Science Vs - UFOs: The Truth Is Right Here

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

A whistleblower claims that the U.S. government is covering up what it knows about aliens on Earth, and several military pilots recently testified to seeing strange objects in the sky. It kinda feels like the tide is turning on UFOs — even NASA is taking these sightings seriously. So what’s going on here? Have aliens visited? And will we ever find alien life somewhere … out there? We speak to astrophysicists Prof. Kevin Knuth, Dr. Sara Webb, and Prof. Adam Frank.  Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsUFOs2023  Check our previous episode on UFOs here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/60oChXf4TK7dN4NZslVUpx Prof. Adam Frank's new book, The Little Book of Aliens, comes out October 24. Chapters:  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Chapter 1: Congress takes on aliens  (03:04) Chapter 2: Why is Rose Muldering?  (05:44) Chapter 3: The ‘Tic-Tac’ incident (13:54) Chapter 4: We need a Scully (26:45) Chapter 5: The new science on searching for alien life This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, with help from Wendy Zukerman, as well as Michelle Dang, Joel Werner and Nick DelRose. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, Emma Munger, Peter Leonard, and So Wylie. Special thanks to Matt Shilts and Walter Rimler. An extra special thanks to researchers we spoke to for this episode – including Prof. Seth Shostak and Julio Plaza Del Olmo.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. And this is the show that pits facts against flying saucers. On today's show, UFOs. Have aliens visited us? We've talked about UFOs on the show before, but recently there have been some very big developments. If you're following stuff about aliens and about UFOs and what U.S. lawmakers are saying about all of this, you know things are very confusing right now. This year, the U.S. government held not one,

but two hearings about UFOs, which are sometimes called UAPs, Unidentified Anomalous or Aerial Phenomena. UFO fever taking over Capitol Hill. The nation watched gripping testimony of UAPs. What, if anything, does the Pentagon know that it's not telling us? You might have heard about the hearing in July where three people testified, including two military pilots, and they talked about seeing weird objects zipping around in the sky. But the star of the hearing was a former intelligence officer who testified that there is a super

secret program in the U.S. government that knows all about alien craft. I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program. And he told Congress that people in the know even have bits of alien bodies. Biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah. Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics? Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program. And if that wasn't enough, then a journalist took two supposedly alien bodies

into a Mexican congressional hearing. Now Mexico's Congress is taking things to a whole other level, showing the remains of what certainly looks like tiny aliens with elongated heads and three fingers on each hand. This might seem totally absurd, but the thing is, this idea that aliens have visited us here on Earth, a lot of people believe it, and it feels like it's being taken more and more seriously. Like NASA recently convened a group of eggheads to write a report about how to study these strange phenomena. A couple of years ago, when we first covered this topic, we were pretty unconvinced that

aliens had visited us. But maybe we were wrong. So today, we're going to bust open the X-Files and ask, what can science tell us about all this? Because when it comes to UFOs or UAPs, there's a lot of UFO fever. But then there's science. Science versus UFOs is coming up just after the break. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think?

I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan Eleven? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves.

Get ready to learn. I'm Jan Eleven. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. Today, we're talking about UFOs or UAPs.

Potato, potato. It's weird shit people see in the sky. There are some reports of people seeing some very weird shit indeed. Senior producer Rose Rimler has been looking into this. Hey, Rose. Hey, Wendy. There are some reports of people seeing some very weird s*** indeed. Senior producer Rose Rimler has been looking into this. Hey, Rose. Hey, Wendy. Okay, so are you going to be the Mulder or the Scully in this relationship?

I think we're both Scully or two Scullys, actually. All right. Although, I have to say, I am getting a little more Muldery. Like, I feel like I'm moldering. So it sounds like you're like a you're a smoldering molder. Yeah. You haven't completely switched sides. So tell me what changed.

I will tell you. I'm going to spend the whole episode telling you. But first I want you and the audience to know that it's not because of the little alien bodies in Mexico. Okay. They're probably a hoax. The guy behind it has a history of making fake monsters.

And we already know that most likely these bodies are very old animal bones and mummy bones mixed together. Right. And it's not because of the whistleblower in the U.S. who said he knew about biologics. I mean, is biologics even a word? Like, that is not a word, right? Like, it sounds like a skincare product. It kind of sounds like when cops refer to women as females. Yeah.

