American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - I Debated UFOs With America’s Top Skeptic (It Got Ugly…)

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Starting point is 00:00:22 free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Michael Shermer, it is an honor. to have you here. I'm talking to Michael Sherman. Michael Shermer. Good to see with your pile of your writing. You are probably the most prominent scientific skeptic in the United States.

Starting point is 00:00:44 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.

Starting point is 00:01:05 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, satellite, swamp gas, spinning eddy, sun dogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light up the clouds.

Starting point is 00:01:26 You're picking the winners. We're picking the winners. The vast majority of these things are things. 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?

Starting point is 00:01:45 I don't like the word believe in. What about General Neil McCasteland? 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 anti-deluvian civilization. If there was an advanced civilization, where's their trash? Where's their tools?

Starting point is 00:02:03 If you read the book, your base case has to be that Charles Manson was probably an MKLTRA. Either that are 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 low life like Lee Harvey Ozzled and nobody? Yeah, and that's why I said, I'm a patsy. That's exactly who you'd hire. Somebody disposable. I will admit that I want to believe. Will you admit that you want to disbelieve? Do you want to have a mystical experience?

Starting point is 00:02:35 Okay. All right. Yes, that could be... I think you're running from your shadow. You're a secret mystic. Very strange. They tabby me last night. You were once abducted by aliens.

Starting point is 00:02:47 Okay, you want to hear that story? I do. I want to hear that story. Michael Shermer, it is an honor to have you here. Michael Shermer, it is an honor to have you here. You are probably the most probably the most prominent scientific skeptic in the United States. You're the founder of Skeptic magazine. You are synonymous with pouring cold water on all sorts of, you know, mythological 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 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.

Starting point is 00:03:52 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. Yeah, yeah. I guess I'm the Scully. You're the Scully.

Starting point is 00:04:04 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 Vile and we're next to that poster. So that is one of my prized. Well, I love his work. He's, you know, when you read him, it's like, oh, my God, this guy's a, he's a skeptic.

Starting point is 00:04:21 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, okay. And then he goes, but it could be these interdimensional beings of the mythology. I'm like, okay, wait, hang on. Where are you going with this? Yeah, he's very interesting because he pulled, he's, first of all, he is a real scientific background.

Starting point is 00:04:40 He was on ARPA net, 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 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 Lizar case. I happen to disagree with him, you know, on that specifically.

Starting point is 00:05:13 But he's a very interesting sort of deep, deep thing. Well, the collection of stories and anecdotes that they're not enough for belief or to tip over into accepting it as viable. But it is a direction of which to go. Like, what are these people experiencing? 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.

Starting point is 00:05:36 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, go, okay, what are they experiencing?

Starting point is 00:06:00 So it leads us in a direction for research, like Jeffrey Krippel's research also. He compiles these hundreds and hundreds of anomalies, right, weird things that happen to people. And they are. They've happened to me. And then people write me when I write about this. I'm like, oh, my God. Wow, these are wild. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:20 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 guy. So I don't think you're arguing with the fact that they're saying they saw a thing and that

Starting point is 00:06:49 they're earnestly retelling their experience. What do you, do you believe that all of those things have some sort of prosaic explanation within kind of our current physics or where do you stand exactly? Yeah. Okay. Fair question. Well, I would say on the, 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 Methalot, well, with universal realism. There is a reality. We can know something about it.

Starting point is 00:07:18 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 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, okay, 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.

Starting point is 00:07:55 No matter how many steps are in there, 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. Yes. So you have deductive logic. You have inductive logic.

Starting point is 00:08:18 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 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,

Starting point is 00:08:55 you know, not involving sort of lift mechanisms that seem like prosaic propulsion. How do you explain that? Okay. Well, 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 the in contact, the prime number sequence that Jody Foster's character hears in the earbuds. So that would be something that's not naturally produced. It's not a rotating black hole or wazard or whatever. For, 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, okay, we've seen all this. We've had three government dumps now,

Starting point is 00:09:45 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 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, what is it, 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. 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 in 2020. Everybody sees it. It's covered in the news,

Starting point is 00:10:33 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. Shermer, look, here it is. And NASA said it's real.

Starting point is 00:10:54 You know, he gets the money, right? I mean, the money all goes to the Gallo 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 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 I think we have an abundance of evidence in the open source world that, that would, you know, I believe that. I believe that now.

Starting point is 00:11:34 So like I've already hit that threshold. What's your threshold? Wow, much higher. Yeah, no, I need to see the bodies or the spaceships or, you know, let's 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 actually show you, but we found it. And okay, all right. If Avi accepts that and all these scientists accept it, then, yeah, it would be nice to see it.

Starting point is 00:12:02 Like, okay, let's see it. Yeah, we all see it. The problem with anecdotes like that 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 Hamalayas 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.

Starting point is 00:12:36 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 it. Show us the body, right? The roadkill, the dead bigfoot, whatever. You know, so that's what it would take. Like, just show us.

Starting point is 00:12:54 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 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.

Starting point is 00:13:38 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 tick-tacks, 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

Starting point is 00:14:09 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 plus off record. So this is more than just, the Malstrom nuclear site in Montana, right? Because that's the most famous one. Yeah, so that's Bob Salas in 1967. Right.

Starting point is 00:14:36 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. We have... That was the one off the coast that was like rectangular, like football size shape, rectangle. That was in 2003 at Vandenberg. In 64 at Vandenberg, Bob Jacobs, he was a photo instrument. specialist and he was up the coast 100 miles at Big Sur and he was, uh, uh, had a telescope pointed at an Atlas 5 missile with a dummy nuclear warhead. And, uh, afterwards when he was reviewing

Starting point is 00:15:11 the tape, uh, UFO seemed to wrap around it and caused the warhead to tumble out of the sky. A couple of guys in, and, uh, tweed suits behind him were basically swarmed a secrecy, said, you can't speak about this again. He was deleted from the government, despite having, his DD-214. And you managed over 100 people, so. Yeah, I had 130 for guys working for me. 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 managed

Starting point is 00:15:56 over 100 people. And it turns out we found Florence Mansman in the 90s, 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?

Starting point is 00:16:10 We have, well, you don't have photos because nuclear sites. Yeah. So obviously all of the sensors, any of the collection, is going to be classified a prior. So presumably the sites have some recordings or radar or other than just the guard said he saw this. They do. Well, in the case of Minot Air Force Base in 1968, we actually have radar associated with it. And physicists have reviewed the radar.

Starting point is 00:16:35 Kevin Knuth, you know, who's a prominent physicist on the topic, you know, is 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 much of anomalous objects showing up. Well, it indicates something. The question is what, right? Is it, you know, ball lightning or, you know, satellites or, I don't know, drones? These are too early for drones. But, you know, something like that.

Starting point is 00:17:01 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 launch control center. He basically, you know, he gets called down. 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 ten missiles go into no-go status.

Starting point is 00:17:32 Can't launch it. Had that ever happened in your career thus far? I was there for three years that 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 taken under, 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

Starting point is 00:18:08 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 Bobbiard. Hasting 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

Starting point is 00:18:50 that happen at all nuclear sites everywhere in the world for the last 50 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?

Starting point is 00:19:16 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 this. 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.

Starting point is 00:19:40 Yeah, sure. 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:19:58 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 it? 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 so on, and so on all this. And so there's a lot of stuff going on there.

Starting point is 00:20:19 Then there's commercial drones, which are now popular. And then the other effect is that people are going outdoors and looking up in the sky because they've heard the news reports. Like, oh, my God, there's something going on. 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.

Starting point is 00:20:38 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 Van derbyrug 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.

Starting point is 00:21:09 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, wow, 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 mead telescope,

Starting point is 00:21:31 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, 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, well, what is that thing that's going by Jupiter?

Starting point is 00:21:55 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 love. 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 when

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Starting point is 00:24:47 What would your base rate be for things going wrong with nuclear weapons? Because mine would be pretty low. Well, things go, okay, no, mine would not be low. Look at all just the literature on accidents, nuclear accidents since the end of the Second World War. You know, there's dozens of them. You know, these are the list of close calls, you know, like the Russian guy, who, you know, Oh, of course, close calls.

Starting point is 00:25:15 But I'm not talking about manual. You know, 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.

Starting point is 00:25:32 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 nuke 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 backchannel and do a little digging, the people on site are saying they're associated with things that are flying around in the local airspace that seem to break physics.

Starting point is 00:26:03 And in the 2010 case at Effie Warren, it was this tick-tack flying around. Then I'm like, okay, maybe there's a correlation here. Maybe there's something going on that. Maybe. Yeah. You know, might be future science. You know, I'm not saying it's not saying it's some like woo-woo thing. Let's hang on.

Starting point is 00:26:19 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. Of course it does. No, no.

Starting point is 00:26:38 So Einstein did not overturn Newton. Newton's works. It's couched within Einstein. Newton's, 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 time. You have time dilation. You have, you know, observer dependency for, you know, a lot of things.

Starting point is 00:26:58 Where are we going? Where are we going with this? 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 995% of them have been explained, even by the Uophologist. So we're down to just not a handful. There's still hundreds and hundreds of unexplained things.

Starting point is 00:27:20 All right. What are they? Okay. So, okay. So I have three categories, ordinary terrestrial, 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.

Starting point is 00:27:35 Yeah, let's plug it. Treat. Go back. No, I don't want to treat the book. I just want to talk about it. the aliens here. I'm going to give you Leslie Keen's list of

Starting point is 00:27:44 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,

Starting point is 00:28:03 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, whole punch clouds, and the list goes on. In other words, so medical students get this reference.

Starting point is 00:28:28 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% are something in that list. And 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, don'ts 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.

Starting point is 00:29:03 First, if that were true, what else would be true? Why wouldn't the Russians use it in Ukraine? Right. Why wouldn't we be using this in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran? I'm not saying we can use it. I'm not saying it's us. I'm saying it's not it. But a lot of people do think that could be it. So I debunked that. Say that can't be because if the Russians had this, we would know because we steal their stuff. They steal our stuff. 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 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,

Starting point is 00:29:44 Schumer, 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. 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 humans. how many of the millions of species on Earth think that they're apex predators when they're not,

Starting point is 00:30:11 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 umwelt's and the ability to, you know, scope out new territory, whether it's James Webb 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 have the large Hadron Collider and stuff like that to detect subcork 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.

Starting point is 00:30:49 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 engineer. and upgraded our computers from, you know, vacuum tubes to computer chips. Like, really? That's five years.

Starting point is 00:31:11 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 Neanderthal. Like, it feels god. I think 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.

Starting point is 00:31:31 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, I want to take your, you know, drones, space trash, temperature, inversions. You have thousands of documents between 1945, so the advent of the nuclear age in

Starting point is 00:31:55 1950, which is when the first recon U2 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. You're picking the winners. What about what's the Bay Area? Picking the winners.

Starting point is 00:32:21 Okay, let me back up one second. On the history of science, you were 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.

Starting point is 00:32:38 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. It would be an a historical thing to say flash freeze frame now.

Starting point is 00:32:54 I know. We're done with knowledge. At the end of the 19th century electromagnetism had the last. 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.

Starting point is 00:33:17 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,

Starting point is 00:33:41 the people working at these nuclear bases are MK Ultra 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. And then, you know, you can't really come up with the drone thing, but you could come up with some sort of X, maybe some spoofing technology

Starting point is 00:33:57 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 Sen Gunmori, which is dedicated to UFOs, Barreloche, Argentina, next to their civilian energy grid.

Starting point is 00:34:16 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 35,000 feet, okay?

Starting point is 00:34:38 They were seeing the U2 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's... spy plane. I just don't know. I understand all of the like, oh, yeah, we used to mistake the U2, 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, the first case in this book is 1945 Hanford plutonium.

Starting point is 00:35:18 When I got down there, they told us that this bogey was out there right over the Hanford Ordiners Works and directed to Lieutenant Commander Brown to take off and challenge him. He said all I can see is a bright red or 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 it 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. The government would care. They would care deeply if somebody was messing around.

