Something You Should Know - The Truth About Love at First Sight & What the UFO Videos Actually Show

Starting point is 00:00:01 Today, on something you should know, if you hate paying fees and you love free shipping, then there's something you need to hear. Then understanding why some people really do seem to fall in love at first sight. The speed and ease with which people fall in love is an individual difference like anything else. We all exist on a spectrum. And so love is absolutely real, even if it happens overnight. These people are feeling the same emotions. They're feeling the same commitments.

Starting point is 00:00:29 They just feel it much faster. Also, the dangers lurking in your restaurant leftovers. And there's new information coming out from the government about UFOs. What exactly do we know? There are several dozen documented cases of objects that have accelerated at extreme rates of speed that we can, with our technology, duplicate it. All this today on Something You Should Know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about

Starting point is 00:01:06 parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at Longest Shortest Time. com. Something you should know. Fascinating Intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Starting point is 00:01:46 So if you hate paying fees or hate paying for shipping, I've got something to start this episode that I think you'll find interesting. Hello, I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Have you ever been online shopping and ever? added something to your cart that you didn't really want just to get free shipping, or driven across town to avoid paying a $3 ATM fee, or passed up a convenient gas station to go to another one to pay a few cents less per gallon. Economists say this is a perfect example of the strange psychology of paying.

Starting point is 00:02:23 Research shows that people often hate extra fees more than they hate higher prices, even when the total cost is exactly the same. In experiments, shoppers preferred paying a higher product price with free shipping over paying a lower price plus shipping. Experts call it the pain of paying. A separate fee feels like a penalty. In fact, studies show many shoppers will spend more money just to avoid paying for shipping. It's the same psychology behind ATM fees and gas prices. A $4 coffee barely registers, but a $4 ATM. fee, that can feel outrageous because it feels like you're paying for nothing. People don't just

Starting point is 00:03:08 care about how much something costs. They care deeply about how the cost is presented, and that is something you should know. Do you believe in love at first sight? I've always been a bit skeptical of the whole idea. I mean, how can you really fall in love with someone you hardly know? Maybe it feels real when you're 14, but in the adult world, I've never really bought it. But it turns out there are people who are wired to fall in love fast, hard, and often. They crave the emotional rush of new romance, and that tendency can lead to incredible passion and serious trouble. Psychologists have a name for it. It's called emophilia, which is the tendency to fall in love fast, easily, and often. You may be one of these people,

Starting point is 00:04:01 or maybe in a relationship with one of these people, and understanding it may explain a lot about your past and current romances. Here to discuss it is Daniel Jones. He researches romantic attraction, deception, and personality at the University of Nevada Reno, and he's author of the book, Falling Fast, The Perils and Possibilities of Emophilia. Hey, Daniel, welcome to something you should know.

Starting point is 00:04:29 Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. So the idea of love at first sight, as I said, I've always thought it was kind of teenagey, and I certainly never knew it had a name and was never something that people would study, but obviously they do. You study it. So why do you study it? The common narrative that we have in our culture surrounding relationships is till death do we part. And that's the part of huge expectations surrounding relationships in our culture. And most people believe that in order, if it's real love, it's going to endure. But the speed and ease with which people fall in love is an individual difference like anything else. We all exist on a spectrum. And it's very real.

Starting point is 00:05:09 And so love is absolutely real, even if it happens overnight. These people are feeling the same emotions. They're feeling the same connections. They're feeling the same commitments. that often come with love that takes years to develop, they just feel it much faster. But it seems the definition of love may be important here, because if someone falls in love fast, really fast,

Starting point is 00:05:32 are they falling in love in the way that people who take longer fall in love? Is it a different kind of love? One of the things that we've done in our research is we've shown that the markers of love, the willingness to sacrifice, the willingness to put yourself at risk for this other person, to build a life together, all those things are present. They just happen much sooner. And the way I try to describe this very often is it's a threshold model. Everybody has a different threshold that needs to be met in order for them to cognitively and physically acknowledge, wow, I emotionally am feeling this thing called love. And so it stands to reason that physiologically