Exactly. Okay. Okay. And so why didn't he convince you? Well, I watched the whole hearing. It was four hours long. And that whole time, he didn't produce any actual evidence. It was just, somebody told me, I heard.

I'm like, you got to give me more than that. That is just. Yeah, science can't do anything with that. That's just, that's basically gossip. Okay, so I am the scully here. No surprises. But it's really because last time we looked into UFOs for this show, I read about all of these UFO sightings, supposed UFO sightings, that just ended up being this purely mundane stuff.

Balloons, the planet Venus, lights from a Tina Turner concert. That's the best one. But, you know, it was was, that is simply the best. You know, and I guess it was something like 90% of so-called unidentified flying objects were identified. And it just made me pretty skeptical about the whole thing, right? Right. But let's look at that remaining 10%. Because it's when you dig into those that you start to molder, or at least I did.

Right. So I'm going to take you in the audience with me on a deep dive into one of the weirdest UFO or UAP sightings I've ever heard. It's something that came up in that hearing. These pilots talked about how they saw a thing in the sky that looked like Tic Tacs. You know those mints that come in a little plastic box? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so let me set the scene. They are U.S. Navy pilots flying off the coast of San Diego.

It's a beautiful sunny day, clear sky. The pilot in question, he's got another plane next to him and he has a co-pilot in his own plane. So there are a number of witnesses. They're out there flying and they're told by officers who are on a nearby aircraft carrier that they should go check something out that's been popping up on the radar. And they want these pilots to go see what is it. So the pilots go to that location, and when they get there, they see something weird. This happened in November 2004, but it took a while for the pilots to start talking about it openly. So here's one of them telling his story to the U.S. Congress this year. All four of us looked down a small, saw a white tic-tac object with a longitudinal axis pointing

north-south and moving very abruptly over the water like a ping-pong ball. He flew down to get a closer look. But he says when he did that, it flew up and then spiraled around him, almost like it was reacting to him. As we pulled nose onto the object within about a half mile of it, it rapidly accelerated in front of us and disappeared. Our wingman, roughly 8,000 feet above us, lost contact also. Lost contact? Huh. Yeah, it like disappeared.

And then it turned out it was what appeared to be the same object was reported by some other pilots and radar operators 60 miles away. And it was also these tic-tac shapes have been reported on other days by other people. One witness on an aircraft carrier said that at one point it was raining UFOs, according to what he saw on the radar. And later that day, in 2004, a different pilot went out and got a video of the tic-tac. This was taken by an infrared camera. And this video is all over the internet. It's famous. What did you think when you saw it?

Well, you know, I didn't really know what I was seeing because it's like blurry. It looks like a little dot on a screen. Either the dot is moving or the camera is moving. You know, it's actually kind of unremarkable. Right. The footage. What's remarkable is the explanation by people who saw it, their story. That's interesting. Like, one pilot said that this thing was moving in a way that our technology never could, and he believes it came from another world. So that certainly captured my attention. And it captured the attention of a physics professor named Kevin Knuth.

The stories were pretty astounding. The descriptions of the objects as being, you know, these white butane tank sort of things that were bouncing around like zigzagging back and forth like they were bouncing around like ping pongs in a bottle. I'd never heard a description like that before. And I thought, these are very strange objects. This is really interesting. Kevin has worked for NASA and he teaches at the University of Albany in New York. He studies exoplanets, among other things.

But he's recently started down this whole new path studying UAPs. And so he wanted to know if these tic-tacs were actually moving in extraordinary ways. And he figured he could find out by doing some pretty simple calculations based on pilot testimonies and the radar data. Although one problem was he didn't actually have a copy of the radar data. I would have loved to have actually had the radar data in hand, the original radar data. That would be great.

We don't have that. No, we don't have that. And in fact, that day after they returned from encountering the Tic Tacs, somebody showed up on the ship and confiscated all of the data. And as far as I understand, to this day, no one knows where that data went or where it is. Huh. That is spooky. So there's something, yeah, there's something going on. There's something important going on here.

So we reached out to the Navy and the Pentagon and asked about this. They said they'd get back to us, but they never did. Oh, okay. Okay. So I guess what did Kevin use instead if he didn't have the actual radar data? He pretty much decided he'd just take the reports at face value, what the pilot said it did and what the radar operator said it did on the radar. And he felt good about that because the reports seemed to line up. Mm-hmm. And right away he realizes there is something weird about these things in the sky.

