Former NSA Director Breaks Silence on UFOs

Whenever you see something that doesn't fit what you know, a real scientist should get excited. Not skeptical. My two guests today have credentials that are impossible to ignore. Dr. Eric Hazelteen was director of research for the National Security Agency. Basically, he was the tip of the spear on science and innovation for the US's most hardcore intelligence agency. Before that, he was an executive vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering. He's a neuroscientist, a futurist, and has over 70 patents to his name. He possibly has one of the most intriguing resumes of all time. When you look at all the many thousands of reports and we've looked at all, and some I have guilty knowledge from when I was inside the government. It's real, and it's something we do not understand. Dr. Chris Gilbert has an MD and PhD from one of France's top medical schools. She's worked with doctors without borders across four different continents, and she's pioneered her own incredibly unique methods in holistic medicine. In our own body that we've studied so much, there are things we're discovering that we had no idea existed. She also happens to be Eric's wife. Together, they've co-authored several books, including the new Science of UFOs in the Shadow of Time. A book involving ancient archaeological objects with anomalous properties being systematically excavated by private corporations. "It seems to cover up." So when I found out that a former NSA director of research who was privy to just about every sensitive piece of intelligence in the United States wrote a book about anomalous objects being recovered in the desert. I had to reach out and learn more. Do you guys have kind of a base case for what's going on? I think what we're seeing with these credible real phenomena is something really bizarre and out there. We might all be martians. What is to say that life doesn't exist 120 light years away from us? I think it's almost certain that we're involved from building blocks that are extraterrestrial. There was some advanced civilization on earth, many hundreds of billions of years ago, that discovered near luminal travel. This whole interview is a fun game of cat and mouse. It's me basically trying to figure out whether Eric and Chris' fiction books were at all informed by what Eric saw behind the curtain. You can move something through the air where there's no engine on it at all. You're just pushing on it with photons. Did you do that at a larger scale? Yes. Whoa! So without further ado, sit back, relax, and enjoy a mind-expanding conversation with a bunch of rabbit holes you won't want to climb out of with this week's American alchemists. Dr. Eric Hazeltine and Dr. Chris Gilbert. [Music] Oh man, this is a total honor. I feel very, as is often the case, but maybe especially today, intellectually underqualified to be in this room. Dr. Chris Gilbert, Dr. Eric Hazeltine, you are the former director of research at the NSA, the National Security Agency. And that role actually ended up with you on an A&E History series, Alien Files Reopen. Having been at NSA and being one of their senior leaders, I find that highly unlikely. Which is fascinating. You guys co-authored a book about UFOs together, which I can't wait to get into. You also worked at Hughes Aircraft, Disney Imagineering, Dr. Chris Gilbert. You've done amazing work around the world as a physician, MD-PhD. And you guys have co-authored a few books together that I want to talk about those. You've independently offered a spy and Moscow station. And you guys have just an incredible background, both individually and together. So it's an honor to be with you today. That's a great honor to be here. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. I wanted to talk about your book, the new science of UFOs. Because I think it's a really great kind of survey level overview of all of the possibilities. I think often in this space, there's a lot of kind of mushy brain thinking. And just almost people are overindexed on intuition. And you really kind of lay out all of the possibilities from spoofing techniques to man-made craft, to genuine non-human intelligence. And then you even get into frameworks for thinking about the non-human intelligence. So yeah, why don't we start there? What are the possibilities kind of high level when it comes to UFOs? Well, I'll start and then you can fill in where I miss things. First of all, little context for the book. I spent years at the CIA after leaving NSA and ODNI where I was basically the CTO of the US intelligence community, the whole thing. And I was an analyst for a particular target and was trained in analytic tradecraft, which is basically the scientific method. And we call it the method of competing hypothesis. When we see a phenomena or an event, we say, what are all the different hypotheses for what could be driving this? And then we go and we look for evidence that would support or contradict each of those. And at the end, we weigh it and come out with an assessment with the probability of what we think is the most likely of all of those with some confidence. And so, for example, in Iran, you have the Iran group at the different agencies doing that. Now saying, okay, the Iranians have a nuclear program. What is our best guess at what probability about where they are in that program and what their intent is? So that's an example. So with the UFOs, UAPs, we did the same. We said, okay, here are the reporting. What are all the different things that could be, and now let's examine them. So we have a matrix in there, which is a little bit geeky, and that we present all of them that we surfaced. And then we evaluate the plus or minus and at the end, we come up with a conclusion. So we start with the observer themselves. When you look at a phenomena, you have to look at what's reporting it and how accurate and biased is the thing that's reporting it. So the human instrument is a neuroscientist, as a physician. We can both tell you the human instrument is highly flawed. And so we look at things like optical illusions, emotional bias that make you see what you want to see, that make you see what you expect to see. We get into how your brain is wired to cut corners. And so we explore optical illusions or other kind of illusions. We explore atmospheric effects, some of which are just now being discovered, like sprites at southern latitudes. Things really weird, ball lightning, things like that. Classmate type effects, we explore the possibility that the mundane ones, like its drones, balloons, things like that. We explore the possibility that it's of human origin, highly classified and super high tech. We explore the possibility that it's of nonhuman, but of earthly origin. And we always assume if it's from earth that it has to be human, well, what we look at is old Sherlock Holmes thing, what isn't impossible. And we'll get into this more, but CIA, we used to have a saying in analysts that says, do not look for your keys under the lamppost. Right, don't look only where you can see. So if you're not seeing something, it's probably because you don't know where else to look. So one thing we used to do is say, what do we know or think we know? What can we see and not see? And if we're not finding the answer, it must be the opposite of what we can see. It's in the negative space. Right, so I was once involved in the hunt for a very senior Islamic terrorist whose name I will not mention. And I was employed by CIA when I was at NSA, and I went to them and I said, you haven't found this guy. Where do you expect him to be and where do you not expect him? Where do you want him to be and where do you not want him to be? And I said, look for him where you least expect and least want him to be, because that's where he's going to be by definition. Well, my mind is now going to like dark matter or concepts like dark chemistry, parts of the universe that are honestly the majority of the universe, which isn't visible and doesn't seem to interact with light. And so I don't know if you guys have considered that as a possibility. And we kind of imagine what would that be, an extraterrestrial, how, what would that be? So it could be made of dark matter and feeding on dark energy. It could be, and we said that it could be anything that we could not think about. So what are we not thinking about? What could we not predict? So we could not predict that they might not derive from animal forms that they might not derive from plants that they don't require food or water to survive, maybe, that maybe they are immortal, that maybe they don't sexually reproduce, we imagine that they sexually reproduce, maybe not, maybe they have no written or spoken language, maybe they don't emotionally bond with others, maybe they are not a social species, maybe they are not curious, we think they are aggressive, maybe they are not aggressive, what if they have all the resources they can ever need, what if there is, there are a collection of single cells that origin develop and live in space and not on the planet, maybe we're just surrounded in space, but we don't see them and what if they use a type of propulsion that is unknown to us, that we think about every possible way of moving, but there is, I'm sure there is ways that we have no idea exist and what are they, what if they don't derive directly from biology and there are hyper-advanced digital AI's, I mean, we're trying to think about all the elements that are completely out of the box, that nobody could think about, but nobody can even imagine that our brain could not even compute. And then you have to think, you know, we discovered bacteria as late as the 19th century, and Occam's Razor is it's not zero or one thing, it's zero or a whole host or swimming in life that might be more advanced than us and you never know it. You never know it. Yeah, the way I think of it is we've all seen those cartoons where the coyote goes through a door and you see the silhouette, you know, where he went through the door and so you see where he went through and that's the positive space, the negative space is the door. We tend to always focus on the positive space, which in human terms is in the intelligence where we call this mirroring. We look at a target and say they must be like us, therefore if they're doing X is for motivation Y. So what Dr. Gilbert just said is we did the opposite of that. We said let's take everything that humans are and assume that extraterrestrials are none of those. They're the opposite because we would never think to look there and we never think to understand the motivation. And for example, let's take the tick tax, suppose the tick tax are driven by an extraterrestrial species that are unlike us in every possible way and the way she just described. How then would you explain what they're doing? You wouldn't explain it with human motivations now. You'd explain it with anti-motivations and when you do that, it's freeing. It's kind of like in that movie Pirates of the Caribbean, someone says to Captain Barboso when they're looking for Captain Jack and they say Captain we're lost and he goes I, you have to get lost to find something that can't be found. And that's deep. That is really deep and that's why I could say in the intelligence world when we're doing our job right, we understand our own limitations. One very productive place to look is where we know we're blind and then to purposely try to look there. Oh, that's so fascinating. Something I think about a lot with this topic is we think about mining resources. You know, we have this whole conflict with China around rare earth refinement. For example, what if their resources, like I think about what's most interesting about human beings and it's probably not the material world that we're in. Maybe it's our consciousness and so is there something around our consciousness or even our emotions or our thoughts that are more interesting to these beings than just, you know, they're here for gold or copper or whatever because they're, you know, maybe their atmosphere is burning up. They need reflective material. Well, now you're getting into a really interesting field called noetics. When we first started selling merchandise at AmericanAlchemyMarch.com, we had no idea how complicated and annoying selling merch could be. 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Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start today at Shopify.com/Jessie. Again, that's Shopify.com/Jessie, J-E-S-S-E, for a $1 a month trial. It's just $1 a month to try Shopify. A state-of-the-art solution, any commerce. Well, now you're getting into a really interesting field called Noedics. And it's a fringe field of neuroscience and biology where, for example, they believe that consciousness is a property of the universe, not of us, and that each of our brains is like a radio receiver that's tuned in to consciousness. This is the idea where the soul comes from, that consciousness isn't tied to our bodies. Any more than radio waves are tied to a radio. I believe that because you have the binding problem, for example, in neuroscience, which is this classic problem of you have all these disparate pathways. You have Wernicke's area for comprehension, and you have Broca's area for speech. But they're all disparate, and then we see this perceptually seamless kind of movie. There's this question of how that is, and I think about a radio. If you have the radio's components, you take away the battery, you take away the capacitor, you take away the antenna, any one of those might break the radio, and the music might stop playing. But none of those productively explain why it's playing for all these four seasons. You need to know the frequency it's passing into. So I'm not saying I'm a fan of noetics, but what I'm saying is that it's so interesting that these ideas show up throughout human history in terms of, like, if you look at the Vedic scriptures in the Hindu and the whole notion of transcendentalism, like the deity, whatever it is, exists everywhere in all things simultaneously. And that led to transcendentalism, and you could look at Jung who believed in the collective unconscious as an example of the human instantiation of that. So it is interesting when you see these ideas, and I'd just like to make a comment, and then turn it over to Dr. Gilbert. If you look at our language, we say things like, in our heart, I believe, in my gut, I believe. Right? Or I have this feeling. Those were metaphorical when we thought we thought they were metaphorical. What we now know is they may not be metaphorical, that we have more neurons in our gut than the cerebral cortex of a monkey, and they're pretty damn smart. We have a huge number of neurons in our heart. And now we know the cells themselves can have perception and learning, and we have gut bacteria, which is this whole other hyper complex organism. And so I think this is the subject of the listening cure, where Dr. Gilbert has come up with this idea of listen to your body, because all of these different entities that we call our body actually are not metaphorical. Yeah, so the listening cure is one of our books that talks about how our body has a mind of its own, how each organ has a mind of its own, how each cell in the liver, each cell in the gut can have a mind of its own, and a purpose, and maybe feelings, and connection to the brain, and vice versa. But there are so many things that we don't know, that we think we know. So how is it that we can believe we know everything about space, about the planets, when even in the body, in our own body that we've studied so much, there are things we're discovering that we had no idea existed and we'll give you an example. like Stanford University Researcher did a survey of DNA fragments circulating in the blood. And it suggests that microbes living within us are vastly more diverse than previously thought. In fact, 99% of our DNA has never been seen before. And then there's an entirely new class of life that has been found in the human digestive system called obelisks. And there are obelisks, microscopic rods made of RNA that we had no idea existed and we have no idea what they do. And also in the brain, in the brain, I mean, we think you talk about the Broca area, the vernicate area. We don't think they're isolated there. I think we think they're working in conjunction of a multitude of other kinds of cells that are necessary for their function. But we don't know exactly which ones and we're studying this now. We think that everything is related. Every single item is related to other items in ways that we cannot comprehend yet. And that's the relationship. And everything in the universe might be, that's my assumption, that's my belief that everything in the universe is probably also related to interconnected. And there's so much we don't know. And it's so fascinated to imagine and to discover what we don't know. We probably know maybe 1% of what exists in the world. We think we know so much, but we know so little and discovering everything is like, it's wonderful. Even in the human body, it's wonderful. But outside earth, oh my God, so much. So I want to circle back to your original question of which hypotheses did we surface in the new science of UFO? Because we didn't finish going into them. We talk about erasing the difference between space and time because Einstein didn't think of them as separate. Time is just another dimension as valid as up, down, left, right, and so forth. And it's interesting in all of his field equations. Time does not have to move in one direction. The laws of thermodynamics say it does, but there is no physical equation that says it has to. And we have some really weird laboratory phenomena and theoretical phenomena that suggests that time, for example, there's this experiment called the quantum eraser. It's a famous three-slit experiment. And where you can do something in the present that influences which way a particle or wave behaved in the past. And then you have the whole business of non-locality, which has something in one part of the universe instantly or nearly instantly. We now know there's a speed to it, but it's faster than the speed of light affects something on the other side. And then we have the whole area of quantum neuroscience where is entanglement between quantum states in one person's brain or one part of the brain entangled in others in ways that affect or influence. So what we do is let's take time. Everyone assumes that if they're non-humans coming in UFOs that it must be from outside Earth. And that may be true, but what if it weren't true? Let's start with that fork and say what happens if these things that we're seeing are from Earth, but either from the past, present, or future? You say, well, time travel backwards is impossible. Well, in our current framework, most physicists would say that. And yet, there are these weird phenomena that we talk about in the book like frame-dragging, where if you have a black hole that's spinning really fast, a swarge child black hole, the spinning really fast. The black hole itself isn't just spinning, it's spinning space-time with it. And so if you were orbiting outside the event horizon of a spinning black hole, there is a thing called the closed time-like curve where when you started the orbit and you finished it, you'd end up at the same place in time. So if you end up where you started, you went back in time. The math says that is theoretically not impossible. And there's a distinction. And so you're going to hear this throughout our discussion of what we like to explore is the not impossible. Because we think that's where the answers are. So to get back to this time thing, one of the things we explore is the possibility that there was some advanced civilization on Earth many hundreds of millions of years ago whose evidence has been covered up by the relentless reshaping of the