Front Burner - Congress, aliens and the search for E.T.

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

Crashed crafts, non-human biologics, and the Pentagon in possession of UFOs. Last week, former military and intelligence figures appeared as whistleblowers at a U.S. congressional hearing, testifying about the government’s apparent secrecy around UAPs: unidentified anomalous phenomena. But one former air force intelligence official, David Grusch, claimed the Pentagon collected non-human organic material and that he knew where it was keeping UFOs. Researchers searching the universe for alien life say this is far from proof they’re among us. Today, Seth Shostak explains. He’s the senior astronomer for the SETI Institute – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – and the host of its radio show and podcast, Big Picture Science. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Tamara Kandaker. If you believe we have crashed craft, stated earlier, do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft? Biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah. Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics? Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.

This exchange isn't from a midnight radio show or some podcast with a third eye thumbnail that we found in the depths of Spotify. It's from a U.S. congressional hearing on UAPs, or as they're more commonly known, UFOs. Has any of the activity been aggressive, been hostile? I know of multiple colleagues of mine that got physically injured. Last Wednesday, former military officials testified as whistleblowers, answering questions about unexplainable objects and the government's secrecy about them. They told Congress the government knows much more about UFOs

than it's telling the public. But the testimony of one former Air Force intelligence officer was particularly out of this world. You have mentioned that there's interdimensional potential. Could you expound on that? The framework that I'm familiar with, for example, is something called the holographic principle. It derives itself from general relativity and quantum mechanics.

David Grush worked on a Pentagon task force looking into UAPs. He said he'd interviewed dozens of people and learned that the government had collected debris from UFOs that had crashed into Earth and said that he knew where it was being kept. He also repeatedly said there was more that he couldn't talk about publicly. But while some UFO chasers took this as confirmation of aliens, researchers who are actually searching the sky for life say it's not even close. Seth Shostak is the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute and the host of its radio show and podcast, Big Picture Science. SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Today, he's going to tell me what proof of ET could actually look like.

Hi, Seth. It's nice to talk to you. Nice to speak with you. So last Wednesday, we heard from former military members saying some things that we've actually covered on the show before, like a former Navy pilot who said he saw an object shaped like a tic-tac darting around. What is shocking to us is that the incident was never investigated. None of my crew were ever questioned. Tapes were never taken. And after a couple of days, it turned into a great story with friends. But then there was the testimony under oath from

Grush. And as a researcher, what claims did he make that you found the most extraordinary? Well, I think when he said that there were federal teams, in other words, federal government teams that routinely went out to recover crash debris from alien visitation. I think that's what struck me as, well, that raised my eyebrows about a meter or two. And why is that? Well, to begin with, there's the whole question of why is the federal government doing that? Why don't they send out some scientists or something like that? But secondly, the whole premise there that there are aliens visiting us is something that's been a story that's, well, it goes back to the 1940s.

And there's never been any proof of that. It's just, you know, like a ghost in the attic. There's no proof of it. It just sounds neat. Right. And Grush isn't a nobody. He's a former intelligence officer who was presented as a whistleblower here. Mr. Gresh, finally, do you believe that our government is in possession of UAPs?

Absolutely, based on interviewing over 40 witnesses over four years. And where? I know the exact locations and those. How did he say he came across this information about a cover up? Well, that I don't know, actually. I don't know where he gets any of this information. As far as I could tell, he didn't support it. He said, well, he made claims that these recoveries were being made, but when he was asked, well, can you give an example of one? He said, well, I can't because it's all classified. And that's an argument from ignorance that's saying, look, I'm saying something extraordinary,

