I Debated UFOs With America’s Top Skeptic (It Got Ugly…)

Michael Shermer, it is an honor to have you here. Talk to Michael Sherman. Michael Shermer. Michael Shermer. Good to see you with your pile of your writing. You are probably the most prominent scientific skeptic in the United States. I'm the publisher of Skeptic Magazine. You are synonymous with pouring cold water on people's wanting to believe. Yeah, that's right. I've been hearing about disclosure coming any day now for 40 years. When's it going to happen? I think we have an abundance of evidence in the open source world. I believe that now. So, like, I've already hit that threshold. What's your threshold? Wow, much higher. If we're talking about aliens, I would say they're out there somewhere, but they have not come here. What about observable anomalies we are seeing on Earth all the time? Space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light up the clouds. You're picking the winners. The vast majority of these things have a prosaic explanation. We don't give a shit about those ones. Do you believe in dark matter? I believe there's a mystery to be explained. So you believe in UFOs as much as you believe in dark matter? Uh, I don't like the word believe in. What about General Neil McCaslin? In isolation, that story is completely significant. No, I don't. It's just totally random. What do you mean? There was likely some sort of antediluvian civilization. If there was an advanced civilization, where's their trash? Where's their tools? If you read the book, your base case has to be that Charles Manson was probably an MKUltra mind control patient. Either that or cult leaders can use sex, drugs, and rock and roll to get people to do crazy shit for them. If you were the CIA, would you really want to hire somebody, a lowlife like Lee Harvey Oswald, a nobody? Yeah, and that's why I said I'm a patsy. That's exactly who you'd hire. Somebody disposable. I'm just a patsy. I will admit that I want to believe. If you want to believe, will you admit that you want to disbelieve? Do you want to have a mystical experience? Okay, all right. Yes, this could be. I think you're running from your shadow. You're a secret mystic. Very strange they tabbed me last night. You were once abducted by aliens. Okay, you want to hear that story? I do. I want to hear that story. I don't know about that. Their existence cannot longer be denied. You're the founder of Skeptic Magazine. You are synonymous with pouring cold water on all sorts of, you know, illogical belief systems that people have. People's wanting to believe. You know, in the UFO world, we have a phrase, which is, I want to believe. I will admit I fall prey to that all the time. I would say that's probably my a priori bias is I want to believe. So you, I think, are a healthy check against that sort of thinking. And maybe I can challenge you on a couple of things here. But this will be a really fun conversation. And I'm honored that you're here. Well, thank you. Isn't that the Mulder poster? I want to believe. It is. Exactly. I guess I'm the Scully. You're the Scully. That's exactly right. Yeah. Perfect X-Files reference. And I actually have a photo. I think it's the background of my phone of me and Jacques Vallée. And we're next to that poster. Oh, wow. So that is one of my prized possessions. Well, I love his work. He's, you know, when you read him, it's like, oh, my God, this guy, he's a skeptic. You know, he's like, oh, I don't believe Bob Lazar. I don't think this is aliens. I don't think this is what they said it was. I'm like, whoa, OK. And then he goes, but it could be. These interdimensional beings of the mythology. I'm like, OK, wait, hang on. Where are you going with this? Yeah, he's very interesting because he pulled. He's first of all, he has a real scientific background. He was on ARPANET, the first version of the Internet with Doug Engelbart. And in the 60s, he was also an astronomer, you know. And so he's a real kind of, you know, scientific credentials. And he talks about the phenomena in this really interesting way where you can't take it at face value. You know, you have this phenomenon. You have this phenomenological experience, but that is sort of the mask. And behind the mask is something else sort of going on. And then, yeah, at other times he sort of debunks, you know, he doesn't believe the Lazar case. I happen to disagree with him, you know, on that specifically. But he's he's a very interesting sort of deep, deep thing. Well, the collection of stories and anecdotes that they're not enough for belief, but or to tip over into accepting it as viable. But it is a direction of which to go. Like, what are these people experiencing? And what are they seeing? You know, it's like alien abduction people. I've met a lot of these people, and I don't think they're making it up. I don't think these are fraudsters or anything like that. I think they're and they're not mentally ill people. Also, there was, you know, Susan Clancy at Harvard for a doctoral dissertation in psychology. She wrote a book on abducted and she did a study on people who had been abducted by aliens. They're not abnormal people. These are normal people that have. Well, it's probably sleep paralysis, mainly a sleep disorder. But, you know, you get enough of those. OK. What what are they experiencing? So it leads us in a direction for research like Jeffrey Kripal's research. Also, he compiles these hundreds and hundreds of of anomalies. Right. Weird things that happen to people. And they are. They've happened to me. And then I get people write me when I write about this. I'm like, oh, my God. Well, these are wild. Yeah. Well, I want to establish. And by the way, congratulations for being appointed to the UAP White House Advisory Board. That's a big deal. You're sort of the resident. Skeptic there. What do you believe overall? Why don't we set the table with that for the audience's sake? Obviously, phenomenologically, as you're saying here, there are things that are happening, you know, from abductions to people seeing things in the sky. So I don't think you're arguing with the fact that they're saying they saw a thing and that they're earnestly retelling their experience. What do you do? You believe that all of those things have some sort of prosaic explanation within. In kind of our current physics or where do you stand exactly? Yeah. OK. Fair question. Well, I would say if we're talking about aliens, I would say they're out there somewhere, but they have not come here. Now, I don't know this for sure. So I always start with universal realism. There is a reality. We can know something about it. And then fallibilism. We're not gods. We don't know everything. So we have to start with some element of doubt. So, you know, given the Drake equation and, you know, there's a. A trillion galaxies or more, and each of these galaxies has hundreds of billions, maybe up to a trillion stars in each one of them. And now we know from the Kepler Space Telescope and others that pretty much all these stars have planets. So you start crunching the numbers. You go, OK, there just has to be Earth sized planets at an Earth sized distance to have water and air and so on and so on. And you're eventually going to get the development of life and then complex life and then intelligent life and then maybe communicating intelligent life, no matter how many steps are in there. The number. The number is so big that we just can't be the only ones. Right. So but said that that said, it's a big, vast, empty universe. There's just mostly empty space. So the chances of them having come here, I would say, is not very good. So I would say they're probably out there somewhere. They probably have not come here. So you have deductive logic. You have inductive logic. What you just described is deductive logic. Yeah. It's sort of, you know, this large scale, you know, kind of probabilistic reasoning a la kind of the Fermi paradigm. Paradox or the Drake equation, like you just mentioned, you know, there has to be life out there. What about observable anomalies we are seeing on Earth all the time as far as, you know, objects in our air, often in our very sensitive military kind of nuclear airspace when it comes to the U.S. That doesn't look like it comes from here. It seems to be breaking physics, breaking conservation of momentum, materializing, dematerializing, you know, not involving sort of lift mechanisms. That seems like prosaic propulsion. Well, how do you explain that? OK, well, let's let's back up for a second. So there are scientists searching for extraterrestrial signals from space. The aliens are out there somewhere. Let's see if we can pick up their signals. Right. And Carl Sagan famously used them in contact, the prime number sequence that Jodie Foster's character hears in the earbuds. And so that would be something that's not naturally produced. It's not a rotating black hole or ways are whatever for for. So have they come here? What is our evidence? So there's lots and lots of these anecdotes and stories and blurry photographs and grainy videos. And one of the purposes of our committee that Avi's heading is to say, OK, we've seen all this. We've had three government dumps now and no one has anything obvious. So come on, give us the good stuff. Right. That's what everybody says. So what would it take? Well, so Avi and I have a bet, you know, a thousand dollar bet. We each put in 500 bucks. It goes to the long haul. Now, Foundation, they have the money. They invest it. And by January, by December 31st, 2030, one of us is going to get the money. And who determines it is if two of three major scientific institutions, NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, and then the American Astronomy Society, if two of the three of them go, yep, aliens are here. That's it right there that we've made contact. That's the evidence. And everybody can see that much like the Chinese spy balloon. that floated over U.S. airspace 2023. Everybody sees it. It's covered in the news, the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state. Everybody goes, yeah, it's real. Now, I didn't personally see it, you know, but I accept that that's real. And no one cares about the credentials of the pilot that shot it down or anything like that. We have the balloon. So if we had the aliens, okay, that would do it. You know, Avi would go, yeah, that's it. Schirmer, look, here it is. And NASA said it's real. You know, he gets the money, right? I mean, the money all goes to the Galileo project anyway, because I support it. But so it's just a way of focusing our attention on what constitutes good evidence and not good evidence. What would it take to go from here, I doubt it, to here? I think it's probably true. Well, that, so I would, I would ask that for you, like what constitutes the threshold of evidence, you know, after which you are ready to say this is a real phenomenon and that humans or prosaic explanations aren't responsible for it. Because Yeah. you have an abundance of evidence in the open source world that, that would, you know, I believe that. I believe that now. So like, I've already hit that threshold. Wow. Much higher. Yeah. No, I need to see the bodies or the spaceships or, you know, not me personally, you know, if Marco Rubio goes there with the camera crew from 60 minutes or whatever, and they're in the warehouse and he goes, all right, I can't, I can't actually show you, but we found it. And okay. All right. If Avi accepts that, we're going to do it. And all these scientists accepted then. Yeah. It'd be nice to see it. Like, okay, let's see it. Yeah. We all see it. The problem with, you know, anecdotes like that is, is there's different fields where other people have anecdotes of other things, paranormal, supernatural, miracles, things like this. And it's like, they can't all be true just on the anecdotes. We need more than that. So my analogy is if you're a biologist and you show up at a conference with your colleagues and you go, look, I found a new bipedal primate species living in the Himalayas or, Washington or Canada or whatever, Bigfoot, Yeti, Sasquatch, right? And you go, oh, wow. Okay. Let's all see it. Put the slide up. Well, you see, it was three in the morning and I was asleep and I heard this noise. I went out and I snapped this kind of blurry photograph. You can sort of see in the shadows. They're like, no, dude, you got to bring the, bring it, show us the body, right? The roadkill, the dead, the dead Bigfoot, whatever, you know? So that's what it would take. Like, just show us. So, so my threshold for evidence for believing in corporeal, alien bodies is the same as yours. I'd want to actually see those to believe them. But I think there's all sorts of other stuff before going there that just makes us, me think that we're not alone and that there are things that seem to be intelligently moving around in our sensitive airspace. I'll give you an example. This is a book by a friend of mine named Robert Hastings called UFOs and Nukes. And this is accounts basically for 167 people that work at nuclear bases all over the United States. And these guys are on often what's known as the PRP program, the personal reliability program. So they have to report if they're taking Tylenol or ibuprofen, you know, like they literally have to be the picture of mental health. They can't do any of that. Yeah. Yeah. No ayahuasca for them. And they consistently report seeing tic-tacs, saucers, orbs, things flying around in our most sensitive airspace and often tampering with the nuclear weapons in a way that we'd never do to our own nukes. It just doesn't make sense. And then the, okay, you could say, oh, it's like, that's some sociological, you know, hysteria or something. But if anything, you know, again, these people are screened for mental health. This is a database. It's not a bunch of anecdotes. And if anything, there's preference falsification in the opposite direction because it's this culture of shame, secrecy, and humility. And so I would assume if we have 167 on record, we probably have a thousand. So this is more than just the Maelstrom nuclear site in Montana, right? Because that's the most famous one. Yeah. So that's Bob Salas in 1967. But there are tons of others. There are two cases in September of 1964 at Vandenberg Air Force Base that seemed to dovetail with each other. That was the one off the coast that was like rectangular, like football size shape rectangle. That was in 2003 at Vandenberg and 64 at Vandenberg. And Bob Jacobs, he was a photo instrumentation specialist and he was up the coast 100 miles at Big Sur. And he was had a telescope pointed at an Atlas five missile with a dummy nuclear warhead. And afterwards, when he was reviewing the tape, UFO seemed to wrap around it and caused the warhead to tumble out of the sky. A couple of guys in tweed suits behind him basically swarmed to secrecy, said, you can't speak about this again. He was delusional. He was delusional. He was delusional. And I had two friends from college who were my commanding people. And I also have something called a DD-14. I have records here. My officer efficiency reports are in there. And his boss, Major Florence Mansman, nobody could get a hold of him. So there's this liminal question of, is Bob Jacobs completely full of it? He's saying he's mad. Over a hundred people. And it turns out we've found Florence Mansman in the nineties. And he admitted that Bob Jacobs worked underneath him. He has all his records. Let's assume he's not making it up. Yeah. So 167 cases. How many photos do we have of these objects? We have, well, you don't have photos because it's nuclear sites. So obviously all of the sensors, any of the collection is going to be classified a priori. Presumably the sites have some recordings or radar or other than just the guard said he saw this. They did. Well, in, in, uh, in the case of Minot, uh, Air Force Base in 1968, we actually have radar associated with it. And physicists have reviewed the radar. Kevin Knuth, um, you know, who's a prominent physicist on the topic, uh, you know, is, uh, he's at University of Albany and he's reviewed the Minot, you know, radar, for example. And he thinks that, you know, it indicates a bunch of anomalous objects showing up. Well, it indicates something. The question is what, right? Is, is it, you know, ball lightning or, or, you know, satellites or, I don't know, drones. These are too early for drones, but, you know, something like that. I, I have in my book, that list of Leslie Keen's, you know, possible ordinary terrestrial explanations for UFOs and UAPs. But when you have multiple witnesses, like, so Malmstrom, let's use the 1967 case. You have Bob Salas. He's at Oscar, uh, launch control center. He basically, you know, he gets called down and he says, you know, top side guards are seeing this like red orb. Making right angle turns and flying around in weird ways. And then nine of his missiles, nine of the 10 missiles go into no-go status. Can't launch it. Had that ever happened in your career thus far? I was there for three years. One of them may have gone down for some power problem, but nothing like multiple shutdowns. And then simultaneous to that, Bob Hastings himself, who wrote this book, he was actually, uh, taken under, he wanted to go to the U.S. and he was taken under, he wanted to go to the U.S. and he wanted to learn more about radar theory. And he was a janitor at Malmstrom in 1967. So he independently was taken in by this radar guy. And he pointed, he said, we're tracking. And he probably said unknowns. That's the formal term for unidentified objects. I saw five blips in the sort of northeast quadrant of his radar scope. So you have in that case, top side guard eyewitnesses, you have Bob Hastings independently seeing the thing on radar himself. And then you have a guy in the launch facility saying that the, you know, the missiles are all going down. And then you have a strategic air command report saying that the missiles went down eight days earlier for this other, you know, echo flight incident. So you have this, like, it's, it's kind of a tapestry of like good evidence. All right. So you're picking, you're picking the unusual anomalies that happen. So what's, so this is what's called base rate neglect in Bayesian reasoning. What's the base rate of weird anomalies that happen at all nuclear sites everywhere in the world for the last five years? Fifty years. Does anybody keep track of this? Like most nights, nothing happens. Nobody sees anything. 365 nights a year, maybe one night a year, somebody sees something weird. We write books about the weird stuff. Why is it, if that was true, what else would be true? Why are the aliens or whoever not harassing nuclear sites and military sites? Most of the time, most of the time, nothing happens at these sites. How come they're not harassing the Russians? Or maybe they are, maybe you have some cases of, you know, Russian sites like, so in other words, 167 sounds impressive, but compared to what? How unusual is that really? I mean, if you took any place anywhere where there's a lot of people in cameras and people paying attention because this is an important site, there's more observations. I'll give you an analogy. So last year, two years ago when Trump was rerunning for president, fall of 24, there was the New Jersey swarm, UFO swarm, UAP swarm. All right. So are these drones or whatever? And yes. So Trump gets in there and goes, well, I'm going to find out what's going on here. So he sends his people in there and they come back. It was nothing. It's just normal drones and planes and stuff like that. And one of the effects is that's a heavily trafficked area. So the base rate, like the Bermuda triangle, how come there's more ships and planes crashing there? Because that's where most ships and planes go is in that little area, right? New Jersey is a very crowded area for a lot of airports, LaGuardia and JFK and so on, all this. And so there's a lot of stuff going on there. Then there's commercial drones, which are very popular. And so they're going to be able to get in there and they're going to be able to get in there. So it's a lot of stuff going on there. So the base rate is that people are going outdoors and looking up in the sky because they've heard the news reports like that. Like, oh, my God, there's something going on in the skies over New Jersey. They look up. Most people don't ever look up at the skies at night. They're busy. They're watching TV or whatever. And if you do that, there's a lot of stuff up there. I mean, Venus and Jupiter are both very bright, very surprising to people. And now Elon has launched over 10,000 satellites for Starlink. And I know because I live in Santa Barbara, in the mountains above Santa Barbara, so it's very dark. And Vandenberg is just, it's about 90 miles up the coast. So every week there's a launch. And the rocket goes up. And about six minutes later, the sound gets to my house. It's a pretty cool effect. And then you see the string of satellites. The next, like, 90 minutes later, they come over the house. And then the next time around, they're really stretched out. And if you didn't know what was going on, this would be freaky. Like, whoa, what is this? Well, the base rate, right? Elon is right there. They're launching satellites. And now, because I have a nice 12-inch Meade telescope, and I get it out, and I look at Jupiter and Saturn, for example, which are pretty cool because you can see the rings and all that stuff. Pretty much every time I look now, I'm looking through the eyepiece, and a satellite just streaks right across. And so on X, this happened like a year ago. On X, I see people going, oh, my God, there's a weird thing going around Jupiter or Saturn. It's like, no, it's going around the Earth. They just notice it because, whoa, what is that thing that's going by Jupiter? Right. It's a satellite in our atmosphere. What would your base rate be for things going wrong with nuclear weapons? Because mine would be pretty low. Well, things go, okay. One of the main reasons I'm able to go multiple hours on these podcasts while staying mentally sharp is because of this little drink. It's a product I started using years ago, and it's called Ketone IQ. I know the founders, Jeff and Michael, personally. And I was thrilled. I was thrilled when they agreed to sponsor the show because it's one of the few products I trust to give me clean, sustainable energy. I've been taking a little shot of this thing during every long recording, and it lights my brain on fire. Here's the science behind why it actually works. When you're running on glucose or sugar, as your brain is most of the time, it's essentially burning dirty fuel. Your brain could be like a Ferrari, but you're feeding it 87-octane fuel all the time. Ketones are what your brain actually performs. 