Starting point is 00:06:13 people would have a different threshold for and cognitive cognitively emotionally that that needs to be met in order for them to acknowledge that they're in love or feel that they're in love and individual difference wise that threshold can sit at different levels across the population so the difference between that and something like infatuation is where infatuation is cursory it's transient it is not something that lasts it's it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a whimsical where what we find with people who are high anemophilia is that they're feeling very real emotions. These emotions are are backed by commitment readiness. They're backed by physiological arousal. All the things that we would expect to be healthy markers of falling in love, they just, they feel those love emotions just much sooner. Well, I love the feeling of falling in love. And, you know, but once you're committed, then it's hard to have that feeling again. But don't most people love the feeling of falling in love? Most people love that sensation once they have it,

Starting point is 00:07:18 but the triggers for it and the threshold required the amount of background information you need about somebody, the amount of time you need to spend with somebody, the emotional and cognitive threshold for feeling the love sits at a different level across the population. So some people feel that rush and love it, and they feel it much faster and much sooner with less information about a particular partner.

Starting point is 00:07:39 where some people may love it, but they've only felt it once in their life. So it's not just the love of falling in love. There are also other cognitive and emotional elements that need to be present in order for somebody to say, oh my God, I can't get this person off my mind. I'm ready to sacrifice. I'm ready to be with this person. I'm ready to share my life with this person. It just sits at a different level.

Starting point is 00:07:58 And so absolutely, I mean, the feeling of love is an amazing feeling, but it does take more buildup for some people as opposed to others. And therefore, while we may love it, just like a lot of the, different things and and one of the comparisons I often make is there's a construct in psychology called sociosexuality which is the comfort with people would have with having casual sex and or sex one and only one time and things like that one night stands and and people have a different threshold for their willingness to do that some people it's I know you for an hour that's good enough other people it takes a year and so

Starting point is 00:08:31 that same threshold exists on a sexual dimension as well most of the people who have had sex say they love it that doesn't mean they're going to to do it overnight. Same thing with love. The rush of falling in love is exciting and a great reinforcing feeling, but that doesn't mean they're going to do it immediately, whereas others will. So let me ask a couple of quick questions and get some quick answers just to frame this picture a little better. What percentage of the population would you say fit into this category? What a great question. So I'd say about 15 to 20 percent of the population would fall in what I would call the high range of eymophilia. And it actually has an individual difference trait

Starting point is 00:09:11 across the psychological field. It's what we would call a normal distribution, which means there are some folks who are high, some folks who are low, but the majority of people fall somewhere in the middle. And so it has a nice normal distribution to it with the surveys that we've administered across different populations and different cultures. So with that distribution, I'd say between 15 and 20 percent would probably fall in an appreciably high category. And when you look at those people, how likely is it that when they fall in love quickly that that love sustains or that love goes away as fast as it got here? Well, you know, that actually varies with the people who are high in amethelia.

Starting point is 00:09:54 Some people, the love does fade, but what we find more and more, which is really fascinating, is the love may fade once the honeymoon period or the rush of excitement period ends in the relationship and that more subtle companion at love takes over, but they don't necessarily fall rapidly out of love. What we find with people high anemia is they have that initial rush, that initial excitement, they're super into the relationship, that component fades, and then they fall in love with other people, and that tends to be the rush, the excitement, and they tend to be drawn to that rush and excitement that they don't drop the partner that they're with.

Starting point is 00:10:32 They just, I don't feel the same way, or I met this other person, and they're so much so exciting right now. I can't get them off my mind. So it's not that they drop the person they're with like a rock. It fades. And then the excitement and that seeking of the rush takes over for a new partner. What else do the people who do this have in common besides this? Are they mostly men, mostly women? Are they about a certain age?

Starting point is 00:10:58 Are they accountants? I mean, I don't know. Right. No, I have a lot of friends who are accountants, they'd be horribly offended at what you said, no, I'm just kidding. And there's nothing offensive about it, by the way. I should say people, this is a natural individual difference like extroversion or agreeableness. But as far as demographics are concerned, we find that men are slightly higher on eomophilia than women are. But aside from that, we don't find any constraining or demographic variables that would indicate that one population or one particular demographic is more likely to be amethelic than another group.

