Somewhere in the Skies - OMNIBUS 03 | Science and UFOs

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

In another omnibus collection, we bring you a handful of our past episodes where different scientists, in varying fields of study, discussed with us the topic of UFOs. Interviews include: Adam Frank - Astrophysicist and Author Beatriz Villarroel - Astronomer Jacques Vallee - Computer Scientist Paula Bontempi - NASA Oceanographer Stanton Friedman - Nuclear Physicist Robert Powell - Chemist and Nanotechnology Specialist Please take a moment to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple. Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Discord: https://discord.gg/NTkmuwyB4F Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ryansprague.bsky.social Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomewhereSkies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somewhereskiespod/ Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U Read Ryan’s articles at: https://medium.com/@ryan-sprague51 Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Copyright © 2025 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is somewhere in the sky. with Ryan Spread. Adam, welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. It's my pleasure to be here. Pleasure is all mine, man. I had the amazing opportunity to read a advanced copy of your new book, the little book of aliens, and I knew I had to talk to you, man, because not only do you cover one of our obvious favorite topics here at Somewhere in the

skies, but you cover it in a very hopeful, optimistic, but most important, scientific way. So that's really what I want to break down with you tonight is what are aliens. What could aliens be if we do eventually somehow make contact? You know, there's many people on this planet who believe we have already. That's not really what this conversation is about today. I really want to dig into a lot of what you believe, as an astrophysicist, I might add, what these alien intelligences could be, how they could possibly get here, how we can search for them, all of that. But obvious question, before we even get to all of that, origin story time, how did you get interested in astrophysics? And yeah, if you don't mind, give us a little bit of, I guess, your resume, if that's cool.

So I got started in astrophysics as a five-year-old. I found my dad's, I have this really clear memory of this. I found my dad's, or wandered into my dad's library, and he was a big science fiction fan. He was a writer. And he had those pulp 1960s science fiction magazines like Isaac Asmanoff's, you know, amazing stories. And I remember looking at the covers of those things, you know, like, and they had pictures of like guys bouncing around on alien planets and Michelin, Tyreman, spacesuits and rocket ships, with flame blasting out the back and bug-eyed monsters.

And that was it. I was done. Like that was, I've never wanted to do anything other in my life than be an astrophysicist and study the stars. So that was the beginning. And then my dad also started putting science fiction in my hands early on. I remember him giving me like when I was 10 or 11, the big book of the Golden Age of Science Fiction,

which was Asimov and Heinlein and those people. And then Dune, he gave me Dune. So I grew up with science fiction ideas. I still am. You know, as a kid, I watched every science fiction show there was. And back in those days, there wasn't much. So as you can see here, you know, Star Trek, back in the mid-70s when I was coming up, the Star Trek, the show, the reruns would be on at 4 o'clock and 7 o'clock.

So I watched every episode of those first three seasons of Star Trek, like 30 times. Wow. So, yeah, so I grew up with this, you know, real passion for space. And then I learned that, you know, I had some facility with mathematics, you know, in physics. I really fell in love with mathematics and physics. So I went to school to study physics. I became a physics major. Then went to graduate school, also in physics because it was really theoretical physics that really, that was the way, that was the approach I wanted to take.

I knew I was bad with machinery, right? So you never wanted to put me in front of a telescope. And I always had a strong interest in life in the universe, in astro, what we now call astrobiology. But back in the day, there wasn't much going on there. There was just SETI, essentially. And SETI was still kind of marginal. So I pursued, I became a computational fluid dynamist. I studied things like how it starts form out of clouds of gas, how they get torn apart.

And all through, you know, so that was most of my career. I ended up at the University of Rochester where I ran a research group that does this. I'm a professor there. But I always had that interest in life in the universe. And then, you know, starting in the 1990s, astrobiology, as for reasons we'll talk about, starts to grow again. And I jumped on board. By the mid-2000s, I started doing, I turned my research group to studying exoplanets, the atmospheres of exoplanets, and then dove all the way in, started to really get involved in astrobiology. And now, again, this is something we can talk about.

But in 2019, a group of us applied for a grant to NASA to study what are called techno signatures. And we got the first grant. NASA, again, we'll talk about this. NASA really was not giving any grants, lots of money to study dumb life, you know, microbes or what we call biosignatures on alien planets, but not much money to study intelligent life. And our grant was really one of the first ones ever, or at least in a very long time, that NASA gave to study the possibility of finding technological life, technological civilizations. And so since then, our group has done really, I think really amazing, interesting work, pushing the boundaries on that problem. That's amazing. And yes, I do want to touch on techno signatures a little later because I think that

is really, you know, the advent of a new way of searching for this intelligent life out there, which I think is very exciting. You've got a lot of different groups trying to tackle that approach right now. So first of all, congratulations. That's amazing that your group was one of the first. And the fact that NASA is finally getting so much more proactive with this topic of searching for life. They're also apparently searching for UFOs. So that's kind of what I want to touch out first here with you, Adam. You do start the book actually with some chapters that do concern the topic of UFOs or UAP is there now sort of calling them. So that's my first question for you in terms of the book. What made you want to start the book,

talking about UFOs. And what are some of your thoughts on the topic of UFOs, especially in the last few years when it's really become more mainstream than ever? Yeah. What do you make of all that? And what made you want to decide to start the book with that? Well, you know, one of the, the book is about about, you know, it's the little book of aliens, right? So it's all about aliens. It's about our conception of aliens. It's about the history of our searching for aliens. And, you know, the main reason I want to have that pull back and have that background is because from the scientific point of view, we are at the cusp of finding alien life, whether it's intelligent life or microbial life, you know, the profound explosions in the science of astrobiology mean that you

really need to look at the big picture. And, you know, UFOs have been a big part of the popular conception of a life in the universe. And so I wanted to run through that history. I also wanted to explain to people why as a scientist, like how scientists view the subject. And the history has a lot to do with it. So, you know, I am very skeptical that UFOs have anything to do with alien life, you know, life in the universe. And we can talk more about this. But certainly, when you look at the history, you can see how much of our popular conceptions were driven by the presence, you know, by what goes on in the UFO community. You know, I talk about the government reports. And, you know, certainly because the government, though, you know, those, that long history of government reports,

which has a lot to do, I think, with shaping where we are now. You can see because it was the Cold War, the government was certainly less than transparent about what it was doing with UFOs. The government was very happy to use UFOs as part of its Cold War subterfuge. You know, this was a battle to the death with the USSR, with the Soviet Union.

And so, you know, the government was certainly willing to use misinterpreted, information when it came to UFOs. So I wanted to cover that stuff as well. I wanted to give people the history of those reports, but also understand, yeah, sort of what was going on with them. And then finally, we get to the modern era with UAPs. And I really wanted to track through what was going on with the UAP.

So people had a firm understanding of where we are now, especially when it comes to, you know, things like the NASA panel, which I'm all for. Again, I'm skeptical of the fact that I don't think UFOs and UFOs have anything to do with the alien life. But, you know, I'm a scientist. And if we can collect the kind of data that scientists require in order to judge. So, you know, the thing about this is scientists have, we're brutal with each other. We're really mean to each other about when it comes to the link between data, some data, and a conclusion, you know, a claim, right? We are very, very mean to each other.

And, you know, if you've ever stood in front, the hardest thing as a scientist is to stand in front of like, you know, a bunch of people who are much smarter than you and argue that you have a piece of data that is linked to a conclusion as they shred every possible, you know, nook and cranny and nuance in that link. So the good thing about, I think, with the NASA panel, which is, you know, the NASA panel and the Galileo project and such,

is that now, you know, we can begin the process of collecting the data that we need to try and link to just figure out at all what these things are about. So, you know, I think it's good that the pilots now feel free. You know, there's not this stigma to talk about it because that way, you know, that's the first step to collecting data. But as I say, you know, one of the things I wanted to cover in the book is how science goes about its business. So people can understand how science will link a piece of data to, you know, or a collection of

data to a conclusion. Because, listen, if somebody comes and tells me a story that they saw something in this guy, I'm not going to tell them they didn't. I wasn't there, right? But science is about public knowledge, right? It's about knowledge, you know, 400 or so years ago, we came up, human beings came up with this amazing way of interrogating nature, of getting into a dialogue with nature, whereby we can pull out conclusions that we can all go, oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

You know, gravity, the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared. Anybody can test that, right? And so that is what we're looking for. If we want to understand what, you know, UFOs or UIPs are, we need to build that same kind of process, which will require probably building new instruments and having a rational search strategy and having a rational, well-crafted way of sorting through the enormous amounts of data you're going to get from that. So that's why I wanted people to understand.

I wanted people to sort of see the history, see it as scientists. see it and see, you know, from the scientific perspective, what would you actually need to have data to go one way or the other? Like, as a scientist, if the data is good enough, I'll go in whichever direction the data is going to go, right? And I would hope that would be the true for UFO. People are really excited about UFOs as well. If the data really doesn't point to, you know, if you don't, if you can show that things aren't moving at Mach 5th, Mach 500 and making right-hand turns, if the data doesn't support that, then, okay, you know, it's something else. And no matter what would I really want people in the UFO community. to understand, though, is that, you know, the stuff on the science end, the stuff I'm going to talk about with techno signatures and biotechnology is super exciting. Like, you know, we're a poise to be able to find the possibility of alien life, whether it's intelligent civilizations or microbial life. To me, it's the same. They're both equally mind-blowing. That we're on the edge of doing that. Like, if you're, you know, if you're alive today, there's a good shot that there's going to be data relevant to that question coming down the pike in your lifetime.

That's amazing. That gives me so much hope that we might live to see that day where many people in the past haven't. And what I think is really cool too, Adam, is not only do you cover the history of the UFO topic, but you also cover the history of those who did ask that big question, are we alone? You know, you bring up such things as the Fermi paradox. You bring up the Drake equation. These are big buzzwords that us in the UFO field either love or hate, depending on where you lay in the grand scheme of belief, I guess. But yeah, could you maybe run us through a little bit of that, the history of our search for alien life throughout the years? And how that can kind of, I guess, propel us forward as we continue to look for new ways. Yeah, what's really amazing is this question is ancient, right? is I talk about in the book, you know, you can see the Greeks, the ancient Greeks, like Aristotle and

Democritus, you know, in a steel cage death match, you know, arguing over whether or not, you know, the Earth is special or whether, you know, there's planets with life throughout the universe. And so this question, people have been arguing about for 2,500 years, but it was only the 1950s, really, that there was this amazing decade, 1950 to 1960, when so much of the foundational science, the foundational questions were asked. So like the Fermi paradox was this idea that Enrico Fermi, you know, the paradox itself is just from, you know, a lunch conversation that he was having with colleagues at Los Alamos. But the basic question that Fermi recognized early on was, well, you know, why isn't the universe full of detectable aliens? Why aren't they here?

Or why haven't we found signals of, you know, of intelligent civilization? Because what Fermi realized, like in a split second was that if the. there even one, star-faring civilization, even if it was, you know, even if the speed of light really is a speed limit, then even, you know, if they're moving at a tenth of the speed of light, in a timescale very short compared to the history of the galaxy, they could reach every star system in the galaxy. So, you know, his question was why aren't they here? And another, you know, so that's what I call the direct Fermi paradox. The indirect Fermi paradox is something that's also called the Great Silence, which is, well, we've looked, but why haven't we found any? So of course, if you're a UFO fan, you're going to argue that they are already here. If you're an astronomer like myself, you're going to focus on the indirect Fermi paradoxes, which is why haven't we heard anything. But of course, the answer to that one, that one's got a real clear answer, which is we haven't looked. People have this idea that like, oh, every night, astronomers, you know, take their radio telescopes, you know, like Jody Foster in contact and listen

for, you know, signals of alien civilizations. And nothing could be further from the truth. there's never been any money in SETI. And part of that is because SETI got pinged with some of the more wackiness that happens in the UFO community. And NASA wouldn't fund SETI because Congress kept burning them for it. So there's never been a whole lot of SETI done. In fact, actually, if you look at all the SETI searches that have ever been done, you know, and compare it to like the ocean. Like if the ocean is all of the stars we need to search for alien life, so far we've looked at a hot tub worth of water.

