American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Beam Greens: Getting your daily nutrients has never been easier. Click https://shopbeam.com/JesseMichels and use code JESSEMICHELS to get up to 35% off Beam Greens for a limited time only! LUCY: Let���s level up your nicotine routine with Lucy. Go to https://lucy.co/jesse and use promo code JESSE to get 20% off your first order. Lucy has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. Join Jesse Michels on today's episode of American Alchemy as he sits down with Beatriz Villarroel to discuss the Baltic Sea anomaly, vanishing stars, hunting for UFO crash retrievals and the lack of scientific inquiry into such UAPs. Villarroel expresses skepticism about government transparency in UAP research and highlights her project, Project Vasco, which systematically analyzes data for signs of artificial non-human objects. Beatriz's Website ➤ http://beatrizvillarroel.com -------------------------- JOIN OUR WHOP (Exclusive Episodes & Group Calls) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels Become a Member of American Alchemy: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join -------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 01:28 Meeting Dr. Beatriz Villarroel 02:52 Journey to Astronomy 05:01 Halton Arp's Influence 06:36 Diving into UAP 07:52 The Baltic Sea Anomaly 09:25 The Search for Vanishing Stars 14:16 Historical Context of UFOs 18:11 The Villainous Legacy of Don Menzel 20:47 Contrasting Views on UFOs 26:11 JFK, UFOs, and Secrecy 27:52 Exoprobe: The Future of Exploration 33:08 Defining UAP and UFO 37:08 Challenges in the Scientific Community 40:23 The Pursuit of Truth 43:14 European Crash Retrieval Initiative 46:34 The Quest for Proof 51:51 Supporting the Search for Answers -------------------------- SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's something that looks like it has been sliding into the ocean. So they found this thing that looked like a crashed UFO or looked like an artificial structure outside the Swedish coast. They found that it was covered in burned biological material, which is really weird because we don't have volcanic activity. In that area, we need the actual physical proof. And I don't think any government is willing to release that. But the scientist who had claimed it was just a rock never studied the actual samples. and there's no paper and no open data there's just a claim to the media by those scientists

and I'm just like, this is not a way of analyzing something. Wow. So there are no samples of that object because it was so hard so they couldn't get a piece out of it. So I still think it's something that should be analyzed because it might be possibly the best candidate and non-human artifact that you can find. Wow.

And I really believe that we need to seriously study this kind of objects. Yeah, absolutely. I'm here with Dr. Beatrice Villarreal, who is a phenomenal astronomer, both in a conventional sense, she's conventionally trained, but also I think you are a rare kind of very open mind. in your field and you've found some very interesting things and so I'm really excited to speak with you because you're kind of on the frontier. You're the intersection I think between scientific rigor and this burgeoning field of studying kind of anomalous phenomena in the air and in space. And so thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. It's my pleasure and it's a true honor. Oh, well, thank you. How did you get in this space to begin with? Were you always in the space as a kid?

actually not. So Al-Aqaeda was a very, very curious person. Well, I am still a very curious person, but of course I was very interested in space. So I was very curious about a lot of things. And I think already when I was six or seven, I had written a small little essay about cats in flying saucers. I still like cats as well. When you were six or seven, you wrote an essay. Yeah, I had that essay. I don't remember how long it was. I had also painted the cats and the flying saucers there. So I don't think it changed too much. Oh my God. That's unbelievable. Anyway, I simply liked probably this topic already since I was very young. I got interested in molecular biology and DNA.

And I actually started my university studies with an engineering program in molecular biotechnology. And then I got super bored. How did you get bored of molecular biotechnology? Well, it's like we were all the time, I think it was the particular program I was studying at the university, we were all the time repeating the central dogma and how DNA turns into a protein over and over. And I just started wondering about the mysteries of the universe, galaxies, how are galaxies gaining the shapes that we see, the spiral form versus the elliptical forms. I wanted to understand all that while I found myself on a PhD program in astronomy. me. And I started studying active galactic nuclei, which are galaxies that have lots of light coming from their center. And I tried to see how different types of active galactic nuclei, and you

could see these different types by looking at the spectra, some had broad, emission lines, some had narrow, and how are they related? And I did my PhD on that topic. However, already, like in my early years as a PhD student, was it even maybe in my last year as undergraduate student? I had, while writing some fable, I had started wondering about if a star could vanish or if a galaxy could vanish. What do you think sparked that question of could a galaxy vanish? Well, I think I was so influenced and fascinated by Halton Arp. Heltonarps theories. So Haltonarp was an astronomer who was a super famous astronomer for a very long while who one day observed.

