Rev Left Radio - UFO's, The Pentagon, Space-Time, and Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Episode Date: July 3, 2021

In this unlocked episode of Guerrilla History, Breht, Adnan, and Henry discuss the recent release by the Pentagon of UAP (Unknown Aerial Phenomenon aka UFO) footage, the theories surrounding its release and the interests at play, the vastness of our cosmos and the challenge of space travel therein, and speculations on what these things could be and, if they are aliens, what their intentions might be.  Subscribe to Guerrilla History anywhere you get your podcasts. Support Guerrilla History here: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory Support Rev Left Radio here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio 

You don't remember Den Van Poo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to a guerrilla history intelligence briefing. Guerrilla history is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckamacki, joined as always by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great and it's really terrific to be with you again, Henry. Yeah, it's a pleasure. It's been a little bit since we've recorded live together. And I'm also joined, as always, by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are

you doing this fine, well, morning for you, afternoon for me? Yeah, I'm doing great. It is very early where I am, but hopefully this conversation will get me going. Yeah, for sure. And I'm looking forward to the conversation. So just the brief reminder for the audience who's listening to this. Our intelligence briefings are our Patreon episodes. We record about two a month. One is an early release on Patreon, and then the other one is a Patreon exclusive. This one is going to be our early release. So it'll be coming out on our general feed in a week or two after we release it on Patreon. And our topic today is, well, a bit of a fun one. It's a bit out of left field, considering the topics that we generally talk about, you know, medieval history,

decolonial history. Today, our topic is UFOs. Brett, why don't I turn it over to you to introduce the topic for us and why we're deciding to talk about it today? Yeah, so I'm sure most people listening are somewhat familiar with these recent sort of spate of videos that have gotten a lot of media coverage. I mean, coverage on CNN, New York Times, all the mainstream outlets, Washington Post, etc. and they stem or they're centered around a set of videos that were initially leaked. I believe by a couple different organizations. I know Jeremy Corbell is a journalist on this front that has a lot of connections and does

the releasing of these videos. And then basically that was done in like 2017, at least some of them. And then the Pentagon had to come out officially in 2020 and say, yes, these videos are official. They do come from us. These are legitimate leaks. and we don't know what's in them either. And that has obviously set forward a whole cascade of conversations around what these things are, the true believers and the debunkers, you know, they take their size on opposite sides of this debate

and they're already sort of arguing toward a conclusion that they already have in their head. But I think that this is compelling evidence. I know the statement is going to come out of the government from the Pentagon, giving more details on their relationship to these videos, what they think, etc. We can see that the, I believe the Pentagon intelligence agencies have already kind of leaked to the media, this idea that there's no evidence that these are alien spacecraft. And then you go into the article and they say there's no evidence. They're not.

We have no clue what they are. But they're sort of leading with maybe it's probably not aliens. And in fact, maybe it's Russia or China, which we can get into because I think, think that is that conversation around like what are their intentions is this a sciop you know what's the goal here of these different agencies i think that's an important part of this conversation and it could lead people to come to different conclusions about how much to to believe these videos or to be compelled by them i guess a good way to start off um this whole conversation just to kind of check in on you guys and ask both of you your baseline skepticism assuming you've seen these

videos and have followed some of the news, your baseline skepticism, are you one of the people that want to believe? Are you one of the people that have a knee-jerk, skeptical debunking attitude or something else? Well, I think that's great that you've posted in that frame, and maybe this will be one of the early episodes where we actually have some disagreements. I don't know. This is interesting because we haven't talked about this sort of a subject. So what is the left view on UFOs? Is there a left view? What are the range of possibilities? I mean, my sense of the story is to be skeptical about the historical context

for why there is official acceptance now of the topic when it is something that was used throughout the post-war period when modern UFO kind of UFOology or whatever started coming to the fore why you know was constantly denied it was you know something that was made marginal by government denial of the existence of the phenomenon and that was taken up by experts and the media to make it seem as if it was a crazy sort of fantastical you know response to you know anxieties about technology or Cold War fears and so on.

So that's kind of one of the questions I have is what has changed that the government and the military are actually willing to convene the study, or at least the sort of amassing together from different agencies of this evidence and put something forward publicly

when that hasn't been the case before. And I do wonder, you know, from the very start, there were Cold War fears that it was Soviet technology that had made a breakthrough that could undermine U.S. national security or that we were losing in the race with the Soviets. You know, that that was very early on, one of the kinds of framing stories for the phenomenon. And now it seems that there are some lawmakers who are eager to push the same kind of idea,

as you mentioned, but also those people who seem to want to characterize possible alien intervention in Earth's affairs and airspace as itself a national security threat that needs to be taken seriously as a threat, right? So this is the way that it's often being approached is very much from the security. and militaristic perspective. So I'm kind of interested in following that, and I wonder, you know, if there are other ways of approaching it,

both scientifically and socially and politically, to have a more open, you know, perspective on the phenomenon, no conclusions, but be militantly agnostic until you can explain them. And as a corollary, also keep open the possibility if this was, you know, some contact, I mean, how should we be approaching it? Clearly, I don't think the way to approach it is through, you know, aggressive military response, but instead, with curiosity and openness to possibilities that may, you know, change our

understanding of the universe, that would seem to me a healthy, a healthier approach. So, Adnan, let me nail you down then for a second, and then don't worry, I'll do the same for myself. I'm not going to be a hypocrite and ask you to give, you know, firm, firm answers here. I'm just curious. So up until these recent releases of these videos, so up until that point, how likely did you think that it was that there was extraterrestrial life of some form? How likely did you think that there was intelligent life of some form? And how likely did you think that previous UFO sightings were actually UFOs? Just out of curious. Yeah. Those are three, you know, different and potentially overlapping questions. You know, as I watched Cosmos as a youth, I loved Carl Sagan, billions upon billions of stars and planets. And it seemed to me that there would reasonably be a case that the conditions for supporting life on some other solar system in the universe,

seems like you couldn't rule it out as a possibility and that in fact, maybe it could even be likely that there would be some planets that would have the appropriate conditions. Whether there was intelligent life is something that if you think that life could develop, then it's very possible that a form of intelligent life could. We wouldn't be able to know on the basis of current evidence that it was the case, but it doesn't seem like there's any reason to discount that. as a potential possibility. The latter is the really kind of, I think, questionable circumstance, which is whether such in, you know, extraterrestrial intelligent life from some distant part of the

universe or even the galaxy would have developed the technology early enough to be able to arrive, you know, to the, to Earth. Obviously, you know, I'm a fan of science fiction, but I'm not sure warp speed really, you know, is possible. So we're talking about something that would take a very long time. And so it doesn't seem likely, but since they can't explain it, you know, a certain percentage of these sightings have been explained, you know, various, convincingly. you know, meteorological phenomena, so on and so forth. But there is a sort of five to 15 percent from what I understand of the literature of phenomena that have been observed that really haven't been explained. And it just seems to me there's no reason to dismiss that. In fact, it seems

an invitation to figure out an appropriate way to assemble evidence and conduct a scientific inquiry to try and explain, explain what they are and explore them. So I've never bought into the more wild claims about alien abductions and, you know, all of this kind of stuff. There may be other reasons to explain that as a phenomenon, but I feel like there are a lot of things in our world, our universe, that we don't understand, both from a physical, scientific perspective, but even socially. There's so much we actually don't know. I think it's better to be humble and be open, you know, to the possibilities, rather than dismissing things simply because we can't explain them or we can only explain them away. Yeah. So, okay, I'll give my thoughts.