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These are the list of close calls. Like the Russian guy, Petrov, who. Oh, of course, close calls. But I'm not talking about manual. They're not just close calls. The B-52 crashes, and there's two nuclear weapons at the bottom of the ocean. There's another one in Greenland. But these things are. I mean, weird shit happens. Just entropy. You have. You have the best cryptography of the NSA. You have Faraday chambers, you know, surrounding these things. And they are, you know, guarded in extremely sort of intensive ways. And so, to me, when I hear, you know, the two times I know of where nukes getting, you know, going down, being decommissioned and getting tampered with, one is 1967 Malmstrom, the other is 2010 F.E. Warren. And both, if you actually back-channel and do a little digging, the people on site are saying they're associates. And they're associated with things that are flying around in the local airspace that seem to break physics. In the 2010 case of F.E. Warren, it was this tic-tac flying around. Then I'm like, okay, maybe there's a correlation here. Maybe there's something going on that. Maybe. Yeah. It might be future science. You know, I'm not saying it's some, like, woo-woo thing. Let's hang on. Let's not go there yet. Because time travel has other problems with the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. You can't. They can't. Far-future humans can't come back here. But our current physical model of reality always gets overturned. So saying a thing. Not always. No, no, no, not always. Of course it does. No, no. So Einstein did not overturn Newton. Newton's works. Newton's physics works. It's couched within Einstein. Newtonian mechanics works very well for most things. If you want to fine-tune it, you want to land right there instead of right there, okay, you got to use Einstein. You have time dilation. You have, you know, observer dependency for, you know. Okay, okay, hang on, hang on. You have the perception of Mercury. Okay, I know where you're going with this. So let me back up for a second. So we have a lot of anomalous, unexplained phenomena, UAPs or UFOs, whatever. And we have 99.5% of them have been explained, even by the ufologists. So we're down to just not a handful. There's still hundreds and hundreds of unexplained things. All right? What are they? Okay, so, okay. So I have three categories, ordinary, terrestrial, extraordinary. Extraordinary, terrestrial, and then extraordinary, extraterrestrial. Okay? So the first one is, can you hand me my book? And I'm going to read to you just since we have plenty of time. Yeah, let's plug it. Treat. No, I don't want to treat the book. I just want to talk about the aliens here. I'm going to give you Leslie Keen's list of ordinary terrestrial explanations. This is from her book, UFOs, Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. So she says, quote, roughly 90 to 95% of UFO sightings can be explained as weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets, Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning netty, sun dogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light up the clouds, lights on the ground, lights reflected on the cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole punch clouds, and the list goes on. In other words, so medical students get this reference. If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Now, Nick Pope, famously on my show, said, unless you live near a zoo and there's a lot of zebras. Yeah, okay, fair enough. So 90 to 95% or something in that list. Now I would add drones because commercial drones are so popular. How does something that's big and going really fast suddenly turn and go like, well, drones do that all the time. Extraordinary terrestrial. Would be like the Russians have this super advanced technology. The Chinese have it or the CIA DARPA has this advanced technology or so on. Okay. First, if that were true, what else would be true? Why wouldn't the Russians use it in Ukraine? Why wouldn't we be using this in Iraq, Afghanistan? I'm not saying we can use it. I'm not saying it's us. I'm saying it's not. Or maybe it's not. But a lot of people do think that could be it. So I debunked that saying that can't be because we would, if the Russians had this, we would know because we steal their stuff. They steal our stuff. I, I think you're arguing for this being non-human. Well, it could be. Okay. So, but if it's not human, what would it be? Okay. So then, so my third category is extraordinary extraterrestrial. So these are aliens. These are okay. Now I know non-human intelligence does not mean aliens. So the people on the UAP panel are going, Shermer, don't say aliens because it could be something else. Like, okay, what else could it be? You know, interdimensional beings or far future human time travelers. Okay. All right. Now I think we're really getting into speculation there. But you mentioned up top that it's important to have epistemic humility, which I agree with. And so we have a limited scope of reality as, as humans, how many of the millions of species on earth think that they're apex predators when they're not because the apex predator above them, it just exists at a higher scope. And you know that the history of science and cosmological models building is all the history of umvelts and the ability to, you know, scope out new territory, whether it's James, web on the macro scale or, you know, room at the bottom, you know, as Feynman said, You know, we have, you know, increasingly granular electron microscopes and we're doing the Large Hadron Collider and stuff like that to detect sub quark stuff. So, you know, to say that we won't bump into, you know, some sort of species above us and then you have all sorts of observable anomalies that we're seeing. So, like, why not? I'm not saying that. I agree with you. We could. Okay, so this is the last chapter of my book, my God Gambit. If we encountered extraterrestrial intelligences, they're not going to be just like five years ahead of us where, you know, we back engineered and upgraded our computers from, you know, vacuum tubes to computer chips. Like, really? The aliens are just five years ahead of us? They would be hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us, millions of years ahead of us. They would be like gods to us, right? Like the iPhone to the Neanderthals. Like, it feels godlike. I think that's. That's how people who are in the quote unquote UFO legacy program talk about UFO materials. I know. I know. Because I talk to them. That's fine. If we encountered aliens, they would be far advanced. That does not mean that that's the explanation for the anomalies. Yeah. It's just one of multiple possible explanations. For sure. But let's, let's, I want to take your, you know, drones, space trash, temperature inversions. You have thousands of documents between. Between 1945, so the advent of the nuclear age, and 1953, 54, which is when the first recon U-2 spy plane was created. This is well before any drones were in the sky. You have thousands of documents from the FBI, the CIA, all sorts of, you know, Army, CIC. And they're all talking about UFOs showing up in our most sensitive airspace, specifically around nuclear. There was, in fact, a project called Project Twinkle. What about. What's the base rate? We're picking the winners. Okay, let me back up one second. On the history of science, you're picking the winners there, okay? Everything you said is true. Yeah. This theory overturned this one, and so on and so forth. That has happened. But that doesn't mean the new theory is going to be overturned, because it is also wrong, the current paradigm. I mean, they may be wrong. The Big Bang theory might be wrong. The theory of evolution might be wrong. Maybe quantum mechanics isn't right. It would be a bet. But that would be very surprising, given how well supported these are. But, Michael, we're never at the end of history. No, no, no. It would be an ahistoric. It would be an ahistoric thing to say, flash, freeze, frame now. I know, I know. We're done with knowledge. At the end of the 19th century, electromagnetism had the last laugh. I know, I know, I know. And it obviously didn't. Okay, so all this is possible, but that doesn't mean that is the explanation for these anomalies. I don't think that we have a good explanation, but I do think they're genuine anomalies that aren't explained away through prosaic means. That's all I'm trying to say. I don't think we should snap to grid, say, these are aliens from Zeta Reticuli, because we don't have a lot of evidence that they are. But I do think we have a ton of evidence that intelligently propulsed things that don't seem to be human are moving around in our sensitive nuclear airspace. And then you could take it a step further, and you could come up with some sort of like, okay, it's, you know, the people working at these nuclear bases are MKUltra patients, and they've been tested on with mind control experiments. No, I don't think that's it. You don't think that's it? No. No. No. And then, you know, you can't really come up with the drone thing. But you could come up with some sort of, maybe some spoofing technology in the sky that's sensitive, that's co-located. It's really hard. But then you get into the fact that in Japan, next to their civilian nuclear energy grid in Fukushima, they have a mountain called Mount Senganmori, which is dedicated to UFOs. Bariloche, Argentina, next to their civilian, you know, energy grid. You have UFOs showing up, and you have a famous case in 95 with a commercial plane. You have similar accounts at Chernobyl. Here's another example. So it's global. Commercial airline pilots in the 1960s and 70s being startled at UFOs that are streaking above them at like three or four times their speed, two or three times the height that they're at at 35,000 feet, okay? They were seeing the U-2 spy plane or the SR-71 Blackbird, but they didn't know about that because that was secret, okay? So how do you know that some of these are not some of them, are not like the next generation of DARPA, CIA type, spy planes or whatever that we haven't heard about? Again, between 1945 and 1953, before the U-2 spy plane, I just don't know. I understand all of the like, oh, yeah, we used to mistake the U-2, the SR-71, things like that. But we're talking about before that. We have thousands of documents that comport exactly with the stuff in this book that occurs later on. So I just, you know, as early as the first case in this book is 1945 Hanford plutonium. Right over the Hanford Ordnance Works and directed to Lieutenant Commander Brown to take off and challenge him. He said, all I can see is a bright red or a reddish orange fireball right up in front of me. Okay, go ahead and give me your best speculation about what you think, whatever it is, is doing at our nuclear sites. I don't know, but I don't think our current science explains it. And I think it's worthy of further inquiry. And I feel like the skeptical mode is shutting down the conversation. At least the government would care. They would care deeply if somebody was messing around. And they do. And so I think Blue Book was a front-facing basically decoy that was meant to throw the public off. And then underneath that, and this is now publicly admitted because Jacques Vallée was J. Alan Hynek, the chief astronomer of Blue Book's assistant. And he found this thing called the Pentacle Memo, where it looked like Battelle Memorial Institute, which works hand in hand with our nuclear sites all over the country, even back then. And basically a more granular mapping of UFO instances across the country, even in the 50s. Project Blue Book was the best I could do at the time because I felt they had a real project going on that was secret. Is that true? And the Air Force did. Oh, I didn't know that. And so I think they care intensely. And I think the reason to not disclose this is you don't want things that you don't, that flying with impunity, you don't want things that you can't attribute flying around. And around our nukes and tampering with them. I agree. So this, one of the goals of the UAP Science Advisory Committee is to get more information so that we can figure out what it is. If somebody in the inside knows, then tell us. Now, what we're worried about. Okay. So this is a point of discussion in our first Zoom meeting was what if they misdirect us and go, hey, Avi, here's some stuff. Now go spend a few weeks analyzing that. Meanwhile, we're going to invade Cuba or whatever. Okay. So we're aware that this could be. Avi's a pretty savvy. I don't think that's going to happen. But, but yes, they would care. So why are they not doing something about it? Why did these things keep happening? And so every president that gets in there, you know, Clinton and Obama, Trump, you know, we're going to find out what's going on. Right. And then you see, you know, like Obama on these shows or Clinton on these shows going, I got in there. I sent my people in. We didn't find anything. Anything having to do with UFO or related material. And we're going to be releasing a lot of things. There's footage and records. Of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are. Did you go through the UFO documents? I'm not telling you. But that's the thing. I think that's why disclosure is a misnomer. I don't think they have an ontological model of truth. And let's just simulate this. You're Obama and you're like, I really want to understand what's going on. You send your best people at it and they say, there are things flying around our nukes and we have no idea what they're doing, why they're here. And sometimes. They turn the nukes off and they're, we do have multisensory data against this. We know it's a real thing. We know it's not kind of illusory. Of course, you're not going to disclose that to the American public. What is it? That's crazy. Well, now you're accusing Obama of lying. No, not at all. Or he's siloed. No, I'm accusing him of doing the rational thing, which is not touching off mass hysteria. If that's all, you know, I see. I see. So you're saying he's siloed from the, some other people in the government who know what's actually going on and they just don't tell him. Yeah. I don't think. I don't think this is your day-to-day concern as president, you know, but I think if you, if you want to do a deep inquiry and then you find out that these intelligently propulsed things are flying around our nuclear assets, you know, totally like, you know, we have no, no attribution on them. We have no idea where they came from. They're flying, you know, in ways that break our modern physics and our understanding of physics. You're not going to willy nilly disclose that. That then creates a green field for adversaries to. Try to, you know, do recon against our sensitive sites because it becomes this real, you know, then it's, we, we, we're admitting, um, that we don't know about these, these certain things and they can sort of muddy the waters by, by throwing, you know, more mud at us. But who's the, they. No, I'm saying adversaries can then, they can then throw, throw a bunch of like their most, you know, exotic drones in the mix. And then it's like, oh, we don't know whether it's the NHL or the, so you'd never disclose it. We know the Russians do. They muck. With stuff all the time. They're doing this social media. For sure. Absolutely. And we do that with them. Our spies do bad stuff too. But you get what I'm saying. The public would freak out. You would never want to. I don't think the public would. Okay. And I don't, you don't mean like if we discovered aliens, the stock market would crash and religious. No, no, no. I don't mean that. I mean, if you're Obama and all you find out that all we actually know about this stuff is, yeah, maybe some material was dropped. Maybe we have some remnants of actual physical evidence, but like ultimately one of the core truths about it is. That these things are flying, you know, with complete impunity around our most sensitive defense assets. So what's the, what's the criteria cut off to tip over? on that particular issue of because power goes out at stations all the time this happens so maybe the power just went out for some other reason at the maelstrom site and it wasn't these orbs or whatever so how many does it have to happen and we go okay this is not just some random electricity occasionally goes out and shuts off the nukes it was something else the reason i think that it was actually ufo related is there's a boeing uh strategic air command report where they actually looked and they tried to recreate the effect and this is on the echo flight incident so this was eight days before the salas incident just to be clear but it was at maelstrom and they couldn't recreate the effect and they couldn't understand they had no idea what it was and so they concluded that it was anomalous then cut back to uh a year or two ago the wall street journal reports that the power went out at stations all the time and they tried to recreate the effect this clearly disinfo hit piece on ufos and it's around this event and they say that an emp in 1967 like a huge like a 60 foot emp was wheeled up to maelstrom and we shut down our own nukes in some sort of experimental testing which has all sorts of issues the nukes wouldn't go back online if they were they'd be fried you know from the emp you would never do that with people present we he's in 1967 so that's checkmate in one you know so so whenever you know of maybe the cia darpa has some i don't think that i don't think that reminds me a little bit of the bluegill triple prime was four years before where we incidentally created an emp in the starfish prime series i don't think we had and i don't know okay maybe so the question would be how can we get to the bottom of this okay so part of my problem is that you know i've been hearing about disclosure coming any day now for 40 years when's it going to happen when's it going to happen when's it going to happen when's it going to happen right and so every time clinton or obama and trump okay we're going to get to the bottom of this i looked into it i didn't find anything and then the ufo people go oh okay he's siloed or he's lying or he's or they're lying to him or no they have different criteria they probably personally believe in this that's why obama thought about producing betty and barney hill's you know documentary that's why he's on set at spielberg's disclosure day it's because he's into this stuff but he can't talk about it publicly because it was on that podcast this is what the the ufo files dump was uh-huh you know he said the host asked him do you think aliens are real and he goes yeah i think aliens are real are aliens real uh they're real but i haven't seen them and and and uh they're not being kept in uh what is it area 51 uh there's no underground uh facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they they hid it from the president of the united states then he clarified i meant they're out there somewhere like what i said not that they're here but the revealed private preference is that if he's funding documentaries about the first introduction case in the united states i mean spielberg's a filmmaker um if it is direct the director of his cia brennan and director of national intelligence that oversees all intelligence agencies under him james clapper is on record you know in the age of disclosure saying that you know we were at area 51 and we had we were systematically detecting ufos in that sensitive airspace so obviously obama knew detecting what detecting something an anomaly that's not aliens but again i i again i think if you go back to the pre-u2 spy plane and then it comports with all of this data so you have eyewitness accounts you have radar and you know you you have all sorts of evidence that that this is happening like clearly you have an abundance of evidence of something but what i i i don't know i don't know no no but i i think i think what i'm saying is that that's obviously worthy of further inquiry that's obviously worthy of further inquiry that's obviously worthy of further inquiry that's because the skeptic thing shuts down the conversation you know no i don't want to say so you admit that you admit that this is phenomenologically real and hard to explain by i'm not sure that the nuclear thing is beyond statistical chance see like in the social sciences you're familiar with the null hypothesis of course your path is not true until proven otherwise you got to have you run the experiment the randomized controlled trial and so on and so forth you get to the 0.05 or 0.01 level statistical significance you go okay i think we have a real effect and not that holds up and it's and it's replicated sometimes it's not maybe manipulated the stats or whatever in other words there's a method of course to get there what would be the method for that to say okay something weird is happening in our nuclear sites and it's predictable and here it's repeatable and you can see it versus some weird stuff is happening let's look further okay but then what i think this is happening far more frequently than if you were to like stand in random locations you know all over the world but not random because you know you're not going to you got to be where there's there's a lot of people looking up they're interested there's observers of course yeah yeah i mean while being hyper vigilant about what's going on controlling for all of the other variables yeah so here's an example um like like the um navy pilot david fravor um talks about the uap going from 80 000 feet to sea level like that right like one second okay how could this possibly be it rapidly accelerated in front of us and disappeared our wingmen roughly eight thousand feet above us lost contact also we immediately turned back to see where the white water was at and it was gone also you know avi does a calculation saying this is not possible for any physical object to move through the air at that speed because it would it would burn up it would release a you know an explosion you know break the sound barrier the people on the aircraft carrying nimitz they would have heard it they would have reported it none of this happened so whatever he thinks he saw or people think they saw the radar whatever that's not what happened it cannot have happened that is physically impossible this is avi lobe saying this he did the calculation can't happen we know what happens when bolides and meteors come through the atmosphere at that speed they burn up they explode it's a big thing this never happened with that uap so whatever the story is 80 000 feet to sea level oh my god okay you're wrong so yeah that's the point that it's defy our current physics and so that means we should study it and figure out if some future physics might be able to explain it or that's not what happened it one or the other a sizable object did not drop from 80 000 feet but when you have somebody like it was a camera effect or it was a lens effect or the zoom effect yeah but when or okay so these are choices it was a normal camera lens something weird yeah effect or all of our physics is is is off and we need a new physics okay let's go with this one first well you fair enough but i would say i don't know if you know miguel alcubierre is an expert in physics but he was at the university of mexico and he figured out a way you know for faster than light travel within the scope of general relativity it requires negative energy but you have things like the casimir effect which allow for essentially show negative energy and then you have somebody like sunny white at nasa who's figuring out how to harness the casimir effect to light up a small chip so you can make the casimir effect useful okay but you're doing these calculations to explain something that may not need explaining it's not what you think it is but it needs explaining because you have you have calculations that may not need explaining but it needs explaining because you have you have commander david fravor who is an extremely esteemed person who is in charge of i know you know he's a drive is flying an f-16 is extremely extremely experienced you have this whole squadron okay and you have you you have you have uh chad underwood catching the thing with forward-looking infrared you have kevin day who's catching the thing with with radar on the uss princeton you have a whole chain of custody and you have all these different kind of you know multi-sensory corroborating things you have the radar which was confiscated and then again there's a nuclear connection tactical nukes were likely on board the nimitz was still um adjusting a new radar system uh for that particular one was it the tic-tac one or it was a spy radar system yeah so maybe it was inaccurate maybe it was still being adjusted they thought that and then they repositioned it and it was total it was reading the same thing and it's been fine ever since and it's this it's been the state of the art ever since okay and how many of these do we have and by the way i'm not sure if you're familiar with the the the the the the the the way how come we don't have we have tons we have tons in this book how come we don't have good photos what's your answer to the where's all the clear and unmistakable photos and videos we do maybe the navy needs better cameras do you know do you know about the do you know about the lake coat photos no and and and costa rica they were doing aerial mapping around this this uh uh arenal um area lake coat they were trying to do this hydroelectric project and um this guy sergio leozzi i always mispronounce his name he was the this guy you know flying this plane doing the aerial mapping you know it's with a professional grade cameras for the their um geographical institute which is in their you know ministry of public works they're developing the photo and they see this ufo over you know over the region that looks like this perfect ufo that they didn't even spot while they were taking the picture and jacques valet and gerald haynes looked at the negatives and the negatives looked perfectly fine the costa rican government has never denied it so this is an official photograph that's been taken there are other cases like the costa rican government has never denied it so this is an official photograph mcminnville where you it's really hard to debunk the mcminnville one i mean really this looks like a hubcap tossed into the air but there's no way to ultimately debunk it it's unfalsifiable in either direction and paul and evelyn trent were these hapless farmers i know i know and they took two different i have i have faked ufo photos it's super easy to do but they're my point is there are a bunch of these things that sit in liminal space where you can't say that i'm definitively wrong and say that you're definitively wrong it's not even wrong right you you end up in this impossible argument and then you have eyewitness accounts and then you have And then you have radar and then you have materials. And it's like we have a tapestry of really good evidence beyond the threshold for me, at least as far as, OK, this is really worthy of further investigation. OK, you know, the Tic Tac video where you see the little white thing in the middle, all of a sudden it zooms off. Yeah. OK, this would be that direction for you. That could be the lock losing target. We don't know what that is. Well, but Mick West pointed out that if you look on the vertical axis, you'll see zoom 1.0. And the moment it goes like that, it goes from 1.0 to 2.0 zoom. In other words, the lens is zooming in, not the object moving. All right. So he was the first to point that out. Also, the triangular. All the shows show these triangular green shaped UAPs near LAX. They're not. They're blinking in the exact same pattern as a commercial airliner. These are commercial airliners coming into LAX. It's the. The bokeh effect on the triangular lens that's causing it to look triangular. But context matters. And so the Nimitz case is really important because not only do you have Commander David Fravor, you have Alex Dietrich, you have, you know, Underwood, who's doing the FLIR. I'm glad you caught it on FLIR. You have you have radar catching it for days before and after you have the fact that the UFO showed up at the rendezvous point at the cap point 60 miles away. Yeah. On radar that that, you know, Fravor was headed to. So I just think this is hard to argue with, like the overall tapestry of evidence, at least that it's worthy of further investigation. Absolutely. Could could could this have been some secret American technology red teaming our systems? Possibly. I'm open to that. I am. But but I think I think the the the nuclear stuff, again, going back to the 40s is just really, really hard to debunk. I think you're on very, you know, not. Solid. I don't know. Maybe, you know, it's just OK. So you brought up Dietrich. So I'll give the this is the end of my chapter on aliens. I'll give the last word to Dietrich, who witnessed the 2004 UAP incident from the USS Nimitz fighter jet, as I think it well sums up 75 years of UFOlogist search for aliens. Quote, I think they enjoy the anticipation more than actually