Science Vs - UFOs: What the Government Covered Up

Episode Date: June 21, 2018

Could aliens actually exist? Is there any chance they’ve visited Earth already? What really happened at Roswell? The truth... is right here. We talked to astronomers Dr. Jill Tarter, Dr. Seth Shostak, investigative journalist David Clarke, and physicist Prof. Jim Al Khalili. Check out the full transcript here: http://bit.ly/2PqOHRj Selected readings: Seth’s account of that day in 1997The “Condon report”-- a 1968 effort to go through and identify all UFO sightingsThe Roswell ReportThis paper estimating how many planets are in the “Goldilocks” zoneA good read on wormholes and their history; a tough read on how we might use them to teleport Credits: This episode has been produced by our senior producer Kaitlyn Sawrey, as well as Wendy Zukerman and Rose Rimler, with help from Shruti Ravindran and Meryl Horn. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Meryl Horn. Music by Bobby Lord and Emma Munger. Editing by Blythe Terrell. Additional editing help from Caitlin Kenney. We performed this live for GimletFest - and we were joined onstage by our Aussie mate and mathematician Adam Spencer who has his own podcast you should check out ‘The Big Questions’, and astronomer Dr Emily Rice, who helps run Astronomy on Tap which brings together astronomers and beer. Check it out to see whether it runs in your city. Also thanks to Dr. Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, Dr. Craig O'Neill, Dr. Jessie Christiansen, Dr. Cameron Hummels, Dr. Phil Hopkins, Dr Avi Loeb, and the many other researchers who helped us on this.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This is the show that pits facts against flying saucers. On today's show, UFOs. You might think the idea of aliens visiting Earth and UFOs is kind of crazy, perhaps the stuff of people in tinfoil hats or conspiracy theorists. But governments around the world have been tracking unidentified flying objects on and off for decades. And in fact, just last year, the New York Times reported that the Department of Defence was actually running one of these programs really recently.

Throughout history, some quite established and powerful people have shown a soft spot for UFOs. People like Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan. So, on today's show, we're going to try to get to the bottom of two classic questions. One, could aliens actually exist? And two, is there any chance they've visited Earth already? When it comes to UFOs and aliens, there's a lot of believers, but then there's science. Okay, so powerful governments have been keeping tabs on UFOs for decades. But here's the thing. Scientists have too.

And one of those scientists that are trying to work out if the truth is out there is Jill Tata. So you saw a UFO once? I did see a UFO. My husband and I both did. Jill is an astronomer and pilot, and several years ago, Jill and her husband were flying a plane when they spotted something really odd out of the window. A bright light, 18,000 feet above the ground.

What it looked like was the headlight of an oncoming airplane. So we quickly called the controller and said, what's the traffic at our two o'clock position? And he said, there's nothing on my radar, right? And it's this sort of classic, oh my goodness, you do see that light, but the controller says there's nothing on the radar. An unexplained bright light hovering near their plane and nothing on the radar. Spooky. And because Jill is a scientist, her brain was going crazy trying to explain what she was seeing.

But up there in that plane, she couldn't deny what was before her eyes. I'm a very sceptical person. I want explanations. I want reasons. And I'm looking at something that I can't explain. Jill says that she watched this light for a couple of minutes, and then something happened. A hole in the clouds that we didn't realize were there opened up some more, and we understood that the light we were seeing was the moon.

Yes, the UFO was actually the moon peeking through the clouds, which sounds kind of silly. But up that high, a sliver of the moon poking through the clouds looked like a weird floating light to Jill, which is a bit of a letdown, right? Well, Jill's a nerd, so she was kind of relieved. I'm glad that it became an explained flying object rather than remaining an unexplained flying object. Jill's story tells us that anyone can be sucked into this idea of UFOs,

even if just for a second. But then again, Jill is not just any scientist. She co-founded the SETI Institute, which stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. And SETI pops up in Hollywood films all the time, like it's in Independence Day... It's the real thing. A radio signal from another world.

..and in the 90s film Contact. In fact, Jill was actually the inspiration for Jodie Foster's character in that movie. So beautiful. I had no idea. And SETI captures the imagination of Hollywood because they're doing something really amazing. They're monitoring the universe for

signs of alien life. And in particular, they're searching for whether ET has figured out how to use radio. Is it a bit like when you're in a car that has a, you know, an analog radio and you're switching the dial and you're hearing static and then, shh, shh, shh, shh, and then eventually you get onto a radio station. Yes, that's a very good analogy. It was like tuning a hundred radios in parallel. Yeah, SETI's computers are on the lookout for radio signals. And why radio? I mean, that's so old school.