And then, Brett, I would like your thoughts on the same questions afterwards. So just be prepared for that. From my perspective, I would say that I'm very much in agreement with what you laid up. Adnan, I think that the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is incredibly high. I mean, I don't want to say 100%, but incredibly high, I think, the percentage of extraterrestrial life. Intelligent extraterrestrial life, I would still say it's quite high. Obviously, slightly lower because it's a higher threshold, but I still think that it's very high that you have intelligent life of some form. Now, whether or not that life is intelligent enough to communicate with other civilizations on other planets is another question entirely.

And obviously the percent likelihood of that drops dramatically from the previous threshold of just having intelligent life of some form. I still say that it's still fairly likely. I'm not talking like 75%, but I still think that it's fairly likely in a reasonable realm. And the Drake equation based on, and I'll talk about the Drake equation first, second because I'm sure that that was going to come up anyway. The Drake equation, based on most estimates that I've seen, would indicate that that would be the case, that there's a fairly reasonable likelihood of advanced intelligent somewhere

in the galaxy. So first thing, I guess, Drake equation for listeners who are unaware, is this estimation of the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligent life capable of communication. And I say it's an estimation. It's a really popular example of, I don't remember exactly, oh, the acronym is swag, a scientific wild, a wild guess. So you can fill in what the A means. But yeah, it's a wild guess because there's a lot of variation in this, in this equation. But the factors that play into this equation are the number of broadcasting civilizations broadcasting in terms of being able to communicate with other planets equals the average rate of formation of suitable

stars in the Milky Way galaxy times the fraction of stars that form planets, times the average number of habitable planets per star, times the fraction of habitable planets where life emerges, times the fraction of habitable planets with life or intelligent life evolves times the fraction of planets with intelligent life capable of interstellar communication times the number of years that a civilization remains detectable. Well, as you can see, this is why we call it a scientific wild gas. There is a lot of variation in those estimates in each of those terms of that equation. So you can end up with incredibly different estimates on the likelihood of broadcasting civilizations, anything between, I've seen some estimates as low as like one in a

billion. And I've seen estimates of, well, there's a likelihood of something like 15,000 broadcasting civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. But I think that a lot of reasonable estimates are in the likelihood, or in the ballpark of around 10. So if you have a lot of estimates and the equation, like I said, is an estimate, but the terms in it are fairly, fairly reasonable in terms of what you'd be looking for to determine whether or not there is intelligent life, other places in the galaxy. If there was 10 civilizations in the galaxy that were able to communicate intergalactically or interplanetarily, interstellary, whatever term you want to use here, yeah, I would say that

the likelihood of that would be reasonably high, that there's at least one. In terms of the UFOs, though, until the recent releases, I always assumed that the percentage was really, really low. Like you said, Adnan, I think warp speed is more sci-fi than science. The ability to travel faster than light is, you know, the science behind it is a bit tough. So the likelihood of UFOs being UFOs, I always assumed was really low, like under 1%. These recent releases increases the likelihood for me. I don't know to what extent. I certainly wouldn't rule it out. And you mentioned that a lot of estimates and on the number of UFOs that are truly unexplainable was in 10 to 15 percent, I think that that's a pretty standard estimate.

I remember back Project Blue Book back in the 50s when they were looking at UFOs found that something like 22 or 23 percent of UFO sightings were unexplainable and therefore were truly unidentified flying objects. It's come down a little bit since then in more recent estimates, but yeah, I mean, I don't see a reason why it wouldn't be. I would just say, for me, the likelihood is still pretty low, but not, not completely out of the realm of possibility. Yeah, there's a lot more that I want to say regarding pastodism, for example, and

things like that, which I'll talk about later on. But Brett, why don't I turn it back over to you for a while now? Sure, yeah. So, yeah, this is fun already. First, I would just like to start by kind of like breaking down the scope. of the galaxy we're talking about the likelihood of life and let's just keep this conversation I think congealed to life in the Milky Way because inter-solar travel right the travel between two star systems is already a lot I think the closest one to Earth is four light years away

so traveling at the speed of light it would take you four years and that is like next door neighbors um galactically let alone cosmically intergalactic travel is something that is way beyond I think our scope, and as you guys talk about the likelihood of, you know, warp speed or, you know, using gravitational fields to increase the ability to travel, maybe even beat the speed of light, et cetera, it's funny to think about it and to try to extrapolate based on what we know, but like we're 200,000 years out of the jungle. I mean, you know, 10,000 years of human civilization, only 100 or so since the scientific revolution. So we already know that the cosmos is infinitely stranger than our best.

science can even struggle to try and comprehend so that, you know, that's epistemic humility inducing for me. But just in the Milky Way alone, there's 100 to 400 billion stars, right? And around most stars, as we've found over the recent decade or two, most stars have a set of planets, right? Like the Earth's sort of solar system here is not that crazy. We see similar patterns all throughout the Milky Way. So 100 billion stars. Let's say every star has an average of three to four planets, some having many more, some maybe having zero. You're talking hundreds of billions, possibly trillions of planets.

Now the question becomes which ones of those are in the habitable zone. But just statistically speaking, we're dealing with such big numbers that a fraction of a fraction of those planets actually produce intelligent life and given the time span that the Milky Way has existed and the cosmos has existed, the likelihood continues to climb up. And the cosmos has existed since the Big Bang, we think, for 14 billion years. Earth has existed for four billion years. So about one third the length of the entire cosmos itself. The interesting thing, though, to skew towards the skeptical side is how long it took not life to form on Earth, but multi-celled life.

So for like a billion years, what, a billion or more years, maybe two billion years, there was life on Earth, but it was only in the form of single-celled organisms. And then about, let's see here, 900 million years ago. So within even a one billion time frame, we started seeing very simple multi-celled life. Then we had the Cambrian explosion about 500 some million years ago, et cetera. So not only was Earth in this position to form life, but look how long it took for just that jump. So now the question becomes these recent videos. And what makes these recent videos even more compelling than the average, I got a picture of something weird in the sky, is the fact that these were highly trained Navy fighter jet pilots who were observing it. The instruments used were highest of the line military instruments

using infrared and other sorts of instrumentation to record these things in a bunch of different ways. Plus you have visuals from highly trained Navy pilots. And the way that they move is anathema to anything we know. It seems to defy our understanding of physics. There seems to be no propulsion system to these vehicles. And, you know, the common idea that's tossed out there is what if this is classified American technology that even these pilots aren't aware of. So they're just seeing it as weird or what if it's another countries? I think those are increasingly unlikely. Because to have this sort of technology that you can see this thing instantaneously move, no slowing down, no inertia, no momentum to take off its speeds that

even our highest technology can only get to a fraction of. If that was classified, that would have leaked out. Let's just say you had some of this like propulsive abilities that these craft have, that would, if you introduce that to your society, your GDP would skyrocket. You would revolutionize your entire society. There's a huge economic incentive to, have this technology come out into the modern or to the economy and the public in some shape or fashion. And this just seems light years ahead of what anything that we're able to achieve. So I take these things like more seriously than I think even I've heard some people on the left be very skeptical of these videos and talk about them as a sci-op. And the last thing I'll say on that front

and I think Adnan sort of alluded to it is like, you know, what's what's their play here? And I just don't understand what their play would be to release this stuff and say, we don't know what it is. First of all, these were leaked, right? So their hand was kind of forced. It wasn't like they came out of the blue and said, here's three videos you guys never saw. These had been circulating. These had been going viral.