And that's an argument from ignorance that's saying, look, I'm saying something extraordinary, but because it's all classified, I can't really prove it to you. So that's a rather poor reason to believe it. And so the fact that this was a hearing in Congress, it did lend a credibility to Grush's claims. And I've seen people who believe that this hearing meant that the government has officially confirmed the existence of aliens here on Earth. But I know that having listened to his testimony closely, you don't think he's offered enough evidence that aliens have come to Earth. And I wonder if you can tell me a bit about why you're skeptical. Well, to begin with, you know, the premise is something to be skeptical about, because if aliens have come to Earth, you would think that, you know, some of our assets, as they're sometimes called, you know, there are 8,000 satellites orbiting the Earth that are photographing mostly the Earth,

and that some of them would have seen something, and that, you know, there would be people in other countries that would have seen something. So there's this lack of corroborating evidence, which I think is important. I mean, it's an extraordinary claim without any extraordinary evidence. He just says, it's true. And if you don't believe me, it's only because I can't tell you everything because it's classified. So back in 2017, there was this New York Times story about the Pentagon secretly studying the possibility of UFOs. And Congress has now held two hearings on UFOs in the last couple of years. Why do you think these claims have gone from somewhat fringe to getting mainstream attention recently? Well, I think that they've always been in the mainstream in terms of the public.

The public has been interested in this idea for a very, very long time, certainly since the 1940s. And once you keep in mind that the federal government, from its point of view, is interested in these two, I don't know anybody in the federal government, you know, thinks that these really are alien craft, but they do want to know whether they're perhaps Russian craft or Chinese craft or something else. They certainly want to know what's up in the airspace. And, you know, that's just from the standpoint of, you know, just good defense policy. So they're interested. And of course, when they show interest, particularly if it's related to defense, they may not tell you everything. And that just feeds the conspiracy aspect of this whole thing. The public, a large fraction of the public, seems to believe that the aliens are visiting and that the government knows it and is covering it all up. And in terms of the public, you mentioned the 1940s. I assume you're talking about Roswell? Well, Roswell was one of them. Yes, that's perhaps the most famous incident. There were others. And in the 1950s, you know, there were reports of saucers flying over Washington, D.C.

There were reports of saucers flying over Washington, D.C. In Washington, ghost-like objects dart across the radar screen at the CAA Traffic Control Center at National Airport for several hours, traveling more than 100 miles an hour. Air Force jet fighters spend several hours chasing the objects plotted on the radar scope. So we should say that the Pentagon has responded and says it's never had extraterrestrial materials. responded and says it's never had extraterrestrial materials, but Grush repeatedly suggested that the government knows about aliens and that they're covering it up. Why do you think it's unlikely that the government would be able to do that? Well, to begin with, how is it that the aliens have arranged things so that only the federal government gets the evidence, right? If they're really visiting Earth, don't you think there would be lots of people who would be confronted with aliens in their front yard or something like that?

I mean, would be making photos or videos or something. It's hard for me to believe that the federal government has been able to monopolize all the good evidence of this. If there's really visitation, I don't think it's in the aliens' interest to make sure only the government knows about it. So obviously, you don't think aliens have been to Earth yet, but you and your colleagues at SETI are actively searching for other life in the universe, what is it that makes you optimistic that there is probably life out there somewhere? Well, I think that really it boils down to what's

called in science the principle of mediocrity, which is to say, you know, if you think there's something special about your circumstances, you may be wrong. And we now know something that we didn't know 30 years ago, that there are a lot of planets out there. Right. And in fact, every third or fourth star seems to have a planet somewhat like the Earth. Every third or fourth star like the sun, which is, you know, eight or 10 percent of all stars. So there are a lot of planets out there that are, if you will, cousins of Earth. And you can say, well, OK, but that doesn't mean they have life, which is true. of Earth. And you can say, well, okay, but that doesn't mean they have life, which is true. It doesn't mean they have life. But on the other hand, is Earth the only such planet to have spawned life

and eventually intelligent life? Or is that, you know, a very commonplace sort of occurrence? And it seems safer to me to believe that it's a commonplace occurrence. There's nothing we can point to about Earth that, you know, you couldn't point to for some of these other millions and millions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy. And one thing I always wonder is what we mean by quote-unquote life in the universe. Are we expecting life out there to be something like bacteria and worms or intelligence like us or something that we can't even fathom, like a Star Trek being of pure energy. Pure energy. Pure thought. Totally incorporeal.