He could see like he found couples of galaxies that were, they looked like they were exchanging gas. But if you looked at their redshift, which are indicators of distance, they had completely different redshift, which completely went against all the idea of the expanding universe and how we interpret redshift. So when he said this, all astronomers attacked him. So it was the controversy of what we have today with Avilob and Omoa-Moa, and in the 80s with the non-cosmological redshift or anomalous redshift, as we call them. Yes, so I was fascinated by that thing and I wrote an essay based on these ideas, and then somehow I killed off my poor Quasor because it was a fable, and it vanished at the end of the story, and I started wondering,

But hey, has anyone ever searched for galaxies or stars that vanish? Interesting. And so can you explain what a non-cosmological red shift is? So it would be, so usually when we look at galaxies, we can see the redshift. And it's a Doppler shift because the universe is expanding and is moving away from us. So it's stretching light and you're moving lower down on the electromagnetic wave spectrum towards that. Exactly. So what then happens is that people use this redshift to calculate the distance through galaxy.

Now the problem would be if you have two interacting galaxies that are completely different redshift, you wouldn't be able to use that as a distance estimate. So I was just curious about that. Why do you think it was so controversial? Well, because that would question the entire Big Bangs idea. So it would completely change all Fundaments of physics as we know today or cosmology, rather.

So the verdict on red shifts is still out, but you've moved on. And you might come back at some point. When I get really bored. So how did you get into, because I know you through my own interest in UAP, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. How did you get into even believing

that that was possible? So I'm going to show you some contradictions in how I were thinking when I was younger. So as an undergraduate student, I was in Sweden and I one day heard about this fascinating discovery that a team of divers had done called the Baltic Sea anomaly. So they found this thing that looked like a crashed UFO or looked like an artificial structure outside the Swedish coast. What did it look like? It looked like Millennium Falcon that had just. crashed into the deep seas. I was super fascinated.

And I was like, oh my God, can there have been aliens coming to visiting on Earth? Later, when I started working with this searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, which we did through the project by looking for vanishing objects, that's when I started wondering about the UFO question as well, which I until then didn't want to touch. And is there any government interest when it comes to this? Well, I don't know about that, but I know that they did super interesting investigations of it. I think they found that it was covered in burned biological material, which is really weird because we don't have volcanic activity in that area.

Plus, I don't think they even said it was a crashed UFO. I think their idea is that this is an artificial structure, and they don't know what it is, but some kind of artificial structure. And they also saw there's this kind of, there's something that looks like it has been sliding into the ocean. Sadly, Fox News went out with saying that this was just a rock. But the scientist who had claimed it was just a rock never studied the actual samples. And there's no paper and no open data. There's just a claim to the media by those scientists. And I'm just like, this is not a way of analyzing something.

Wow. So there are no samples of that object because it was so hard so they couldn't get a piece out of it. So I still think it's something that should be analyzed because it might be possibly the best candidate and non-human artifact that you can find. And I really believe that we need to seriously study this kind of objects. Yeah, absolutely. We should go down there and try to gather resources. I hope these two guys will get all the support they can to actually study it and research it. So how does looking at vanishing stars then lead you to an interest in UAP or UFO?

So we were looking for these vanishing stars. And so now people talk about vanishing stars sometimes in different ways than I talk about them. So we had access to these catalogs, like lots of imagery from 1950. and also a catalog called the US Navy catalog. And then we had images of the sky as it looks today. And so we were comparing these images from the early 50s to images as it looks today. And I was hoping to see this perfect sparkling star that you can find in multiple images that one day vanishes. But before you find that, you find lots of candidates.

And like things that you see in the 50s that have vanished, but you don't know if it's a beautiful star or if it's something. else. I had this image where you could see multiple stars appearing and vanishing, which is completely crazy. Because one thing to have one transient, but when you have several of them happening in a small space at the same time, you really start wondering. So I started studying this phenomenon. I showed it to my colleagues. And we all started investigating it. We had this guy at Grand Telescope, Canaria, one of my friends who actually pointed the world's largest optical telescope, a 10.4 meter telescope to the positions of all these nine objects or eight of

them or something like that. And there was nothing left. Because we were hoping to see like, you know, we were really hoping to see some kind of counterpatch there. And you said, oh, maybe there were nine lasers or whatever. There was nothing like that. And then we started wondering, so what can actually cause this thing? And there's no astrophysical explanation. So we started looking at various kind of instrumental explanation and all of them have. And this is not a supernova or like, you know, the heat death of the sun type thing turns into a black hole or a dwarf or something. You're not going to get several of them in a small space at the same time.

