Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Sarah Scoles, Journalist and Author of “They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers” (#043)

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

   Science journalist and author Sarah Scoles talks about her new book “They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers”, a study of UFO culture and its critics. What makes people believe intelligent alien life has visited the Earth? Fresh off this week’s news that the Pentagon has declassified and released three videos of UFOs (or UAPs Unidentified Aerial Phenomena as the government prefers to call them), Scoles talks about why some people are more prone to believe than others. And, for an alternate explanation, we refer you to Mick West, a popular skeptic, who analyzed the Nimitz #UFO / #UAP video last year.  Show notes and resources are available here. And a worksheet for this episode can be found here. 03:20 How a New York Times article about UFOs led to inspiration. 06:00 Why don’t astronomers see UFOs? 10:30 Confirmation bias for fans of the X-Files. 14:10 Why people believe the government, and even astronomers, are hiding something. 18:10 Could UFO investigations benefit from the scientific peer-review process? 18:35 MUFON is crowdsourcing the search for extraterrestrial life [https://www.mufon.com] 20:30 Why are millionaires & billionaires like Tom DeLonge and Robert Bigelow willing to spend so much money on this pursuit? 29:40 Earth may already host alien life in a shadow biosphere. 31:30 5 questions INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE asks all authors. Sarah Scoles is a freelance science writer, a contributing author at WIRED, and a contributing editor at Popular Science. See her impressive list of bylines here: http://www.sarahscoles.com  Sarah previously worked as an associate editor at Astronomy magazine and an educational tour guide at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. In this discussion with Brian Keating, Scoles relates that she never planned to write a second book about space, but research and imagination demanded it. Her first book, 2017’s “Making Contact,” is a biography of Dr. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, who provided inspiration for Carl Sagan’s protagonist in his book “Contact.” Buy Sarah Scoles’ books here: They Are Already Here: https://amzn.to/3fcofXp Making Contact: https://amzn.to/3fc644o Find Brian Keating on Twitter: twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Find the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination on Twitter: twitter.com/imagineUCS Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'd like to welcome everybody to this episode of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imaginations Into the Impossible Podcast. I'm your fearful host, Brian Keating. Joining me today is one of my favorite author, science journalist Sarah Skulls. Hello, Sarah. Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's great to have you on The Into the Impossible Podcast. Today we'll be discussing your brand new book, which is your second book, I believe. And it is called They Are Already Here. about why there is this frequently reported description of flying saucers and why that may be and what that tells us about the state of the world and how people perceive interesting phenomena such as unidentified flying objects. So Sarah, I have to say your last book, Making Contact was a biography of Jill Tarter and the realm of kind of investigative journalism, so to speak, but also pursuing this ambitious goal of perhaps hearing and listening to perhaps extraterrestrial intelligence.

And now you're writing a book, you've written a book, a wonderful book, about seeing flying saucers, unidentified flying objects in various locations around the world. And my next question for you is, what is next for you? Is it a book about the Yeti or Loch Ness Monster? What do you have next? I don't know. I feel like other writers kind of have the cryptos. and cryptozoology pretty well covered.

I've actually been doing some research into the history of doomsday cults lately now that we're in a strange state of the world. So I don't know if that will turn into anything or not, but I have a batch of books to read about it. So we'll see what happens. Oh, maybe they'll bring you down to San Diego, where we've had our fair share of cults, some unfortunately successful in their pursuit of their own personal doomsday's.

But I can't wait to learn more about that project for you. So I want to begin with the book, a discussion of, they are already here and we'll have not only a, you know, a screenshot from the book's cover and some images that you've provided us, but also we'll have a giveaway for listeners on the iTunes store to the actual audio version of the podcast. We'll give away a copy once the bookstores get liberated from lockdown. We are currently in COVID lockdown. I want to talk about the book, the process of writing the book, and of course, you know, hopefully entice our listeners, our audience to go and pick up a copy. But I want to ask first, after writing Making Contact, what impelled you to want to write this book? And it's sort of setty adjacent in the sense. So what impelch you to want to write they are already here?