According to the radar operator, these Tic Tacs would often be really high up in the sky, but they would be moving very slowly, which, you know, for planes and stuff, you have to move a lot faster to stay up in that thin atmosphere. And then they would suddenly just drop from like five miles up in the sky down to sea level in less than a second.

Both these observations are really strange. I asked Kevin about them. So they were going too slow when they were cruising, but then they were going too fast when they dropped from up high down to sea level, to make any sense. Exactly. They were anomalous in several respects. So this wasn't just one strange thing.

There's not just one strange thing about them. They're strange in many ways. So then he worked out how fast it would have to accelerate in order to drop down from the sky that fast. And he found out that the Tic Tacs would have had to accelerate at more than 5,000 times the acceleration of gravity. Whoa. Which is, like, ridiculous. That's way faster than planes can accelerate. In fact, planes would rip apart if they flew that fast. And then imagine what it would do to the human body. It would be pretty awful, probably really quick too. So if I'm kind to myself,

my top half of my body weighs about 100 pounds. So now if I was to accelerate it 5,700 Gs, that 100 pounds would weigh 5,700 times more. And so what would that do to the lower half of your body? It would crush it into a soup on the body. Yeah, you basically would be soup on the bottom of the floor. I mean, could this be some kind of like spy technology? No, it's not like, oh, you know, China's 10 years ahead of us or whatever. It's like, no, that is way beyond what anyone can do currently. And if you had a craft that could go that fast,

you could get around the galaxy like, you know, like nothing. Which led Kevin to conclude that unless the pilots were totally wrong or lying, the Tic Tacs are from out of this world. They appeared to be incredibly advanced craft, probably, certainly not of human origin. And they, we don't know how they operate and could very possibly be interstellar. I ran that by another scientist we spoke to, and he said, whoa, that conclusion is daring.

Do you think it's a daring conclusion? I'm not sure what else it could be. What else is going to be accelerating at 5,000 or 10,000 Gs? If you can come up with something natural that does that, that would be great. But I couldn't imagine what that could be. So. Wow.

Okay. Rose, are you here on Science Versus saying that the Tic Tacs are aliens? Are we doing this? First, I think we need a second opinion. Yes, yes. We have our Mulder. We have two Mulders, if you're including you, Rose. I'm not a Mulder. I'm Mulder. We have two Mulders, if you're including you, Rose. I'm not a Mulder. I'm Muldering.

All right, all right. I want a Scully. Where's our Scully? Here she is. I'm a Scully, for sure. I love the X-Files. And I love the idea of the wonderful, the weird, and the unexplained. However, I am a scientist through and through.

And if anything's going to be spectacularly unexplainable, it needs to have some pretty great evidence to go with it. That's Sarah Webb. She's an astrophysicist at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Just down the road. Sarah's specialty is red dwarf stars. So she's not a ufologist. Ufologist or ufologist?

Or ufologist. Like urologist. So she's not one of them either way. She's not one of them. But she does a lot of science communication. And people love to talk about UFOs and are always asking her about UFOs. Okay. The first time she saw the Tic Tac video was because journalists asked her to comment on it.

Journalists like me. Do you think the Tic Tacs are alien spacecraft? No. I'd be willing to make a bet that they are most likely not alien spacecraft, which I know. I'm a bit of a killjoy. Sorry. Well, you did say you were in Scully, and she said fastly popping Mulder's bubble the whole, like, in season nine. She's like, I don't know, Mulder. I'm like, Skully, you've seen so much.

How can you still be skeptical? You've been abducted by aliens. What will it take? So Sarah does not know what the Tic Tac is. She doesn't have something that she can pull out of her sleeve that's like, aha,

it's a viral marketing campaign for Tic Tacs, which is my favorite explanation that I made up. Think of all the free press Tic Tacs are getting. I know, I kind of forgot they existed. So here's why Sarah is not convinced. And actually, this comes from Sarah and other scientists I spoke with. I'm going to lay out the skeptic side. Okay. Kevin used three lines of evidence. The eyewitness reports, the video, and what was supposedly seen on radar. Up to now, we've been acting under the assumption that

these three pieces of evidence are describing the same event. We're acting like they are three lines of evidence that are like three strings that have been braided together into a rope. But what if we drop that assumption? Because here's the thing. They may not all be describing the same event. We know, for example, that the video that was taken was taken later that day by a different pilot who actually says he didn't even see the thing with his own naked eyes. It was just on his infrared camera. He actually didn't see it. Okay. So maybe these three lines of evidence should not be braided together into a rope. And when you don't have a rope,

you just have three dangling strings, right? Which are much weaker. So now let's look at each of those things on its own and see how does each piece of evidence stand up under its own merit. Love it. I can hear you cracking your knuckles, Rose. Okay, number one, eyewitness testimony. Even I could give you this one. It sucks. Ask lawyers.

