Jesse Michels

And she wasn't into this stuff at all.

She was like a Catholic studies professor, and she wrote a book on the Catholic concept of purgatory.

And then she started to look into basically experiences that brothers, nuns, saints, people at monasteries across history had with what they would describe as angels or Jesus or the Virgin Mary, their Virgin Mary apparitions across Catholic history, obviously.

And she looked into them and she would often look into the original Greek translations.

Like the archetypal example is actually you have St.

Francis of Assisi in 13th century Italy on Mount Laverne.

And he's just one of these really interesting figures, kind of similar to like St.

Augustine, where he starts out.

struggling with faith and kind of like a life of the party sort of guy.

And he has this really interesting experience at the top of this mountain.

And he's with Brother Leo, this confidant who's kind of documenting this whole experience and essentially sees, and she does the original translation in Greek and, or I think it's in Latin, sorry.

And it's a flaming torch.

And he receives what he says, you know, this wound in the flesh and it's the stigmata.

But then she looks at it and she's like, well, he died a year later from the stigmata.

And actually the stigmata looks a lot more like just electromagnetic burns.

And so she gives this manuscript of stories like, you know, St.

Francis of Assisi's to her friend.

And her friend goes, this reads like a Steven Spielberg script.

Like this is not, this looks exactly like what UFO stories are today.

And she looks into the work of John Mack at Harvard University.