Starting point is 00:35:55 And they do. And so I think Blue Book was a fairer. front-facing, basically, decoy that was meant to throw the public off. And then underneath that, and this is now publicly admitted, because Jacques Valais was Jaylon Heineck, the chief astronomer of Blue Book's assistant, and he found this thing called the Penticle memo, where it looked like Battelle Memorial Institute, which works hand in hand with our nuclear sites all over the country, even back then, on 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 they felt they had a real project going on that was secret.

Starting point is 00:36:35 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's flying with impunity. You don't want things that you can't attribute flying around a nuke's and tampering with them. I agree. So this one of the goals of the UAP science advisory committee.

Starting point is 00:36:57 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.

Starting point is 00:37:20 Avi's a pretty savvy guy. I don't think that's going to happen. 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.

Starting point is 00:37:49 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 we do have multi-sensory 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. That's crazy.

Starting point is 00:38:32 So now you're accusing Obama lying. No, not at all. Or he silo? 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 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 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

Starting point is 00:39:13 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'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 day? No, I'm saying adversaries can then, like, 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 NHI or the, so you'd never disclose it. We know the Russians do. They muck with stuff all the time. They're doing

Starting point is 00:39:52 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 do that. I don't think the public would. Okay. You know, I don't mean like if we discovered aliens, the stock market would crash and religious. 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 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 Malstrom site. And it wasn't these orbs or whatever. So how many does it have to happen?

Starting point is 00:40:45 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 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 Malmstrom. 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 a year or two ago, the Wall Street Journal reports this clearly disinfo hit piece on UFOs. And it's around this event. And they say that an EMP in 1967, like a 60-foot EMP was wheeled up to Malmstrom. 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 would be fried, you know,

Starting point is 00:41:47 from the EMP, you would never do that with people present. We didn't even have operational non-nuclear EMPs in 1967, so that's checkmate in one, you know. So whenever there's... Maybe the CIA DARPA has some advanced technology. I don't think that, I don't think that. This reminds me a little bit of the Havadillo, 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.

Starting point is 00:42:11 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? Right. And so every time Clinton or Obama and Trump go, okay, we're going to get to the bottom of this. I looked into it. I didn't find anything.

Starting point is 00:42:30 And then the UFO people go, oh, okay, he's siloed or he's lying or he's or they're lying to him. 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. disclosure day. It's because he's into this stuff. But he can't talk about it publicly because it's sensitive. Obama was on that podcast.

Starting point is 00:42:52 This is what triggered the UFO files dump was, 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? They're real, but I haven't seen them and they're not being kept in, what is it?

Starting point is 00:43:08 Area 51. Area 51. There's no underground facility. Unless there's this enormous conspiracy. and they hit it from the president of the United States. Then he clarified, I meant they're out there somewhere, like what I said, right? Not that they're here. Yeah, but the revealed private preference is that if he's funding documentaries about the first

Starting point is 00:43:28 deduction case in the United States. I mean, Spielberg's a filmmaker. If he's 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 were systematically detecting UFOs in that sensitive airspace. So obviously Obama knew. Detecting what?

Starting point is 00:43:53 Detecting something, an anomaly. That's not aliens. But 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 have all sorts of evidence that this is happening. Like, clearly, you have an abundance of evidence. Evidence of something, but what? I don't know. I don't know. No, no, but I think what I'm saying is that that's obviously worthy of further inquiry.

Starting point is 00:44:22 That's obviously warrant science. Because the skeptic thing shuts down the conversation, you know? No, I don't want to say that. So you admit that this is phenomenologically real and hard to explain by any prosaic means. 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. The hypothesis is not true until proven otherwise. You got to have, you run the experiment, they have randomized controlled trials. 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. Sometimes that holds up and it's replicated. Sometimes it's not. Maybe manipulated the stats or whatever.

Starting point is 00:44:58 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

Starting point is 00:45:18 than if you were to like stand in random locations you know, all over the globe. Well, but not random because you've got to be where there's there's a lot of people looking up, they're interested, there's observers. Of course, yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:28 Yeah, I mean. While being hypervigilant about what's going on, controlling for all of the other variables. Yeah, so here's an example. Like the Navy pilot David Fraver talks about the UAP going from 80,000 feet,

Starting point is 00:45:44 to sea level like that, right? Like one second. How could this possibly be? It rapidly accelerated in front of us and disappeared. Our wingmen, roughly 8,000 feet above us, lost contact also. We immediately turned back to see where the whitewater 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 burn up.

Starting point is 00:46:07 It would release 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 on the radar, whatever, that's not what happened. It cannot have happened.

Starting point is 00:46:24 That is physically impossible. This is Avi Loeb 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.

Starting point is 00:46:35 This never happened with that UAP. So whatever the story is, 80,000 feet to sea live, oh, my God. Okay, you're wrong. So yeah, that's the point that it's flying in ways that 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. One or the other.

Starting point is 00:46:58 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 you. Okay. So these are choices. It was a normal camera lens, something weird effect. or all of our physics is off and we need a new physics.

Starting point is 00:47:15 Okay, let's go with this one first. Well, fair enough, but I would say, I don't know if you know Miguel Alcubiarias. He's at the University of Mexico and he figured out a way for faster than light travel within the scope of general relativity. It requires negative energy. But you have things like the Casimir effect, which 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. 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

Starting point is 00:47:51 explaining because you have you have commander David Fravor who is an extremely esteemed person who is in charge of, you know, is flying an F-16 is extremely extremely experienced. You have his whole squadron. Okay. And you have you have, you have Chad Underwood catching the thing with forward-looking infrared. You have Kevin Day, who's catching the thing 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 adjusting a new radar system for that particular one. Was it the Tick-Tac one?

Starting point is 00:48:33 It was a spy radar system. Yeah. So maybe it was inaccurate. it. Maybe it was still being adjusted. They thought that, and then they repositioned it, and it was reading the same thing. And it's been fine ever since, and it's been the state of the art ever since. Okay. And how many of these do we have? And by the way, how come we don't have...

Starting point is 00:48:53 We have tons. We have tons in this book. How come we don't have good photos? Which are your answer to the, where's all the clear and unmistakable photos and videos? We do have some good photos? Maybe the Navy needs better cameras. Do you know about the lake coat photos? No. And in Costa Rica, they were doing aerial mapping around this, this arena area, Lake Coat. They were trying to do this hydroelectric project.

Starting point is 00:49:17 And this guy, Sergio Leutsi, I always mispronounce his name, he was this guy, you know, flying this plane, doing the aerial mapping. You know, was with a professional grade cameras for their 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 McMinville where it's really hard to debunk.

Starting point is 00:49:56 The McMinville 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. I'm just telling you. I have two different angles of the thing. I have fake UFO photos. It's super easy to do. But 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 I can't say that you're definitively wrong. It's not even wrong, right? You you end up in this impossible argument. And then you

Starting point is 00:50:28 have eyewitness accounts and then you have Fleer 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. least as far as, okay, this is really worthy of further investigation. Okay, you know the Tick-Tac video where you see the little white thing in the middle, all of a sudden it zooms off. Yeah. Okay, this would be in that direction for you. That could be the lock losing target.

Starting point is 00:50:49 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 triangles.

Starting point is 00:51:07 green-shaped UAPs near L-A-X. They're not. They're blinking. In the exact same pattern as a commercial airliner, these are commercial airliners coming into L-A-X. It's the bokey 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

Starting point is 00:51:29 Fravor, you have Alex Dietrich, you have, you know, Underwood, who's doing the Fleer. I'm glad you brought her up. who caught it on Fleer. 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 on radar 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.

Starting point is 00:51:59 Absolutely. Could this have been some secret American technology red teaming our systems? Possibly. I'm open to. that. Okay. I am. But I think, I think the, 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, okay. So, you brought a Dietrich. So I'll give the last, this is the end of my chapter on aliens. I'll give the last word of Dietrich who witnessed the 2004 UAP incident from the USS Nimitz. Fighter Jet, as I think it well sums up 75 years of UFOologists 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.

Starting point is 00:52:45 Okay, all right. And it never happens. Okay, 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. Okay? She seems to be an insider. She just yesterday had a big congressional hearing on M.K. Ultra. All right.

Starting point is 00:53:05 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. Okay, so I'm hoping that Annapalina Luna or somebody that Avi knows on the inside could go, 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.

Starting point is 00:53:28 I'm prepared to be frustrated and, you know, but. So I will, I agree with you. And I think this is important for the audience to be more. 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 the bend sort of thing. But I also think if you are familiar with, obviously, you know, Thomas Coons, 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

Starting point is 00:54:02 was the first person who thought that, you know, we lived in a heliocentric unit. And but it took the, you know, Galileo and Copernicus measuring it, you know, or 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 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,

Starting point is 00:54:42 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, okay? But he was not the first.

Starting point is 00:55:19 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. Okay, what took him so long? Well, because a guy named Robert Chambers wrote a book called Vestages in which he had his own theory of evolution that was widely criticized and completely wrong. So Darwin thought, I don't want to be like that guy. And, you know, everybody laughs at me. I want a career in science.

Starting point is 00:55:50 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. 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 telescope's there eventually, oh, it's a planet.

Starting point is 00:56:11 Right. That guy also saw perturbations in Mercury's orbit. He's like, okay, 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.

Starting point is 00:56:25 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. Okay. 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? I mean, 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. Okay, Jesse, I agree with you. Okay.

Starting point is 00:57:15 This is why I said. There's no daylight between it. I've always supported the SETI program. I've supported the Galileo project. I'm on the Galileo team. Yes. Since the first week, every Monday, the first Friday of every month, we meet on Zoom. I never miss a meeting.

Starting point is 00:57:28 I'm there. I want to find out. Okay, I love it. Now, I don't have enough poll, Avi, because of his Harvard connections. I think, okay, maybe this guy can actually make it happen. In other words, the Stephen Greer's of the world are like, we're going to get to the bottom and it never happened. Even Clinton, Obama, it never happens. Damn it.

Starting point is 00:57:47 Show us. 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 interstellars. something. 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, oh, and hopefully you'd admit this in the skeptical position have just tried to shut down the conversation. No, of course we don't. I will love the conversation. Okay, good. Here I am. So that's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. I know you do. And I

Starting point is 00:58:22 appreciate that. And I have immense respect for you. And I'm glad. We've always had great conversations. I mean, personally, I don't think the discovery of an extra trust in 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.

Starting point is 00:58:44 Everybody goes, well, of course, God can make as many species around the globe as he wants. 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 a double. or a budget. Look what we found. Right? And the military go, hey, what if they're dangerous? We need a bigger

Starting point is 00:59:04 budget. Right? 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 of anything, the Russians and the Chinese and the Americans go, okay, we now have a common

Starting point is 00:59:20 enemy, you know, Reagan thing. And so we ought 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. I will admit that I want to believe.

Starting point is 00:59:39 Will you admit that you want to disbelieve? I don't want to disbelieve. No, I would like Sagan, I would love 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,

Starting point is 00:59:53 intelligent organisms in the entire universe. Would you be surprised if we were being visited, 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.

Starting point is 01:00:14 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. No, new physics. Quit bringing up new physics. You think we're at the end of history of physics? No, of course not. But we just spent a billion dollars.

Starting point is 01:00:27 We just spent a billion dollars at CERN. They found no new physics, right? There's nothing new. Yeah, but that's, it's often the wrong framework. You, you'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.

Starting point is 01:00:53 It could happen. Yeah. It could happen. Okay. But, I mean, Avi's point is, you know, no new physics. What he means is we're not Star Trek here. We're not just writing new crazy stuff to explain. Let's get the bottom of it.

Starting point is 01:01:06 Show us the thing that we're looking. Give us the film. Give us the, like on the UFO files that Trump has dumped three of them now, all the photos and videos have these big blacked out rectangles. Okay, what are those? Those are the numbers from the cameras. Where was the camera? Which camera was it?

Starting point is 01:01:20 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?

Starting point is 01:01:28 I'm right there with you. I think we need more. Have you, did you look at the Gemini 7, Frank Borman, by any chance, that audio? Yes. And also, and Buzz also. Roger. Okay, so, yeah. I forget on the Borman one, but Avi had a good explanation of this, is Cosmic Rays.