Starting point is 00:11:37 So really, much like extroversion, you wouldn't find extroversion, you know, you may find people gravitating towards certain professions based on their extroversion, but you wouldn't out of the gate find, you know, people, for example, in Colombia being more extroverted than people, for example, in Italy, that it's a robust individual. difference across cultures, and that's what we're finding with eomophilia as well. But it's really important to understand this is not a mental disorder. There's nothing wrong with people who are high in eymophilia. It's an individual difference, just like conscientiousness. And, you know, when people are high in that end of the spectrum, it's a trade-off like any other individual difference variable. There are some wonderful things that come along with it in certain circumstances, and there are some hardships or challenges that may be presented when somebody's

Starting point is 00:12:22 high in eymophilia as well. So it's not a diagnosable category. It's not that if you score a certain score on the scale, you're suddenly an emophilic as opposed to if you're just slightly lower, you're not an emophilic. It's scored on a continuum. So I get if someone is falling in love at first sight in their teens or even in their 20s. But in just a second, I want to ask you about what happens with people when they get older? You know, once someone is in their 70s, are they still inclined to do this? I'm speaking with Daniel Jones about love at first sight. He is the author of a book called falling fast, the perils and possibilities of emophilia. And so if somebody is high in emophilia in their 20s, so they tend to fall in and out of love quickly and frequently, is it something

Starting point is 00:13:11 they, I don't know, that they get it out of their system? Or if they're doing it in their 20s, they're probably still doing it in their 70s. That's a really, really good question. So what we find is that the general population fluctuates, you know, like you say, early 20s, people will be probably the highest they are in amophilia at that stage. But let's say we have a bunch of 70-year-olds in the room. And somebody who is higher than the average person at 20 in amephilia will be higher than the average person at 70 in that demographic in amophilia as well. So while personality and individual differences traits, across the spectrum do vary across the life. span, generally speaking, people based on their percentile or their rank among the population

Starting point is 00:13:59 within the demographic who are high will stay high compared to the demographic as they get older. So while emophilia may indeed fade over time, it's a great study that we really still need to do, we don't find, I would argue that it wouldn't necessarily mean that somebody who is high in their 20s would then suddenly be low comparative to 70-year-olds. Somebody who's high compared to 20-year-olds in their 20s will be high compared to 70-year-olds their 70s. And so it would seem that somebody who is looking to get married and fall in love for the rest of their life would be wasting their time going out with someone who is high on emophilia

Starting point is 00:14:41 because it's doomed. You know, that's a really, really good point. One of the things that I always argue about personality, and I do this with my class when I teach as well, is personality defines your predispositions, not your destiny. So being aware of the fact that you're high anemophilia and you have these propensities to meet that love threshold much sooner, much easier, doesn't mean that the relationship is doomed. It means that the relationship might require extra work on your part as somebody high anemophilia, that you have to put up guardrails faster. You have to be prepared to deal with those emotions and communicate with your partner better. It may require you being with a therapist, who's a couple's therapist, that can walk you through

Starting point is 00:15:23 those periods of when the honeymoon area ends and that more companionate love begins, that you acknowledge that is a natural process through the evolution of love. And if you fall in love with somebody else, you're going to repeat that cycle eventually. It's just going to come at a different time frame. So people can work with individual differences, much like I would consider myself somebody low in conscientiousness, but I've been successful only because I put guardrails in my life, forcing me to stay on top of things. And so somebody high anemophilia for a example, may be able to compensate in a relationship that's really matters to them, something that they're really, somebody they're really committed to. If they're, you know, forewarned is

Starting point is 00:16:02 forarmed and knowledge is power. So if these people are aware of their amethylic tendencies, they absolutely can put safeguards in place that allows a long-term relationship to function. But you've been researching this. How likely is that? How often does that actually happen? Or that's just hypothetically possible? I'm saying it's hypothetically possible. I've been, you know, throughout the research that I've done, I have seen hemophilic people stay in relationships for long periods of time. So in all the surveys we do, we often ask, how long have you been in your relationship,

Starting point is 00:16:35 how frequently have you been unfaithful, things like that? And I know empirically it's true that people have stayed in relationships 8, 10, 12 years and been faithful who are high in nemophilia. I haven't dug deeper, to be honest, in why they've been able to be successful in those situations. And I will acknowledge that those types of people who fit that profile are not common, but they do exist. Do you think that most people who have emophilia get it, that they know it, that they understand that this is who they are? Or do they tend to think something's wrong with me? How self-aware are they?