Yeah, actually, when I finished making contact, I didn't. intend to write any other books, and definitely not any more books about aliens or alien-adjacent things. That was kind of unexpected, but it all started when there was a New York Times story that came out in late 2017 that was all about this Pentagon research program that supposedly had done a bunch of work, trying to figure out what UFOs are, or as the military likes to call them UAP, an identified aerial phenomena because it sounds more serious. And I was very interested in this story as someone who had done a bunch of research on study and had kind of covered the space industry for a while.

And I just started setting out trying to confirm or deny all the things that were in this story about this UFO research program. And in doing that any time as a, you know, as a study. scientist or a journalist when you go out to research something, you meet a bunch of people who've been researching it for much longer than you and who know a lot more than you do. And it was when I met those people who had been really interested in UFOs for years or decades that I discovered that UFO people, as I sometimes call them, are not just all, you know, conspiracy theorists.

There's a lot of very smart, good researchers out there who just happened to have this as their subject. And then I started to think, you know, why and what place do UFOs hold in our culture? Because they're this really persistent phenomenon. And that's too long for one article. So I had to go off and write a book. So you are very renowned journalist. And in fact, we met several years ago to the story about one of the research projects I was involved with to look for peculiar phenomenon known as cosmic bio-refringence and twists and certain properties of the light.

that comes from the earliest times in the cosmos. And that kind of segues into my first set of questions as a professional astronomer, you know, who does observations, including some conducted with large radio telescopes, such as the ones behind me and my screen virtual background from a very large array out in Socorro, New Mexico. We use these massive telescopes.

And, you know, basically any night of the year for a radio telescope is almost as good is a perfectly pristine, clear, crisp night that you describe in the book, having experienced the 2017 eclipse of the sun, and then encountering an unidentified flying object, I want to first, you know, kind of theme this conversation around the very weighty and important issues that you bring up in this book of confirmation bias and sort of, you know, the notion that we sometimes see what we want to see. But I want to begin with a question that some of my assurance. Astronomer friends want me to ask you, which is, you know, given that we have, you know,

thousands of telescopes, radio, microwave, and optical telescopes, plying the skies, looking for any shred of evidence over the last, you know, 50, 100 years where the SETI kind of, not just SETI, but the notion of extraterrestrials, perhaps visiting this planet, how come we tend not to see them coming from professional astronomers, in your opinion? Yeah, well, I think the first and probably easiest answer to that question is that astronomers tend to be more familiar with what they see in the sky. If somebody who is looking at data from a telescope all the time sees something anomalous, A, they're trained to, you know, try very hard to figure out what it is and not just say,

that's a crazy thing, and I don't understand it, but to go out and try to understand it. and then also are familiar with things like, you know, you get a lot of people, just casual observers, who will see things like Venus, which can look very strange in the sky and think that's the UFO, but an astronomer would think that looks like it's in the part of the sky where Venus is.

And in terms of, you know, telescopes, I think that that is a good question, why we have all of this hard data, not just from astronomical observatories, but also from space-based observatories that are doing Earth observation that could theoretically see some sign of alien presence on Earth and why they don't, as far as we know.

And I think that's a problem for the UFO community if we have all of these sensors, why we don't have any hard data and what we have instead are just a bunch of eyewitness reports. And I think especially physical scientists, are rightly, very skeptical of eyewitness reports. And I know personally, I mean, I'm not a scientist, I'm a journalist, but when, especially prior to this book, if I saw something I didn't understand in the sky, like it wouldn't

have a deep effect on me. I don't think really in the way that it does for a lot of people, I would just see it and think, that's weird. I don't understand what that is, but probably someone could. And I think a lot of people without scientific training especially think then that if they don't understand it, then therefore it must be not understand bubble, which is just a difference in thinking. Yeah. So one thing that we are both connected to is being open to evidence, but not, you know, hopefully not being prejudiced by the desire to believe something, for example. And that's afflicted. you know, as I've discussed in the past in many different regimes, whether it be in science when we want to make a big discovery for different reasons,

personal, professional prestige, that sometimes influences decisions that in ways that aren't intrinsically scientific. And you go through the book and you talk a little bit about, you know, one of the most foremost kind of popular culture references to the phenomena of UFOs. that is of course the X-Files. And the theme are sort of the tagline of the X-Files on all these posters is, I want to believe. And I usually get asked this question of the scientists, you know,