Starting point is 01:01:49 Okay, so Cosmic Rays, ping your retina. They also land on film, and they can cause film to, to, to, to, you know, record something. So he thinks, and I think he's probably right, that 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

Starting point is 01:02:35 sky. This is before satellites as far as Sputnik. So in 1940s and 50s. This is Beatrice, Vio Reel's Project Lasca. Avi says, I'm pretty sure those are cosmic rays. And she says, 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, seemingly objects, flashes. You're talking about the film now, or you talk about eye volume? I'm talking about, no, in the plates, the astronomical plates at the Palomar Observatory. And you have all these people saying they're plate defects, but then she showed that there's

Starting point is 01:03:11 actually a drop-off in the sun's, in the Earth's, you know, obviously you have a side of the earth where there's shadow from the sun, so, you know, where the sun doesn't exist. And there's a massive, you know, drop-off. 30 to 35% of the objects we are working with come from solar reflections. And not any solar reflections, because the short flashes and not streaks, they're associated with things that are extremely flat and extremely reflective. Wow. Like mirrors. And that makes it more fun. Like mirrors.

Starting point is 01:03:41 So that seems like, okay, we're looking at physical objects at that point. And I don't think solar or cosmic radiation is a good explanation, actually, because there's ambient solar radiation all around the earth due to solar, radiation and you wouldn't have these sort of pointed spots. Not solar radiation cosmic rays from distant space. So they come in in parallel. They're so far away. These are quasars or distant galaxies.

Starting point is 01:04:05 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 hers, 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 raining it because she's an academic, and this passed peer review, by the way. But, you know, I think implicitly we're talking about UFOs, especially given that you look at the-

Starting point is 01:04:31 What do you mean by UFO? Well, this is the thing. You look at CIA documentation at the time, and it says flat mirror-like objects that reflect light. So, like, 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.

Starting point is 01:05:11 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:05:39 It's like, you have to do that. And then also, here's the rest of the anomalies. We don't know what they are. Can you explain any of those also? Of course. So that's the test. Of course. And I don't think anything is adequately passed that test to my knowledge.

Starting point is 01:05:52 So common, Michi Okaku has a web page in which he says, if you're writing me about your alternative theory of physics, here's what your theory has to do. Here's a bunch of stuff that 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 Kazimir 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.

Starting point is 01:06:26 And that fully comports with our physics. So I don't think we necessarily need a theory of everything to explain some of this. I mean, let's take dark energy, dark matter. Okay, these are linguistic placeholders by cosmologists. That's right. Do you believe in dark matter? Well, I believe it. I believe there's a mystery to be explained.

Starting point is 01:06:45 Okay. So it's the UFO. So what is it? You're indirectly measuring it. Yes. That's right. Okay. fine.

Starting point is 01:06:53 So you believe in UFOs as much as you believe in dark matter? I don't like the word believe in. 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.

Starting point is 01:07:12 Okay, so when astronomers tell me galaxies should not be helping. 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. My book is something confirmed to such an extent it would be rational to offer your provisional assent. But do you think human beings are rational?

Starting point is 01:07:28 Provisional. Yes, pretty, pretty rational. I would say that 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 normal life where it happens like with conspiracy theories. it's in areas where they can't know.

Starting point is 01:07:54 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 it and said, nah, we didn't find any fraud. But this is an epistemology question. How do we know about anything in the world?

Starting point is 01:08:15 So dark matter is a conspiracy. Okay. So back to the dark matter. My astronomer friends tell me that. There has to be more stuff in the galaxy to hold it together. Okay, what is it? Their answer is we don't know. Could be neutrinos.

Starting point is 01:08:27 Right. It 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 and go, okay, that's a mystery to explain. Same thing with dark energy. So, and same with UFOs. Okay.

Starting point is 01:08:40 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. Okay, but if we can't detect it. Let's say astronomers all decide 99% of astronomers,

Starting point is 01:09:00 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.

Starting point is 01:09:18 Okay, we're not there yet, right? again, you got 90, 95% of them are explained. You got the 5 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 have 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.

Starting point is 01:09:42 And then you have one person being like, I don't know if the body's dead. And you're sort of just like poo-pooing the field overall. And I feel like the skeptics role in UFOology 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 shifting to like we kind of trust the witnesses and we think this is worthy of investigation no I'm very leery of witnesses by themselves okay but it's not witnesses by themselves well okay if it's if it's more than just the witnesses that you have we have cases with witnesses and radar yeah okay so that's 45 minutes okay so that nudges it from here to here Japan Airlines then we got to get we got to get up here we 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 whole 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. Of course. I agree. All right. So I'm in favor of that. Okay. But you're admitting, you're admitting, you know, all the, the criminal case example, you're admitting a crime has been committed. There is a there's a hole here that we have.

Starting point is 01:11:14 If there's something, that's right. If you say, are UFOs real? Yes. I mean, there's an unexplained. Okay. So 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 Elizander 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 equivalent. We're measuring something. Yes. There's something to be explained. Okay. So you would put dark matter, UFOs, same category. I guess so. Yeah, okay.

Starting point is 01:11:50 Sure. Okay. All right. On the eyewitness thing, the problem. Okay, so let's go to the court case. Yeah. So how do we determine truth in the legal system? All right.

Starting point is 01:12:00 We have an 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 lawyers to win the case for their side, right? It's the prosecution that depends. And so in this case, the peer review system is the judge or the jury. They're the ones that decide, okay, I've heard your evidence.

Starting point is 01:12:25 I've heard your evidence and arguments and so on. 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. Just picture a two by two grid, right? So we've got four sales, one, two, three, four, right? So I did this sort of a fun example of cursed horror films, right?

Starting point is 01:12:41 So I'm doing a documentary, talking head for a 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 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?

Starting point is 01:13:07 Curse 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.

Starting point is 01:13:28 And then the non-cursed non-horror films, right? So in other words, you have four cells. Like in 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?

Starting point is 01:13:42 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. Well, okay, what's our base rate? How many people go dead or missing every year? In any case.

Starting point is 01:13:54 You're talking about the missing scientists. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So you have four cells. You've got the non-scientists who go missing or commit suicide 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.

Starting point is 01:14:10 You don't have personal security here, do you? Knock on metal. And then the fourth category. So in other words, we have to keep all of these other possibilities in mind. So that's what I do when I hear anomalies. Okay, what's the base rate? Okay, the nuclear, what about the other cells? The nuclear sites where nothing weird has happened.

Starting point is 01:14:29 Or the non-nuclear sites where weird 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 speedup of scientific suppression? No, I can't say that for a fact at all. I don't know. Are each of those cases and some of them are, you know, are they all non-stories? Absolutely not. And that is what some people are implying. The idea that Nuno Lerrero, 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, you know, him getting gunned down at his doorstep as a non-story or Carl Grilmer. 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 class.

Starting point is 01:15:21 But the, yes, but the older 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's neither here nor there. No, no, it is because. No, because I'm admitting that.

Starting point is 01:15:36 I'm saying that there might not be a statistical speed up. But what about General Neil McAastland, who's responsible for a lot of modern UFO? Why doesn't anybody kill Louis Alizond? He's going to tell everybody everything. He dealt with Tom DeLong at the highest level when it came to writing secret machines. He's going to expose everything. Why isn't he hiding? Well, General Neil McHaston was on the Special Access Program oversight committee,

Starting point is 01:16:02 and he ran Wright Patterson's Air Force Research Laboratory. So he's as 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 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, yeah, is that not significant?

Starting point is 01:16:30 Of course it's significant. In isolation, that story is completely significant. No, I don't think. It's just totally random. What do you mean? A gun was missing. And his wife said he was suffering from depression for years. His wife also said the only explanation might be that an alien took him on the mothership.

Starting point is 01:16:48 Why would she joke about a missing husband a week later? That's weird behavior. Because of all the weird conspiracy theories around it. It's a strange joke. Well, I mean, come on. It's not nice for these families who have just suffered a loss. Like Elizabeth Weiss, her, in her husband, Nick Pope, died of cancer. Of course, yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:05 She's not vibing the, oh, Nick Pope was an insider and he was killed. There are people that think this happened, and she's not vibing 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 for their investigation? You don't think it's case closed. I think his own family. He goes missing. There's no footage of him.

Starting point is 01:17:28 their ring cameras all throughout the neighborhood goes missing. Okay, where's Nancy Guthr? And everything that would do. Okay, why are you, why not? And a gun and a gun is missing. Why not, why not Nancy Guthrie? Where's she? What, what if Nancy Guthrie?

Starting point is 01:17:39 Yeah. But she's not related to nuclear property. 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. No, I think that should get attention to. I think that should get it.

Starting point is 01:17:55 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 death, all ages. Yeah, but 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, it's a big mess. Okay. She was probably kidnapped.

Starting point is 01:18:13 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 obviously warrants further investigation. Yeah. As does the McAstallon thing.

Starting point is 01:18:29 That's fine. They are not non-stories. But, okay, there's 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, 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. Oh, he's missing.

Starting point is 01:18:51 We don't even know if he's that. You're now jumping to the conclusion. 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?

Starting point is 01:19:01 It's like 1,200 a year or something. It happens all the time. And they can't find them. They fall off the cliff. They fall under the bushes. The animals get them. There's nothing unusual. You can be that one because he's an interesting character.

Starting point is 01:19:13 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 overfix, you know, some sort of like, ah, yeah, that's survivorship bias, or it's file drawer, or it's P hacking. You can always do that. Yes.

Starting point is 01:19:37 Or you can look into the specifics. Yeah, but it's better to look into the specifics. But why are you interested in that particular one? Because of his, who he was. Yes, I know. He was privy to the most sensitive science in the country. But lots of people are talking about UFOs with Tom DeLon. What about all the people that work at NASA now or work at the nuclear site?

Starting point is 01:19:56 I think anybody. working in an extremely sensitive capacity who goes missing without a trace should be investigating and it's not a non-story. If this is true, there's something spooky after. I'm not saying definitely there's no Occam's razor explanation. 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.

Starting point is 01:20:16 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 case, because of his specific access and credential, obviously. I don't think so. I think you're fine. I think that's you're not wanting to believe. You're wanting to disbelieve.

Starting point is 01:20:38 No, I think you're finding, you're just as a patternicity. It's like, I love this story about power and propulsion and nuclear. And here's something weird that happened to somebody in that field. Okay, what I'm saying is if that was true, what about all the other people that are in that field that are high up, that are classified and so on? I think everybody involved in sensitive national security work that goes missing in a way that Neil McCaslin what missing should be investigated, obviously. But after the fact, you're picking it. Now, let's go forward. Who do you think is next? I have no way of predicting it because you don't have a story underneath it. You don't know what happened.

Starting point is 01:21:15 You don't know if somebody took him or what you need more information. My point is we should try to get more information. Okay. Okay. I think, yeah, the local police, the family. Sure. They should do that. Okay.

Starting point is 01:21:26 Because they want to do that anyway. Okay. I mean, Elizabeth Weiss knows why Nick Pope died. He had cancer. Okay. 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.

Starting point is 01:21:41 In that case, I agree. Okay. But, okay, shifting gears a little bit. What do you think is the strongest UFO case based on the evidence? Well, so like in the U.S. 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 those.

Starting point is 01:22:12 The foo fighters during World War II, the pilots that saw these things. Oh, it's ball lightning. Okay, maybe. I don't know. Some of the stuff they described doesn't sound like ball lightning. Yeah. So, all right. And we know the Nazis that could not possibly have been that far.

Starting point is 01:22:25 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 Valle talks about and Jeffrey Krippel talks about of historically people seeing weird things. Now, most of this, I think it's just sociological or whatever psychological effects, but not everything. So back to your liminal case.

Starting point is 01:22:55 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, 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. Okay. So, but the rebuttal is, yeah, but the religions didn't have the language. to describe what's actually going on. You know, this is like the ancient alien stuff or the Vandanagan, you know,

Starting point is 01:23:31 the ancient alien gods that are actually, you know, spaceships, right? So, okay, 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, no.

Starting point is 01:23:50 Just like scientists are inserting version of that. Unfortunately, they don't do that. Okay. So one of my criticisms of the ancient aliens, for example, is, They almost never have on like an archaeologist that goes, oh, the Easter Island statues, here's what we know. 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?