surface of the planet with tectonic and so forth. Various environmental things had happened that we wouldn't necessarily see evidence of it and they likely not almost unlikely given it depending on where it was and so forth. The Earth's crust has folded over on itself and got pushed under and subducted and blah, blah, blah. And so what if there were an ancient species that discovered near luminal travel, speed of light, or even faster and we can get into that later, you know, what are the possibilities for faster than light travel that aren't impossible. And where that takes you is the civilization could have zipped out. And to them only spend a few years in space and come back a few hundred million years later. That could be what we're seeing. Is it likely? No. But is it impossible? We can't say. As she said, we know so little to say there's something's impossible is somewhat wrong. And then again, can you look at the future? And then you say, well, what about the present? There's some obvious mundane things like, okay, the Chinese or the Russians have cool stuff we don't understand, which is true. They do. But there are other more exotic, really exotic, like, you know, the multi-worlds hypothesis that there are parallel quantum realms that are splitting off all the time. And then some of those, could there be some weird things happening? That one gets a little dicey, I think. But I think that the more important thing is to break out of the chains of expectation and what we know. And just be humble and say, there's so much we don't know. Don't ever rule out something unless you have really hard laboratory proof. I love that. And I think if at any point in history, you were to see, you know, a repeated anomaly within abundance of anecdotal evidence, but it didn't comport with the physics of the time. You'd get all these people saying, this can't be true because of physics. And those people would be wrong. And the people just saying, we got to follow the evidence and look at the anomaly itself would end up being vindicated. And there would be some new theory that would come to explain the anomaly and per the kind of anthropocentric kind of bias and where the extraterrestrial bias, you know, versus time travel. If you were in, you know, kind of North Sentinel Island, which is this remote island that's totally uncontacted, that's, you know, technically part of India. But, you know, has never been contacted outside of a few missionaries where I believe, you know, they've been trying to evangelize Christianity. You know, these missionaries, you know, I think in certain cases of met tragic ends, they go and, you know, they get speared or something or, you know, shot with a bone arrow. And you always, I wonder, you know, do the North Sentinelese have legends of aliens coming and contacting them? When, in fact, it's just, you know, human beings nearby. And so that, oh, yeah, just cuts to this perceptual bias. And to the time travel thing, Kurt Gertel had this, you know, model for time travel. And then Frank Tippler, who was a contemporary of Wheeler in a physicist shrunk down the Gertel time travel model. And it was, he had his thing called the Tippler disc. And it's a flying saucer. So I find that fascinating too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the, the main point we want to make is that when we want to study something, the first thing you study is the thing that self is studying it, meaning us to look at that instrument and be very clear about its limitations and its strengths so that you are more tempered in the conclusions that you reach. If you say this instrument isn't saying something, could be interpreted as the thing isn't there, or the instrument can't see it. And there's too little of that kind of thinking. And I'll just give you an example. Hocking radiation. Okay. Hocking radiation, we believe, is due to particle antiparticle pairs popping out of the void, whatever that is, kind of the vacuum quantum field that's seething with energy. There is no such thing as nothing according to modern cosmology. And these particle antiparticle pairs normally pop out of the void, whatever that is, recombined where the matter antimatter completely annihilate leaving some residual energy, which is one of the theories of dark energy that's pushing the universe apart. And if these particle antiparticle pairs pop out of nothingness on opposite sides of the event horizon. Some of the energy escapes, which is why there is a glow or hucking radiation around a black hole. And why they think maybe black holes evaporate over time. And it also solves some loss of information paradoxes around black holes where physics says you can't create or destroy information in the physics sense. And maybe this is how that's conserved. And through entanglement there are things that go out. Well, the point I'm trying to get to is let's suppose that we live in an end-dimensional universe for that we can see, but there are many more. So imagine the analogy of a three-dimensional universe interacting with someone who only lives in two dimensions. So if all we saw was two dimensions, everything would be in a flat plane. It would be lines, right? So let's say I'm a three-dimensional person. And I have the surface of the water, which is two dimensions. And I put my five fingers, well, four fingers in one thumb through it. The two-dimensional being is going to experience me as five circles. Because that's where I intersect its reality. So when you look at these quantum things popping in and out, that could be something as simple as if we were a plane. And there was something circling that hit us every now and then. We would see it pop in and pop out. But it's only because we don't see the three-dimensional reality. We only see the two-dimensional reality of something popping in and popping out. And so that is where if we relax the assumption that there are four dimensions, whatever dimension is, and there are more, a lot of things now might make sense, like something moving in impossible ways. Yes, in three dimensions or four, that could be impossible. But in five or six or seven, it could be totally possible. And that's why we really have to open up our minds when we look at UFOs. Yes. And say it makes no sense in our framework. And that to me says our framework is wrong. We've talked a bit about longevity and life extension on this show. Extending your telomeres, metabolic optimization, and the through line is always the same. Most of what determines how long you live comes down to really basic stuff. Not these more exotic treatments. I think about that sometimes when I realize it's 10 p.m. and I haven't eaten all day because I was deep in prep for the next episode, which is kind of the story of my life since I moved to Austin. 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So we better start questioning our whole understanding of reality. There's a really cool professor named James Madden who wrote a book called Unidentified Hyper Objects. And Hyper Objects is a platonic idea of objects that exist in higher dimensional space like Tesseracts. And you would just see kind of the shadow of these Tesseracts. And if you take this pen, you put it through 2D paper, all you see is a disc. And so I wonder, you know, in his model, it's like these objects show up in order to almost break your priors. Specifically, there is this the wow factor that is on the human side is the intended effect. And the sort of there is some sort of like almost intermittent reinforcement or conditioning going on where it's there. It appears it excites you and then you keep going or something. And it's this sort of synchronicity thing. And it's impossible to, you know, kind of separate the observed in the observer, which we obviously would do in traditional science. Well, you know, it's fascinating about that. And it gets back to something Dr. Gilbert was saying about the motivations. What is I told you before the we started, I was a therapist. And as therapists, we try never to tell a patient anything. We need them to discover it on themselves. Or they won't quote, get it in their gut. People only understand that which they themselves discover. You can't tell people anything. There's this great book called if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. No one can tell you anything. You have to discover it for yourself. So what if extraterrestrials are here to teach us? This is their mission. They want to bring intelligent life in the universe up to kind of a standard level. So we can join a galactic federation. Or maybe they just are altruistic missionaries or something. And these events are anomalies that they keep introducing to say, Hey, pay attention. There's something over here that tells you you're not looking at things right. Yeah. Like maybe there are end dimensions. And we're going to keep hitting you with these things. And tell someone says, hmm, maybe this is telling us about our own ignorance on purpose. Yeah. So I mean, I'm not saying that's a case. But that's the kind of thing that we would never normally think about because we wouldn't behave that way. It's like in Star Trek, the prime directive, you can't kind of openly commune unless, you know, if you're pre-warp drive or not up to a certain consciousness, love or whatever. And you might use these tactics. Maybe it's like cellular automata or something where it's like a, you know, this kind of biological network. And you're hitting a little node with a little wow factor. They tell their friends, you know, and then it's sort of your, you're influencing the teleology of the entire kind of, you know, petri dish, you know, with with these little appearances. Well, it's funny. We'll get into this later when we talk about the shadow of time. But we talked about a hyperintelligent entity who has learned the hard way to have a very light touch. Because the universe is very complicated. And the slightest thing you do here could have a huge effect there. And so this creature realizes that and kind of works within the system to cause something they want to happen. And so there is some of that in our book. But I think that, again, just to kind of summarize the new science of UFOs, what we try to do in there is look into the negative space. And to take people at a place they've never been before. And also to expose people, not to the James Bond kind of side of the spy business, but the analytic academic kind of intellectual side of it, which is okay. We have spies that collect the information. But then how do we make sense of it? And when you look at intelligence failures, such as 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and so forth, with one exception, which is we miss the Indian nuclear program, that was a failure of collection. We just didn't have the data. But in every other case, we've had the information. We just didn't know what was staring us in the face. That's what I mean, to me, that's why this whole idea of disclosure, I don't know if you saw this, but the White House just registered aliens.gov, which I found to be pretty funny. I don't know if you guys have a take there. But this whole idea of disclosure is kind of a misnomer to me, because I think this space, there's a ton of data, there's a ton of asymmetric data on the government side. But the sense making is totally lacking. And so you have all these file releases going on now with JFK and MLK and Epstein and stuff. But nobody, it's like finding a needle in a haystack. And nobody knows how to make sense of what's going on. To me, if you can't make sense of those things, which are like, you know, conventional, prosaic political things, good luck with UFOs. Well, I think AI is going to help that. True. Yeah. I will tell you that the biggest problem in the intelligence world is not collecting. It's understanding what you've collected. And, you know, there's so many reasons for that. There's the volume, velocity, and variety of information goes up exponentially every day. Right? There's a lot more information out there. Yep. And then, yeah. So the real frontier in intelligence is to understand. Yeah, except the problem with AI is that AI is trained by humans. So if, if any AI is trained by humans to detect one or two things, it's not going to see the thing called X that will appear out of nowhere. It's right. So it will miss it also. That's right. Yes. Yeah. If that low sample size in AI classifiers going to mistake something, then at high sample size, it's still going to mistake it. And you need some sort of human supervised learning component in the loop to actually have good signal on the anomalies that are correct. And then you train up the model or something. Yeah. Yeah. But a good intelligence analyst will be humble and look outside the lamppost. In other words, be aware of their own biases. This is a great book called The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richard Toyars. All analysts are taught to read it. It's part of our training and it's to look at our own instrument and he talks about all the different biases, confirmation bias, you know, and so forth. And it's true that AI is just, you know, it's like a Ferrari that will go now a million miles an hour instead of 200 miles an hour, but it's still a Ferrari, right? You know, it's not going to go into the air or go below the water. And there are things like, you mentioned time. Time to me is so interesting because it's like the, you know, there's a David Foster Wallace speech and it's like these goldfish talking to each other and they're trying to conceptualize water, but water is the medium in which they swim and that feels like time in many ways. It's the most used noun in the English language and yet it's always defined with respect to something else. So, macroscopically, the movement of bodies and then microscopically, you know, oscillations on an electromagnetic wave and you get into things like, you know, Einstein's equations or even Maxwell's equations, I believe work the same way forwards as they do backwards. And, you know, you have time treated as a formal axiom or as a classical axiom rather in Trotinger's equation, and so it's, but, but, but, but there's all sorts of possible time weirdness in certain quantum interpretations, obviously, of temporal nonlocality. And so it is, that seems like a very interesting foray into studying the UFO stuff. Yeah. I mean, there is, for example, one minority theory that the big bang spawned a matter universe which went one direction in time and a simultaneous equal one, an anti-matter universe going in the other direction in time. Is this a sacchar of? I don't know who is that. I just remember reading that and there are other theories we live inside this huge supermassive black hole and there's some word paradoxes like the more massive the black hole, the less likely tidal forces will stretch you apart. The math is very complicated, but that's true. So it could be that what we call the universe is just what we see inside this big black hole and how would we know? Right? I mean, I think that at the end of the day, if we ever know the truth, which I don't think we will, you don't. Well, no, this is a conversation I had with Marvin Minsky. Okay. And I said, Marvin. Yeah. Are we as humans? For the audience, by the way, Marvin Minsky is kind of the godfather of modern artificial intelligence. Right. MIT. MIT. And I love kind of beessing with him and, you know, kind of like you did in the dorm, you know, her freshman, like, oh, man, this thing's all connected, everything. Well, I said, Marvin, are humans either collectively or individually capable of understanding nature in its entirety, and he goes, of course, not. I'll give you an example. My cat over there is the smartest cat I know or have even ever heard of. It is a genius cat. I'll never teach it French. Right. And it turns out that was wrong, too, because we now know that some cats can understand about 400 words of a language, but the point is that it's hubris to think that at whatever level of intelligence we've achieved is enough to understand nature, right? Well, it's like, you know, whales and dolphins and elephants and parrots are like way smarter than we ever thought they were, crows. You know, a crow will remember your face for two decades and come after you if you pissed it off. That's wild. I mean, they're animals are way smarter than we think they are. But do we really think we can explain partial differential equations to a parrot? Maybe? Maybe not. Probably not. Right. And so it stands to reason that there's way more to be known than what our brains could ever comprehend. To me, that's the exciting thing about UAPs and UFOs. It's nature's way of reminding us how little we know. And Isaac Asimau said, science doesn't proceed with Eureka. I like, oh, we get this great insight. It proceeds with, that's funny. You know, because that's funny means, hmm, that makes no sense compared to what I think I know. Yeah. Not skeptical. Yeah. But as Max Planck said, science proceeds one funeral at a time. Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Well, accepting that caveat around kind of having epistemic humility, you guys have done this amazing survey level overview. And if it's a soup of things? Well, yes and no. Yes and that we believe when you look at all the many thousands of reports and we've looked at all, and some I have guilty knowledge of from when I was inside the government. There is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction. Maybe a few dozen out of all the many tens or hundreds of thousands, where I feel confident saying there's something real there. It's not an artifact of who observed it, of the instrument, of some mistake. It's real and it's something we do not understand. Right. And so that to me is why we are so passionate about this because the scientist that excites us. We are not threatened by it. We are not repelled by it. We are drawn to it. And so I guess I shouldn't say this, but you can comment for yourself. But I'm kind of on a mission to get serious scientists to take a look at this. Because right now, it's very hard, because there's the Giggle factor. There's the OUFO alien, little green man. And so really the world's best scientists, there are a few exceptions like Levy and Harvard and places like that. They're staying away from it because it's a career killer. That's what it seems like. And then simultaneously you have, you know, you obviously were as high up as it gets in the US government when it came to science, you were kind of the CTO of the country. And then you have this movie, I don't know if you've seen this, The Age of Disclosure where you have guys like Jim Semivan, you know, high up at the CIA or Chris Mellon, who is deputy to sick and assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, you know, also clear, do a lot of stuff. And we have a program that's like reverse engineering this stuff. What do you guys think there? Do you think that's legit? Well, I got to be careful what I say here. I was, I had access to a whole lot of stuff. Yeah. I never saw it. Okay. I never saw anything like that. I, we have this thing we say, yo, explain yo. It's maybe yes, maybe no, yo, you know, when presented, we call it the power of yo. Okay. We presented with something. Yeah. Don't say yes. Don't say no. Say yo. Okay. Maybe yes. Maybe no. Keep an open mind. Yeah. Yeah. And so I don't have any illusions. It's just because I should have known everything that I did. Yeah. I know for a fact that people hide things. Right. You know. And so the fact that I didn't know it doesn't mean it wasn't there. Yeah. You see, this is a fascinating thing. Your average lay person when they look at the government saying we're not going to release this UFO thing. They're gone because they don't want us to know about aliens, but they don't think about other motivations. I'll give you one. Let's say we have sensors of a certain kind or way better than we want anyone to know they are. Right. Because we don't want the adversary to know, oh, we can see X, Y, or Z. That's called sources and methods. And in the intelligence world, that's what we protect more than anything. We can't let the adversary know what we know we can know. And so I have no doubt the sum of the reluctance to release some of the stuff. It was captured by a collection system that we don't want people to know we have. Yeah. That makes sense. I can see farther longer into wavelengths that they didn't know that we could and so forth. And I think some of the data captures have been through those kind of systems and just to reveal that can reveal the capability that we have. And so I feel quite certain that there's some of that going on. Yeah. No, I mean, that makes total sense. You mentioned also Navy patents around laser holography. Oh, yes. Yeah. Well, this is interesting because in looking at the possibilities, I just start from first principles of physics. If something is moving really, really fast with a super acceleration, the most fundamental equation in physics is F equals M a force equals mass time is acceleration, right? And so if you look at an extraordinary acceleration, there are two ways to look at it. There's an unbelievable force or there's very low mass or both. And you say, well, what could do that? Well, when I was at Disney, we were developing electronic fireworks. And the way we did it is we had a Q-switch neodenium yag laser that we focused to a spot in the atmosphere. And we put so much energy there that we ionized the air and created ball lightning, okay? And then we moved it around with mirrors and lenses so that we created voxels in open space. And we could move those around like fireworks or like anything else, okay? Those little plasmas reflect our energy and give off tremendous heat and obviously a visual signature. So I thought, well, that has essentially zero mass. If I were going to fake it on purpose, and that is, by the way, one of the things we look at in the book, if someone was consciously going about faking something to make you think there was a UFO. For whatever reason, like the Russians do this all the time, they call it Mosquitoovka, they make a sink, they can do things that we never thought they could do to deter us. And so I asked, this is what I used to do at Disney, to fake things. And I talked to this guy Cliff Wong, who was the world's expert on drones. And I said, if you wanted to fake X, Y, or Z, how would you do it? And so he told me, he said, well, what I do is I would have a big, a huge balloon here that was towed by a little teeny drone. And you think it was this big orb when, in fact, it wasn't. So we get into all the ways of fake, but getting back to the plasma, I said, these glowing orbs could be free, free space plasmids that are being directed by a laser. Well, I turned out there's a Navy patent to do exactly that to draw things in the shape of an airplane to fool missiles. And it would be, it would look like it's accelerating it, you know, crazy, and yeah, and it would do everything that these orbs are doing. Seems like it's breaking conservation momentum, but it's not. It has zero mass, right? Something is moving in a way that no mass could. Maybe it doesn't have any mass. Maybe it doesn't have mass. Maybe that's the way to look at it. Yeah. Well, if you were to look at, let's say the Nimitz 2004 case, which I know you guys are pretty familiar with. And the Roosevelt and Omaha. And yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, in 2015. So in 2004, you have, you know, Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, you have solar carrier, strike group, you have radar, you have, you know, eyewitness observation. And then you have thermal imaging that's been released this forward looking infrared and CCTV also and CCTV. And so would this sort of plasma ball configuration be able to account for all of that? Yes. It would from a kinematic point of view. But the visuals don't line up. These are tic tacs. And the plasmus actually can look like a tic tac because they're not actual balls normally the way you do them unless you really are good with adaptive optics. But generally what happens with these plasmus, it's a laser beam coming to a focus. And what happens is instead of just a ball, you tend to get the actual caustic of the energy coming in like this. So you'll see kind of a rope of energy like this. And that could look like a tic tac. And then when you take into account atmospheric scattering and stuff, I would say possibly, it wouldn't be my first hypothesis because they define it. It looks like it's in a made of white plastic or something. Under normal conditions, these plasmus wouldn't look that way. But they also are louder than hell. In fact, when Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney, I first showed him these things. He said, oh, we're not going to do this. It's really impressive, but we're not doing this. And I said, why? He said, Eric, there's something profoundly disturbing about the air over your head catching fire. And yeah, we like to stimulate our guests, but we don't want them running streaming out of the building. And it's really loud. It's really loud because it creates sonic booms. And so it's part of it. But what I do, what we do in the book is that sounds like a pretty good capability for like a siop or something. Well, it is. Yeah, I want to do something on foreign land, you know, Eastern the old tech or whatever you, you know, fire in the sky and you know, some plasma projection balls everywhere. Well, that's right. I mean, let's get back to the faking theory. Yeah, someone isn't doing it and you're noticing it. Yeah, they're doing it on purpose to mess with your head. Uh-huh. And the Russians in particular really do a lot of this. Do that. And because patent said it, weapons change, but man who uses some change is not at all. To defeat an enemy, you don't defeat their weapons. You defend, you defeat their brain and their heart. You you rode their will to fight. The Russians know this. They don't have the resources we do. So one of the things they do is make us think they can do things that make us think twice about messing with them. And so it isn't I'm not saying they're doing this. I'm saying it would be consistent with their modus operandi to be messing with our heads. And by the way, when it comes to directed energy, there's no one better in the world than the Russians. You know, buzz off and the laser, you could say they invented it. You know, and they are really good at directed energy. I mean, that's what Havana Syndrome is all about, directed energy. So I think it's entirely possible that some of these phenomena are foreign actor deliberately messing with our head. Interesting. Yeah, there's, um, I think it's 1976 salt, uh, talks. And it's, uh, Kissinger is talking to Dobrinin, who's the, you know, foreign minister from the Soviets. And he's saying stop beaming our embassy with microwaves. You've been, you know, blasting it for, you know, 12 hours straight. And Walter Stossel, who's the American ambassador, was, you know, not only hurt by this, he ends up dying of kind of a rare form of blood cancer. And so if that's going on in the 70s, and then it feels like we've had all this like, honestly, gaslighting on the part of, you know, CIA, the lot of people, a lot of diplomats who are stationed abroad who are experiencing these things that, you know, they're consistently called psychosomatic or crazy or whatever. And then you have this dare speagull 60 minutes, you know, report saying, no, this is all real. And the Soviets have been doing it for decades. Well, you really, you're deep into that. I mean, I've been, I can't say exactly, but I'm very much part of that investigation. And so is Dr Gilbert. Yeah, we've been interviewing victims of Havana syndrome. Yeah. And it's spectacular because nobody understands that there are a series of symptoms that are all linked together that people don't understand that are just unique. But there are a lot of people, there are like over 1000 US officials, you know, from state department and other American personnel, their family members, their children also that have reported, it's called anomalous health incidents now. A HI, just Havana syndrome, you know, and people are usually in their 20s, 30s, 40s, they're in great physical shape. But the symptoms started when they were stationed in Cuba or Russia or China, Austria, Germany, Switzerland. And there are a lot of them in the United States, near the White House also. And people are staying at hotels, apartment offices or sometimes in their cars. But there are puzzling combinations of symptoms that we've never seen before. So a few people described like dissonance, combination of dissonance, headache, hearing, loud, high frequency, very directional sounds that seem to come from a specific location. And both sounds and symptoms disappear when victims leave the room. And they reappear when victims re-enter the room. You know, and some Havana syndrome victims describe disabling cognitive problems, like memory problems and slow processing speed, balance problem, hearing loss, ear pain, tinnitus, insomnia, irritability and sometimes depression. And physicians could not understand what was going on. So we did a lot of studies and we find a ENT specialist found that that's the auto-lith inside the inner ear that get affected consistently in most of those cases. And now- What is it in the inner ear? The auto-little-little-little tini-libony structures inside the inner ear that are responsible for balance. And those get disrupted. And it's very difficult to find what it is. People do MRIs and they can't find anything. It's only when you study the auto-liths of the ears, of the inner ear. Well, that's the one cluster of symptoms that seems to be in common with many of them. And I'll just say again, I have to be careful picking my words. But I think there was not unanimity within the community, the intelligence community on what was going on. You had one side saying it's real and we know what it is with very high likelihood. And here it is. And then you had the other, which was the official version, there's no there there, nothing to see here, folks. And those of us who are tightly connected on the one side who heard that were shocked, mortified, angry. But you saw Dr. Rillman, for example, the Stanford MD. I think he said it best. And in an essay, I just published, I really talk about, again, the psychology of how that could happen. And I believe that the people in the intelligence community, at State Department and CIA, who say there's nothing there, I don't think they know it and they're covering it up. I think they don't believe it. Because I have seen that that over and over and over again. And at the end of the essay, I quote, "Uptance and Claire," who said, "You can't explain something to a man "who salary depends on not understanding it." - Right. - It's again, it gets back to the common theme you've heard us talk about, which is, whenever you have an instrument reporting something, ask about the instrument itself. - Yeah. - Right, so the people who aren't believing it, can't believe it because if they believed it, their whole ego structure would fall apart. - Right. - So they have to believe it. - Yeah. - And so I think they truly think there's nothing there. - Speaking of which, yeah, go for it. - They don't believe that something can happen that they don't understand. They think they have to understand everything. And if they don't understand it, it doesn't exist, but it sure does exist. I mean, we have interviewed a number of victims, and this is not fake, this really, really exists, and it's devastating for the people. - One of them used to work for me, and I know him extremely well. - Jesus. - And we had a long conversation with him recently. I can't mention his name or where he worked, but what bothers us the most about it is the victimizations of the victims. Imagine serving your country, being wounded in service of your country, and your country says, no, you didn't have that happen, and you're crazy. - Scary. - It's awful. I mean, to me actually, and a lot of them will tell you, that's the worst part, Mark Polly Moropolis, who was on the 60 minutes piece, said it very well. It's like, he loves the CIA, but they betrayed him. - So we think what it is, and what we think it is, it's a radio frequency, microwave, or directed energy using repetitive pulse train, very short, very high peak power radiation, that could be sent from anywhere within line of sight. Now, how big or small can the culprit device be? Well, it could probably be as small enough to fit in a backpack. And how can we detect something that is really very short? It could be a nanosecond of radiation, very high-intense repetitive. We have no way to detect this nanosecond, very high pulse rate, and that's, what is it? We, all those organisms in the CIA doesn't think that this can happen because they think they would detect it. And interestingly enough, they would not, we don't have the devices that could detect that. - Well, or do we? - Well, I'm gonna pick my words carefully here. I think that to detect something, you first have to be open to where it might be. And so let's take this radiation, this directed energy. Microwaves are one possibility because there is a thing called the microwave hearing effect where you can beam a microwave at someone and cause them to hear things because of thermoelastic explosions in the endo lymph of the inner ear that create vibrations like sound. And in fact, there's a program to modulate that with voice. We call it the voice of God where you can project the voice into someone using this. And in fact, in our book The Shadow of Time, we talk about that is how one set of creatures who have hearing could talk to another said that don't using that phenomena. But again, let's open up what isn't impossible. Remember I said we can do things with lasers and free air plasmus. Well, remember I said that lasers can interact and create shock waves in the atmosphere. And so it is possible that you could create local shock waves very, very precisely located that would cause some of this kind of damage acoustically. But the origin wasn't a speaker or an acoustic system. It was a laser. It could be a tear hurts laser. It could be, you know, a neural trivalently. It could be all kinds of different kinds of directed energy. It could be a millimeter wave. It could be tear hurts. I mean, you can worry about the other side of the extremely low frequency. Because that I'm less interested in. Because F equals H nu, which is to say that the lower the frequency, the less energy it carries. And also ultrasound, the wavelength is so large, it's like many miles long. So what that means is the gradient of energy from here to here across something like your head is extremely, it's basically flat. Now you have resonance in your body. Your body is a cavity resonator. And if you hit it with something like 6 to 12 hertz, you can maybe cause yourself to have to go to the bathroom. But it wouldn't create these kinds of effects. It's probably something way higher. I wouldn't rule out acoustic. But that doesn't mean it's an acoustic source. It could mean it's a directed energy source that creates an acoustic effect. I don't think that's what's happening. I think it's straight up RF. But again, I'm somewhat humble in that we can't say we know for sure. Yeah. And I think if we too quickly reach conclusion, we're not doing anybody any favors. On the UFO front, one of the kind of data sets, so to speak, that I think, I hold in highest esteem, is this idea of UFOs showing up around nuclear weapons facilities and installations all over the world, civilian energy grids, even. There seems to be something there. Have you looked at any of those cases? We have, and we're trying to be honest and say, yo, maybe yes, maybe no. First of all, there's a lot more sensors around nuclear plants. Yep. And so you're going to see a lot more stuff because you have a lot more things looking at it. So you see more frequency. But is that due to things showing up more frequency? Or because you have more stuff looking at it? It seems to me, it seems beyond sensor bias. Could be, but maybe. But then you have to ask, well, what happens around nuclear plants? You have very high electromagnetic fields. Like, for example, the high power. So you may have extremely high voltages, right? Because power is transmitted at very high voltage to reduce resistance losses, right? Because of Ohm's law. And so when you have extremely high slope, high gradient electromagnetic fields, you can have plasma generation. If you have aerosols in the air, you can charge them up. Maybe you can cause some fluorescence and some weird effect. So if you're going to be intellectually honest, don't look at what you'd like to be true. Oh, yeah, yeah. They're interested in their nuclear prick. Well, maybe. But if it's nuclear, what else is it about the nuclear that might lead to other phenomena? And this is where we try to be objective because we want to kind of send a message to the world that hardcore objective scientists who are more interested in the truth than their particular agenda, who have rigorous scientific process are taking this seriously. And so that's why we think it's really important to be hyper rigorous and look at all possibilities. So again, about the nuclear, maybe yes, maybe no. I wouldn't come down hard yet. And what I think is happening there. I think, but the thing is really hardcore serious scientists with resources really don't look at these issues. Now, the government is prone to say, oh, yeah, we've got this 18 looking at it blah, blah, blah, blah. Don't believe it. They have someone looking at it to some degree. But are the best of the best really going to risk their careers to look at this and volunteer for it? That seems like the most important thing. It's the frontier and it can be get so much interesting, productive, useful stuff. Outside of obviously it being the nature of reality and kind of ultimate truth seeking, which I think is very valuable unto itself. But I think you could end up with new propulsion modalities and possibly new energy modalities. All these things could come from studying this stuff. See, I got to say I'm not objective here. Because I've seen so many times being inside the government, where for what we call in Washington, the optics, Congress wants us to look into this. Let's look into it and let's form a team and let's put scientists on it. But you saw in 60 minutes that guy who said he quit said that woman came to him and said, we got to turn down the temperature on this thing. And so people inside the intelligence community told me, like I was starting to work in my own lab to reproduce it and to come up with a sensor, the sensor stuff. And I said, I'm making progress, but it's on my own dime. I'll continue on my own dime, but I have to know if I succeed, you'd want it and he goes forget it. It is career ending here. If you even ask these questions, it's just optics. They don't really care. They already know the answer they want. This isn't serious. And so when it comes to UFOs and all this other stuff, if I had to be a betting man, I'd say they don't really take it serious. - Yeah, I don't know. I imagine you worked with James Clapper. - Oh, yes. He was the guy who gave me my intelligence distinguished service metal when I. - Okay, well there you go. So he publicly in the age of disclosure was like an Area 51. We had some sensor program. We were looking for UFOs and then mic Rogers. He probably also know. - Which one, the mic Rogers, the congressman or mic Rogers, they had a NSA. - I had a NSA. He said Clapper called him in a public interview. He said Clapper called him and asked. for all the UFO data from the NSA. - The director of National Intelligence James Clapper calls me, Mike, I need you to go through all of it. I need the team to go through all of NSA's holding all of its files, and I need everything that you have on UFOs. And I'm like, what's her? - So it seems like there's some internal movement. Like even if you don't accept it face value, all of the UFO crash retrieval and reverse engineering, which I think there's some evidence around that. That's like pretty good too. But even if you don't take that a face value, there is some internal interest around this stuff. - Oh yeah, there's some, but it's all not official. - Yeah, we talked to pilots on the Navy base, I don't know. - Aviators, they like to be called aviators. - We are mere pilots on a non-official manner on a Navy base. And they told us that they saw they were seeing phenomena that they couldn't understand on a very regular basis. But they were not talking about that. They were not mentioning that because it was career-ending with a big career on ding. - They say all of us have seen a lot of stuff and none of us say anything because we want to keep flying. - Yeah, and that's the same thing as the Habanah syndrome. Also, people don't, the officials, the government doesn't acknowledge the fact because if we acknowledge, I think, my personal opinion, if we acknowledge the fact, then it's going to scare people. Who else is going to go abroad and work for state department? Nobody will want to do that 'cause they know they will risk their life. If we acknowledge that there is something we don't know of the same thing in UFOs, who is going to go on missions, aerial missions, they won't want to do it also 'cause they will risk their lives. It's a big scare factor. It's going to scare a lot of people and I think our government doesn't want to do that. Plus, they don't understand it. They don't understand it and they don't want to scare people so it doesn't exist. - Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And in the intelligence world, there's a really unfortunate thing that happens. It really bothers me a lot. And I've had it happen to me personally in the war in Iraq and the connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. In intelligence, we're supposed to speak truth to power. We're supposed to be objective reporters who report what we think is happening with what confidence and to never let our own political agendas color what we tell policymakers. But you heard on the 60 minutes interview where they said, well, look, if it's the Russians doing it to us, that's an act of war because they've done it against very senior US officials, national security officials, on our own soil. They've attacked us. It's an act of war and it is. I think that is exactly what it is. 