Wow. So this just didn't match anything. Just like perfect anomaly, basically. It's not explained by any. Although today you can have that in the sky because today you have lots of satellites that sometimes are blinking, you have lots of space garbage. And then short reflections just happen. due to, I mean, because you have solar reflections.

Sure. The problem is that that would have, this is from 1950. We didn't have any of that technology back then. So, and that's how I became interested. And I got an idea of that one of the ways how I can also search for more such examples by looking for those that are lying along a line or in a narrow band. So my friend Lash helped me to develop the statistics to properly see how many do we need at least in a line in order to or in a narrow band in order to say that even if you have this kind of transits also their positioning is anomalous that they are kind of not randomly placed but they are aligned or so. And we had two such examples that are statistically significant.

and one is five objects on a narrow band and it's from the 27th of July in 1952 my colleague Enrique found these three stars, the triple transient and this one is from the 19th of July in 1952 and it's super beautiful and then my colleague Dave Altman who is the manager, a media manager for Vasco,

he said, do you know what happens? Oh, what happened on 19th of July 1952. No, I wasn't around. So he introduced me to the Washington flap. That's absolutely amazing. I mean, because in UFO lore, not even lore, this was a national event.

It was all over the press. It was in, you know, newspapers saying, you know, saucers on the White House lawn. It prompted a call between Truman and Edward J. Rupelt, who was the head of Blue Book at the time. And it was, you have, had this Washington invasion or DC flyover where there were saucers all over DC at the time. And it was

specifically, it was July of 1952, but it was specifically two weekends. It was the 19th and 20th. And it was the 26 and 27th. So I find that absolutely remarkable. So these are naval records that you're looking at to see the stars. We use this naval observatory catalog initially, or I used them initially, but later we just went directly to the Mount Palomar images. Got it. And so you're seeing images. You're seeing this three in a row and then five in a row in your case. The three are just randomly placed and the five are along a narrow band. Okay, got it. And then they just seemed to vanish.

They weren't in the public reappearable data like a year later or even a week later. Exactly like you said. That's wild. I mean, that's really fascinating. Is there anything that is distinct about them when comparing them to other stars in the images or do they look like garden variety stars? They look like garden variety stars. We actually now are re-exploring whether they look identical to the garden variety stars or if there might be some small, tiny difference, because you can expect slight differences if you have short flashes depending on the shorter they are, the more they might be concentrated.

Interesting. And have you seen any vanishing stars since 1952? Have you combed through the record since then? or? We have a lot of single transience, but what I actually want to do is to look at more cases of multiple transients. We have some more cases when we were looking for these alignments that we just ignored because we were looking for alignments.

Can you describe the methodology of Project Vasco? What exactly are you doing? So we take images from Mount Palomar from the early 50s, and then we look at the same positions in new images from Pan Stars. And Matt Palomar is an observatory in a telescope in California. Exactly. And then we use these images from Hawaii. And we compare the same spot just 70 years later.

Wow. And see has something vanished. It was actually quite fun. There was an expert in satellites that contacted me when he saw our paper where we were looking for these alignments. And I found these two particularly interesting cases. And he wrote me something like, but come on, you have just found satellites. Haven't he thought about that?

And I wrote back, did you look at what year these satellites are from? They're kind of before Sputnik. Yeah, I think that's kind of hard to argue with. It was quite fun. And you can't imagine how often some astronomers actually make that kind of comment. Aren't you just having satellite links? Do you remember Don Menzel? Do you know that name by any chance? Yeah.

It's a famous astronomer. It's my favorite. Typical arc villain. He kind of is, right? It was all like, what was it? Like temperature inversion? He was a Harvard astronomer. And I think he was also a cryptographer and kind of deep in the national security state.

And he would just write these kind of naysayer debunking books in the 50s. And he would describe all the stuff. with light reflections or, you know, temperature inversions and that sort of thing. But yeah, what are your thoughts on it? Why is he your favorite villain? I mean, I don't think he necessarily is a villain, but there's some very interesting coincidences around his name that really make me wonder. What are the coincidences?

Well, first, I mean, we all know that he was a super famous UFO debunker, if not the most famous UFO debunker. Absolutely. And he helped the U.S. Air Force to. debunk the Washington 1952 flap. And two or three months after, he suddenly becomes the director of Harvard Observatory

and he destroys one side of the photographic plays. And he doesn't ask, as I understand, from the record, he doesn't ask the astronomers to select the place. No, he asks his secretary to go and throw away one third of the plates. And there's a woman, Dorrit Hofflight, that

has been like telling about the story in her memoirs. and kind of he started revenging on her later too for, as I understood it for, that she tried to protect some of the plates. He also threw away a number of the blog books that are keeping the observations and what plates exist. In 1953, Donald Menzel also stopped the astronomers at Harvard to carry out their very famous sky survey where they were monitoring the entire sky since already late 19th century. And he stopped them.