Right. And if you looked at a hot tub worth of water and didn't find any fish in it, would you then go, well, there's no fish in the ocean? So the Fermi paradox is one of these foundational ideas, which still today we deal with. And then there's the Drake equation, right? So Frank Drake, so the 1950s begin with Fermi, and they end with Frank Drake doing his the first, really, astrobiology search of any kind, the first astrobiology experiment ever taken, which was Project Osma, where he convinced his colleagues at their. radio observatory to let him use this new instrument and look for, he looked at two stars looking for signals of alien life. He didn't find any, but that launched the, that launched SETI, that launched the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It was the first time anybody at any,

anywhere, had ever done a search for life elsewhere other than the Earth. And, and then in 61, you can have this very important conference on intercellar communications. It's actually, it's a workshop. There's seven guys at it, but including a young Carl. Sagan, and that's where the Drake equation comes up. Drake was trying to formulate an agenda for this meeting, the first ever meeting on, you know, communications with extraterrestrial civilizations or finding extraterrestrial civilizations. And he needed an agenda and he broke the problem up into like these seven different pieces and he wrote them down as an equation whose solution would be the total number of intelligent, technological civilizations in the universe. And the way he broke

that problem up, first asked how many stars are there, and then how many stars have planets, and then how many planets are in the right place for life to form, how many planets where life can form, does it actually form, bing, bing, bing, bing, all the way down. He broke the problem up into these seven pieces, which still today are foundational. We still use that background in how we organize a lot of astrobiological sort of thinking. So that first decade is important for everybody for people who are into UFOs, for people who are into just astro, the scientists are into astrobiology, that's when a lot of the core ideas were laid down that we're still working with today. Because in science, science is very conservative. I just wanted to put this in. You never give up

on a good idea, right? And so that's why those ideas are still around today. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer, Gina Carrano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best heavy weight in the world, Frances Ngano versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carano,

live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Interesting. Well, on the spot, I want to ask you, Adam. Within sort of those time periods, you also had this thing called the wow signal. What do you make of that personally

as an astrophysicist, as an astronomer. That was one of the one moments where I think a lot of those people who really want to believe that we got a signal, that we got a signal, supposedly. What do you make of the wow signal? I'm not wild about the web. I'm not wow about the wild. Because it was one-off. Like, you know, it happened once.

I mean, the exciting thing about it was it looked exactly like what you'd expect it to look like if it was a signal. But, you know, a one-off, you can't do anything with that. the one off, like in science, right? So, you know, and the people have gone back and they've looked at that source again, you know, that location on the sky again and again and again, and they've never found anything else. And so you just, you can't do anything with that. Whereas the new stuff that we're developing now, the techno signatures, which is based on entirely different approaches to the problem, that won't be a problem. If we find a techno signature in the way that we think we're going to, you know, the way what we're planning, you'll be able to go back and look again and again and again.

it should always be there, right? Because we're not looking for sort of like radio beacons that somebody's like pointing at us to say, hey, we're here. We're going to be looking for the indirect signatures of biological or technological activity. So, you know, just like, you know, civilizations or biospheres going about their business. So that's why the wow signal, you know, if it's only a one off, I can't do anything with it. I can be like, whoa, that's really cool. But then I'm stuck, you know, with arguing over whether that one thing that happened was, you know,

But the cool thing about science is that every, somebody said this to me one time, in science, a good theory or a good result is like putting a quarter in and getting a dollar back out, right? It takes you, it leads to the next question that you can try and answer. The wow signal, you put a quarter in and you got nothing back, right? Because it was just nowhere to go. Okay, we went back and looked and we didn't see anything. So, you know, it was exciting, but it just, it was a dead end.

I hate when that happens. I hate when you don't get. money back. Such a good point. Where's my candy bar? Yep, yep. That's when you tip it over. That's when you tip it over. Well, you also cover

Adam sort of these hypotheticals about how life, if it is out there, how it could possibly get to, let's say, our solar system. And these are big questions. And these are big questions that a lot of skeptics often will put in front of UFO people

and say, there's no way. There's no way that they would be able to travel these vast distances. So you do tackle this issue in the book of how could an advanced civilization possibly get here? Is that something you can briefly touch on for us? Yeah, yeah, because what I wanted people to see is like, you know, of course when we talk about, you know, alien civilizations or civilizations have been around a lot more, we don't know what science they have, right? But you also can't to sort of wave your hand and use that as an excuse to say anything's possible. Because the thing is, we do know a lot of physics, right? And any physics that the aliens have has to sit on top of the physics that we do know, right?

So for example, the second law of thermodynamics, right, which says that if you use energy, you're always going to generate some heat or generate some waste. That law, I mean, we have not seen anything that would ever tell us that that law is going to be overcome, right? So anything that the aliens do is going to have to sit on top of the second law. That means you've got to do some work. If you want to extrapolate the, you know, the science that we have now, you got to do some work to connect it to the science that we do have because we've got some pretty amazing science. Like we've done for a bunch of hairless monkeys, we've done pretty well, you know. So, okay, so that when we run down the list of ways in which you could cross the mind melting distances between the stars, I think Rick, really everybody should spend a little bit of time working out with those numbers, like how far away the star.

are, I mean, it's really, it's hard to sort of get in your gut just how distant the stars are. So, you know, the first, so we can start with stuff that we totally know and work upward. So one way is, is hibernation, right? You know, if the speed, so we believe every, there's nothing that tells us that you can get around the fact that the speed of light is a constant and nothing can go faster than it, right? That, for the physics we understand, that's the way it is. So, if you're going to go slower than the speed of light or as close to the speed. speed of light as you can, then the stars are pretty far away. If a star is 100 light years away, it's 100 years to get there. Right. So, but you know, you could do maybe hibernate. If your biology doesn't

allow, you know, if you only have a 70 year, 80 year lifespan, then you can hibernate if that's possible. You could also do century ships where like, you know, you have ships where like one human generation after the other is born and lived and die. And it's the great, great grandparent, great, great grandkids that arrive there. You know, those are pretty, you know, those are pretty, expensive and hard to do, you know? I mean, and also, if you're going to do that, you're, you know, it's slow, right? So one of the weird things about having the speed of light be a limit means that interstellar civilizations may not be possible, right? If it takes 200 years, 200 year, light years is the next door for us, right? That is 200 light years away is still the

block, you know, on the block. And if it takes 200 years to get somewhere, you know, and your typical lifespan is 80 or 90 years, then like, how do you have diplomacy? How do you have, you don't really, it'd be hard to have a coherent, stellar civilization, right? Okay, so you go past that. Then you start to get into things like, well, okay, what about a warp drive, right? Because Einstein's theory of relativity does allow for this idea of bending space time. So that, you know, if you don't want to actually go from point A to point B, can you bring point A and B together and kind of hop through space, you know, hop through space?

you know, hop through curbspace via like a wormhole or a warp drive. And I cover these possibilities. And like with warp drives, there is a solution to the general relativistic equations, the accubre drive, as they call it, that actually does, you know, because here's the interesting thing. Nothing can travel through space faster than the speed of light. But space itself or space time itself can move it at whatever speed it wants. So the accubre drive is this idea that you could create a warp bubble that sort of bends itself

through space that sort of propels. It's a, you know, a bubble of space time that is moving through space time at whatever speed you want. So, you know, the, the ideas of general relativity give you some ways of maybe thinking about how you could have it. But here's the problem. The only way any of this works is you have to have what's called exotic matter to be able to bend space in time this way. And it doesn't exist, right? Exotic matters basically, you take the, you know, it's something, you got these equations, you say like, oh, if I just had a term that, you know, had a minus sign right here and I could make all this work. And that's literally what we do when we play with those equations.

But there's no evidence for exotic matter. It's literally just something we dreamed up, you know, and put into the equations. So, you know, that's the problem with exotic matter. Now, you know, maybe some super advanced civilization has come across that. I don't know. But that's, you know, that's the problem with exotic matter. And then you get to quantum mechanics, right? And quantum mechanics is just so weird that who knows what's hiding in.

it, you know, but that's really, then we're pulling stuff kind of out of our butt. So that those are kind of, you know, the possibilities. Now, I know that there are some people, UFO people, who really are into extra dimensions. And I have a whole chapter on extra dimensions, on what extra dimensions mean scientifically. Because it's one of the most beautiful and coolest ideas in mathematical physics, the idea of being able to like, you know, do the mathematics for objects that have more than three dimensions, more than three spatial dimensions. And it's just, I love it. I love talking about it.

I love thinking about it. But the problem is there is zero evidence, zero. I mean, really zero, because people have looked, that there's any more than three dimensions of space. You know, you can go forward and back, you can go right and left, and you can go up and down. And that's pretty much it. So, you know, from that scientific point of view, there's just, you know, because

people, there's ideas like string theory, which was playing with the idea of extra dimensions, but those ideas just didn't work out. They have not played out. I mean, to me, string theory is really kind of a dead end. So, you know, so I examine all those possibilities. Well, you know, who knows, you know, again, where we'll go. But if you're, you know, if you're trying to take, take a ladder, you know, and begin with the physics we know, and I think that's really important because if not, you're just making up science fiction stories. That's what you got to work with. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. It's always that frustrating, I guess

conundrum of like our own limitations as human beings, our own physics, our own logic in terms of all this. But hey, like we, like you said, we work with what we have to try to ask those bigger questions. And then you just hope that they converge. Well, okay, so we cover how they could possibly

get here, Adam. But in terms of us going out and looking for it, you do cover that as well, the different ways throughout history and now how we are searching for that. And we've been saying it throughout this whole conversation, techno signatures. It's kind of the big buzzword nowadays with a lot of search for alien life. So let's go there, man. Would you mind kind of breaking down what techno signatures truly represent?

Because I don't think a lot of people really understand what that term means as opposed to biosignatures. And then on top of all of that, second prong question, exoplanets, a place where we could search for techno signatures. So, yeah, would you mind maybe break in all that down for us a little bit? It would be my pleasure. I love talking about this stuff. You know, what's amazing is like, so when I was in graduate school in the late 80s and early 90s, like, you know, astrobiology just wasn't a subject. Like SETI was kind of marginalized, you know. you know the

Viking landers in 76 had landed on Mars. There was a little biology in the experiment that hadn't really gone anywhere. So, you know, it was kind of like there was nowhere to go. And then two amazing things happened.

One was we found this rock from Mars in Antarctica. It was literally a chunk of Mars that had been blown into space. And it appeared to have what looked like maybe some evidence of fossil life. That turned out not to be true,

but it got us starting. propelled us to start looking at Mars again and thinking about the whole idea of looking for life in microbial life in the solar system. And then in 1995, the really big thing is we discovered for the first time, the first planet orbiting another star, an exoplanet. This is also a question that goes back to 2500, or goes back 2,500 years. People have been arguing about, I can't tell you how many scientific careers over history were ruined by someone saying, I discovered an exoplanet, right and then we're trying out to not to be true and that guy's you know or girl's career was was was ended um but so in 1995 we had our first conclusive proof of a planet orbiting another star and then you know within 10 20 years or 10 15 years

we had a census we knew that every plant every star in the sky hosted a family of worlds and we knew that one out of five of those had a star or had a planet in the right place at least of the sun like ones had a planet in the right place for life to form, where liquid water could be on the surface. So this exoplanet revolution just blew the doors off of everything. Suddenly, we knew exactly where to look for life, right? And the original seti, that's not the way it was. You just sort of pointed things at sun-like stars and hoped for the best, right? So the exoplanet revolution was one of the most important parts of this new age of astrobiology. The second thing that happened was the development of the, of what we'll call this technique, this amazing technique called atmospheric characterization.

And what it meant was our telescopes had gotten so powerful and the instruments we put on our telescopes had gotten so powerful that we could see into the atmospheres of these worlds that are 10, 20, 100 light years away. And we could sniff out, so to speak, the composition of that atmosphere. We could tell what chemical compounds were in that atmosphere. Now, why is that important? That has to do with another astrobiological revolution, which was learning Earth's full history, seeing the full, you know, 3.8 billion year history of Earth and life together. Because one of the things we've learned from that is that Earth has been many planets, you know, many different kinds of planets across that time.

And life has been the driving force for a lot of those. For example, oxygen. The only reason, you know, I can take a nice big breath of oxygen is because life put the oxygen in the atmosphere. before, you know, about two billion years ago, before like a new form of photosynthesis was invented by microbes, the Earth's, Earth had life and it had no oxygen in it. So the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere of Earth is a biosignor. So it's biosignature. Someone looking at Earth from light years away could look at our planet, see that there's oxygen in the atmosphere and deduce like that planet has a biosphere. So this process of,

of atmospheric characterization where you can see how life has changed a planet, changed the atmosphere, was the beginning of this great revolution that we now started to figure out how to search for biosignatures, all kinds of biosignatures. Oxygen was the first one, but now we're getting very, very sophisticated in thinking about how to do it. We don't have to rely on Earth's history, right? We're starting to think a lot about agnostic signatures of life, where, you know, could be a completely different biochemistry, but we'd still be able to tell that that planet had something going on with it that was not, that could only happen because of life.

