Episode 39: Are the Gray Aliens Hungry Ghosts? with Joshua Cutchin

Detail of “They Come In The Night” Mixed Media Collage by Barbara Fisher

We love Joshua Cutchin—which should be obvious, because we keep having him come back.

This time around, he came to discuss a very specific topic, which is the question—could gray aliens—those little sneaky guys popularly believed to be involved with the “alien abduction phenomena” be something akin to hungry ghosts?

So, first we need to explain what a hungry ghost is. In editing the episode, I realized I gave a personal, less rigorous description of what a hungry ghost was and completely forgot to really go into what hungry ghosts are from a Buddhist perspective. So, let me rectify that right here.

In Buddhism, hungry ghosts, or preta, are the spirits of humans who have done very evil deeds in life, such as killing, sexual crimes or stealing, often with motives of insatiable greed, lust or unnatural desire. They exist in a spirit realm where they suffer greatly because of their crimes, where they hunger constantly, with large stomachs, tiny mouths and long thin necks, which makes consuming enough of whatever it is they desire painfully impossible.

Buddhism teaches that we should have compassion for these suffering souls, but that ordinary people should be wary of the preta. There are festivals where it is traditional to set out food for the hungry ghosts, and light incense and pray for them, but to have much to do with them other than that is considered to be dangers to all but the most learned practitioners of Buddhist meditation.

The Hungry Ghost Festival, one of the most important religious festivals in the Chinese calendar, occurs this year on August 22nd. This is the time of year where compassion toward hungry ghosts is to be shown by all devout people, as well as devotion to ones ancestors. The entire month includes ritual feeding of the dead, and the giving of gifts to comfort the dead.

The definition I gave is much less specific than this one. In reference to what I was reading in Whitley Streiber’s book, A New World, it sounded like the grays he was dealing with, who very much want to share our human experiences of life, who hunger to feel alive again, were similar to the Buddhist view of hungry ghosts.

But even more similarity is to be seen in what author Joe Fisher called hungry ghosts in his book on spirit channeling, The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts. In this book, we see the manipulation of living humans by spirits, who many Theosophists or Spiritualists would consider to be spirits of a “lower order” who, if they are the spirits of dead humans, they are tricksters who latch onto the living with the intent of feeding from the attention and affection that the living give them.

This is all conjecture on our part. And we could have gone deeper into this discussion, and maybe when Joshua’s next book comes out, we will get back together for a second round of brainstorming and thought chasing on this issue.

And, of course, fairies came into the discussion, as they always do when we have Josh into our virtual living room. And there are several tangents where one or another of us goes galloping off after a wild hare and end up having to be herded back on topic by somebody else. It’s all part of the fun, isn’t it?

We hope you enjoy this discussion as much as we did. And as always, the books quoted and mentioned in this episode are listed below.

A New World by Whitley Streiber
The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by W.Y. Evans-Wentz
The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts by Joe Fisher
Hungry Ghosts by Andy Rotman