It's all about podcasting now, right? Well, radio is a very simple technology, so it wouldn't be too hard for anyone, including aliens, to figure it out. Plus, radio waves also travel really fast at the speed of light, making it a very efficient way to communicate over large distances. We have equipment that looks at billions of radio channels. The problem is that these radio waves are all around us. The sun, the stars and the planets, they all emit them.

So Jill and her team pick these up as they're searching for ET and changing the dials on their cosmic radio. As you're tuning between the stations and there's that static, about 10% to 20% of that noise is actually coming from the galaxy. It's cosmic radio emission. So how do you know what's ET and what's Uranus? Well, different things emit different kinds of radio signals and stuff that isn't natural, like a radio transmitter, emits this very particular kind of signal.

It's called a narrowband radio signal. And that's what the SETI computers are looking for because they reckon that these narrowband radio signals coming from far away would have to be created by an alien species. By now, Jill and her team over at SETI have been searching for these radio signals for decades. And what have they found? Well, in 1997, Jill was searching for aliens at a telescope in Virginia

when she got this weird radio signal from the skies. Here's what happened. Jill had the graveyard shift, searching for aliens, and she told us that these nights at the telescope were usually pretty boring. So she had this trick for keeping herself awake. I read that you played salsa music at levels high enough to kill plants. Is this true? No, no, it wasn't salsa. Samba. Brazilian samba, yes. Dancing around this deserted control room with the music blaring because, you know, most of the work was really being done by the computers. We were just babysitting.

So, Jill is dancing around the control room to samba music in the middle of the night, as usual, and suddenly the SETI computers start freaking out, telling Jill that it's found a weird signal coming from space. So, clearly this isn't Mother Nature. It's a technology. A technology from an alien? Well, before Jill gets too excited, she starts doing some tests. And we're imagining the samba music is still playing.

One of the tests involves moving the antenna of the telescope back and forth to see what happens to the signal. You move the telescope away from the source you were pointing at and the signal should go away if it's actually coming from a distant extraterrestrial source. And it did. It did. OK, so now Jill knows that she has this very clear particular signal

which seemed to not be natural. And it seemed to come from one place. So Jill is thinking, whoa, this is really happening. I got really excited then. I woke up my colleague who was still sleeping in the dorms, and he came in, and we kept working around trying to figure out different things that we could do that might tell us whether the signal was really

what we were beginning to think it was. And then Jill starts calling and waking up more SETI scientists. SETI Institute freeze-dry room. We have all the aliens you need. Just click three for frozen aliens. Punch four for preserved aliens. Four. What?

Sorry, Wendy, you do not get any aliens. What? This is Seth Shostak, and no, he's not secretly hoarding freeze-dried aliens. That we know of. He's a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. There are a couple of SETI locations on that night in 1997. Seth was on the west coast and Jill was on the east.

And when Seth got this call, he knew it could be a big deal. When the boss calls you at home, it's usually not good news. Seth, I think you ought to get down here. There's an interesting signal. So now the SETI scientists are on high alert, thinking this might be a signal from ET. And if they're right, this could be the most important day in human history. This was their contact movie moment for real. I was very nervous. I couldn't sit down. I didn't sit down.

I never sat in a chair that whole evening. And so for a full day and night, the SETI scientists on both sides of the country are now frantically trying to figure out what this signal is. By the time we left the telescope and went back to the sleeping quarters, we were pretty sure that this wasn't, in fact, an ET technology. Oh, no!

We didn't know yet what it was. Jill says that after hours of monitoring this signal, they could see that it was changing in this particular way that suggested it wasn't coming from the far-off alien planet they thought it was. But Jill and her team were so exhausted that they completely forgot to tell the SETI scientists on the West Coast.

So Seth and his team were still madly trying to figure out if this was an alien. And then... What happened next was I fell asleep at my desk. And to Seth, this is kind of funny when he thinks about all the conspiracies that people have about what would really happen if scientists discovered an alien signal. If you ask the public what they think would happen, the government would shut us down and take over everything and, you know, whatever. But this showed that, well, actually, none of that happens. What actually happens is that you go upstairs and fall asleep on your desk.

