You know, it is gratifying when you point out a very obvious (to you) hanging thread, and someone takes the time to follow it and, most importantly, has the capacity to comprehend it. Good job, lads.

The truth is out there… sometimes… maybe… well, Hine and Buckley just aren’t sure. UFOs, UAPs, Flying Saucers, Alien Spacecraft, whatever you think they are, you don’t know for sure – and if you think you do know for sure, it’s a sure sign you don’t.

What you do know for sure is that you are told a lot of different things about them by a lot of different people: abductees spinning stories of high strangeness, senators pressuring whistle-blowers for information in congress, devoutly religious authors telling tales of angels and demons, folklorists and scholars of comparative religion painting vivid pictures of ancient beings dressed up in the skin of Technicolor sci-fi nightmares… no-one agrees and everyone is out to prove that their interpretation is the right interpretation – but what does any of it actually mean?

In this episode Hine and Buckley don’t analyse the verisimilitude of the stories or the veracity of the storytellers but instead examine the discourse around the phenomena or more accurately the discourse around the discourse around UFOs. The mechanisms with which people might think about this topic and the reasons that they may think in that way.

The conversation around UFOs is big business, a lot of people making a lot of money – but who are these people and what happens to that money? Where did it all start? Was it Peter Levenda that stealthily laid the ground work over the last 50 years to shape the UFO movement as we know it today? Why would people lie about this stuff? Why should you believe some conspiracy theorist warning you of the terrible dangers of the existential crisis that UFOs pose anymore than you should trust some conspiracy theorist warning you of the terrible dangers of vaccines and their link to childhood autism?… and if the people who are trying to take control of the discourse are lying, overly-gullible or deluded, then is there really any truth out there at all? (recorded 23 April 2026)

LINK: https://www.vayse.co.uk/vys0061

https://josephmatheny.substack.com/p/the-compleat-broadcasts-chapter-1

This is a free podcast/post series of Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT

For reviews regarding this work, go here.

You may subscribe to this series via RSS here. https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/232444.rss

A new series and some assorted news

It’s been on my mind to do this for a while. So, I’m just going to do it.

This is the beginning of a free podcast/post series of Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT

You may subscribe to this series via RSS here. https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/232444.rss

On Spotify

Apple podcasts

iHeart

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-joseph-mathenys-art-is-war-107824877/

Pocast Addict

https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/joseph-matheny-s-art-is-war-talks/4223678

and most other podcast outlets.

Or you can just receive them through this Substack.

You get the picture.

Twice a month, I will publish, in order, a chapter of the book and the corresponding discussion audio. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is a multidisciplinary work: the text is one part, the audio is another, and the links within the text add a different dimension. Sequoyah and I discuss it in depth, including how I intended people to experience this design. Here’s a video of that discussion:

Here is the first chapter, with a bonus intro by David Metcalfe, which was previously included only in the print version.

Ong’s Hat Introduction Combined

212KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Faq Read Me First

95KB ∙ PDF file

Download

I hope you enjoy this free experiment and know that it was made possible by those who bought the print/audio or combo. If you’d like to donate some change to thank us for the tremendous effort it took to produce 14 hours of audio and all the linked print for this project, feel free to buy the audio files on Bandcamp or the print or digital versions of the books. If you can’t afford it, that’s ok. The people who bought the work this year and last year covered for you. Kinda like a “pay it forward” model.

Be well and enjoy.