what do I hope to see and what do I want to come out of a given project? And it's a very delicate question because on one hand, you can't help but, you know, have a desire. We're only human after all. And we're humans doing science, even despite the kind of cliches to the contrary. But what do you make of this desire that for someone who's, it's hard enough for someone to be a scientist to keep his or her confirmation bias out of the mixture? But what do you make of it for people that are, you know, maybe prone to believing in

conspiracies, whatever that means, and or, you know, perhaps cover-ups by more powerful agencies? What is it about the human brain that really seeks to observe or discern these, these phenomena. Yeah, I think I mean, anytime you go into a topic and you already know what you want to find, which, like you said, afflicts all of us, no matter how objective we try to be, that can't help but affect your thinking. And, you know, the scientific process has some built-in checks and balances against that,

at least in some places. But if you're a person who, let's say, you want to believe in UFOs like Mulder on the X-Files, then when you do see Venus on the skyline or something else, and you're going in wanting to see something strange, then chances are you're more likely to interpret it as something strange because that supports this view that you already had. And I think probably most of us are prone to that in some ways. But then you can stop yourself and say,

I just think that because that's what I want to think. But I think that's kind of a little bit against our natural nature. So it takes an extra kind of metacognitive step. And I think there's also this additional element that a lot of the UFO anthropology ties to I talk to pointed out, which is that movies and TV, and books, the ex-files, you know, everything that's about UFOs or alien heads on Earth has trained us from the time that we started consuming media to think that when we see something weird in the sky, it must be an alien spaceship because that was what was in Independence Day and

the X-Files and basically anything else. And if we didn't come into it with that interpretation, you know, we might think of it as something else. Like maybe if we grew up in a culture where we were all the movies were about weird atmospheric phenomena. We'd be like, wow, look at that weird atmospheric phenomenon. And it's just we come into it with all these cultural biases built in, that it's hard to even recognize as biases because they're so, they're the water that we swim in. Yeah, that's one of the things that I noted in reading your book and talking with friends

and family about it is that it's really kind of a stealth psychology book in a way. It's really written in a perspective that you really have to, examine yourself as John Muir, you know, one of the foremost naturalists in history described, you know, his voyage into nature as more going, you know, going out as he went out, he went in. And the way that he found himself is really by looking at and by going out into the while. I'll get that quote. But we'll put it in the show notes. But the point is that the book has a real wonderful quality about it.

This is, again, we're talking to Sarah Skulls about her book. They are all right here, why people see saucers. And this is really highlighted in a way that surprised me. One, you know, I'm, of course, familiar with standard sort of perceptions of lay people and even scientists that are kind of anti-government and even anti-authoritarian. But what surprised me is that the general public thinks of us, you know, we astronomers as a sort of the man, you know, this culture of authority. And you describe, you know, kind of these government installations that are really astronomical

facilities. And I wonder if you could take the listeners through that journey to the various, you know, major telescope facilities. You yourself had worked at one in your previous life and career. And then that in some part, small part, led to, of course, making contact and writing the authoritative of biography of Jill Tarter, my friend Jill Tarter. So can you say something about why is, and if it surprised you, that people kind of perceive even astronomers

as part of perhaps a cabal of maliciousness? Yeah, I think there is definitely a certain subset of people who do, whether it's like the far end of things of flat earth believers thinking that astronomers are manipulating data to show a circular Earth and faking, the orbits of things from space or people who think that there's somebody at NASA manipulating images from, you know, the Mars rovers to remove the alien so that we don't see them. And that is a theory that exists. And what I have found, partly from, yeah, like you mentioned, I used to work at Green Bank Conservatory, which is a radio telescope in West Virginia.

