High Strangeness: Where UFOs, Consciousness and Survival Meet

Start in a hotel room in Las Vegas, where Jeffrey Mishlove and Nick Cook have just come from the Bigelow Institute's essay award ceremony on consciousness survival, and where the conversation turns to a question that has run through Cook's career for decades: do UFO sightings, near-death experiences and a grandmother's haunted attic belong to the same unexplained territory? In this New Thinking Allowed interview, recorded December 3, 2021 and rebooted for 4K, Cook traces how a childhood in an English country house and a shared death experience pulled him away from nuts-and-bolts technology journalism and toward the idea that consciousness is larger than the body, possibly larger than the universe itself. The conversation is a useful map of one researcher's path, and of a framework he uses to hold together physical UAP reports and the psychic and metaphysical strangeness that keeps resurfacing around them.

Where did Nick Cook's interest in the unexplained begin?

Cook's answer begins with a divorce. His parents separated when he was five, and he and his sister went to live with their grandparents in a large, rambling country house in southeast England, where they stayed for about three years. His grandmother was American. She had crossed the Atlantic to marry his English grandfather in a household that, as Cook put it, was not used to discussing feelings. She was, he said, "a very sort of passionate" woman, and she had an interest in the paranormal.

She was also an insomniac who went up to the attic at night and swept it. While she was alive, the sound of her broom knocking against furniture carried through the house. After she died, that sound returned. Cook's father, an engineer, heard it one night while he was staying to console his father. That, Cook said, was not the strangest thing.

The strangest thing happened at a family argument over the will. Cook's father and grandfather disagreed on a point, and a heavy Victorian lamp that sat on the table between them rose, tilted, wobbled and came back down with a loud thud. Cook was six or seven at the time and learned the story only later, when it passed into family lore.

"There's got to be an awful lot more to our existence than is merely set out by sort of our 3D four-dimensional physics."

— Nick Cook, New Thinking Allowed interview with Jeffrey Mishlove (recorded December 3, 2021), 6:16

What makes the lamp story more than a family anecdote is how Cook describes his father's response. The engineer was intensely curious and set the question of consciousness to one side. His concern was mechanical: how had energy moved from somewhere into that lamp? Cook has carried that question forward, but for him it became the opening wedge rather than the answer.

What is a shared death experience, and why did it change everything?

The second turn came decades later, at a deathbed. In 2014, Cook's mother-in-law died with seven or eight members of her extended family in the room, his wife holding her mother's hand. At the precise moment of death, Cook expected distress. Instead, his wife stood up and announced to everyone that all was well.

Cook was stunned, and he asked her about it later that evening. Her reply stopped him: weren't you there as well? When he asked where, she described a space in which time stopped but stretched without end, in which she was connected to everything and knew everything, a place that felt "more real than real" and was suffused with what she called all-encompassing joyous love. Cook recounted this to Mishlove as an account he had trusted for roughly twenty-five years of marriage, which is precisely why it unsettled him.

"Maybe an hour or two later when we were sitting down and I asked my wife about this... she said to me, weren't you there as well?"

— Nick Cook, New Thinking Allowed interview with Jeffrey Mishlove (recorded December 3, 2021), 8:09

When he looked up what she had described, Cook found the term shared death experience. He calls it the primary inciting event for his move into consciousness research. He needed a way to rationalize what his wife had experienced, and he found that it connected to the account his father had passed down about his grandmother. Two people he trusted, decades apart, had described something that sat outside ordinary physics, and both had come through the same family.

How does a nuts-and-bolts journalist end up at the edge of consciousness?

Cook's professional life was not that of a mystic. For some fifteen years he worked as aerospace and aviation editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, a military affairs journal read by professionals in the defense field. He covered technology at the hardware end: stealth, aircraft and the mechanics of advanced systems. He describes himself as coming from "a very nuts and bolts background," and he has said that this is part of why the consciousness question unsettled him so much. A journalist trained to ask what something weighs and how fast it moves had to take seriously experiences that refused those measurements.

That tension is the throughline of his books. The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology takes the hardware seriously, while his parapsychological thriller The Grid is fiction built from the same material. Cook has written twenty fiction and nonfiction titles, and the pattern is consistent: the physical world is treated as real and measurable, and the strange is treated as real too, just harder to pin down.

Is the UFO phenomenon physical, psychic, or both?

This is the central idea of the conversation. Cook describes reality as an interface where our consciousness meets a wider consciousness, and where a great deal of unexplained material shows up. He argues that the survival of consciousness after bodily death manifests there, but so do near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences and remote viewing. In his view, UFO phenomena also reside on this interface.

The UFO case is special because it seems to have two faces. At times, Cook says, the phenomenon takes on a physical aspect, and when it does, you could metaphorically pick up a brick and throw it at the craft, and it would go clang, because in that moment the UFO is real. Cook's brick is the test of hard evidence: the object is solid enough to resist.

"There is another aspect to the UFO phenomenon which is, um, more metaphysical and has, as others have documented, psychic qualities to it."

— Nick Cook, opening exchange of New Thinking Allowed interview with Jeffrey Mishlove (recorded December 3, 2021), 0:00 onward

The second face does not respond to the brick. It belongs to the psychic and metaphysical record, the reports that do not fit a hardware account. Cook's framework lets both faces coexist without forcing one to explain the other. That is a useful discipline for any reader of UAP material: ask which register a claim belongs to before deciding whether it counts as evidence.

The same caution runs through his comments on the field's information environment. Cook has said the material is mixed with a whole range of disinformation, and that the human input behind reports, from the defense and intelligence realm, complicates any clean reading. He also argues that it is important for science to engage with the subject rather than leave it to the margins.

Who was Ted Owens, and what does his story have to do with it?

Mishlove brings his own history into the discussion. He is the author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems and The PK Man, the last of which concerns Ted Owens, a man known as "the PK Man." Mishlove shares stories from his investigation of Owens in the conversation. The thread matters because psychokinesis, the apparent influence of mind on matter, is the same kind of interface question Cook is raising. A lamp that rises without visible means, a broom that sweeps an empty attic, and a claim to move objects by intention all press on one boundary.

Mishlove's credentials give the exchange weight. He hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series between 1986 and 2002, holds a doctorate in parapsychology from the University of California, Berkeley (1980), and was the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition on the best evidence for survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death.

Does the universe itself have a mind?

Cook's most ambitious claim is that the universe is itself conscious. The conversation does not give this a full treatment, and it would be unfair to flatten it into a formula. What is clear is the direction of his thought. If consciousness is the substrate, then the lamp, the attic, the shared death and the UAP are all expressions of one field, and the question is not whether strangeness exists but how it gets through to human perception and into the physical world.

Where to go from here

• Watch the full New Thinking Allowed conversation with Nick Cook and Jeffrey Mishlove, which includes the family stories in full and the discussion of Ted Owens.
• Read The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology for Cook's hardware-first account of the field.
• Read The Grid, Cook's parapsychological thriller, for the fiction side of the same questions.
• Read Mishlove's The PK Man for the Ted Owens investigation, and The Roots of Consciousness for the wider consciousness-research context.
• Download New Thinking Allowed magazine issue 10 on UFOs and UAP from newthinkingallowed.org, or sign up for the weekly newsletter there for early access to videos and live events.

The strongest lesson in Cook's story is a method rather than a belief. Keep the physical record physical. Keep the psychic record in its own register. And when a family, a deathbed or a sighting refuses to fit either, treat it as data about the interface, not as noise to be filtered out.