And then along the same time, while this is happening in the 2000s and 2010s, Jill Tarter, the great hero of SETI, right? This woman who, you know, has been at the forefront of SETI for decades, said, look, if you're going to search for biosignatures, if NASA's going to fund, and it was, a lot of research, research in biosignatures, how could you avoid also thinking about techno signatures, right? How can you not think about the possibility of looking for, you know, the presence of industrial chemicals in the atmosphere, right? You know, what about city lights? What about, you know,

there's all this whole range of things that you could look for in the exact same way that you're going to look for biosignatures that will tell you there's a civilization there, harvesting energy and doing work in the service of the civilization. So that was where, that's where the term techno signatures came from. And then it was in 2018 that actually, this is, I talk about this in the book, this conference. And someone in Congress said, you need to spend 10 million, told NASA, you need to spend $10 million on techno signatures. And that was like, what? It's like, okay.

So they had to have a meeting. They called us together. They called a bunch of us together who were interested in this to have a meeting to say, okay, look, if they give us this money, which in the end they didn't. What would we do with it? So we had this amazing three-day meeting in Houston at the lunar science, a very storied NASA facility

to talk about this. And it was the most amazing, exciting meeting I have ever been at in my entire life. Everybody's got crazy ideas, but also trying to systematize for the first time, the crazy ideas. And out of that came, a bunch of us decided to put in this proposal to NASA

to, you know, say, look, all right, we want to look for atmospheric techno signatures. We want to design a study. We're not going to look yet. We're going to do the theoretical research to tell observers what they should look for if they're looking for techno signatures from planets. And that was the beginning. And so now what people really need to understand is already with the JWST,

the James Webb Space Telescope. It's at the hairy edge, but it's possible that the JWST could detect both biosignatures or techno signatures. We did a paper where we showed that chloroflorocarbons, this chemical that we pumped into the atmosphere, kind of by mistake. But you could detect that with the JWST from like 10 light years away. So game on, man, right now, you know,

and going into the future with the better telescopes we're going to build, we have the capacity or we're going to have the capacity to find alien life where it lives on alien plants. Wow. You know, and I feel like that, Adam, it's like the only positive to come out of any sort of pollution is the possibility that it could lead us to finally finding some sort of alien life. Or them finding us. Let's be completely honest. Right. We've had, yeah. And the thing is about the pollution, you know, CFC is right. We did that by mistake. But, you know, there's lots of reasons and we have a paper that we're working on right now that you might purposely put chemicals into your atmosphere. So, for example, For example, chloroflorocorocorbons, they're bad for the ozone. But if you wanted to turn Mars into a habitable world, which we do, eventually we may try. CFCs are great. They are very, they're chemically inert, but they're great greenhouse gases. So that means that like, yeah, if you could pump Mars's atmosphere up with CFCs, you could raise the temperature to the point where like it would be warm enough to wander around with just like an air mask on.

So, you know, absolutely these different kinds of chemicals, you might have reasons. but it's not just chemicals. City lights. There was a paper that showed that you could, for a world that had larger amounts of artificial illumination, you would be able to see that in the light from the, you know, from the planet. You'd be able to see that there was artificial illumination. You'd be able to see the possibilities that they were using, that a civilization was using

solar panels of any form. The reflected light would actually carry the signature of the solar panels. So the list goes on and on and on. And that's what we're developing. That's what our job is, is to carry out these studies to explore different kinds of techno signatures because starting now, you know, we can start looking for them. I love it. I love that. It's amazing.

It's really exciting. It is. I can hear the passion in your voice at him. What I would have given to be a fly on a wall at that conference, by the way, that I can't even imagine. Nobody got any sleep. I was going to say how hard you guys probably party. Yeah. Yeah.

A lot of beers. I mean, it's just, I got, you know, the, you know, sometimes people in the UFO community can say like, oh, scientists are closed-minded or whatever. You had to be at this meeting to hear some of the ideas that were getting batted around. We were talking about billion-year-old civilizations and how they evolve. Like, what happens to a civilization after, you know, a hundred thousand years, a million years of continuous evolution? Does it stay hold? Does it break up? What kinds of, you know, what kinds of technology might they evolve?

You know, if you become AI or if AI takes over, what does that look like? I mean, there were some really cool ideas that were getting bounced around. That's good. Well, and that's kind of what you cover in sort of the remaining chapters of the book. Again, without giving away too much, I cannot recommend this book enough. I'm just going to say that flat out. Oh, great. Thank you.

Of course, of course. You cover everything from how we may, like, communicate with aliens. do make contact. And you cover things as like the ethics of making contact and what that would look like too. And kind of the possibility of everything, even ancient aliens, like you said, you guys theorized about a billion-year-old civilization somewhere or, you know, in ancient aliens is a big thing in the world today. No matter what you think of it or how controversial it is, it's out there. The theory is out there. So could you maybe break down that last chapter of the book for us? This was by far my favorite chapter of the book in terms of, yeah, how would we communicate with something? Let's say it is AI or it's so, forgive the pun, alien to us that we don't know how we could possibly communicate with it. Yeah, maybe break down that last chapter for us a little bit if you don't might. Yeah, that chapter was super fun to write too, because really what I wanted to explore was how aliens will aliens be or how alien will aliens be? And the answer is very, right? That's really the thing. You know, what's cool about about this subject is you've got to push your imagination to the edge, right? But still bounded with science, right? So science is really constrained imagination, right? You can go to whatever heights you want, but you got to use like the laws of physics and chemistry and dark.

Winnie in evolution, which we think is going to be pretty universal, to somehow bound your thinking, so you don't just fall off into writing science fiction novels, right? We want to somehow ground ourselves so that we can kind of systematically explore the options. So one of the first things I talked about was alien minds, right? Because alien minds are really, you know, what is the cognitive structure of a mind that has evolved under entirely different kinds of evolutionary back? backgrounds going to be like. You know, so there's this great, and when it comes to communication, right, you know, people, there's this great idea from Carl Sagan that, oh, we'll teach them our math, right?

That's been the whole foundation, like in the movie Contact, you know, we're, you know, we'll meet aliens and then we'll teach them like, oh, look, this is how we do one plus one, and that equals two, and we'll show them the symbols, and then we'll work our way up to pie in the circumference of a circle. And then, you know, after a while, you know, we'll all be friends, you know, we'll all be, you know, sharing our favorite Netflix shows. Yeah. But really, that idea may not, I mean, maybe it'll work, but it may not work at all because it assumes that our math, the way we structure think about math, is universal.

And that's, it's entirely possible. That's not true. That really are the way, we invented our math in a way that our brains, which grew up on the, you know, the plains of Africa were useful for. Imagine, as I said, imagine a species that does, that is what we would call like a liquid brain, a lot. liquid body like, you know, amoeba. They have, you know, if they want to grab something, they kind of reach a pseudopod out, like, you know, grab something and pull it back. They don't have digits.

Would they even have integers? Would the idea of one, two, and three make any sense to them, right? So, so that's a really interesting possibility. And there's a, you know, there's that great movie, Arrival, which maybe some people have seen. Yes. Where I love, I think it's what, that's one of my favorite, it's like really smart. I mean, I love, you know, I love.

I love Star Wars and Star Trek, you know, give me all the laser blasters you can give me. But Arrival was like one of these really quiet, thoughtful movies about aliens. Yes. And so they send in like, you know, these, these heptopods arrive and they send in a Carl Sagan kind of physicist guy and then a linguist. Right. And the Carl Sagan guy goes in and, you know, tries to do the Carl Sagan thing with math and spectacularly fails immediately. And it's the linguist who understands that language has to do with like the whole embodied experience. So you have to be, it's not abstract.

It's actually very much about being in a body and having experience. She's the one who makes contact. And then realizes that their whole experience is entirely different. Like they are, they move, they live simultaneously in the past, present, and future. And I really thought about that a lot, how, you know, maybe it's biology that determines physics, not the other way around in some sense. It, like, that's, it determines what parts of the big book of physics are actually accessible to. So that's a great idea.

And then the ethics part was really, I wanted to talk a little bit about, I mean, we talked about, I talked a lot about just the, you know, ethics of what kind of ethics might, you know, different, depending on your evolutionary background you might have. But I really wanted to cover the idea of many messaging extraterrestrial intelligence where like, you know, a few times people have pointed giant telescopes and sent some kind of message to a distant star. And that's been very controversial because, you know, as anybody who's read the, um, the three body problem, you know, maybe you don't want to do that, right? Maybe you don't want to stick your head above the grass and be like, hey, I'm here, I'm tasty, you know, come on over. And I kind of, I'm kind of in that thing. I think like we just don't know what's out there, right? And it's, it's, it's, I don't think it's a good idea, just assume that because civilizations will be older that, you know, that may be older than us, that they're suddenly like

wearing togas, you know, and meditating, right? You know, who knows what. And this is, you know, I love science fiction. As I said, I read lots of science fiction. This is a theme that shows up in a lot of really good science fiction stories about this idea of, you know, the dark forest or one idea, it's a book. I forgot in the name, but the idea that there are wolves between the stars, you know, and you got to be careful. So that's why that was kind of part. And there's a lot more in that chapter about ethics. And then finally, the ancient alien, I think for us ancient aliens meant something different where we did a paper with David Kipping. from the Columbia, and it was a very sort of detailed theoretical paper to ask this question,

if we find aliens, if we find signals of aliens, not necessarily communications, but we just find evidence for a civilization, would we expect it to be younger, older, a younger, our age, or older? And by, you know, by our age, we're talking anything within, you know, a few thousand years, right? So we're doing the science thing of being very sort of order of magnitude, as we call it. And the result of these calculations using what's called Bayesian probability, you know, David was very good. David's a real master, kung fu master with this kind of thing. And we, the conclusion was that it'll be older, you know, quite possibly much older. So, you know, that's where the ancient aliens comes from for us is that if there are, if we make contact with a civilization or find a civilization, it will probably be quite a bit older than us.

And what does that imply? how can you think systematically, right? How can you lay, again, because this is what science does. We don't just want to write a science fiction story. We want to somehow lay out in a systematic way the possibilities for civilizations that have been around and contiguous, you know, or continuous for a million years. What is a, you know, we've been around as a technological civilization for a century, maybe two, depending on how you define it.

What does a million years look like? Like, what do you become? You know? Yeah. So super cool. Yeah, absolutely. It really does. And that's what I love about this question of alien is it tells us so much more, I think, about ourselves than actually the aliens.

It really does put that mirror back on us. Be like, hmm, what could we be? What could we aspire to be? Or it could be a warning, a cautionary tale, you know? Exactly. Both of those, right? And I think that's the importance of looking is that, you know, if we did find a civilization, and it would probably be older than us, that would be enormous comfort, right? Because as if right now, you know, we've got all these problems in the world, climate change and, you know, the rise of AI and, you know, whatever, just our nuclear war is still clearly hovering over us. You know, does, so the question is, does any civilization make it? Does it, does the universe do long live technological civilizations? That's an open question. So to find just one civilization, doesn't matter whether we talk to them or not, just to know that like, oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, sure. This is something that you

universe does. That would be good. Absolutely. Yeah, that would be very good. Very comforting, like you said. Well, last question for you, Adam. What do you hope people will take away from the book? What's like the big thing you hope that this will contribute to the question? Are we alone? And if not, where do we go from there? Right. The main thing I want people to take away is excitement. Like, you know, people should be pumped. This is amazing. We live, I mean, really, how often, how many generations, you know, how many people get to be around when a 2,500-year-old question gets answered, right? Now, you know, I don't know, I can't tell you for sure it's going to get answered. I can't tell you for sure what the answer is going to be.

But here's the thing I can be sure of over the next 10, 20, 30 years, you know, and science is always about a long game. You know, you can't learn something amazing unless you put the time into it. But the thing I can tell you is we're going to have data. For the first time, we're going to have actual hard data related to the question. as opposed to just yelling at each other's opinions, man, you know, about it. So this is, I want people to see like, wow, man, this is amazing. We're about to find out.