Starting point is 01:24:06 Do you think like people like Graham Hancock or Randall Carlson, do you think any, they've contributed anything to the field? I do. Yes. I like, I like people on the margins and fringes because they push us, the mainstream people to better define what it is you're talking about. Do you agree with them or anything? 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.

Starting point is 01:24:39 What he's missing is is 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 NASCAR line. explanation, because you can see him from the local mountains. It's a water god or whatever. Okay, that's the accepted dogman. And Graham comes along and go, okay, I'm going to challenge that. Okay, good. You know, and his little line he uses on X, you know, stuff keeps getting older. He has a t-shirt. And he's right. Stuff does keep his older. He is right about that. You would admit that. Yes, but. You admit, Gobeckley-Tepi rewrites the map as far as how old human civilization.

Starting point is 01:25:19 But no, what's happening. Archaeologists are responding to Go Beckley-Tepi by going, Huh, I guess these hunter-gatherers were 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 conclusion as you actually just have to go a little farther back for civilization. So the alternative of that is, no, actually, this was a, this was a deeper advanced. I mean, Graham thinks these were built by ancient peoples, the Atlantians or whoever. Yeah, he thinks it's a holdover for.

Starting point is 01:25:54 from before the Ice Age or something. From like tens of thousands of years before. Transfer of technology. Yeah. All right. Okay. If that was true, what else would be true? Well, first of all, we should find out where do they live?

Starting point is 01:26:06 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.

Starting point is 01:26:25 He's pushed us farther. We wouldn't be talking about Quebecly-Tepi if it wasn't for him and the fingerprints of the gods. Oh, yeah. Schmidt, you know, the German archaeologists, in archaeology circles, there's no mystery about Quebec-Tepi. They all know about it.

Starting point is 01:26:39 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 helped popularize. The National Geographic did a whole cover story on Gobeckley-Tepe. I remember when this came out. They described it as like the,

Starting point is 01:26:54 the world's first religious ceremony place. Well, okay, 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. Okay, I know Graham pretty well. Okay, so he's a very likable guy. He's a great writer. He's one of Rogan's first guests. Oh, I know.

Starting point is 01:27:10 I know. I know. I know. I've seen all of it. It's been four hours of them in the studio, you know. Yeah. He's debated. Okay.

Starting point is 01:27:15 But part of the problem he has is what I tried to explain him is that you have the mainstream archaeologists and they're just working away going, this is what we think happened. and this is what we're working on. The Graham comes from the outside and goes, I think you're all wrong. They're like, okay, where's your evidence? And are you going to publish a paper about this? Here's our peer-reviewed journals.

Starting point is 01:27:34 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. Okay, 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

Starting point is 01:27:48 and become famous for your alternative theory. You got to do what the rest of us do. You got to work at it. But so 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 all the time, right? And so that's the problem. Mainstream media blocked out too much. There's an overcorrection.

Starting point is 01:28:13 And, 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, uh, uh, extra. or issue, you know, with that. But let me just finish the point. Okay, 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 antartals.

Starting point is 01:28:37 We got lots of stuff from them. The earliest homo sapiens, we have lots of stuff from them, all living in small groups. Okay. 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 inserting Atlanta, 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 anti-deluvian, you know, 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, you know, how old civilization is around Quebecly, Tepa.

Starting point is 01:29:21 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. But also Graham pushes this mean that, you know, scientists are closed-minded or whatever. I mean, nobody believes in the close-minded. of his first hypothesis. Everybody knows that humans came to the North American continent and

Starting point is 01:29:56 South American continent long before 11 to 13,000 years ago. Okay, nobody's arguing that. They've all shifted. Everybody admits, Gobeckley-Tepi is 11,000 years old. Nobody's going, that never happened. That shift was slow. Because we were, we thought that they, I learned that they crossed the Bering straight. I learned that. Oh, I know that it was probably multiple migraine. 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.

Starting point is 01:30:35 Whoever actually said that, yeah. Whoever actually said that. But, like, you could be stuck in this, like, petty, sharp elbow thing. Or you can be famous and have fun and make money and contribute. Many are called. Few are chosen. Grandma's one of the few alternative people that have made. There's lots of them.

Starting point is 01:30:51 Lots of them. I mean, you talk to like, what's his name, Havas? Zahiyahuas. Zahiyahabh. So, I mean, you know, how come Graham, 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 thing. The pyramids where it's a nuclear power plant. But I think the pyramids are another example. As with the JFK assassination, 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. And so people are tired of being gaslit. But if you watch that Zahiwas interview with Joe Rogan. But are there photographs online? Yes.

Starting point is 01:31:36 In my book. I don't know. Boy. I don't go online. Why 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.

Starting point is 01:31:45 It's in my book. I wrote about it. It was a little painful to watch. Very painful. Yeah, I know. Very painful. So the same with the JFK assassination, where it's like people are tired of being lied to. There's obviously something more than the Occas Raider-Lones-gunman.

Starting point is 01:32:00 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 using his carcano man-man-licker rifle. He goes, oh, my God, this goes higher than I. thought. That is a funny joke. In my 20s, I loved the ritual of drinking coffee, but then my sleep

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Starting point is 01:33:19 That's M-U-D-W-T-R.com. Now back to today's show. But this is what happened. But you don't think. How did we get to the, everybody? I saw he made a tweet about my friend Tom O'Neill today. Yes. And he's because there's M-K-U-T-U-TRA hearings.

Starting point is 01:33:36 Yes. And he has this theory that maybe Charles Manson was an M-K-U-U-R-R-P-U-R 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. Yes. But if you read the book as a read,

Starting point is 01:33:49 reasonable third party, then you have to think your base case has to be that Charles Manson was probably an MKLTRA, mind control patients. Either that are co-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 Haydashbury Free Medical Clinic where Jolly West, who's definitely the head of MKLtra. I know, there's enough of these weird connections. I will admit Manson's an interesting case. And O'Neill did, I think, properly debunk the Helter-Skelter. He did. For sure. Vincent Bugliosi. I like Vincent Bulio. I knew him. I think he sold us a bill of goods. Because I bought that. I read the Helter Skelter. Oh, my God, this is a great story. And I think Tom O'Neill showed that was a bunch of bullshit. Well, you know what else he revealed all the JFK assassination in that book is that Jolly West saw it. So for the people that don't know, Lee Harvey Oswald, supposed and lone gunmen, probably not lone gunmen in my opinion of, you know, JFK on November 22nd, 1963. He, he, He then gets killed right outside the courthouse by Jack Ruby, who's this, like, nightclub guy, you know, and he ends up in jail, Jack Ruby. But doesn't actually remember having shot Lee Harvey Oswell?

Starting point is 01:35:02 Is this very strange sort of circumstances? That was a later story. 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.

Starting point is 01:35:14 I know. Jolly West. He's the head of M.K. Ultra. And then he has a... He was one of the guys, yeah. And then Jolly West comes out and he does a press conference and he says, Jack Ruby has had a psychotic break. Yeah, he might have.

Starting point is 01:35:26 I mean, he admitted I was really upset because I loved 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. No cameras. I recommend reading Gerald Posner's book case closed. He goes through all this stuff.

Starting point is 01:35:45 And so why Oswald. I don't think he went through the Jack Ruby thing. That's a more recent revelation. Well, that, yeah, okay. So, but the 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.

Starting point is 01:36:01 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 he said, I'm a Patsy. That's exactly who you'd hire, somebody disposable. I mean, but somebody who's incompetent. I mean, he got lucky. You know, he got the.

Starting point is 01:36:18 job at this cool depository building before they announced where the motorcade was going. That was just pure luck. Do you know who the mayor? Do you know who the mayor of Dallas was? Do you know he tried to assassinate Edmund Walker? I do. Six months before. He was a nut job. He wanted to be famous. He wanted to kill somebody. He was going to kill Nixon at some point. And his wife locked him in the bathroom and took his gun away from him.

Starting point is 01:36:41 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' number two at the CIA, the deputy director of the CIA. That's just random get. That's just paternity. I don't think. I don't think. Come on.

Starting point is 01:36:57 We'll check with Gerald Posner on that. Seems somewhat significant. No, it is the fact. Those are facts. Those are facts. I know. They're unfortunate facts. They're unfortunate facts.

Starting point is 01:37:07 They're all these things. And their half of which are just made up. I mean, there's a whole webpage dedicated to JFK. It's pretty good. What did Oliver Stone make up? Oh, well, there's a bunch of stuff like Lee Harvey Oswald could not shoot very accurately. And he shot Maggie's drawers when he was in the Marines taking riflery. Not true.

Starting point is 01:37:26 He got the second highest rating. And Posner shows in his book his report from the riflery training, he had scored the second highest you could get. He was a sharpshooter. Okay. So Oliver Stone got one thing wrong. Not just one. But then he also. There's pages of this.

Starting point is 01:37:41 And if you go to D. He said he was incompetent before. If you go to Deeley Plaza and you look out the window. there's two Xs in the road. And you can stand on the X's and look at the sixth floor of the room or you can look down. It's close. It's really close. There's no way you could miss.

Starting point is 01:37:57 Right? And he was a sharpshooter. And they've tried. 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 cocked and loaded. Boom.

Starting point is 01:38:10 And then you only have to do two more. And then end of story. Eight seconds. No problem. We get deep into the issue. with the autopsy that the coroner himself had, the idea of the magic bullet, and the missing frames that were published in the video

Starting point is 01:38:24 in the Zepruder film. But I want to get back to UFOs. So the Gemini 7 case, I found the, 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 some of the astronaut sightings were interesting.

Starting point is 01:38:44 maybe some are explainable by cosmic rays. You know, I'm very open to that. But I think this- Or like John Glenn, you know, with the little ice crystals. Yeah, sure. Which come off. And he sounds like, whoa, what is this?

Starting point is 01:38:58 Of course. 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, because it so clearly separates any sort of false positives with, you know, other misidentifications. Gemini 7, Frank Borman,

Starting point is 01:39:13 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, you know, this was not a UFO. Like he 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. Right.

Starting point is 01:39:32 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 a real object. And he calls it a bogey, which is basically. basically code for unknown, unknown object. And he said, that's a 10 o'clock high. Right. It was too far away and it was off the right.

Starting point is 01:39:50 And it could not have been the booster. I'm going to read you another. 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 another. And it couldn't have been part. If it had been part of the booster, you would have seen that part of the booster,

Starting point is 01:40:08 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 sight in. Yeah, I know. I understand. Okay. So what is that?

Starting point is 01:40:28 What is it? I don't know. I'm going to read to you. This is a part of the problem. This is eyewitness. I don't think he did either. That was a UFO. All right.

Starting point is 01:40:34 So here is Scott Kelly, NASA, astronaut, and pilot. 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,

Starting point is 01:40:59 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 got it Who-hoo Roger I was a UFO

Starting point is 01:41:16 I remember one time I was flying off Virginia Beach military operating area and my Rio RIO radar

Starting point is 01:41:23 intercept officer who sits in the back of the Tomcat was convinced we flew by a UFO I didn't see

Starting point is 01:41:30 it so we turned around and to go look at it turns out it was a Bart Simpson balloon

Starting point is 01:41:34 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 were potentially to go do a spacewalk to retrieve it, but before they did that, my brother grabbed the camera, and they took a picture of it. And when they

Starting point is 01:42:02 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 run, 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, of course. This is a problem with these. Of course.

Starting point is 01:42:25 He was a pilot. I'm sure there are all sorts of false positives. Yeah. These people are under duress. But the idea of 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.

Starting point is 01:42:50 Yeah, no, I like, I like him too. But NASA from 1958 till now has been, it's basically an intelligence agency. If anything involves national security matters, it's not going to let the thing out. I mean, he's one of Elon's man. Okay. He says we're going to be transparent. All right. Good. Yeah. But here's the problem, Jesse. Yeah. Let's say he goes, all right, I went in there and you know what? We didn't find anything. Now, you know, you A people, you go, okay, he's covering it up or he's not telling us everything.

Starting point is 01:43:19 Well, I need. Or he's silo. Well, at this point, I have enough evidence in the open source world and everybody listening does to say, for example, with the Freak Borman case, we need an explanation for that. 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,

Starting point is 01:43:41 and he calls that a bogey, which is the nomenclature for unknown, detected object. And so, and he says it's an actual site. 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.