Ask the countless people wrongfully imprisoned under eyewitness testimony and they will tell you. Yeah. And then something to consider is that the pilots were really far away from the Tic Tac. They'd estimate things like its size, which Kevin used to do these calculations, from 20,000 feet away, which is 6,100 meters. And Sarah points out that we know humans aren't that good at judging things from a distance. We can't do that for objects that are very, very far away. Our eyes aren't very good at judging things from a distance. We can't do that for objects that are very, very far away. Our eyes aren't very good at doing that.

So we can lean on our best estimates of, well, I know that this thing is probably this far away, or I've seen this before. But we're not, yeah, our interpretations are not precision instruments. And this is especially hard if you don't have any points of reference to help you out. So these pilots, they were just over an open ocean.

Sarah says she always gets fooled by this on the highway. There's one exit I take here in Melbourne, and it's always like 300 meters. Here's your exit. And I look at it and I'm like, that is so close. That cannot be 300 meters. You're traveling at 110 kilometers an hour on this particular highway. And so you're traveling so fast that your brain is processing distances a bit differently. I reached out to a scientist who studies human visual perception. And I told her, you know, the Tic Tac story. And she says that from that far away, with no reference points while moving,

it would be, quote, almost impossible to judge the size of an object, end quote. And there's a powerful example of this that I wanted to share. It's a different incident altogether. It's hot off the press though, and it shows how with human perception, we can be misled. So it's about one of those videos

that was released by the Department of Defense that got everybody all excited. It's another supposed UAP sighting. I'm going to send you a link to the video. So I'm just going to, I'll send it to you now. Okay. Okay. I'm opening it.

We see the ocean. We see a water. Oh, okay. Is that it? Yeah. Okay. I guess like it is weird. It's just like it looks, at first it looks, okay. Is that it? Yeah. Okay. I guess, like, it is weird. It's just like, it looks, at first it looks like a bird, the way it's flying,

and then it looks like a ping pong kind of just like. Just zooming. Yeah. Yeah, it looks like it's going really fast. And it looks like it's just over the water, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Well, NASA's task force on this,

they just put out an analysis of this video in their report. And they found that the object is actually two and a half miles above the water. So four kilometers above the water. So it's not right over the ocean at all. And it's going at a speed of 40 miles an hour, 64 kilometers. Oh, it's not fast. Which is probably just the wind. Yeah. Oh, no. It's probably just drifting with the wind. So what is it? They don't know what it is. They don't know what it is.

So it could be, guess the drum roll, please. A balloon. Oh, my God. Okay. So that's thread number one. Human perception is fallible. Right. Got it. Thread number two. Speaking of videos, let's look at the video for this incident, the Tic Tac video. So not everyone agrees that the video is showing an object behaving extraordinarily.

There's another researcher who did his own analysis where he just looked at the video, and he found it was moving at speeds that are within the realm of what's possible for just a regular airplane. But how could they have such different answers? They're using the same equations, right? It's because the numbers they're putting in the equations are different, obviously. Well, they're doing a bit of a different analysis,

but when it comes to the video itself, they made different assumptions about how the object moved in relation to the camera. So Kevin assumed that the object was stationary and then zipped from the stationary point. Whereas this other scientist, Julio, he assumed that the object was moving at a constant rate and then appeared to zip away. And assumptions like that completely changed the game.

Okay, so that's thread number two. Thread number three? The radar data. You know, in this case, Kevin didn't have the actual data. Right. He had the radar operator told him he saw on the radar. But in general, we have other UFO incidents where there's something very strange on the radar. Okay.

The thing about that is radars have false positives. Radar sometimes picks up radio waves that have bounced around in weird ways. It can pick up reflections of ships or buildings. And there's one example from 1996. On radar, there seemed to be a UFO hovering over an English town. It turned out what was happening was that radio waves were bouncing off of a church spire. Oh, wow.

Wow, wow, wow. Okay, so is this Tic Tac thing just like dead in the water? I mean, I could already hear the real UFO believers. I can hear them being like, what about this? What about that? And like the salient points are that A, eyewitness testimony is unreliable. Yes. And that's mostly what we have when it comes to UFO sightings.