And my job there was interacting with the public a lot. And I was surprised to learn when I worked there that lots of people, you know, probably one on every other tour, thought that we had some secret evidence of aliens that we just weren't telling them about. And A, I was like they definitely wouldn't tell me because I would tell everyone. And B, like, in general, astronomers aren't hiding things because the culture of sciences to, you know, produce open data and do things in public and make things transparent. But I think what I found from working in Greenbank and visiting various other spots, including one that appears behind you right now, it's a very large array, is that to a lot of people, astronomy is really opaque profession

to use in astronomical words. People might read stories about cosmic discoveries, but they don't really understand exactly how it happens what it is these telescopes are doing, especially ones like radio telescopes where they don't produce traditional visual images, visible light images that you can see. And so that's one thing. So when something is opaque, people just kind of put their own interpretation on it sometimes. And then there's also the element that a lot of scientific facilities have started their

lives as military facilities or with some kind of military funding in their past. And now with the internet, it's not hard for people to find that out. And then kind of springboard that into the present and say, well, they're still doing secret government work and things like that. And just to see all of these invisible hands in the background kind of moving the pieces. And yeah, I don't think of astronomers as the men. But I can definitely understand why some people might. Well, you know, another aspect that comes through a little bit more in making contact than in they are already here is kind of this adversarial nature of science in that, you know, there's nothing more that I would like to do than to, you know, make a discovery.

But there's, you know, second to that in many scientists' minds is almost disproving someone else's discovery because that's the real nature of scientific confirmation is that it must be confirmed. that must be replicated in an independent, reproducible fashion. We always refer to this as peer review, et cetera, and despite some of my colleagues have a poster in their offices, I have no peers. But for most of us, we certainly have peers and superiors, but the question of, you know, if somebody were to see something, you know, there would be nothing, you know, more, more, you know,

kind of significant in an astronomer's career than to actually make a discovery. And I wonder, does the UFO culture even recognize that, that having peer review, the equivalent of a peer review, or some kind of crowdsourcing of data or of observations could benefit the credulity that people have in bigger society? Yeah, I think there's definitely certain elements of the people who are interested in UFOs who would welcome that kind of thing. And there have been different attempts to try to do that. Like there's an organization called Mufant, the Mutual UFO Network, that has kind of tried to standardize investigation and produce reports. They're not peer-reviewed, but they're trying to have some kind of reproducible procedure. But a hard thing about that, and like we were talking about earlier,

is that lots of the data that exists right now that people are trying to dig into is first-person accounts, which we all know are not very reliable. no matter who you are. Like, if I had an account, you shouldn't trust it, probably. And I think, you know, there are people do advocate for attempts to get to get hard data and do peer review. And in, but the UFO culture in general is not as open as scientists are. Like there's one guy named Robert Bigelow who has funded a number of UFO studies that were supposed to, to collect this hard data with sensors and cameras

and spreadsheets and software and scientific type things. And that data, for whatever reason, I'm not sure, never became public and never got published in a peer-reviewed journal. And so I think in a lot of cases that's probably related to the I Want to believe phenomenon is that people are finding data that doesn't align with their hypothesis.

And when that happens, you don't want to publish it, which happens to scientists sometimes, too, who don't publish there, no results or things like that. But I think it's more prevalent in the UFO community. Yeah. So speaking of Bigelow, I want to kind of address that particular elephant in the room and kind of wonder, you know, what is it about rich, mostly men that seem to be so drawn to this or prominent men versus? is when, or did you, is it true? I mean, are there, would you say, what would you say that gender, you know, kind of breakdown is? Yeah, I would say it skews heavily male, the general demographic, yeah. I think. And in making contact, of course, you know, one of the lead, you know, characters in the sense is Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, the late Paul Allen, passed a day,

about a year or so ago. And Paul funded, you know, this massive project that was really the culmination of Jill Tarter's career at the SETI Institute and that you describe the trials and tribulations of that wonderful facility, but yet to live up to the promise that it could have had. But I wonder, what is it about these billionaires that make them so intrigued about, about investigation of, you know, potentially fringe or, you know, at least outside the scientific mainstream, in some cases for UFOs, in particular, maybe less so for SETI, I think we'll get to, you know, the stats. of SETI in a little bit, but what do you think appeals to them about this, about, you know, using their well to look for things like UFOs. I'm talking about him and the Blink 182,

co-leader Tom, is it Tom Dallon? Yeah, Tom DeLon. Yeah, and his Ad Astra project. Can you maybe speculate and what makes people devote so many, so much other resources to this Sure, yeah, I can absolutely, with the caveat that it's speculating and pop psychologists, I think in my mind, what motivates people is similar to what you were just talking about with scientists where there's nothing more appealing than making a really big discovery, and that is a big motivating factor and why people are doing science or researching UFOs in the first place, because as fringes, we think of this, topic as and it is fringe.