People within the military, like fighter pilots had begun to talk, at least behind the scenes to certain people. So their hand was sort of forced. But if you are the leaders of the national security apparatus, you don't want to come out and say, hey, there's something in our airspace that we have no idea what it is. We have no ability to defend ourselves against it. It behaves in ways we cannot even comprehend. We don't know what it is. Like that is a position of weakness.

You wouldn't make that necessarily public unless you had to. So I don't understand what their shit would be there. And then the national security framework, people say, yeah, scary things in the sky. We got to fund the government and the military so they can defend us against this. But I think most people intuitively understand. that if this is extraterrestrial craft, the national security framework is literally incoherent. This is a species so far above us,

they can cross interstellar, at least space, come visit us with physics we can't even comprehend. If they wanted to go to war with us, it wouldn't even be a contest. And so that entire framework of we need to take a defensive posture against these craft, it doesn't, it's just completely incoherent to me. and so that's another reason why I don't think it is now given what's out there given what's leaked

I think the play is well don't say it's aliens right in fact try to use your language to hedge against that to calm people down a little bit and then put forward this idea more and more intensely that it could be our already existing enemies Russia and China therefore we need to be given more money in a bigger budget because if China or Russia has anything like this well we really got to prepare right so I think that's the play they're making in a narrative that they themselves didn't fully get to control. And I don't think, you know, in contradiction to a lot of like conspiracy theorists that the government's in on it or, you know, like the president or these high figures in the

government know what's going on either. I think they're just as bamboozled and confused and bewildered as the rest of us. And then there is their argument at that point is like, how do we spend this to the best of our advantage? And so the whole idea of it being like a wholly created sciop, I just does, I just don't think makes sense for what it is. But I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm going to jump in here for a second because you touched on two things that I want to bring up.

You actually hit one pretty much dead on the head, but I want to just recapitulate it for the audience. So you mentioned that it doesn't make much sense that they would announce that they didn't know what it was if they had any clue of what it was. And yeah, I mean, that that makes total sense. And you know that if there was any speculation that it was somebody like Russia or China or if it could even be played off as technology from Russia or China, that the Defense Department and the State Department would be all over it saying, look at what Russia and China can do. They've got these craft that can change directions with no slowing down. They can do this. They can do that. So beyond the, and I know that, yes, I said that I find that even now I find the likelihood of UFOs being manned by extraterrestrial being still relatively low, higher than previously.

I know I said that, but I'm trying to give some credence to it here. If there was any indication that they could figure out that it was a man-made craft, you know that whether or not they thought it was from Russia or China at all, even if they just thought it was a man-made craft, they'd be saying it's probably something from Russia or China, and therefore we have to increase our surveillance capabilities. We have to increase our, you know, radar or whatever. So, yeah, I mean, you pretty much laid out that exact point that I was going to make. It was just worth recapitulating.

But the other point that you touched on, and this will let me talk about Pasadism briefly, is that if it is an extraterrestrial life that's traveled to Earth, It is obviously far more advanced than we are in every possible way in terms of technology. And so trying to worry about defending yourself against it is going to be a rather futile effort. It's not going to be like Independence Day, the film that is, not the date. But trying to mount counteroffensives against a spacecraft that can travel close to, if not in excess of the speed of light, I would say close to being much more likely than in excess of, you're just not going

to do much against it, which brings up Pasadism. So for people who are unaware, Pasadism is a branch of Trotskyism. It was advanced by, I believe, he was Argentinian, an Argentinian trotskyist, Juan Posadas, who, among some very interesting other theories of his, like, for example, wanting a nuclear first strike by the, the Soviet bloc against the United States as a way of achieving world communism. Very interesting theory there. One of his other theories is that

for interplanetary, interstellar space travel to be possible, it has to have come from a communist society because without being a communist society and without them being able to collaborate as a society, there's no way that they could develop the technology that would be possible for interstellar travel. You know, they'd be busy killing each other if they weren't a communist society.

They'd be busy exploiting other people, extracting surplus profit from the serfs of their population, et cetera, et cetera. So based on Pasad's thought, the only way that there would be interstellar travel is from a communist society. And therefore, and here's the jump that I really like in. Pasadism. Therefore, if we do have UFOs that are able to be contacted by us, we should be reaching out to them and pleading with them to help bring communism to Earth because they already have found the blueprint to have a communist society, a planetary communist society.

And of course, that is what we want. And therefore, we have to contact them and have them help us figure out how to do it. So under Pasadism, one of the goals is to make contact with other species that are capable of space travel in order to help us achieve world communism. So just an interesting theory, and I'm sure that there's probably some thoughts that are going to be shared now. Adnan? Well, I just, when we were talking about this episode, I sort of jokingly, you know,

talked about marks in space and whether, you know, aliens were proliferation. And that is because I didn't know about Pasadism, in fact, actually. So that's very interesting, Henry. But there's a book for you, Adnan. It came out maybe a year or two ago. It's called I Want to Believe. And it's all about Pasadism. You should check it out.

I definitely will check it out. And I'm delighted that you brought forward this sort of idea because I was sort of trying to get towards that by saying that we should have a different approach, if it indeed is, you know, a matter of extraterrestrial life that is making contact, we should be open to, you know, the possibilities for learning and growth, partly because, obviously, if they have the kind of civilization that has produced the capabilities technologically for interspace, interstellar travel, and so on, that obviously we would have a lot to learn from them. And what I really object to in some sense is the militarizing of space,

which is something that, you know, I think we have to be concerned about. The national security sort of language that is being used around a lot of this as a security threat. We'll see what the report actually says. The fact that is coming from the military can be quite concerning that it's tied up with statist, militarist approaches and perspectives to this. And I also think that in this context, we have to think also about the private commercial interest in space that is being developed rapidly.

And you have, you know, Bezos and Musk to dueling, you know, billionaires seeking to be the first to get into space, into Mars, and, you know, these kinds of projects. is that clearly that's not the best model for how one would develop a program, you know, for, you know, exploration and contact in space out of capitalist, you know, sorts of motives and as the individual, you know, megalomaniacal kinds of goals, you know, egotistical kinds of self-aggrandizement that seems to be, you know, part of it. And so I think that's very interesting and that's one thought that I had about it also is that there's so much private initiative that is new that I wondered if that is also a little bit responsible for the willingness of the government and the military to also introduce these issues in some sense to counter or not be completely left behind by these private corporate approaches to space.