B, given the imperfections with radar data, we don't have any good enough radar data to really suggest that there's something truly extraterrestrial happening here. Can I just ask, what did Kevin say about all this? Well, I went back to Kevin with all these points. And we talked over email this time, and he sent me a really thoughtful reply.

And he says, he said a lot of things, but, you know, one, he disagrees with the idea of unbraiding these three pieces of evidence. He thinks that's unfair. He points out that the pilots who saw the Tic Tac and the pilot who took a video of the Tic Tac were both sent to where it was by a radar operator who saw something weird on the radar. So he thinks that that means they are

clearly connected. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Point taken. And he also said that, you know, just because radar sometimes makes mistakes doesn't mean that the radar in this case was making any mistakes. Sure. And then regarding the pilots being able to judge things from a distance, and we specifically talked a lot about judging the size of an object from a distance. He did some math and he said that even if they were off by an order of magnitude, the Tic Tac would still be moving incredibly fast. And ultimately, he wrote, and I'll quote this, I understand the

skepticism, but beware of people eager to dismiss data because it does not agree with their expectations. Touché, Kevin, touché. So Rose, how are you feeling about all this? I, you know, I'm not convinced yet, but I'm very aware of my bias now. I wasn't as aware. I was like, well, I'm just following what the evidence is. But Kevin's right. Like, being that skeptical is a form of a bias. And we all have biases about everything. And so I can't change that.

I can just say, like, I'm biased in the direction of being very skeptical. So my bar for evidence for UFOs and aliens is going to be really high. Yeah. No, I do. I absolutely take that point. I do think it's not an exact apples-to-apples comparison. You're biased, and you're biased, too, because I think it just comes

back to that maxim of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And if I told you, hey, Rose, yesterday I saw an ant, you'd be like, great, good story. I don't even need a photo of that. I believe you. But if I said I saw an alien creature, you would say, give me some evidence that it better be strong. And so I do think different claims require different evidence. And I suppose what we've kind of canvassed here, I think the claim is so extraordinary that I don't think the evidence is there for it. Yeah. So Rose, where do we go from here? I asked Sarah about that. So, if these items or whatever, if these reports are not truly aliens,

does that dash our hopes and dreams that there is alien life out there somewhere? No, I don't think so. I think we can separate those two things. And I'd be very happy to say that out there somewhere, there's probably life. And they're probably wondering about us. They're probably wondering if there's life out there beyond them.

On their podcasts. Yeah, on their podcast, exactly. We don't want to get too discouraged. In fact, scientists are telling me that we are closer to finding aliens than we have ever been before. And that's coming up just after the break. Hey Rose, should we do our best there impersonation? Welcome back. Today on the show, Rose and I are talking about UFOs. It seems like a lot of the stuff in the news is a bit of a beat-up

around aliens, but now we are getting into the hunt, the search for alien life outside of our planet, our solar system even. Rose, tell me where we're up to with this. Yeah, I didn't really know this before I started working on this episode, but as it turns out, we are living through this incredible time in history when it comes to this topic. I talked about all this with Adam Frank. He's a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester. Adam says it's really cool to see more and more scientists picking this up, this kind of research looking for alien life,

because he said there used to be a stigma against doing that kind of research. And some people call this the giggle factor. So basically, you know, if you were a scientist interested in seeking out new life and new civilizations. Eyebrows would get raised or there would be like a kind of a snicker of like, oh, little green man. Oh, and it's only been very recently that that association has begun to fade. And science just in general isn't as giggly anymore when it comes to looking for life outside of Earth.

What changed? Why is it different now? The major thing that changed is that we found exoplanets. Until the mid-90s, we actually didn't know whether or not there were any planets outside our own solar system. So the discovery of the first exoplanets changed everything. Now all of a sudden, we knew that there were other worlds, other surfaces, other atmospheres, you know, where life might be able to form. Wendy, when you and I were born, there was only nine, counting Pluto then, planets. And now we've identified more than 5,000.