If someone, you know, did find the flying saucer and verify that it came from outer space, that would be a very large, that would be huge. And I think that people with a lot of money who have the resources to pursue something huge and can also just risk losing all of that money are willing to do it for the, it's a low probability, high consequence event, I guess. when you get to a certain place with your money and then also with your reputation, like people still respected Paul Allen after he funded a search for broadcasts from extraterrestrial. I'm not sure how much respect people have for Tom DeLong, but Reno Robert Bigelow is a businessman who,

well, actually his company recently shut down for a while due to the pandemic, but he had a module attached to the space station, which he's a big now. the contractor taken seriously and yet ran like a paranormal research institute and I think once you get to a certain threshold you can kind of do what you want and people will say like that's a quirky guy but they'll still take you seriously yeah I think that is interesting you know also again pure speculation psychological armchair analysis is worth what you pay for it but you know this legacy of wanting you know somebody said recently once once people about Jeff Beza And once they get to be a certain level of wealth, they really just want to live forever.

And in some sense, making a discovery like this would be scientifically, scientific immortality, if you will. So maybe that's a part of it as well. One person who I've always been very interested in is Michael Shermer, and hopefully you guys will connect together too. And Michael, of course, describes an alien abduction that happened to him in his book, as well as this wonderful book called Mistakes Were Made, but not by me by Carol Tavers. I don't know if you've read that book before.

Yeah, that's a really good book. It's about all sorts of cognitive dissonance and how human beings cannot tolerate being in a state of this dissonance and the extraordinary links that police officers go to justify to themselves that the perpetrator is guilty and how attorneys will do similar things. and even in marriage or relationships that people will have kind of blinders on while they're in the pre-nuptial kind of phase. And then they all of a sudden their eyes are open.

And the part I haven't completed, I'm almost three-quarters of the way done. But basically, I believe that there's a virtue in teaching these kinds of dissonance and biases in the guarding against them at a young age as well as possible. And I think, you know, Michael's adventure when he was abducted by aliens or he believed that he was really led him into a new career, which is quite the opposite, 100 maybe the opposite, towards the realm of debunking and being a skeptic, which he'll hopefully, as I said, have you on his show. And, you know, we've discussed this to be and I together, and just this adversarial nature that scientists have. And whether or not it's a good thing, I think, you know, all fields need sort of a beginning phase where they sort of get their start and to take it seriously. I think things like SETI have been going on now for 60 years. Actually, I think this is the 60th year of the original papers that were produced in the Project Osma. And you talk a little bit about that in this book.

Did you find, you know, kind of old friends and recurring themes coming from making contact? in the making of they are already here? Yeah, there's not so much overlap exactly with the people researching SETI and the people researching UFOs, but of course the people who are doing SETI get a lot of emails and random phone calls from people who are interested in UFOs and want a respected astronomer to be able to explain that to them. But one overlap I did find was one that articulated by a radio astronomer named

astronomer named Garrett Berscher who once was involved in SETI in its earlier years and then came to see the motivation behind it as almost religious. Like even if a SETI astronomer says, you know,

I go into this without a hypothesis I am trying to find out whether there is intelligent life elsewhere and I'm just trying to figure that out. He pointed out that it has to be motivated by the hope that it's out there. And also, a lot of the justification for doing SETI is about, you know, things like if we find a civilization, they've existed for a long time, therefore they must be peaceful because they

haven't, you know, atom bombed each other to death, or they've figured out how to solve their own global warming. And so it kind of has this salvation. thing going on. And I think both of those, which SETI astronomers would probably argue with, do have some amount of overlap with UFO believers who kind of look to the skies for something more powerful. And they wouldn't call it a god, but it kind of plays that role for them. And I think that's, he called it the Salvation School of SETI. Yeah, that's interesting. I want to get into that towards the end in a few minutes when we talk a little bit about the kind of personal motivation and perhaps revelations that you've had in the writing of this book.

