to go next, I do think that the UFO phenomena, the ET phenomena, is really an important part of what’s evolving as our culture, our understanding of who we are. Obviously how we fit into the world, what this thing called consciousness is. So what I thought was interesting about your book without this even being the purpose of your book, is you shatter some of the paradigms that are most prevalent within that UFO community.

For example, let’s start with the whole origin of the ET phenomena. There’s this debate. Did the ETs arrive in 1947 with the explosion of the nuclear bomb and then the crash at Roswell? Is this a recent phenomenon? What would your over 1,000 first-person accounts tell us about answering that question? The “when” question in terms of this phenomena?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: I think for a majority of the people I interviewed, their opinion is they’ve always been here. That it’s not a new phenomenon. They have been visiting Earth for many, many eons. One person said, “Before the beginning of time,” when he was telling me some of the ancient stories. He said these stories go back before the beginning of time. They are the old, old stories. Of course, I don’t include those in the book but what he was saying to me is that this is nothing new. We’ve always had interaction with the people from the stars.

But I also met other people from different tribes who had no connection or no stories that were related to that. It would appear that, depending upon the tribal group, that also varied. I don’t know if you read it but one story, the young man who told me about his grandfather who, when he was a young man, helped bury an alien in the desert. And this was before Roswell.

Alex Tsakiris: I don’t remember the story.

Dr. Ardy Clarke: The young man who told me about his grandfather that buried the alien along with some other teenaged boys. They found him wandering in the desert and he died and they just buried him and never told anyone. They considered that Star Person to be a messenger from the Sky Gods. So they buried him. It’s just a totally different kind of relationship that we’re talking about here.

Alex Tsakiris: Another aspect of the ET/UFO phenomena that we’re constantly trying to get our arms around, once you cross the chasm and say, “Okay, there is something here that we need to study and we need to understand,” let’s jump over there. All the rest is kind of silly to ignore it.

Are we talking about a nuts-and-bolts phenomena i.e., flying saucers and vehicles and beings? Or are we talking about a consciousness phenomenon? Inter-dimensional, mind control, dream kind of phenomena? Or is it both? What does your research tell you?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: I think it’s a combination of both. I’ve found that to be present, particularly in some of the Maya stories, that traveling back and forth between dimensions. In fact, sometimes I think when I was listening to some of the Mayan elders that probably the Mayans were the first time travelers because they seemed to have that ability or at least that knowledge of how to travel back and forth. But then Black Hawk also had that ability, the great Sioux medicine man.

I think most of the stories that are recorded in my book, they were the nuts-and-bolts kind of things. What I find is most interesting about them is that they weren’t channeling somebody. They weren’t under hypnosis. They were telling stories as they remembered them. They were not under some kind of hypnotic spell.

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s touch on the potential agenda here, which is speculative and a tricky topic to even approach. I was listening to a presentation the other day by a UFO researcher, Barbara Lamb, who’s done regression therapy work with over 1,000 people who claim to have had contact with aliens. She, like many others, has the distinct impression that there’s some kind of interbreeding, a hybridization process going on here. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: I had no stories of that among American Indians, but I did encounter it in Mexico and it Guatemala, of women who claim to have been abducted and to have borne hybrid children. I had one young woman tell me the story that she had been in the plaza one evening with her boyfriend and her friends. She was sixteen at the time. Her boyfriend was sixteen. They were walking back home and both of them were taken. She told me how they struggled because they were being pulled up into the sky. They kicked and clawed and tried to get away.

The next day, she realizes she’s pregnant and she’s never had sex. So she and her boyfriend decide that it’s a Virgin Birth, like the Virgin Mary. They were very strong, devout Catholics. So he decides that he has to marry her because if the marries her there will be no one in the village to criticize or isolate or shun them. He will marry her to protect her because he knows it’s a Virgin Birth. A few weeks later, as the ceremony is being planned, she’s abducted again. When she wakes up the next day she’s no longer pregnant.

Alex Tsakiris: Of course, those kinds of accounts directly relate to so many accounts that other UFO researchers, John Mack at Harvard, Budd Hopkins, just many, many very credible UFO researchers have found the same things. It’s interesting that you’ve run across that, as well.

Dr. Ardy Clarke: I ran across more than one case. I had a wonderful guide who knew what I was doing and he was taking me to these different sites. Actually, back when I was about fifteen years old a librarian handed me this book called, Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan. It was by two 19th Century explorers by the name of Stephens and Catherwood. They had heard rumors of these great cities in the jungles of Mexico and Central America that had been built and they went there in search of them. Of course, the book chronicles their trip. I had promised myself when I was a teenager that one day I was going to follow in their footsteps and go to all these ancient cities.

Then the years passed, making a living and getting my degree took the forefront and my dream of following Catherwood and Stephens through the jungles took a backseat. The day I retired from MSU I was coming home and I saw a yard sale with a bunch of books stacked up against a garage door. I couldn’t pass that up so I stopped my car and here I found one of these old books by Stephens. I thought, ‘You know, this is something I have to do.’ I had read the works by Von Daniken and different people who talked about the Ancient Astronauts and everything in these cities.

So I was interested in following up not only on Stephens and Catherwood but also finding out first-hand the experiences of modern-day Maya with UFOs. Down there, most of them call them the “Sky Gods.” So that’s what I set out to do and along the way I had some wonderful people helping me. I was actually taken to this village where six women came forth to tell me their stories. This young woman who was now in her twenties told me the story of what had happened to her. It was quite an interesting night.