I wonder what people thought about that issue. You're talking about space force, Adnan. We need more space force. Yeah, exactly. I mean, but it also reminds me that, you know, George Bush, during the Iraq war, it was just such a strange thing. The Iraq war was going poorly.

it was like 2004 or five when he made, you know, a keynote about a mission to Mars as part of his, you know, presidential state of the union address. And it came so out of left field. And at the time, I wondered, you know, what is fueling this distraction and turn away from actually dealing with the contemporary issues and problems that were so controversial? during his administration with the iraq war global war on terrorism and so on and i thought that in some ways it was uh like what you see in elizium you know that uh interesting movie um that elites had basically decided that they'd made such a mess of this world that they were starting to imagine scenarios for you know leaving the earth to you know the rest of us after they've destroyed it stripped

it of all its resources, you know, concentrated its wealth, and then finding some escape route. You know, sort of seemed like this kind of fantasy. And that's what I think this Bezos and Musk aspirations are all about. Instead of confronting the problems on a planetary level through collective and cooperative and equitable means, you know, instead just try and run off

with the ill-gotten wealth and insulate yourself from the necessary fallout of this corporate capitalist abuse of our planet and of our world. Brett, I'll let you follow up on that. I just have one brief quote that I want to throw out there because it's a very funny one since I mentioned Space Force. The year was 1988. The man was Vice President Dan Quayle, who is a wealth of some of my favorite political quotes of all time because the man was and is an absolute buffoon. Absolutely crazy.

Just Google Dan Quail quote sometime and be prepared for a couple hours of entertainment. But the year was 1988 and he was talking about defense policy. And very seriously, he responds, we should develop anti-satellite weapons because we could not have prevailed without them in Red Storm Rising. So I guess Tom Clancy novel. are way ahead of their time and should shape our defense policy. And so, you know, maybe we just need to look at other sorts of fictional accounts of how we should respond to threats.

So maybe Independence Day isn't such a far-fetched idea. I shouldn't have dismissed it. Sorry about that. Brett. Yeah, that's very funny and interesting. I guess what I would say to Adnan, what he put on the table, is not really to disagree or take that line of thought too much further, but to say that I think there's an almost an opposite, hope or optimism on the side of people who see these videos and are sort of like actually I kind

of hope it is aliens and far from like we need to just like destroy earth and flee to the next planet to keep our colonial apparatus going there's like a hope like the aliens would come down and intervene like because people feel so politically defranchised and there's an inability to create any of the change that is clearly needed and every year becomes more obvious we're on a pathway to off the cliff, unless big, serious changes happen, but there's no real political sense that that's even a possibility. And people see these videos, like, maybe they're coming down to put their hand in our chest. Maybe at some point, they'll stand back, they'll have like a hands-off approach, but maybe this is them sort of desensitizing us to their presence slowly, so as not to

create maximum social instability, but is also coming at this point precisely when we need them to intervene to say, hey, like, come down and just like, here's how you can do clean energy. Now, I think that's a utopian fantasy too, right? I think there's no shortcut around the hard political struggles at this time demands. And sitting back and hoping for aliens to come intervene is like waiting for the rapture or something. Don't put, you know, don't put your hopes into that outlet. But I can see people have a sort of like, ooh, maybe this means that.

And specifically, there's interesting stuff where these sightings of the, you know, These craft are also around military installations are one of the most, like the thing that happens the most is where they show up. They've, there's stories where these crafts have come near nuclear facilities and disarmed nuclear bombs just to show that they have the capacity to do so. Then they flutter off or shine a light on a nuclear facility and be like they're investigating, almost as if they're saying like, hey, this thing right here, you got to chill out. Or, you know, just as we start to destroy the planet and runaway climate change is happening, you know, if they're in England, civilization. We've seen this before. Do we step in and stop this civilization from ruining this habitable planet? I think that's very, there's a whole sort of box that gets opened up. And that's why I kind of want to shift this conversation into that direction here in a second

and get your thoughts, sort of away from the political and more into the imaginary. But I do just want to say also, just thinking about the Milky Way game, these numbers never fail to surprise me. You're talking about the Milky Way galaxy, the one in which we lift. Of course, one of hundreds of billions, not trillions of galaxies, right? So 100 billion stars within our galaxy, and there's likely hundreds of billions of galaxies out there. So that's just, I mean, mind-blowing. And the Milky Way has existed for almost 13 billion years.

So the vast majority of since the Big Bang, the Milky Way has existed. So that leaves, let's say, 10, 12 billion years for life to happen on planets around stars in the Milky Way. And you could have a situation in which entire civilizations, more advanced, even than humanity has risen and fallen in that time. There's like planets out there that are graveyards of civilizations that used to exist and were even more advanced than us. And that leads to this next question, which I'm going to bounce it back over to you guys,

the possibility of these craft not being manned alien extraterrestrial spacecraft, but actually drones sent out maybe millions of years ago that make the rounds that have AI of some sort that are meant to just go out and probe or coming from a civilization which might still exist, which might have colonized their entire solar system and have the technology to throw out drones that can not be manned, but go out and check for other planets and stuff. And that would seem more reasonable than jumping on a ship and putting an organic being into interstellar space travel for however long it takes you to travel, even at the highest

rates of speed that we think are possible. You're talking hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years, 100,000 years going at the speed of light just to cross the entire Milky Way. So just to like set down our skepticism for a second. Let's just assume that these things are what they look to be and let's just play that theoretical game. So in that case, what do you think about the debate between alien manned craft and them being drones and what, and if this is extraterrestrial life, do you have any sense of what

their purpose might be? saying what I said about climate change and nukes and the fact that they show up around military installations or if you have your own ideas. I'm just really curious as to aliens or drones and if so, what's the purpose? Well, that's fascinating. I love it. I mean, because in fact, actually on some level, while I've emphasized all of the dystopic and politically nefarious dimensions of it, that clearly the popularity of the story, meets exactly what I think what you're saying. Brett, is that in this moment, it seems like you need a deus ex machina because we've lost

real optimism about the ability of our current political leaders in this political system to actually make the huge and necessary changes that are required. And so there is something interesting about the coincidence of this public acknowledgement of these stories of recent sightings and the political moment that we're in. It really does fit that. Now, whether that's fantasy or not, that's a whole other issue. And you've invited us to, well, set aside the skepticism about it. If it is real, then my sense is that, you know, we ourselves, of course,

have sent out unmanned craft first and on continuing missions that, you know, can go on for years and years beyond the lifespan. of an individual organic astronaut, you know, controlling it. So it would certainly make sense that if, you know, some civilization elsewhere had the capabilities for this, that there would be at least some sort of program of un-I don't want to say unmanned because also that's too gender-specific but also species-specific. but, you know, something that was not a life form, like through AI and so on, that would make a lot of sense to me, that these could be, you know, drones of some kind operating on some algorithm.

But, I mean, you know, it could very well be, if we're putting aside, you know, this kind of skepticism, it could, you know, be that you have multiple generations of organic. reproduction, you know, that take place or civilizations that if they've achieved this technology have found ways to adapt life to, you know, conditions of long-term space travel and have just decided, you know, to explore the amazing universe and to, if, you know, just as we are curious and we've been asking, you know, are there other beings out there? I mean, this goes back to ancient times. You know, humankind in its religious thought and mythologies has always envisioned and imagined the possibility of other kinds of life, either on this earth or from beyond. I mean, I'm just thinking even in, for example, the Quran, Muslim sacred scripture, talks about

worlds, you know, that, you know, God is the creator of worlds, not just this world, but that there are worlds and there's this sort of sense that, you know, humankind is not alone in the universe and as the, you know, androcentric perspective would understand it as the ultimate outcome of this creative universe, this universe of creation, that, you know, that's a very narrow and, you know, human-centric kind of view. So I think you find that in other traditions, in mysticisms and spiritualities of some sense of others. And so people are curious about that. So I think that would be a normal motivation for any form of intelligent civilization to explore and to seek contact. That's how I would look at it, I think, is perfectly reasonable possibilities if you

put aside the science limitations that we are aware of. But I'm also somebody and I would get criticized, I'm sure I would be criticized by many for this, is I don't think we really still understand a lot of things about the universe and a lot of the, you know, things that we use as explanations, you know, in some later generation of scientific research and scholarship will probably revise. And it's just good to be humble about what it is we think we know and what we can explain and to be open to those possibilities. And really quick, I just think it's wild to think how recent, just the scientific method came across the scene of our civilization and really became to put into use. And so, you know, this idea that we would have even a,

even a somewhat coherent, true understanding of the cosmos seems absolutely absurd. These theories, these hypotheses, quantum mechanics, general relativity, they're all really good. And it's amazing that apes like us could fathom those things and even come to those conclusions. But the one thing that's been consistent in scientific history is that there have been theories that people have taken as common sense. And this goes back into religious history as well, which has been disproven over and over again. There's never been sort of theory that helps us really understand the fundamentals of nature that has stuck around in all of human history. It's always been displaced, complicated, add nuance to or completely revolutionized with these huge epistemic rupture.