And then I want them to really start to, you know, to understand. So when I want them to be ready so that whether it's UFOs or science or astronomical science, when someone says we found it, I want them to be ready with their skeptical hats on, but also their, you know, their background that the book gives them to be able to know how to evaluate that claim, right? And then be ready to think about it. And then if that claim is true, what the consequences of that claim are. I love it. I love it. Be ready. Guys, be ready October 24th when the book releases. It's the little book of aliens by Adam Frank. And Adam, first of all, thank you. Thank you for being so open to coming on a UFO podcast first and foremost. I think it's very important

to have these conversations when when you deal with such a a speculative theory based conversation like I do as a UFO podcast to get on the ground and think objectively about oh yeah who could be piloting these possible aerial phenomena or at least behind them I think it's important to really step back and look at these questions because like I said no matter what UFOs are or aren't or no matter what aliens. are or aren't, it tells us so much more about where we've been, where we're going. And I think that's what I really took away from your book is hope. There's so much hope. And it was so accessible. Like I said, guys, October 24th is when the book comes out. I cannot recommend it enough. Where and when can we get the book?

I said when, but where can we find it at him? Well, you can already pre-order, you know, at your favorite pre-ordering book, you know, Amazon or the Harcourt, or Harper Collins, excuse me, Harper Collins, or, you know, pretty much anywhere that you can pre-order books. So it's available now. Of course, it'll be delivered on the 24th. So, yeah, that's what I encourage people to pre-order. Get yours now. So, yeah, and I hope they enjoy it.

I hope they, you know, that it's, I wrote the book in a way that was really meant to be fun, you know, even if you don't usually read science books, science-based books. You know, I'm from Jersey. You know, New York Mets here. you know, from the tri-state ethnic. And I kind of just, in this book, I've written a lot of science, popular science books, but this one I just let loose with, you know, as if, you know, I was just having a conversation with my buds, you know, and that's kind of the way I did it because that was fun. That was actually the most fun for me.

Yeah, yeah, it was. Like I said, it did feel unlike any other book I've really read on this topic in a very long time. So again, I got to thank you for that, Adam. And once more, I got to thank you for coming on somewhere in the skies today. I really enjoyed this. This was a great conversation. Greetings, everyone.

Ryan Sprague here, host of Summer in the Skies. For over seven years and more than 400 episodes, the Summer in the Skies podcast has always been free to listen to, but it's not free to create. So we offer several ways to help support our efforts and get rewards in return. If you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can click the subscribe button at the top of your Summer in the Sky's feed

to become a premium Apple subscriber. Or you can join our Patreon campaign with several tiers available. Both of these options give you the same benefits and rewards. Add free episodes, early access to the main show, and bonus episodes and content. Help keep the lights on at the Summer in the Skies HQ and help us continue to grow by becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Or by clicking the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support and keep looking up.

My team is searching for objects that have vanished or appeared during 70 years on our night sky. This includes a number of exotic astrophysical phenomena, including stars that collapse directly into black holes. It also includes possible signatures of ET. Our research is basic research, which means that it contributes to human knowledge and aims to answer some of the most profound questions. For example, are we alone here? This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Beatrice, thank you so much for joining us today on Somewhere in the Skies.

It's a pleasure. Yeah, we're really excited to talk to you when Chrissy and I first heard about your work and we saw that you were the winner of the 2021 L'O Nesco for Women in Science Award. we were like, yes, this is someone we have to talk to you. Not only because of the amazing work you've done, but highlighting the work of women in science, which is an issue a lot of the times when it comes to who's at the forefront of talking about these things. And we were super excited. So yeah, Chrissy, if you don't mind, I'd love to start and ask Beatrice the obvious question, like how she got interested in all this stuff. So Beatrice, how did you first get interested in all this stuff? So Beatrice, how did you first get interested? interested in astrophysics and what made you want to take that journey? Actually, it wasn't a clear thing for me. I always like a lot of things. I have always been very passionate about music since I was a kid.

I really loved playing violin. I still love playing violin. At the same time, I was quite intrigued by science. And as a teenager, I was particularly interested in molecular biology. And I thought that it was so cool, like how DNA becomes. of protein and all these things. However, with time, I discovered, like, there were many questions in astrophysics

that intrigued me as well. And, I mean, and since I was a kid, I was always kind of a nerd. I loved Star Wars and all these things. And so astronomy has kind of been very natural for me, like a choice. Right. Well, you're talking to two Star Wars fans here as well.

So you're in good company. You're in good company. I love that. I love hearing the origin story of how people get interested in what they do. Christy, do you want to take it from here? Yeah, you said music. You brought up the music part. Have you been able to bring bridge music and your passion for it into the work that you're doing in science? Have there been any intersections of that? Actually, I was organizing for several years, it's chamber music concerts at my alma mater,

where I did my PhD during those years. I was doing my PhD studies. I also organized this concert and sometimes played on this. them. So I did that. It has been very important for me to kind of keep the music alive. I can't function unless I both have music and science at the same time. Yeah, and you have like two research fields. Can you break them down a little bit for us and like what they consist of? So one of the things I like working with is active galactic nuclei. I think many might have heard of quasars and they know that quasars are like extremely

the luminous galaxy course that you can find. And these kind of quasars, I've been very, very interested in trying to understand the physics and of them and so on. And the second thing I'm interested in is searching for vanishing stars, because this is a field that is pretty untouched and that I always been, or not always, but that I have been very excited about in the last years. Yeah, the vanishing stars aspect of there. This is what I'm really interested in hearing about and how this will eventually relate to, you know, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and whatnot.

But I actually heard you in an interview talk about how you first got interested in the idea of vanishing stars. And I loved how endearing the story was. Would you mind sharing that with us? Sure. I can tell the story. I actually also posted it on my blog on the 11th of February, on the... international day for women and girls in science. So it's, I was younger.

I was, I think either I was in my undergrad years or I was a PhD student. I don't remember exactly, unfortunately, when it was. I used to write some kind of fables and short stories, and whenever I had something I wanted to tell, like you should type it down for myself. I usually never share these stories or very seldom I share it with someone. And so I was writing this kind of fable about a sad quasar. And I kind of wrote it and then I, towards the end, I sent him through a wormhole.

And then I kind of started wondering, has anyone ever seen an object just vanishing from the sky? has nothing to do with science. Absolutely nothing with science. It was just, well, me, a younger version of myself, typing up these fables and stories. And that's kind of how I got the idea. I got stuck with it. And then I wanted to check it. The problem was that I didn't have any tools. I didn't have the means. I didn't know which surveys I could use. and so I postponed it and in the final year of my PhD studies I knew how I could do it and I tried and I tried it with like

1% of the database that I had access to because it was a too big effort and that's kind of how Vasco project was born it turns out to be super difficult to check technically but yeah interesting I see that's so cool how like your curiosity as a kid would ultimately lead to like this huge project that you undertook. I love hearing stories like that.

We always hear like science fiction, you know, inspires a lot of scientists until they can make it science fact. When I heard that story, I was like, I have to ask her about that. But the Vasco project. I love to hear, you know, how you started this. What exactly it is? And yeah, would you mind telling us a little more about that? So the VASCO project is the vanishing and appearing sources during a central of observations project is a project where we are looking for vanishing objects, anything that vanishes from the sky.

And the hope is to find something that was there, always was there, and one day it just vanishes. Of course, we don't know if these objects exist at all. We only know that there are not many studies that have dedicated to look for them because people just assume that it kind of doesn't happen. If you have a star that dies, either it's going to go supernova or it's going to transform into a white dwarf, which will take billion of years, if it transforms into this white dwarf. So you have these two modes for a star to die, but there is nothing that says that it's going to just vanish.

So now there is actually a hypothesis that some stars might collapse directly into a black hole, a so-called failed supernovae. But this is hypothesis. Nobody knows if this failed supernova ever happen. So there's obviously a science case also. So the Vasco project is therefore looking for these kind of banishing objects. In the Vasco project, there is also a connection to like SETI research, because this is an example of a so-called impossible effects.

And we proposed in a paper in 2016 that you can look for things that are impossible, let's say a star that vanishes or a galaxy that vanishes to take it even more absurd. Because these kind of impossible effects would be a sign of something that would look like magic to us. And we know from Arthur C. Clark's laws that anything that looks like magic can just be a very, very advanced technology. I'm not sure if I said it exactly as it was written there, but something in this... Close enough. Okay, sufficiently advanced technology could look like that. Right.

We do hear that a lot in the UFO research community. You know, what may look impossible to us? And even some of our most advanced, you know, fighter pilots saying that what they saw, what they chased these anomalies in the sky performed unlike anything they'd ever seen. And yeah, that's going to look like magic to us until we understand the technology being displayed in what these anomalies might be. So I find that fascinating as well. Before Chrissy takes it over from here with the VASCO project, I love to know, have you found any of these anomalies or anything really compelling in the research that you've done that would lead you to think, yeah, yeah, I think we're on the right track. I think we found something that is very compelling but could also have a very mundane and boring cause

and we don't know which one it is right now if it's the exciting cause or the boring cause. So last year we published a paper in scientific report where we see nine sources of light that appear and vanish within half an hour or like or something of that order of magnitude within the exposure time of the photographic plates. So this plate is from 1950 and you have these star-looking things that are there. If you look at a plate that was taking half an hour earlier, they are not there. You take a look at the same region of the sky six days later and they are not there. So we have tried to identify the cause.

We try to look for all kind of astrophysical effects that could cause that. And it's simply too many of these transients. as a too small image of the sky to be anything that we know like any astrophysical phenomenon that we are aware of. So we did all those checks, all known astrophysics gone. So then we started looking at all kind of instrumental issues. We have been thinking, for example, double exposure and so on, and we haven't found anything that shows or proves us that this is something instrumental either, which of course means it still can be instrumental. For example, maybe there is some type of rare contamination or something like that that would look exactly like stars. So we've been thinking if it could be,

for example, some, well, some maybe a nuclear fallout or something like that. And something boring. We have also been wondering if it could be something more exciting because it doesn't have to be instrumental effects, even if we know that most of the times it is still the boring explanation that wins over time. And this kind of more exciting idea has been that maybe what we see could be some kind of solar reflection, some reflections of objects that are in high orbit around Earth

and that objects that are very reflective and flat. because if you would actually use the same instrumentation and have a look at images today, you have so much of space debris that you cannot actually see transients that kind of appear and vanish in a small image. This is kind of one of the things that you see when you have this space debris, you see lots of glins here and there. However, these images from 1950, seven years before Spook Nikon. So that's the more exciting hypothesis. but one should always start with the most boring explanation and maybe go from there. Yeah.

Yeah. Hey, I wouldn't say that nuclear fallout is boring, but I hope it's the other answer. I honestly do. Well, Chrissy, I love if you took it from here. I know we have some other questions relating to Vasco and whatnot. Yeah, please. I just, I think even if it's mundane, it's still exciting. Like all of the research that you're doing is.

wonderful and exciting overall. I wonder, like, does your work cross over into cosmology and has it? And if so, how does it cross over into it? My work is not crossing over to cosmology right now. The work I do with AGN sometimes has some implications for cosmology, possibly, or some of it might have had. All the objects I work with are fairly close to me. or to us. So it doesn't really dive into cosmology as such.

Well, you did mention instruments, Beatrice. I'd love to know where do you work out of when you're doing this? What type of instruments are you using? Is this a like an observatory in Sweden that you use or how does that work? It's much simpler for me in this sense. I don't work with the instruments directly myself, I use public data from like surveys that have been done by all the astronomers. For example, I use images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. I use images from the Palomar Sky surveys, these images that we're taking in the 50s and 60s and so on. That actually bleeds into my next question then. Citizen science, you know, how can people, you know, who amateur astronomers,

or people like that, how can they actually be a part of the research, I guess, is my question. And how far have you gone into the citizen science realm? So we have actually made a citizen science project, and it has been developed by the Uppsala University's IT department, where they have a design, a very wonderful webpage that is also gamified, so that this should be a little bit more fun for the users, where citizen scientists, can go there and compare two images of the sky, one from 1950 and one from, let's say, five or ten years ago, and can see if a star that was there has vanished in the new image. So the citizen scientists can go there and make any comments she or he finds important and, well, simply participate in the project.

It's open for everyone. And the citizen science project is very important. fun for me to work with as well. We are working in particular with some institutes in Algeria and in Nigeria and with amateur associations in Algeria and it's super fun because we have a very good collaboration there. I love that. The whole citizen science thing really, I think, brings the world together. You know, it seems like there's a lot of division in the world going on right now. But I love that coming back to these topics of space exploration and even UFOs, it actually bridges that gap and we can all come together and share our information. So, yeah, I think that's awesome. That's why I love citizen science. Citizen archaeology,

I'm part of an amateur project there where I go over Google map images for hours on end to see if, you know, I'm finding the same things as other people. So I finally, my dream has come true and I'm sort of in Indiana Jones. So that's fun for me that I can have some place in the scientific world. So, Chrissy, please take it from there. Yeah, no, I think that's wonderful. It's fabulous. You're based in Sweden from what I know.