And we know there's many, many, many more. In fact, scientists think that one in five sun-like stars hosts a planet or planets that are in this sweet spot for life that's sometimes called the Goldilocks zone, where they're not too close to their sun, they're not too far away from their sun. And that means that many of these planets would look familiar to us. There's a lot of planets out there where right now,

as you and I are talking, there's snow falling, you know, in valleys. There's fog drifting over seashores. There are mountaintops that have glaciers on them that are, you know, where there's avalanches falling. There are ocean worlds where, you know, there are white cap waves, you know, blowing over as hurricanes come in. There's just the universe is full of worlds. That's so cool. Yeah, it's pretty mind-blowing. And now that we know about all those worlds,

Adam and a colleague did some math to figure out the odds that humans are the only technological species that has ever evolved on any of them. And that number turned out to be 10 to the minus 22. One in 10 billion trillion. One in 10 billion trillion. That just doesn't compute, right? So another way to look at this is that the universe has run 10 billion trillion experiments in life, planets, and civilization.

And they'd have to all fail in order for us to be the only one, the only civilization ever in the history of the universe. Some researchers actually think it is possible that intelligent life is that rare. But Adam is one of the more optimistic ones. And there are other people who are optimistic on this point, too. And lots of scientists are rolling up their sleeves and looking for alien life, any kind of alien life, whether that's like, quote unquote, intelligent or, you know, pawn scum. And one way that they're

doing this is with really powerful telescopes using a technique that's called atmospheric characterization. And it goes like this. When we're looking at a star and we watch a planet that orbits that star, when it passes between us and the star, making a kind of a little teeny tiny eclipse, right, some of the light from the star gets blocked by the planet. making a kind of a little teeny tiny eclipse, right? Some of the light from the star gets blocked by the planet. But the rest of the light will pass through the planet's atmosphere, if it has one. And that means that we can compare the light that's blocked or absorbed by the planet's atmosphere

to the light that's not blocked. And so when we get the starlight that is passed through the atmosphere, there's a fingerprint. You know, there's what we call a spectral fingerprint. Okay, and so why is that spectral fingerprint a sign of life? Well, what they're looking for are signs of life in the spectral fingerprint. So they're looking for stuff that's in the atmosphere that would only be put there by life. So an example is on Earth, we have a very oxygen-rich atmosphere. And the reason for that is we have plants and bacteria and other stuff that does photosynthesis and makes oxygen. Right, right. So that's one potential signature, biosignature, that scientists are looking for? Is there a planet out there with an atmosphere that has a lot of oxygen that could indicate life? Cool. And Adam told me looking for biosignatures

is really going to ramp up with this next generation of telescopes that we're going to build. We finally have a way to look at planets that are 40 light years away and still tell whether or not there's life on that planet. And that is what makes this moment in history so radical. That's so awesome. It's amazing. It's stunning. In fact, very recently, scientists observed what might be a biosignature. Really? On an exoplanet that's 120 light years away from us. They picked up a signal in that planet's atmosphere of a molecule that on Earth, it's only made by life. It's this weird molecule that's mostly made by phytoplankton.

You don't seem very excited. Like, have we just found phytoplankton on an exoplanet? Nobody's willing to say that yet. They're just like, oh, we found this interesting signal, and, you know, it's worth noting that here on Earth it's only made by phytoplankton, but, like, everyone's, like, jury's still out. Okay, okay.

The point is that scientists are looking, and they've got the tech that can pick it up, and they will have even better tech in the near future. And, in fact, they're even starting to look for something beyond the biosignature. They're looking for something called technosignatures. Technosignatures. All right.

It kind of sounds like what Elon Musk is going to call the next Twitter or X. Or name his next child. Oh, name his next child. Okay. So what is a technosignature? So the example I just gave you of looking for oxygen, that would be a biosignature. It's a clue that life exists. A technosignature is a clue that technology exists on another planet.

So, you know, there's the project called SETI, which we talked about in our last episode about UFOs. And one thing SETI is famous for is searching for life using radio signals. Right. And, you know, that is an example of a technosignature. But now there's all these new ideas about different kinds of technosignatures we can look for. And a lot of that came from just in the last few years

where scientists have like gotten together to really talk about this because the giggle factor has gone away. And in fact, in 2018, NASA had a conference in Houston all about how to search for techno signatures. And Adam was there, and he said it was basically like just kids going nuts in a candy store. So that meeting, we had three days where we're just talking

and talking and talking. The talks were amazing, and then then over dinner the discussion was amazing and then after dinner you know at the bar the discussion was amazing and then at 2 a.m in the hotel lobby the discussions were amazing because we really felt like finally we're gonna get the chance to do this and so wait and they're just like what if the aliens were doing this and what if the aliens are doing that and maybe they're not using radio signals like with SETI, but maybe they're using lasers. And maybe that's what they were chatting about. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, and I hate to bring down the party-like atmosphere, but one idea was looking for alien pollution. What if those space schmucks pump out garbage into their atmosphere, just like we pump garbage into our atmosphere? Who would do that? Why would who, what kind of, what kind of s***ty species would pump a bunch of crap into its beautiful atmosphere? Okay, okay. So they were like, let's do an experiment.