It was interesting, too, because of the lack of sophisticated methods of explaining things. Instead of talking about a UFO, two different women described the spacecraft as a gasoline tank that came down from the sky and sat there. I found it extremely interesting to listen to the way they were describing these craft because they didn’t have television in their village. They weren’t exposed to sci-fi movies and all the information that’s out there. They lived on a hillside in Guatemala, away from all that.

Yet when you read UFO literature about the cigar-shaped craft and here they are describing it as a gasoline tank because that’s what they’ve seen in their environment. So that was really interesting.

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, that is very interesting. It speaks to all the cultural flavoring we imagine goes on in these accounts, especially when we look at the older accounts.

Finally, Ardy, what I want to talk about is spirituality. If we unpack these experiences with American Indians that you’re talking about, we assume going in that there’s a different spiritual orientation. I mean, you’re in your professional career at Montana State University. You have to walk a fine line like we all do. You can’t walk around and say, “Oh, of course I believe in spirit communication and talking with the dead. In fact, everyone I know just assumes that that’s a truth.”

We have this kind of cultural barrier in the West regardless of any kind of religious background we may have in terms of talking about and experiencing spirituality. I think we assume—whether this is true or not and maybe you can tell me if it is—that in American Indian cultures there’s a different set of givens. A different orientation regarding the spirit world. What would you say about that? Is that true? Is that a misconception? How might that play into these accounts and someone’s receptivity to this kind experience that they might have?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: Well, I think again you have to separate tribes. There are some tribes that it’s forbidden to even speak the name of a dead person. Where in other tribes they believe that when someone dies they stay with them for a year. Their spirit remains with them for a year and then after a year they hold a ceremony to release that person. They have ceremonies where they can speak with those who have passed on. They have ceremonies where they can speak with the Ancients or where the Ancients come to them and give them knowledge and answer their prayers or their questions.

So it depends on the tribal group. It varies greatly throughout the United States and Alaska. So it’s difficult for me to say that is a general rule, that it has a spiritual connection. But definitely it does with some of the tribes. There’s no question about it. Some of the tribes actually talk–and the Maya do this too–they talk about the trip across the Milky Way. That when you die you cross the path of the Milky Way. See, that’s what the Maya believe. They talk about going to Xibalba.

You’ve got a common theme there that the cosmos plays so much a part in afterlife and death and the ability of the deceased that they never really die. They just move on into another dimension and that they can come back and communicate with the living.

Alex Tsakiris: See, I just think no matter what subtle differences you might have in that worldview, I think that worldview puts you in a completely different place in terms of dealing with the UFO phenomena. I have to tell you…

Dr. Ardy Clarke: I do, too, because Native people on a whole are accepting of it. They aren’t skeptical of it. So if you approach it from a perspective that it is part of the universe and that it’s nothing to fear, then that’s one view. But to be skeptical of it and not believe what you’ve seen or to deny that it occurs is a totally different worldview.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. I think if you have that worldview that is so prevalent in our society and our culture and when you deconstruct it, which is what this show is about really, not so much deconstructing it from a UFO perspective but from a straight scientific perspective…

Dr. Ardy Clarke: That is what I was going to say. Don’t you think that comes from the fact that modern-day society is so controlled by the scientific evidence of everything? Where in the Native community it is not?

Alex Tsakiris: I do think so. But I even think that’s somewhat of a misdirect because I think that the best scientific evidence that we have—for the last 100 years all the best scientific evidence and quantum physics has pointed us in the other direction, right? We’ve just chosen to ignore it…

Dr. Ardy Clarke: We chose to ignore it, right.

Alex Tsakiris: …because the materialism that is so much a part of capitalism and the thing that we live in that we love and our computers and all that pulls us the other way. So we can’t possibly imagine what it would mean to give all that up. So we hold onto what’s familiar. It has all sorts of other implications, as well.

I guess we are coming to that same point, that maybe there is some reality to when people have an orientation where they’re free from that baggage they can look at this and go, “I don’t know. That happened. It does relate to these other stories I’ve heard in my past, so it must be true.” It isn’t as hard to accept. Does that make it easier for them to incorporate it into their life without getting totally whacked out and thinking…

Dr. Ardy Clarke: Right, traumatized. I absolutely believe that’s true because I’ve found very little evidence of trauma among the people that I’ve interviewed. Certainly less than 10%. Maybe less than 5%.

I never sat down and really took each story and put it in a category but I think there was one instance I pointed out in the book where the young woman, her cousin had had an encounter and she had witnessed it. Therefore she really had difficulty dealing with it and had dropped out of school because she figured if there was something out there that had that much power over you and could do with you at will, then what was the purpose of even trying to do anything? Of course, over time she came to recognize that that was a fruitless behavior. But rarely did I encounter that.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, it’s an absolutely fascinating work and I’m glad to hear that there may be some more down the road.

Dr. Ardy Clarke: Oh, yes. There will be.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s fantastic, Dr. Clarke.

Dr. Ardy Clarke: Right now there’s a look at translating it into Japanese, of all things.

Alex Tsakiris: Wow, that’s great. So Japanese and probably Spanish has got to be on the table, too, right?

Dr. Ardy Clarke: I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything, but I certainly have been in contact with some people who are interested in publishing it in Japan. I just referred them to my editor. I think you know him, Patrick.

Alex Tsakiris: At the Anomalous Press. Yeah, great folks over there. They have some great books. Again, the book is Encounters With Star People: Untold Stories of American Indians. A fascinating book.

Dr. Clarke, it’s been great having you on. Thanks so much for joining me on Skeptiko.

Dr. Ardy Clarke: It’s been my pleasure. I enjoyed talking to you.