Okay, so if this was no alien, what was it? Well, eventually, the team figured out that the signal was coming from a spacecraft called SOHO. I know, right? SOHO? More like, oh, no. Anyway, this spacecraft was helping scientists to study the sun. SOHO was beaming information to Earth about the sun's surface

and solar weather patterns. And that's what the SETI computers had picked up, and what Jill had confused for aliens. Yeah, it was a disappointment. On the other hand, like the UFO that I experienced, it did end up having an explanation. It did not remain a mystery. That day in 1997 goes down as one of the most exciting days in SETI history, which is all to say that they haven't found any aliens. But Jill hasn't given up. She says the search for intelligent alien life has really only just begun because space is just so big.

Here's how Jill explained it to us. She says if you think about space like the oceans on Earth. So how much have we searched in 50 years? And my calculation said, well, it's about one eight-ounce glass of that ocean. So that's it. That puts that in perspective. It's because we haven't really looked yet. And so you believe that there is fish in the ocean?

I believe that that's a really good question to ask. And the fact that one glass doesn't turn up a fish doesn't yet mean that there are no fish in the ocean. Just keep fishing. And this is an argument you hear a lot, that there are so many planets in the universe, intelligent life just has to have sprung up on one of them. We asked Seth about this.

And how many planets are there? Well, we know roughly how many planets are in the galaxy in the Milky Way. It's roughly a trillion with a T, trillion. And we can see two trillion other galaxies. So, you know, two trillion times a trillion is two trillion trillion. It's a lot of trillions. Yeah, that's a big number. I mean, really, that's, you know, usually it's compared to the number of grains of dry sand on all the beaches of the Earth.

It's bigger than that. Okay, so all those trillions, that's a bit of a back-of-the-envelope calculation, probably on the high side. But still, everyone who studies this agrees that there is a kangaroo pouch full of planets out there. Which is all to say that there's a lot. And even when you limit it to planets that we think could be the right size as well as the right temperature to host life, planets in the so-called Goldilocks zone, where it's not too hot and it's not too cold, but it's just right, well, there are still billions and billions of these planets out there.

And it's these estimates that have Seth really excited. He just can't believe that Earth is that unique. If life, intelligent life, brewed up here, surely it would crop up elsewhere. I would be surprised if there was something very special about Earth. Increasingly, scientists are agreeing that there is probably life out there, somewhere in the universe.

Where it gets contentious is whether that life is pond scum or intelligent enough to build a radio transmitter. Another point of contention, these aliens might have built their radio at a totally different time to us, like maybe thousands of years ago, and now they're dead and gone. Still, Seth is optimistic about one thing. He says we might not have to wait too much longer to settle some of these arguments.

Because Seth says the tech is getting so good that we're no longer dipping a cup of water into the ocean. We're starting to pull out buckets. If this experiment is going to work, it's going to work in the first half of this century. You spend so much time thinking about it, so it's not so exciting. But I really thought that this was not something that could happen in my lifetime. Well, just be careful when you cross the street so that, you know, your lifetime is long enough to see this happen. Right? Okay. So other scientists we spoke to thought that this timeline might be a bit optimistic. But still, if it's not crazy that

there are other planets that could host intelligent life and that we might even find that life in the next few decades. What about this idea that aliens have already visited Earth? How crazy is that? After the break, we're tackling one of the biggest UFO conspiracies, Roswell. And we've got answers. Welcome back. So we've just found out that it's not bonkers to believe that intelligent aliens are out there somewhere in the universe. But could they be right here?

Could aliens have visited our home planet? Last year, this might have been something that a lot of us were wondering, even if we didn't want to say it out loud. That was when it became public knowledge that the US Department of Defence had a secret UFO program. And this made headlines around the world. To maybe our favorite story of the day, what looks to be a case of real-life X-Files. The existence of a secret government program to investigate UFO sightings.

My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone. Whatever that means. Whatever that means? That was the former U.S. government official who headed up that UFO program. And even before this news story broke, there were already declassified documents showing that the U.S. government had been investigating UFO sightings on and off since the 1940s. So, what does the government know about UFOs?

Do they have any evidence that aliens have visited Earth? We asked David Clark, an investigative journalist and researcher at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, and he's been trolling governments for decades to find out what they know about UFOs, writing his first letter to the UK Ministry of Defence when he was a teenager. My mum said, well, you've got a letter from the government. And I remember sort of tearing open the envelope and finding this quite polite letter saying, thank you for your letter.

The Ministry of Defence... But sorry, mate, there's no good evidence that we've been visited by aliens. Still, that didn't throw David off the UFO trail. He's kept at it and in particular keeping a close eye on revelations about one of the most infamous UFO conspiracies of all time, Roswell. Roswell is a touchstone for UFO believers. They say that alien spacecraft crashed in the desert of New Mexico and the government covered it up. And now there are thousands of Roswell truthers all over the world and even a museum dedicated to the cover-up.