So to think that we have any real coherent grasp is, I think, just the peak of human hubris. but go ahead, Henry. Yeah, yeah. I was just going to say that I guess there's two questions that I still have to address, which are do I think that there's a possibility that these are unmanned again, keeping in mind Adnan's disclaimer that this is both gendering and specing the life that would be sending this, but that's one question and the other question is to what purpose, which was your other question.

I guess I'll take the first question first in terms of whether this is, unmanned. I think that's pretty likely. If these are actually from, and again, keeping in my disclaimer that I'm not convinced that these are, I do say that there's a definite possibility of it, but not necessarily a high possibility. But if these are from a different planet, from a different intelligent life outside of our own planet, it's pretty likely that they're unmanned because it's just a long time that they would have to be traveling for. I mean, assuming that they're traveling under the speed of light, they're still going to have to be going for a long way to get anywhere,

particularly Earth. So, for example, the farthest thing away from Earth that we've sent out is Voyager 1. We sent it out in 1977. Right now it's about 14 billion miles away from Earth. it passed, just for the sake of understanding how far that is, it passed Neptune in 1989, so about 12 years after it was launched. It passed by Neptune and it's been going ever since then. And it's still traveling away from Earth at a speed of about one 18,000th, the speed of light,

which is to say that to go one light year, it would take 18,000 years. That's how fast we're talking. You know, this thing passed Neptune in only 12 years from Earth, and it's still only traveling in 18,000th, the speed of light. Now, we're talking about even the closest sun to our sun. As you mentioned, Brett, is about four light years away. So based on our technology, again, 1977 technology, but once you get out into deep space, things get a little bit weird because of, you know, the physics of the physics of

deep space, it would have to be traveling for what is 18,000 times four years just to get to the next sun. But even if you are traveling at the speed of light, the closest sun that is estimated to have a potential of intelligent life on it is still decades and decades and decades of light years away. So for it to be manned, again, gendering it and specieing it, it would still have to have a lifespan that's either in excess of decades and decades and decades, perhaps hundreds of years, perhaps thousands of years, or it would have to be able to have life reproducing on that spacecraft that's traveling. To me, it just seems a lot more likely that it would be an unmanned drone for reconnaissance purposes. Because after all, unless they've

got telescopes that are super you know super duper they can see uh wonderfully everything as far out as they want to see they wouldn't even know where they're going and it would be a pretty big gamble to travel 20,000 light years hoping that you find something and it turns out that the intelligent life that you were hoping to find ended up being in the opposite direction uh so kind of being drones for reconnaissance purposes seems pretty um it seems like that would be a reasonable suggestion for them to be doing, again, if this is from a different planet. Now, the other question, because I know you're going to tackle the purpose question. Just because we're playing the game, all the caveats, skepticism, this is peer speculation area now.

But there's also other options, right? It's not just how long does it take to cross inter-solar space or deep space. There's a possibility of interdimensional travel, right? Quantum mechanics, mini-worlds theory, it's interesting, it's on the table. There's the concept that's at least technically, conceptually, not absurd, of the idea of wormholes, which would allow for travel between huge distances of time that far exceed anything close to the speed of light. There's the possibility of intertemporal travel. You know, we know that the theory of relativity says that at least one way time travel is at least theoretically possible.

We're talking about species that possibly evolved for billions of years, billions of years ahead of us. Who knows? And then at the level of quantum mechanics, there's this idea of spooky action at a distance where particles that could be in different galaxies or across the Milky Way simultaneously behave in ways that totally transcend any need for them to slowly travel the speed of light to the other particle. And now can that be scaled up? We don't even know. And I think this, again, gets to the complexity of this situation, all the different possibilities and how little we know about the fabric of space and time and the ways to manipulate it. But go ahead, Henry. No, I think that those are all important contributions.

And I just have to apologize that I'm going to be the boring one on this podcast. And it's just because I'm a scientist. You know, when we talk about history and we're talking about, you know, what could have happened if this didn't happen or if this person hadn't met this person or this person, you know, those I'm fine speculating on. Just because it's a science-related topic talking about the physics, I'm a little bit more hesitant to speak on it since I'm not. a physicist. I mean, I'm aware of all of the concepts that you've mentioned, Brett, but I'm not

a physicist by training, so I don't have enough information. I just know that these are theories that have been put on the table by a physicist that do know what they're talking about, and these have been debated for decades at this point, and are certainly worth continuing to debate until there's pretty conclusive evidence one way or another, right? I mean, it seems like a reasonable position to take. But because I am a scientist, and this is a science-related topic, but not one that I'm well versed. And that's about the extent of my speculation on that, is that, yeah, these are things that we should continue to explore, but I'm not in a position where I have the expertise to really add anything to that conversation. But on the other side

of it, I am willing to speculate in terms of what the purpose is, because that's not really a science point. So even though, you know, I'm a scientist and blah, blah, blah, I'm willing to speculate on this just because it's more fun. Um, I think that, again, assuming that these are unmanned, I would say that just reconnaissance looking for life would be probably top of the list in terms of things that they would be looking to do, just find out where the other life is because there are, you can have telescopes. You can have really good telescopes, but the extent to how good telescopes are, I don't know. And, you know, maybe something's behind something else.

I don't know of any technology with telescopes that lets you see around corners. So I would say that that would probably be the top of the list is just looking for other life, perhaps looking for other suitable planets for colonization. You know, we're looking at a more depressing side of things now. But I want to believe to take that title of that book, that this is a communist alien society that's looking around to help other, more barbaric societies like our own find the way to communism i want to believe that i don't actually think that that's the case but i want to believe so i think that that's that's pretty much

all i have to say on that is that i think most likely it's probably just reconnaissance if it is anything but i want to believe that it's uh space communists trying to help us find earth communism yeah uh another question i'll pitch you guys away because i have a few questions to ask both of you and this could be a way to hand off to Adnan. Quickly, I just want to say, whatever the purpose is, man or on demand, if they have the capacity to get here, they have the capacity to humiliate any military actions we could come up with, and they have the capacity to completely hide themselves if they wanted to.