Not life as we know it at all. Yeah. Yeah. They're always pure energy. What are the beings that aren't pure energy? What kind of energy are they? What are the beings that aren't pure energy? What kind of energy are they? No, impure energy. I don't know. But it's hard to say. We don't have a good definition of life, actually.

That may be somewhat surprising, but it is the case that if you try and write down, well, what do you mean when you say something is alive? What does that mean? You can write down various properties of something that's alive. It reproduces and it metabolizes and so on and so on. But there's no simple definition of life, it turns out. So we're not even sure what it means to be alive. But you could say, well, all right, leave that aside. We'll just assume that if there is something alive, we'll recognize that fact. Maybe that's the best you can do. But again, the premise here is that what's happened on this planet is probably not a miracle. It's probably not so extraordinary.

You know, life may have formed many, many times just in our galaxy. And of course, we can see hundreds of billions of other galaxies on that basis. Just the availability of a lot of real estate. There's probably an awful lot of life around. But when we see aliens in pop culture, the alien life often looks something like us, right? Like in the movie Alien, the alien has an extra mouth and acid for blood. I don't see anything like that except molecular acid. It's got a wonderful defense mechanism. You don't dare kill it. But it still has legs and hands and its head looks like a human's. So do you find it likely that alien life would look like us? Well, to begin with, you have to understand that in fiction, it's helpful to have the alien look something like us because that way you can recognize it.

I mean, you know, if it looked like a bicycle or something, well, I don't know what that is. Now, would the real aliens look very much like us? Well, I mean, we're not a terribly bad design from the standpoint of an intelligent species. You know, we have our eyes up near our brains so that we get quick reaction and so forth. I mean, if you look at it strictly from an engineering point of view, it's not a terribly bad design. But on the other hand, it's certainly not the only design. All you have to do is go to the zoo and look around there and you'll see all sorts of other creatures, many of which are fairly clever, and most of them don't look like us. So there are many possible designs. The fact that in fiction, they usually look like

us is just a convenience from the standpoint of telling the story. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years.

I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Let's get into how SETI is actually looking for life far away from us. So what are you using to listen for intelligent life out there?

Yeah, well, this is an old idea that goes back many decades. And that is to see if we can pick up any radio transmissions, right? Or for that matter, flashing lasers. You know, some sort of signaling that an advanced species would use to send information from one place to another. And so we do that. But, you know, we do it because the physics allows it. And it's a very rapid way of sending information around. It goes at the speed of light. You can't do any better than that. And consequently, we figure, well, OK, if it's occurred to us to use this particular bit of physics, if you will,

to send information from one place to another, then maybe advanced societies elsewhere are doing that too. So we look for it. It's mostly because, you know, what else can you look for? So this is kind of just like the movie Contact. The very large array in New Mexico is the key to our chances for success. With its 27 linked radio telescopes, we can search more accurately than at any other conventional facility. Yeah, it's very similar. I mean, contact was based on the kind of work that we do. So maybe that's not surprising. And what about for non-intelligent life? What is SETI looking for in far-off planets to find evidence of that? Well, in some ways, that's easier. And in other ways, it's harder.

I mean, you can't find it with a radio receiver, really. But what you can do is use more conventional telescopes to look at the atmospheres of planets that are around other stars. look at the atmospheres of planets that are around other stars. And if, for example, you find oxygen in those atmospheres, you know, you'd say, well, why is there oxygen in our atmosphere? Well, it's only because of the life that's here, right? It's the product of photosynthesis. So if you find it in the atmosphere of other worlds, you would say, well, I mean, it looks like they have photosynthesis too,

which would, you know, imply some sort of life. So, you know, we proceed on the basis of what we know about because we don't know how to do much more than that. So where are we in the search? Like, what's the closest thing SETI's found to evidence of life in the universe, intelligent or not intelligent? Well, there's no such thing as close. You know, you don't get points for being close because nobody knows what close means. Either you found it or you haven't. And we haven't conclusively found life anywhere else, actually, in the universe, even in our own solar system, right? Although there are, you know, numerous worlds in our solar system that might