finding answers. And that's been my frustration because I've been hearing about this for decades. It's like, you know, like Stephen Greer. Boy, we're going to get to the bottom. OK. All right. And it never happened. OK, so what I'm hoping for the UAP committee advisory committee is that Avi knows people who know people on the inside, like he's friends with Anna Polina Luna. OK, so she seems to be an insider. She just yesterday had a big congressional hearing on MK Ultra. All right. Let's get to the bottom of this. I happen to know a lot about this, that Gottlieb destroyed most of those records. I don't know if there's a bottom to get to, but fine. OK, so I'm hoping that Anna Polina Luna or somebody that Avi knows. All right. Damn it. We're going to I'm going to go in there and I'm going to get the stuff from the nukes or the whatever. And we're going to bring it out and show it. Will this happen? I don't know. I'm prepared to be frustrated. And, you know, but I so I will. I agree with you. And I think this is important for the audience to be more discerning in cases. I think you serve a very valuable role there. And there is a dynamic with this whole field of kind of Lucy with the football. So I think it's, you know, it's constantly like, you know, disclosures around. Sort of thing. But I also think if you are familiar with, obviously, you know, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I think consensus thought and science moves as much due to politics as it does due to truth. You know, famously, Aristarchus was the first person who thought that, you know, we lived in a heliocentric universe, but it took the, you know, Galileo and Copernicus measuring it, you know, Copernicus theorizing it many, many years, centuries later in order for the. Consensus to shift on this sort of topic. And then if you look at the money that's been historically spent on UFOs, it's basically nothing. And then you you look at, you know, the Robertson panel documentation, which is was meant to be classified at the time, saying Blue Book's literal explicit motive is to throw the public off and systematically downplay, suppress and rationalize UFO sightings. Of course, you're not going to have made good scientific progress on these things that seem to be breaking our. Physics like you're not going to because you haven't spent the proper resources or money you go. Just now, certain academic institutions are starting to take it seriously. You have, you know, Avi Loeb and Gary Nolan, Stanford and Harvard, you know, respectively. But like this is we're talking about the last four or five years. So I think, yeah, on the one hand, yes, it's Lucy with the football. And then on the other hand, it's like, give us a chance. All right, I'll give you some more stories. So when Darwin published on the origin of species in 1859, you know, he was right. That theory has stood the test of time. OK, but he was not the first. There were many other people speculating about the origins of species and they were wrong. One reason Darwin waited so long because he returned from the Galapagos in 1835 and he opened his first notebook in the fall of that year. And it was not until 1859. OK, what took him so long? Well, because a guy named Robert Chambers wrote a book called Vestiges in which he had his own theory of evolution that was widely criticized and completely wrong. So Darwin thought, oh, I don't want to be like that guy. And, you know, everybody laughs at me. I want a career in science. I got to really take my time and build up tons of evidence. So he does it. Right. So that's what it takes. Right. The famous French astronomer who discovered Neptune, he discovered Neptune by seeing perturbations in Uranus's orbit. And he said, there's got to be something right around there pulling it that direction. The telescopes there eventually, oh, it's a planet. Right. That guy also saw perturbations. He saw perturbations in Mercury's orbit. He's like, OK, here we go again. There's another planet in there. It's planet Vulcan. And he twice found it. He never found it. Right. He was mistaken. And it was Einstein that figured out, oh, Mercury is very close to the sun. It's not the perturbation of another planet. It's the distortion of the space time around the sun causing Mercury to the relativity theory. OK, so you're picking the winners. Those are all true. But don't forget, most of the ideas in the history of science are wrong. Right. Copernicus was right. But Brahe had an alternative theory to Ptolemy, where the sun and the moon go around, but then that whole thing goes around the sun. Right. So it was kind of a modify between Ptolemy and Copernicus. Brahe was wrong. Most ideas in science are wrong. So the people that discovered this or that about bacteria and virus, you know, like cancer. But I'm not presenting an idea. I'm presenting a tapestry of evidence that wants further investigation and a theory to explain it. OK, Jesse, I agree with you. OK, so there's no daylight between us. I've always supported the SETI program. I've supported the Galileo project. I'm on the Galileo team since the first week. Every Monday, the first Monday, the first Friday of every month, we meet on Zoom. I never miss a meeting. You know, I'm there. I want to find out. OK, I love it. Now, I don't have enough pull, Avi, because of his Harvard connections. I think, OK, maybe this guy can actually make it happen. In other words, the Stephen Greers of the world are like, we're going to get to the bottom. Even Clinton, Obama. It never happens. Well, Greer's theory is that they're all love and light and good. And it's, you know, almost like a play on the great filter theory that they have to be perfectly altruistic to have, you know, to go interstellar or something. And they, I don't know. So that would be an example of a thing where I'm like, that is not going to probably stand the test of time. Like what you're talking about. But I think just getting off first base, because some people, and hopefully you'd admit this in the skeptical position, have just tried to shut down. No, of course we don't. I would love the conversation. OK, good. Here I am. So that's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. I know you do. And I appreciate that. And I have immense respect for you. And I'm glad. And we've always had great conversations. I mean, personally, I don't think the discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence would disrupt anything. I think it would be great. I think the stock market would go up. Yeah. Every religious person I've ever talked to and all the surveys that have been done over the decades of religious people, would this upset your religion? Yeah. Nobody goes, yeah. Everybody goes, well, of course. God can make as many species around the globe as he wants. Yes. And maybe Jesus goes to different planets to save people. I don't know. But it's not a problem. And, you know, if we discovered aliens, I mean, NASA would go straight to Congress and go, hey, we got to double our budget. Look what we found. Yeah. Right? And the military would go, hey, what if they're dangerous? We need a bigger budget. Yes. So contrary to the myth that, you know, the world would fall apart, or in the new film, Spielberg's film, you know, the geopolitical stability will be disrupted. I don't think so. Yeah. I think if anything, the Russians and the Chinese and the Americans go, okay, we now have a common enemy, the Reagan thing. And so we got to stay close together here. Yeah. Work together on this problem. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. Will you admit that you want to disbelieve? I don't want to disbelieve. No, I would like Sagan. I would love to. I would like to know there's aliens. I would be surprised if we were alone. As Carl always said, it would be a terrible waste of space if we were the only living intelligent organisms in the entire universe. Would you be surprised if we were being visited, though? I would be surprised because, again, the vastness of interstellar space, it's just, you would need this new kind of physics that you're talking about because- But we always get new physics. That's a safe bet. No, not randomly. It's a safe bet to say we always get new physics. Okay. I'm not saying randomly. I'm just saying we always get new physics. I mean, here's one of the things that Avi Ovi says in our new meetings. Do you think this is the, this is, this is- No new physics. Quit bringing up new physics. Do you think we're at the end of history of physics? No, of course not. Okay, okay. But we just spent a billion dollars at CERN. No new physics. Right. There's nothing new. Yeah. But that's it's often the wrong framework. You you you're we're going we're just smashing particles together to get to, you know, smaller and smaller. You know, maybe you find the Higgs field and then and then what do you have left? But then, as you know, if you read, you know, structure of scientific revolutions, often it's going down the tree trunk, finding another branch. And then that's where the new new physics comes. So it could happen. Yeah, it happened. OK. But I mean, Avi's point is, you know, no new physics. What he means is we're not we're not Star Trek here. We're not just writing new crazy stuff to explain. Let's get the bottom of it. Show us the thing that we're looking for. Give us the film. Give us the like on the UFO files that Trump has dumped three of them. All the photos and videos have these big blacked out rectangles. OK, what are those? Those are the numbers from the cameras. Where was the camera? Which camera was it? What was the distance? Was it triangulated? All the details we need. Yeah. Otherwise, I don't know what I'm looking at. Totally. You see this. Blurry thing going around like, what is this? I'm right there with you. I think we need more. Have you did you look at the Gemini seven? Frank Borman, by any chance, that audio? Yes. And also and Buzz also. Roger. OK, so, yeah, I forget on the Borman one, but but Avi had a good explanation of this is a cosmic rays. So cosmic rays ping your retina. They also land on film and they can cause film. OK, so I'm going to ask you to tell us a little bit more about what you're talking about. So he thinks, and I think he's probably right, that the the lunar photos where you see the little blue lights in the distant sky on the moon and Buzz Aldrin's report that inside the cabin, he sees lights even with his eyes closed. He sees light. Well, that's cosmic rays. It's like if you press the side of your eyeball, you'll see a little white light. And then now the third one that I'm not sure about. But the Palomar. Telescope, the 200 inch telescope there in the 1940s, developed film there of things in the sky. There's nothing in the sky. This is before satellites, as far as Sputnik. So 1940s and 50s. This is Beatrice Villareal's Project Oscar. Avi says, I'm pretty sure those are cosmic rays. I don't think I'm pretty sure they're not. So this is this is an amazing astronomer from Stockholm University. She's also a physicist and she saw all sorts of light reflecting transients, basically objects in the sky. And she's also a physicist and she saw all sorts of light reflecting transients, basically objects in the sky. distant space. So they come in in parallel. They're so far away. These are quasars or distant galaxies. This is what Avi thinks. And he thinks that the light reflecting specific transients are based on that? That's what he thinks. Yeah. I don't think that's right. It's not a great theory, but she doesn't really offer a theory. She goes, this is just some weird stuff. Well, I think her theory implicitly, and she's obviously, you know, kind of reining it in because she's an academic and this past peer review, by the way. But, you know, I think implicitly we're talking about UFOs, especially given that you look at it. What do you mean by UFOs? Well, this is the thing. You look at CIA documentation at the time and it says flat mirror-like objects that reflect light. So that's how they're describing these things. And then that sounds a lot like these transients being described as well. All right. So here's the bigger issue. You mentioned the word liminal. You know, in any field, there's always a residue of anomalies that can't be explained. Every scientific field has these. So back to Kuhn. Do enough of them build up? It's like, you know what? There's something really wrong with this theory. We need a new theory. Okay. So how does this happen? Well, if you are an outsider, you just want to challenge the mainstream, which is good. This is what young scientists should do. Your new theory has to explain all the stuff the old theory explains pretty well and some of the new anomalies. Of course. And this has always been the problem with these kind of fringe physicists or whatever. The people that say, I have a theory of physics that overturns Einstein or whatever. All right. Right. Can you explain all this stuff over here that current physics explains? You know, the standard model that explains quarks and this and that, whatever. And usually, no. They just say, well, they have some model of space and time and whatever. It's like, you have to do that. And then also, here's some, the rest of the anomalies, we don't know what they are. Can you explain any of those also? Of course. That's the test. Of course. And I don't think anything is adequately passed that test to my knowledge. In fact, this is so common. Michio Kaku has a webpage in which he says, if you're writing me about your alternative theory, I'm going to tell you what it is. I'm going to tell you what it is. Your alternative theory of physics. Here's what your theory has to do. Here's a bunch of stuff it needs to explain. Absolutely. But there are ways of explaining what seem to be anomalies. Like, again, the existence of dark energy and quantum vacuum fluctuations and quantum electrodynamics. You have the Casimir force and you have somebody who's harnessing the Casimir force seemingly on small scales. You know, we're talking about sunny white here. So then could you end up with some larger scale propulsion due to that? Like, possibly, you know, we have to keep an open mind there. And that fully comports with our physics. So I don't think we necessarily need a theory of everything to explain some of this stuff. Yes, I agree. Yeah. So, I mean, let's take dark energy, dark matter. Okay. These are linguistic placeholders by cosmologists. That's right. Well, I believe there's a mystery to be explained. Okay. So it's the same thing as UFOs. You're indirectly measuring it. Yes, that's right. Okay, fine. I just, it's like, what is it we're talking about? So you don't want to believe. So I don't like the word believe. I like to say I don't want to believe things that have to be believed in to be true. They're just true. Yes. Okay. So when astronomers tell me galaxies should not be held together. But they're true according to you. Ultimately, we're all pre-leveraged by our own epistemics. Well, true. What do you mean by true? So I define it in my book as something confirmed to such an extent it would be rational to offer. Your provisional assent. But do you think human beings are rational? Provisional. Yes, pretty, pretty rational. I would say they're pretty irrational. Well, my whole life is spent showing how irrational humans are. But now I've had a bit of a turn of heart here that most people most of the time are fairly rational. This is how they maintain jobs and families and they keep gas in the tank and food in the fridge. And they lead a with conspiracy theories. It's in areas where they can't know. Like, how am I going to fact check if the 2020 election was rigged or not? What do I I don't have time to go to Arizona and go to the voting booth and see what I'm just going to trust the Department of Justice and Attorney General Bill Barr. Love Trump voted for him, looked into and said, no, we didn't find any. So this is a but this is an epistemology question. How do we how do we know about anything in the world? So dark matter is a conspiracy. Okay. So my astronomer friends tell me that there has to be more stuff in the galaxy to hold it together. Okay. What is it? And their answer is, we don't know. Could be neutrinos, could be dark, whatever, these dark stars, brown stars or whatever. Okay. Keep working on it. We'll just. So to me, I just set that aside. Okay. That's a mystery to explain. Same thing with dark energy. So and same with UFOs. Okay. So you're placing it in the same category. And by the way, UFOs are even more accurately and epistemically humbly framed because they're called unidentified flying objects. Yes. Whereas with dark matter, we're calling it, you know, this thing, like we're acting like we know what it is. But if we can't detect it, let's say astronomers all decide 99% of astronomers. Okay. Now we know dark energy is neutrinos. Just make that up. Okay. Then I go, okay, then that one is pretty much solved. Now, if the UFO people go, okay, we figured it, put it out. It's the ball lightning or it's the orbs or, you know, whatever it is. And now we know the CIA had this thing or the Russians or it's the aliens or whatever. Then I go, okay, then that one's solved. Okay. We're not there yet. Right. Again, you got 90, 95% of them are explained. You got the five to 10% like, I don't know what that is. The nukes, the orbs, the could be this could be that. Okay. Now what? But say you, say you have a, like a criminal case, you have like a dead body, right? And you need to have the detectives work on finding what happened, you know, in this criminal case. And then you have one person being like, I don't know if the body's dead. And you're like, sort of, you sort of just like poo-pooing the field overall. And I feel like the skeptics role in UFOlogy, for the last 20 years, and maybe now it's starting to shift. And, you know, with Neil deGrasse Tyson is taking it more seriously. You're taking it more seriously. When these people of high rank started reporting, I said, all right, I have to jump in here. I can't stay silent. Historically, it's been like, I don't really think there's anything there. And it's like, don't trust the witnesses. And so now I just want to acknowledge your, would you say that you're now "We kind of trust the witnesses, and we think this is worthy of investigation." No, I'm very leery of witnesses. By themselves. OK, but it's not witnesses by themselves. Well, OK, if it's if it's more than just the witnesses that you have, we have cases with witnesses and radar. Yes. OK, so that's 45 minutes. That nudges it from here to here. Japan Airlines. Then we got to get we got to get up here. We have Japan Airlines pilot flying for 45 minutes with radar that was confiscated by the White House. And the radar is publicly available. And physicists have looked at it and be like, Jesse, what's the point of these UAP congressional hearings? The point is, we want to get to the bottom of it because we're not there yet. We want to get to there and figure out what the hell it is. And we're not there yet. Everybody knows we're not there yet. Of course, I agree. All right. So I'm in favor of that. OK, but you're admitting you're admitting, you know, all of the criminal case example, you're admitting a crime has been committed. There is a there's a hole here that we have to find. That's right. If you say our UFO is real. Yes. I mean, there's an unexplained. OK, yes. So they are. They're as real as dark matter. It's a little bit like when the government said in 2017 that UAPs are real. And in Lou Elizondo goes, the government says they're real. The government said the videos are real. We didn't fake these. These are not CGI. These were actually filmed by our jets. So we are indirectly measuring them like we are indirectly measuring dark matter. And those are measuring something. Yes. There's something to be explained. OK, I agree. So you would put dark matter UFOs same category, I guess. So, yeah, OK. Sure. OK. All right. On the eyewitness thing, the problem. OK, so let's go to the court case. Yeah. So how how do we determine truth in the legal system? All right. We have an adverse adversarial lawyers method. Right. So the goal of the lawyer is not to find out what actually happened. Did this guy actually kill this person or not? The goal of the lawyer is to win the case. The goal of the other lawyer is to win the case for their side. Right. Prosecution depends. And so in this case, the peer review. The system is the judge or the jury. They're the ones that decide, OK, I've heard your evidence. I've heard your evidence and arguments. So I think this is the right one. Now, did they get it wrong? Yeah, they get it wrong. Right. So here's how I do it. Just picture a two by two grid. Right. So we got four cells. One, two, three, four. Right. So I did this. This is sort of a fun example of cursed horror films. Right. So I'm doing a documentary talking head for documentary on cursed horror films like Exorcist and other horror films where bad things happen on the set. The actor dies. Like what was the famous one with the omen, you know, and so on. So there's you know, there's a good half dozen really popular horror films in which bad things happen. So cursed horror films. All right. That's cell one. So my answer to them is, well, what about the other three cells? Cursed horror, cursed films where nothing horrible happened like it, you know, the shining and so on. These are really scary. And then what about the non horror films that were cursed? You know, like Apocalypse. Now, you know, what's his name? Has a heart attack on set. Charlie Sheen. No, the father. Martin Sheen. And then the non cursed non horror films. Right. So in other words, you have four cells like it's the case of the missing dead scientists. Ooh, spooky. Right. Well, okay. First of all, we have to quantify. What do you mean by a scientist? What do you mean by they work for NASA? They work for propulsion systems. They work for the military. They worked on a nuclear site. This is all over the board. And then dead or missing. Okay. What's our base rate? How many people go dead or missing every year? In any case, you're talking about the missing scientists. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So you have four cells. You got the, the, the non scientists. Yes. Who go missing or commit suicide or, or, or, or killed. And then you have the scientists who just live fine. How come, how come no one's murdered you? Jesse, you're a big UFO guy. You don't have personal security here, do you? Knock on metal. So that's what I do when I hear anomalies. Okay. Okay. The, the nuclear. What about the other cells? The nuclear sites where nothing weird has happened or the non nuclear sites where weird orbs or something happens. So you have to keep track of all that. Of course. And so my nuanced take on the missing scientist story is that, is there some statistical speed up of scientific suppression? No, I can't, I can't say that for a fact at all. I don't know. Okay. And some of them are, you know, are they all non stories? Absolutely not. And that is what some people are implying. Well, the idea that Nuno Lorero, who is, you know, probably the tip of the spear on magnetic reconnection, which is the number one thing around making nuclear fusion work is, is, is, is, you know, him getting gunned down at his doorstep is a non story or Carl Grillmare. Okay. But that guy that shot him was himself deranged and he had already harassed him before. Right. So each particular case has an explanation. He was, he was an old classmate. Yes. But the old, the, the deeper question is how many people commit suicide every year? About 45,000 in the United States alone. Okay. How many people go missing? It's thousands. Yeah, but that, that's neither here nor there. No, no, it is because. No, because I'm admitting that. I'm saying that there's, there might not be a statistical speed up, but what about General Neil McCasland, who's responsible for a lot of. A lot of modern UFO lore. Why doesn't anybody kill Lou Elizondo? He's going to tell everybody everything. He dealt with Tom DeLonge at the highest level when it came to writing secret machines. Why doesn't somebody knock out Tom DeLonge? He's going to expose everything. Why, why isn't he hiding? Well, General Neil McCasland, General Neil McCasland was, you know, on the special access program oversight committee and he ran Wright Patterson's Air Force Research Laboratory. So he's as, you know, top of the pyramid as it gets more so than any of the people you just mentioned, including me, Tom, even Lou. So, you know, I think there are distinctions to be made. And this is, this is a few days after Trump said we are going to be looking into UFOs. Speaking of which, oh, they did try to kill Trump, but for other reasons. So there you go. So, so, so, yeah, is that not significant? Of course it's significant. No, I don't think, it's just totally random. What do you mean? A gun was missing and his wife then. His wife said he was suffering from depression for years. His wife also said the only explanation might be that an alien took, took him on the mothership. She was joking. Why would she joke about a missing husband a week later? That's weird behavior. Because of all the weird conspiracy theories around it. Oh, it's a strange joke. And, and the, well, I mean, come on, it's not nice for these families who have just suffered a loss like Elizabeth Weiss, her, you know, her husband, Nick Pope, died of cancer. Of course, yeah. Yeah. She's not vibing the, oh, Nick Pope was an insider and, and he was killed. There are people that think this happened and she's not vibing. And this at all, like, that's not funny. All I'm saying is the fact pattern in the McCaslin case is extremely, again, do you not think it warrants further investigation? You don't think, you think it's case closed? I think his own family. He goes missing. There's no footage of him. There are no, there are ring cameras all throughout the neighborhood. Goes missing. Okay. Where's Nancy Guthrie? And everything that would be. Okay. Why, why are you, why, why not? And a gun, and a gun is missing. Why not, why not Nancy Guthrie? Where's she? What, what if Nancy Guthrie? Yeah. But she's not related to nuclear power. Oh, that's, that's the mother. Of the reporter who, I mean, that's also like correlated with Savannah Guthrie looking into Epstein. But this happens all the time. The reason this is getting attention is because the daughter is a celebrity. No, I think that should get attention too. I think that should get it. Or our daughter is investigating Epstein. But again, we, the house, how many people die every year? 2.6 million in the United States, all causes, all, all, all ages, all causes. Yeah, but wasn't, wasn't, I don't, I'm not super familiar with that story, but wasn't she kidnapped, the mother? Well, okay. There was, yeah, there's, it's a big mess. Okay. She was probably kidnapped. We don't know who, there's a ring man, there's a ring camera footage of this guy. It looks fake. And then there was a note sent to TMZ. Yeah, that's obviously, that, that obviously warrants further investigation. Yeah, and it is. As does the McCaslin thing. That's fine. Yeah, but. They are not non-stories. But, but, okay. They're stories for the family to figure it out or the local police or the FBI if they think something's up. Yeah, but it's part of the public conversation at this point because he's, you know. He's trying to put himself out there as a collaborator of people who are disseminating UFO information. You're picking people that worked in some area you're interested in that also died mysteriously. Okay. Oh, he's missing. We don't even know if he's dead. Yeah. You're now jumping to the conclusion. He's, he's, okay, yeah, he's missing. Okay, fine. But people go missing. Okay, so you just look it up. How many people go missing every year in national parks in the United States? It's like 1,000 or 1,200 a year or something. That happens all the time. And, and they can't find him. They fall off the cliff. They fall into the bushes. The animals get him. There's nothing unusual. You can, you can. You're picking that one because he's an interesting person. You can always, you can always use like heuristics, like laws of large numbers. You can always use these sorts of things. I think that is a poor excuse for thinking in a, you know, about the idiosyncratic case with all of its complexity. You can always sort of overfit, you know, some sort of like, ah, yeah, but that's survivorship bias or it's file drawer or it's P hacking. You can always do that. Yes. Or you can look into the specifics. Yeah, but this, but why are you interested in that? Because of his, who he was. Yes, I know. He was, he was privy to the most sensitive science in the country. But lots of people. And he's talking about UFOs. What about all the people that work at NASA now or work at the nuclear site? I think anybody working in an extremely sensitive capacity who goes missing without a trace. Yeah, but why. Should be investigating. And it's not a non-story. The counterfactual. If this is true, there's something spooky happening. I'm not saying definitely there's no Occam's razor explanation. Why aren't all the people. I'm just saying. Why aren't all the heads of all the nuclear sites or the generals? Why aren't they all going missing? Because I don't know. I don't know what happened. I'm not impugning a motive or coming up with some fake story. I'm just saying it warrants further investigation. That's obvious. Only because we're interested in whenever there's a dead body or a missing body. No, because of this specific. Not above that though. Because of this specific case. Because of his specific access and credential, obviously. I don't think so. I think you're fine. I think that's you not wanting to believe. You're wanting to disbelieve. No, I think you're finding you're just as a pattern is that he's like, I love this story about power and propulsion and nuclear. And here's something weird that happened to somebody in that field. OK, what I'm saying is, if that was true, what about all the other people that that are in that field that are high up, that are classified and so on? I think they're not being. I think everybody involved in sensitive national security work that goes missing in a way that Neil McCaslin should be investigated, obviously. But after the fact, you're picking it now. Let's go forward. Who do you think is next? I'd have no way of predicting it because you don't have a story underneath it. You don't know what happened. You don't know if somebody took him or what. You need more information. My point is, we should try to get more information. OK, OK. I think, yeah, the local police, the family. Sure. They should do that because they want to do that anyway. OK. I mean, Elizabeth Weiss knows why Nick Pope died. He had cancer. OK. Nobody planted cancer in Nick Pope's body 20 years ago as part of a plot against him because he believes in UFOs. Of course not. This is random. I in that case, I agree. OK. But OK. Shifting gears a little bit. What do you think is the strongest UFO case based on the evidence? Well, so like in the. UFO files, I think a lot of the sort of Orbish looking ones, it's not clear what they are. I would like to get more to that. Like there's something there. Some of the stuff you brought up, I think, again, I just call them anomalies, but it would be good to get explanations of the Foo Fighters during World War Two. The pilots that saw these things. Oh, it's ball lightning. OK, maybe. I don't know. Some of the stuff they describe doesn't sound like ball lightning. Yeah. So. All right. And we know the Nazis that could not possibly have been that far. Advanced to have these things that are observed to move in strange ways. So that one would be a big one. I think historically, I enjoy all the, you know, the kind of almost mythological, the stuff that Jacques Vallée talks about and Jeffrey Kripal talks about of historically people seeing weird things. Now, most of this, I think, is just sociological or whatever psychological effects, but not everything. So back to your liminal case. You know, this is what I do. I'm kind of on the margins of science. I can't quite explain it. It's probably this, but it may not be. You know, let's keep looking. So I do think all of that. Now, you know, can we get to the bottom of some of these historical events? You know, probably not. You know, you look at these medieval paintings with the thing in the sky that looks sort of like a UFO or whatever. Now, art historians go, no, no, this is what it is. This is what the painter was doing. And so these are religious symbols. OK, so but the rebuttal is, yeah, but the religions didn't have the language. They didn't have the language to describe what's actually going on. You know, this is like the ancient alien stuff or the Vandana can, you know, the the ancient alien gods that are actually, you know, spaceships. Right. So, OK, maybe I love all that stuff. I've read all those books. I watch all the shows. You know, it's like that would be super interesting. But, you know, they're inserting placeholders. They're looking at anomalies and then they're inserting explanations. They're not just like scientists are inserting. Unfortunately, they don't do that. OK, so one of my criticisms of the ancient aliens, for example. They almost never have on like an archaeologist that goes, oh, the Easter Island statues. Here's what we know. And then and then they give the other guy that goes, no, I don't think it's that. I think it's the space aliens or whatever. Do you think they don't do that? Do you think like people like Graham Hancock or Randall Carlson, do you think any they've contributed anything to the field? I do. I do. Yes, I like I like people on the margins and fringes because they push us mainstream people to better define what it is you're talking about. Do you agree with them? Better evidence. No. Not really. Like in the case of Graham, I know a lot about his theory. I've been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization in prehistory for more than 30 years. He's what he's missing is his positive evidence in favor of his theory versus negative evidence against the mainstream theory. Right. So mainstream archaeologists say this is how the pyramids were built or this is what happened with the Easter Island statues. This is the Nazca lines explanation. Because you can see them from the local mountains. It's a water god or whatever. OK, that that's the accepted diamond. And Graham comes along and go, OK, I'm going to challenge that. OK, good. You know, and his little line he uses on on X, you know, stuff keeps getting older. He has a T-shirt stuff. Yeah. And he's right. Stuff does. He is right about that. You would admit that. Yes. But but you admit Gobekli Tepe rewrites the map as far as how old human civilization. But but know what's happening. Archaeologists are responding to Gobekli Tepe by going, huh, I guess he's. Manor gatherers are more sophisticated than we thought they were. I guess they were more advanced. They could build monumental architecture without thousands of people. But that seems like as unfalsifiable a conclusion as you actually just have to go a little farther back. What's the alternative for civilization? So the alternative to that is, no, actually, this was a specialization a little earlier than a deeper advanced. I mean, Graham thinks this is these were built by ancient peoples, the Atlanteans or whoever. But yeah, he thinks it's a holdover from before the Ice Age. From like tens of thousands of years before. Transfer of technology. Yeah. All right. OK. If that was true, what else would be true? Well, first of all, we should find out where do they live? Where's their trash? Where's their tools? Yeah. Now, if they're advanced, do they have any technology, any metal? Did they even have pottery? And the answer is no, there's nothing. But you'd have to admit that that's a tall task to put totally on Graham in a single lifetime of investigation. Well, I mean, he's. He says. He's pushed us farther. We wouldn't be talking about Gobekli Tepe if it wasn't for him and the fingerprints of the gods. Oh, yeah. Schmidt, you know, the German archaeologist in archaeology circles. There's no mystery about Gobekli Tepe. They all know about it. It's only to the public, you mean. Yeah, but that was, you know, it was a discovery. It was really popularized in the 90s. And it was. And Graham Hancock has really. National Geographic did a whole cover story on Gobekli Tepe. I remember when this came out. They described it as like the world's first religious. Ceremony place. Well, OK, we don't have to argue about, like, who's responsible for making it more famous. But I do think Graham is very responsible for it. I know Graham pretty well. OK, so he's a very likable guy. He's a great. He's one of Rogan's first guests. Oh, I know. I know. I know. I know. I've seen all of it. Spent four hours with him in the studio, you know. Yeah, he's debated. OK, but part of the problem he has is what tried to explain him is that you have the mainstream archaeologists and they're just working away going. This is what we think happened. This is what we're working on. They grab. Graham comes from the outside and goes, I think you're all wrong. They're like, OK, where's your evidence? And are you going to publish a paper about this in the you know, here's our peer reviewed journals. Here's our conferences and so on. This is how we do it. And he's going, I'm not going there. I'm not publishing there. I'm going to do an end run around you. OK, so what irritates professional scientists is. But this is how the game is played. You don't get to cut to the front of the line and become famous for your alternative. You got to you got to do what the rest of us do. You got to work at it. But so I. I will admit that podcasting independent media engages in way more type one errors than type two errors. We are falsely accepting bad hypotheses probably all the time. Right. And so that's the problem. Mainstream media blocked out too much. There's an overcorrection. You know, I'm still pro independent media because everybody can just say what they feel. And I like that. I'm more biased in that direction. But that is that is a real externality or issue. You know, with that. But let me just finish the point. OK, if there was a civilization that lived 30, 40, 50,000 years ago. Now, we do have lots of finds of hominids that lived then. The Andertals. We got lots of stuff from them. The earliest Homo sapiens. We have lots of stuff from them all living in small groups. OK, so first of all, if there was an advanced civilization, what do you mean by civilization? And what do you mean by advanced? And where did they live? Where's their trash? I will be the first to say that. I think that's a good question. And he will say that, too. He'll say inserting Atlantis as a placeholder is speculative. And so that's fun to speculate about. And I think all he would say is that there was likely some sort of antediluvian civilization with common architecture from all over the world and that there's mounting evidence for that sort of thing. I think that is more speculative than just rewriting how old civilization is around Quebecly Tepe. And then but then you also we have to be epistemically. Humble, right? You know, archaeology as a field was invented 200 years ago with the discovery of the Babylonian cities. And so it's almost like you could probably create a law around like the farther we go in archaeology, the older things get. In fact, lower in the sediment layer, the deeper you dig, the older things get. So almost definitionally, that has to be true. Also, Graham pushes this mean that, you know, scientists are closed minded or whatever. I mean, nobody believes in the Clovis first hypothesis. Everybody knows that humans. Came to the North American continent and South American continent long before 13, 11 to 13,000 years ago. OK, nobody's arguing that they've all shifted. Everybody admits Quebecly Tepe is 11,000 years old. Nobody's going. That never happened. That shift was slow because we thought that I learned that they crossed the Bering Strait. I learned that. And so I know that it was probably multiple. So people like Graham are serving a vital role. And then just to defend him further, as far as his career decision, you can travel the world, write books, have fun. Make money and contribute massively to the field or you can be constrained. by this publisher parish, you know, Kissinger had a famous quote about academia, the lower the stakes, the harder they fight. Whoever actually said that. Yeah. Whoever actually said that, but like you could, you could be stuck in this like petty sharp elbow thing, or you could be famous and have fun and make money and, and contribute. Many are called fewer chosen. Grandma's one of the few alternative people that have made, there's lots of them. Lots of them. I mean, you talk to like, uh, what's his name? Havas. Zahi Havas. Zahi Havas. So, I mean, you know, how come Graham, how come he doesn't talk to Graham? He's not nice to Graham and other friends. I don't know, whatever. But there's hundreds of guys like Graham who show up at the pyramids and go, I have my alternative. The pyramids where it's a nuclear power plant. But I think the pyramids are another one. The pyramids are another example, as with the JFK assassination at a lot of these things where it's like, I don't know the ultimate answer. I'm not, I'm not claiming to be the source of ground truth, but the prima facie story. Is so obviously a lie. So, so, so people are tired of being gaslit by like, if you watch that Zahi Havas interview with Joe Rogan. But is there, are there photographs online? Yes. In my book, I don't, I don't, I don't go online. Why do I have to go online? I go to my book. It's like, come on, this guy, this guy is gatekeeping all of our information. It's in my book. I wrote about it. It was a little painful to watch. Very painful. Yeah, I know. Very painful. I know. So same with the JFK assassination where it's like, people are tired of being lied to. There's obviously something more than the Occam's Raid or Lone's Gunman. I don't think so. I don't think so. And JFK, do you know about the JFK conspiracist who died and went to heaven? And God says, you know, sir, you were such a pious man. I will grant you any wish you want. I'll answer any question you want. He goes, all right, who really killed JFK? And God says, Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, you using his Carcano man liquor rifle. He goes, oh my God, this goes higher than I thought. That is a funny. In my twenties, I loved the ritual of drinking coffee, but then my sleep started to suffer. Energy would peak and then it would drop. It felt like I was just taking credit out on my future energy. That's when I decided I was going to maintain the ritual, but switch to a much calmer, better, and just healthier alternative. That alternative is today's sponsor, Mudwater. It's a coffee alternative made with functional mushrooms and adaptogens. Lion's Mane, Chaga, cacao, chai, with about a seventh of the caffeine of coffee. So you get a steady, cleaner energy without the spike in the spiral that so many people experience. So if you've been looking for a calmer alternative to your morning coffee routine and are curious about trying Mudwater, the starter kit is the move. Right now you get up to 43% off, free shipping and a free rechargeable frother. When you use code Jesse at mudwater.com, that's M-U-D-W-T-R.com. Now back to today's show. But this is what happened. But you don't, how did we get to the, I saw, I saw you made a tweet about my friend Tom O'Neill today. Yes. And he's because there's MK Ultra hearings. Yes. And he has this theory that maybe Charles Manson was an MK Ultra patient. I read his book. At the end of the book, he goes, damn it. I didn't get a smoking gun. Here's a bunch of little things. But if you, if you read the book as a reasonable third party, then you, then you have to think, your base case has to be that Charles Manson was probably an MK Ultra. Either that or cult leaders can use sex drugs and rock and roll to get people to do crazy shit for them. And this does happen. Yeah. But he's going into the Haight-Ashbury free medical clinic where Jolly West, who's definitely the head of MK Ultra. I know there's enough of these weird connections. I will admit Manson's a interesting case. And, and O'Neill did, I think, properly debunk, um, the, um, Helter Skelter, um, he did. Yeah. What's his name? Vincent Bugliosi. I liked Vincent Bugliosi. I knew him. Uh, I think he sold us a bill of goods. I, cause I bought that. I read the Helter Skelter. Oh my God, this is a great story. Yeah. And I think, uh, Tom O'Neill showed that was a bunch of bullshit. Well, you know what else he revealed? All of the JFK assassination in that book is that Jolly West saw. So for the people that don't know Lee Harvey Oswald, supposed lone gunman, probably not lone gunman, in my opinion of, uh, you know, JFK, uh, on November 22nd, 1963, um, he then gets killed, uh, uh, right outside the courthouse. By Jack Ruby. Um, who's this like nightclub guy, you know, and, um, and he ends up in jail, Jack Ruby, but doesn't actually remember having shot Lee Harvey Oswald. It's this very strange circumstances. That was a later story. He, no, he shot. Well, he's, that's what he said. And he was confused at the scene of the crime. He's in jail for six months and you know, who sees him in jail. And this is according to Tom O'Neill and Jolly West, Jolly West, who's the head of MK ultra. And then he has a, and then Jolly West comes out and he does a press conference and he says, uh, Jack Ruby has had a psychotic break. Yeah, he might've, I mean, he admitted I was really upset cause I love Kennedy and I felt bad for his wife and that's why I shot him. But line in the sand, you have a psychotic break after you see the guy who's the architect of MK ultra. Come on. I know it's weird. I know it's weird. No cameras. I recommend, uh, I recommend reading Gerald Posner's book case closed. He goes through all this stuff and shows why. I don't think he went through the Jack Ruby. Well, well that, yeah. Okay. So, but the root, the Ruby case closed. I don't think he went through the Jack Ruby case. He was a, he was a short fused, angry guy. He got bites all the time. He, you know, acted just spontaneously. The perfect MK ultra candidate. But maybe, I mean, I mean, if you were the CIA, would you really want to hire somebody, a low life like Lee Harvey Oswald and nobody pull off the greatest? Yeah. And that's why I said, I'm a patsy. Somebody just disposable. I mean, but somebody who's incompetent, I mean, he got lucky, you know, he got the job at this cool depository building, uh, before they announced where the, uh, motorcade was going. That was just pure luck. Do you know who, do you know who the mayor, do you know who the mayor of Dallas was? Do you know he tried to assassinate, uh, uh, Edmund Walker? I do. Six months before. Six months before. Yeah. He was a nut job. He wanted to be famous. He wanted to kill somebody. He was, he was going to kill Nixon at some point and his wife locked him in the bathroom and took his gun away from him. Do you know who the mayor of Dallas was? I forget. I forget. Earl Cabell. I forget who that is. He was the brother of Alan Dulles's number two at the CIA, the deputy director of the CIA. That's just random. That's just catechism. I don't think so. Come on. We'll, we'll check with, uh, Gerald Posner on that. Seems somewhat significant. No, it is the fact. Those are facts. Those are facts. Those are facts. I know. Oliver Stone's movie JFK has all these things in there, half of which are just made up. I mean, there's a whole webpage dedicated to JFK. I think Oliver Stone's pretty good. What did Oliver Stone make up? Oh, well, there's a bunch of stuff like, um, Lee Harvey Oswald could not shoot very accurately. And he shot Maggie's drawers when he was in the Marines taking rivalry. Not true. He got the second highest rating and positive report shows in his book, his report from the rivalry training. He had scored the second highest you could get. He was a sharpshooter. Okay. So Oliver Stone got one thing, not just one, but then he also has pages of this. And if you go to, he said he was incompetent before. If you go to Dealey Plaza and you look out the window, there's two X's in the road. Uh, and you can go, you can stand on the X's and the floor to the room, or you can look down. It's close. It's really close. There's no way you could miss. Right. And he was a sharpshooter. So, and they've tried, uh, sharpshooters have used the same rifle and they can hit it. No problem. They can get the three shots. So you have one shot already, um, cocked and loaded. Boom. And then you only have to do two more and then end of story. Eight seconds. No problem. We get, we get deep into the issues with the autopsy that the coroner himself had the idea of the magic bullet. And there's missing frames that were published in the video and the Zapruder film. But, uh, but I want to get back to UFOs. Um, uh, so the Gemini seven case, I found the, um, you know, Pentagon kind of UFO drop to be lamer than I would have liked. I would have liked to see much more higher signal stuff. So I sort of agree with you there. I think, uh, some of the astronaut sightings were interesting. Maybe some are explainable by cosmic rays. You know, I'm, I'm very open to that, but I think like, uh, John Glenn, you know, with the, uh, the little, uh, ice crystals, which come, come off and he sounds like, Whoa, what is this? And then, so the Houston goes pound on the wall. So he pounds on the wall and they come off. It's like, Oh, okay. So one of my favorites, it, because it's so clearly separates any sort of false positives with, you know, other misidentifications, Gemini seven, Frank Borman. Um, they were actually specifically trying to travel the second stage alongside the booster. Yes. Right. And so for the rest of his life, he was like, I, you know, this was not a UFO. Like I'm downplayed it. And he was like, we were trying to travel, you know, right next to the booster. It was just the booster that I saw in the audio. He clearly delineates the booster. And he says that that's at, you know, two o'clock. And then he says, there's, there's a real object and he calls it a bogey, which is basically code for unknown, unknown object. And he says, that's a 10 o'clock high, right? It was too far away and it was off the right. And it could not have been the booster. I'm going to read you another. Um, and so then you're like, he was probably lying for the rest of his life. That doesn't make sense. All right. I'm going to read you, um, another, and it couldn't have been part of, if it had been part of the booster, you would have seen that part of the booster, which was originally traveling next to the booster as you would in a zero G environment. You would see it slowly move to 10 o'clock high and you would know that it was the booster. And he goes, this is an actual site. Yeah, I know. I understand. Okay. So what, so what is that? What is it? I don't know. Uh, I'm going to read to you. This is a part of the problem. This is eyewitness testimony. I don't think he did either. That was a UFO. All right. So here is Scott Kelly, NASA astronaut and pilot, right? His brother Mark is a senator. They're twins. They've both been in the space shuttle. So during the hearing like two years ago at NASA about the UAP videos, okay? And he gives a little speech, just takes 30 seconds. In my experience of flying over 15,000 hours in 30-something years in airplanes and in space, the environment that we fly in is very conducive to optical illusions. So I get why these pilots would look at that GoFast video and think it was going really fast. I remember one time I was flying off Virginia Beach Military Operating Area, and my RIO, R-I-O, radar intercept officer, who sits in