And that's another theory that's been floating around, people that are more susceptible to believing that this could possibly be artificial intelligence is that this now recent boom is them letting themselves be seen. by the top technology we have, which is unfortunately in the U.S. military, allowing that to be seen in a slow way, like you don't get these high close up pictures, they can easily dart off. They know when they're being approached. Like they could hide, they're not. And maybe that is a slow desensitization process because you think that if highly advanced civilizations

were going out seeking life, just like in Star Trek, there would be protocols that you would follow sort of ethics that you would you would have of like I'm not going to you know necessarily intervene in these people's or if it comes to the point where we have to intervene they're going to be this slow desensitization process etc that's interesting but the thing I want to bounce off you guys now going a little deeper there's this huge argument on joe rogan and neal degras tyson was on and they were arguing about this topic and neal degross tyson is obviously taking a much more skeptical approach and his argument that i thought was interesting is like aliens even be interested in us. He does the whole thing where, like, to highly technically, you know,

evolved civilization that could travel interstellar space and have this sort of technology, we would be akin to worms or ants on the concrete, nothing of particular interest. And Rogan pushed back on this. It's like, no, that's insane. Of course, they would be interested in us. We're these monkeys that can, you know, blow up the planet many times over with nukes. And it is not, Some people, it's not a coincidence that the whole UFO phenomenon really took off after 1945, after the nuclear bomb was created, 1947 was the Roswell incident, whatever you say about that, and it's not really irrelevant. The point is that this is happening after a certain period where if you have a sort of objective checklist of a species evolution,

being able to split the atom and blow up the planet seems to represent a rung on that ladder that might then spark interest and move us from just interesting apes that wear clothes. It's like, okay, now this is a baby civilization that might one day be able to join the Galactic Union, et cetera. So where do you lay on that argument? Would we be interesting to aliens or is that human hubris projecting our sort of exceptionalism onto a cosmos that we could be at the very lowest rung of? What are your thoughts on that? I'm going to hop in first because I've got just brief. thoughts on it. And then I've got a question that I'm going to follow up with for each of you.

And that can pretty much, that should get us close to the time. So I'll say that I take a position between the two of them. I do think that if they have the capability of interplanetary travel, we're obviously a far less evolved species than they are. And therefore, we're not going to be on the same rung as them. They're not going to be looking at us as a peer species. But on the other hand, I don't find Neil deGrasse Tyson's point particularly compelling. We would be the same as worms or the same as ants and therefore we wouldn't be interesting to them. I don't know how much biological training Neil deGrasse Tyson has done. But let me tell you, we have studied the heck out of every type of worm that you can possibly think of. We have

some nematodes that have been studied more than humans over the course of years. So just because we're not at the same rung as aliens doesn't mean that we wouldn't be interesting to them. Heck, one of the most studied species of any species on the entire planet is not something like tigers or lions. It's Drosophila, fruit fly. Fruit flies have been studied the heck out of. There's entire institutes devoted to Drosophila research.

Every research facility has a Drosophila facility. There's researchers who spend their lives, and I'm not talking an insignificant number. I'm talking many hundreds or thousands at any given time of researchers whose entire careers are based at looking at researching fruit flies. Now, if we go to such lengths, having entire breeding facilities, genetically engineering fruit flies so that we can look for different conditions in them, looking at how the immune system has evolved in fruit flies. If we've gone to such lengths with our resource, you know, we do have resource constraints in terms of research capacity. There's only so much

space and money, basically, that can go to research. We've devoted a lot to researching fruit flies. So I don't know why, again, we're a species that wouldn't be at their level, but why would they still not care? And I do think that your point of splitting the atom does make for perhaps a threshold where they would say, yeah, we're going to be using a lot of resources to travel and look at these weird looking things. But, you know, they are at a certain level that it might be interesting to study. So I don't find Neil deGrasse Tyson's argument compelling, even if they do see us as an inferior species. That's what we study most as inferior species. My follow-up question, and this will get us close to time. And Adnan, feel free to address that

same question as well. But my other question is, why hasn't this gotten more press, this release of these videos? I mean, there was a couple days, I would say, where every newspaper had one or two articles about it, some YouTube shows, popular YouTube shows, both from the progressive side, the conservative side. They would have a story or two on these videos. But, you know, we've been talking about UFOs. I mean, how many movies have. have been based on aliens and UFOs, UFO abductions, how many books have been written about aliens, how many people's popular imagination has been taken by space travel

and things like the Roswell incident. Why is it when we finally have something get leaked from a government source that it isn't in the news constantly all the time? Like over the course of months, it was really there for a couple of days, then fizzled out, and now it's starting to come back up again because they're going to be holding a House Intelligence Committee meeting on it on Wednesday, I believe. We're recording this on Sunday, June 20th.

Why is it that when we have something come out from a government source that would indicate that perhaps there is UFOs, again, not saying that there is or isn't, but it is a government source there that we're looking at? Why is that not headline news all the time everywhere? just an interesting question. Well, that is an interesting question. I mean, maybe part of it is that the media elites and experts, so on, have been so conditioned with years and years of marginalizing it and making it seem as if it was just ultimate quackery, unsurious, that they're not actually really prepared for how to deal with the story.

But on the other hand, I think they have spent a lot more attention on it precisely than they would normally, precisely because it's coming from a government source. So they're willing to credit that there is something to talk about precisely because it's coming from the military. And they have dismissed and denied when it has come from other sorts of sources, socially and culturally. So it'll be interesting. Maybe they're just holding off until, you know, the report is actually released and they can get an understanding of what line they're supposed to take on it.

know, from the way the report actually frames it, and they'll probably end up following, you know, following that. But, you know, and also maybe it works better, you know, in terms of popular culture, it works much better as a kind of countercultural, unofficial sort of story. You know, like that's why people partly are interested in it is because there is this sort of sense of it having been suppressed, and but maybe it's real and you know that is something that's interesting in terms of cultural

production and so there's a lot of popular interest but you know if we're going to deal with the facts of documenting these particular sightings and the various explanations that kind of comes i don't think there's going to be the revelation that yes all the roswell stories are true and so on and so there might be some kind of caution that it's a little bit underwhelming what's more exciting is the fact that there might be, there's reason to be curious and to investigate further. But we won't have any real conclusions, I think, at this point of what it is. So the great disclosure is not about to happen, I think. That's, I think, my point about how this is being managed and existing as a media sort of phenomenon. But on the other point, I guess I

don't really have that much more. I think you said it, Henry, that they would be curious about life. know they would be interested in studying and especially if it is a fairly rare phenomenon in the universe it's worth understanding the development and nature of life you know in all the context that you might be able to find it you know as a sort of system of of and form of life so I think what that says really it says much more about Neil de Grice Neil de Grisneel deGrasse Neil deGrasse Tyson actually than it does about any kind of answer

from the perspective of these aliens that might have contact with us and I think something that Brett said is very useful as well is that of course they must have some kind of protocols about how you would make first contact and what the ethics of that

would be I would presume I mean they would have at least thought about it. And on this, I think, you know, one of my favorite shows has always been Star Trek the next generation. And I think they have tried to basically take a lot of these scenarios and think through them. It's a really interesting conceptual show where they've taken problems and tried to, you know, dramatize something around them that really investigates it. So one of them was about this being, this individual being who was able to do, travel in the space-time continuum, the traveler who shows up, right? And he's just, he's attracted