Starting point is 00:17:16 All of the above. So one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about emophilia is because I want people to know that, There's nothing wrong with them. They're not deficient. They're not disordered. They just have a different threshold for love as other people. And so I've had a lot of folks talk to me and say, you know, up until this point, I really thought there was something broken about me, something wrong.

Starting point is 00:17:36 I couldn't control myself. They blame to themselves. And then there are other people who are self-deceptive about their eymophilia. And they say, no, no, no, no, no, Mike, this is the one. This is really the one now. And I'm really committed to this person. And then six months later, things change. So there are the self-deceptives.

Starting point is 00:17:51 There are the self-blamers. And what I want to do is really bring the common narrative into it's just another individual difference. If you don't like certain aspects of eymophilia where you're on the spectrum, you can work on those things. You can put in guards rails. You can make your life what you want it. These are just predispositions. They're not destinies. And so there we go.

Starting point is 00:18:13 We can work on this type of stuff. And so, yeah, I would argue absolutely there are people who blame themselves, people who are self-deceptive and don't think there's anything wrong with it. and they're just running from relationship to relationship. And then there are people who I hope will listen to this podcast and realize it's not their fault, but they do have to take responsibility for their behavior. When people get to their later years, if you've studied this, and look back, and they have been high in emophilia for most of their life, are they happy they were?

Starting point is 00:18:44 Do they regret it? Do they wish they had found that special someone a long time ago? or they don't have anything to compare it to? How do they look at it? Really fascinating question. The best I can answer is this. People who are high in amephilia generally have a little bit more extroversion,

Starting point is 00:19:06 their self-esteem doesn't vary tremendously. So I'm not seeing any life-satisfaction outcomes that are different, high, low, or otherwise. But what I can answer is that somebody who's extremely low in eymophilia, somebody who falls in love once, if ever. It's much harder for them to move on if that relationship dissolves because the threshold for them falling in love is so high,

Starting point is 00:19:27 the probability of this happening ever again is actually quite low. And so somebody who is extremely low in amephilia is going to struggle to find a partner that matches the partner that met their threshold that one time. So one of the things that we do know in the relationship literature is that people who have a crushing blow to their relationship life often can trigger depression of having a very strong love go sour can alter life outcomes, as we all know. So if you have one person who has met that threshold in 60 years and that person, you know,

Starting point is 00:20:03 passes away or there's a divorce or you separate or something happens to the relationship, the pain can be tremendous, especially if that threshold is so high that nobody is really going ever meet that again. So my argument is emophilia is a trade-off and it can be very functional in helping people move on because their threshold is lower for finding a new love. I saw something in the material about you about how people who are high in emophilia need to be very wary of narcissists. So talk about that. Most of us have dated a narcissist. And because of their ability to charm and promote themselves in a way that is extremely flattering, they create a rush of excitement. Well, if you're high in eymophilia, you're prone to feeling that

Starting point is 00:20:47 rush of excitement, you have a lower threshold for falling in love, and you interpret those feelings as love much faster. So when a narcissistic person meets an emophilic, it's a match made in hell, is what I often say. And so one of the things that I would argue is that if you're high in eymophilia, make sure that you acknowledge those red flags as you're going through the dating scenario. Don't gloss over them. Don't rush through them. Talk to a trusted friend, a therapist, a counselor, find somebody with whom you can bounce these relationships off of. Because very often we do find the people high in eymophilia find themselves in relationships with narcissistic people, because narcissistic people have that excessive charm and excitement in the early stages. And that's

Starting point is 00:21:27 what anemophilic often gloms on to. Well, this is a whole other way of looking at love at first sight that I certainly have never considered. So I appreciate you educating me and sharing all your your information, thanks. I want to compliment you. Your questions really pushed deep down some of the, some of the, I've been on a lot of podcasts with this, and this is the first time somebody really challenged me to think. Well, good. Thank you. Yeah, I have heard that before. People often tell me, you know, you ask the questions that I would ask. And so I'm glad you, I'm glad you felt challenged by it. I've been talking with Daniel Jones. He is author of the book, Falling Fast, The Perils and Possibility, of emophilia, and the perils and possibilities of emophilia,

Starting point is 00:22:13 and if you would like to read that book, there is a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Daniel. Hey, thanks, Mike. This has been a really fun conversation. You've probably seen those videos that government has released showing strange objects in the sky, objects that appear to move in ways that seem impossible.