the back of the Tomcat, was convinced we flew by a UFO. I didn't see it, so we turned around to go look at it. It turns out it was a Bart Simpson balloon. My brother Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and also now a U.S. senator, shared a story with me about an experience he had years ago that when he was commander of the STS-124, they were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the space shuttle, and they see something in the payload bay, and they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt. They couldn't figure it out. And they would potentially have to go do a spacewalk to retrieve it. But before they did that, my brother. My brother grabbed the camera, and they took a picture of it. And when they blew up the picture, they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay. It was actually the International Space Station 80 miles away. These are cases where pilots have. There are cases where pilots have rendezvoused on a buoy because they thought it was their wingman. It's just a very, very challenging environment to work, especially at night. Of course. This is a problem with these. Of course. Oh, he was a pilot. I'm sure there are all sorts of false positives. Yeah. These people are under duress. But the idea being, I'm a trained observer. Yeah. But you still get stuff wrong. Yeah. But even Jared Isaacman, the current NASA admin, is admitting that some of these cases are unresolved. Yes. Okay. I like him. I like him. I think if we're going to expose anything, he would be on board with releasing it. Yeah. No, I like him too. But NASA, from 1958 till now, has been. It's basically an intelligence agency. If anything involves national security. If anything involves national security matters, it's not going to let the thing out. I know. Well, so, I mean, he's one of Elon's men. Okay. He says, we're going to be transparent. All right. Good. Yeah. But what if. But here's the problem, Jesse. Yeah. Let's say he goes, all right, I went in there, and you know what? Now, you know, UA people, you would go, oh, okay, he's covering it up, or he's not telling us everything. Well, I mean. Or he's siloed. Well, at this point, I have enough evidence in the open source world, and everybody listening does, to say, for example, with the Frank Borman case, we need an explanation for that. Because. Because, again, there are sparks coming out, and he delineates that from the booster, and he delineates both of those things from what he calls an actual sighting at 10 o'clock high, and he calls that a bogey, which is the nomenclature for unknown detected object. And so, and he says it's an actual sighting, and like, you actually hear the guy in mission control, he wants to say UFO, and he goes, is it an actual sighting? And he goes, yes, it's an actual sighting. It's so clear. It's so clear that it's something that he, you know, is confused by and doesn't understand. So, all I'm saying is we should have all of the data in that specific instance. If Jared Isaacman is going to say, yeah, this is definitely prosaically explained, give us all the data in that instance, and then I'll be satisfied. But here's the problem. There's probably, we're probably never going to get explanations for a lot of these. This is a one-off event. There may be nothing to find. In other words, maybe NASA doesn't have the explanation. They can explain some of the stuff. Do you know. You know, like with the case of Buzz Aldrin. I was on Larry King Live. I was on Larry King Live once with Buzz Aldrin and a couple of UFO people. James Fox was on there, too. And Buzz launches into this long story about, you know, when they launch the Apollo 11. He's going out there, and he reports to Houston, oh, I see this thing out there. But he went into a long thing about the panel of the second stage of the Apollo, and it was just also just going alongside them. That's what it turned out to be. But it took him like 10 minutes to get this story out. Larry King is like, come on, get the story out. We got to go on a commercial break. It was really a funny moment. But that's all there was. Okay, so that one is explained. The barman one, maybe NASA doesn't have an explanation for that. Maybe they have one, and they're not telling us. Buzz Aldrin got pretty uncomfortable on air. Buzz Aldrin had a sister that said that he was very into UFOs in his private life. And James Fox actually chased Buzz Aldrin all around the world, finally cornering him in Monte Carlo. And he was about to interview him on UFOs, because apparently he had had a sighting as a fighter pilot in World War II. And basically, Buzz Aldrin said to him, well, you know, I can't do this, you know, mess with my radio. And he said, well, you know, I can't do this, you know, mess with my radio. doesn't want to go Ed Snowden. Ed Snowden did a lot of amazing things as far as showing, you know, overreach on the part of the NSA when it came to PRISM and Bull Run and all, you know, harvesting consumer data. But he also, you know, compromised a lot of Americans' lives abroad. So Grush is making this explicit decision to not do that and to go as far as he can and to try to push the president to make, you know, do all sorts of executive actions around this stuff and to make speeches around it and to make it clear, you know, from the top down. So that was his explicit strategy. What's wrong with that strategy? Nothing. Okay. Come on. Okay. But again, Jesse, I watch all this stuff. It's like interview after interview after interview. I can't show you. I can't tell you. I can't classify. I got to tell you. Can I give you an example of something? It's so frustrating. Aren't you frustrated? You're like, damn it. Show us. Well, I'll give you an example of something that he explicitly did say in coming out. He talked about a 1933 Magenta Italy crash. Yes, 1933. Magenta Italy was the first recovery in Europe in Magenta Italy. They recovered a partially intact vehicle. News Nation itself went to the Vatican and checked in the Vatican files that we couldn't find any. Well, guess what? 1933 Magenta Italy. I spoke to a man at the end of his life. His name was Harold Malmgren, who said that he was briefed by the number two in the CIA, Richard Bissell, who founded Area 51. And Richard Bissell told him about the Magenta crash in 1933. Yeah. What else did Richard Bissell tell you? He said this didn't start last week. This has been going on. He mentioned 1933 Magenta. He did? Yes. Richard Bissell mentioned the 1933 Magenta crash? Yes. That's amazing. So all of a sudden you're spanning generations. Now let's go continents. So you mentioned the Vatican thing. I tracked down Marconi's grandson, Marconi being the inventor because Marconi was supposedly part of this RS-33 cabinet, the special research group under Mussolini that was dedicated to studying UFOs. And I wanted to see if this was actually a real historical artifact. This group was real or if this was all BS. Okay. Marconi's grandson said that he knew through the family, not through any sort of circular reporting BS, you know, zero collusion with David Grush, that he was part of RS-33, research group under Mussolini studying UFOs. In 1933, the Italian government set up this group, the secret research 33 cabinet, where Marconi was the president and Enrico Fermi was the vice president. And they made some searches and studies on this phenomenon. So then you have to come up with this crazy thing of like Harold Malmgren is colluding with David Grush and they're colluding with Marconi's grandson in Italy. And David Grush got on a limb and, you know, a few years ago and said this, and it's proving to be true in the open source context. How come no one else has brought up this Vatican UFO 1933 story except for Grush? That's not true. You have Roberto Panotti wrote a book about it. He's an Italian UFO researcher. He wrote a whole book about it. And he shows telegrams at the time that clearly indicate there was some sort of press blackout and they were, you know, they were trying to cover it up. And the most important one is the third one, this one. And he says, you see, on the personal order of Il Duce, absolutely no mention is to be made of the alleged landing of an unknown aircraft on national soil. The same applies to today's news due to for publication by the Stephanie Agency and individual journalists. This is much evidence for like any other, you know, thing that was, there was an attempt to hide it. That's that old. It's 90 plus years old. Let's talk about the crash retrieval programs. Let's do it. Okay. Those are not abnormal. All governments have them because we want to know what the other side is doing. So famously, like during World War II, when a B-17 got shot down, they had to try to destroy the, you know, Norton bomb site finder so that the Nazis don't see how they were doing, how we were doing this, right? Of course. And we, you know, captured some zeros in the Aleutians just before midway so that we could find out how come these zeros are such great planes and ours are way slower, you know? So in other words, governments do this to find out what technology the other side has. That has nothing to do with aliens or orbs or whatever. Naturally. But then it gets weird when the same people in charge of those prosaic crash retrieval programs, people at places like Wright Airfield, which was responsible for recreating the German pulse jet engine in 1943, are talking about material they've never seen before with weird hieroglyphics that's malleable. You're talking about the Project Mogul balloon? High altitude balloon? It's clearly not project. That's the other, that's the funny thing about the cover story for Roswell. So we're talking about Roswell now, 1947, July, you know, a flying disc came down the Roswell Army Airfield balloon crash. Well, they they published flying disc and then they retracted it, which is strange if it were a balloon. Well, you know, so it was secret. So they go like, well, we got to make up. So they've changed their story three times now. And they went to government and made that first. They said it was a weather balloon. Then they said it was, you know, Project Mogul. Now they're saying that it's, you know, progeriatric crash dummy children. There's two different reports. So there was the 94 report and then the 96 report. The 94 report was about Project Mogul. The 96 report was about years later. They were throwing these anthropogenic dummies out the balloon thing at high altitude to test how pilots would do. And so their explanation was that when people said they saw these humanoid bodies, they were probably seeing these crash dummies. Yeah, but you can't have it both ways. It's either Project Mogul or it's a crash. Well, no, no, it's both. The crash dummies. So their explanation was. All of a sudden the Occam's Razor explanation sounds a lot more ridiculous than the, than the, it's just non-humans. I have my doubts about Occam's Razor anyway. But, but their, their explanation was there was a conflation of memory because this is decades later. I mean, don't forget Ros, Roswell as an incident didn't become a thing until 1980 when Berlitz wrote his book about it. And then Stanton Friedman and others got involved and started writing books and then films and so on. It became, you know, in the 19, from 47 to 1980, Roswell was nothing. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Because you were living in this Cold War era of secrecy where everything was shut down. But you have, you know, somebody like Lieutenant Walter Hott coming to out, you know, with an affidavit, you know, to be released upon his death, saying that he actually witnessed a craft. He saw bodies under a tarp. And, you know, this was this kind of memory metal thing, which totally comports with what Army Intelligence Officer Jesse Marcel said. Jesse Marcel's son said that he took the material home. If you go there, I was just speaking to a physicist friend. He works at a venture capital firm and is like totally like, you know, hardheaded, you know, really smart guy, materialist, reductionist. And he was like, yeah, I went I went to, you know, the Roswell site and I saw that a boulder had clearly been pushed into it. What was probably a sapling at the time. So the tree was growing abnormally around this boulder. So he was like, it seems like, you know, maybe the craft crashed into the thing and it was split down the middle. And he was like, what could have, you know. Caused this boulder to split down the middle. There is so much evidence when you actually look into Roswell. I don't know. I think it's Project Mogul. What do you think it is? I think it's worthy of further investigation and that this memory metal. I believe Jesse Marcel. I believe Walter Haught. I have no reason to disbelieve them. I disbelieve these BS cover stories that keep changing over decades. And so I think it's it's something crashed that was anomalous and it's worthy of investigation. And that's all I want to say. I don't want to say it's definitely alien. Yeah, but it's weird. What if the government, let's say the UAP committee and Avi comes out and goes, OK, we got to the bottom of Roswell. It was this Project Mogul. Would you then go, Avi's just not. He would need to. No, no. If he explained to me how he got there in a first principles way, I'd be like, Avi, you got me. OK, so the boulder split apart like this. Cool. So the memory metal, it was actually this material they were using for Project Mogul at the time, which is especially reflective and helpful for detecting radar. Boom. I'd be like, have you seen the case close? The story of the movie. Was it the moving boulders in the Mojave Desert? No. It was one of these mysteries or these huge. They're like the size of this table. And then, you know, like the next day, it's like way over there. This is like a two ton boulders. And anyways, it was finally figured out that that the rains or whatever, the moisture from the night freezes and then the thing slides on the ice and then it unfreezes and the people come out and go, oh, my God, look, there's this. So there's these it's called the boulder racetrack or something in the Mojave Desert. Yeah. So it looks kind of spooky for a while. It was like, ooh, there's something mysterious. Oh, never mind. I don't know. It's a little bit like the crop circles. You know, we've seen people fake them. Why do you why do you think people who are at the top of the pyramid when it comes to American intelligence, people like James Clapper, you know, people like Brennan, why do you think they would come out in a movie talking about Roswell being real and there being, you know, a surviving being from Roswell? Like, why would why would they talk about and implicitly sort of endorse those cases if they were going to be looked at like sycophants? Years later, and they didn't have some asymmetric intelligence that Roswell actually happened. OK, my explanation for all these is that they're not making it up. They're genuinely reporting as best they can what people told them. So let's take the case of Grush. And I talked to somebody who interacted with this spaceship. He told me it was a spaceship. Maybe Grush is being truthful. This is what he was told. And the guy that told him that saw something that he indeed couldn't explain. Maybe it was a CIA DARPA test. drone or something like, Oh, my God, I've never seen this before. I looked alien or something to me. So he reports that to Grush who then reports it to Congress saying, I know somebody that went. But the Roswell Army Airfield published Flying Disc and then retracted it in a panic. It's a Cold War. They're making shit up because governments do that. So do governments lie? But that's right. They were making the cover story up. Probably. Yes. Okay. So there was something. In the two 1990 reports, they said, yes, we made this up because it was the cold. We didn't want the Russians to know. We were launching these high altitude spy balloons. It's just, it doesn't work. And it doesn't work when the story keeps shifting. Like then you get into the crash dummy thing, which is the most recent story. And I'm sorry. So the crash dummy thing. The skeptics have to get their story straight. They're saying it's two different things and that people are conflating memories together and that they're separate. That's all they're saying. Human memory is not reliable. And people are saying, at the time of the Roswell crash, I saw these bodies. And the government is going, no, you're conflating a later memory of the crash. Dummies with the Roswell balloon. The human memory not being reliable is also, you know, just as true for the skeptics case. Yes, of course. Yes, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then you have like a whole host of like, I would now say on the UFO issue, you're a contrarian. I would say seriously. In terms of the scientific community. No, most, most scientists don't, don't think so. In the UFO community. Yes. This science is lagging. I would admit that. But otherwise you have, you know, presidents, you have, you know, Navy fighter pilots, you have. You have astronauts, you have civilians. So Trump says, we're going to get to the bottom. Part of that is because Obama's gave that. He also told his son that something very interesting happened at Roswell. Would you ever open up Roswell and let us know what's really going on there? So many people ask me that question. I know. It sounds almost ridiculous, but it's actually the real question. It sounds like a cute question, but it's actually, there are millions and millions of people that want to go there, that want to see it. I won't talk to you about what I know about it, but it's very interesting. But Roswell's. Roswell's a very interesting place. I know. All right. Let's see it. Yeah. I mean, I do trust that Trump means it when he says he wants transparency. He did that sort of begrudgingly with Epstein files, but he did that with the JFK files. There was no smoking gun. And now he's doing it three times. We're promised a fourth dump here, maybe this week. There's no smoking gun with the JFK files because we're already oversaturated in data. We have everything on. We know. So you have, you have people like. But wouldn't there be a paper trail, like somewhere in the. Because we got to pay Lee Harvey Oswald, send him, send him some money or send this guy with cash. Especially no, especially not if, you know, JFK said, I want to see scatter the CIA to the winds. Yeah. He said Dulles had a lot of power, but he was outside of the CIA. People say shit all the time. The CIA lied to him and they said, if you invade Cuba, it's going to go great. Yes. And it didn't. So he's like, that's when he said, I want to. He's just pissed off at the CIA. But he fired Dulles. He actually fired Dulles, the director. Trump has fired, you know, most of his cabinet members in his two. Terms. Yeah. But that's not unusual. Yeah. But, but, but usually president versus, you know, Intel world, Intel world wins historically, whether it's Nixon, JFK. Maybe, you know, I don't want to get into, you know, what might be happening. You know, my concession to conspiracy theories is like when you get elected president, they take you in the back room and they go, OK, here's what's actually going on. You know, you can't close Gitmo because of this. You can't stop the war in Iraq because of that. And they're like, oh, no, but I said I would. And then they don't. I mean, this is the explanation. How come Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on nuclear weapons? He didn't do anything. And my answer is, is like, well, they must have taken him in the back room and go, look, all our allies are saying you can't end, you know, launch on warning. This is what they're depending on this. No first use. We can't get rid of that. We have to threaten the Russians. And they're like, oh, yeah. OK, never mind. Yeah, there is. There is this thing where you run on this. Mr. Smith goes to Washington campaign. Right. And it's like, you know, no, you know, you need FISA warrants, no wiretapping. Right. And, you know, we're going to close Gitmo. No more drone attacks. You know, this is Kumbaya. And then all of a sudden you go in, you're like, oh, you turn into a neocon overnight. Something happens. So, yeah, I hear you. I know. I know. But if anything, it's a it's a tip of the hat to you and the conspiratorial movement, because I think there is a lot of stuff like that that happens. You're a you're a tough nut to crack. OK, I'm going to read you something else. I feel I feel like I can't. Well, I mean, I can't. Get in there. We're just talking. But what is it you want to. I want to I want to I want to. I almost think an interesting inroad is like your relationship to the topic, because you were once abducted by aliens. Yeah. So, I mean, have I had experiences? Yes, I've had a lot of anomalous experiences. I have seen UFOs. You know, most of them, I think I can explain, like one of them looked like a V shaped shiny object out in the desert. Turned out it was a flock of geese. Right. We drove further during Race Across America. We flew, drove further down. Oh, it's OK. Yeah. But it was like, whoa. And other examples I use, like seeing the stealth bomber fly over my house when I lived in Altadena every January 1st at 8.05 a.m. Because the stealth bomber flew from Edwards Air Force Base over the Rose Parade. Right. So but if I didn't know what it was, it'd be like, whoa, because it was really spooky looking. It's this, you know, delta shaped thing. It's super black. It looks like a hole in the sky. When it comes at you, it makes no sound. Now, I already know what it is. So I was like, OK. But I can imagine being in the desert like in 1950s going, whoa, what is this? OK. I did have an alien abduction experience in 1983. I was traveling along a lonely rural highway near Hagler, Nebraska, and a big vehicle with bright lights pulled me over and the aliens got out and they abducted me into the ship where I lost 90 minutes of time. Missing time. OK. Anyway, so this is during Race Across America. The big spaceship is my support crew, big motorhome with lights. And the aliens are my support crew, my girlfriend, my best friend, my mechanic and so on. And I had transported in my mind and I'd ridden 1280 miles from Santa Monica Pier all the way into Nebraska nonstop on a bicycle. Right. Except for a few bathroom breaks, but just no sleep. Right. So I'm sleep deprived, going like five miles an hour, just sort of wobbling down the road. And and they go, we got to pull Shermer over. He's going too slow. So they get out and, you know, to put me in the vehicle. And in the 1960s, when I was a child, there was a CBS show starring Roy Thinnes called The Invaders. And it was the aliens were had invaded this small town and snatched the bodies. It was a body snatcher story. And the humans that lived in the town looked just like Roy Thinnes is the hero of the story, just like his neighbors and his friends. But you could tell that they were actually aliens because they had bent little fingers. Right. Somehow they could clone humans, but they couldn't bend their fingers. Anyway, so I thought that. And then the next day after my sleep break, I'm like, well, that was wild. So you can go on YouTube. You can look under Shermer, comma, abducted by aliens. And you'll see an interview with me with Eric Hyden. Eric Hyden is the Olympic speed skater. He was also a bike racer. And he worked for ABC Wild World of Sports, who was filming our race. And so he pulls up to me when I'm crossing the Mississippi River the next night. And he's like, how's it going? I go, not so good. I got abducted by aliens last night. He's like, what? That's a very, very strange thing that happened to me last night. I'm thinking my crew was aliens from another planet trying to capture me. So I told him all about it. You know, so I've always used this example of people that have experiences, really have them. Schizophrenics really hear voices that are out there, not in here. You know, the people that have have abduction experiences. It's sleep paralysis, almost truly. But do you think you think it's. Always explainable by sleep paralysis. Well, I try to explain. Yeah, because most of the cases. What about John Mac, head of the Harvard Psychiatry Department? Yes, I think he I think he was a little too open minded. I don't want to use the word gullible, but I think he took people's stories at their word instead of this person that's telling me the story had sleep paralysis. And they're reporting it as if this happened to him because they don't know I was asleep. So Edgar, Edgar Mitchell, six man to walk on the moon. We mentioned, you know, Apollo 14 astronaut. He has a database of 5000 plus, you know, abductees. You were saying that all of those abductees. Either sleep deprivation or another popular theme with like Bud Hopkins was using hypnotic regression. OK, we know from cognitive psychology, hypnotic regression is not reliable. People use their imagination and just make stuff up. Right. So I'm fond of saying, do you think, you know, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is true? He's like, no. What are you talking about? He just made it up. I know. People have fantastic imaginations to just make stuff. Do you not think that it's a viable and real method for recovering memories that are shattered due to a traumatic experience? No, we know it's not. And we know this from the recovered memory movement in the 1990s. Do you know about the recovered memory movement? Tell me about it. OK, this is a dark chapter in psychology history, but it's sort of a Freudian idea that if something bad happens to you, you bury it, you repress it. Yeah. And that in therapy. You can recover this repressed memory of this horrible thing that happened to you. OK, this was long debunked, but it came back online in the late 80s and early 90s. These are adult people going to therapy for various issues, depression, anxiety, sleep problems and so on. The therapist is saying, OK, it could be this could be