Starting point is 01:43:58 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.

Starting point is 01:44:13 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.

Starting point is 01:44:24 They can explain some of the stuff. Do you know, like with the case of Buzz Aldrin, I was on Larry King Live once with Buzz Aldrin a couple of UFO people. James Fox was on there too. Yep. And Buzz launches into this long story about, you know, when they launch

Starting point is 01:44:36 Apollo 11, he's going out there and he reports to Houston, oh, I'm going to see this thing out there. But he went in 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.

Starting point is 01:44:53 We've got to go to a commercial break. It was really a funny moment. But that's all it 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 it? Buzz Alder and. got pretty uncomfortable on air.

Starting point is 01:45:06 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 reputation. And, you know, I think it was actually around Paul Allen getting, getting it, he was one of the

Starting point is 01:45:34 co-founders of Microsoft, he was getting a lot of flack at the time for being involved in SETI, which shows you how far the conversation has moved on this topic and where the Obertin was. He funded the Allen Array of telescopes. Right. Right. So this is Buzz Aldrin being really fearful about what's going to happen to him. And he says, I can't jeopardize my initiative. I'm working with Congress right now.

Starting point is 01:45:53 I'm trying to get money to develop a rocket. It's going to help put civilians into space. And how's my story going to change anything anyway? Which to me is implying that there's something real here. And that, you know, you're worried about your own reputation as a result of going out on the record and on a limb in this case. Edgar Mitchell did just that. He was an Apollo 14 astronaut. And he ended up being, all right. So there's a good example. Marginal. Is he marginalized? I mean, he's a famous Apollo astronaut. A lot of people said he went crazy and lost his mind after that, you know. And so anybody didn't.

Starting point is 01:46:25 I don't know. You saw what Buzz did to Cibrell. They said, guys him in the face. Never went to the moon. Give him a knuckle sandwich. Okay. I have a hard time believing Buzz, would be afraid of anything. He seems pretty fearless. One more interesting NASA data point is, do you know who Gary McKinnon is by any chance? So this was a guy who was working in bank security. He had basic IT skills.

Starting point is 01:46:47 He was in the UK. This was 2003, I believe. I read the Disclosure Project book, Stephen Greer and his team. And they told you installations, locations. And so I thought I could use my basic networking skills, just to do a scan, you know, a light scan on American military networks, which is mad now. But back then it was just kind of like a playful idea. He was interested in Building 8 because a whistleblower named Donna Hare had come out saying

Starting point is 01:47:18 that she had met somebody there who was responsible for airbrushing out. She was a NASA employee. This is on record. She had met somebody, you know, in that building who was responsible for air brushing out UFOs from real photos. and she had even seen one of these photos. I said, is this a UFO? And he's smiling at me, and he says, I can't tell you that. And he said, well, we always have to airbrush him out before we sell them to the public.

Starting point is 01:47:45 And McKinnon hacks in, and he starts to see a UFO pop up and populate on a screen. It's a Tick-Tac UFO, and it's orbiting Earth. And the U.S. goes after him hard, and he is still on the Interpol watch list. And for 20 years, there's this crazy sort of witch hunt. They're trying to extradite him. Eventually, Theresa May ends up sort of protecting him. Why would you go after somebody that hard? There are actually other hacking cases where people broke into even more sensitive areas in the U.S.

Starting point is 01:48:15 What's their source for this story? If this UFO thing wasn't true. And it, again, comports with the Dono here. But what's the source? The source is, is McKinnon, yeah. And why would he play up the thing if they were, they were witch hunting? Maybe he's mistaken. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:48:31 He almost committed suicide because they were trying to extradite him. So he's not lying. Why would he try to play up the thing that they're getting after him for? Maybe they're genuinely mistaken. Maybe he thought something was happening and it wasn't. I don't know in this case at all. I was thinking of the David Grush case because people have been bringing him up a lot lately. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:48:48 Yeah, you said David Grush is that. Is that Cod's wallop? No, did I use that? Yeah, yeah. I deleted. I used you in a couple of tweets. I delete him. I mean, you know, he's just ex.

Starting point is 01:48:58 You said he's a top 10 all-time bullshit. Oh, yes, that's right. The Bullsinger. Bunkum, Blather, Codswell. Yes, Codzwell. I find David Drush to be incredibly smart and above board. But his stories. So you take those back.

Starting point is 01:49:10 Enough of the stories. But they're not stories. I'll give you an example with Grush. But so, okay, one thing. Yes. He says he's never seen anything himself. He actually doesn't say that. He said in his original testimony because he, you have to clear certain things that you say,

Starting point is 01:49:25 everything that you say for somebody in his position through Doppser, which is the pre-publication review for the defense. Department. You mean in the congressional hearings? Yes. And he didn't clear one of these things. And I think he did later that he actually does have firsthand experience with this stuff. He also gave hundreds of pages to the intelligence community inspector general who called his claims urgent

Starting point is 01:49:45 and credible. So why are you calling him an all-time bullshitter when the intelligence community inspector general says he's legit? But they don't think that. The intelligence community inspector general doesn't think that. Then show us. I would like to see that too. But clearly it's too classified to let out.

Starting point is 01:50:00 Okay, there's a reason that it's sensitive. But Jesse, aren't you frustrated hearing these people going? We, I talked to somebody who saw the body interact with. I talked to somebody who went inside the spaceship. Can I give you an example of a thing? Can you show it to us? No, we can't. Come on.

Starting point is 01:50:13 But think about, he's, he's this guy who's obviously operated in sensitive areas. He's handled the presidential brief. But he, he knows that he's not, doesn't have an understanding of all of the equities when it comes to the, you know, kind of American situation. He doesn't want to go full 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.

Starting point is 01:50:59 So that was his explicit strategy. What's wrong with that strategy? Nothing. Show us. Come on. Okay. But again, Jesse, I watch all this stuff. It's like interview after interview after interview.

Starting point is 01:51:11 I can't show you. I can't tell you. I can't classify. I got to tell you in his skin. Can I give you an example of something? It's so frustrated. Aren't you frustrated? Like, damn it.

Starting point is 01:51:18 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. 1933 was the first recovery in Europe in, in Magenta, Italy. They recovered a partially intact vehicle. News Nation itself went to the Vatican and checked in the Vatican files

Starting point is 01:51:38 that we couldn't find anything. 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

Starting point is 01:51:54 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 that in 1933 Magenta. He did? Yes. Richard Bissell mentioned the 1933 magenta crack.

Starting point is 01:52:12 Yes, 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 of the radio. Yes.

Starting point is 01:52:26 And I met his grandson. 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,

Starting point is 01:52:48 not through any sort of circular reporting BS, you know, zero collusion with David Grush, that he was part of RS 33, the special research group, under Mussolini studying UFOs. In 1933, the Italian government set up this group, Secret Research, 33 cabinet,

Starting point is 01:53:08 where Marconi was the president, and Enricoferrami 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? Like, and David Grush went out on a limb, a few years ago and said this,

Starting point is 01:53:29 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 Grouch? That's not true. You have Roberto Pinotti, wrote a book about it.

Starting point is 01:53:40 He's an Italian UFO researcher. He wrote a whole book about it. He shows telegrams at the time that clearly indicate there was some sort of press blackout and they were trying to cover it up. And the most important one is the third one, this one.

Starting point is 01:53:54 And he says, you see, on the personal order of Il-Ducce, absolutely no mention is to be made of the alleged landing or an unknown aircraft on national soil. The same applies to today's news

Starting point is 01:54:07 due for publication by the Stephanie Agency and individual journalists. This is much evidence for like any other thing that was, there was an attempt to hide it. That's that old.

Starting point is 01:54:17 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

Starting point is 01:54:26 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. There's nothing to do with aliens or orbs. or whatever. Naturally.

Starting point is 01:54:57 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

Starting point is 01:55:05 for recreating the German Pulse Jet Engine in 1943, are talking about material they've never seen before with weird hieroglyphics that's malleable and, you know,

Starting point is 01:55:16 you're talking about the project muggle, balloon, high altitude balloons. That's clearly not project. That's the other, that's the funny thing about the cover story for Roswell.

Starting point is 01:55:24 So we're talking about Roswell now, 1947, July, you know, a flying disc came down. The,

Starting point is 01:55:30 the, Roswell Army Airfield. A balloon crash. Well, they published flying disc, and then they

Starting point is 01:55:35 retracted it, which is strange if it were a balloon. Well, you know, so. But it was secret. So they go, like,

Starting point is 01:55:42 well, we got to make up. They've changed their story three times now. And they went, they were, they were admitted that. First,

Starting point is 01:55:47 they said it was a weather balloon. Then they said it was, you know, a project mogul. Now they're saying that it's, you know,

Starting point is 01:55:54 pro-jariiational. crash dummy children? That was the Annie Jacobs and the same? There's two different reports. So there was the 94 report and then the 96 report. The 94 report was about

Starting point is 01:56:04 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

Starting point is 01:56:17 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 dummy. Well, 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...

Starting point is 01:56:33 I have my doubts about... Non-humans. But their explanation was there was a conflation of memory, because this is decades later. I mean, don't forget, Roswell as an incident didn't become a thing until 1980. When the Litz 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 a thing... You know, in the 1947 to 1980, Roswell...

Starting point is 01:56:55 was nothing. 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 Hot 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 who 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,

Starting point is 01:57:37 you know, the Roswell site. And I saw that a boulder had clearly been pushed into a, 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 Mughal. What do you think it is? I think it's worthy of further investigation and that this memory medal, I believe Jesse Marcel. I believe Walter Hott. I have no reason to disbelieve them. I disbelieve these BS cover stories that keep changing over decades. And so I think it's,

Starting point is 01:58:18 it's something crashed that was anomalous and it's worthy of investigation. And that's all I want to to say. I don't want to say it's definitely alien. Yeah. But it's weird. But what if the government, let's say the UAP committee and Avi comes out and goes, okay, we got to the bottom of Roswell, it was just project mogul. Would you then go, Avi's just not, he didn't find it. No, no. If he explained to me how he got there in a first principal's way, I'd be like, Avi, you got me. Okay, 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

Starting point is 01:58:53 Raider, boom, I'd be like, easy, case close. Have you seen the story of 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. I mean, there's like a two-ton boulders. And anyways, it was finally figured out 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,

Starting point is 01:59:16 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. Like, oh, never mind. I don't know. It's a little bit like the crop circles.

Starting point is 01:59:29 You know, we've seen people fake them. 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 they're being, you know, a surviving being from Roswell? Like, why would they talk about an implicitly sort of endorsing. worst 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. Okay, 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 I'll just take the case of Grush, say, and I talked to somebody who interacted with this

Starting point is 02:00:13 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. He's like, oh, my God, I've never seen this before. It looks alien or something to me. So he reports that to Grush. 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.

Starting point is 02:00:40 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. In the 90s, in the two 1990 reports, they said, yes, we made this up.

Starting point is 02:00:55 Because it was the cold. We didn't want the Russians to know. We were launching these high altitude spy balloons. 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.

Starting point is 02:01:12 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 crash. The human memory not being reliable is also, you know, just as true for the skeptics case. Yes, of course. Yes, of course. Yeah. Okay. And then you have like a whole host. 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 scientists don't think so. In the UFO community, yes. The science is lagging, I would admit that. But otherwise, you have, you know, presidents, you have, you know, Navy fighter pilots, you have astronauts, you have civilians. So Trump says we're going to get to the bottom. Part of that is because Obama gave that interview.

Starting point is 02:02:06 He also told his son that's something very interesting that 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. It sounds almost ridiculous. 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 a very interesting place.

Starting point is 02:02:31 I know. All right. Let's see it. 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.

Starting point is 02:02:48 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 people like. But when there be a paper trail like somewhere in the CIA, because we got to pay Lee Harvey Oswald, send him some money or send this guy with cash? Especially no, especially not if, you know, JFK said I wanted to scatter the CIA to the winds. Yeah, he said that. He had a lot of power, but he was outside of the CIA. People say shit all the time.

Starting point is 02:03:15 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.