There's a type of molecule in our atmosphere that isn't made by nature. It's made by humans. They're called chlorofluorocarbons. CFCs. Yes, yes. Yeah. I live in Australia. We know all about CFCs that ate up the ozone layer,

and now I get sunburned every time I leave the house. Yeah, and fortunately, we don't pump out CFCs the way we used to, but we do still make them, and they're still in our atmosphere. Adam and other scientists asked if a distant planet also had CFCs that they pumped into their atmosphere, would we be able to detect that? So what we found was that even Earth levels right now, Earth levels of chlorofluorocarbons, could be detected using the James Webb Space Telescope on a distant planet in its atmosphere.

So we now have the capacity to detect that in an alien world. So that was a milestone. So if you copy-pasted Earth and you put it 40 light years away, we'd be able to pick up on it? Yeah, yeah. You'd be able to pick up on it. So they showed that we could probably see a funky atmosphere from really far away. And now we just have to look for that on distant planets. And there's one last technosignature that I want to talk about really quick. It's pretty science fiction-y, but it could happen.

So this is the idea of an alien megastructure. Yeah. Who doesn't love just saying alien megastructures? I think the best thing about this whole field is to introduce that term into like the global lexicon. So an alien megastructure is theoretically a giant machine or a bunch of giant machines that an alien civilization has put into space for some

reason. And that reason could be like they're harvesting energy from a star. So we should look for those. And in fact, there was a false alarm a few years ago. Really? Some astronomers saw a very weird signal in some data they were looking at. And researchers published a paper where they said, it could be this, it could be that. It could be an alien megastructure. Whoa. And what was it? Now scientists think it's clouds of dust.

Oh, okay. Passing around a planet, making a strange signal. Oh, okay. Oh, the search for alien life is just like littered with these close calls. Yeah, it's always so close. Yes. But Adam says the point, like the takeaway from that is that, A, like we could detect a signal like that if it was machines.

But B, you can publish in a scientific paper, might be an alien megastructure and not get laughed out of science. Yeah. Which is kind of laughed out of science. Yeah. Which is kind of shows a paradigm shift. Absolutely. Because it was like, well, you know what? That's possible. We've now reached the point with the kinds of science we're doing.

We're staring at solar systems. We're staring at planets. Yeah, you have to take into account the possibility that it would be some kind of, it would be from life, that this thing you're seeing is going to be associated with life. All right. So Rose, I guess it's a good time to be a smoldering molder. What are you, a scolder? I'm a skeptical molder. I'm a scolder. Yeah, at this point. A skeptical molder. Right. Great time to be a skeptical molder. I'm a scolder. Yeah, at this point. A skeptical molder. Right.

Great time to be a skeptical molder. Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Wendy. Oh, and while you're here, how many citations are in this week's episode? This week we have 84 citations. Excellent. And by the way, when we say this, what do we mean? Well, the idea is that for every claim we make, we have a reference to back it up or explain where we got it from.

So you can click on the link in our show notes. It'll take you to our transcript. And if you're wondering about anything or you want more information, you can look at our script and you can look at the reference for why we are saying what we're saying. Yeah. Awesome. All right. Bye, Rose. Bye, Wendy. This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, as well as Michelle

Dang, Joel Werner, and Nick Delrose. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, Emma Munger, Peter Leonard, and So Wiley. A special thanks to Matt Schiltz and Walter Rimler. An extra special thanks to all the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Seth Shostak and Julio Placer del Olmo.

Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are listening on Spotify, then follow us and tap the bell icon so that you never miss a new episode. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time. And you went to look for Tic Tacs in San Diego, right? We did, yes. We spent five days watching the skies off the coast of Laguna Beach and Catalina Island for watching for anything.

Did you find anything? We did. We did find some things. We found probably the first object we saw. The team in Catalina Island spotted it first, and we tried to track it. That turned out to be the International Space Station. Ah. So, yes, we found the International Space Station. That was cool.