'Cause the Russians look at war differently. They're always at war. They call it gray war or active measures. And their intelligence services are more about making things happen than reporting what happens. Very different philosophy than ours. And so it's very inconvenient to have to tell the Russians, you just declared war on us. And the guys at CIA don't want that. They don't want a nuclear war. They don't want because what are we really gonna do to the Russians because they've been doing this to us? Really, are we supposed to launch a nuclear war against them? Are we supposed to start killing their intelligence operatives? What are we supposed to do about it? We're not only that, but it's so embarrassing 'cause it's been going on since 1980s. So we're helpless. So we're starting the 1980s and we haven't done anything. Well, yeah, it was a word to go, what? Yeah, so the fact of the matter is, the Russians know very well that if they keep the aggression below a certain threshold, we're gonna do nothing, right? And so they know that and so they keep doing it. And if we say to the American voters, we know the Russians have been at war with us. And we're just gonna sit here and take it. Well, how would the voters like that? But on the other hand, if we get too aggressive and react to the Russians, we're gonna turn up the heat. So you have an example there of CIA saying, we're gonna control the narrative to keep us from going to war with Russia. Yeah. Okay, that may actually be, at the end of the day, a good thing, but they don't get to decide that. That's not, and I've seen this inside where I see exactly that happened in other contexts. And I said to a very senior person at NSA, not the director, someone below them. I said, you don't, we weren't gonna tell Bush something, we had discovered. And she said, nope, I'm not gonna let you do that. And he said, why? And he said, well, this guy's crazy. He'll go do anything. And I said, that's not your call. She said, you know, she said, well, we can't let him go off on a tangent. I said, but that's not your call. She said, well, yeah, it is. And that's the reality. And you see, when that happens, people's trust in the intelligence apparatus starts to road. And I will tell you, I didn't see a lot of that, but it happens. Yeah, and if it's something coming from outside Earth, it's the same thing. 'Cause those pilots were describing a lot of near misses when they were flying, they almost missed something. They were worried with safety over everything. And they were worried. So if it's the same thing and it's something coming from outside Earth that we don't understand. If officials acknowledge that this is what is happening, it's going to scare the bitches out of everybody, right? And they don't want to do that. Because first, again, they don't understand it. So it doesn't exist. 'Cause otherwise, it will make them look incompetent. And it's been going on for several years also. So how come they've led this happen for several years without doing anything? And the only way is to say it doesn't exist. Yeah, not good. Not the right orientation towards this whole subject. And another thing sort of like that. And I actually think it's more acknowledged, probably, by CIA than it is by the civilian world. But there is a psychic spy program. This is M.K. Ultra. Well, there's M.K. Ultra, but there's also Stargate, do you know about this? Yeah, yeah. And so to me, a bunch of evidence from CIA circles that there is some sort of mind, matter connection where there's maybe we're talking about kind of transmission theory of consciousness, something else going on as far as our epistemological circuitry than anybody in academia would ever admit. And something that I feel very passionate about is like science should not be locked up in any of these agencies to the extent that there's some trade secret that confers a tactical warfare advantage fine. But the idea that like something that fundamental is just kind of stuck in these agencies. And I mean, this is all, by the way, this is FOIA in 2017, these programs are public now. But that's pretty wild, right? And like no one in academia would, they'd all laugh at this. If we're, you know, they'd laugh at the conversation we're having right now. But then the people in aerospace and in these agencies that like need every advantage they get with intelligence modalities use it. (laughs) Well, I don't know, I wouldn't go that far. I will tell you this, the Russians take this stuff way more seriously than we do. And to the extent that in chess matches, they would have summoning like beaming negative mental energy at a opponent of a Russian, you know? And the Russians are much more open to things that we aren't. And the both good and bad. And the things that don't cost anything, because they don't have much. That's the resources. No, that's true. And I think that some of the biggest discoveries in this area probably will be the Russians, because they have much more open minds than we do. They think they tend to be more spiritual and mystical maybe than we do because of their history. But let's talk about this remote consciousness thing. And this phenomenon where a psychic can tell you there's a body buried under a bridge. And they go there and yeah, the body's there. One explanation is ESP or clairvoyance or non-local consciousness. And that's possible, but then let's look at the other possibilities. We know there are some humans that are savants. Someone who you could say, what day of the week is 50, 55? - Rain man. - October, yeah. And so there are some people with unbelievable, weird genius capabilities. - Yes. - You know, who's to say that someone couldn't have absorbed all the news and everything about the human condition and reached the conclusion that a serial killer of a certain kind is gonna put a body in a certain place and a certain date, right? That this is not ESP. It's just elevating an analytic skills to a genius level. And so to me, something like that is more likely explanation than something that's totally outside any range. - So I would disagree with you. - Well, but I always look at, you have to respect what we don't know and I'm not gonna say impossible. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I would go that far. But at the same time, I am a scientist and I look at evaluating possibilities based on the best tools we have available. To come up with is there an explanation within the science we do know and I would start there and Then deposit a science we don't know is such an unknown realm It's almost not worth looking at because there's no way of evaluating that information You don't rule it out and we say maybe there's something there, but um, but then you become the cat That doesn't know what that cannot learn French. Maybe No, no, I'm saying look this is a fascinating thing about the scientific method Uh-huh. We assume it's the end all But clearly it isn't because it fails us over and over again. Yeah, and so I Went to a hunter-three union of my PhD program at Indiana University, you know where BF Skinner was there You know these luminaries and I I was an industry and I said, you know I've been out 10 years and I think the scientific method is really flawed and limited And I said why and I said because in science you have to narrow things down so Tiny and so narrow to reach a real robust conclusion You have to control so much that it becomes Inapplicable to the real world where nothing is controlled Hmm, and I said in my world where I'm in the fighter simulation business And I have to figure out how to make a pilot think he's flying at 20 feet off the ground With very limited cues. There's no science for that. I just have to try a bunch of shit And see what works. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I said I think the the method is Seriously flawed and limited. Yeah. Oh my god So I think that I will give you this the scientific method itself is limited agree as the same thing as you know When you're looking for the body or body that's buried Maybe that person has an extra sense of smell that could smell what it is Yeah, maybe that person has an extra sense of Something that we don't know exit. We don't acknowledge that it exists and we don't have the tools to evaluate So I think it is very possible that that that particular person has Capability capacity of finding a body so right and we don't know and we don't know We don't know how to evaluate that Possible capability. So I do I think it's there's it's something we don't know and we have no idea and we should be open in I'll give you both a big yo. I like it. I like it. Yeah, it is one of those things where It's a paradigm shifting thing if real and then we don't know if it's real But you have you have this woman Jessica Uts who is president of the American Statistical Association She looked at all the CIA data around Stargate did a meta study and she came out saying if this were any other field and not Parapsychology, which has this inherent kind of stigma stench attached to it It would be beyond a shadow of doubt with the p-value as she was looking at that. This is totally real and then To me, it's like okay. It's like black body radiation in the late 19th century where you can say it's fake because of the prevailing theory at the time Or let's like try to find a theory and I don't know, but like I say maybe yeah, maybe yeah, yeah But you see the thing is one reason you'll find me to be such a stickler. Yeah is I kind of have to be to have Probability because I want hardcore scientists sure to look at someone like me and someone like Dr. Gilbert and say they're not wild-eyed Crazies. Yeah, they are disciplined. Sure and so I'm purposely that way, you know that I want to maintain healthy skepticism At the same time. Oh, because the very best scientists Realize that we're much more limited than we want to admit Mm-hmm. And so what I want to do is speak to those scientists and say Play in this space because there's some exciting stuff here. I have no idea what it is Mm-hmm, but I know what it isn't and what it isn't is something we understand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Was there any While you were at NSA or OD and I anything that's now declassified Around the UFO stuff that came across your desk any signals intelligence or no and I'll tell you that Inside the highest levels of the intelligence community. This is not something we spent a femtosecond thinking about anytime I don't think there was any point I Did get involved in some FOIA requested NSA is a senior executive. Mm-hmm, but None of us spent any time There's one guy I interviewed whose his name is Dan Sherman and he said he was taken to an NSA complex and he was like Kind of humming these like tones with this headphones and then it was that was all met to so he could communicate with non-human intelligence and he said I'm gonna play a tone And I want you to mentally hum that tone and he said that you will Eventually feel a connection the line will change. Mm-hmm when I saw the sine wave move I'm like oh, okay, I heard about something like that. Yeah, it's called above black is the bookie wrote. Yeah, project preserved destiny Do you have a take on that? No, okay? I heard about it. I know but but I will tell you that Look at that level you're interested in budgets Policy right and I'm trying to get more money to do high-risk high-reward research. Yeah in the community That consumed the 100% of my time and I except when I was gonna be interviewed by 60 minutes and they wanted to ask me about this Mm-hmm. I never even came up mm-hmm in thinking about Kind of terrestrial Propulsion modalities that could explain what we're seeing because this is part of your book Is there anything you guys are aware of or think could be possible? That transcends chemical combustion. Yes, okay. Yes I'm glad you brought that up because we go through NASA's innovative Propulsion program. Yes, I think it's fantastic because it's one part of the government that's saying we will fund Anything that isn't impossible. I Love that approach and they give you a little funding if you can play with it and an example of that is a warp drive mm-hmm and Again in our book the shadow of time we get into the possibilities of You know when people don't talk about When you talk about traveling near the speed of light is the Acceleration and deceleration. Mm-hmm. Right. You've got to accelerate from nothing to this near the speed of light and then you've got to slow down to get where you're gonna go well Either those take a really long time Which gets rid of a lot of the advantage of traveling that fast or you have an organism that can withstand Unbelievable G's which yeah, which yeah, we studied there were there were some studies done on on that because for For organisms to be able to travel From outer space to earth, for example They need to be able to resist extreme cold extreme heat Extremely long journeys. So extreme acceleration extreme decelerations and Intense radiation cosmic radiation. So is it possible is there been any any anything like this where there has been? So they we've we've done studies on on Like for example, where we're talking about nuclear nuclear Nuclear plants. So there is an organism a bacterium called deenococcus radio durance, which can resist Intense radiation it can actually thrive on intense radiation, but also it can survive cold dehydration Vacuum and acid, so it's it's an extreme of our there and we've got a few that are extreme of ours and this one The deenococcus radio durance has been found to survive three years in outer space Based on the studies conducted in the on the international space station Now we've done studies on ants. There's certain type of ants that can sustain 5,000 G's of 5,000 times the force of gravity. Wow They're tardy grades with our tardy grades are little little bears that are from half a millimeter to 1.2 Millimeters that have eight legs and they're found on moss or fresh or seawater sediment and they can sustain 16,000 G's like 16,000 times the force of gravity when a human will be killed with a sustained exposure to 12 G's So and and those little tardy grades can survive 30 years at zero degree Fahrenheit Can survive 10 years in a dehydrated state and NASA did an experiment where they survived 18 months in the vacuum of space Same thing outside the international space station. Now there are fruit flies fruit flies Surprisingly, the little those latini things are able to withstand have to 17,000 G's 17,000 times the the the force of gravity. There are roundworms Roundworms are parasite. They can be parasite in animals or so any humans. They can withstand 80,000 G's And in 2023 was reported than an individual nematodes was has been revived after 46,000 years in the Siberian permafrost and Talking about organism that are resistant to extreme conditions Like in the bottom of the ocean near the bottom of the ocean At five miles below the ocean, which is 26,000 feet below the surface, near hydrothermal vents. They are cells that can survive. There is an ocean warm that the home is located near hydrothermal vents, and it's not, it's not crushed. There's a mariana snailfish that can live near the mariana or in the mariana trench, in the western Pacific Ocean. So imagine an organism that is under five miles of water, that heavy, heavy weight that would crush any kind of organ, it would crush us, and it does not crush a snailfish. It doesn't crush a little worm. Why is that? How is that? You know? So, I think the bottom line of everything that she's saying is we should never say never when it comes to nothing could sustain interstellar travel, nothing could sustain the kind of geese that we see with the tic-tac, that we actually have existence proofs that those things are possible. But getting back to the question you asked about propulsion, which this is relevant because some of these propulsions get to extreme accelerations and radiation even. The ones that I think are the most interesting are where you're not putting the power source on the vehicle. So for example, we have this video and we know the guy who did it at Sandia National Lab in White Sands, where you take a disk, a flying saucer basically, and you put a pulse laser, just like I said, and you shoot it up and you propel it with laser energy. Whoa. So you can move something through the air where there's no engine on it at all, you're just pushing on it with photons. Yes. Whoa. In fact, this guy that we've talked to did it for the government and he's been forever trying to say, look, you want clean energy? You don't need any fuel at all. You just use a laser being or a microwave to push it. What's, can you say the guy's name? I'd have to look it up. And I don't know he'd want himself. He's a little private. But, you can go online and you can look at laser propelled disk and you can see a video and it looks exactly like a flying saucer just levitating up. And wires? Are we investing heavily in this if you can do that at high, no, okay. Well, this gets into another thing and this is his frustration is that if this were successful with threatened, a huge established, you know, jet engine and he wants to use it for civil