Starting point is 02:03:30 Yeah, but he, but he, that's not unusual. Yeah, but, but, but, but usually president versus, you know, Intel world, Intel world wins historically, whether it's Nixon, JFK. Maybe. You know, yeah, 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, okay, 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.

Starting point is 02:03:57 But I said I would. And then they don't. I mean, this is the explanation. How come Obama gets the Nobel Peace fries for his work on nuclear weapons? He didn't do anything. And my answer 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, okay, never mind.

Starting point is 02:04:19 Yeah, there is, there is this thing where you run on this Mr. Smith goes to Washington campaign. Right, right. And it's like, you know, no, you know, you need FISA warrants, no wiretapping. And, you know, we're going to close Gitmo, no more drone attacks. You know, this, a pukumaya. And then all of a sudden you go in, you're like, you turn into a neocon overnight. Something happens. I know. So I hear you. I know. But if anything, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, 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 tough nut to crack. Okay, I'm going to read you something else. I feel like I can't. Well, I mean, I can't get in there.

Starting point is 02:05:00 We're just talking. But what is it you want to get into? I want to, I almost think an interesting en route 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 the flock of geese. We drove further, during race across America, we flew, drove further down, went, oh, it's geese. Okay, 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. 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.

Starting point is 02:05:54 It's super black. It looks like a hole in the sky. When it comes at you, it makes no sound. I already know what it is. So I was like, okay. But I can imagine me in the desert, like in 1950s going, whoa, what is this? Okay. I did have an alien deduction experience in 1983.

Starting point is 02:06:09 I was traveling along a lonely rural highway near Hegelor, 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. Okay. 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 support crew, my girlfriend, my best friend, mechanic, and so on. and I had transported in my mind, and I'd ridden 1,280 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, I'm going like five miles an hour, just sort of wobbling down the road. And they go, we got to pull Shermer over.

Starting point is 02:06:57 He's going too slow. So they get out to put me in the vehicle on it. And in the 1960s, when I was a child, there was a CBS show starring Roy Thinness called The Invaders. and it was the aliens had invaded this small town and snatched the bodies. It was a body snatcher story. And the humans that lived in the town

Starting point is 02:07:16 looked just like, Roy Thinness 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 finger anyway. So I thought that.

Starting point is 02:07:30 And then the next day, after my sleep break, I'm like, whoa, that was wild. So you can go on YouTube. You can look under Shermer. Accoma, abducted by aliens, and you'll see an interview with me with Eric Hayden. Eric Hayden is the Olympic speed skater. He was also a bike racer. And he worked for ABC Wild World Sports, who was filming our race.

Starting point is 02:07:49 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 to be last thing. I think my group was aliens from another planet trying to capture me. So I told them all about it.

Starting point is 02:08:12 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 abduction experiences. It's sleep paralysis, almost truly. Do you think it's always explainable by sleep paralysis? explain. Yeah, because most of the cases... What about John Mack, head of the Harvard Psychiatry Department? Yes, I think he was a little too open-minded. I don't want to use the word gullible, but

Starting point is 02:08:41 I think he took people's stories at their word instead of this person that's telling me this story had sleep paralysis, and they're reporting it as if this happened to it because they don't know I was asleep. So Edgar Mitchell, six-man-to-walk on the moon, who we mentioned, you know, Apollo 14 astronaut. He has a database of... 5,000 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. Okay, we know from cognitive psychology, hypnotic regression is not reliable.

Starting point is 02:09:17 People use their imagination and just make stuff up, right? So I'm fond of saying, do you think, you know, J.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 up. Do you not think that it's a viable and real method for recovering memories that are shattered due to traumatic experience? We know this from the recovered memory movement in the 1990s.

Starting point is 02:09:44 Do you know about the recovered memory movement? Tell me about it. Okay. 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.

Starting point is 02:10:01 okay. 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, okay, 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 can talk about it. Six months later, they're accusing their father, grandfather, uncle, whatever, a molesting them as children. These are like mostly women in their 30s now.

Starting point is 02:10:37 There were hundreds of cases. So I do think memory is not reliable. 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 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 when those memories involve real missing time, sometimes physical marks on the person. You think it's

Starting point is 02:11:18 missing time. People have marks on their bodies from various things. No, I mean, I literally, in this book, there's a, you know, a friend of mine at Ellsworth Air Force Base, 1970s, he woke up nine miles away. Well, it was the back side 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. 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 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 be tested. Do you think those are fully perfect, the lie detector test?

Starting point is 02:12:03 No, you can beat him. Yeah. But he said, I want to take a light detector test and he failed it. Doesn't mean anything? Probably not. I mean, you can't use a medical. They measure stress specifically. You can't.

Starting point is 02:12:12 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 to court. Okay, okay. So you were using it as a rhetorical argument that you're now retracting. Not retracting. He said, I'm telling the truth, I'll take a lie detector test.

Starting point is 02:12:27 He didn't pass the lie detector test. That's not why I think he's lying. I think he made it up because he was late finishing the job. So you think like the grays, for example, that seemed to be just a common, consistent archetype of what people see. Well, not just the phrase. 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.

Starting point is 02:12:47 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. Comenian. Streber, yes. Sorry, Streber. I met him in the green room at Bill Mars show, politically incorrect. So I'm just chatting.

Starting point is 02:13:09 He's like, what do you do when you're not writing about being affected by aliens? He goes, I write science fiction and fantasy. He 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 you can't.

Starting point is 02:13:21 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.

Starting point is 02:13:38 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.

Starting point is 02:13:49 But, but, but, 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 Mangala on the platform when I got up the train.

Starting point is 02:14:12 I fact check 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 him. Mangala, 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. It 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. Yeah. But, but then the, the, but the memory, the specific

Starting point is 02:14:43 memory is not reliable. So, 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.

Starting point is 02:15:03 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. Right. So, okay.

Starting point is 02:15:16 Anyway, so I mean, okay, this is my point about epistemology. This is my point about pistomology. How do I know the 2020 election wasn't raped? I didn't check myself. I trust Attorney General Bill Barr, who was a lifetime, a 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.

Starting point is 02:15:36 So this reminds me of Christopher Hitchens' line about which he 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 today. If you hear the Pope saying, you know, I'm having some doubts about God's existence, you think, oh, Pope might be under 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.

Starting point is 02:16:06 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, 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 me 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 Bays. Reverend Thomas.

Starting point is 02:16:50 Reverend Thomas Bays, 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

Starting point is 02:17:24 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, Dair 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.

Starting point is 02:17:56 And we realize that it's this real directed energy weapon. We still don't have a directed energy weapon. Where is this weapon that could do this? Do we have this? I mean, I think it's pretty clear that microwave, you know, weaponry 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 not psychosomatic.

Starting point is 02:18:21 Would you now bet that it's psychosomatic? Again, 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.

Starting point is 02:18:40 But this is the problem with the UFOs. What if the, what if you APs 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, you know, advanced human technology. And, you know, Russian tech spying on our new sites. And in 1945? Well, they had nuclear weapons by 46. They already knew that we were working.

Starting point is 02:19:03 Not by 46. It was, it was. In, 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, it was 47.

Starting point is 02:19:18 47, okay, yeah. 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. But again, the Russians are not going to have. Stuff that's breaking our physics in the late 40s. They would not have that. Yeah, okay. They would never have that.

Starting point is 02:19:35 Okay. That can't be. This is why I reject that in my chapter. on that is 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?

Starting point is 02:19:48 Yeah, no, I still think it's mass hysteria. Oh. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. 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 them.

Starting point is 02:20:01 I just think, anyway, I don't know. I think they could be wrong. I think they got a very right. Show us the, again, they're anecdotes. People saying, I had these weird things happen to me, and I'm a diplomat in Cuba. Yeah. That gets our attention. Okay, fine.

Starting point is 02:20:15 Yeah. Now we investigate. Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 02:20:26 And this was with your wife. Oh, my, the radio story. Yeah. Okay. Can you tell that? That's fine. Yeah. No problem.

Starting point is 02:20:34 I mean, this is a popular. Because I wrote about this. 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, you know, don't tell her that. So she, you know, 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

Starting point is 02:21:12 and forth stuff, they're not going to let her back in. So, like, oh, okay. And 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 fell 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 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

Starting point is 02:21:48 from her grandfather. Now, she didn't have a dad. Single mom raised her. So her grandfather was sort of a 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 do 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, the drawer and the bedroom and the big, you know, desk. And nothing ever happened for months and months and months. The day we get married, we're just kind of standing around.

Starting point is 02:22:16 We hear 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.

Starting point is 02:22:27 And it's like, I get closer to the desk. It's like, it's coming from the desk. So I open the drawer and there's the radio on, perfectly tuned to a station playing beautiful romantic music. It's like, whoa, this is fucking weird. What song? I don't remember the song. I think it was a classical song.

Starting point is 02:22:45 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. 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.

Starting point is 02:23:01 Anyways, I wrote about this in Scientific American. And to my utter surprise, is like hundreds of letters from people saying, you know what, I had something similar to happen to me, and they would tell me these stories. I mean, one went on and on about the, you know, when I had this necklace and I was going to marry this guy, and I didn't, so I get rid of the necklace.

Starting point is 02:23:18 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?

Starting point is 02:23:31 Yeah. I just keep a little door open just a case. I like that. Yeah. Would that be a nice. reality if if 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 if there's some rules about that yet um i don't know about the afterlife jesse i you know i wrote a book about this heavens

Starting point is 02:23:51 on earth i concluded that nobody knows what happens after you die we don't know uh 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 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. I was 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,

Starting point is 02:24:20 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.

Starting point is 02:24:39 I think he's... 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 bottle, and then thinks it's the mate. Yeah, the model beer bottle looks like a female. That's right. Okay.

Starting point is 02:25:00 That's true. You know, but so my response to that is, let's say a bat sees this. Whatever it's seen 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.

Starting point is 02:25:27 And that's not the bat's mic. Yes. there's something there. So philosopher would make a distinction between, like, colors and sounds, versus 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 a 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. Do you think that? But there really is a shark in the water and it really should avoid it.

Starting point is 02:26:00 Yeah, that's right. Well, and for in a species context, you know, there's, 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 they're likely species that exist outside of our scope. Like, would you admit that? Oh, yes, absolutely. But I do have a thing on, on Donald Hoffman in the book. And I have a picture here of, um, um, MC Eshers, 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.

Starting point is 02:26:45 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 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 and so far as it's useful.

Starting point is 02:27:20 And so, you know, it can be predictive and you can create technology from it. But there are things in physics, for example, like, you know, the planks 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. I don't, I disagree with them there. Why? It's really hard to, it's really hard to argue. Let me use another argument. Okay, so when you see Penn & Teller or David Copperfield, I don't know, Penn Teller walks through a wall, or Teller makes the Statue of Liberty disappear. Okay. This is fun. It's when people like, whoa, where do 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? And an extremely like, unlikely instance of, you know, electron coherence where you don't get electron repulsion. These are magicians. They're not doing this. No, but.

Starting point is 02:28:27 But this is my point because what would you say quantum mechanics is fake? No, no, it's real, right? But it's, but it implies that all subatomic particles are probabilistic in nature. Yes,

Starting point is 02:28:37 but, but what is that mean? Like, this table is solid, even though the atoms that it's made out of are mostly empty space. But what are, because the jiggling of the atoms makes it solid piece. But these are all just placeholder names.

Starting point is 02:28:49 But just, you know, the movie and book, the men who stare atotes, right? Yeah, so General Stubble. I interviewed the guy who was the basis of that character. Oh, you did?

Starting point is 02:28:56 Oh, you did? Oh, yeah. A stubblebine, that guy or the other one? No, so not General Stubblebine, who's head of Army Innscom, but Carrie 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. Well, you cannot walk through walls. It doesn't matter what the quantum physics says you can't do it.

Starting point is 02:29:23 I'm not going to die on that hill, but I'm just trying to, you know, and be. this conversation with a little epistemic humility on what we can say about, you know, reality itself ultimately. I do, 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 you were, 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 to us to Marvel and the Mysterious.

Starting point is 02:29:59 That is so beautiful. I wrote that? Yeah, you did. I think you're running from your shadow. You're a secret mystic. Do you want to have a mystical experience? Okay. All right.