And they didn't do this survey between 1953 to 1967 for roughly 15 years. So he also had apparently some more later episodes of late destruction I've heard. That is wild. And suddenly you find that his name is famous for the so-called MJ12, Majestic 12. And you start wondering, of course.

I mean, I can't help it, but it's a lot of coincidences because we also see things on these days from Mount Palomar. Well, the other fascinating thing about Don Mansell is he went on to run the Bureau of Public Standards, which, you know, they're sort of codifying time zones, but also a lot of astronomical data as well. And so if anybody were to like manage our reality, it would be somebody in that position. And then I don't know if you know this fact, this is kind of trippy, but he had an understudy a PhD at Harvard. who studied right under him named Lou Branscombe. Lou Branscombe gave Edward Condon his clearance back, and Edward Condon went on to do a hit job on UFOs with the Condon committee, which killed Blue Book.

So it was literally Menzel's like protege giving Condon his clearance so that he could completely kind of put the kibosh once and for all on UFOs and kind of kill the field. He's my favorite arch villain. Yeah, I think he's an arch villain. I think there's something going on there. And we were talking in the car earlier about Carl Sagan, who I think is such a fascinating figure because, you know, we were saying he, in his early diaries, he would write all about UFOs. He was clearly sort of fascinated by them. It feels like if you read, you know, pale blue dot or watch contact, he's sort of, it seems like this tongue and cheek reference to actual, you know, non-human intelligence or extraterrestrial visitation. But then publicly, he just seems to dogmatically flip on the topic and just become this kind of debunker.

Actually, right around the time when Jay Allen Heinek kind of goes in the opposite direction, he was running Blue Book an astronomer. And he says, you know, actually, I played a part in the cover up. And so it's interesting that, yeah, Carl Sagan, there seems to be this kind of split between his private life and beliefs and public life on UFOs. So do you know that Alan Heineck worked under Menzel at Harvard? So there was this project called Operation Moonwatch held by Fred Whipple. So Fred Whipple was the PhD. student of Donald Mansel. And so he created this program where they had the station, like they had 12 stations around the earth with a lot of citizen scientists that were tracking satellites over the sky. And so Alan Heinek was helping Whipple in this program. And they actually had 36 UFO report that I think Jacques-Wale found that we now also look through.

There are some very interesting things there. So astronomers and amateur astronomers have been seeing UFOs forever. It just has been ignored. Do you know who's running the Harvard Undersea Observatory at the time? Galileo Project. Currently maybe the guy at the time was Robert Sarbacher. You know those moments in the middle of the day when you feel your energy dipping and you just need something to help you reset.

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Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive. chemical. Thanks so much to Lucy for sponsoring today's episode. Who David Grush says went on to basically create UFO secrecy through the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and was very close confidant with Thomas Townsend Brown, who's working on anomalous gravity research. And so it seems like Harvard was the epicenter of a lot of this interesting work. It seems so fascinating to have been at Harvard in the 1950s. And actually, the same time as Menzel was there, JFK, was the on the board of overseers for the astronomy departments.

I didn't know that. I found that in Stanton Friedman's notes. So I'm fascinated. That's amazing. Yeah, I've always wondered how much. Do you think JFK was maybe privy to the UFO? Because there's this letter. I don't know anything about it.

All this is outside my specialty. I'm now wildly speculating, really speculating. That's what we do on my ship. But there's a letter that was foyer, you know, the Freedom of Information Act was used to request it out of the government in 2005. And it was from JFK to acting director of the CIA, John McCone. It was after JFK had fired Alan Dulles. And he's asking for data on unknowns because he's worried that the Russians, the Soviets, might view it as a threat if they see the unknowns in their airspace.

And I would think it was fake, but it really dovetails with the language that was used in the 1971 salt talks. We're on record. We're saying that we have to coordinate with the Soviets on unknowns and their airspace and our airspace, especially around sensitive military installations so that these things don't provoke war. And if you're thinking about detente, that's obviously a really important vector to kind of think about. And so I always ask myself, you know, this guy, John Greenwald, black vault.com has done a lot of of work on this and he's looked into the veracity of this document and the verdict's still out. It's unclear and I think there are a lot of reasons to think it might not be real, but it's,

it's interesting because there were some people in and around the JFK assassination that think that maybe it had something to do with his inquiries into UFOs. I don't know. There's a lot of fascinating questions to explore for sure. But that's really interesting. I didn't know he was, I mean, I know he was the Harvard affiliate, I had no idea he was at all involved in anything they were doing in the world of astronomy. That's really fascinating and cool. What is the current, so you did Project Vasco and now you're onto a new project to get more of a smoking gun possibly around these anomalous objects. Can you describe what that project is?