sport some sort of microbial life, we haven't conclusively found any of that yet. That might be the first place we will find it because, you know, we can get to these worlds, some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, for example. But if you're talking about the kind of aliens that you see in the movies, which are intelligent and can hold up their side of the conversation, you know, that's a harder thing. We're not going to find that in our solar system. And none of the worlds of our solar system are likely to support that kind of sophisticated life. But you might find it elsewhere using the techniques that we've already talked about and trying to pick up the signaling. Right. So I know you've

made this bet that if extraterrestrial life exists, we'll find evidence of it by 2035, despite how unbelievably huge the universe is and the number of planets there are. What makes you confident that we'll be able to find such a needle in a haystack that soon? Yeah, well, it is because it's so huge in a way that the universe is so huge. And we now have the ability to, if you will, sample the atmospheres of planets around other stars. That's still a hard experiment, but we can do it. And that experiment gets only better with time. And that's kind of why I dared to say, to my regret, I suspect, that we will find some sort of evidence for extraterrestrial life by the mid-2030s.

For a lot of people, the prospect of other life out there is terrifying because it could be hostile. And I know SETI just listens for ET, but if we do find life, how will you consider the question of whether or not we should make contact? Well, to begin with, there's the whole question of whether you can make contact, right? If you find evidence for life and it's 100 light years away, which is still pretty close, actually, astronomically speaking, you know, making contact is a really big project. You can say, send a message of some sort of picture or whatever and it takes 100 years to get there and another 100 years for their response to get back to you so making contact may may not be part of the deal here but if you if you can find it you would certainly study whatever signals you picked up to see if you could understand any of it because obviously i mean if somebody is broadcasting

something into space, they're not just going to, you know, broadcast an empty signal. There'll be something on that broadcast. Maybe it's only music or who knows what. But you would try and figure that out as a first go. Right. And is there a protocol around this that SETI has already established in case it happens? Well, there are protocols out there. I don't consider them terribly important because in fact, the protocols say things like don't respond to a signal that you pick up until there's been some sort of international consultation,

things like that. Those are mostly political, but it won't work that way. If somebody picks up a signal coming from another world, you know, everybody with the ability to build a transmitter is going to do so and start sending their personal messages to the aliens. And you can't stop them. There's no body of law that allows you to stop them. So I'm sure that if we were to find some evidence of intelligence elsewhere, there would be people who would be trying to make contact with that intelligence. There is the possibility that they could share technology with us, right?

Especially if it's a society that could communicate or even visit us over these vast distances, they'd have to be extremely advanced, right? Is that an argument for making contact? Well, it could be. I mean, they might be more advanced. It's likely that they would be more advanced because that would make it easier to assume that they're making a signal that we could pick up. So they might be more advanced than we are. And to say that we could learn something from that or that they will send us information. I mean, that may be just wishful thinking. I mean, just imagine that, you know, you could send information about your software on your home computer there to a Neanderthal. The Neanderthal is never going to get it.

Never going to really understand what you're trying to tell them. So I'm not sure that we would ever understand what's going on. But what we presumably would know is that there's some information there. And this is coming from a sophisticated intelligence that, you know, is trying to say something important, even if we don't figure it out ourselves. Yeah, I want to end on a more philosophical question, Seth. So even if we don't make contact and just find real evidence of other life, as someone who researches this, how would proof of ET change how you think about this world?

Well, I think most of the effect would be, as you note there, philosophical. It would be like asking, you know, suppose you could tell the Europeans in the year 1400 that there were a couple of continents on the other side of the Atlantic where there were societies and, you know, indigenous flora and fauna and so forth and so on. You know, how would it change their existence for them to know that that was true? And you could say, well, maybe it wouldn't change their daily life very much. But on the other hand, it's philosophically very interesting to know that you have company out there.

And I think it would be kind of the same thing. It's not that we would necessarily be able to learn at their knee, but we would know that what's happened here on this planet has happened in other places and presumably many times. Okay, Seth, thank you so much. This was fascinating. I appreciate it. It's been my pleasure.

All right, that's all for today. I'm Tamara Kendacker. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you tomorrow.