Starting point is 00:22:37 If you haven't seen them, they're pretty amazing, watch. These objects accelerate instantly, change direction without slowing down, and sometimes appear to have no visible means of propulsion. That raises some pretty big questions. What are we actually looking at? Is this secret military technology, optical illusions, something explainable that just looks bizarre, or something else entirely? I've always been pretty skeptical of UFOs or UAPs as the government now calls them, but when military

Starting point is 00:23:12 pilots, radar operators, engineers, and intelligence officers all start talking seriously about these sightings, you have to at least pay attention. So what do we really know and what don't we know? Why has the government become more

Starting point is 00:23:27 open about this now? And why was it so secret in the first place? And is there actual scientific evidence behind these claims? Here to help separate fact from speculation is Robert Powell. He has 28 years of engineering experience in the semiconductor industry. He co-holds four patents, and he helped develop some of the first flash memory technology used in today's cameras, PCs, and video cameras.

Starting point is 00:23:55 He's founding board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, and author of the book UFOs. A scientist explains what we know and don't know. Hi, Robert. Welcome to something you should know. Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me on. So I'm a skeptic. I've always kind of been of the belief that, you know, if aliens actually came here, if UFOs were real, that they wouldn't land in the swamp. They would land next to the Washington Monument or they'd land in Times Square and they'd come out and say, here we are. And they've never done that. So I'm skeptical. But where are you on this? And why are you?

Starting point is 00:24:35 do you care? I'm normally skeptical. I'm normally a skeptical person, and that's the way I began my journey in studying UFOs. And I also used to think, okay, why don't they land on the White House lawn? But in a way, you know, that's because we are very human-centric. We think that's the way we think is the way some other intelligence should think. But then why the White House lawn? Why not the Kremlin lawn? Or why not not on anyone's lawn? But going back to your question, for the last 20 years I've studied this subject. And what really excites me about it is because if UFOs, at least a percentage of these reports, represent an alien technology, that would be the most impact to humanity in probably, arguably, 2,000 years.

Starting point is 00:25:46 One day UFOs became UAPs, at least according to the government. And I'm not even sure what a UAP is, but why did they do that and what is it? UAP. What does it mean? UAP. Of course, everyone knows UFO, unidentified flying object, but UAP is an unidentified anomalous phenomenon, which really is a broad catch-all subject. And the reason it came about was in about the year 2019, a gentleman by the name of Jay Stratton, who was out of the Office of Naval Intelligence, was the head of the United States UFO program.

Starting point is 00:26:32 And he wanted to brief Congress on the seriousness of UFOs. And so the term UFO had so much baggage about little green and gray aliens and all of the craziness in it that he felt to be able to get Congress to have serious attention, he needed to change the name. So what do we know? What do we actually know about UAPs? What we know is that there are several dozen documented cases of objects that had accelerated at extreme rates of speed that there is no way, we can, with our technology, duplicate it.

Starting point is 00:27:28 Some of those cases, there's radar data that supports it. And in other cases, there are multiple witnesses who see a craft standing still and then suddenly accelerating and disappearing in a matter of one to two seconds. So both of those, the radar data and the multiple witnesses, those types of those types of of accounts support an object in the air doing something that we are not capable of doing with any of our aircraft or missiles. Well, and I've seen some of those images, and there are always these, you know, dark, grainy, you know, it's not a big technicolor picture.

Starting point is 00:28:14 And so it's really hard to get a real sense of what's going on. And I understand that that's what pilots and people see. But again, it's always like, why can't it be much more clear? And just because objects are moving in an unexplainable way, it's still a big leap to, therefore, aliens are involved. Right. I think the only thing you can truly conclude, at least that I feel comfortable, is that there's intelligent control of this object. and whatever that intelligence is, it's far more advanced than we are.