So we still have Vasco running and we are going to be looking for more signatures of satellites with a Vasco project. And hopefully also make a new citizen science project where we look for these signatures. Was that the extent of the vanishing stars just the 1952 or you found a lot of vanishing? Well, we found a lot of transient things that appear and vanish. Okay. Okay, so what exactly do you hope to do with Exoprobe? If you remember with the Vasco project, when we saw this multiple transins, there were no satellites in the sky. Today there's loads and loads of space debris.

So now what we want to do is that we want to look for this kind of signatures of non-human artifacts. in orbit around the earth, outside the Earth atmosphere, but we also want to remove all this contamination from human space debris directly when we do our observation so that we get clean data. So to do that, first we have a method that cannot discuss how we are removing all this space debris, but more importantly, or equally importantly, is that we are hoping to build a network of telescopes, and by having multiple telescopes,

you can determine the distance to an object and the more telescopes you have, the more accurately you can actually determine this distance in three dimensions so that you can actually eventually go there, pick up the object and bring it down to the earth, because that's what I would like to do, to bring down an actual ET probe. So that's what exo probe is about.

It's about validating, a finding, verifying it, localizing the object and characterizing the nature of it. Since the 1960s, we have developed new way of imaging the skies, new technology for imaging the skies. We don't use photo emulsions anymore

like was done in the 50s. Our cameras are much more sensitive. We have also artificial intelligence that can analyze a huge amount of data. We can now digitize the entire sky. that wasn't possible in the 60s. All that was impossible for them that time or extremely difficult. And today you have all the methods you need to look for probes.

So now since Radio SETI has failed, why not going back to the second best idea of those times, which is looking for artifacts and probes from advanced civilizations? And I think that's the root, have to take. And I also believe that instead of looking for anomalies blindly, we should look specifically for artificial non-human objects. That's how I'm thinking. I think it's a error to do UFO projects to open where you look for anything that doesn't match what there is natural or earthly. I think we need to be much more concrete with what we are looking for. If we're thinking

So metallic orbs, you design a project, the sign for looking for metallic orbs. That makes so much sense. We were talking earlier, and there are certain projects out there that kind of just use generic, you know, a lot of sensor modality, kind of constant observation and then just the exclusion principle. And it's like, okay, there are all these objects. We do recognize what lies outside of the scope of what we recognize. And you presented this really interesting kind of model, which updated me where it was like, No, you actually need a hypothesis going in. That's actually really good.

That's good science. Having an idea of what you're looking for and then whatever signatures you'd expect to see from that thing and actually looking for that precisely. And so I guess the question for you would be, in the case of UAP or UFO, do you have specific signatures you might be looking for? Yes, we are looking for either solar reflections

that can be short or it can be streaking or we look for emissions from, artificial objects. We simply want to look for these very distinct signatures. And like one discussion I have in a new manuscript that we put out is that I don't like the definition of UAP because it fits almost everything now. It's so broad. Yeah. And in that way, UFO is more limited object. Yes, but even better is flying saucer. Yeah. Because when you have flying saucer, you directly can see the flying saucer in in your head. Yeah. But when you can see it in your imagination, you can imagine how it would look in your data.

Right. That you can directly transfer it to an image in your mind makes it possible to design a scientific experiment that is very clearly looking for these flying saucers. Now, I'm not saying that you should only look for flying saucers, because we know about the metallic orbs and all these other possible signatures we can look for. But having it so concrete makes it possible to... also not only imagined experiment, but also imagine all the ways how it could fail. Yeah. And all the limitations of your design, while when people work with exclusion

principle and look for everything that doesn't fit everything, I mean, that doesn't fit the earthly or the natural, you have so many things you have to test. You can always go on forever and say, and what will you actually prove from that? You just prove that there's a bunch of stuff outside of what you'd expect, but you're sort of, you know, using process of elimination forever. Exactly. So it's a barely falsifiable hypothesis, while if you have the flying sorcery, it's a very concrete hypothesis. So I think my feeling is that more science projects have to be working with very concrete hypothesis around the UFO question. What are you, so when you say you're looking for like light reflections and light emissions, is that specifically like, you know, in a specific light wavelength or is it other possible signatures or is it, it's just light? Well, you can look all over the electromagnetic spectrum.