Starting point is 02:30:09 Yes, that could be. No, no, I meant that. I do believe that. I do try to keep an open mind. I'm not as dogmatic. I'm not like one of the angry atheists, the new atheists. I'm not like these hardcore materialists that say never, ever, ever, ever. just in case, right?

Starting point is 02:30:25 Yeah. I think a lot of things can be explained, but not everything. Okay. All right. So there's always these anomalies. I'll read you two examples. Okay, let's do it. And that's why I enjoyed talking to you about it.

Starting point is 02:30:35 These are coincidences, right? Yeah. So here I'm discussing statisticians, Percy Diaconis and Frederick Mueller 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

Starting point is 02:31:04 his own handwritten notes in the margins. It was the very book Gardner had lost. Okay, this is even spookier. Quincidence that happened to the actor Anthony Hopkins, who in 1972 was signed to star in the film adaptation of George Fiver'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 on a bench at the Leicester Square tube station. Unbelievably, it was the girl from Petrovka. Two years later, when Hopkins met Fyfer and mentioned the coincidence to him, the author noted that he had lent his last copy to a friend with handwritten edits in it

Starting point is 02:31:42 for the American edition, Changing Labor, L-A-B-O-U-R-to-L-A-B-O-U-R-R-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E For example, when Hopkins flipped open his copy, he saw Fyfer's annotations. It was the very same book. Wow. Okay, 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?

Starting point is 02:32:02 We remember the hits. We forget the misses and so. But there's enough weird stuff like that. And again, I've received hundreds of stories. And I mentioned Jeffrey Krippel 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.

Starting point is 02:32:22 is one. The God issue, you know, that you mentioned fine-tuning. We have explanations for that, but they're not right. The multiverse is not... It's not great. It's as unfalsifiable as... It's kind of science-fictiony, sort of metaphysics, you know, string theory. Even Avi goes, ah, string theory is a bunch of nonsense.

Starting point is 02:32:42 Oh, okay. It's not my fields. It's like, whoa, okay, no one seems to vibe this anymore. So what happened? This was the big explanation. Okay. And, you know, Martin Rees wrote that book, just six numbers about fine-tuning,

Starting point is 02:32:53 but he doesn't believe in God. So, 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. Okay, we're coming at it the wrong way. We're asking the wrong questions. Like the consciousness problem.

Starting point is 02:33:10 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,

Starting point is 02:33:30 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, okay, 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.

Starting point is 02:33:48 and taking it very seriously as a real modality. You know, they gave another past interviewee of mine is Joseph McMonigle, who was given the Legion of Merit for helping, you know, aid in 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. And Rosemary Clooney circled a three square mile radius in Zaire and they found this plane under the treetops there.

Starting point is 02:34:34 Okay. So here's the counterfactual to that. Okay. So during the CIA program, 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 that program. But A, how do we know that remote viewing wasn't used in certain instances? You know, we don't know about the hits. We might not know. That's possible. And then, B, there was actually a meta study done by Jessica Uttz, 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, if I recall. Well, he agreed that it was statistically significant, that And then he was like, but I think we'll have to, this will get explained down the line, which Carl Popper, a great philosopher of scientists, he would call that materialist promissory notes. He would say that that is, that is, you know, taking out debt on materialism and assuming it'll stand up.

Starting point is 02:35:35 Ray's pretty good at these things, though. But he admitted it was statistically significant. Jessica Utts and him and also Richard Wiseman, the psychologist from England, 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 Sheldrack has this whole theory about, you know, perception is your eyes sending stuff out and it tickles the back of your neck. And if I'm staring at you and you pick that up. Scopesthesia. Or the dog, your dog knows when you're coming home and you're miles away at work or whatever. Okay.

Starting point is 02:36:07 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 gets no results. Okay. And then Jessica comes in and it's 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 psychic, whatever. Okay, so here's my problem with all this is that so many of these things are not replicated.

Starting point is 02:36:37 So we know that in psychology, probably half of all studies ever published should never have been unpublished. This is the replication crisis. Yes. This is very disturbing. And worse than psychology in medical research, these studies are so complicated and so expensive to run that a lot of things pass peer review that probably should have never passed or they were pehacking or whatever. So ever since the replication crisis started 2010 with Darrell Bams research on the backward causality. That's how it began. And so for your viewers, I don't know this story.

Starting point is 02:37:11 Because I would always be asked, what would it take for you to believe in psychic ESP psychic power? 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? And that happened. Yeah. Okay, Ben did this. Okay, not very many. This hasn't happened very often. But this in the psychic context, that's happened. Well, but they're 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 Daryl Bem that has a stellar record. So he sets up subjects in front of a screen and on the screen you have to take take a pick you press one key or the other key will

Starting point is 02:37:48 the will the image come up on the left screen or the right screen so one image is a emotionally neutral image the other one is is an emotionally arousing image like a like a pornographic type image and so the subject's guessed which one it's going to be okay it should be 50 50 is your prediction all right so it comes out statistically not statistically significant that they did it above chance Okay, that was his finding. Before the computer decided with this random number generator, which side of the screen the image would appear on. Okay, that's the key.

Starting point is 02:38:22 So this was what he called backward causality. They knew before the computer even decided which side left or right that the image was going to come on. All right, so that was a big story. You got a lot of media attention. Darrell Bam went on Colbert Rippor and told this story, and he famously joked its, you know, extrasensory pornception, right?

Starting point is 02:38:41 And I remember thinking, okay, 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.

Starting point is 02:39:11 Richard Wiseman and Stuart Ritchie replicated the exact experiment and got null results, sent those results, their paper, to the same journal who rejected it that said, we're not interested in null results. Another problem with psychology. No results are important, right? They are, of course. And 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 start. Gate program and, you know, these are the Gansfield method that Ray Hyman and Jessica Utts actually looked at. But you look at the Princeton, you know, engineering and anomalous research

Starting point is 02:39:52 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 you 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. MK Ultra came out of the fear that we're losing the race to the Russians on mind control, the Russians, Chinese, and North Korea. Yeah, and it was a vital program that's now being investigated by Congress. It turns out you can't control people's minds.

Starting point is 02:40:24 You can't create a killer like that. How do you know that? Oh, there's tons of research, cognitive psychology 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. How do you know that? Well, the research shows you can't do it.

Starting point is 02:40:42 I don't know if that's right. Yeah. Now, you could do it, I say, more globally. Like religion. Take 9-11. How can we get, okay, how can we, you know, design these missiles to take down the World Trade Center building? You know, it's really expensive.

Starting point is 02:40:56 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 in 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.

Starting point is 02:41:11 Right. But 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, show weak effects,

Starting point is 02:41:29 and we can't perfectly manipulate it in a lab setting over and over and over again. That could be a problem. And so science has this very limited criteria, and I would put ESP in that bucket. It could be. Okay. Yeah, it could be. I mean, there are limitations to science for sure.

Starting point is 02:41:43 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. 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 I 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. Oh, so that's what dark matter is. I see. Okay. That was obvious.

Starting point is 02:42:10 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 is like, oh, Einstein was interesting, but he completely missed whatever. Well, it would be quantum physics, I guess, but whatever comes after that. Yeah. Right.

Starting point is 02:42:34 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, they're wrong. Most, that's correct.

Starting point is 02:43:00 We have survivorship bias. Yes, yeah, yeah. But many people who have contributed to science were considered. Heretics in their time. Anti-establishment thinkers. I mean, like Einstein, yeah, he worked at a patent office and general relativity. All that stuff. But he went and got a PhD at a normal university, published in peer-review journals.

Starting point is 02:43:19 He knew all the top physicist. He was an insider. But he wasn't just some. Relativity was seen as a total novel curiosity. It was completely marginalized until the 50s and the golden age of relativity. No, no, I'll tell you when it happened. It happened in 2019, sorry, in 19, 19, 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.

Starting point is 02:43:46 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 pulling the light. It's the bending of this. That's experimental proof of the theory. I think it was still. Well, there's a New York Times headline. The universe's light is all askew. Einstein discovers whatever.

Starting point is 02:44:11 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.

Starting point is 02:44:44 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, 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. 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

Starting point is 02:45:24 bets on. Okay. Absolutely. Okay. Okay. So I'm in favor of, you know, the Graham Hancock's 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, and he doesn't agree with me. Whatever, fine, that's fine. Let everybody have their say.

Starting point is 02:45:44 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, I'll go, look it up myself. I don't like these people to go, he, Rogan shouldn't platform these people. Why? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:45:55 I mean, it's kind of condescending. Like, you're too dumb to go look it up yourself, really? I mean, come on, right? Nothing wrong with that. So, and, and Graham has gotten the attention of archaeologists who have now responded. Okay, good. Right? That's good.

Starting point is 02:46:07 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 guy. 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?

Starting point is 02:47:02 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'd be laughed out of the rim. That's starting to change, but there's still real stigma attached to you. Okay, okay, I will admit. So, Avi's talked about this. Like he wrote a paper about 3A Atlas. And, you know, it's probably a comment, comment, comment, comment, comment, comment. But it has these weird anomalies. So last paragraph, let's not rule out the possibility. It could be an extraterrestrial light sailor, space, spaceship, whatever he called it. And so he said, he was telling this on a Zoom meeting, the journal editor goes,

Starting point is 02:47:41 okay, this is a great paper, but you have to take out the final paragraph. He goes, well, that's not science. I mean, the whole point is like, here's what we know, here's the methods, so on, here's our final speculation. That's okay, because 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.

Starting point is 02:48:00 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. The fewer of 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.

Starting point is 02:48:26 And I'm sure this happens. I'm absolutely sure. And here's another complaint. So these peer-reviewed articles 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.

Starting point is 02:48:44 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. You know, some of that's – 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 happened. 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?

Starting point is 02:49:14 Okay, bet on it. And this is based on actually the work of there's this guy, Philip Tetlock. You 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, you're, this is Nassim Taleb 101 as well. You're more likely to make, 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. 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.

Starting point is 02:49:49 And no one, like a week later, goes, well, he invaded and you said he wouldn't. No one fact checks them. I go, you lost. You lost your money. Right. But if you go, okay, now you have to place a bet. All right. Now, how often does Putin actually do these things?

Starting point is 02:50:00 Or what is the base rate of terrorist? 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? What's the base rate? 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, you know, it's what. Nancy Pelosi seems like she's been doing for the last couple of decades. I want her investment program. Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. Just track her portfolio. You looked into the Virginia UFO crash of 1996.

Starting point is 02:50:48 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 were alive. I know. Yeah, I know. Same thing with the, what you call it, the miracle of Fatima. You know, there was 50,000 people, 70,000 or whatever it was.

Starting point is 02:51:05 Yeah, but in the. 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 Tick-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 Maillini farm. This ultra-light pilot and geography teacher Carlos DeSosa 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.

Starting point is 02:51:41 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, is this the hospital where they treated the E.T? They go, yeah, this is the hospital?

Starting point is 02:52:04 and their chief neurosurgeon, a guy named Italo Ventorelli, says that he was face to face with the being for four minutes. And he oversaw the work of this other guy, Marcos Benesis, who, like, 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 U.S. And I just interviewed a former defense minister and a current presidential candidate, a guy named Aldo Rebello. And he was like, yeah, this happened. You said that fundamentally you do think something happened in Varge. in 1996. Believing that a phenomenon like this exists, of course, because these were phenomena that

Starting point is 02:52:43 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 it? Okay, so something happened clearly. Yeah. The question is, what is it? And if it was true, what else would be true?

Starting point is 02:53:02 What does the government say that they think it was? He thinks it's akin to what happened at Roswell and this is all the rebello. And Carlos DeSosa, 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. I mean like Celophane does. Like cellophane? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:53:29 Yeah, he crunch it up and it unravels back to. solid piece. Maybe it's not salafing. Nitinol. Nightingal or nitn'tle. Yeah, whatever that stuff. Anyway, well, I don't know, Jesse. I mean, again, these are good things that would be good to know what actually happened.

Starting point is 02:53:45 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 to go, 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 touch off mass hysteria.

Starting point is 02:54:06 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? Some famous scientist and 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?