that. But, you know, a lot of people who were molested as children repressed that memory and they have these symptoms similar to yours. And persons like I don't think I was ever molested. Well, you think about it, dream about it. We could talk about it. Six months later, they're accused They're accusing their father, grandfather, uncle, whatever, of molesting them as children. These are like mostly women in their 30s now. There were hundreds of cases. So I do think memory is not reliable. Fallible. Those guys were all the people that were convicted based on these recovered memories alone were let out of jail. Some of the women sued their therapist for planting false memories. Do you would you admit that due to your own experience, you're looking at John Mack's whole data set and you're you're biased because of your own experience? Could I be biased? Of course, anybody can be biased. But what's more likely? Right. We know tons of examples where people falsely remember things. They conflate memories. Yeah. But but when when those memories involve real missing time, sometimes physical marks on the person. I think it's missing time. People have marks on their bodies from various things. No, I mean, I literally there's in this book, there's a, you know, a friend of mine at Ellsworth Air Force Base, 1977. He woke up nine miles away. Well, it was the backside of the New Lake Reservoir Dam. And that is about on the map, about eight miles, eight and a half miles away from November 5. He says he did. No, he and a partner both did. And both of them weren't into aliens at all. The Travis Walton case, I think he just made it up. I think he was just late getting the job done. And he did. He didn't pass a lie detector test, by the way. I was on a show with him in which it was called. I forget what the name of the show was, but you had to. Do you think those are not? Do you think those are fully perfect lie detector tests? No, you can beat him. Yeah. But he said, I want to take a lie detector test and he failed it. Doesn't mean anything. Probably not. I mean, you can't use it. They measure stress. You can't. You can't. And thinking about being on live television. We did whole issues of skeptic on light. It's not reliable. This is why they're not allowed in court. Okay. So you were using it as a rhetorical argument. No, but you're now retracting. Not retracting. He said, I'm telling the truth. I'll take a lie detector test. He didn't pass the lie detector test. Yeah. That's not why I think he's lying. I think he's made it up because he was late finishing the job. So you think like the grays, for example, that seem to be just a common, consistent archetype of what people see. Well, not just the grays. Don't forget the Norwegians and the lizard people. No, no, that's right. So there are others as well, but they're often fairly consistent. You know, it's those two. Well, but some of that is due to cultural influence, right? The moment that Bud Hopkins publishes his book with the alien, with the bulbous head and the almond-shaped eyes and tiny nose. You mean Strieber? Strieber, yes. Sorry, Strieber, yeah. I met him in the green room at Bill Maher's show, Politically Incorrect. So I'm just chatting. He's like, what do you do when you're not writing about being abducted by aliens? He goes, I write science fiction and fantasy. I went, oh, okay. He's got a vivid imagination. He thinks this happened to him. Okay. I'm not saying he made it up. Yeah, but that- People- People have experiences. You can't rule it out entirely just because of that. I would say the vast majority, we have explanations, and it's okay to say maybe there's some that this doesn't fully explain. And you're- Maybe they weren't using hypnotic reduction, repression. Maybe they weren't asleep when it happened. Okay, so then what? In your belief, that is biased from your own experience, which was clearly an alien overlay on a real thing. Yeah, maybe. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, at least you could admit that. But I mean, okay, none of this is reliable. This is why eyewitnesses are so bad. When I was writing my book on the Holocaust deniers, they would use survivor stories to show how wrong the survivors are, and they were right about that. I mean, the survivors of Auschwitz have all seen Schindler's List and all the movies and so on, and they have this, oh, I saw Mengele on the platform when I got off the train. I fact-checked one of these stories I heard. It's like, but he wasn't there when you were there. This woman's remembering seeing the movie about Mengele, right? Right. And, you know, I saw the flames coming out of the chimney at Auschwitz. No, that's not possible. The crematoria is over here with the ovens and the chimneys are over here. That has to go through. You could not have seen the, okay, this kind of stuff. So people, they're not reliable. And this is why in the- But that's a good example because the Holocaust, you're saying the Holocaust happened, right? Oh, yes, yes. But then the memory, the specific memory is not reliable. So you could say that an alien abduction happened, but the specific incidental, you know, details are often wrong. That could be. But if that's the only thing you have. But we have way more than that for the Holocaust. The Holocaust is only tiny supported by eyewitness testimony. Yeah, yeah. I'd love to move away from this analogy. I know, I know. If at all possible. But just one more point. I mean, if the other side says, yeah, we did that. And that's true. No one in the German, you know, community today denies it. They all go, yeah, we did that. Yeah, of course. So, okay. So, I mean, okay, this is my point about epistemology. No arguments there. This is my point about epistemology. How do I know the 2020 election wasn't rigged? I didn't check myself. I trust Attorney General Bill Barr, who was a lifetime Republican, twice voter for Trump, said, I'm going to look into this. If anybody would find it, he would find it. He didn't. Okay. So this reminds me of Christopher Hitchens' line about what she got from somebody else. That when you hear Mother Teresa saying that she believes in God today, you think, well, yeah, that she's doing her job to, or the Pope. The Pope says, I believe in God. You think, well, the Pope's doing his job. If you hear the Pope saying, you know, I'm having some doubts about God's existence, you think, oh, the Pope might be on to something. Because if anything, he would believe one thing if he says the other, right? So if somebody like, again, a Marco Rubio, you know, goes in there and goes, okay, we have something, that would get my attention. You know, not another one of these third level, I know somebody who knows somebody, you know, just somebody more direct, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Trump, you know, the head of the CIA. Yeah. Somebody that would have reason to know, then says, yes, I found it. Okay? Now, maybe if Marco says, I can't show you because it's actually, what we have is CIA, DARPA, top secret. I don't want the Russians to know, but we do have something. Can I give you an example? That would get my attention. Can I give you an example of why I think that's not always the best scientific methodology? You're familiar, obviously, with Thomas Bayes. Yeah, Reverend Thomas Bayes. Reverend Thomas Bayes, you know, who was, you know, famous statistician as well, came up with Bayesian logic. I have a whole chapter on it right here. There you go. And I think it's a very important way to think. If you start to build up, you know, mounting evidence for something possibly being real, I think that should warrant further investigation. So a good example is if you have some circumstantial evidence, say, around Epstein circa 10 years ago or around. Directed energy weapons and, you know, Havana syndrome. Skeptics magazine in 2022 said, you know, this is all psychosomatic and this is not serious and we shouldn't, you know, these diplomats are experiencing kind of mass hysteria. Or vertigo or whatever. Or vertigo. And in fact, we realized that it's, you know, Der Spiegel, 60 Minutes, do this piece. In 2016 and 17, 25 Americans, including CIA agents, suffered serious brain injuries. We have been collecting. Evidence of what appears to be a hostile foreign government's plan to target Americans and we realize that it's real directed energy weapons still don't have a directed energy weapon. Where is this weapon that they could do this? Do we have this? I mean, Mike, I think it's pretty clear that microwave, you know, weaponry can can do this and this is being admitted at the highest levels of intelligence again on both sides. But it's similar to the UFO thing because you don't have a smoking gun, but it's, you know, if I were a betting man, I would bet that it's that and that. It's. It's not psychosomatic. Would you now bet that it's psychosomatic? Again, I'm I'm withholding judgment until I see, like, I don't know, somebody in the FBI or whatever goes. We found the sonic weapon, the acoustic weapon or whatever that the. I'm sure they have it. They're not going to release that publicly. Why? Because that's a literal tactical, you know, trade secret that literally confers an advantage. But this is the problem with the UFOs. What if the what if UAPs are actually just weapons that our government has? I think in certain cases there are conflations. But I think a lot of the stuff that we've outlined. Today are cannot be explained by. And maybe some of the new stuff is, you know, Russian tech spying on our new. And in 1945. Well, they had nuclear weapons by 46. They already knew that we were working. Not by 46. It was it was in 1943. Klaus Fuchs was a Russian spy from 42 to 50. Yeah. Working at Los Alamos. That's right. But they ended up building the weapon later than 46. I believe the Russians. Yes. Forty seven. Forty seven. Yeah. So. But but I mean, the point is, yes, they do spy on us and we spy on them. So maybe some of the weird shit people talk about with anomalies. Maybe that's just Russian assets or. But again, the Russians are not going to have. Stuff that's breaking our physics. No, no. They would not have that. Yeah. They would never have. OK. That can't be. This is why I reject that in my chapter on that. Yes. That no country gets far ahead of any other country. So would you admit you got the Havana syndrome thing wrong? No, I still think. Really? Yeah. No, I still think it's. Mass hysteria. Oh, vertigo. Oh, yeah. Oh, you. OK. So you're in the real minority there. Well, you know, I think the 60 Minutes, I really think they got it wrong. Yep. I usually trust. I usually trust them. I just think. Anyway, I don't know. I think. I could be wrong. I think they got it very right. Show us the. Again, their anecdotes. People saying I had these weird things happen to me and I'm a diplomat in Cuba. Yeah. That gets our attention. OK, fine. Yeah. Now we investigate. All right. Where's the weapon? Where's the people? That did it. We don't have any of that. I want to speak about a mystical experience that you cannot explain. And this was with your wife. Oh, my. The radio story. Yeah. Can you tell that? That's fine. Yeah, sure. No problem. I mean, this is a popular. Because I wrote about this in Scientific American because I do want to keep an open mind and I want people to also keep an open mind just in case, right? So, yeah, so I got remarried in 2014. So when my wife, Jennifer, moved to the United States from Cologne to be with me, which I still think it was a big mistake, but don't tell her that. So she'd come here and I went there and back and forth, back and forth, and I tried to navigate the immigration system and it's a mess online. So I just hired an attorney and we went to see the immigration attorney. They're like, if you keep this back and forth stuff, they're not going to let her back in. So I'm like, oh, okay. And, you know, what should we do? Well, you should get married. You know, if you're going to do that anyway, we're not telling you to do that, but if you're going to do that anyway, sooner is better. So we said, all right, let's just go down to the courthouse, Beverly Hills Courthouse, and just fill out the form, get married right there. So we did that. And it's like, but this is not very romantic. So then go back to my house where she'd moved in and we're going to have a little ceremony. So this is all my friends and family and she doesn't have anybody there from Germany. So she's feeling kind of blue. Now, you know, months before she had shipped out all her stuff, including a little 1977 Phillips transistor radio from her grandfather. She didn't have a dad. Single mom raised her. So her grandfather was sort of her surrogate dad and they used to listen to the radio together. So she always kept that and sent that to me. And I tried to get it working. I couldn't get it working, but new batteries in and did the, you know, the slap it on the table test and all that stuff. Nothing happened anyway. So before she even got there, I just threw it in the back of the drawer in the bedroom, in the big desk. And nothing ever happened for months and months and months. The day we get married, we're just kind of standing around. We heard music. And so we go back to the back bedroom and it's like, there's music. And is it the house music system? I don't really have one. Is it my laptop with the iTunes? No, it's not. Is it the neighbors? No. It's like, I get closer to the desk. It's like, it's coming from the desk. So I opened the drawer and there's the radio on perfectly tuned to a station playing beautiful romantic music. And it's like, whoa, this is fucking weird. What song? I don't remember the song. I think it was a classical song. We, Jennifer and I like classical music and anyway, so it was something like that. It was perfectly tuned and it was just kind of a moment of like, oh, so it's sort of a connection with the grandfather. You know, did we think grandfather's in the bedroom with us? No. That would be kind of creepy. Right. But it was just like an emotional anomalous event. Anyways, I wrote about this in Scientific American. And to my utter surprise, I got just like hundreds of letters from people saying, you know what? I had something similar that happened to me. And they would tell me these stories. I mean, one went on and on about, you know, well, I had this necklace and I was going to marry this guy and I didn't. So I get rid of the necklace. And then like 25 years later, I'm in Jakarta or somewhere and there's the necklace. It's the actual necklace. Wow. Yeah. I mean, there's like hundreds of stories like that. Do you think it's possible? That her grandfather was in the room with you guys? In a connection? Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. I just keep a little door open just in case. I like that. Yeah. Would that be a nice reality? I think so. As long as it's not creepy. Like grandfather's in the bedroom when we're, you know, fooling around. That would not be cool. No, that wouldn't be cool. But, you know, there's some rules about that. Yeah. I don't know about the afterlife, Jesse. You know, I wrote a book about this, Heavens on Earth. I concluded that nobody knows what happens after you die. We don't know. I'd be happy to wake up. And I'm going like, oh, so this is what it is. Okay. Because we don't know what consciousness is. We don't have the solution to the hard problem of consciousness. I write about that in here. It's like, nobody knows. And you look on Wikipedia, there's like two dozen theories for the hard problem of consciousness. It's like, well, okay. We don't know what's going on here. So I guess in that sense, we're seeing everything through a headset, through this like very limited scope. And so then you get into this area of kind of radical Cartesian doubt. And, you know, There's a whole host of possibilities as far as non-human intelligence. But also, are we even seeing. Didn't you have Hoffman on your show? I did have Donald Hoffman. Yes, I know him. And he says the likelihood that we see base reality is zero. I think he goes too far. His stuff about, you know, species-dependent perception, that's correct. Particularly colors and smells. Yeah, like the, what's the beetle in Australia that sees the brown beer bottle? Yeah, the beer cap. And then he thinks it's the mate. Yeah, the model beer. The beer bottle looks like a female. That's right. Okay, that's true. You know, but so my response to that is, let's say a bat sees this. Whatever it's seeing with its sonar echolocation, it's not what you and I see. It's a different icon on its brain. But there really is a mic there. And if the bat flies, it's really going to do this. It's going to go around it. But the characterization of the mic is fully dependent on your conception of a mic, which is based on your observation of the mic. And that's not the bat's mic. Yes, but there's something there. So philosophers make a distinction between, like, colors and sounds. But it could be something there that's entirely different. Physical objects, like touching a physical object. You know, this isn't species-dependent. The bat, the dog, whatever is going to feel it, that's really there. Even though it's different, it looks different. Like a shark icon. Whatever it's like to be a dolphin, I don't really know. But whatever a shark looks like, it surely doesn't look like what it looks like to me. Right. Right. Right. Right. But there really is a shark in the water, and it really should avoid it. Yeah, that's right. Well, in a species context, you know, there's obviously resource allocation when it comes to evolution to detect certain predator and prey. And there are definitely species, you know, higher up and lower down that aren't adaptive for you to perceive. And so there are likely species that exist outside of our scope. Like, would you admit that? Oh, yes, absolutely. But I do have a thing on. I'm Donald Hoffman in the book, and I have a picture here of M.C. Usher's The Waterfall That Flows Uphill, right? Oh, yeah. Okay. So illusions only work because there actually is a reality, and water never runs uphill by itself. There's something off here, and we all recognize that. Okay. So predators, or I should say, like, prey animals that look like predators, you know, they have the eye spots, or they have the fake rattles, or the fake wings, or whatever. They evolve. They evolve those because there really are predators that look like that, and there are prey that are afraid of those predators. And so if you can be an organism that looks like the predator, that can be adaptive. But that only works if there really is a reality that there really is a predator. It's a reality, but it's a reality that it's hard to say a lot about. Science is only true insofar as it's useful. And so, you know, it can be predictive, and you can create technology from it. But there are things in physics, for example, that can be predictive, and you can create technology from it. For example, like, you know, the Planck's constant, or, you know, gravity that seems so finely tuned. You know, this is the anthropic principle, where if they were slightly different, you know, we wouldn't have a habitable Earth. And you could say that's a bunch of rolls of the dice, and we got lucky. Or you could say that this is all an interface, and that physics actually comports with what is, you know, adaptive for our survival. And so physics is actually downstream of our biological needs to survive. Yeah, I don't, I disagree with him there. Why? It's really hard. It's really hard to argue. Let me use another argument. Okay, so when you see Penn and Teller or David Copperfield, I don't know, Penn and Teller, Teller walks through a wall. Or Teller makes the Statue of Liberty disappear. Okay, this is fun. It's when people are like, whoa, where did it go? Does anybody actually think Teller can walk through a brick wall? No. Does anybody think Copperfield is actually moving the atoms of the Statue of Liberty somewhere? In an extremely unlikely instance of, you know, electron coherence, where you don't get electron repulsion. These are magicians. We're not doing this. No, but this is my point, because would you say quantum mechanics is fake? No. No, it's real, right? But it implies that all subatomic particles are probabilistic in nature. Yes, but what does that mean? Like, this table is solid, even though the atoms that it's made out of are mostly empty space. But what is an atom? Because the jiggling of the atoms makes it solid. But these are all just placeholder names that we attach to that. But Jesse, you know the movie and book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, right? Yeah, yeah. I interviewed the guy who was the basis of that character. Oh, you did? Yeah, yeah. Stubblebine, that guy, or the other one? No, so not General Stubblebine, who's head of Army INSCOM, but Cary Cassidy is based on a guy named Lynn Buchanan, who's a famous kind of Army psychic spy remote viewer, and I just interviewed him. Well, in the movie, they show him, I'm going to run through this wall now because it's mostly empty space. And he runs into the wall, splats back. Because, of course, there really is a reality. You cannot walk through walls. It doesn't matter what the quantum physics says. You can't do it. I'm not going to die on that hill, but I'm just trying to, you know, imbue this conversation with a little epistemic humility on what we can say about, you know, reality itself, ultimately. I do want to, just going back to your story, the Phillips Transistor Radio. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, right. I want to quote you to you, because this is so eloquent and beautiful. You wrote in The Scientific American, If we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive, we should not shut the doors of perception, quoting Aldous Huxley, or William Blake, actually, originally, when they may be open. We should not shut the doors of perception, quoting Aldous Huxley, or William Blake, actually, when they may be open. I think a lot of things can be explained, but not everything. Right. So there's always these anomalies. I'll read you. I'll read you two examples. OK, let's do it. And that's why I enjoy talking to you. These are coincidences, right? Yeah. So here I'm discussing statisticians Percy Diaconis and Frederick Muller about coincidences. So here's an example from the skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner. One day, Martin was perusing a used bookstore when he came across a familiar title. His father had given him a copy of that book when he was a child, but he had lost it during a move many years later, many years prior. As he considered purchasing this replacement copy, Gardner flipped through the pages and found his own handwritten notes in the margins. It was the very book Gardner had lost. OK, this is even spookier. Coincidence that happened to the actor Anthony Hopkins, who in 1972 was signed to star in the film adaptation of George Pfeiffer's novel, The Girl from Petrovka. Hopkins went to several London booksellers to purchase a copy, but none had it in stock. Heading for home, he chanced upon a book. He sat on a bench at the Leicester Square tube station. Unbelievably, it was The Girl from Petrovka. Two years later, when Hopkins met Pfeiffer and mentioned the coincidence to him, the author noted that he had lent his last copy to a friend with handwritten edits in it for the American edition, changing labor, L-A-B-O-U-R to labor, the American spelling. For example, when Hopkins flipped open his copy, he saw Pfeiffer's annotations. It was the very same book. OK, that's pretty spooky. All right. So then I discuss, well, it could be this could be that. I mean, how come he didn't find? A copy of Silence of the Lambs, you know, or something like that. We remember the hits. We forget the misses. But there's enough weird stuff like that. And again, I've received hundreds of stories. And I mentioned Jeffrey Kripal and Chuck Belay collects these as well. There's thousands of these. So just in case, you know, there's a lot we don't know. You know, the consciousness problem is one. The God issue, you know, that you mentioned fine tuning. We have explanations for that. But there's a lot we don't know. They're not right. The multiverse is not. It's not great. It's as unfalsifiable. It's kind of science fiction, sort of metaphysics, you know, string theory. Even Avi goes, string theory is a bunch of nonsense. Well, OK. It's not my field. It's like, well, OK, no one seems to vibe this anymore. So what happened? This was the big explanation. OK. You know, Martin Rees wrote that book, Just Six Numbers, about fine tuning. But he doesn't believe in God. But he doesn't have a final answer either. Why is the universe this way? So I think these are what I call known, maybe unknowables. OK. We're coming at it the wrong way. We're asking the wrong questions. Like the consciousness problem. You know, what's it like to be something is what the hard problem people talk about. What's it like to be? I think that's the wrong question. I can't know what it's like to be a bat or a dolphin or my dog or you. Right. I can just. And the implication in this question is that the little homunculus in my mind can jump out and go over to your head and look inside. And see if the red looks like to you what it looks like to me. And go, oh, Jesse's red looks like my red. This is not possible. You know, I have to make assumptions. So all the stuff you're talking about, like, you know, consciousness or these things happen. OK. Could be. There's a lot we don't know. But there's and there's so much we don't know about consciousness. I mean, the government for decades has spent money on remote viewing and taking it very seriously. Yes, I know. Again, this is one of those areas. A real modality. Yeah. You know, they gave another past interviewee of mine is Joseph McMonigle. Oh, it was given the Legion of Merit for helping, you know, aid and intelligence collection and all sorts of, you know, you have Jimmy Carter on record in 