And I'm going to just, you know, go into the UFO question. I've talked to some people, you know, in Clubhouse. and you know, which is a great app and you get to, you know, talk to people internationally in real time. And a friend now that's in the clubhouse is from Sweden, and he said that the conversation around UFOs is not really big in Sweden. Do you know why that might be? You know, they say it's kind of like people are really mum about it. It's not very much of a conversation now. Or maybe that's changing. I don't recall many conversations about UFOs with anyone of my Swedish colleagues.

or Swedish friends. I think there's a very different approach or attitude to UFOs in United States and in Sweden. And I think like if a Swedes see something weird on the sky, she or he will most likely first say, well, maybe it's a helicopter

or maybe it's a weird airplane and the interpretation will always be, will maybe always be the, most boring explanation first. Maybe I can imagine that. I love to kind of play off of that Beatrice, the idea of UFOs. A lot of people do believe that these are craft or these are some sort of intelligence that might be extraterrestrial in origin. So in the research and work you've done, has there ever been any compelling data that would lead you to believe that there might be,

extraterrestrial intelligence out there, interstellar even. Yeah, what do you think about the whole idea of these UFOs, people seeing on Earth, could be piloted or in control by some sort of, I guess, ET? I think I am a UFO agnostic in the sense that I actually don't know at all what I think about. It is like, depending on if you ask me in the morning or in the evening,

you might get a different answer. So that's kind of my initial impression on UFOs. I think that people's experiences are almost always real, like in 99% of the cases. On the other hand, I don't know if I would attribute them to anything supernatural. That's exactly what I hope to find out if there's something, let's say, there is something like extraterrestrial behind this kind of sightings. That's something I think it would be super cool if I had a chance to find out during my lifetime as a researcher. On the other hand, I think there is a very wonderful opportunity for astronomers to study anomalies on the sky now,

especially if there is some kind of support for that EU up sightings might be real sightings of something anomalous. I think it brings a wonderful opportunity. for projects like the Galileo project. And I think what shouldn't miss out on this beautiful opportunity to learn more about the universe. But so far, I must say, I haven't seen anything that has convinced me in science that there is,

that the youth, sorry, that EIT has been here. But there are things that, some indications that one might see published in the scientific literature, and that says that the question is justified to pose and that we should be looking, maybe more like that. I love that. At least you're willing to ask the question because I feel like for so long, many in the scientific community weren't willing to do that.

And we do see individuals, you know, kind of putting, let's be honest, their reputation on the line in saying, we need to ask this question. That is part of the scientific method. You have people like Avi Loeb with the ego. Leo project, you have your project with Vasco and searching for dying stars and what that could mean. So I guess, kind of playing off of that, I'd love to know, SETI, is this a organization that you've ever worked with? And what do you think about their idea of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence through

such things as radio waves? Do you think there are more beneficial ways that we could be trying to search for ET intelligence? or even communicate with them other than just radio signals? I think looking for radio signals is a fantastic first idea to explore, and one has been doing it since the 1960s. And I think there's a very wide parameter space one can look into, and I think it's great that they are doing these searches in California. I think, however, that one can also try different methods.

I think, for example, expanding searches in the optical, expanding searches with other methods, for example, like doing more space archaeology in the solar system. Because there are so many different ways one can look for ET. And if one is willing to look for life far, far away, I don't see why we shouldn't be looking for extraterrational much closer to us of extraterrestrial life. much closer to, yeah, where we are. If the UFOs really are caused by extraterrestrials, it means that it's low-lying fruit or low-hanging fruit

for a scientist to sort out. Yeah, did you by chance get to read the UFO report that was released? There was a preliminary report, right, on June 25th of last year. What was your perspective from it in the, you know, your scientific perspective of it and your thoughts and feelings around it. I have been thinking about that report quite a lot, and I've been changing my opinion back and forth about it as well, depending on if you asked me in the morning or in the evening. I found it very interesting. I liked the fine wording it used.

I am still skeptical to it because it's these data is not public. It's not published. It's a report and it's not like scientists can go there and have a look at the data and play with it themselves. You just need to trust whoever who wrote the report that the analysis was currently done. So I'm both skeptical to it at the same time as I find it as a good enough reason to actually do this research for those who are interested. I think we need to remove the stigma from UFO research. And I think that's kind of what the U.S. government is trying to do to get their active military. involved and to report these UFOs when in the past they haven't done that. But I think you're right.

I think the next big step is, well, that data in the reports, where does that go next? And I obviously believe it should be going to the scientific community, the ones who can actually explain these things. I think in the report, they looked at 144 UFO reports, and they explained one, one as a balloon, but what about the 143 others? Could they be explained by citizen science? Could they be explained by our top leading scientists throughout the world, possibly? But that information is classified, and we will probably never know what's in it.

So how do we study something when we don't have the data to study it? That's the, I think, the conundrum and the frustration by many in the science world and in the UFO community of, hey, look, we could help you. We will probably be wrong, but we could at least ask questions that you're not. So, I mean, that's my personal opinion on the report. But people have heard my opinion enough. Yeah, I think that's actually a really, it's a great comment that you said. Like, how are we really able to fact check it?

It's just somebody who wrote it and now we have to take it as fact. I think that's great. Why? You know, we should be able to ask more questions. And hopefully in the next coming months, you know, in years that when more reports come out, they start giving us better data. Because I think you're right, the scientific community is going to ask for it. And I'm happy that I think I'm really happy you made that comment. One thing that we are going to do or that we are trying to do now with the Basco project is that so we are trying to test for this hypothesis that there might be something artificial in high orbits around the Earth before.

And the first satellite was launched. And this turns out to be quite easy to do if you use old photographic material from, let's say, from the 50s, or if you would have material that is even older. Because what you can look for is several glints that fall upon a line, because if you have something that is very reflective and it's far away from the earth and it maybe rotates or spins around its axis, it's going to give us a few glints. And that's kind of what we see today also with satellites. And you can look for these things. And you can look for this in all photographic plate material. And if you have a single piece, it should show up in these images. And that's one thing we can do.

Then we don't deal with any human report, not with any classified data. We deal with public data, data that is already out there, digitized there, that any person can get access to citizens, scientists can help to look through it. And if there's a single sign of E.T. Or a single piece of metal in the wrong place at the wrong time, we should be able to see it. So, you know, being a female in science, how has the landscape changed is like a female perspective from like over the years from when you maybe first started to where it has now? How has it changed for women in science? I think it's steadily progressing and becoming better and better.

I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been, let's say, 50 years ago or 30 years ago. But I think it's always progressing. And the conditions today are, I think, pretty good. It can still be better, of course. And I still think there is some work to do to make it better. Yeah. And L'Oreal is working, like right now, like you're working with them and women in science. How did that all come about working with L'Oreal?

And we watched the video that's come out that they did, the little biopiece on you, which is really lovely and wonderful. How did that all start? And to be honest, that was one of the first times I've heard that L'Oreal's been doing that. It's a larger beauty brand. So, you know, kudos to them, a little bit of a plug. But kudos to L'Oreal for that. But yeah, how did that all start?

So I got the price last year. And I was like super, super happy when I got it because this is a price that you can apply for. and I had sent in my application and I thought I have no chance. I just applied for fun. I did the best of course with application. And then when I got the letter, I was super shocked and super happy. I couldn't believe it that I got the price. And so then, well, of course, we got to know the organizers of the prize.

And it was great because we were invited for, a virtual ceremony because it was during the time of the pandemics, which means that they couldn't have the normal ceremony where 100 people are usually there and having dinners and all these fancy things like having beautiful dresses. Yeah, I like these kind of things like ceremonies. Anyway, we had a virtual ceremony instead, so they were filming and it was super cool because they also took very nice photos with a professional photographer. I thought it was super from everything. Yeah, I can imagine. And, you know, even to keep on the topic of women in science, do you have any advice for women, you know, young women that want to get into this topic and are curious

and, you know, are interested in science? Do you have any advice of how they can start their career in that field? My most important lesson has been to trust the gut feeling. Don't listen to senior scientist, trust your gut feeling. If you feel that something is interesting, you follow that, even if the other one say that this is boring or uninteresting or something like that. I'm worried sometimes that maybe the longer we are in science, the more we kind of gaslight this inner gut feeling we have. Like we always self-gaslight as I say, maybe this is not so important or so. No, I think one should just trust it and follow this intuition to watch what you want to work with.

That's my advice. Yeah, the questions you're asking in the projects you're involved with are some of the most profound questions we can ask of humanity. You know, is there life out there? What is out there? What comes next? I find it so inspiring. I remember hearing, you know, someone like the character of Dana Scully in the X-Piles television show. I love her. There we go. See? After her character came on television, they said that women got involved in the scientific world almost it shot up like 68% and that she was the inspiration and reason that a lot of women got into science so it's good to hear that she had an impact on you as well I can't even imagine what that feels like and that you're

probably doing that for younger women as well who want to get interested in this it's it's very cool and this is what we have to do create better role models like interesting role models that the younger generation can be inspired by. Yeah, science is, you know, hopefully becoming cool again in many ways. And women are getting excited about it and they want to join in the community and learn more and research. I think it's fabulous. You know, hopefully we'll see more in the years to come. Absolutely.

Well, what's to come? That's what I'd love to ask. Yes. To kind of wrap things up. Two questions for you. And the big, the first one's kind of big. Say there is an extraterrestrial intelligence out there somewhere, or just something non-human that will possibly make contact with Earth or has made contact.

What do you want that to be? Do you want it to be alien? Do you want it to be interdimensional? Do you want it to be humans from the future coming back and visiting us? Is there any, like, true answer to this UFO question that you personally want? Yes. I would wish it to be some aliens with a very strong interest into art that will compose a lot of beautiful music and share all these arts with us so that we could get enriched culturally.

like for example we have all these wonderful composers all over the word today but imagine if we could get a factor hundred more music coming to us to listen to me that's what I would like I love that more art is definitely what we need and who's to say some of these composers aren't aliens

I mean some of the things they do are yeah Yeah. So what comes next, Beatrice? I know the Vasco project is ongoing. I know you're doing some work with other organizations and whatnot. So what comes next for you in your endeavors in the scientific world? So we are now trying to wrap up the first phase of the citizen science project. We have more than 250,000 of classifications. And we're working on, like, VETA, getting the most interesting candidates. And also we are now actually doing the analysis in the searches for these glints along a line. We published one week ago a paper in Act Astronautica that describes how you can do these searches. And now we're actually carrying them out and analyzing the results.

So that is the first thing that comes to me trying to see, is there a single piece of metal in orbit around the earth before Sputnik? one. Interesting. So that would, would that sort of fall into the realm of techno signatures, some sort of technology that is not from here or originated on Earth? Would that be considered something techno signature-esque? Yes, it would be a techno signature, but right in our own backyard. It would be, let's say, if ET through some space trash on the way to the earth, then we would see that. Give us all your trash aliens.

Right, right. We will study until the end of time. Exactly. We'll be in museums forever. Yeah. I'm excited a bit of the projects. So let's see if it gives us any consistent results or so. And I think even leaving with the concept of space trash is like, I think it's awesome.

And I'd love the whole facts. Like you look at like, yeah, like alien artifacts and things to that. So I'm just glad that we're looking in all different areas. So it's exciting. It's very exciting. Beatrice, there's so much for me to go think about right now after this conversation. And that's what it's about. It's about making people think and keeping that curiosity going.

And that's what's honestly going to unravel the answers to the questions we've had for all of human history. So I personally want to thank you for taking the time to talk. to us today and thank you for joining us on Somewhere in the Skies. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very happy you did and I want to contribute to destigmatizing the euphotopic. The Somewhere in the Skies podcast is part of the Lionsgate Sound Network. Please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever possible. Thank you for listening. Greetings everyone. Ryan Sprague, host of Somewhere in the Skies. For over seven years and more than 400 episodes, the Somewhere in the

Sky's podcast has always been free to listen to, but it's not free to create. So we offer several ways to help support our efforts and get rewards in return. If you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can click the subscribe button at the top of your Summer in the Sky's feed to become a premium Apple subscriber. Or you can join our Patreon campaign with several tiers of El. Both of these options give you the same benefits and rewards, ad-free episodes, early access to the main show, and bonus episodes and content. Help keep the lights on at the Summer in the Skies H.Q. And help us continue to grow by becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere skies.