I'm going to start in the optical, but I think the infrared might be very, very interesting. Yeah. I've heard a lot of people commenting on that there are many more UFO. in the infrared. However, I'm a little bit skeptical because our eyes are trained with the optical. I mean, we are all the time judging an object, what it is based on optical light. When people look at infrared imagery, they don't have that same experience. So I think it's much easier to find a UFO simply by the lack of experience.

It doesn't mean that they are more visible in the air. in the infrared, it could just mean that we are worse at identifying objects in the infrared. So you think, like, because one example would be, you're familiar with the Nimitz case in 2004, the TikTok. So that was detected right when a forward-looking infrared new system from Raytheon was installed on the Nimitz carrier strike group, you know, system or whatever. And so people hypothesized that that aperture allowed them to see the UFO. And if UFOs are moving, like, We think they might move. You'd expect light stretching or light crunching.

And so in the light stretching case, you'd get, you know, red shifts. And you get, you know, infrared would be probably better. And then in the light crunching case, if it was moving towards you, you'd see UV. And so, you know, maybe these are good detection methods. I guess we will discover. We will discover. We have to do more infrared surveys and simply search for UFOs in it. or search for flying saucers in it, like I rather suggest.

I think there has been also certain misdirection, like when people try to answer the question, what are UFOs? Because you have all these UFO reporting groups that spend lots of time trying to say, what are UFOs? And they say, oh, no, you know, 3% of the time it's birds, 10% of the time is insects. And, you know, they go on. I think it's an irrelevant question.

The only question that should matter is like, are those that would push the edge of science, which is, for example, are there non-human intelligence on our planet? That's the relevant question to answer, not what are UFOs and what is all falling into that category. Yes. So if you say, is there some non-human technology that we see available, that's a relevant question. The relevant question is, of course, also if UFOs have some kind of medical effect on people. Yes. Or are they proposing a hazard to pilots or to people on the sea?

Yeah. These are relevant questions. But just the question, what are UFO? It's too broad. Yeah. Have you ever experienced, because you are going out on a limb and even looking into this stuff, you know, you obviously. you, Avi Loeb, a few other astronomers of serious pedigree are even entertaining this. Do you, have you experienced any blowback for what you're doing?

Yes, I have. So far not come in the form of direct complaint on my choice of topic from astronomer colleagues. They have been too busy with attacking me for my choice of collaborator. And who is that? So in 2021, when we did this discovery of the nine transients, I published a paper with my colleague Jeff Marcy. So he had been cancelled in a sexual harassment scandal in 2015. But he kept on publishing papers and everything kind of, I mean, even if he retired himself, but he still published papers and collaborated with scientists.

Except for that, the same week as we got our paper accepted into the journal, suddenly the National Academy of Sciences decided to kick him out of the National Academy of Sciences, so he was removed from there. And then science and nature published papers about it, and everyone said, Who is still collaborating with Jeff Marcy? And we had that paper already accepted. and I remember someone like calling me and saying, don't make any press release because otherwise you're going to get seriously attacked.

That's wild. So since then I got kicked out of conferences. They find all kind of ways to like not letting me talk, forgetting my registration. I was had social media attacks. Wow. I had like very like I'm going to work with the scientist because he's fantastic simply. So, and I, like, I believe in human rights, and that's my thing that I don't understand that people should be, like, the idea of that one condemns a person outside of the court. Yeah.

In a public court is for me. He was never convicted. No, nothing like that. So he was, that is for me, goes against the human rights. And the second thing is that even if people do something wrong, this still should have. chance for rehabilitation. Right. Why is Jeff Mars is suddenly an exception to all human rights?

I just could, I cannot accept that. Also, I have no idea what he did in 2015. I didn't know him back then. Right. I don't know him much later. So not even commenting on, you know, whatever happened then. The time, for me, I care about the truth as far as, you know, what people's incentives around, you know, attacking the person.

It's like, okay, go after the person when they did it. if you really care about the thing they did. But to go after it right when you publish your paper about these anomalous objects, that seems to be at least motivated by the anomalous objects and trying to cover that up and not like the initial grievance. I cannot answer that question. There might be a, it might have been a coincidence.