Starting point is 00:29:00 And we're certain that nobody on earth in some other country doesn't have some technology that could do that. No, no one does because some of these measurements have shown an object accelerating at hundreds of G-forces. and to give you an example, an F-18 or an F-35, actually direct linear acceleration is only one to two G-forces. And when it's banking, it may be able to hit seven or eight G-forces, but nothing in the range of hundreds of G-forces. And if a human being or any living creature was in a craft, hundreds of G-forces would just turn you into a liquid mush. Well, I wouldn't like that. No, it would be difficult to survive that.

Starting point is 00:30:05 Yes. I mean, an F-35 will come apart at around 13 to 15 Gs. When you look back in history, when did people, first start reporting about aliens or spacecraft. When did we first hear that? There's very few cases that you can see in history that would make you think, okay, this sounds like a craft that has come into our atmosphere, right? And it is being explained in the terminology of that time in history.

Starting point is 00:30:41 But if you look in modern history, and I've done this and looked at it, beginning in 1942, is when you see a sudden increase in reports of these strange moving objects in the sky. So it actually began during the middle of the Second World War. And at that time, they weren't called UAPs or even UFOs. They called them foo fighters. And it is curious that it would start in that era, which is roughly, I would imagine, the time when stories of aliens and UFOs were in the books and newspapers and movies and things like that. Well, you know, of course, the famous one was 1933 with Orson Wells, right, in his radio broadcast of the Marquis. invading the earth and a lot of people believed it. You know, amazingly, that did not cause a wave of UFO reports in 1933. There was still basically no reports of UFOs. It didn't really

Starting point is 00:31:55 begin until 1942. And we were not even aware of these reports until people started going through the flight logs of pilots during the Second World War. war and both German, Japanese, American, English, and French pilots had reported strange spherical lights that would move along with their aircraft during a mission. And that is the very first time in the modern history where we've had a lot of reports in the beginning of UFO sightings. Is there any evidence that these UFO sightings seem to happen somewhat randomly in various places around the earth? Or are they concentrated in certain places, or I guess above the earth? But is it just everywhere and anywhere, or is it, you know, right over New Mexico or something?

Starting point is 00:33:02 UFO sightings are all over the world. I mean, there's no nation that has not had UFO reports. what makes them more prevalent in certain areas. We don't know the why, but there are, for example, within the United States, there's more sightings in New Mexico and in Colorado and then the northeastern United States. We also know that they're more prevalent around nuclear installations. So we've actually done a study where we looked at, nuclear military installations versus non-nuclear military installations, and do we see more

Starting point is 00:33:47 reports of UFOs in one over the other? And the answer was, we do see more reports over the nuclear installations? By far? Yes. And we did a statistical analysis, and statistically, there are more UFO reports over military insulations that have nuclear weapons on the base. So maybe they're just looking for a gas station to fill up for the ride home? That could be, although all the signs are, whatever means of propulsion they use, there doesn't seem to be, it's not like our typical type chemical or nuclear.

Starting point is 00:34:36 It's some other method that, you know, we have not yet discovered. So one of the characteristics of, you know, conspiracy theories or things like that is that in order for it to stay secret, everybody has to be quiet and people have a tendency to talk. And why you wonder hasn't anybody come out and said, I met this alien and I saw him and, you know, we had drinks together. And this is what he said, you know, from some reputable source. But it's always these little hints and little snippets of video. And it's never like, boom, here it is. I'll tell you a story.

Starting point is 00:35:24 And, you know, it's purely a hearsay story, but it comes from a very reputable source. So the very first UFO program in modern time. was called the UAP Task Force. And that was created by the gentleman I mentioned earlier, Jay Stratton, who came out of the Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence. So Jay, I know well. And I've been over to his home. I've had dinner with him and his wife.

Starting point is 00:36:02 You know, he's a fairly intelligent guy. and he seems very honest, right? He told me that he had seen dead aliens. And so I said, well, wait, Jay, I mean, you're in, that would be top secret information. How could you tell me that? I mean, that, you know, why should I, you know, that this doesn't quite seem right? And he said, well, the problem is, I did not see this as part of my naval duty. I was at a defense contractor when they showed it to me.