Or by clicking the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support. and keep looking up. You are now somewhere in the skies with your host, Ryan Spraib. You know, something happened in Washington yesterday. Yes. Is that something you'd like to talk about? With Anna, a representative, Anna Luna,

reading the statement that for... Investigations would be begun to reveal the number of statements, a number of facts about the assassination of President Kennedy, about two other major historical things, and, of course, the problem of unidentified flying objects. Right. So that being said, I think my... My book comes at the right time to help inform the proceedings. Because we, as you know,

in public science talks about what we did in terms of the research with Beigelow and Derbass and so on. And the research that I continue, to do after that in Brazil and Argentina and other places where I wanted to go back and get additional information. So I think those are the new things. Absolutely. Well, that's a perfect place, I think, Jacques de starts. So I will officially welcome you to the show. Welcome back to somewhere in the guys. It's been a while. I believe I had just actually moved here to Scotland. The day I moved here is the day I got to my first ever interview with you. So that was a memorable moment. And now we are

some two years later having this conversation with your brand new book, Forbidden Science, Six Scattered Castles. And we were just talking in the preamble there about what happened yesterday in Washington. I do want to circle back to that. But, Jacques, before we do that, let's talk about the brand new book. If you don't mind, this just released recently. You can purchase it online. We will put links to that in our show notes as well. But yes, first and foremost, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure, as always.

The subtitle of the book really caught my attention. So, you know, very simple question for you. Scattered Castles. What is the meaning behind the subtitle of Forbidden Science Six, if you don't mind? It's a designation for a repository of classified files. the name itself is not classified. Otherwise, I couldn't use it on the cover. But this is where you go if you want to find out

if there is a specific project on a particular topic. And it's used, of course, primarily by people who are classified secret or top secret have the access. And these names, these classified projects in the U.S. always use two words that are picked at random by a computer. So you don't know, you know, you don't always, you don't know what will come up. And I thought that that configuration of scattered castles was a perfect title for my book,

because we have little castles that are institutions that are keeping different parts of the enigma, and they are scattered all over the globe, and they need at some point. We need to communicate with them. Interesting. That actually reminds me of the recent revelations brought forward at the most recent congressional UFO hearing of this program allegedly called Immaculate Constellation. So, you know, everyone is speculating what do these, what do these mean? So I'm glad you sort of clarified that for me that there's not necessarily a specific meaning behind it within the government. say, but it's the meaning you give it, such as the subtitle of your book and what that means for forbidden science, right? Most classified projects have two, you know, two words, and those words are picked at random.

So this is just the repository. Immaculate Constellation, I think, was a specific, specific classified program. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Well, so you mentioned these different institutions, classified programs. Now, Forbidden Science Six really starts with you. Having sort of this, I guess you would say, a profound revelation that the work you're working on, this classified program, wasn't really unraveling.

the mystery as you had hoped in terms of the approaches that were being taken and whatnot. And this would eventually lead you to globally begin to explore the phenomena in many different ways, travel all across South America, Europe, Russia, even to try to continue to unravel these mysteries. So I guess my first question for you would be, what was that program, if you don't mind giving us any information you can on what that program was. And where did you go? So I think a lot of it is known now. There have been several books already published on the program itself.

And those books were touching on information that had been declassified. you know, the books were reviewed and published with the understanding that this was ready to be released. There are still parts of the program that have not been released, they are still covered by, you know, they are still classified, including the part that I was partially responsible for, which was the development of the database, a large amount of and again, some of the books already published have described what

what I did and what the project continued to do but the content is still classified so I'm not a liberty to discuss it. I believe that eventually all of that should be open

And certainly now that the Trump administration wants to see things in the open, I think it could be open. There are several exceptions to that. The files that we developed contained a large number of medical records. Those medical records currently should be. kept classified, but they are also protected in the U.S. by a regulation for privacy of the patients. So, you know, if you said you had an operation, I have no right to ask for the records from that operation. It's private to you and your insurance company and your doctors. So we have, we have, a large number of cases where the witnesses were injured, where the witnesses saw a doctor or were treated,

including some cases of people on the ranch, on the Nevada, on the Utah ranch. And those should not be public until they can be. sanitized by typically removing the name of the patient from the files, and then they can be. That's what the French do. The French files are completely available. They are, you know, put on the Internet, but the privacy of the witnesses, even those who are not medically related, but the privacy of the witnesses is preserved. And very often they change the names of the location,

so that the location itself is preserved. Now, if you want to know more, then you have a good scientific reason to know more, that can be made available. I don't see why we cannot do the same thing in the U.S. eventually. but I would be very concerned if those files were released because of the impact on the patients or the witnesses themselves. Right, exactly. And, you know, we did have a member of the security team that worked on the ranch on our show, a gentleman Chris Bartel, who did have, you know, alleged. physiological effects after being on the ranch and such things.

But however, like you mentioned, you know, those things are ethically, cannot be shared, at least yet. Yet this is the type of information that scientists or, you know, people in the medical field that might want to look into the effects of UAP on human beings, the type of information they would want. So you're sort of caught in this, this like catch-22 of we want the information, but it's not available. And I can understand how that could be frustrating, to say the least. Physical injuries, that's another topic that you explored in the book when you went to, you know, I guess I'll point out specifically, Brazil.

You know, so many cases out of Brazil where physical injuries, people were harmed, even some diet. from some of these encounters. You've investigated that throughout the years. Now, I guess my question for you is, do you think this is intentional on behalf of the source of these phenomena or is this just happenstance in terms of our interaction with these phenomena?

Where do you lay on the physical effects on human beings? Many of the traumatic injuries happened in South America. And there seems to be a cultural bias there where the interactions are much more violent. And where, I mean, those are fairly well documented now. As you know, I've gone four times to Argentina, four times to Brazil, always with people who spoke the local languages and knew the areas.

And we formed a team to go there to overcome the cultural differences. And there we, you know, I looked into and I published a number of cases of casualty of death in Brazil. cases where people were injured. I have published photographs of some of the injuries, both on male and female patients. And to some extent, those have been followed up. And we need to do the same thing in the United States under standards that are good medical standards. The same thing has happened in France, no death to my knowledge in France, but many cases of injuries. And there is one thing I can talk about, you know, about the project we had in Nevada. the concern that I had is that there were a number of stove pipes.

There were people looking at the physics, people looking at the biology, people looking at the sociology or the messages, or the technical aspects, or the analysis of the of the residue, analysis of archetypes and so on. As you know, I've done some of that myself with Dr. Nolan at Stanford, Dr. Sturrock at Stanford and others. And I've shared some of that with my friends and colleagues in France, where I am now, they've given me some of the material from cases in France

that I've taken to analyze in the US and vice versa. I mean, that's the way science has to work. It's not just one measurement. You have to replicate measurements in different lands and with different equipment. Overall, what I can say, I'm very proud of the work that our team did under, you know, Mr. Bigelow, under Bass, under Bigelow aerospace systems. And before, under NIDS, I think the team did a great job. I think there were brilliant people involved in all those areas, in physics,

and in biology and other areas. And it was well run. The problem that I discovered, you know, with the classified project is that there is very little sharing once we get started with the different parts of the team. So I've discovered since the project was essentially cut off and terminated. It was terminated after only two years. The project should have been a five-year project.

And we had, of course, the work we were doing had a specific program in steps to go into implementing artificial intelligence on top of the database that we built which was really a data warehouse with 260,000 cases from all over the world. And I brought in my files into that to get the whole thing sounded. So a lot of the cases were cases that I already knew that were in an unclassified category,

and then it became part of the data warehouse. which was classified and still is. I discovered since the project termination that some of the people who were using the database were interested in extending the range of the data in areas where I had data that wasn't in the project. And I never knew that they needed it. Now, that has to do with the way those classified programs are run, and it makes sense if you're developing, say, a new satellite, and the satellite has five components, you know, an optical component, an electronic component, and so on.

So the optical people work by themselves, and they have, you know, some standards they have to meet, and the electrical people, on the radio people have their own standard and they work against those standards. And then somebody puts a whole together and they launch the rocket, okay? And that's fine. And the data goes to different places. But in what we did, we did, you know, overall research on a very complex set of phenomena where we should have been able to communicate. And the communication was to a large extent did not happen.

For example, the people who were primarily interested in the medical data were not briefed on the trips that the team took to Brazil to investigate some of the cases in Brazil. So there was a lot of the... lot of information that was lost. Now, I had gone to Brazil three times, and in the new book, you know, book number six of forbidden science, it talks about my going back to Brazil now to find out what was missing from the research that was done by Bass. And I was able to reconstruct some of the missing parts by going there myself. But I went there with Brazilians and with

Americans who had worked in Brazil, spoke Portuguese and so on and had access to the things I was interested in. So I knew where I was going and I knew there was information where I was going. And that's what's in the book. I did the same thing in Argentina and discovered that in Argentina, there were samples that Dr. Sturrock at Stanford had never known about. We had very, very little information, you know, just little, very small pieces of material we could work with at Stanford. But I came back with a lot more material from Argentina that we're now working on in the lab. So those things have to continue, and they don't need to be classified, frankly. And I'm delighted that now the new administration in Washington wants to open the windows

on the doors and let people communicate and especially let scientists communicate on the record and the way it should be. Yeah. Swing those doors wide open. I hear you, Jacques. Well, okay, so Argentina, Brazil. Now, this book covers, you know, basically 2010 to 2019 of your journals, your travels and the things you discovered along the way with your independent research and

work with several others. Do you have any very memorable journal entries or moments that really stick out to you in this volume that you'd be willing to share with us? Any, you know, the highlight reel, I guess, as we would call it. there would be many, one of the areas where I was eager to go after the, you know, I was prepared to work for another three years with the, you know, with the team of the project. There were many things that I was ready to bring in, and especially the AI component. So I had already developed an AI system for my own for screening cases in 1986. I published it in 1986. When 1986, the web did not exist.

Right. So how could you do AI? Well, the network existed, and I had access, as you know, to the network from the beginning of the network from my days at SRI. So I knew how to use that and so on. So we could have done a lot more. Well, after two years, that project was shelved, and then I was free to go on with my own research. A lot of things I wanted to do were in the parapsychology angle.

And I started working with a number of my friends. friends, including people from SRI, who had been part of the parapsychology program. Ingo Swann, who had been one of the leading parapsychology subjects at SRI, you know, in the project of Dr. Putoff, Dr. Targ at SRI, at the project, SRI, had recruited me as a subject for something he wanted to do outside of the project. He wanted to develop a better protocol for remote viewing. Now, the remote viewing, the concept of remote viewing came from a discussion I had with Ingoswan at the beginning of the project.

Ingo Swam wanted to find out if there was something in science, some methodology, that he could bring to parapsychology. And in those days, you know,

parapsychology was guessing at some symbols that were hidden in a box somewhere and so on. And he didn't want to do that. He wanted to do some something new. And we had a seminal discussion where I told him, look, do you know how a computer uses data? And he said, no, I'm not, you know, I'm an artist and a psychic, but I'm not an engineer. And I told him, I took him through a very quick overview of how computers use data.

So in this computer, there is data that's fixed. For example, today's date is in a cell in this computer. And it's not going to change until tomorrow and until midnight tonight. Okay. And it's fixed and everybody knows where it is. You know, it's in cell number 10,027. Okay. There is other data that comes and goes because I've written the program.

that uses, for example, names of people for interviews, and that name will change every day and so on, and I can look it up, but it's going to change based on the program that remembers the schedule. So those are in the name changes, but the location can also change. So from day to date, maybe in a different location, in the computer.

But my program can find that location. It goes there and it gives me the name. This is direct everything, essentially. However, there are also cases where my program doesn't really know that cell number. But I'm going to compute the cell number, and the program is going to then go and get it into that cell number, which is going to be a result of the calculation. And that's called indirect in dressing.

It's not direct. I don't know the number. But the program is going to get the number and go there and get the information and bring the information to me. And then there is another problem where the range of things, is bigger than the memory of the computer. And then it's a form of addressing which has to guess,

to go through a random process, to go and discover where the information is. And that's called indirect addressing. And the... that Ingo fell in love with that series because to him this is what consciousness does. You know, it can go to those different levels. And there is a level where you're just plunging into a range of things that are not in front of you, but are somewhere else.

And you still have a way of proceeding within, you know, within that range and find that device. So we started, that's the way the remote viewing program got started from that conversation between Ingo and me. I don't think the agency knew that, but that was, at the time, was not written down anywhere. I mean, that conversation. Ingo wanted to refine, and I'm getting to your question, forgive me. Oh, of course. Rebels. This is great.

Ingo wanted to refine that. And he had a special program by himself where he was going to define the process by which he could train people in remote viewing. And he wanted to use me as a subject. Now, I'm a mediocre remote viewer. But I understand the process. and I was, we did a number of experiments. I did a number of experiments with both Yuri Geller and Ingo and others, and I had done some experiments in France that convinced me that I could understand the process.