But it's, anyway, it happened at the same time. So I have no idea what to answer on this. But I can say that I had a lot of, a lot of troubles because of my collaboration with Jeff. I'm sorry. But I will work with him as long as it's productive, as long as it's fun, and helps the science, I will keep working with him. And I simply am not going to allow some peer pressure to stop me or force me into

giving up my belief into human rights. And that's something that is important to me. Good for you. Do you think we are close to finding anything? I mean, do you have like an intuitive sense for just the overall dynamic of, you know, finding kind of more of a smoking gun, more evidence around UAP? I think we have to search for more. We have to do the best we can with the scientific projects. We have to attack the data from all directions. And we have to ignore all the setbacks. because I think actually one of the things that the whole bad episode with all these troubles with the cancel culture taught me is that one has to develop resistance. One has to develop resistance on peer pressure and critique. And I think it maybe even helped me. If I wouldn't have that experience, would I dare to work on UFOs today so openly?

It's a question I asked myself. Or did that actually liberate me in some ways that I say, okay, they're always going to go. complain. Some of my favorite people have been like unreasonably canceled and it's weirdly freeing because they're just like when you get crucified like that you're just like whatever, especially when it's like completely unwarranted and unreasonable. You kind of like let go and just you know and then you're really you're kind of free. You're not bounded by like needing to be liked or validated which most most people are. So that's I think that happened to me and I just say, I'm going to do the science I love to do.

I love to work on this topic. I don't care if anyone now thinks that I'm touching forbidden land or that I'm saying something that I shouldn't be saying. I know some people are uncomfortable with that I have the European crash retrieval initiative as a hobby project in my free time. What is that? The European crash retrieval initiative. Well, it's a private citizen driven crash retrieval team. How do you go looking for crash retrieval? Well, we actually are...

How can I get involved? So we have a small database run by Vasco, where we take in all the tips and suggestions for possible crash retrievals in Europe. We only stay inside Europe because of the... It's easier from a legal point of view to operate. And are the databases just like collect crowdsourced from people saying like online, I saw a thing crash and that sort of thing? Yeah, we have gotten lots of suggestions for cold cases, but we hope to also get some hot case where someone says, hey, I saw a UFO crash yesterday.

Can you come here? Wow. That's what we are hoping to get. Do you have any recent cold cases? We are working on a cold case that I cannot go into details on, but it's super cool, super scary. I want to go. That sounds amazing.

But I can't comment further on that, but there are some really interesting cases, yes. Wow. So is there a correlation with where the crashes occur? Are they around specific sites? I cannot answer any questions. About that? I cannot comment more on. Okay.

Is it like it's like a private group? It's a private group. So it's led by Thomas Bovinder and Alex Torrell in Sweden. Okay. So they are the project leaders. Are you guys, is there like a, desire to commercialize this stuff? We are trying to actually stay as independent as possible so that we cannot get under

pressure in any way. So so far we are not funded. We are just putting our own private money into if there's something fun that we find. We are looking into some interesting cases and we have something particularly interesting right now. I cannot comment on it. I hope that we will learn more. more in the coming year while working on that.

And the idea is simply that we don't want to wait for governments to open up about materials or UFOs. I simply believe that this is a question everyone can work with. I believe that the only thing you need is some activity that one starts collecting, inquiring about potential UFO crashes and try to see, is there anyone who is willing to share material or, willing to share knowledge of such a crash

I suspect that there must be quite a number of such crashes in Europe also and not only those that one discusses those that I want to discuss regarding the United States so

where is the information and what can we learn about all this? Is the methodology like scraping the internet for like people writing about this stuff? Well, we are doing some active investigations, of course, also looking ourselves for these places, but also hoping that someone will just inform us about something that is new, because it's sometimes maybe easier to go to a newly crashed UFO than to try to find it 50 years after.

Fascinating. Do you have a hypothesis as to, you know, per our conversation earlier, do you have a hypothesis as to what you'll find in the form of a crashed UFO? Well, it would be nice to find a flying saucer. Do you believe most of them are flying saucers or do you think they're, you know, this Michael Schallenberger, this journalist just testified in front of Congress, put out this 12-page report, immaculate constellation, this program that seemed to be some unacknowledged special access program in the U.S. And in it, there are like, there's a taxonomy. They're like different descriptions of crafts. You have flying saucers.

You have orbs. You have jellyfish is actually mentioned in this document. Do you believe in kind of a variety of things, or do you think the flying saucer is the main thing? What do you think? Well, my guess is that there would be a variety of things, but I first would like to get confirmed a single object. Yeah, that would be great. Before I could even speculate further because we need the actual physical proof. And I don't think any government is willing to release that.