Starting point is 00:36:47 So he said, in his opinion, it did not fall under his top secret classification as something he could not talk about. As a scientist, I like to have some kind of evidence like radar data, multiple witnesses. But here I just have a single witness. He happens to be the head of the UAP's task force, right? So is he just BSing me? I don't know for certain, but I have no reason to believe he would do that. But that goes back to what we were talking about before,

Starting point is 00:37:27 is why is it so secret? If they're dead aliens, put them in the Smithsonian, and let's all have a look. Here's why he tells me that's so secret. He says that the United States is trying to reverse engineer these craft. And he claims that we have one or two of these craft and that we've been trying to reverse engineer them for decades, but have had no success. But nonetheless, he indicates that our fear.

Starting point is 00:38:03 is that Russia and China may also have a craft. So the view is any nation that is successful in reverse engineering how these craft operate would have a huge technological advantage over any other nation. And so as a result, they don't want our enemies to know anything about it. Just because there's dead aliens, and you were to display them somewhere, doesn't mean you have a spacecraft. I mean, let's see the aliens. If they're lying around dead, why not see them? It doesn't mean, I don't see how that's a threat or a concern with our other nations like China and Russia. So what?

Starting point is 00:38:52 Right, right. There's no concern about the dead alien bodies. The concern is he says they also have the. craft. Well, I don't want to see the craft. Then keep the craft secret, but let us see the aliens. Seeing the aliens doesn't reveal anything about the craft. It's just the aliens. That's true. Or if you don't want to show the aliens, put their clothes on display or, you know, give us a hint. Give us something. Right, right. No, that's, I like your argument. That's not a, you know, that's a good point. Now, I suspect, right in the government, when in doubt, you go ahead and classify it.

Starting point is 00:39:38 So I just suspect that they automatically classify everything. So since he said there are the spacecraft that we've seen or we have, what do they look like? How big are they? Even if you can't reverse engineer them, you could describe them. Yes, supposedly this one was a disk shape object, kind of like an egg shape, and they're unable to get into the inside of it. So all that they have is the exterior appearance of the object. What do you mean they can't get inside it? I guess the material is too difficult to penetrate.

Starting point is 00:40:28 And the dead aliens that he claims he saw, what did they look like? The typical gray type alien is what he describes. So four to four and a half feet tall with a large head, two arms, two legs. Doesn't that seem kind of cliche? Like, you know, he just seems like that's the average alien in any TV show from the 50s or the movie from the 50s. Well, actually, I think in the 50s, the aliens were more our size. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 00:41:08 But starting in the 1980s, they dropped in size. Well, we can probably thank ET for that, I imagine, in the 80s. Well, it's a topic I think everybody's interested in, and I'm still very skeptical about it, But I watch those videos, and wow, you have to wonder. I've been talking with Robert Powell. He's author of a book called UFOs. A scientist explains what we know and don't know. And if you'd like to read it, there's a link to that book at Amazon and the show notes.

Starting point is 00:41:44 Robert, thanks for coming on and talking about this. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure talking to you today. I've enjoyed it. When you leave a restaurant with leftovers, Food safety experts say you should get them in the fridge within two hours. And when you do reheat leftovers, hotter is better. The USDA recommends you reheat food to 165 degrees all the way through.

Starting point is 00:42:14 That's especially important in a microwave because microwaves heat unevenly. So you should stir it midway through, get it really, really hot, and then let it cool down. One leftover that deserves special attention is really. Rice. Cooked rice can contain spores of a bacteria, and if rice sits out too long, those spores can produce toxins that will survive reheating no matter how hot you get it. That's why fried rice syndrome has become a real food safety concern. The trick is to refrigerate rice quickly, store it cold, and avoid reheating it more than once. If you ever wonder whether leftovers are still safe, food safety experts have a simple rule. When in doubt, throw it out. And that is something

Starting point is 00:43:04 you should know. Something You Should Know is produced by Jeffrey Havison, Jennifer Brennan, executive producer Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on. on right now in the world of reproductive health, and we're covering it all. Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm, and of course, the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages. If you're new to the show, check out an

Starting point is 00:43:46 episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talk to plenty of non-parents, so you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at longest shortest time.com.

Something You Should Know - The Truth About Love at First Sight & What the UFO Videos Actually Show

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