I could not use it reliably if you're looking for the solution to a crime, for example. I wouldn't be the best person. person to do that. But Ingo thought that I did it well enough that he could use me as a subject in developing the different stages of his method. The first method was just getting an overall impression. The first level of the method was beginning to get specific impressions of, for example, names of things and colors, music, sound, wind, things like that. And then you would go deeper and deeper into details, always recalling the information and reprocessing it.

So that's the way it works. So we had a long table in a room that was classified, and most of SRI didn't know how that room was used. It was only used for that project. And he had coordinates, which were based on that initial discussion we had, we used coordinates as the way to name, to have a handle for the site. And the, you know, it was a little bit like scattered castles, might be, you know, the coordinates.

But at that time, he was still using longitude and latitude. And we would get up, I had another job at that point. I was doing venture capitalized, doing investing. But I would go twice a week, you know, in that lab with him, and we would work on it the whole morning. And over the whole morning, we would do four or five different sites, of different difficulty. One time I go there at 8 o'clock in the morning.

He's sitting at one end of the table. I'm sitting at the other end. All I have is a pencil and some paper. And he had some pencil, a pencil, a number two pencil, always, and some paper. It was very, you know, very rigid, very structured. And he takes a file, opens it up, and reads a longitude and latitude. And I become sick, essentially.

And he says, Jacques, I mean, what happens? And I say, well, you know, this is, I don't know where you're sending me, but it's very uncomfortable. And he says, well, tell me what you feel. And I feel, well, I have vertigo. I'm very cold. I'm scared. I'm scared that I'm going to fall. And there is wind around me, and it's very cold.

And I'm very uncomfortable. And he says, you're on top of a mountain in the Andes. Wow. He says, we're done for this morning. We're going to stop there. Wow. I mean, you went to the site. Yeah.

And I wasn't supposed to go to the site. I was supposed to draw something that might have been, you know, a little peak. And then at the next level, you would have said, how do you feel? And I would have said, well, it's kind of cold. you know, and we would have done, this was level one, level two, level three. I was at level seven, essentially. I was there. And I said, well, Ingo, I'm on the role here. You know, I got it.

Why don't we continue with other sides? He said, no, you're going home. Because I don't, I want you to remember that. I want you to go home with that healing because you got 100% of it. You were at the site. Wow. And I've never, you know, it's one thing I've never, I've never forgotten. And I know the process.

I know how the process works. I know what you have to do to make it work. Now, my problem is that, you know, at heart, I'm a computer programmer, you know, I'm a hacker, so I'm very rational and very structured in what I do. I like things to be neat. I like things to have, you know, the structure and so on. And this is, I understand why Ingo was so good, because Ingo was an artist. and he was working, he was getting at the same result, but he was getting at the result in a much richer way

that was less structured, okay? And he wanted to combine the two. He wanted to bring structure to it to teach it to people, okay? And I've never forgotten that experience. There was another experience which is more, you know, more recent, that I have not completely recovered from. I had continued to look at how open our psychology could be used to, frankly, to get to contact. And so I had spoken to people who had research the same thing and could.

And to create the conditions where you could have, you could make something happen. And this was in San Francisco, not here in Paris. It was in San Francisco and we did a number of structured environments that might be susceptible. And I talk about that in the book. might be susceptible to bringing that kind of experience of contact. And nothing much had happened. Vague impressions, so on. And then one night I'm asleep.

All of a sudden, I'm out of my body. Now, people, psychics describe going out of their body with a structured way and so on. There are people who can apparently teach that. I have never taken those courses. I had spoken to them, Bob Monroe and others. I had met and I had discussed the process and so on. But this was not under my control.

I mean, something had just taken me and moved me to a place in my apartment in San Francisco where I was in front of an entity. I was, the entity was not threatening, but it was large. It was, I thought of it as, frankly, as a living being in front of me, as slow as I am, with no particular features on it, but they're clearly ready to communicate. There was a sense of complete communication, but again, I was out of my body, so it wasn't going to be hearing or I was in that presence. I was very scared, even though it was not retina.

but I had never anticipated that. And I think I was so scared that that projected me back in my body. My body woke up and I was in tears. And I was just completely surprised, you know, by what had happened. There was no question I was asleep. My body was asleep the whole time. My mind wasn't. So it had essentially extracted me to present that situation.

Now, I write about that in the book. There was more, and obviously I want to explore it more. But I don't want to lead the reader into any theory about what happened, because I don't understand what happened. I've spoken to people who went out of their body, you know, specifically for research. Certainly part of some of the people at SRI, you know, who worked with Tag and Putoff and so on. And later with Ed May, you know, had that ability to move out of their body. But I had no prior experience of that.

So I need to work on it myself. It suddenly changed my view of what these people were describing. I have an open ticket to that area. me, that has become much more interesting than doing programming on, you know, databases and so on. There are other people who do that very well. You know, I respect my colleagues certainly in the information science and AI. You know, I have a PhD in AI from 1967. AI has a long history.

You know, it's just not the kind of AI. it was the first generation AI that it worked. You could ask questions in English about a database and get an immediate answer instead of writing the program and running the program to compute the answer. You know, my program could be addressed in English. It was a program about astronomy. You could ask a complex mathematical question

about a catalog of stars and get an answer back instantly. That maybe I should revive that program. It would run on any computer. It would be fun to show it as sort of level one AI. But at that time, they were only for AI programs in the world, two at Harvard, one at Stanford and mine.

So I was part of that first generation of AI. So I know it can be done. I know how it can be done and so on. But I think the parapsychology angle is going to be much more interesting because now we have to communicate with whatever entity is involved. You know, it's not just a matter of, you know, picking up samples and looking at how much carbon there is versus lead and uranium or something. We need to do that.

And as you know, I've donated all my collection of samples, physical samples, to Dr. Nolan, and we're working together on that, you know, on that collection to improve that methodology and try to get more. specific, you know, technical answers about that. But I think the psychic angle to me now is where I want to continue to go. Interesting. Well, to sort of play off of that, Chuck, yeah. I mean, the work with Gary Nolan is one thing, and it's vital, it's essential.

It's important to understand, you know, let's say, what the tool is made of, how the tool works. But then you flip it on its head and you go to this more psychic approach or, let's say, even metaphysical to an extent, to understand the motivation behind what the tool is and why it's being used. Like what is the motivation behind the intelligence of those fragments you discovered or the craft or, you know, the trace evidence left behind. left behind. So I guess to kind of play off of that, do you think as the methodical person you are trained with AI using protocol for such things, math, all of this stuff, it's very rational, it's very structured. Do you think by using a protocol or a process that you could revisit that experience you had in your bed that night to commune with this entity? Is that something you think you can do or no?

The work that I've done in AI, as I said in 1967, between 1967 and now, a lot of people have developed AI programs to implement things in your car. You mean, your car is, the programs in your car are not the classical programs. that, you know, two plus two gives four and so on, there are programs that analyze your behavior as a driver that remembers how you've driven before, can detect if you're in a hurry to go somewhere, if you're making mistakes,

it will adjust if you're making some mistakes. If you're falling asleep, it will wake you up. It will detect all that, and it will work, with you, without you being aware of what's going on in the engine that adapts the capability of the car to your state of your physical state and your intellectual state to some extent. It doesn't know why you're disturbed. It could be a number of things, but it knows that the way you're sitting in the car, the way you're using the wheel and so on is different from what you usually use it,

and it will adapt its own behavior to that to anticipate things. If it knows where the yellow line is or the white line, and if you go across the white line, it's going to know that. It's going to assume that either you're very disturbed or your, you're asleep and then it will do something to wake you up. So that intelligence is already in the car. So those are things that work with us. To me, AI is going to be most useful in that way.

The program I wrote, actually I published it in 1987 at a meeting in Los Angeles, a meeting about how to use computers in aerospace. It was an aerospace meeting. And the problem was, how do you go faster in screening reports of UFOs? Well, there are a number of hypotheses if you see me, or if you tell me that you've seen strange light at night, there are a number of questions I'm going to ask you, because it could be the moon behind a cloud. Now, I know where the moon was that night, and I can screen that. But it's going to take a lot of time. The computer can, I designed a program that had about 200 possible situations where a report of a UFO could be explainable by some hypothesis. In some cases, there are several

hypotheses that would come up at the same time. Now, a normal program cannot handle that, you know, conflicting two different conflicting hypotheses hypotheses at the same time. AI can do that. You know, we can think about things that are red and things that are green at the time, okay? And essentially model the situation you're describing in terms of that. That it takes AI to do that. You can't just have a normal program to do that. I mean, you could, that it would take all day to go through all the possible situations. You need to have inference, you need to the computer to infer something from what you say as a witness. So my program was essentially a guide that would, they couldn't find the answer by itself.

That's not, you know, people are trying to do that. I think they'll have some interesting time and there are many mistakes before that kind of AI is really going to work, including on the stock market and all those things. So I'm not saying you shouldn't use chat GPT, but. The way people are using it now is comical. You know, it's a big laugh. I think there may be a level in the computer that's laughing at the questions we're going to ask.

To me, it was more like a dialogue with a very, very smart assistant who could make influence, you know, ahead of me. I could say, well, you know, maybe he saw the moon through the fog, but think of all the other things it could be. And there are some very weird hypotheses that people forget, you know, forget to ask. And the computer is not going to forget. The computer is going to remind me that, yes, there could be, you know, a 50% chance that they, that they, that there could be, you know, a 50% chance that, that they, This is, in fact, the moon behind a cloud, but because the moon is, in fact, there, because it's computed the position of the moon when you saw that UFO. But, you know, it could be, it could be an airplane making a turn through the fog to go to, you know, an airport that's close by.

it could be some illumination from something else. So the computer is not going to forget all the other things it could be. Your brain is going to think, oh, you know, I got it. I mean, it's got to be this. And then your emotions to take over. You know, my little assistant didn't have any emotions. They don't say, well, Jacques, you may be right, you know, up to 43%. but you should also look at the 20% hypothesis

and the 15% hypothesis and so on. It's not going to let me out of the hook. So I think that, again, this was a kind of AI we could do in 1987. But we don't do it. I mean, that's the thing that I wanted to bring to Bigelow, I wanted to bring into our program for DIA. I didn't think of that. You know, that's something

that we could have contributed. That would save, you know, thousands of hours of analysts trying to reconstruct what could have happened in some of those cases. You could put that on top of, you know, the scanning programs

that look at signals in the sky. and so on. I mean, there is a lot of the basic work that can be done. Yeah. You asked me about specific things, and there is some of it also that somewhat buried in, you know, in science, because I wasn't sure for a long time, I wasn't sure what to think about it. My wife and I bought a property in the redwoods in Northern California, two hours north of San Francisco. It's a wonderful area.

It's in Mendocino, Mendocino County. You know, the last huge redwoods that they live for 100 years or more. So we had some century-old redwoods on the property, and I had a lot of respect for those beings, because they, for example, when there is a forest fire, they don't die. They thrive in the fire. The fire destroys the low branches, but there is a lot of water. there are many tons of water stored in those towering redwoods so that they don't burn. So the fire clears the under the under the wood itself, the lower level plants. And it clears the landscape for the redwoods.

and the redwoods because when they you know the fruits of the redwood will fall into the ashes and stop new redwoods so that's why you see in those old redwoods if you're ever in Northern California

you'll see a big redwood and you'll see the five or six little ones that are just growing next to it that's how it happened You know, if the fruit falls in the ash and it's very nourishing for it and that's how they reproduce. Okay, I mean, I've learned

you learned so much but just going into nature and talking to the local people and understanding that. I built an observatory in the middle of the Redwood Forest. Okay. It was very dark. There were no lights. closest neighbor was three quarters of a mile away. So I put an observatory there because I wanted to

re-experience the joy of being an astronomer and on having your own telescope and being able to look at things. I didn't do anything very fancy or experimental, but I wanted to track satellites again. I wanted to look at the moon. Again, I would study the moon. Of course, I had done all that, you know, at Paris Observatory and later at McDonald's in Texas, we were working, my boss was working mainly on Mars and galaxies, and I worked for him on galactic spectra and so and so. I wanted to re-experience what it was like to to be at the prime focus of the telescope. We could sleep in the tower,

and there were a number of times, three times, when my wife woke up in, I didn't wake up. So it was the opposite of Whitley's tree. weekly would wake up and would have these experiences, which I've, you know, I've admired the way he was able to describe them and work with them in his own process. My wife was, Janine, my first wife,

was not a skeptic by any means, but she was in many ways, more approaching the whole thing more rationally than me. She saw, she was woken up by lights that were small, she describes it as, you know, small lights sort of like this, that would, that would move around as if it was exploring the room we were in. There were books in that room there were rare books there were some scientific instruments I was just storing them there and then it would move around and then it would disappear and I should told me about those on the last day after when we sold the property we

I was back in San Francisco. She was finishing where to sell the car, where to put the car on the trailer and had it moved to be sold in the city. And then there was nothing else on the ranch. So she was spending the last night there. And then she was awakened by her life. Now, I had hoped we had that ranch in the forest for 18 years with an observator that was the only thing sticking out of the redwood forest.