So what really happened? Let's set the scene. It's 1947. A rancher in remote New Mexico comes across this weird wreckage covered in what appears to be curious symbols. David told us, so the story goes, that the rancher picks up the wreckage. Puts it on his truck, takes it back to his ranch, shows it his family. They try and bend it, try and burn it. It won't burn. They flex it and it returns to its original shape. It's weird.

A couple of weeks later, the rancher goes into town and reports the strange debris to the sheriff. He pretty much says, Guess what I found? What do you think this is then? The local sheriff doesn't know. So then he contacts the Air Force and eventually they put out a press release pretty much saying, Nothing to worry about, kids. This is nothing odd. It's just a weather balloon tracking winds high up in the sky.

Big letdown. Oh, it's not a flying saucer after all. It's a weather balloon tracking winds high up in the sky. Big letdown. Oh, it's not a flying saucer after all. It's a weather balloon. But of course, that's what they'd want you to think. So what really happened? Well, the funny thing is that Roswell actually was part of a secret government program. So there was a government cover-up. Yes. Just not with aliens. Yes. So David told us that they weren't tracking aliens. They were tracking the Soviets. Remember, this is the late 1940s. The Cold War was just starting

and the Americans were worried about the Soviets building an atomic bomb. So the American military has this kind of crazy idea to use large 70-foot balloons loaded with different kinds of equipment to try to detect if the Ruskies were exploding nuclear bombs. And they did a bunch of tests releasing all these balloons around the United States to see if their idea might work. But they were trying to keep this hush-hush.

Secrecy was endemic. It was part of the Cold War mindset. The problem was that according to a declassified government report, these giant balloons were unsteerable and they often went rogue. Like one balloon landed on top of a Brooklyn tavern and another, they said, in Roswell, New Mexico, where that rancher would find it. Here's David.

Turns out years later it emerged that what he'd actually seen was one of these giant balloons. And here's a pretty funny thing. The US government actually knew that the public was confusing these weird looking balloons for UFOs. And they kept an eye on UFO sightings, hoping to find out where their blasted, unsteerable balloons had got to. Our senior producer, Caitlin Sori, asked David about this. So from a government perspective, the alien conspiracy was actually working in their favour because they could keep track of these balloons. Yes.

Wow. What a good way of putting the Russians off the scent by encouraging these stories about flying saucers. So, yes, Roswell was a government cover-up, but not nearly as fun as the one UFO truthers would have us believe. OK, so there's an alternative explanation for Roswell, but that's just one UFO file. David has looked through literally thousands of reports of UFO sightings from

the UK government. I would say probably 60 to 80,000 pages. 60 to 80,000 pages of UFO reports. Yeah, must be something like that. I mean, don't forget, I didn't do this in one afternoon. This is over 20 years. 20 years of trawling through the public stories of weird sightings and odd experiences. And what did he find? Any real UFOs? Well, about 90% of the things that people reported ended up being identified. And it turns out that

people confuse all kinds of things for UFOs, including the lights from a Tina Turner concert and even Richard Branson's blimp. But more often, David says that these now-identified objects have a fairly mundane explanation. Balloons, aircraft, even things like birds fly in unusual formations, unusual weather conditions, ball lightning.

And also you have people who deliberately make up their stories, hoaxes. They're a huge part of the phenomenon. And David told us that planets and stars also get confused for UFOs. In particular, the planet Venus. Venus is often low and bright in our sky, and when you view it through the lens of our atmosphere, it can distort, looking a bit like it's moving about. But not everything can be explained by Venus and Tina Turner concerts.

90% of these objects were identified. But that still leaves a cheeky 10% of these sightings that have no explanation at all. So what's that got to do with it? Got to do with it? Well, 10%. That's not nothing. I mean, could some of them, like even just one of them, be intelligent life visiting Earth? Does David believe? People have extraordinary experiences. There's absolutely no doubt about it, and we can't explain all of them.

David's like, just because we don't know everything, it doesn't mean it's an alien. I challenge anyone to sit down, do the same thing that I did, go through every single one of those pages and come out at the end thinking, yes, we're being visited by aliens. But still, the unexplainable does leave the alien spacecraft door ajar, even if it's just squeaking open. So how hard would it be for an alien spacecraft to visit Earth?

