The Real Mantis Was The Exploitation We Made Along The Way

About this episode

The episode explores the origins of the mantis alien archetype and its implications for understanding exploitation in society.

Somewhere in the deep lore of alien abduction, past the gray guys who run the equipment, sits a manager. Six to nine feet of praying mantis, purple robe for rank, telepathic, standing at the head of the table while the drones do the wet work. It regards you the way a farmer regards livestock. This week, Tristan brings on Stanford (yes, the one we verbally abused all of last season, now a guest in good standing) to work out where this giant bug came from. The trail runs straight to David Jacobs, an actual history professor who ran more than 900 hypnotic regression sessions and emerged with a full taxonomy of alien species and their agendas. We get into why hypnosis is the same memory-fabricating machine that produced the satanic panic, how your brain rebuilds every memory from scratch and patches the gaps with whatever's lying around, and why sleep paralysis has been parking a terrifying presence at the foot of human beds for as long as we've had beds. Then there's the square-cube law, which is grim news for anyone hoping a seven-foot insect could stand up without collapsing into paste. Then the part that matters. Peel the costume off the mantis, and you're left with a job…

People in this episode

Hosts: Tristan Johnson, Scott Niswander

Guest: Stanford

Topics covered

• alien abduction
• hypnosis
• memory fabrication
• capitalism
• surveillance
• sleep paralysis

Keywords

• mantis alien
• David Jacobs
• hypnotic regression
• memory
• capitalism
• sleep paralysis

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