Starting point is 02:54:32 And they were all, they all came in pro disclosure and they waited, 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. No, yeah, but let it all out, yeah. But do you, do you think that maybe that's been the case? I mean, I do think governments overcorrect on the security and secrecy and classification.

Starting point is 02:54:57 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's been dead since 1991. You know, it's time. What happened in 1947? I mean, who cares? Yeah. They just show us, right?

Starting point is 02:55:12 That's, yeah. Well, I'm hoping, again, part of the UAP Science Advisory Committee, that's someone like an Avi lobe 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? I would be totally, I would love it.

Starting point is 02:55:35 It would be amazing. Yeah. I would love that. Okay. But again, I mean, you know, I'm of an age when Sagan was, you know, 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.

Starting point is 02:55:51 I mean, let's go looking and so on. Absolutely. I mean, I think they're out there. If they came here, even more amazing. Sagan's interesting because he wrote The Demon Haunted World and obviously was a... Good skeptic book, yep. Yeah, as a fan of weeding out bad ideas. I remember Richard Dawkins blurbed that book.

Starting point is 02:56:08 But in other ways, he seems kind of privately interested in UFOs and aliens. Oh, yes, 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 check with his widow, Annie, who's a friend. She goes, that never happened. That's funny of those bullshit.

Starting point is 02:56:27 Like deathbed confessions, I believe in God now. Yeah, it never happened. Yeah, yeah. Hitch always said, if anybody tells you I said at the last moment, I believe in God, don't believe him. I'm never going to say that. Yeah, 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.

Starting point is 02:56:49 I don't remember that. It's fascinating. Is that in the bios? I don't remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, all right. I must have got that. Okay, yeah.

Starting point is 02:56:55 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

Starting point is 02:57:13 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 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.

Starting point is 02:57:37 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. So it's, but just a case. But also it's a slice of what we cared about, what we think is important about us for other people to know.

Starting point is 02:57:54 even if no one ever finds out, it's 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,

Starting point is 02:58:21 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?

Starting point is 02:58:46 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 spooky action of distance stuff. You know, they brought the hard problem of consciousness, you know, Stuart Hammeroff 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.

Starting point is 02:59:17 That would just be like quantum neuroscience or something to be part of science. And there are physicalist models around remote viewing where maybe, you know, in certain quantum interpretations, you have obviously have temporal non-locality with double slit experiments. You can reverse cubit positions and 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 hammeroff, then you could maybe access your future knowledge state.

Starting point is 02:59:48 So if you were given confirmatory feedback on a remote viewing session, that would be a physicalist, materialist, reductionist explanation of remote viewing. You know, that would fully comport with possible interpretations of physics. So this is my point. If it became part of science, so the word's paranormal and supernatural, they're just linguistic placeholders.

Starting point is 03:00:10 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 parisole. Yeah, super normal or, yeah, like, really cool or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Well, I love it. And I hope we can, 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. Oh, thank you. And I'll do my best. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think I'm excited. You know, just the fact that this exists, I think is a really cool stamp of approval for the space. And yeah, hopefully we can do this again because I always enjoy my conversation. If nothing else, it could expose how much governments keep seeing.

Starting point is 03:00:51 which is also interesting for conspiracy studies. 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.

Starting point is 03:01:05 9-11's 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, Rogwood was talking about that way before any of this stuff came out. For sure.

Starting point is 03:01:17 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, some of the rich guys taking the blood of adrenal. I think that was like Q and non. So all of 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 a problem of conspiracism is that,

Starting point is 03:01:51 Conspiracy theorizing is that some conspiracies are true. That's right. And I think being a, there's a healthy, efficient frontier of looking skeptically into conspiracies, which should be everybody's kind of a priori, you know, orientation. Because I think if you write it off and you say, oh, nothing to see here because it's called a 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.

Starting point is 03:02:25 And 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, we have six different alien races. And they're from these planets or whatever. And it's every podcaster's dream to have those people on, you know. So it's important, I think, to go into the conspiracies, but with your wits about you. Yeah, our latest issue of skeptic, we look into the whole social media model. and podcasting and the kind of attention economy in which you get people like Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens saying just crazy stuff. And I can't tell that they believe this or 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 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,

Starting point is 03:03:20 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 yet for sure. Podcasting is sloppy right now. Yeah. And then at the same time, I understand they're tapping into something very real, like an emotion 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.

Starting point is 03:03:50 state's government by, you know, basically a pedophile who was running a ring. Right. And so, you know, 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 else are they lying to us about?

Starting point is 03:04:16 I don't, you know. I know. I know. Yes, well, so that's why I like independent journalism. you know, when something that 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? This happened in Iran. Like, maybe that didn't happen in Iran because I know they got this one wrong, right?

Starting point is 03:04:34 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, you can't do everything, right? So that's all.

Starting point is 03:04:54 But I think it'll 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.

Starting point is 03:05:14 This is, I feel like the Star Trek bridge here. Yeah. No, it's so fun. And, no, this is a blast. I really appreciate it. And, you know, I now know that you're on record, right? That aliens are real. Yes, that's it.

Starting point is 03:05:28 Yeah, they're here. Yeah, yeah. I've been zapped by the alien beam. Yeah, no. 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 fair of that.

Starting point is 03:05:39 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 will the only guarantee about the futures that we're going to be surprised. And so I would say, all the memes 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, 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 four grade eight, five great apes, that's it out of millions of species.

Starting point is 03:06:16 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. Piedel.

Starting point is 03:06:27 Well, that's the thing that I think points more towards something that's derivative of humans. If you're a North Sentinel Island, which is, you know, off the coast of India, it's completely uncontacted, you know, for centuries. Oh, those guys. If, say they've had, you know, a couple of missionaries have shown up with Bibles and stuff. And I think a couple of been shot down. Yeah. But, you know, maybe these North Sentinelese go back to the, you know, the inland tribes and they say, you know, we've seen aliens.

Starting point is 03:06:55 They've attempted contact. Don't worry. 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 actually sort of like, you know, 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.

Starting point is 03:07:20 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 Burgessale 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 waist 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.

Starting point is 03:08:01 So I read his book and I had him on the show. I was like, yeah, that guy actually makes sense. So this is, 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.

Starting point is 03:08:15 So he's a paleontologist. I think he's at Oxford. And so when Steve Gould wrote his famous book, 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.

Starting point is 03:08:37 Like, oh, yeah, that's a good point. Interesting. Well, I would love to talk to him. He sounds fascinating. 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.

Starting point is 03:08:49 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 works on extraterrestrial liberty. So that's kind of his big thing.

Starting point is 03:09:09 Like if we set up a civilization on Mars, what should be the political system? or the economic system? What if somebody takes control of the oxygen production and then they monopolize it? 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 kind of system are they going to have? 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. These are super interesting questions.

Starting point is 03:09:43 that would be awesome. But on the Conway example, you're kind of saying that, you know, maybe they are extraterrestrial. Maybe the grays 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 going to be primates, but something like you got to have arms and legs to move around and manipulate tools and two eyes and, you know, the brain is up here and, you know, so on, you end up kind of like this. Yeah. It's also interesting to think of like, 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 humans do are actually scientific laws versus, you know,

Starting point is 03:10:27 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 this? Which one is that? 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 this sort of just consistent phenomena.

Starting point is 03:10:59 It's like the weather or it's, you know, a 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. Oh, that's really, that's a great example. It's a great example. Another great example thought experiment is you have turkeys that 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 an analogy for the tricelarian 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.

Starting point is 03:11:40 and discretion behind some of these things that you're observing. Yeah. Well, I said when Edvitt's 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 chauvinist, he'd like to say.

Starting point is 03:11:55 You know, don't think carbon is the only way to structure a living organism. And he would talk all the time about tesseracts and, you know, platonic. You showed it. You showed it on your show. I've showed all the time. Yeah. He shows it to, he goes, you can't see a tesseract. Yeah, you can see the shadow.

Starting point is 03:12:10 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 that. 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.

Starting point is 03:12:47 Now the jellyfish UAP looks to be a group of drones. The drones are interconnected, you know, Bluetooth or whatever, and they're coordinated. Well, 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. He's like, what are you doing? What are you thinking? He goes, I'm thinking computation. All these little molecules that could all be coordinated and computing and thinking.

Starting point is 03:13:14 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 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 human astray historically. But it's the epitome of human hubris to say that the Enlightenment is not another example of a mythology.

Starting point is 03:13:44 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 not immune to any of the, you know,

Starting point is 03:13:58 consensus dynamics and herd-like thinking of any of the other mythologies. You know, Dan, Dennis, analogy with termites and thinking. So 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? It looks like a skyscraper.

Starting point is 03:14:22 No. They're just doing their little thing, right? But together, the whole collective builds this magnificent structure because that's what we're doing. 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

Starting point is 03:14:50 fundamentally different in 100 years. And this is not, you know, this is not normative statement from me. Because I think it's actually, you know, bad in many ways. Like I'm sort of more of like a primalist in this context. but there are people like Noah Yuval Harari who, 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

Starting point is 03:15:11 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 what do you detect on the other side?

Starting point is 03:15:29 Is there an intelligence, you know, a 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 in ways to get us to just meet them and be able to communicate with them?

Starting point is 03:15:49 Who knows? There was this line asked, I think it was to Ray Kurzweil. You know, do you think there's a god? And he said, we're working on it. That's fascinating. Wow. Well, that's the singularity, right? Right? I mean, everything changes and they become essentially omniscient.

Starting point is 03:16:06 Right. But then that also feels really heretical. Like it should be, there should, there should be a God that created. But he's been right by so many things, you have to take him seriously. He's also been wrong on a bunch of things too. And then he might be right on this again. But like, I don't know. I find that like, you know, the whole AI craze, it's like, I think this is a simulation from some higher sentience. And so why would you port yourself into a low. 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

Starting point is 03:16:50 pretend worlds, right? So one of the common themes in that series is Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty and the whole thing. And they go in there and they play act and do the whole thing with So one of the in this particular episode, Sherlock Holmes and his sweetheart, they're in there and they're all interacting with the Star Trek crew people, Captain Picard and so on. All of a sudden, the holodeck doors open and he walks out, the holodeck guy, the, what's the, yeah, Bariardi 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?

Starting point is 03:17:32 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 a little box in the holodeck. I love it. I love it in it. And then it ends where Barclay, the kind of character officer, he's wondering, like, huh, I wonder if this whole, now they're in the real enterprise and it's wrapping

Starting point is 03:17:57 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, whew. Like, 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.

Starting point is 03:18:17 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 real truth finding? I think it's, I love myth. Myth is important. I think so, too. Yeah, I love, you know, Joseph Campbell's stuff. I love some of Jordan stuff about this, what they really mean.

Starting point is 03:18:36 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 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 von Schleiman went looking for Troy when it was relegated just to Homer's The Iliad.

Starting point is 03:19:00 I have gazed upon the face of Agamendon. That's right. And he found it. Oh, God, this one's real. And he found it. Yeah. So I wonder, I wonder if they're right about that. And the Hindu, you know, the Hindu, you know, Maya, the great illusion is like a real, is 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 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 Nineven people, whatever there, 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 flounders, 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 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. And 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 they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Starting point is 03:20:26 That one has to be true because for Christians, like, maybe it's not literally true. It's okay to mythology has deeper truths that are valuable. Yes. But it could also be. But it could be. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Starting point is 03:20:38 The face of Agnamon, Mn and Troy actually existed. Yeah. Maybe. It's, you know, I don't know, it's so fascinating.

Starting point is 03:20:45 And we could go on forever. But I think your, the way you think is a very healthy check. Again, probably the way a lot of my audience thinks, probably the way I think. And the great Bertrand Russell once stared up at the stars. And he,

Starting point is 03:21:00 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 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 really appreciate you uh you being here. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me, and you're welcome. This was a blast. Big fun. Let me know when you, when you find

Starting point is 03:21:35 the aliens. It's okay. Maybe I can be the... You'll be the first person I call. Please. Yeah, I'll be the, I'll be the water boy. Jesse, Avi says we got it. I'll be on the next plane. All right. All right. Thank you. Cool.

American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - I Debated UFOs With America’s Top Skeptic (It Got Ugly…)

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