Like, we have this vision that they would just press a button from their alien spaceship and kablam, they'd be here. But seriously, how would they get here? Well, that's coming up after the break. Welcome back. We've just found out that despite lots of people having weird experiences and a cheeky government program exploiting our belief in UFOs, we actually don't have any good evidence that

aliens have visited us from afar. But the last question that we want to tackle is this. How would aliens reach us at all? Like, how hard would it be for them to travel from their homeland to ours? To get our heads around that, we need to consider where aliens would be coming from in the universe. We asked Jill Tata, aka Jodie Foster, about this. Well, they could be as close as the nearest star, which is four light years. Jill says the closest planet that we think might host alien life is Proxima b.

It's in that sweet-ass Goldilocks zone, and it orbits a star that's roughly 4.3 light years away. How long does it take to get 4.3 light years away? If you're a rocket with our fuel, tens of thousands of years. Duh! Right? We're slow. We're slow compared to the speed of light. We actually did the calculations,

and for an alien ship to come from Proxima b to Earth using our rocket fuel, it would take more than 100,000 years. Plus, a study came out last year suggesting that this planet, Proxima b, might not have an atmosphere which would make it hostile to life, at least life like us. So it looks like we might have to go even further out for intelligent alien life. How much further out?

Seth at SETI has thought about this question long and hard. My calculation, which was based on what I thought were fairly conservative assumptions about all this, suggests that the nearest other aliens might be 500 to 1,000 light years away. That would mean it would take well over 10 million years to get there on rocket fuel. Now, let me just do that calculation. No.

Yeah, no. That's about right. Yeah. These are some rough estimates. But the point is, the aliens live very, very far away, if they live anywhere at all. And we have no idea how they would get to us. Using our best technology, you and me, we couldn't get to those aliens. But science fiction has a solution, suggesting that maybe the aliens have access to something that could help them move across the galaxy at a tremendous pace. A gateway.

A wormhole. So, just quickly, we wanted a gut check on this. Could wormholes really make long-distance space travel possible? Right, well, wormholes, yes, they're very interesting. This is Jim Al-Khalili. He's a professor of physics at the University of Surrey in the UK. And Jim told us that this idea of wormholes isn't totally loony. Einstein came up with it. It all goes back to Einstein, usually these things. He developed his general theory of

relativity 100 years ago, 1915. And that's the theory that talks about the shape of space and time and how gravity can warp space and time. We've done lots and lots of tests and it seems to be right. Wormholes, if they exist, come about because theoretically space and time can warp so much that they can connect to places that are very far apart. So it's a shortcut from one point in our universe to another that takes us out of our universe.

Here's how Jim explains it. Look, take a piece of paper, two points on that piece of paper. The shortest distance between those two points is a straight line drawn on the paper. Now fold the paper over so the two points are very close together, hovering above each other with a gap of air between them. Imagine you could hop from one point out of the paper through the air to the other point. OK, so it looks good on paper, but is it actually physics?

Well, Jim told us that we haven't actually found any wormholes. They live in the land of theory. That's what we hang on to, the hope that if ice-size theory is right and it predicts everything else that we've checked out, maybe wormholes are right as well. Now, some scientists, including Jim, think that wormholes are so unstable that it would be impossible to actually travel through them. But Jim did say that at least in theory, perhaps some advanced alien could build a particular kind of wormhole that they could then travel through to get to us. So it sounds nonsense, but, you know, it's fun because I haven't broke any laws of physics in saying any of this.

Physics, it sure is fun. OK, so we haven't found alien life yet. We don't have any good evidence that they've found us and we don't even know how they would reach us. But still, there are a lot of planets out there. Kangaroo pouches full of them. So who knows? Maybe you and I will live to have our Hollywood contact moment. So beautiful. I had no idea. I had no idea. That's Science vs UFOs. This episode has been produced by our senior producer,

Caitlin Sorey, as well as me, Wendy Zuckerman, and Rose Rimler, with help from Shruti Ravindran and Meryl Horne. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Meryl Horne. Music written by Bobby Lord and Emma Munger. Editing by Blythe Terrell. Additional editing help from Caitlin Kenney. We performed a version of this episode live for Gimlet Fest

and we were joined on stage by our Aussie mate and mathematician, Adam Spencer, who has his own podcast you should check out called The Big Questions, as well as astronomer Dr Emily Rice. So thank you very much, guys. We'd also like to thank Dr Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, Dr Craig O'Neill, Dr Jesse Christensen, Dr Cameron Hummels, Dr Phil Hopkins, Dr

Avi Loeb, and many, many other researchers who helped us out on this. Next week, we're tackling serial killers. How do you really make a murderer? Then he used her head for a dartboard. But he wasn't done killing. You never turn your back on a serial killer.

I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.