Why do you think, you know, like. At least not now. One, if I were playing devil's advocate and acting skeptical, I would say, if you really have crashes going on everywhere, they're not just around military installations, then, like, why don't we have a smoking gun yet? Like, if you have plenty of UFO crashes in Europe and other places in remote areas, why don't you have some, like,

Inuit tribe or something, just come upon a crashed UFO, and then, like, you know, some anthropologist is visiting, and then they see the crashed UFO or, like, I don't know, random explorers or travelers or whatever, not, we don't have one case of like somebody, you know, having like at least a larger craft. Gary Nolan has in his possession because they were mailed to Jacques Valais and he did mass spectrometry on them, these objects from an ubituba crash in Brazil and, you know, from, from Roswell, you have bits and pieces of, you know, possible stuff. But you don't have like

the larger objects that you might expect. Well, my guess is that if I'm going to think about a counter reply to that is that we have been so much as a society marinated in skepticism and we have been, let's say, if you now would see something that is metallic and a flying saucer like, maybe you'll think this is some waste from industrial waste that is lying there. You will find probably 1,000 ways of dismissing that. And if someone would actually say there seems to be a flying saucer in the garden, you will again think that this is some kind of military project and you shouldn't go to check it out, not to get into trouble.

I think we have ways of rationalizing and coming up with counter arguments so effectively that we wouldn't be able to recognize a flying saucer if it even just lied in front of us. That's what I think, that there's some sort of programming as well that has been happening. What drives you on a deeper level? Do you hope we do make contact? And if so, how would the best form of that contact look like? Absolutely.

I really hope we make contact with a benign kind and nice civilization. I don't know how likely this defines such a civilization, but imagine if we find out that we are in touch, how much could we learn as species? How much could we learn from them? What could we learn? what are all the discoveries that we don't have to make, but that we could learn about from them directly.

I think it would be an amazing opportunity for humanity to actually progress. Amen. Is there anything on molecular biology, which you studied before, or just life in general or religion or anything, that you've rethought because of your current contemporary interest from an astronomical perspective in UAP? That's a very good question. I must say that I don't know the answer to it,

but I'm definitely open about the idea that another civilization might have been interacting with us for thousands or tens of thousands of years or longer, and that they could have brought some influence already into, well, our development, I'm open for that. I want to know if it's that way or not. I want clear answers. I want clear answers with if there are any UFOs or flying saucers that can be seen in astronomical data. I want simple binary answers to whether they are non-human artificial objects on the earth or in our oceans or buried underground. and I want to know of course if there is some non-human biologics that has been caught or by the humans that are by the military

because all these questions can change our understanding of our place in the universe, my place in the universe. And I would like to get answers within our lifetime. I think this is the most pressing and important question. I'm with you. It's almost like a governor has been placed on fundamental physics and religion, our understanding of ourselves and the universe we live in, and that governor hopefully will come off. I have a weird feeling it will in our lifetime,

which is like wild. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, right? Like, St. Friedman, unfortunately, would have been wrong. Like, I don't think things shifted that much in the last 50 to 70 years, but maybe now things are speeding up. It kind of feels like they are. It feels that way to me, too. I just want to know, and I hope that we will get a positive answer soon,

Either through the disclosure process for the political movement behind or through science, if that is the case, I just don't know what will be the implications, but I guess we will learn. We'll find out. Well, Dr. V. Rael, I appreciate you spending time with me. This was really remarkable to just learn about all the stuff you're doing. How can, you know, are you looking for more funding? Is that like something that you're always sort of open to or like what, how can. people help you, you know, in your efforts? Well, there are several ways that they can help us. One is with the XOPro project, we are always looking for more support to set up more telescopes in New Mexico, where we have our telescope. I think I didn't...

Where in New Mexico? So the XOPro project that I'm having now, we're setting up a network of telescopes, because that will allow us to look for such a signature from an extraterrestrial probe or non-human artifact, but also confirm it via multiple telescope. And once you can see it in at least two telescopes, you can also get the distance to such an object if it's outside the atmosphere where we are looking. So we are looking outside the atmospheres with exoprope. But in order to localize it, well, you need to have at least two.

that are well separated. And of course, for every additional telescope, there is a running cost coming in and also the cost of the telescope itself. So this is one way that one can be supporting us. Another thing that I would hope to do in Europe is that we would like to have at some point a conference completely dedicated to non-human artifacts

and how to search for them in space in the atmosphere, underwater, on the ground, underground, and also these are things that are difficult to organize, where we always can, will appreciate some kind of practical support to organize it if you have a hole in Europe that we could use for free, for the audience, and so on. So there's lots of ways one can help. Awesome. Well, audience, help Dr. Vioriel, if you can, if any of that applies to you. I really appreciate it.

It was awesome. That was fantastic. Yeah.