Before we get there, we had an event earlier this year at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, which we called, is ET already lurking in our own cosmic backyard with scientists and authors, both of them, Jim Benford and Paul Davies. And Paul Davies wrote a book in 2010, so exactly 10 years ago, called The Erie Silence. And in that case, in that book, he makes a very convincing case that the likelihood that the extraterrestrials could have really overcome some of these great giant hurdles to their existence to become, not only as Jill Tarter often points out, It's not enough that you create life. You know, slime mold on Enceladus is very fascinating and important, but it has no technological

capabilities. On the other hand, he pointed out, you know, perhaps it could be that there could already be here, pre-empting your title, that aliens could be here, but in the form of sort of a shadow biosphere. And I wonder, did you consider, you know, not just the saucer appearance, I mean, of certainly UFOs, that's by nature, but of aliens among us, but not in the kind of prosthetic forehead type variety that we typically see defecting. Yeah, I didn't include it in the research,

but I have looked into the shadow biosphere idea that life either arose twice here or, you know, came here from somewhere else and still exists. And I think that's an intriguing possibility. And I think there's the very smart people who have written about ways to look for life as you don't already know it. And that seems to be the problem with finding a shadow biosphere here on Earth is how do you look for something when you don't know what it is? And how do you differentiate it from this life and from not life? And it's an intriguing topic.

But in the research for, they are already here, the form I most encountered it at was more likely there are reptilians in Congress kind of form, which is different from a shadow biosphere. So I'd like to conclude this wonderful discussion by asking questions that are tangentially related to the topic we were just discussing, at least at first, and that has to do with reading and books and how in my mind, second only to DNA, which perhaps some alien microbe might have in a slightly different form than we experience here on Earth. But, you know, what do books mean to you? This is your second book, which is a heroic accomplishment by anyone's standards. But I wonder, you know, what do books mean to you? And in the case of, you know, the future legacy that a book can provide, I always like to ask my author guests if you would rather prefer

that you have 100 readers one year from now or one reader 100 years from now. That is a hard question. Let's see. I think I would prefer at least for the most recent work 100 readers now

because I feel like not just for sales purposes, but I feel like I undertook this book based on something that happened just a few years ago and it's kind of reflecting on where we are now as a society and how UFO belief rises and falls

with what's happening culturally. And I feel like maybe, especially while we're all isolated in our own houses in a kind of moment of fear and uncertainty, which is something I talk a lot about in the book that maybe this would have some resonance beyond just UFO people. But I think for the book about Jill Tarter,

I might prefer one reader 100 years from now because when I was working on that book, I thought a lot about what if study succeeds someday and we find something and someone wants to look back on what the endeavor was like in its early years and the people who started it and like I can create something now that someone in the future could have as a as a present record while all of the players are you know alive and still still doing things um of what I mentioned now um but to me books um you know I read a ton starting very early I was obsessed with books um I would go on hard trips with my family and my mom would always be telling me to look out the window with the nice things that the word that they were showing me because I always had my nose buried in a book.

But I think then and now, you know, is a way to go places that you can't go, which is pretty cool right now. And also a way to get different perspectives on things. You know, there's some studies about fiction reading and empathy and how people who read fiction especially have more empathy because you're just forced to think about the minds of other characters. And yeah, so that is, I think, what I look to them for. Oh, great.

And speaking of those readers now, my next of the second of the five questions that I like to ask authors is, of those readers, those 100,000 readers that you're hopefully going to get thanks to this podcast and how we're going to advertise them on the surface of the moon. For those 100 readers, 1,000 readers, however many you get. Of those, which sort of would you prefer as your target audience? People that are skeptical about this phenomenon or people that are sort of already down

and they sort of already are predisposed to the notion that UFOs exist? I would prefer the people who are predisposed to thinking UFOs exist because I think it's always useful to be able to see from the outside. something that you're a part of and see how somebody else views it. And because I think UFOs, you know, whatever they are to people, no matter what they think of them, the seeing of them is a human phenomenon. And when you're part of a, part of like a culture, it's hard to see its flaws and it's good parts.

And I don't know, I think it's useful to help you from the outside. And so maybe, you know, continuing on that theme, one question I like to ask, especially for people that are astronomically inclined, is a quote that I read and included in my book by Sorin Kirkagard, who said that life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards. I think that's this kind of, you know, typifies astronomy, and we're always looking back into space and seeing things as they were in the past. So I'm wondering if you could look back into your past.