by somebody who shows some potential of being able to understand conceptually the real nature of the universe, a young, you know, character on the show. And he's there because he sees that potential. And so that's a kind of way in which they might, as Brett was saying, you know, when you reach a certain threshold of technological advancement, it makes us relevant and interesting on some level, both dangerous and, you know, and interesting, you know. So I think they would be interested and they would be curious. They would want to understand us from multiple sorts of levels. I think that would be clear. And obviously, the real question is just what would be their real motives. We talked a little bit about that and what they

hope to learn and how would they manage this encounter? I think that is what we don't really know. How would they manage this encounter? Yeah, great, great points all around. For my two cents, I think one of the things that complicates this idea of would they be interested or not is, you know, we become very suspicious in these conversations of like ascribing to our extraterrestrial intelligence, human motivations, or, human psychological sort of tendencies and so like the idea that they would come to colonize us right is

clearly a projection of our own history and our own fears and and perhaps a colonialist sort of subconscious fear about them doing to us or somebody more powerful doing to us what we've done to others etc but i think where we can talk meaningfully about their intentions is welded into the idea of partially convergent evolution right all throughout the cosmos is evolution so radically weird. They will have like intelligent beings that get their food through photosynthesis or silicon based life or does it narrow down to like two arms, two legs and these big heads with forward facing eyes. Does that happen more often than not? That's interesting. But I think what we can say safely is that if there was a species that got to the point where it was capable

of having the science and technology to make interstellar or intergalactic trips or to go out to the cosmos, that would be a species who is it like us driven by curiosity and creativity. If you didn't have this impulse that seems to come with high levels of consciousness, to be self-reflective, to try to understand the world around you, you can see why that impulse is buried deep into evolution, right? Like as the intelligence is developing, you want to have deeper understandings of the world around you so you can navigate that world better. And so that level of curiosity would make people maybe think about.

studying the stars and then to have craft that go out into the solar system and maybe go to the next planet and put a little rover down or send Voyager out past your farther like what we're doing that would seem to be that would make sense to me for an intelligent self-reflective consciousness to pursue that and to Henry's point I love that like you know Neil deGrasse Tyson is famous for speaking outside of his field he does it with philosophy a lot so you know he makes people on the philosophy side, prickly, and I can see on the biologist side why he would do that as well. But you're absolutely right that we would be interested in a whole plethora of species. If we just saw microbial life on Mars, we would be fascinated in breaking that down and

studying it and getting as much understanding as possible. Now imagine if we saw a great ape start to harness the power of fire, right? So we just saw them at a much earlier period of our own evolution. We would be fascinated. If a chimpanzee put together a primacy put together a primitive crossbow and went out to hunt monkeys or squirrels or something we'd be like oh my god they're making this very specific jump that we made of course we're going to be fascinated by that even though they are relative to us still incredibly primitive so even notching it up a level above henry's argument on that level that mid-tier level you'd still be utterly fascinated the question becomes how broad is the spectrum of intelligence in the cosmos like you know how

low on the wrong is it a ladder this big and we're down here is it a ladder this big and we're down here. And that's when it can start getting scary and extraterrestrial intelligence, if fully developed, if it's like billions of years into their evolution, would be indiscernible from gods to us at that point. But just to answer Henry's question as a way to wrap this conversation up or get towards that of why isn't there as much media coverage. I think there's two things on top of what Adnan said. I don't think they know quite what to do with it. The average journalist isn't necessarily a speculative intellectual thinking about the cosmos. They're trained in a certain way with certain stories and you've got to have like, you know,

there's not really much there as far as like, where do I take this story other than just reporting what the Pentagon releases and saying this is interesting. And the second element is it's deeply philosophical. So like we can't expect these corporate shallow medias that can't even cover an election with a sufficient amount of depth to have coverage of this. in a sufficiently philosophical or self-reflective way. So I think for both those reasons, it's a little over their head, I think, in most instances, and they just don't quite know what to do with it. And I think that explains at least some of the lack of stories that we're seeing,

although that might change with new developments. Who knows? Okay. So I'm going to make one really boring statement, and then I'm going to make, I'll make up for it. Don't worry. First of all, just Brett, I want to briefly correct you or just clarify one point when you said that like gorillas or chimpanzees are earlier stages of humans, slightly incorrect because we share a common ancestor.

They're not. Totally true, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Just wanted to make sure that that's clear for the listeners and, you know, we're all paying attention here. Uh, yeah, chimpanzees, gorillas, humans, they're not earlier phases of human evolution. We share the same ancestor in evolution. So evolutionarily speaking, if chimpanzees were able to make fire or something like that,

develop more complex tools that would be an example of convergent evolution at that point because we're on two different branches at this point. But if they developed some, I guess, more phenotypical traits, so more physical traits, that would be more like humans, excuse me, like if they started losing their hair and becoming more human in terms of their physical appearance, that would be converge in evolution because they're just on a different branch right now. We have the same common ancestor. So that was my boring point, just to really, really great point. I just wanted to do the thought experiment of the analogy part of it, but the biology, you're absolutely right. For sure. No, and it was a really, it was a really great

point. It's just as the resident biologists of the show, I felt kind of obligated to make that point, but I realized that it really only is going to interest maybe 10 people that are listening. In any case, I'll make up for it now. And this is how we're going to close. I've gotten an alien abduction story that I can tell. And so if you have any stories, you know, that you can tell from your experience with other people that you've known throughout your lives. Get ready. And that's how we'll close this out. So I had a professor during my undergrad. He was my sociology professor, really brilliant guy. Might as well use his name since I called him brilliant. Ron Westrom, who Harvard and University of Chicago educated sociologist, really, really smart guy, pretty good professor.

I enjoyed his class quite a bit. I know there was some other people that didn't, but I really enjoyed the class. And he's an expert on alien abductions. He's done sociological studies on alien abductions. He also is an expert in a Sidewinder Missile Project, and I had his book on the Sidewinder Missile, and I asked him one day if I could have him autograph it for me. He says, sure, stop by my office at such and such a time. And I go over there and he's got the door cracked a little bit.

And I knock quietly on the door. He's on the phone. He waves me in. So I come into his office and he points at the seat. I sit down and he's talking on the phone. And I feel kind of awkward because I'm like listening in on this conversation with him talking. And I mean, it became very obvious that it was talking about UFOs and aliens. right away, which is what most of his examples in our sociology class ended up being.

I mean, he would like define a term and then use aliens as the example of how to apply that term to sociological research. It was a really interesting class. But he has me sit there and I'm listening to this conversation and this is the first thing I hear. No, no, no. I'm telling you, they cannot communicate with humans when they're in the form of the beast. They can only communicate with humans when they're in the humanoid form. And it's like, oh, man, I'm listening to a really interesting conversation here. It was the first thing I heard when I get his office. And he talked on the phone for maybe five more minutes.

And the whole conversation was talking about the beast form of the alien and whatnot. Very, very interesting experience. And then we chatted about whatever and he signed the book. But it was really interesting. And he does have some published research on sociological research regarding alien abductions, which was really his, like, specific field that he was really interested and was abduction specifically. So if you're, uh, interested in that, it's Ron Westram. And I think it's W-E-S-T-R-U-M, believe. So if anybody's interested in that, feel free to check him out.