1976 saying the craziest thing I ever experienced in my presidency is a woman named Rosemary Clooney, who was a psychic spy, a remote viewer. They were looking for a downed TU-22 Russian cargo plane. And Africa was the entire target that they gave these psychic spies. Yeah. And Rosemary Clooney circled a three square mile radius in. And they found this this this plane under the treetops there. OK, so here's the here's the counterfactual to that. OK, so during the that the CIA program start Stargate where they were using the remote viewers. So, yes, they got some hits. But what else would be true if they could really do this? Like, you know, where were the Russian missile sites? You know, where was I don't know, Osama bin Laden. That's probably too late for for that program. But how do we know that remote viewing? Wasn't used in certain instances? You know, we don't know. We might not know. That's possible. And then B, there was actually a meta study done by Jessica Utz, who was president of the American Statistical Association and a fellow skeptic, Ray Hyman. Yes. And Ray Hyman did not agree with her on that, though. He did. Well, he agreed that it was statistically significant that that and then and then and then he was like, but I think we'll have to. This will get explained down the line, which Karl Popper, a great philosopher of scientists, he would call that materialist promissory. He would say that that is that is, you know, taking out debt on materialism and assuming it'll it'll raise pretty good at these things. So, yeah, but he admitted it was statistically significant. Jessica Utz and him and also Richard Wiseman, the psychologist from England. He he's also disputed her. And what's his name? The people that stare at the back of your neck. Rupert Sheldrake. Yes. So, like, Rupert Sheldrake has this whole theory about, you know, perception is your eyes sending stuff out and it tickles you. The back of your neck. If I'm staring at you and you pick that up. Scopasthesia. Or the dog. Your dog knows when you're coming home and you're miles away at work or whatever. OK, so he has all these stories and books about it and experiments he's run. So Richard Wiseman tried to conduct the exact same experiments with the dog. And he's published these and he gets no results. OK. And then Jessica comes in and is like, well, this or that problem with the methodology, it gets complicated. And so, you know, Rupert is gone. It's a skeptic effect. You know, the skeptical energy interferes with the. Very weak power of the of the psychic, whatever. OK, so here's my problem with all this is that so many of these things are not replicated. So we know that in psychology, probably half of all studies ever published should never have been published. This is the replication crisis. This is very disturbing and worse than psychology in medical research. These studies are so complicated and so expensive to run that they pet a lot of things past peer review that probably should have never passed or they were P hacking or whatever. So. But ever since the replication crisis started 2010 with Darrell Bam's research on the backward causality, that's how it began. And so for your viewers, I don't know this story because I would always be asked, what would it take for you to believe in psychic ESP, psychic power or whatever? It's like, well, how about a real scientist at a real university that conducts a real experiment and publishes in a real peer review journal? But that's happened. And that happened. Yeah. OK, Ben did this. OK, not very many. This hasn't happened very often. But in the psychic context, that's happened. Well, there. But there. There are psychic journals. But this is a mainstream journal. He published this in Social and Personality Psychology, which is like the top journal in psychology. He's at Cornell University. He's the great Darrell Bam that has a stellar record. So he sets up subjects in front of a screen. And on the screen, you have to take a pick. You press one key or the other key. Will the image come up on the left screen or the right screen? So one image is an emotionally neutral image. The other one is an emotionally arousing image, like a pornographic type image. And so the subjects guess which one it's going to be. OK, it should be 50-50 is your prediction. All right. So it comes out statistically not statistically significant that they did it above chance. OK, that was his finding. Before the computer decided with this random number generator, which side of the screen the image would appear on. OK, that's the key. So this was what he called backward causality. They knew before the computer even decided which side left or right. The image was going to come on. All right. So that was a big story. It got a lot of media attention. Darrell Bam went on Colbert Report and told this story. And he famously joked, it's, you know, extrasensory pornception. Right. And I remember thinking, OK, backward causality, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. There's an arrow of time. What are the chances that a social psychologist has overturned 400 years of physics by showing pornography to college students in a lab? Come on. And so Ray Hyman famously went through the whole paper. And then the journal also published a critique by somebody else. Not Hyman, somebody else. This is the methodological problems with the study. No one was able to replicate it. Richard Wiseman and Stuart Ritchie replicated the exact experiment. They got null results, sent those results, their paper, to the same journal who rejected it. They said, we're not interested in null results. Another problem with psychology. Yeah. Null results are important, right? They are, of course. And I think. I think we're in the Stone Age on whatever is going on with extrasensory perception. So I think there are very weak effects beyond the standard deviation, as shown by this statistical analysis of the Stargate program and the Gansfield method that Ray Hyman and Jessica Utz actually looked at. But you look at the Princeton Engineering and Anomalous Research Lab, which was started by Bob John, who was the dean of the engineering school. You look at what Stanford Research Institute was looking at. And just the very fact that the U.S. government is willing to pay for this year over year, even despite the optical scrutiny of remote viewing seen as sort of this super quacky thing, I think. Well, the government's done a lot of programs like that. MKUltra came out of the fear that we're losing the race to the Russians on mind control. The Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans. Yeah, and it was a vital program that's now being investigated by Congress. It turns out you can't control people's minds. You can't create a killer like that. How do you know that? Oh, there's tons of. Research kind of was like, oncology now that can you actually control people like this? And the answer is no, you can't. There's no magic drug. There's no hypnotic formula you can use to make people like kill the president or whatever. Well, the research shows you can't do it. I don't know if that's right. Yeah. Now you could do it by say more globally, like, like religion, take 9-11. How can we get, okay. How can we, you know, send, design these missiles to take down the world trade center building? You know, it's really expensive. It's hard to do. And so on. I know, let's just get some guys to fly some, take over some planes and fly them in there. How do we do that? We promise them an afterlife. So religion can do this, right? That's a kind of programming that probably doesn't work for most people, but it works for some. Right. But I'm just, I'm trying to make a larger point, which is that science needs to be perfectly repeatable and it needs to be able to be turned into math. And that's really our criteria for calling something science. Something could be phenomenologically very real. We can't just show weak effects and we can't perfectly manipulate it in a lab setting over, you know, over and over again. That could be a problem. And so, and so science has this very limited criteria and I would, I would put ESP in that bucket. It could be. Okay. Yeah, it could be. I mean, there are limitations to science for sure. I mean, there's a lot of progress, a lot of good stuff we've done. A lot of things we don't know. Again, these known unknowables, I think. Yeah. Free will and determinism, consciousness, God's existence, why there's something rather than nothing, the fine tuning of the universe. These are all really hard problems. We talk about in the book that, you know, that we may not solve them the way we're going. This is why I wouldn't mind being chronically frozen and brought back 500 years from now and go, oh, so that's what dark matter is. I see. Okay. That was obvious. You know, something like that. Much like if you and I can imagine traveling back to the middle ages before Newton and Galileo and all that and go, wow, these people think completely differently than us. Totally different worldview. Yeah. I can't help but thinking, what if I live 500 years from now? It's like, oh. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Einstein was interesting, but he completely missed whatever. Well, it would be quantum physics, I guess. But whatever comes after that. Yeah. Right. That we're not thinking of. Totally. No. Well, I think that's important to say. And another place I would, I don't want to say challenge you, but I'm curious what you would say here. Historically, present day heretics get vindicated as, you know, future pioneers. Most don't. Okay. Most, the fringe challenge heretic people. Oh, they're wrong. Most, that's correct. We have survivorship bias. Yeah. But many people who have contributed to scientists, to science were considered heretics in their time, anti-establishment thinkers. I mean, like Einstein, yeah, he worked at a patent office, general relativity, all that stuff. But he went and got a PhD at a normal university, published in peer-reviewed journals. He knew all the top physicists. He was an insider. He wasn't just some. Relativity was seen as a total novel curiosity. It was completely marginalized until the 50s in the golden age of relativity. Well, no, I'll tell you when it happened. It happened in 20, sorry, in 1919 with Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington led the expedition for the solar eclipse test of the bending of the starlight around the sun from the distant stars, which you can't see during the day. But during eclipse, you can see the stars, take a photograph of them compared to the photographs taken at night. And you can see they bent just the exact amount that Einstein said they would be bent because it's not gravity. It's not pulling the light. It's the bending of this. That's experimental proof of the theory. I think it was still. So that's when Einstein. Well, there's a New York Times headline. The universe's light is all askew. Einstein discovers whatever. So he became famous after 1919. But it was not canonical physics like quantum mechanics was, which he was also contributing to. Well, but he didn't. So he became a bit of a grumpy old man and had a hard time accepting spooky action. Can I give you another example? Marconi flunked out of all of his classes and he tried to send a radio signal across the Atlantic. And he thought that maybe radio signals bent and curved with the Earth. And he was totally wrong, but he tried anyways. And in fact, the radio signal bounced off the ionosphere and it worked. So he was right because he was wrong. And like, I can't tell you how much of, you know, like Eric Weinstein, my former colleague, said that. My former colleague, you know, he would call it like cowboy science, where like you're going out on a limb and you're trying a thing and maybe even for the wrong reasons and then you get it right. And so. Okay, but at some point, you know he's right because it works. But is. We have experimental proof or market proof. Is there one non-consensus thinker now that you would get behind? I don't know, because if I knew, I would get behind him. But it's important to do that work, right? To take bets on. I'm in favor of, you know, the Graham Hancocks of the world going on Rogan and telling their story. I think this is great. Okay, good. Totally fine. I mean, Joe talks to all these people. Yeah. I've been on there seven times and, you know, he's going, here's my opinion. He doesn't agree with me. Whatever. Fine. That's fine. Let everybody have their say. I mean, I watched Robert Malone on his show. It's like, all right, I'm not really vibing this, but, you know, okay, I'll listen to it. I'll go look it up myself. I don't like these people to go, he, Rogan shouldn't platform these people. Why? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of condescending. Like, you're too dumb. You're too dumb to go look it up yourself. Really? I mean, come on. Right? Nothing wrong with that. So, and Graham has gotten the attention of archaeologists who have now responded. Okay, good. Right? That's good that they're doing that. This is how we make progress. So, I'm in favor of that. Yeah. So, you're pro-Socratic method. Now, part of the problem in science is that, is just a practical one. Most scientists don't have time to deal with, you know, the challenges. Like, the archaeologists are busy working and reviewing papers and teaching classes and getting grants and like, well, here's this Graham Hancock. He's like, I don't have time. I get that. Right? It's like, but that's what we're for. We deal with that. Skeptic Magazine deals with that. Right? Or you mentioned Eric Weinstein. I love Eric. You know, but a number of physicists have said, all right, show us. Publish it in a journal. Come to our conference and so on. And he doesn't do it. So, to me, that says, okay, there's something off here. You can't, you don't get to do an end run and go to the front of the line and skip all the steps that everybody else has to go through. You've got to present it. Here's the, here's my theory. Here's my evidence. Now, what do you think? Yeah, but like the politics of academia, like if I tried to write, I was some garden variety professor and I tried to write a paper about a UFO crash, I would be laughed out of the room. That's starting to change, but there's still real stigma. Okay. Okay. I will admit it's obvious. Talked about this. Like he wrote a paper about three eye Atlas and you know, it's probably a comment, comment, comment, comment, comment, comment, but, but it happens. He has these weird anomalies. So last paragraph, let's not rule out the possibility. It could be an extraterrestrial light sailor, Facebook, spaceship, whatever he called it. And so he said, he was telling this on a zoom meeting, the journal editor goes, okay, this is a great paper, but you have to take out the final paragraph. He goes, well, that's, that's not science. I mean, the whole point is like, here's what we know. Here's the methods. So here's our final speculation. That's okay. Cause what if that's the right one? Right. So I don't like that. I admit that that does happen. The other problem with peer review, again, time, you know, a lot of papers get pushed through because they're not really read. And I know this, I get sent papers for review for most of them. I don't do, because I don't have the time. If you are a review, it's like, damn, this is taking me hours to read this. And here's all these statistics and like, geez, if I really run through this, I'm going to spend like two days on this. I don't have time for this. And so you're tempted to just go, oh, it looks good to me. And then so stuff gets through. And I'm sure this happens. I'm absolutely sure. And here's another complaint. So these peer reviewed articles are, are blinded. You don't know who the author is. You just flip to the references and you can see exactly who the author is. There's like 27 citations on one name. It's like, that's the guy. It's like, this is not right either. Right. You'd have to leave off the references. And the p-hacking and all that stuff and the file drawer problem. So now you're supposed to post what you're going to do ahead of time on these sites. Avi does this, which is good. You know, these are all the things I'm going to do and I'm going to report all of them and you can see what happens. I think prediction markets would be a really interesting use for, you know, some of these like nature of reality truths. Like, oh, you believe in it? Okay. Bet on it. And this is based on actually the work of, there's this guy, Philip Tetlock. He wrote a book called Super Forecasting. And it was all about how, you know, if you predict a thing and you put skin in the game, this is Nassim Taleb 101. As well, you're more likely to make money, you know, to be right rather than one of these sort of armchair pundits. That's like wrong all the time. You know, I have a discussion of this in my book because the prediction market people, the super forecasters, Phil calls them, they're more Bayesian. They're like, instead of a pundit on Fox news going, I think Putin's going to invade or I don't think he's going to invade or whatever. And no one like a week later goes, well, he invaded and you said he wouldn't. No one fact checks them and go, you lost, you lost your money. Right. But now you have to place a bet. All right. Now, how often does Putin actually do these things or what is the base rate of terrorists? Like when's the next terrorist attack going to happen in Gaza or whatever, Israel? You know, well, there's prediction markets. So the guys that make money are Bayesian. They're like, okay, how often does Hamas actually attack? And then are there any tensions now? And then they put probabilities on it and then they place their bets. That's the value of prediction markets. Yeah. What I don't like about them is now is the insider stuff is a little like, okay, you know, you knew this was going to happen because you're part of it. Totally. You get, you know, government actors betting on, you know, wars and that sort of thing. And that's totally, you know, that's what Nancy Pelosi seems like she's been doing for the last couple of decades. But I want her investment program. Yeah, right. Yeah. Track her portfolio. You looked into the Virginia UFO crash of a little bit. I mean, I only mostly know through James Fox's work, again, eyewitnesses and so on, maybe 15 to 20 witnesses who are alive. I know. Yeah, I know. Same thing with the, what do you call it? The miracle of Fatima. You know, there was 50,000 people, 70,000 or whatever it was. Yeah. But in this case. Okay. So what is it they're seeing? That's the question. They're not hallucinating. Okay, fine. Okay. Yeah. But they saw in 15 to 20 people, they've triangulated the flight path of this Tic-Tac UFO, which had seemingly like steam coming out of the back because it maybe it had been punctured in some way. It crashes on the Maialini farm. This ultralight pilot and geography, teacher Carlos de Sousa finds it. He picks up part of the material. This whole military crew comes from the ESA base, which is right nearby. They confiscate the material from him. And then you have a being coming out of this craft. It's seen all over the city. These three little girls at the time, now they're women, all testify to having seen this being. It's kind of curled up in a ball and it seems scared and it has red big eyes. And then you go to this specific hospital, the regional hospital, and you can literally walk in there today. And he goes, this is the hospital where they treated the ET. They go, yeah, this is the hospital. And their chief neurosurgeon, a guy named Italo Venturelli, says that he was face to face with the being for four minutes. And he oversaw the work of this other guy, Marcos Venizis, who helped the being with a puncture wound. And then you have all sorts of evidence that the being was carted off and taken to the US. And I just interviewed a former defense minister and a current presidential candidate, a guy named Aldo. And he was like, yeah, this happened. You said that fundamentally you do think something happened in Virginia in 1996. Believing that a phenomenon like this exists. Of course, because these were phenomena that had the testimony of totally credible witnesses. So I'm like, what else do you need? Again, if this were a criminal case, which takes eyewitness testimony into account. What is the issue? It. OK, so something happened clearly. Yeah. Question is, what is it? But that does. And if it was true, what else would be true? What does the government say that they think it was? He thinks he thinks it's akin to what happened at Roswell. And this is all the rebello. And Carlos de Souza, in feeling the material, said that it was very light. And when he would move it around with his hands, it would and perturb it. It would go back into its original shape. Very similar to the testimony of Army intelligence officer Jesse Marcel at Roswell. Like cellophane. Yeah. Yeah. You crunch it up and it unravels back to solid. Maybe it's not cellophane. Nitinol. Nitinol or nitinol. Yeah, whatever that that stuff. Anyway. Well, I don't know, Jesse. I mean, again, these are these are good things that would be good to know what actually happened. How can we get more information? Again, we don't have the body. We don't have the spaceship. We don't have photos, videos. And then the question is, why would the CIA want to hide that body? Why not just show everybody? Go. Yeah. Aliens are here. We need to double our budget because we're going to protect you all. For the reasons outlined in the Robertson memo, you know, they would do a touch off mass hysteria. How put off? I don't think it would touch up. Why do people think that? I agree with you. I'm just saying, if you have this old school mentality, do you know who Hal Putoff is by any chance? Famous scientist in UFO space, but also in sensitive kind of military world. And he says that he, along with Stephen Hadley, who is a national security advisor of George W. Bush. They did this whole kind of, you know, review panel of like, what does disclosure look like? And they were all, they all came in pro-disclosure and they weighted, you know, everything from economic destabilization to sociological or religious destabilization. And they came out of it being like, disclosure is not worth it. Again, I wouldn't make that call. I think it should all be out. But do you think that maybe that's been the case? I mean, I do think government's overcorrect on the security and secrecy and classification they do do that. There's a lot of stuff they don't need to block out, you know, especially old stuff. I mean, come on, the Soviet Union has been dead since 1991. You know, it's time. What happened in 1947? I mean, who cares? They just show us, right? Well, I'm hoping again, part of the UAP science advisory committee, that someone like an Avi Loeb with connections to people in the government, which he does, they really admire him. They're like, okay, we're going to show Avi what happened. I'm hoping. I hope so too. And I hope you get access to the goods. How do you think you'd react if you were taken into a hangar and you saw it? Oh, I would be totally, I would love it. It'd be amazing. I would love that. Okay. But again, I mean, I'm of an age when Sagan was ahead of me by 15, 20 years or so on this whole thing. And it's like, I love this. The aliens are out there. Terrible waste of space if we were the only ones. I mean, let's go looking and so on. Absolutely. I mean, I think they're out there. If they came here, even if they didn't, they'd be out there. Even more amazing. Sagan's interesting because he wrote The Demon Haunted World and obviously was- Good skeptic book. Yep. Yeah. As a fan of weeding out bad ideas. I remember Richard Dawkins blurbed that book. But in other ways, he seems kind of privately interested in UFOs and aliens. Oh, he is. Yes. Although he hasn't covered anything. That was a myth. There was a story about him saying, I think aliens are real and that this was redacted or something. So I checked with his widow, Annie, who's a friend. She goes, that never happened. That's funny. Those bullshit, like deathbed confessions. I believe in God now. Yeah. It never happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hitch always said, if anybody tells you I said it at the last moment, I believe in God, don't believe them. I'm never going to say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he held high clearances. You know, he was involved in this 1958 project called A119, where we were going to nuke the moon as a show of force against the Soviets. I don't remember that. It's fascinating. Is that in the bios? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. I must have forgot that. Okay. Yeah. Yes, I know. Well, I mean, he was a major insider. He, you know, got the Voyager, you know, the record thing he worked on, turned the Voyager around, take a picture of Earth. I mean, he made all that happen. Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating story. The audio version of their 1977 book about the Voyager record, 79, I guess it was published, about him and Annie and a few of the others that worked on it. It's really quite a slice of history because, like, this is what they thought in 1979. This is what we were thinking about the universe and aliens and music. And, like, which music do you pick to put on the record? My favorite story of that was somebody said, well, we got to put Bach on the record. And somebody said, that would just be bragging. It's too good. That's fine. I thought that was funny. But, yeah, I mean, the chances of the Voyager encounter anything, pretty much nil, but you never know. But just in case. But also, it's a slice of what we cared about, what we think is important about us for other people to know, even if no one ever finds out. It's kind of a. It's kind of a look into what we think is important, art, music, language, what people look like, that kind of thing. Well, I'm excited you're on this panel. I think you're going to serve a very important purpose. And if anything, I want you to debunk harder. And what I mean by that is I feel like often our conversations are like, Michael, here's this data set. And you're like, yeah, but the data set is probably happenstance for all these, you know, kind of high-level heuristic reasons. I want you to debunk the isolated specific cases. And be like, actually, here's a conventional prosaic explanation. Because otherwise, we just have so much evidence sitting there in this liminal space. And I'm with you. I don't want to kind of preemptively pre-crystallize or snap to grid some conclusion. I don't know. Space aliens, I'm not sure. But like, is reality much weirder than we think? I'm pretty high conviction in that. I think I would agree with that. I think there's a lot we don't know about the physical world. Even these quantum effects, all the space aliens. Spooky action and distance stuff. You know, the hard problem of consciousness. You know, Stuart Hamroff and Roger Penrose theory about the collapsing wave function inside the microtubules of the neurons. Okay, I don't really buy this. But it's an interesting story. Because if it turned out to be true, then that would not be paranormal, ESP, psychic. That would just be like quantum neuroscience or something. It would be part of science. And there are physicalist models around remote viewing, where maybe, you know, in certain quantum interpretations, you have obviously a temporal non-locality with double slit experiments. Right, yes, yes, right. You can reverse qubit positions in quantum computations. So in a working quantum computer, you'd be able to send information back in time on the application layer. So if there was some sort of, you know, room temperature quantum system in the brain, a la Penrose and Hamroff, then you could maybe access your future knowledge state. So if you were given confirmatory feedback on a remote viewing session, that would be a physicalist, materialist, reductionist explanation for remote viewing. You know, that would fully comport with possible interpretations of physics. Yes, if that happened, then it would become. So this is my point. If it became part of science, so the words paranormal and supernatural, they're just linguistic placeholders. There's no such thing. There's just reality. And if it turns out people can read each other's minds at the backs of playing cards or remote view due to these quantum effects, okay, then that's just part of the world. It's super normal, not paranormal. Yeah, super normal, or yeah, like really cool, or something like that. Yeah. Well, I love it. And I hope we can, uh, I hope we can make a lot of progress on this and i'm really excited to see what you do on the white house advisory panel well thank you and uh i'll do my best yeah yeah well i think uh i'm excited you know just the fact that this exists i think is a really cool stamp of approval for the for the space um and yeah hopefully we can do this again because i always enjoy my conversations if nothing else it could expose how much governments keep secrets which is also interesting for conspiracy uh studies like like do they really lie yeah they really do right i used to make a joke about this like you know crazy conspiracy theories like we never landed on the moon the earth is flat 9-11 is an inside job and this rich guy has this island where he's bringing rich and powerful people to have sex with oh wait that one's real exactly because you know rogan was talking about that way before any of this stuff came out for sure and it's like oh that one's real yeah and a good example there is you have pizza gate which on the face of it looked totally ridiculous but it was one step adjacent to the epstein stuff yes yes some of the rich guys taking the blood of adrenal uh it was i think that was like q anon and yeah so so all these things while maybe prima facie shouldn't be taken at face value and they were wrong they were almost meant to pre-stigmatize against a real truth a really dark truth so that's the problem with conspiracism is that conspiracy theorizing is that some conspiracies are true they that's what happened and i think being a there's a there's a healthy efficient frontier of looking skeptically into conspiracies which should every be everybody's kind of a priori you know uh orientation because i think if you if you write it off and you say oh nothing to see here because it's called the conspiracy there's a cia memo from the 70s saying we're going to popularize the term conspiracy to have people look away i don't doubt that they do this let's feed the ufo people this and this will distract the american public for a while and then there's a there's a there's a there's a and then there's the flood then there's the opposite of the flood the zone like you have these people you know coming out who are disinfo agents saying oh yes there we have six different alien races and they're from these ten planets or whatever and that's every podcaster's dream to have those people on you know so it's important i think to to to go into the conspiracies but with your wits about you yeah our latest issue of skeptic we look into the the whole social media model and podcasting and and the kind of attention economy in which you get people like tucker carlson and candace owens saying just crazy stuff and i can't tell that they believe this uh are they just saying this because it draws attention and here i am watching it and writing about it so i'm getting attention it's like did i just fall for something i think look i think i'm sure they get a lot wrong and then i think there's a general sense of being burned by the establishment institutions that's true and have we overcorrected and you know is there you know blanket anger against like you know every institution everybody with a third degree connection to like anybody who's done bad yeah for sure podcasting is sloppy right now yeah and then and then at the same time i understand they're tapping into something very real like an emotion uh on the part of the american people that they feel ripped off and burned and clearly just you know ignore all the details there was an extreme amount of undue leverage on the united states government by uh you know uh basically a pedophile who was running a ring right and so you know that that's all you need to know right like to be like angry and want investigation and then and then clearly you know people have been distracting systematically from that and so like if you agree with those two things like you know i get it as far as you know that sort of sphere of podcasting world where they're it's like what else what what else are they lying to us about i don't you know i don't know i know i know yes well so that's why i like independent journalism you know when something gets reported that i know a lot about i know they're getting it wrong it's like what else am i watching that i don't know anything about uh this happened in iran like maybe that didn't happen in iran because i know they got this one wrong right that happens like in the new york times the cbs whatever like huh so i do like having you know the independent journalists going let's get lots of voices out there and it gets time consuming sometimes you know it's like okay i have like 20 windows open like i'd really like to read all these articles i really should read all these and it's like okay yeah you can't do everything right so that's all but i think it'll winnow winnow down i think it'll become obvious these are the good places to go you know and try you know left wing right wing libertarian green whatever and add them all up divide by four whatever i love it exactly well michael thank you for coming to my ufo oh i love being here by the way this is i feel like the star trek uh bridge here yeah no it's it's so fun and uh no this is a blast i really appreciate it and uh uh you know i now know that you were you're you're on record right that aliens are real yes that's it yeah they're here yeah yeah i've been zapped by the uh the alien beam yeah i know uh i would love it i mean again if i woke up and there's an afterlife great okay i'm not against that i'm aware of that you know if there's aliens i don't want to be alone in the universe yeah okay so let's do it i think that the only guarantee about the future is that we're going to be surprised and so i would that's a good way to put it i would say i would say all the means we have in our head all the expectations of quote-unquote alien life it's probably going to be so much weirder than we ever expect whatever is coming around the bend well this is a to sagan's credit he didn't show the aliens in contact for a reason because we actually don't know what they're going to look like right i mean i mean how many bipedal primates are there on earth you know there's uh four four great five great apes that's it out of millions of species so if we go to another planet what are the chances they look anything like us probably not they're going to be very different well i think the gray alien thing is a real archetype i think it's consistently seen you do and yes well that's the thing that i think points more towards something that's derivative of humans if you're in north sentinel island which is you know off the coast of india it's completely uncontacted you know for centuries those guys if if say they've had you know a couple of missionaries have shown up with bibles and stuff but you know maybe these north sentinelese go back to the you know the inland tribes and they say um you know we've seen aliens they've they've they've attempted contact don't worry we've we've nullified the you know the threat or whatever and so if you're seeing something that looks like you you know it's bipedal there's this sort of morphological consistency and there's evolutionary convergence you know the likelihood is that it's it's actually sort of like you know it's not a derivative of you and it's in your neighborhood and it's proximate to you and so then you have to get into time travel obviously you have paradoxes there but you have to get into other weirder explanations or another one do you know simon conway morris the paleontologist who countered steve gould's contingency argument for the burgess shale on a larger scale convergent evolution that there's only so many ways for organisms to be designed in a world if you have air you have to have something like wings if you're in the water you need something like fins and a fusiform body and then like so you should have like most of your sensory equipment and your brain on one end your waste disposal system on the other end you got to have some limbs to move around on the land you might end up with like a bipedal dinosaur or whatever right it wouldn't look completely like so i read his book and i had him on the show i was like yeah that guy actually makes sense so this is this because instead of joking about aliens are not going to look like us he's like you don't know that that's fascinating yeah what's his name simon conway morris okay so he's a paleontologist i think he's at oxford and uh so when when steve gould wrote his famous book uh wonderful life and he made his case for how contingent history is which was a good correction but he went too far and simon conway morris is like you know it's not all chance you know wings are going to look like wings because this is the environment they're in right and so most things converge to look certain ways for good reason like oh yeah that's a good point interesting well i would love to talk to him he sounds fast oh he's great yeah he's good i do just think that radically different environments right like we have like a nitrogen rich atmosphere if you know you end up with you know some other element that sort of dominates the atmosphere you know gravity is a little bit different i would imagine morphologically you end up with different you know patterns of life i'm sure he has good counter arguments to that so i'll put you in touch with him also charles cockrell at oxford he uh he works on uh extraterrestrial liberty so that's kind of his big thing like if we set up a civilization on mars what should be the the political system or the economic system what if somebody takes control of the oxygen production and then they monopolize it you know so then he starts thinking what kind of laws do we need on mars and then you take that out to you know an extraterrestrial civilization well you know what what kind of system are they going to have and and then and then different planets are going to have different kinds of bodies right depending on the gravity if you have gravity 10 times that of earth you can't have a giraffe it's just or the bones would be you know this thick right so anyway i'll put you in touch with him too he's uh he's a great guy and he's a great guy and he's a great guy and these are super interesting questions that would be awesome but on the conway example you're kind of saying that you know maybe they are extraterrestrial maybe the greys are in fact yes yes that's that's kind of the argument that at least it's not completely crazy to think they could be something like bipedal they're gonna be primates but something like you got to have arms and legs to move around and manipulate tools and uh you have two eyes and you know the the brain is up here and you know so on you end up kind of like this yeah it's also interesting to me that you're interesting to think of like lower species as far as you know they're less conscious than us what they think of us and whether they think certain things human humans do are actually scientific laws versus you know agency versus humans so i know you have agenticity this idea that we impugn too much sort of agency when it comes to things but are you familiar with like the farmer and shooter analogy from the three body problem do you know about which one is that uh it's fascinating so you have these like um 2d people who are living on this like flat surface oh and you have shooters in 3d world shooting at it and every 10 centimeters you get a little hole and they think each hole is like a crater it's this but it's it's this sort of just consistent phenomena it's like the weather or it's you know natural geological formation that just shows up every 10 centimeters and in fact it's discretionary and it's and it's because of these shots being taken really that's a great example it's a great example another great example thought experiment is you have turkeys that you know every day they're fed at 11 a.m every day they're fed at 11 a.m this is sort of this david hume style thing so you know they're fed they're fed they're fed and then one day their head get chopped off and this is sort of this david hume style thing so you know they're fed they're fed they're fed and this is an analogy for the tri-solarian aliens in the three-body problem which are you know coming to invade or whatever but the point is you know you think of these things as patterns sometimes that are you know out of your control but it's the opposite of agenticity there is actually agency and discretion behind some of these things that you're observing yeah well that's edwin abbott's uh book flatland from the 1890s great book so good yeah you never know i mean i think that was also sagan's point you know we're carbon chauvinists he'd like to say you know carbon is the only way to structure a living organism and he would talk all the time about tesseracts and yes it's a platonic showed it you showed it on your show i've showed all the time yeah he has he shows it he goes you can't see a tesseract but you can just see the shadow and so maybe some of these ufos because they actually seem to show holographic principle like features where you know about the holographic principle of course you just see the 2d boundary of a black hole but it's obviously this larger 3d structure so in this case if you walk into the ufo in many of these reported instances it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside yes i've heard this and so it could be this holographic principle like yeah yeah yeah it could be well fred hoyle wrote that novel about a gaseous cloud in space thinking you know i mean it's just particles that are interacting right like these drones now the the jellyfish uap looks to be a group of drones the drones are interconnected you know bluetooth or whatever and they're why not coordinate molecules of gas or whatever right that was his idea and then ray kurzweil there's a scene in that film about ray kurzweil where he's staring out at the ocean and he's like what are you doing what are you thinking he goes i'm thinking computation you know these all these little molecules they could all be coordinated and computing and thinking don't don't think it's just neurons firing is the only way you can get consciousness right i think that's right i think we yeah we assume it gets cut off and we just we don't know how consciousness works there are all these things that in nature that could actually you know be not random and i would just say also like yes there are all sorts of mythologies that have led humans astray historically but it's the epitome of human hubris to say that the enlightenment is not another example of a mythology right well it's a story but hopefully a story based in reality it's a story it's a story that involves an origin story how things come into creation it involves rituals and labs you know it's like all these things and it's all it's not immune to any of the you know consensus dynamics and herd-like thinking of any of the other mythologies you know uh dan dennis analogy with termites and thinking so he's in his book bacteria to brains he has pictures of these gigantic termite mounds in australia i mean they're like 20 30 feet tall big lots of complicated things do any of the termites that spit the little dirt out and build this thing they have any idea that they're building this tower this looks like a skyscraper no they haven't they're just doing their little thing right but together they're doing their little thing right but together they're doing their little thing right because the whole collective builds this magnificent structure because that's what we're doing that and i you know joe rogan talks about this all the time he says like our need to consume things drives our need to make better and better thing incrementally better things and it's like the tower of babel or something where we're we're just trying to we're creating this like cybernetic sort of thing around us where our own consciousness is going to look fundamentally different in in a hundred years and this is not uh you know this is not normative statement for me because i think it's actually you know bad in many ways like i i'm sort of more of like a primalist in this context but there are people like you know noah uval harari who like you know he's just he's probably and i don't love him on a lot of other things but he's just right about this homo deus thing where we're you know we're probably going to end up merging with technology we are the history of computation is the history of a lower latency higher bandwidth relationship with this stuff and then all of a sudden that's a new aperture through which we see everything and then and then what what do you detect on the other side is there an intelligence you know non-human intelligence that you that's maybe higher than us on the consciousness chain that you can then speak to and have they been you know a la cellular automata have they been poking at us and messing with us uh in in ways to get us to just meet them and and be able to to communicate with them who knows there was this line uh asked i think it was to ray kurzweil you know do you and he said we're working on it that's fascinating wow well that's the singularity right i mean everything changes and they become essentially omniscient right but then that also feels really heretical like it should be yeah there should there should be a god that created he's been right by so many things you have to take him seriously he's also been wrong on a bunch of and and then he might be right on this again but like i don't know i find that like you know the it's like i think this is a simulation from some higher sentience right and so why would you port yourself into a lower bit compressed you know simulation a la artificial intelligence if you can maybe ascend out of this one and maybe you know commune with a real god you know why would you why would you go into the tech thing you know what i mean yeah exactly yeah there's a good star trek next generation episode about this where they you know the holodeck they go in there and have these pretend worlds right so one of the common themes in the in that series is um the sherlock holmes and moriarty and the whole thing uh and they go in there and they play act and do the whole thing with him so one of the in in this particular episode sherlock holmes and his sweetheart they're in there and they're all interacting with the start star trek crew people captain picard and so on all of a sudden um the holodeck doors open and um and he walks out the holodeck guy the um what's the uh yeah moriarty walks out and he's like how's he walking out of the holodeck he's he doesn't exist so the rest of the episode they're trying to figure out how did he do this i mean how does he go from this digital figure that doesn't exist to actually living in 3d space right and then you get all the way to the end where they realize we're still in the holodeck this entire enterprise is in the in a little box in the holodeck i love it i love it and it will because i also did it but and then it ends where barkley the kind of character officer uh he's wondering like huh i wonder if this whole now they're in the real enterprise and it's wrapping up and he's like i wonder and he goes he kind of looks to the sky and goes you know computer and program and it doesn't end he's like like we're we're not living in a matrix because really we could all be in a little box on some you know computer programmer's desk we could and in almost every religious myth we are and so you have to ask is there any semblance of truth in some of those myths do we throw that out entirely or can myth motivate us to think about real truth finding i think it's i love myth myth is important i think so too yeah i love i you know joseph campbell stuff and i love some of jordan's stuff about this what they really mean i discuss this in a book of my chapter on religion that maybe we're misreading some of these religious stories as being real maybe that's not the point maybe the point is what's the story about but but if myth you know if it sets this up as like a construct and we're a lower construct maybe they're right about that there are cases where myth gets vindicated in reality heinrich weiss von schleiman went looking for troy when it when it was relegated just to homer's the iliad i have gazed upon the face of agamemnon that's right and he and he found it this one's real and he found it yeah so i wonder i wonder if they're right about that and the you know the the hindu you know maya the the great illusion is like a real there's a real thing i'll tell you a funny story so in my in that book in my book chapter on religion i talk about jonah and the and the great fish you know so the story is he's living on this one land and god gives him this instructions you got to go over and tell these people the nineveh people whatever they're uh about you know whatever the religious messages he goes i don't want to do it i'm not going to do it so he gets on a ship and he sails away the opposite direction but the ship um flounders and he and he's about to drown and he gets swallowed by a great fish and he lives for three days and three nights very symbolic in the belly of the fish and takes him all the way over the land spits him out on the dry land and he gets out there and goes all right god i'll do it and he delivers the message and he's like oh my god i'm not going to do it and he's to these people all right so like hardcore atheists are like that never happened how could you live in the belly of a fish it's like of course it didn't happen it's the story that you know he's delivering this message of redemption starting over building a new society forgiveness this kind of thing right and then most christians when i tell what i just told you they go yeah yeah yeah of course that makes sense and i go maybe the resurrection didn't literally happen to jesus maybe it's a story about redemption and forgiveness and starting over creating a heavens on earth and like no no no no no no No, that one has to be true. Because for Christians, it's like, maybe it's not love. literally true it's okay to mythology has deeper truths that are valuable yes but it could also be but it could be yeah all right yeah yeah that's right so the face of agnum on memnon troy actually existed yeah maybe it's it's uh you know i don't know it's so fascinating and we could go on forever but i i think your the way you think is a very healthy check against probably uh the way a lot of my audience thinks probably the way i think and uh the great bertrand russell once stared up at the stars and he thought he was awestruck by how random the whole thing was and uh you can be awestruck by the randomness and that can give you the proper kind of you know positioning and um you know humility in life and and sense of wonder and then you can also be awestruck by you know uh an entity a great creator god and so i think uh uh there are failure modes on both sides and it's really it's really good to always check your thinking so i i really appreciate you uh you being here well thank you yeah thank you for having me and you're welcome this was a blast big fun let me know when you when you find uh the aliens it's okay maybe i could be the first person i call please yeah i'll be the i'll be the the the water boy jesse says we got it i'll be on the next plane all right all right thank you all right cool you you you