And the book is very remarkable to me because it's also very personal. It talks about you as a person. And now that you established your credentials throughout your many articles and your previous book, now I think you're giving the public, your audience, some more insight to who you are. So I'm curious as to, you know, what do you think you would look back and tell your 20-year-old self? that it may seem impossible at the time, but looking forward, it will work out. And that kind of goes along with the theme of this podcast.

Into the Impossible was Sir Arthur C. Clark's second law, first being in a sufficiently advanced society, is indistinguishable from magic. And the second one is the only way to find out what is possible is to go a little bit out of your comfort zone into the impossible. So you could tell 20-year-old Sarah Skulls a little bit of advice, What would that be? Yeah, I mean, I guess I think related to the parts of my past that are in the book,

when I was 20 years old, I was recently out of, I had grown up a very devout religious person. My family was Mormon and I had recently left. And at that point, I was, you know, skeptical and kind of, I can't think of a word other than demeaning of other people's beliefs just because I found any kind of belief. So like anathema to this newly, very, very skeptical, very atheist point at which I found myself. And kind of a book like this

where I'm examining other people's beliefs. It forces you to, you know, give them respect and try to understand them and not just be like, well, I was Mormon and I'm not so I know you. And so I think I would tell myself like just, you know, you don't know everything and maybe take a little more time to understand other people, which is probably something most 20-year-olds could hear more often, but me especially, I think.

That's right, yeah. You describe your encounters at Area 51 last summer as, you know, kind of being the elder stateswoman in the group, and it's kind of delightful to hear the journey that you go on and the candor that you exhibit. I always like that. People are honest about there. I mean, and really portray, you know, you're not a scientist, as you said, but you write a lot about scientific topics. And I think, you know, to show that we are, you know, non-scientists, show non-scientists that we are human, right? And it's a wonderful, wonderful service that you continue to provide. The last question is about curiosity and imagination here at the Arthur Sue Clark Center for Human Imagination. I'm always, you know, curious what my guests have to say about

their particular skill set, and maybe it's a set of skills. You're a public speaker, you do journalism, you do scientific research into your subjects, at least, even kind of a large, large scale game. But what you do, can it be taught? Can you actually communicate, teach? Is it partially, you know, born into who you are and your life experiences? And so maybe it won't be able to be taught. What are your thoughts about the transmutability of your values?

of your of your skill set. I mean, I think it's probably true that people are born and then ingrained through nurture with different levels of curiosity and engagement with the world and with the people in it, which I know that, I mean, as a journalist, people think of you as mostly being a writer, but mostly my job is actually talking to people, not writing about them, and doing research. And I think that you can teach that in the same way that you can teach yourself to be aware of your own cognitive biases. I think you can teach yourself to be curious about people and curious about their stories and curious about how that's all interacting with the world around you.

And I think, I mean, especially even looking for stories when I first started doing journalism, I think I thought, you know, how will I ever find enough stories? And then as soon as you start to think of, you know, everything you encounter as an open question that you can go investigate, then that's the way you start to see the whole world. And so I think if you just take a step and take a step back and notice what your mind kind of maybe wonders about for one second, and then instead of wondering about it for one second, just like dwell on it a little more and talk to people about it. And I think that's transmutable. Wonderful. Thank you so much. All right. The last question is really the part of the plug zone, not the twilight zone, but the plug zone. So where can people connect to you online, social media, et cetera? Sure. On Twitter, I am Skulles-S-A-R-A-H. And I have a website where I put up all of my articles, which is www. sarah-squels.com. And you can find information about the book there, too.

Great. And anything you want to say about the future project, whether it's writing or a book or journal articles? Hmm. That's a good question. And actually, let's see, it's mostly an open question right now. What comes next? I have all those books that I mentioned behind me about millennialist Doomsday Cults. So that's all TBG that people can keep an eye out for whatever comes. I look forward to, Doomsday, right. Absolutely. The inimitable Sarah Skulls. Well, Sarah, thank you so much. It's been a real treat. I wish you the greatest success with the book.

And I hope that you'll keep in touch. Yes, definitely. And thanks for having me. You can be short of about the future. This will be absolutely fantastic. Five, three, four, two, one.