aviation, right? And he's done the math. And now with adaptive optics, at the time he first doing this, you could only do it at short distances. But we have adaptive optics now where we can control for atmospheric losses and distortion of the beam and stuff like that. And I think when it comes to getting things into low earth orbit in particular, this ought to really be looked at. But in NASA's program, they look at a lot of things from laser propulsion and space, light sails and they also look at fusion reactors where you basically create a fusion reaction and you spew gamma rays out the back. And again, it's photon pressure. You know, a photon doesn't have any mass, but it has momentum. So when a photon hits something, it imparts its momentum to it and it will move it, right? And so I think that to me, those are some of the more interesting, but there are some other really weird ones like magnetic levitation, right? For example, did you know it's possible for me to levitate you with a super strong magnet, levitate me? Yeah, no, I didn't know that. But we've done it with birds and frogs and spiders. What? Yeah. And here's the way it works. Magnetism isn't just what you think of as a like a piece of iron or a right earth magnet or something like that. This is what we call ferromagnetism. There are a zillion other kinds of magnetism. There's ferrimagnetism. There's diamagnetism. There's paramagnetism. And these all have to do with, if you have a charged particle with spinning, it will create a magnetic field. Okay? Sometimes that magnetic field works in the direction of the inducing magnetic field. Sometimes this is with diamagnetic. It's the opposite. So you get, you get instead of things being attracted, they get pushed away. Like bismuth. Yes. Exactly. Yes. And that was found maybe with the UFO and they think, yeah, maybe. So you could have magnetic levitation. Yeah. And that's possible. And you can take non-metallic things and you can tractor beam them basically, right? There's also such a thing as optical tweezers, where if you create a very, very strong electromagnetic field of the laser, it's very precise. You can move particles of dust around with this laser. It's called an optical tweezer. So remote force fields, if you will. Wow. Absolutely possible. Now, when you do the math of how big a magnetic field you would need to control something many miles away. And it gets to be, but I wouldn't say it's impossible. What I'm saying is magnetic fields decrease as the cube of the distance as you go away. It's not inverse square. It's inverse cubed because they're dipoles. There's no such thing as a magnetic monopole. So it's the same time you have one magnetic field reinforcing. You have the opposite end taking away. So this is in Maxwell's equations, right? So essentially to a first order is goes off as a cube. So to have a steep magnetic gradient that would cause this at a very long distance, we have no idea how to do that, but we can't say it's impossible. So pushing and pulling with magnetic fields is possible. These fusion drives are kind of interesting. And the most interesting of all is the warp drive. So now this is when you get into NASA has funded this. Even though they don't know that it's possible, they don't know that it's impossible. Some physicists have postulated what they call negative energy, which isn't the same as the energy we see, you know, dark energy. It's not the same as dark energy. Negative energy, because energy and mass are basically the same thing, they create gravitational effects. So pure energy has a gravitational effect and so forth, slows down space time, all that. But what happens with this energy is that it creates a repulsion. So the albacurie drive is basically you have a huge mass or energy in front, which is positive mass or energy, and you have a huge negative in back. And so you create a wave of space time that's moved. So the way the warp drive works is imagine a surfer who's on a wave and is stationary with respect to the wave, the wave is moving. And we know that space time can move at faster than the speed of light, because the hyperinflation that happened after the big bang or some think that happened, which is a pretty good evidence for it is that space time itself can move faster than the speed of light, which means that if you're in a bubble of space time that's moving faster than the speed of light, you're not going to experience any acceleration or deceleration, because you're not moving in that frame. Yeah, seems like a really hard engineering problem. Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, we don't know that negative energy exists. It's the same kind of thing that would happen to people with wormhole open. Yeah, right. The only way a wormhole works is if you have that in the middle to keep things from collapsing. But it is interesting because Miguel Alcubiari did this proof that theoretically, even within general relativity, you could get faster than light travel if you do have negative energy. Yeah, yeah. So again, in our book, The Shadow of Time, we explore this as a kind of a plot point. That's the kind of thing that I find kind of exciting. And here's kind of what I think is going to happen. Someone's going to keep looking at that and they won't find that. That'll turn out not to be possible or not to be true, but they'll discover something else. Yeah, exactly. And this is why the study of UFOs is so important. Yes. You know, if we don't make any other point, I want to make this point that in all of science, the biggest discoveries are by definition, those we don't expect. And why is that? You know, if I ask you to imagine a color you've never seen before, it's really hard to do. Right? But if you saw it, you could recognize it. And because when we imagine something, we have to do it from the building blocks of our experience. If we have no experience, we can't imagine it. But if we put ourselves in a position to observe something new, we may see something we could never have imagined. And that's where the biggest breakthroughs almost always come from. I set out to do a, I looked while I was doing it in my peripheral vision and I saw B and I go, ooh, that's more interesting. Yeah. And I think the reason for people to really get serious about studying what's going on here is we're going to see BC D and E. We shoot for the stars you land on the moon and the moon's pretty cool. You land somewhere unexpected. Yeah. And again, remember, that's where discovery has to happen. Where by definition, you can't imagine it. Yes. Yeah. I love the Henri Bergson quote, which is the eyes can only see what the mind can comprehend and you need a hypothesis in order to see something to begin with and so I think that's probably actually the most underrated aspect of the phenomena is that our vision is I mean this is kind of an recognized virtual reality interface and we superimpose our we have like a meme library in our heads and we superimpose these pre-existing building blocks onto the thing and so in the 1890s people would see airships which were like on the edge of what was even possible at the time you had like zeppelins and stuff and now we're seeing these like faster than light you know saucers and that sort of thing so it's there's something going on where we are using what's available to us and superimposing it I think that's right and that's why AI is so important but I'm not worried about AI supplanty or being there instead of our brain I think AI will always be important the future in addition to our brain because it can only work together because the AI will not be trained on anything else that that it doesn't know but the brain will be able to detect something that is different and will be able to train the AI so it will always have to be an augmented brain that will be allowed with the AI but I think the our brain will always be necessary we should not rely well I don't know about mine what we should rely but we should never rely on AI solely AI because we'll never see anything else I think there's something very powerful though in when she said if you extended and taken to account what I said about the negative space we should train up an AI that is the opposite of us in every way not like us but the opposite of us and ask it to look at these questions that's a great yeah love that we need an anti AI yeah right right train it on everything that isn't yeah yeah yeah yeah I love that and see what it says because I mean that's the clear implication of what she's saying where you know an AI can just do what we do only better okay that's useful but an AI that can do things we cannot do and would not ever do is the one that's really going to pay off yeah the question is would we ever believe it yeah exactly well that's the problem with LLM's is they kind of inherently triangulate actually the consensus so they're going for usually the middle of the road kind of most acceptable answer and so if you could trade a more kind of heretical thinking AI or something you know some an AI on the bleeding edge of what's acceptable and maybe decamp it from the instinct that you were talking about you know even I think before we were filming Eric where people are socialized and ideas are fashion statements and you know it's hard to truly think in a heterodox way if you could train an AI to do that that would be amazing yeah yeah and that's why we need an increase in the research budget and not a decrease in research but yeah yeah get me started yeah yeah yeah yeah well but I think research all over the world research is going to increase and yeah yeah governments are going to discover a lot of interesting things yeah well there's a great essay called the usefulness of useless things I don't know if you're familiar with it's by this guy Abraham Flexner and it was kind of the charter for the Institute of Advanced Study Princeton back in the day and it was all about we should pour a ton of money into things that don't have immediate use if you think about you know quantum theory which is responsible for semiconductors and you know a third plus of our economy today it was like people philosophy you know thinking about the kookyest weirdest stuff and then it turns into something that's super productive and so I agree with you I think the idea that you know we should only spend money on things that are super locally useful is not only counterproductive not only myopic but it's it's actually counterproductive from like a even a GDP boosting perspective like it's dumb politics too yep yeah yeah that's what we love to do with Eric we love looking at completely outside the box of the weirdest things that are happening because we think that in the weirdest things are the clue of the clues of the future I have some odds that's funny we're always interested in that's funny but again we're hardcore scientists so our interest is there but we try to be disciplined when we look at those things and most of them you know are unlikely but there are a few and those are the ones that really excite us like those tic-tacs there's something real going on there I mean there's just too many independent parallel yeah sensors on that thing by people who didn't want to see it but saw it anyhow and so those in particular and and so that's why in our book The Shadow of Time the novel that's why the tic-tacs show up because those in particular we come up with a narrative of what could really be going on there yeah well I can't wait to get to the shadow of time because in many ways it is the maybe best conclusion but embodied in fiction of this survey level overview of what you guys talk about in the new science of UFOs and so it's this really cool thing but I want to talk real quick on the on the propulsion front I'm particularly high conviction in this thing called the byfield brown effect have you ever heard of that tell us more so it's this idea that you take a capacitor and you have a negative electrode a positive electrode and you have a high k dielectric in the middle which is you know the ability to store you know high electric fields love it when you talk dirty and I think there's all this interesting you know data around this mid-century inventor towns and brown and his ability to transcend you know chemical combustion and this very cool way with these high voltage experiments that he was doing with this capacitor experiment which to me would lead to stuff that leads us beyond SpaceX and I'm just very passionate about the idea that I think SpaceX is just limited you know it takes with chemical combustion it's 80,000 years to the next habitable planet proximate tarry and that's unacceptable and nuclear thermal propulsion maybe cuts that in half or something and so you need something like this and I think it's I think it's legit so I don't know if you guys have a take there or well okay I know how capacitors work I know how dielectrics work yeah and so in what way could this be used for propulsion so you get thrust from the negative electrode to the positive electrode and you could do this apparently you get more thrust actually in a vacuum than you do in air and a lot of people try to explain it away because of the the ionized air bombards you know the ionized wind bombards there and then you get the sequel opposite reaction and you get thrust but I think you see even more thrust in a vacuum and so you could end up with all sorts of cool space propulsion modalities and then oh yeah oh yeah oh they've there have been things like the EM drive the EM drive sure yeah but the EM drive got debunked by I think by yeah it keeps getting debunked yeah they people keep throwing money at it anyhow yeah and I think this thing you're talking about has that quality because conservation of energy says that can't happen or Newton's yes Newton's law where you have to have a reaction mass in order to get thrust you in other words you have to throw mass or energy out the back in order to move in a particular direction a hundred percent and and the reason I think I put it in the Paris psychology the thing we were talking about earlier I put it in that camp of there's a lot of evidence that these high electric field strength differentials result in thrust and then we just don't have a good theory around it like there maybe there's something quantum electrodynamics we don't understand but well there's something interesting where there's this effect where if you take two plates kind of like a capacitor and they're very very flat and very very close together because of quantum field you will get the plates moving with respect to each other a tiny amount and this has been observed in the laboratory yeah it has a mirror effect it has a mirror effect exactly and but that only works in one direction yeah and it's but yeah I mean it's it's one of these weird quantum things that is moving in the direction you're saying because okay the thing were attracted to each other but what was the force it's a quantum field and that starts to get outside of you know the quantum realm is so bizarre it's so bizarre exactly you have this guy sunny white out here who's at NASA Eagle works and he claims that he can power up 1.5 kV microchip with the chasm air effect and so it's and he's published this and so I think that's so cool you know I don't know if it's right but yeah yeah yeah there you go and then one other thing on the astrobiology front is you were mentioning tardigrades and all the extremophiles have you guys thought of fungi or mushrooms as candidates you know they've been found on the international space station and Francis Crick who of course discovered the double helical structure of DNA and his whole thing was like you know the hundred million years on earth for DNA synthesis was impossible nobody's ever replicated this primordial soup experiment to create it and so maybe you would send fungi across long distances and some sort of spaceship or something maybe you'd feed it algae and CO2 and the thing I like about fungi so interesting if you were to think about like a Kardashev three or four scale civilization you wouldn't create this kind of like biological meat suit you know you show up as this gangly, you know, bipedal being, you know, in some other planet and you're immediately treated as a foreign invader, you would send an extremophile, which is like a zip file of consciousness. Humans all have microbiomes, but we have microbiomes as well, so it affects our thinking. And they're extremophiles that you have, you know, cordisept mushrooms in the Amazon kind of co-opting the actions of bullet ants. And so there's something I think very interesting about and then human tissue is very susceptible to fungal disease because it's so similar, you know, we're actually more similar to fungi than we are to most other plants and animals, phylogenetically. And so it's this really interesting thing of what you would send this thing off that would like merge with the host, you know, and then it would affect their consciousness. And so if they came here, it would be a fun guy. Yeah, I mean, but I want to follow that thread just a little bit, and you know, just as we should never say they would do it the way we do it, we have to say maybe they would. And when we see in space probes, we don't send intentionally organisms. We send automated probes and now with our AI, you know what's going to happen. We're going to be sending AI's out there because we don't have to have a life support system. We don't have to worry about any of that. And as our AI gets better and better and better, I think because, you know, Elon Musk said that we're not going to Mars after all, right, more or less. And I'm on the Explore Mars Foundation group and that was big, that was depressing for us because we want to explore Mars. And the fact is, we don't know how to send a human to Mars and bring them back in good shape with radiation, low Gs, hazards on Mars and so forth. And so where all that takes you is, the first thing you're going to do is not going to be biological. It's going to be AI. And so that tells us that if something has come here from another civilization, it's probably not certainly, it's probably a machine. That's right. It's probably some sort of von Neumann replicator probe or something. And that doesn't mean it's not alive because now you're getting into what is life, you know, and could an AI in a machine be alive? And this gets into what is life and the biologists, I know say it's simple. If a ball rolls downhill, it's dead. If it rolls uphill, it's alive, meaning life is locally neg and tropic. It behaves. It rolls uphill. Right. I love that definition. That's interesting. Yeah. And so could you have an artificial machine that to all intents and purposes, you know, maybe emotions, had feelings, probably, we kind of have an existence proof that it could be done with atoms. Yeah. It's us. So I think that, um, it's like Maxwell's demons. Yeah. Max Scopic Maxwell's demons. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Exactly. Negan tropic. Oh, yeah. I mean, entropy reducers. Exactly. Oh, yeah. What is that? When you look at these tech techs and you see them moving around, you say, well, no biological being could do that. Well, maybe that's true. Maybe it's not biological. Maybe it's hard and electronics, some kind or bio, you know, something. But to me, if we're being visited by a probe from another civilization, it's probably technology, not biology. Well, there's all this lore in UFO world that the crafts are alive in that even David Fraver, Commander Debra Fraver said the crafts seem to be like breathing or something and like, look at that. That's another possibility. Yeah. Like that movie, Nope, which I loved. Oh, yeah. Jordan Peel. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where it's a cloud. And the cloud just doesn't move. But, uh, yeah. Or, you know, as she was saying, as Dr. Gilbert was saying, what if this is worth thinking about? Hmm. Dark matter is dark to us because it doesn't interact with us except very weekly, right? Or maybe not at all. So, here's it, flip it around. What do we look like to dark matter? Hmm. We look dark. Right. If it doesn't interact with us, we don't interact with it. Yes. And so, to it, we're dark matter. Yes. Yes. Right? And we're alive. Yes. So, what's to say? It can't be alive. Right. Totally. Right. And so, there's an example of a mind-expanding idea. Yeah. The way outside what a normal human is going to think about, I sometimes think about the ideas that we live in at kind of a computational universe, like in the simulation of some sort of simulation. And then you look at Fremont's theorem, which is the travel of light and it looks algorithmically optimized for, you know, kind of shortest path between two observers. Well, yeah, but that's kind of the path of least resistance. And you see that is a fascinating subject of fractals in how the veins of a tree or capillaries in your body or filaments of megastructures in outer space, all look the same, the highest level down to the lowest level, and it's the path of least resistance. Yes. That's why those structures exist, because if you're trying to move atoms of water from A to B in the most efficient path with the least energy, that is the path. But then, I don't know, you think of, if I were assimilating something, I would copy code chunks, and then you get Fibonacci sequences and golden ratios and some of these things that seem like consistent architectures and see that is so fascinating. These mathematical things like Fibonacci and fractals and holography and things like that, where math isn't a property of the, is, doesn't describe the universe. It is the universe. Right. I mean, but now you're getting into Wolfram philosophical kind of stuff and that's above my pay grade. For me too. Well, I want to talk about this amazing book, The Shadow of Time, which you guys should all go out and get. It is just fascinating and I don't want to spoil it for people. So I think high level, it talks about an object that should not be found in the desert. That is a total kind of anachronism and involves kind of seemingly like, you know, elements or things that like, you know, shouldn't exist on Earth and look more advanced than, you know, the carbon dating and a very kind of doggedly persistent paleontologist who is kind of pursuing this stuff and finds himself honestly in like a mafia war or something like, it's this wild, wild West landscape of people fighting for this forbidden archaeology. And as somebody who's mired in the UFO world, I think there might be some truth in fiction here. Well, what was our motivation? I think that's very important for the readers to understand. We finished the new science of UFOs, which was a kind of intellectual exercise in the art of the possible and not impossible. And what we wanted to do is basically tell that same story in a way that would be more accessible to people and to tell it from the point of view of interesting people and characters who had problems in their lives and make the science part of the story so that it became clues. And so as scientists, we will tell you that there's nothing more exciting than embarking on a scientific journey of discovery, solving a mystery and peeling back the late onion one layer at a time and seeing something new and unexpected beneath, which only takes you deeper and deeper and deeper. So in addition to exploring the science of UFOs, we wanted to give the readers the feeling of what is like to go on a journey of scientific discovery. And so one thing that happens in this book, you might remember, especially at the end, is there's a bunch of twists and turns like switchbacks up Mount Everest, right? It's kind of like a whiplash like, "Oh, that's true, that's true." Well in science, that's what really happens, where you dig deep and you get answers that you weren't looking for that lead you to questions you weren't going to ask. And so at the end, there's this kind of rapid fire series of reveals of deeper and deeper truths where what you thought just a week ago is now today's illusion. When you turn one illusion into one fact until you finally get to something that's close to the truth, and that's what science is like. So we have a lot of twists and turns on purpose, and all of those are science-driven. So there's pretty much most of the science that was in the new science of UFOs is in here, but it's used to tell a story about people who are trying to overcome obstacles and rise above themself. Yeah, so we wanted to put a lot of science in there, but we wanted it to be exciting, and we wanted it to be a mystery, and we wanted the reader to do the discovery themselves and to be completely caught in the actions of what's going to happen next, and all this is deep into the science that we have studied for the other book. Yeah, and there's a lot of biology in there, a lot of exobiology, there's a lot of neuroscience. Neuroscience is very important. I am a neuroscientist, and I'm really interested in species that are radically different from us. And I would commend to people to read this book called An Amense World by Ed Young, in which he describes what he calls the "unvolved" or "world view." of these exotic creatures like fish that have electric fields and sense electric fields snakes, where I got my PhD on snakes, rattlesnakes and pythons that see infrared, they see in the dark, mantis shrimp that see 12 different colors that we don't see, you know, and I've been especially interested in that phenomena of organisms whose worldview and way of thinking and neuroanatomy is so radically different from ours, they cannot be like us. And so that's exploring the negative space of the human condition. So the main, I guess, villain you want to call it in this story, not exactly a villain, but is about as opposite a human as you could get, right? I mean, in every way this creature is about as different from us as you can get and the interactions between these completely alien us and them, kinds of organisms, contrast creates conflict, which makes things interesting. When each discovers their own limitations, when looking through the world, through the other's eyes. And so we spent a lot of time, and there's a lot of hardcore neuroscience in the way this creature is defined. And in some of the other characters, there's a lot of the kind of animal dimension. I studied in my PhD work and later a lot of animal intelligence. And my conclusion from studying animals is that they're way smarter than we think they are. They're just not smart in ways that we're smart, right? And this is what Ed Young is saying in his book. And so there are two creatures in this story. One is a genius parrot named Walter. That's right. Who is not a nice character. No, kind of like Yago in Aladdin. And Walter is this genius parrot. And if you think about it, humans can be geniuses relative to other unions. Why couldn't an African great parrot be a genius relative to other parrots? And where would that take you? So that's what you have in Walter. And then there's this other creature we won't say too much about who's the kind of the villain who's a fascinating study in what we are not. That other creature, which yeah, we won't talk too much about is just fascinating. And I think what you said is so true that questions grow at an exponent of your knowledge. So you continue on the search. You build up these kind of layers of knowledge. But then the questions grow exponentially more. And I think it really touches on the idea with the phenomenon that that this book and the movie rival also kind of does a good job of this. It's weirder than you can think. And it's not only weirder than you can think. And I think there's an Arthur C Clark quote about this. It's weirder than you can even imagine. And you also explore a hypothesis that I'm pretty sympathetic to, which is this Salary and Hypothesis. This idea of these a what we're calling aliens. We're calling them extraterrestrials. But maybe they've been cohabiting with us on earth for a while. That's a possibility or maybe not. And you know, really any story is about a person who sets out to do something they want. Only to discover that what they need is something very different. And to confront and overcome their own limitations. And this is what the story is really about. It's about this paleontologist who starts off in deep trouble. He's been fired from his job at UCLA. He's got no money. His mother has got a severe chronic illness. He lives in the way back of beyond Trona, which is where I was born and near where I grew up. Cool. So I'm very familiar with what it's like to to come from nothing in that part of the world. And he finds in pursuit of the science of what he's pursuing because he makes a discovery. He goes into the garage because he wants to sell his dad's collection of Native American art just to get a little money. And he discovers something there that's like, whoa, he discovers an artifact that a dealer tells him is priceless. But he can't sell it because of various reasons. And so his science brain kicks in and it leads him on this journey of external discovery. But more important, it takes him on a journey of internal discovery. And I want to emphasize that because what we want the readers to come out of this at the end. And one reason we have so many reveals at the end is to make people question their own perception of reality in their own lives. To have a healthy dose of yo, maybe yes, maybe no, because in all of our lives, we see things and assume things that just aren't true. And so in a sense, the book is about a character, but in a sense, it's about all of the readers too. Because each reader is going to bring their own needs and wants their own obstacles. And we want to leave them with a gift. We want to leave them with that ability to look at the world very differently than when they started the book. Well, I think it achieves that. And I was just, I loved it. I couldn't take my eyes away and was just fascinated by, I mean, you're asking these kind of second and third order questions. It's not your garden variety, you know, book about these topics. Another thing you kind of touch on, another theme without giving away too much is this idea that there's like, there are these like almost gang wars going on for this forbidden archaeology. And there's like a blackmail network involved and this stuff, you know, around, you know, these these kind of mystical objects aren't, they're not being retrieved in these sort of above board ways, which to me again kind of comports with a lot of my study of the UFO stuff in the open source world is like, it is the Wild Wild West. There's a lot of private, mercenary action around this stuff. And it's not, and it's a lot of plausible deniability where you have the fingertips aren't attached to the arm, so to speak. And they can get severed at any time. And it's way weirder than you'd ever expect. It's weird. And you know that text, gritty texture of reality is how weird it is. There's a lot of the intelligence world in this because, you know, they say right about what you know. And I'm a neuroscientist and I was a spy. And so it's really an espionage novel too. And the intelligence tradecraft that's in there is real. Right. And the way intelligence officers think of problems. And also when you get to the very top because one of the characters is the FBI director. And what is the FBI director in this story concerned with protecting the FBI at all costs. Right. And I will tell you having been at that level in the government. You know what we really spend our time on is optics. Okay. This thing happened. How do we spin it to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post? How do we spin it and turn a negative into a positive with Congress? What are we going to tell the OMB, the office of management and budget? So they grow our budget. Right. And how do we take down a rival using this? Yeah. That's all we spend our time on at the very top of the government. I guarantee you that is what happens. Bureau. And so that's what happens with the FBI director. Yeah. You know, when you see that woman and how she interacts and how cynically how cynical she is and how pragmatic and self-serving. That is real. That is a synthesis of real people that I have known. It's very real. And so it's a glimpse just like the new science of UFO is a glimpse inside the mind of an intelligence analyst. And any other time, that was all open source data. So it's unclassified. But you're seeing exactly what happens in the super secret world of intelligence analysis. I've exposed it in that book. And in the novel, I expose the politics and the sausage mating and all the dirty dealing that happens under the hood in the intelligence world. It's fascinating. Yeah, go. And there is a lot of psychology in there because we also like psychology and we like to put our our people in trouble. So our paleontologist is also a troubled person inside himself. The love interest has also some flaws and she's also in her own way trouble their layer under layer in the way they are, who they are. And also the creature is also as also layers inside itself. So there's a lot of psychology in there. We love psychology. Well, that's true. So it's a very complex intricate bit with all those flavors in there. Well, I should also say I was a psychotherapist for a while. And Freud said something really true. What you see on the outside is the opposite of what's on the inside. If you see a really hard, tough, exterior, it's protecting a soft inner side where someone who's very centered and isn't very aggressive or doesn't have to talk a lot or whatever, they're very solid inside very often. They're very centered. And so we have these two characters, the main character and his love interest. And they both present kind of the opposite on the outside of what's really going on. And so through their relationship, you start to see that the layers peel back. And at the end, at the climax, if you will both metaphorically, they kind of expose the vulnerable side of themselves to each other, which is an emotional growth for the two of them. But I think, and what this comes out in that, we'll call them the romantic scenes. Yeah. And the love story is something very unique between the two of them, something like I've seldom seen anywhere described, the progression of the love story, the beats, it's very unique, but it's very tasty. There's a lot of subtle tastes in there, because the taste of extraterrestrials, of love, of psychology, of what's happening in the intelligence world, how to pull, how to aim at somebody with the gun. Oh, yeah, yeah. So many, there's so many different details, different flavors, I think it's very, very tasty. Well, what she's referring to is, I took this long novel writing class, which I had to produce a novel, and the teacher says, the number one thing you have to do is create a character that the reader instantly cares about and put them in trouble, so they care about what happens and want to turn the page. And that's absolutely what we do. But she says you have to put texture in there, the gritty feel of reality to make it authentic. And so things I learned in the intelligence world, I put in there that I could, for example, I had to carry a weapon, right? And so I had to qualify on the range, and I had to shoot three or four times to keep my scores up a week, right? And so I'm over at CIA, and this case officer, hardcore, what you think of as a spy. He goes, Eric, you're going down range, I mean, I was going to Iraq, and I had to carry an M4 and a Beretta, and he said, don't use any of that. He said two things. The first time you shoot for real, because you've shot on the range, you don't hear it. And you hear it, and you're going to be shocked at the moment, you most need to have your senses with you. So you need to shoot without your hearing, so that you're not shocked the first time you hear it. He said, that's real. He said, the second thing is this business of a Weber stance and lining up the rear side, he said, no, here's what you do. You take your pointing finger and you lay it along the barrel, and you take your index finger, and you put it in the trigger. So when you want to point at something to shoot at it, you point with your pointing finger, because you've done that your whole life, you're going to be really accurate. And don't worry about squeezing, just pull off as many as you can, center of mass. And he said, that's the real world. So that's something I learned in my intelligence training that I share with the readers. That's the real world. That's what really happens. Like if you get in a gunfight, which is more than in Iraq, we would shoot just to keep their heads down to create muzzle flashes. If you really have to shoot at something, you don't shoot at it the way you do on the range. So it's details like that that we put in there that are, I guess, what I'd call bonuses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there are all these clearly nuggets just based on your own real world experience. But then it's also just fascinating through a fiction lens. I mean, the other thing that resonated with me was this idea of sort of breakaway science or forbidden archaeology being housed in private corporations. I found that very interesting and possibly dovetailing with things we've seen in the real world. Well, it's funny. You mentioned that because I'm still very connected to the national security world and there's something happening there that's extraordinary, which is instead of the government saying, here's what we need, we're going to pay you defense companies to invent it. You're getting companies like Palantir and Andrewl and Ursus rockets, Ursum Major rockets, where they're saying, we're going to get venture capital money. We're going to invent cool stuff way faster than you could. And we're going to say, here it is. You want it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the military R&D that's going on is happening outside the military in Silicon Valley. Yeah, right, right, right. And you're seeing this happen with Anthropic and the defense department and so forth. And so that is exactly what's happening right now. Yeah. No, it's fascinating. I think those companies you mentioned like Andrewl, for example, is a reaction to Lockheed and Northrop where they have their cost plus models. And so they will charge extra for doing less sometimes. And so Andrewl's like, we're going to actually take the risk burden and the financial burden. We're going to innovate and build something you don't even know you need and try to make it work. Which in some ways, I think if you're a taxpayer, you should be kind of grateful for. And then, yeah, maybe there are some other issues we have to think about when it comes to it. So truth and advertising, I have a relationship with Lockheed and I must disclose. Which makes me have to be careful about what I say. And there's two sides to every story. Yeah. If a defense contractor like Lockheed or Northrop or RTX is doing something, it's for one reason and one reason only. Their customer told them to do it. They don't do things just to add to their profit and so forth. In fact, those businesses aren't very profitable when you look at profit margin. They have to only make between 10 and 15% maximum on a cost plus. Their profit margins are not good at all. The return on capital can be pretty big because the government can pay for some of the capital. But generally speaking, they're not high multiples, very low multiples. That's right. That's for sure, true. And the reason is they're not big growth. And so they don't really rip off people consciously. That's not at all what happens. The government says when you do procurement, you have to do it this way. And when you do cost accounting, you have to do it this way. And you have to do this at the other. And when you add up the slowness and the cost, it's because that's what the government is. It's slow and it's expensive. And really, you could kind of look at these companies and say they're more like part of the government. Yeah. And the way Mikko Yan or Kalishnikov or Sukhoi is really part of the Russian. And so they're really just replicas of the government. And so the problem is that the U.S. is falling behind China and Russia and Iran in some cases, like in hypersonics, and they said we can't have this. We can't fall behind China, who everything is dual use because the government is everything. So they're turning to Silicon Valley to do faster. Yeah. And they're relaxing the rules for them. They don't have to follow the same rules that the law keys to. So I wouldn't be so harsh on the defense companies because they basically are doing what they're told to do. Sure. And I also think they have a lot of really interesting frameworks and things they've discovered that they maybe haven't successfully scaled up all the time. But because they have decades of, you know, a head start on a lot of these kind of new Silicon Valley companies, I'd love to see kind of less loss of information between some of these aerospace gray beards at those companies and some of these newer companies. I think that's, you know, how that's happening. How is that happening? Who, where do you think Andrew's hiring? I don't know where. I'll just say this, technology walks on two legs. Okay. Like, if you want a rocket scientist, you know, and you can pay them, you know, double what Lockheed can pay. So they're just posting. Jenny, where do you think those people come from? The prime contractors. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. And that's not all a bad thing. Yeah. No, no, no. I mean. So, you know, I think that the bottom line of all human behavior is you get the behavior you reward. Yeah. And if you look at the way our defense industry behaves today, it's because that's what they get rewarded for. And if they don't, they get punished. Yeah. And so it's completely, you know, they are so exquisitely tuned into their customer. Hmm. That's all they're going to do is what their customer wants them to do. What on the UFO front, you have all this lore of like the Lockheed's and Northrop's engaging and crash retrievals and not having proper supervision or oversight when it comes to the government. Do you take any of that stuff seriously or I'll just say it's beyond my experience. I know nothing about any of that. And I'm not just saying that. I really don't. Yeah. Yeah. So I can't comment. I've never heard anything. There's this funny thing where I interview, you know, I interviewed this guy, Ralph Mawat-Larson who he spoke about. I think you know him. Yeah. And, you know, I interviewed you. And I interviewed a bunch of people who I respect from government circles. And they know nothing about the UFO stuff. And I take it face value that they know nothing about the UFO stuff and sometimes they'll go even farther. Like, Ralph did and he said if I did know, I would like a thousand percent, you know, publicize my knowledge on this stuff. And to me, it's like because a lot of the people I do interview seem to know a ton about this stuff. And I would love some wave function collapse to occur where it's like, let's get it in a room or something. I don't know what it is. But I'd love to understand ground truth on this whole thing. And I'm sure games are being played. I think the issue where I would challenge my audience is they assume that games are being played from the people that take your stance. And I think they should actively be thinking about possible games being played on the pro UFO side, you know, and that's, I don't know, you know, the way things are compartmented inside the government, it is entirely probable that there were things I had no idea we're going on. So the fact that I, in theory, could have known it means nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For one thing, you know, I once, I was a super user, so I had to get exposed to all these compartmenting programs since the Pentagon. and it's like clockwork orange where they clamped open my eyelids and made me look at this stuff for a whole day and I don't remember any of it, but there was nothing about UFOs in there. Yeah. Well, they should have recruited you because this book, it feels like you're as deep as anyone on this stuff. Well, yeah, I mean, I made it. Well, both of us have kind of, you know, fascinated by this, but it's because we're drawn to the, that's funny. Uh-huh. Right? And like I say, this book, the Shadow of Time, is really, um, kind of taking people on a journey that they wouldn't ordinarily go on like in other science fiction because we're not really science fiction writers, we're hardcore scientists. Yeah. I mean, hardcore scientists. And so, uh, although there's some speculation in here about what isn't impossible. Yeah. Uh, the journey is very authentic. The, the, you know, cause all of us in science who've gotten really into things, we have whiplash from thinking, oh, well, that's the case. And we run toward that and go, okay, that's true. Oops. We get closer to it and go, ooh, that isn't true. Well, then this is the case. And go back to where to say this whiplash that happens in the last chapter is real. That's what happens to real scientists who are really open to what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, the truth is always much stranger than fiction often. So, um, we were mentioning actually before we were rolling that, you know, you worked at Hughes Aircraft and you were doing stuff around flight simulation and you obviously have a neuroscience background. And I brought up Donald Hoffman and you were like, oh, yeah, I worked with that guy. And he's now, I don't know if you know this. He's like all the rage on podcast circuits for his idea that we don't, it's not adaptive evolutionarily for us to see base reality. And so we create these icons in our mind. And it's these created this whole kind of math, you know, underpinning to that. So I found that fascinating. Have you ever heard of anything around like being able to fly a craft with your mind? I would think that that would be innovative. It's funny. You mentioned that. Yeah. Um, up until 2020, I was still working for Disney as a contractor. And I worked in their accelerator where we funded startups and owned a piece of them and then nurtured and coached them. And one of them was a brain sensing company that had a game, well, it was for health. They had it for health. But what we wanted to do is have brain control game experiences. And so do you remember rocking the rocks? Yeah, I remember. Yeah. So I worked with them. And in the lab, we invented a rock that you could move with your mind and steer around on the floor. Well, you call them rocky. And it worked wild. Yeah. I mean, I never made it to market, like, you know, one tenth of one percent of the stuff we do in R&D ever. What was the neuroscience behind it? Well, it was basically AI or a really more machine learning looking at surface potentials, EEG type potentials, not even a vote response, but just basically kind of consciously controlled EEG. And so you put this thing on, which kind of looks like the old Superman brainiac thing, you know, with a little sensor pods, two frontal, two mastoid. And then I think there were two over the parietal lobe. So I think it total of six nodes. And you know, you go through the normal calibration. And then I guess it's kind of like biofeedback training. Yes, exactly. You look at the rock. And then you will the rock to move forward in the machine learning interprets your signals. And then over time, you could have it go forward and back left and right. Yeah. And you know, it was cool. I mean, it was freaky. I'll tell you something. You know, when I see a rock move, when I told it to move only with my mind, yeah. Now, here's the thing. You were picking up brain wave signals, but we're also picking up electromyogram from scalp muscles and from maybe eye muscles and facial muscles. So was it brain waves or was it muscle action or both? We can't say that's not interesting. The in a way it didn't matter because we didn't care. We just wanted to create an experience where someone could actually and now there have been toys sold on the market. Like there's the levitating ping pong ball toy where there's an air column with a little fan and you control the fan velocity with your brain. And so you put on this EEG thing and you think rise, rise and you train and your brain learns how to levitate the ping pong ball. Well, you know, at one time you could buy that on the market. Those exist. So there you have it. Could you do this with a drone? Absolutely, you could do it with a drone. Now, if you use a magneto in cephalography, like the squid based things, you could really do it. Whoa. You could definitely control pretty much anything. There is this guy who I had give a talk at the Aspen Institute. There's two. There's Donahoe in this guy at Duke who implant electrodes in the brain of people who are paralyzed, quadriplegic, and they control a robot arm with their brain. And they train them to play video games and they train the guy to walk with an exoskeleton with a neural implant. So this is the future. So absolutely. Absolutely. This can be done today. Wow. That's so amazing. That's incredible. Where do you guys, you know, net out on the UFO issue? Obviously, there are themes in the shadow of time that to me might represent your kind of net assessment on what you think is going on. But I also don't want to assume that. So what do you think is going on? Well, I will say the shadow of time is first and foremost entertainment. Okay. Yeah. We have to be very clear. Yeah. It's to get an emotional journey where there's suspense, there's mystery, there's, oh, no, that can't happen. And there's there's romance and there's discovery and curiosity. So really it's it's meant to create emotions in the readers and insight and maybe some self discovery. It's not, it's intent is not science. So I don't think that you can say that what we say in this scenario here is what we think is the most likely. We think it's the most entertaining of the not impossible. I will speak for myself and that let you comment. My belief is that there's something real going on. And whether that's atmospheric physics, we just don't understand. Whether it's some other not atmospheric with some physics phenomena that we don't understand. There's something very real in a few of these reports. How would you probability weight the kind of prosaic explanations atmospheric stuff versus the more exotic stuff? I really have no way of saying I would tend to think that is something beyond what our science can even imagine right now is what I really think it is. It's something like this. There are more dimensions than we think or some weird physics that hasn't yet be discovered is what I really think. It shows more the limitation of our understanding of physics than anything. I believe that too. And so I don't think it's mostly atmospheric or any of these other things. I think it's something even more fundamental. I think it's something that we're going to have to completely redefine. And for those of you in the audience who don't know this cosmology today is undergoing this exact crisis where I don't think there's any other field of science that I know of. That really bedrock assumptions are being a question and crumbled like redshift. Well, everyone knows that redshift is the farther something away is, the faster away it's moving, so the more it gets stretched so the redshift is greater. So you can see how far away something is by the amount of redshift. Assuming you have a standard star with a standard emission spectrum, which is an assumption, which may not be true because the things that are farther away, maybe they had different chemistry or something at that time. Then there's somebody say, well, no, maybe light gets tired after traveling for X billion years. Maybe it loses some energy. Well, that's been, quote, disproven, but then some people say, well, maybe it hasn't been disproven, but you have the Hubble tension. You have different measurements of the expansion of the universe, which are completely incompatible, but both true, which tells you some basic things we understood about the universe cannot be true. Dark energy, dark matter. And so I think that we know because of things like dark energy and dark matter and hucking radiation and things like that, we know we're very limited really in what we know. And so because we know that we don't know, I think that's where these things are. I think they are most likely some really shocking fundamental physics that we just can't get our heads around right now. I think that even some of the cosmological concepts that we treat as ontologically true, like dark matter and dark energy, they're just mathematical placeholders. We've never really detected dark matter and then if you, dark energy is just defined by the, you know, inflation of the universe, but if you like, even if you put it through like a, you know, an AI engine, you say, what is this? It goes, well, it's not one of the four fundamental forces, but it's a force that it's like, this is anti-gravity is what it tells you. You know what it's not. Yeah. We don't know what it is. We don't know what it is, which means it's a placeholder, you know? It may not be true. I mean, there are some theories that say that it's just gravity isn't constant across the whole universe in time, like maybe the laws of physics actually change. I believe that. I believe it's, I believe the big G is an averaging of a bunch of stuff. Well, yeah, maybe who says that Planck's constant has to say the same throughout all time? Totally. Why it is what it is, why is C exactly what C is? Mm-hmm. You know, well, Einstein would say it's a property of spacetime. You can only measure C, by the way, one way. You can't measure it both ways there and back. Well, yeah, I get depending on you to find it. That's true. But I guess the point is that you asked me what I think. I think that it's both baffling and for the same reason, incredibly exciting that I think what we're seeing with these credible real phenomena of which there are some is something really bizarre and out there that is so far different than what we think is happening in the universe that we just don't know, we're looking at it, but we don't know what we're looking at. So what do you think because you have all this talk of disclosure now and Trump is, you know, Trump and Obama engaged in some sort of bizarre, mimetic warfare like a couple months ago and Trump's now saying we're looking into the UFO issue, what do you think comes of that? Aliens.gov has been registered. I mean, if it is this fundamental physics thing, there are limits to what you can disclose. But presumably, maybe in just an unofficial context, but there is data on the government side. And so do you think all of that gets released? Some of it gets released? Do you think it's used as a distraction? We're never going to release everything. I mean, I mean, for lots of reasons that I would go into, but certainly some of it where sources and methods are involved, they're not going to release that. They won't do it because, you know, they're, I'll tell you a story. Yeah. Wait, before you tell a story, I want to say, well, I think we did jump in, yeah, no, I always asked her to do that. So good. Yeah. Yeah. I cannot say silent too long. I've got to know where do we want you to? That's right. So what I think is that there are so many, there is a bunch of different phenomena that don't have that might not have anything to do with each other, they could be very separate. So we need to distinguish what are those that are due to weather or atmospheric, atmospheric stuff or the ones that will have no explanations. And the ones that have no explanations, I do think that you're right, there is something that we don't know about, that is fundamentally different than we know. But we need to acknowledge that they exist. We need to acknowledge that this is a puzzling thing and we need to acknowledge it in government in the whole world, which we don't. So in psychology, when we have a problem, the first thing is be aware of it. And I don't think we're aware of it enough to look for the origin of what it is. So first thing is awareness. So I would urge all our listeners to be aware of what is happening in the sky, film whatever is happening in the sky, they see anything abnormal or different and then report it because the more people we have, the report that are part of us to increase our awareness is really important. That's it. Well, I'm really glad you stood up for yourself for a lot of reasons. But she makes a point that I feel horrible I didn't make. I feel very certain that we're not looking at one phenomena. I think we're looking at multiple phenomena. And I think that they're different enough in the way they've described, the glowing spheres or maybe not the same thing as the tick-tax and so forth, the triangular ones that people have reported with some consistency, those flying kind of fireballs that we're seeing over Washington DC and the 50s that seem to have some credibility. I think at the end of the day when they're going to find out, it isn't one phenomena. It's multiple. Yes. And maybe unrelated. I totally agree. So I think that's a really important point that she made. Yeah, I think there's something going on in our oceans that feels more ultra-terrestrial or, you know, salarion hypothesis. And then there's something that feels more of like a mental interface thing where people get into these heightened states and things show up. And those two things feel like probably of a different variety. Like I'd imagine the ultra-terrestrial thing is more, you know, in the same biological meat space as us, but I don't know. We don't know. And yeah, I mean, and there are some people who believe that panthermia, tell them about panthermia and that we're basically all aliens. Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that life could be, oh, we assume that there is life only on Earth, but it could be that panthermia is a theory that is that life could exist anywhere in the universe. Like we found some dimethyl sulfide, the dimethyl disulfide, 222 or 240 light years away from us on exoplanets. So it's very possible anywhere starting to discover long chain carbon structures that are on Mars, that are on different planets. So it's very possible that there is life in a lot of different places in the universe. And it's possible. We could have come here on asteroids. We could have come here on asteroids on planets. We could have come from Mars. You know, we got bombarded by a lot of stuff from Mars. And it turns out conditions for forming life a biogenetically on Mars were there before on Earth. So we might all be Martians or we might be multiple. It could be panthermia, meaning organisms from different places all came here. Yeah. And Mars, most conventional astronomers would say that Mars might have had a biosphere. They're kind of water caverns all over it. It might have had a magnetosphere that it was stripped of. Oh, it did have one. It did have one. You have argon 40 and xenon 129. So there's just one friend of mine who was at Lawrence Livermore in Sandia. And he thinks that there was a nuclear holocaust on Mars. And it's, you know, who knows? He's definitely like, you know, in a camp on his own in believing this. But I think it's really interesting because he says that these exist in excess of what you would ever expect with just normal, you know, radioactive isotope decay. And that the only explanation is that. And so I found and adjusted the isotopic evidence. And when it all kind of sitting in my office had all hit me, it looked like a thermonuclear holocaust and it had happened there and we were so afraid it would happen on Earth. And he sees got the chops to say something like that where I feel like I have to listen. So. There's a lot of lava tubes that we've never been inside those lava tubes. So what is there inside it could be that's a very protective area. There's no or much less prediation in those lava tubes. But we've never had anybody going or any machine going inside those lava tubes. So. But the pants burn me a thing, meaning is it likely that we're all evolved from some extraterrestrial life form or I think it's almost certain that we're evolved from building blocks that are extraterrestrial. If they did that study of that asteroid, Benu, in which they found all of the nucleic bases, which are the formation for RNA and DNA. So I go, hmm. Okay. Well, so we have an existence proof that those really important building blocks, nucleic acids are in outer space. So the law of parsimony says it probably came here from outer space or came here and we co-evolved them. See, we're finding an evolution in anthropology when it looks at how did humans get to be humans where they are. It's turning out that it's unbelievably complicated. There were many waves of migration out of Africa before and after homo sapiens. There was interbreeding between denisovians and neanderthals and, you know, chromanin and, you know, homo erectus and you know, it's like we're this mongrelized, weird, mishmash hybrid of a lot of different interbreeding. And so there is no clean, simple story of how modern humans came to be modern humans. You're a pin in background, so you have probably 3% neanderthal genes, S-D-I, S-D-H-H. Thank you. She's really an alien. I don't know how many, but I think the point is that I think what we're going to find is that in the origin of life on earth, it's going to be messy, complicated, a mishmash of a zillion different things. And it seems like an archaeology is only 200 years old and the further we go, archaeologists like a product of the 19th century finding ancient, you know, Assyrian and Babylonian cities. And the longer we go, the older things get. And the longer we go in anthropology, the more hominid species we find. And so I think we have, you know, it was like five to ten years ago. Now it's 21 to 30. This is depending on your stringentness with, you know, pure review and, you know, what your definitions are. But there are a lot of ancient hominids that we just didn't even know or anticipate. I don't think we ever thought that Neanderthals are as smart as we now think they were. And so, you know, maybe it was somewhat of a, you know, obviously our intelligence and prefrontal cortex was adaptive, but more of an accident than we think it is that we won. So yeah, there are all these open questions that I think we're just going to get a lot more, more data on, hopefully. So I think if you sum up what both of us said about where we come down on UFOs, it isn't one phenomenon. It's multiple. Yes. Some of it might be understandable within our current science, some of it almost certainly is not. Yes. But bottom line, it's real. Yeah. Well, there is some tiny percent that's absolutely real. And science should take it seriously. We should do a lot more hardcore research into that subject. It's cool to see the former CTO of the intelligence community and director of research at the NSA say that. That's a big deal. Well, I think that any scientist who is worth their salt will tell you there's so much more that we don't know. She said we know 1% of what there is to know. I wanted to say maybe one tenth of one tenth of one tenth of one percent. Yeah. Some problems are too small to see, some are too big and it's too big for the human mind to get their mind around just how incomprehensible the universe probably is. And this is the point that I think it was Niels Bohr or Feynman or someone like that said, yeah, quantum physics is not only weirder than we know than we can know. Yeah. Yeah. Bohr was like, you can't understand this. And he was due to debate with Einstein because Einstein was trying to understand the ontological implications of the spooky action at a distant stuff. And Bohr was like, good luck. He also said, Bohr's also said, prediction is very difficult, especially of the future. There you go. I love that. That's hilarious. That's awesome. I want to actually, you know, wrap up here on the listening here because this is a book really kind of based on your long work, Dr. Chris but Gilbert, that was my introduction to both of you, which is funny because I'm obsessed with UFOs and a lot of the topics you're into. But I find it to be fascinating that intelligence might not be just concentrated in the mind, but might be kind of embodied and, you know, we might be holding information all over and really the premise of this book is like, if you have an ailment, you have to listen to it and form a dialogue with it. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. So, if you have an ailment, if you have like a lower back pain, for example, you can have a dialogue between your brain, your mind and your back. Sometimes your mind is going to tell you, oh, you need to lift those heavy bags and you need to walk for your 10,000 steps a day. And your bag is going to say, oh, that's too heavy for me. Oh, that's too many steps for me. This is not right. I don't, it doesn't work for me. So you've got to take into account every part of your body that might not follow the brain. And now we're discovering there is the gut bacteria. What kind of bacteria do you have? And is there a dialogue to have between your brain and your gut bacteria? Probably is. Why are you drawn to certain foods and not to others? That could be the gut bacteria. Now we're discovering the dysbiosis, which is the, again, what gut bacteria you have could be responsible for, maybe, the increased amount of cancer or digestive cancer that we have in people that are 45 years old or at least less than 50 years old, we've got an increase of colon cancer in less than 50 years old. Why is that? We're thinking maybe dysbiosis, maybe the gut bacteria, it's very different. So maybe that dialogue between that part of our body and the brain, and it's fantastic to, for me, it's fantastic to create a dialogue between the, like, several parts of the body. Like, you have a meeting, a conference meeting between a board meeting, between different seats. The stomach will have a seat, the back will have a seat, the liver will have a seat, the brain will have a seat, gut bacteria will have a seat, and listen to what each of them will have to say. And then you will be able to understand yourself better, deeper understanding. It's also very interesting to have a dialogue between my body and Eric's body, for example. So if you have a mate, your partner, and forget about the brain, don't have the brain talk to each other, but have their body, the body talk to each other, what are they going to say? And they could say something very different than what the mind will say. There's fascinating things that happen when you give the body a voice. But, you know, this brings up a fascinating difference between the two of us, which I regard as a strength, and that we look at the world very differently. She is a clinician. She wants to make her patient's body's heel. So she's not into mind-body medicine in the sense of understanding the brain in the mind for its own sake, but she wants to heal the body by, you know, understanding the brain. So her goal is healing the body, right? Yeah. It's actually healing the body and the mind, because they are completely related. But I think what I wanted to say is the difference is she's very practical and pragmatic. She has a very concrete and result, health, right, where I'm more of a bent scientist than a clinician, right? And so I'm interested in the deep why. So in the book, the few parts that I wrote, because it's really her book, and I'm just throwing in a few pieces of neuroscience, that if I had to rewrite that book, my part again, I'd read very different, because I interpreted the body the way a neuroscientist would, which is the map of the body on the brain. We have the, you mentioned the vernicies and brachis area for speech, but they're similar areas for motor and sensory, in which you have this little human version of you called the homunculus, which is a complete map of your body on your brain, one half each, for both motor and sensory, right? And so if you've ever taken a psychology book, you've seen this thing with huge lips and huge hands. And so I talked about the body in that sense, it's a neural incarnation of bodily sensation. But I believe I was very limited now, and I should have gone way beyond that, because now we know that there's a ton of neurons in your body in the peripheral nervous system, like in the gut nervous system, and in the heart. So when we say we feel in our gut, there could be learning and perception and emotion literally in your gut. Metaphorically, because think about where you feel emotions. They are physical sensations, right? Almost every emotion you have, you can map it onto a physical part of your body. And that may be because that is literally where you're consciously experiencing it, not in your brain. And so there's this thing called cellular cognition now, where it turns out that you can classically condition plants and single cell organisms, and you can take a planaria, cut it in half. After you've trained it in amaze, it regrows the front half where the back half had no neurons and it now knows the maze, even so, it's what we call cellular cognition. And so I now believe that when she says you're talking to your back, it's literal. It's not metaphorical. But your back has a constituency, is it work, that it represents the cells in your back muscle and your back. And it has a point of view that it, as the cellular clusters there, individually have, and it's talking to the brain through who knows what. And so I think that what is fascinating to me about this very practical, clinical idea that she came up with is that there might be some literal scientific truth to what she's saying that goes from the far beyond the metaphorical, it's literal. - Yes. - And I think it's important to you. And I say in the book, it's very important to listen to the body, and sometimes the body will tell you, oh no, don't do that, you've got sensations, like tingling sensations, or not in the throat, when you're about to do something, like if you're about to marry somebody, somebody's about to marry somebody that, maybe you're not meant to marry, somebody could have a not in the throat or trembling, or it's important to listen to what the body is feeling, because the body knows usually. And sometimes the body will know if it's the wrong person to marry, for example. So before taking very important steps in life, I say, listen to what your body is saying, because if your body doesn't want to, or if it's before taking an assignment, if you have a promotion, and it's a huge promotion, there will be a completely different, it will be a lot of work, it will be very good for you, but a lot of work, and sometimes the body will tense up, and will say, oh, listen to that, 'cause I've seen people accepting a promotion, accepting this immense stress that they will take on, and then coming afterwards with cancer, and they will die with cancer, because the body knew, the body knows it's too much, too much, too stressful. So listen to your body. At the end of each chapter of the listening cure, there are exercises that everybody can take, and I will make them more aware of what's going on. It's a fascinating word, it's completely different, completely different than UFOs, but it's a fascinating world, instead of the outside world of the universe, it's the inside world of our body, and our brain, and what we're meant to be, who we're meant to be, and who we're not meant to be. - Absolutely. - Well, one comment about different from our book, yes and no, the main kind of anti-character in the shadow of time has cognition in its body, distributed very differently than a human. - Yes. - And that turns out to be really important to the story, and the house is different. So some of that did make its way, and the biology of this particular class of organism as far as we understand it, is so radically different than humans. - Yeah. - And that's why we made this character the way we made it, but some of the listen to your body is in there, and that we constructed this creature, from our understanding of how consciousness can be distributed in different parts of the body. I think this is especially relevant for people who don't have acute injuries or acute illnesses. If you get the flu, there's a clear protocol of what you're supposed to do, if you injure your knee or something, pretty clear. There are a lot of people, especially in Western society, that feel very kind of unheard or gas lit by the medical system, who deal with chronic illnesses, things that just persist throughout their life. And so, yeah, this technique of kind of anthropomorphizing the symptoms and speaking to it, it's very interesting. I think it's gonna be very novel for a lot of people, but the idea that that could be cathartic. Like, there's actually another book that I love. I recommend your book all the time, and I recommend this other book called Healing Back Pain by a guy at Paul Sarnow. - Oh yeah, as we know about him. - He's awesome. And he says that the physical pain you feel is actually adaptive because it's easier for you to process physical pain than emotional pain. So it's like this overhang remnant of what was adaptive because you couldn't process an emotional thing. There's other books like Body Keeps the Score about this stuff too, but the body is sort of an imprint of past, maybe the word traumas overused these days, but past emotional experiences that people have had in their lifetime, and you can actually go back in, find the, you know, have a dialogue, find the root cause, and kind of repropagate back up into a more healthier version of yourself, which is, that's fascinating. - Well, you know, it's interesting to think about the evolution and how we came to have these bodies that we have, and the mind that we have. And if you think about those first leaps between single cell and multicellular organisms, which clearly we made in evolution, you start to understand what she's saying even deeper. Look at a pons gum, or a slime mold. What you find is that's a collection of individuals that start to behave in concert, like you have certain ones that are used for digestion, certain ones that move the slime mold around towards new food or away from threats. And so you also have gene swapping among individual single cell organisms, so that a multicellular organism might form from multiple what used to be different species that became one, right? So if you now fast forward that process over four billion years, you end up with us, but we've retained that original form of multicellular where really we're different organisms, and that is literally true with our bio, right? Most of your DNA isn't yours, it's all your bio, right? And so one way to think about the body from the standpoint of evolution is we're really not individuals. We're a collection of many different organisms each with their own agenda that have cooperated for mutual benefit, but whose needs often collide. And anyone who's felt an urge to do something like eat a donut or maybe do something amorous that they shouldn't knows that life isn't pure. So one party you wants to do it, and the other part says, don't do that. So it's almost like this thesis antithesis synthesis. What you described almost sounded like of internal family systems where you create this dialogue, but it's with components of the body, and then you, you the output is this sort of compromise or something between them, which that's such a fascinating concept. - Well, it's fractal when you think about it. When you think about the way your body is, you have specialists. Evolution has decided that a collection of specialists will outperform an equal mass of generalists. So when you look at your body, you know, your toenail does a very different function from your liver, from your brain, and within your brain you see hyper-specialization. There's different nuclei that have different shapes and size. So diversity of function and narrowness of specialization is what biology has decided works best. And look at human evolution. We went from a society of generalists where everybody hunted and everybody gathered. To now you look at a corporation where, or even medicine, like I'm an internist, but I do nephrology in adolescence with, we slice things narrow and narrower. And so with multicellular organisms as with human civilization and businesses, we go toward bigger and bigger and bigger with hyper and hyper and hyper-specialization. - Well, I don't know anything about each other. Ask a dermatologist how to treat high blood pressure. He will not know, he or she will not know how to treat high blood pressure. So it's hyper-specialized and they don't connect with each other. - Yeah. And it's also looking for, it's sick care, in my opinion. It's waiting for the very margins of extreme, like you're in the bad 5%, let's give you surgery or something. And it's not, this complex is building up over time. You have some tension and then that creates, yeah, dysbiosis and then that leads to cancer. It's not these like long buildups, which are occurring in everybody, you know? And so it's important to, I think, treat the root cause. - And there's another element that complicates stuff is the aging. The aging process is not the same in each organ, or in each part of us. Like the brain might not see the aging as much as the, you know, the back or as the knee. Or, you know, it's every, so you have to take into account each part of our body that ages differently and have a dialogue with those. - Gee, that wouldn't have anything to do with saying my trochanter, versitis, is due to me being 74 years old and not realizing it. - I'm not saying. (laughing) - You're in great shape for 74. - Well, thank you, thank you. I'll take that as a compliment. But, yeah, no, I mean, it is fascinating to, though, you know, when you look at the healthcare system and say, "How come we're sick treatment oriented?" Well, remember I said you get the behavior reward? Money might have something to do with that. It may be more profitable to treat sick people than to stop them from being sick in the first place. - Yep, yeah. - I mean, I'm just saying. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Just a guy asking questions. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you might be on to something. (laughing) Well, it's been such a pleasure in such a wide-ranging conversation with you both. And I hope people buy all of the books. But, yeah, the new science of UFOs, obviously, we have the shadow of time, which is the new book here. Fascinating and really fun to read. And then, of course, the listening care, which is my entry point to you guys. I really appreciate your time. - Well, thank you. This has been a whole lot of fun. And to the listeners, viewers out there, we hope we haven't given you a new whiplash from moving around all these days. different topics. Oh, they're used to it. It's, uh, we all have ADD in our generally. Yeah, so. Oh, thank you again for the opportunity. This has been a lot of fun. Oh, yeah, no, thank you. Thank you, thank you, absolute. It's been a total blast. It's been a lot of fun. All my favorite topics in one set. Cool. Head to americanalchemymerch.com to grab official American Alchemy merch and support the show directly. And while you're there, the Cowboy UFO T is a fan favorite. We always keep in stock. Along with the atomic age design. Thank you all so much for following and supporting the show. (gentle music)