Budd Hopkins and rats running around

In January 2023, I posted "Gordon Lightfoot's UFO song," a post I just had occasion to refer back to last week in "Cold Brother, the Background Brethren, and Christopher Walken." The 2023 post included this account of a dream:

I dreamed that I was watching [the 1989 movie Communion], but some of the scenes were different. There was a scene where Strieber was having a beer with Budd Hopkins (who does not appear in the real film, having been replaced by a fictional female psychologist) and kvetching about the aliens that had been making themselves at home in his cabin. "I'm telling ya, Budd," he says, "these rats run around like they own the place!"

Tonight I listened to part of an interview with Joe Lewels on Whitley Strieber's show. Here's a transcript of the part that caught my attention:

WS: Now John [Mack] later on became much more friendly with Budd Hopkins. At that time, John was, he felt like Budd Hopkins was very wrong.

JL: Well, Budd had attacked him, and David.

WS: Yeah, I noticed that. He attacked a lot of people, including me.

JL: Yeah, yeah, for being "New Age," whatever they call it. They had a name for it, for people who though there was anything that had to do with spirituality.

WS: Or people who sold more books than they did. That was another thing. Both me and John.

JL: They were so into this atheistic way of thinking, and they never talked about their religious backgrounds. I never --

WS: Because Budd did not believe in anything. He didn't believe in the soul.

JL: I think David Jacobs was the same.

WS: I have no idea about David, but I had discussions with Budd about this, and he said that this is what we are and this is what we have.

JL: Right, so if you believe that, you run into a dead end right away with this phenomenon.

WS: Which the entire scientific community has run into. They're now at the far edge of quantum physics and can't figure out where they are.

JL: Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, they're still -- it's amazing -- our top scientists are still relying on that old kind of science that relies on the scientific method, and the scientific method relies on the idea that everything is separate. That we're separate from each other, we're separate from the planet, we're separate from the labs and the rat, the rats that are running around our maze that we do experiments on. And if everything is separate, we can study them objectively. That's the whole idea behind the scientific method.

Here's the interview. I've only listened to 15 minutes of it, so I don't know how worth listening to it is.

And here's "Circle of Steel," the Gordon Lightfoot song that Strieber was quoting in my 2023 dream:

Notice that the Strieber video is titled "Is Earth a Soul Trap?" and the thumbnail is the planet earth with a big steel chain wrapped around it. When I googled circle of steel meaning, the second result said this:

In general, he's talking about people who are living trapped in poverty on that symbolic "Wheel of Life"

Strieber's thumbnail also made me think of the similar image that occurs in Joseph Smith's account of the visions of Enoch:

And he beheld Satan; and he had a great chain in his hand, and it veiled the whole face of the earth with darkness; and he looked up and laughed, and his angels rejoiced (Moses 7:26).

"Circle of steel" is also a link to Budd Hopkins as abstract artist. He really had a thing for circles. Here are a few of his pieces. There are many, many more where these came from.

I knew nothing about Hopkins's art until I googled it just now.