And, uh, I don't know, maybe we'll try to get him on for some time to talk about it. I don't know. I haven't talked to him in a few years. Anyway, did anybody else have any other stories that they want to follow that one up with? Okay. I guess. Brett, you unmuted yourself. Yeah, one time, my only experience with this stuff was one time I was 13, 14 years old, playing basketball with my buddy in the driveway, and it was, you know, evening, dusk, started getting increasingly dark. And we just started, like, looking up in the sky and just sort of talking to each other,

just, you know, just casually looking. And we saw this, like, light come across. It was red, and it was very, it was almost like a very high up plane. And in fact, we thought that's what it was. And we were just, like, sort of amusingly pointing at it and looking at it. And so it's just like this red dot, high, high, high in the atmosphere, moving at a reasonable pace that you'd expect a plane to move from at that distance. And then we were both watching it and it did this in extreme 180. Like it was a very small little dot in the sky, right?

But it did this 180 in a matter of seconds and flung off at impossible speeds. And again, I was a 13, 14 year old boy. We ran into the house. We told our parents, they didn't believe us at all. They just laughed it off. That's amusing. And I've always thought back on that time, like, was that a childish memory that I just, that is not quite right? Did I, you know, put more into it than actually existed? But the way I'd remember it as sincerely as I can remember it, it was a moment where we both

looked at each other like, oh my God, did you just see that, ran in, told our parents, and it stuck with me ever since. So that's my only story. I like it. That's a very entertaining story. Adnan, I'm assuming you're shaking your hat. I don't have any close encounters of any kind, but, you know, I did spend a few years of my college years out in the California high desert, very close to the Nevada border, and you would see different kinds of, you could see the stars so much better because you had so little light pollution, the air was thin, and in fact, actually Caltech had a research observatory. very close by as well. But because it was part of that Nevada sort of world of people who, you know, kind of anti-government and sort of prone to kind of suspicion about, you know, government's motives, you would hear

a lot more people talking about strange phenomena, things they had seen. And I think one of the things that contributed to it and why they are around military bases and nuclear facilities, we were very close to a, also, I think, a major nuclear armory of some sort. And the tonapah was an air base that had top secret kinds of development of the stealth fighters and bombers and things. And I do remember seeing a stealth fighter appear in Deep Springs Valley one time flying very low. It had a weird shape. And it sort of zoomed off.

And I hadn't heard about any of these before. So for a few moments, I thought, oh, my goodness, did I just see something, you know, inexplicably, you know, alien here. And but then I, you know, learned subsequently that the stealth fighter program was very close and it, and it must have been a stealth fighter. But so I haven't had any experiences I couldn't then explain, but I definitely was always open to this. And on some level, and I remember reading chariots. interested in history, reading Chariots of the Gods, you know, Fondonnikin's explanation for how ancients could have developed the pyramids and built the Mayan pyramids and Easter Island and all of these sorts of things plus mythologies that talked about flaming chariots

or even, of course, Ezekiel's, you know, vision and these sorts of things that you see in the Bible and other, you know, religious texts and so on. I was talking with my son a couple months ago, maybe a month or so ago, and they were doing a unit in his class about like pyramids or Mayan civilization, I think, and about these amazing monuments. And he said, I wonder if one explanation for this was that, you know, aliens, you know, helped them build it because otherwise maybe they wouldn't have been able to do it. And I thought, wow, that's great. He hasn't read von Doniken, but he was sort of generating the thesis himself because people want some explanation for things that don't make sense.

And so the search for meaning is constant, it's human at its core. And we just should keep open minds and keep looking for evidence. And I really enjoy so much the conversation. I didn't know what to expect in it, you know, what we're really going to talk about. But I really love the direction you took things, Brett, with suspense. of belief, but then like speculating a little bit. And you really have thought about it quite a lot. And I so much enjoyed getting back into this kind of realm of interest that, you know,

I've had as a sci-fi enthusiast, somebody who watched a lot of Star Trek, Red Chariots of the Gods, you know, when I was young and so on. It's fun to really reconnect with this. And I'm looking forward to see the progress of this story. Yeah, as am I. And I'm looking forward to seeing the feedback from the listeners. on this because it was definitely an episode out of left field for us where we do typically talk about, you know, things with very definite occurrences at definite times with definite

individuals, whereas this one is a very speculative, fantastical episode. But I think that the conversation that we had was really interesting and really fun. And hopefully people agree with that perspective. So feel free to let us know what you think on Twitter or whatever. But But on that note, I think we'll wrap things up. I'll just have each of you tell the listeners how they can find you in the work Adnan. Why don't we start with you? How can the listeners find what you're doing?

Well, you can listen to the other podcast I host and sometimes co-host called the M-A-J-L-I-S. It's on all the platforms. If you're interested in Middle East Islamic World, Muslim diaspora's obviously given the recent killing of four members of a Muslim family in the street. of London, Ontario, just a couple of weeks ago. There's a new episode in addition to our Edward Saeed episode that came out. We also have an episode that is coming out tonight. Well, it's, listeners won't know, but it should be out by the time you hear this on Islamophobia

in Canada. And of course, you can also follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N. excellent Brett how can the listeners find you and everything you're doing yeah you can find everything I do at revolutionary left radio dot com I did just want to make a last point about this conversation I think what what we all walk away with is a sense of our epistemic humility being agnostic but principled and tethered to reality when we're thinking through these things and I think it was Carl Sagan who says keep an open mind but not so open that your brain falls out and I think people on both the hyper debunking side and the true believer side make errors in the opposite direction and become dogmatic about what is a very fluid, interesting gateway to a whole

bunch of philosophical reflections and explorations. But it's that agnosticism and humility that I think tempers you from going too far into either side. And we did mention Pasadism in this episode and the book Henry mentioned, I want to believe Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse. Communism on Rev. Left, I interviewed the author about that book, read a section from the book in the episode, the author's A.M. Gitlitz, I think that's a pseudonym, but that's his name that he wrote the book under. So if you're interested in that discussion, maybe we can link to it in the show notes, or if you just go type in Rev. Left Radio Pasadism, that conversation will come up, and we dive into a lot of this stuff, but tethered to like Latin American Trotsky

is history, which makes it layered and fascinating for anybody interested in these topics. Yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up because your episode was actually how I found out about that book, but I forgot that you had that episode. So, yeah, definitely worth checking out listeners. And I'll link to the episode in the show notes below. So if you don't use a podcast app, you can just click on that. You'll get right to the page for it. But definitely worth checking out. And yeah, you're absolutely right, Brett. That was how I found out about that book. So thanks for reminding me of that. I'm definitely going to go. listen to that.

It was really interesting. I was going to suggest if you didn't have one, that would be perfect for Rev. F, but of course, you've already done it. Awesome. So, for my part, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-1-995. You can follow me on Patreon where I write about immunology and public health, Patreon.com forward slash Huck-1995. And you can follow our show, Gorilla History, on Twitter, at Gorilla underscore Pod.

This G-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. We also have an Instagram that we've been trying to, you know, keep up. And that's at Gorilla underscore History, because Gorilla underscore Pod was not available somehow. In any case, again, it's with two R's. And you can support the show and get early access to episodes like this on patreon.com forward slash gorilla history, once again, with two R's. Now, just the last thing, usually I say solidarity as I close out these episodes, but since we talked about it today, I'm just going to mention I'm not a facadeist, but, you know, if in the off chance that there are intergalactic space communists, and I hope that they are, and I'm hoping that they're listening to this if they are, in that case, I'm going to close this out by saying, workers of the universe, unite. Solidarity, across space and time. I'm going to be able to be.