Elliott Hauser on Robots, Metadata & the Mystery of Contact

Dreamland

In this episode of Dreamland, guest host Kelly Chase (Cosmosis, The UFO Rabbit Hole) sits down with researcher Elliott Hauser, following their meeting at the Archives of the Impossible conference. Elliott had spoken on a panel about a groundbreaking metadata experiencer study involving the Strieber Letters and the John Mack Archives—a project at the intersection of technology, archival ethics, and the anomalous. Elliott, an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UT Austin, brings a unique lens to experiencer research. His work focuses on how information systems shape our understanding of reality, and he’s currently Co-Lead of Living and Working With Robots, a transdisciplinary project studying human-robot interaction in real-world settings. Together, Kelly and Elliott explore the complexities of responsibly structuring data from highly personal experiencer accounts, the possibility of open-source phenomenological research, and what robotic experiments might tell us about the nature of non-human intelligences—whether created by us or encountered unexpectedly.