You would think the aliens would come there. Maybe they did on those two occasions, but I didn't see it. And on the last day, she was woken up by a very, very. bright light that woke her up. I mean, it was filling the room. She went through the window and there was a light essentially driving down the driveway, which was a dirt, just a dirt road, okay, in the middle of that forest, an enormous light that went down the driveway to the main road, as if to say, you know, good luck. Yeah.

That's the way we interpreted it. But why did it wait until the last day? The last night. And again, that's another thing I need to process. I've gained in the process a lot of respect for Whitley and what he's gone through. Because I recognize that, of course, he was the prime witness. You know, his wife was not the witness.

My situation was reversed. I don't know how to process that. There was no special message except a message of saying goodbye. But at last, light was... It was very much in your face. It was bigger than the house. It was unmistakable. It was white, you know, white UV, you know.

And it was not a specific shape. It was not a craft. It was just a massive light going down the driveway, the way a car would go down to the driveway. Wow. So those are some of the highlights, you know, that are in the book. Other than, and funny enough, the people who reacted to the book have not reacted to that. It's as if, well, yeah, maybe, you know, it takes a while.

I don't blame them because it took me. a while to get to recognize how important those specific things were. Because I come and go, you know, it's like Ingo said, it's there, it's too big for your consciousness. So you're vaguely aware of something's happened, but if you don't train yourself, you're not going to understand it. Yeah. And Ingo spent that you're essentially training me in writing that training manual.

I was the guinea pig. And I was privileged to be the guinea pig for, you know, what are the mistakes that people make? Yeah. I had made all those mistakes. And what are the cases where it works? And I recognize when you're, huge worse.

Well, the other thing, too, Jacques, I think, is these experiences are, while subjective and powerful, you know, due to interpretation and things like that, they're so profound and powerful for the individual, the observer, the experiencer, that I can almost understand why people haven't responded so much to those sections of your book because they aren't the one who experienced it. Yet I personally feel in those, you know, those cracks, those small glimpses that each person has of these phenomena. That's where the answers lay, not in, you know, what AI will eventually produce as an answer or what the U.S. government will produce. as an answer to UFOs, but what each individual finds along their path, their journey,

you know, I mean, I'm sure your possible explanation for these phenomena changes on a daily basis like it does for all of us. More and more people, of course, are experiencing that you have to give yourself permission or you have to recognize it. Frankly, when I was

out of my body, at the time, I didn't know what was happening. It was very, very quick. It took less than a minute for the whole thing to happen. And for me to be brought back.

But I had read, I had met Robert Monroe. You know, I had, of course, worked with Ingo. I had met a number of people who, for whom that was a familiar, psychic, you know, experience. So I had something to relate it to. And I think that's going to happen more and more. And, you know, the big question is,

when time comes to really communicate with the entities behind the UFO phenomenon, how is it going to happen? I've continued to explore that with psychics. And they've told me of their own experiences. I'm not ready to write about that. It's not in this book. But that's part of my research now is really at that level. How to refine that so that it becomes reliable.

Yeah. And the research continues, shock. We're coming up on the hour. You've been very generous with your time. I have one final question for you, if that's okay. Okay. So in the book, you give sort of these three critical moments in history where this quote-unquote UFO disclosure could have happened. You know, this is like that golden nugget that everyone wants disclosure.

You know, when you give this example of, you know, late 50s, we had Project Blue Book, Grudge, sign, all of this. Could have been a moment. You had the late 60s and whatnot with the condo. The condo report, you know. Correct. And then you fast forward up to like 2011 with the work you were doing and whatnot with your programs. That these all could have been three critical moments where disclosure could seemingly have happened yet didn't for various reasons. To sort of, I guess, end this conversation.

we had news out of Washington just yesterday as we were recording this that hopefully more transparency is going to be coming in our future, which some people might correlate to disclosure. So do you think we're going to, are we on a path to any more disclosure when it comes to this topic? Or will it forever remain enigmatic as it has for so long? A number of us, of course, we're all asking that question. Nobody has ever defined disclosure. If you took 10 of our friends and tried seeing UFOs, you put them in the same room,

and you ask them to write what disclosure is, and you compare what they wrote, and it would go all over the place. to some extent, as some friends of mine have said, disclosure has already happened. I mean, it's clear that there is something. To me, it happened, you know, four years ago at the Washington Cathedral. I mean, what more do you need?

You know, the director of, you know, national intelligence standing up in a cathedral saying, you know all those things, they are real and they are not part of espionage. They are not part of what our intelligence agencies are doing. It's something else. It's not the Russians. It's not the Chinese. It's something else. And it's outside of intelligence, even though intelligence may have something to say about the methodology

by which you try to understand it. You know, because it's like decoding something, but it's not, you know, it's not an enemy, something else. You had the director of Harvard Observatory. You had the former director of NASA, you know, administrator of NASA. And you had the archbishop of Washington. All of them, one after the other, saying, yes, there's a very much. is a mystery. Here we stand, you know, four years later, and nothing's, nothing more has happened until yesterday. Yesterday, something had. So a number of us are scared, because if it had been

revealed in the 60s, which it could, we came close to that, we advocated for that. The answer we got, actually, you know, I asked a question in France. There was a friend. French officer who went to the American embassy to talk to his counterpart in an Air Force. His name is Clare Juan, Colonel Clarewan. He went to talk to his counterpart at the embassy. And the men in the embassy made a few phone calls and said, it's not the time to do it because there is too much conflict in the world. It's complicated.

we cannot afford to have one more thing that's undefined that's going to complicate it between us and the Russians. You know, those were the, you know, the silent war, the wall, you know, all those things between us and the Russians. That was not the time to bring up another thing in the sky. we couldn't understand or try. And that made sense. Then there was a Condon committee, as you know, Dr. Heineke and I were the first scientist to testify before Condon. I brought my database, you know, to merge with their database so that they had, you know, an up-to-date stuff to work with from the beginning, you know, about 3,000 cases that were well-documented

that they could put next to what they already had. And then, you know, I had the Air Force Fives that I put on the computer that they could use. You know, we donated that to the Condon project. they could, they didn't have to say something that was interpreted as, you know, everybody go home, there is nothing there, you know, which is the way it was interpreted. That's not what they said, but that's the way it was understood. And that was, and then, now, now, if it had happened in the 60s, the scientists would have been very interest. It would have come as one more thing. It wasn't alarming, it wasn't scary, it was very technical. You know, there were a few hundred cases that people could study. It was interesting.

I think it would have cleared the way to the whole discussion later. That didn't happen. It could have happened with Condon. By then, men had been in space, you know, so the whole thing about going to the moon, going to space and so on. That was dispelled. I mean, we could do it. These people came back. They were a human like you and me. You know, this was something we could handle.

So the scary part was God. And that would have been an exciting thing to do with science. You know, maybe we would bring from space, we would bring new medical process. I mean, it's still true today, of course. We have done that. But that was closed. doing it today with all the conflict in the world, all the unknown, with AI on top of it, which is scaring people for good reasons, for both good and bad reasons. But I think this is, we're not going to see a nice, rational acceptance of that.

It's going to scare a lot of people. There are reasons why the part of the armed forces felt it should not be opened up for religious reasons. There would be, history says that whenever a superior civilization has moved into a territory, you know, like the Spanish moving to Mexico and to South America, like the French moving to Africa and so on. Essentially, the more evolved technical civilization kills everything. I mean, that's what we did to the Indian civilization in the U.S. You know, people came from Europe with all kinds of ideas

and all kinds of wanting to do all kinds of science. and other things, and there was never a smooth process defined to ameliorate the process. So it became conflict, out of a conflict, with essentially eliminated entire civilizations around the world. The French, with Spanish, the English, And it's very difficult to recapture, and the question is, you know, are we like going to be faced with something that comes here? You asked me the question at the beginning about injuries, you know. Well, the injuries, this phenomenon doesn't seem to care if it kills people or if it injures people. Dr. Green has all these files that we've worked on together to some extent that is continued to develop no protocols to deal with these patients of people who were exposed to something that we really don't understand that in some cases is obviously hostile.

Now, you know, if I touch a burning bulb, it's going to burn me. It's not hostile, but I know not to do that. And we don't understand that process with UFOs. Should we tell people, yes, if something lands in your backyard, you can go touch it? You know, well, some people have done it and, you know, with no harm. And some people have done it and were irrigated, you know, to a dangerous extent for life. And so all those questions are the questions people are going to start asking now. And they shouldn't.

And we don't have the answers. and we have not prepared the scientific structure to go get this. So, you know, that was what we wanted to do, you know, with a bigger old project with mass, and that was cut off

up to two years for reasons that I've never understood. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, everyone always grasps for disclosure, hopes for disclosure, yet nobody truly knows what that means, what the potential could be for that if it did ever come. And I think you're right. While we may think we're prepared in some ways, there's so many unanswered questions. Like, do we even want those answers,

Jacques? You know, that's the true question. I don't see myself answering those questions. I love to be part of a team where I can bring some elements of an answer or a possible answer to scientists in other branches where we can work together to at least cast some light on that. And that's what I want to continue to do. Yes, absolutely. And the work does continue. That's for sure. The book, again, everyone, is Forbidden Science, Six Scattered Castles, the best subtitle I've ever heard for a book.

I absolutely love it. Jacques, we will put links to the book below for everyone to check out. But I have to say, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. I'm honored to have had you back on the show to have this conversation, and I certainly hope it will not be our last. So I want to thank you once again for coming on somewhere in this guy. Thank you. We're sitting on top of an iceberg, and the enormous size and implications of the rest of that iceberg,

that's what I'd like to know. I came away from the meeting and from the room with the distinct feeling, however, that the panel had deliberately moved to debunk the whole subject and not to give it the serious scientific attention in which it deserved. From my own point of view, I'm going to be very disappointed. If you are first allowed to be nothing more than visit us from another planet, because I think I could be something much more interesting.

When you look up in the sky, you're off in a corner of nowhere. We're nobody. Maybe if we looked around a little bit, we could learn how to be somebody. Greetings everyone, Ryan Sprague, our host of Somewhere in the Skies. For over seven years and more than 400 episodes, The Summer in the Sky's podcast has always been free to listen to, but it's not free to create. So we offer several ways to help support our efforts and get rewards in return. If you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can click the subscribe button at the top of your Summer in the Sky's feed to become a premium Apple subscriber.

Or you can join our Patreon campaign with several tiers available. Both of these options give you the same benefits and rewards, add free episodes, early access to the main show and bonus episodes and content. Help keep the lights on at the Summer in the Skies H.Q. And help us continue to grow by becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Or by clicking the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support. And keep looking up.

This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Today, our guest is Dr. Paula Bentempi. Paula is an oceanographer who has led the use of satellites in marine science during her positions in NASA and as the dean of the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. Dr. Bun Tempe spent over 16 years as the program manager for ocean biology and biogeochemistry at NASA headquarters, as well as the lead for NASA's carbon cyclonexicon. and ecosystems focus area, and NASA's carbon cycle science research lead, before becoming the Earth Science Division's acting deputy director in 2019. She's also taught the Earth Science module for NASA's astronaut training class over the last several years. In 2019, she was named a fellow of the Oceanography Society and was awarded both the Ocean Sciences Award from the American Geoferial.

Physical Union and the NASA Exceptional Service Medal. She most recently was selected as a member of the NASA UAP study team and took part in the recent panel and contributed to the upcoming public UAP report. Today, she joins us to talk all about the NASA UAP panel, what to expect from the report, and then we discuss the mysteries that lay not just somewhere in our skies, but in the the depths of our oceans as well. Here's our interview with Dr. Paula Pentampi. Paula, thank you so much for joining me today and somewhere in the skies. My pleasure. So I think a lot of our viewers are people who are really into UFOs.

They may recognize you from the recent UAP panel that NASA did, that they live stream this four-hour event. I was glued to my... screen watching every moment of this and jotting down every name of every panel member and kind of looking into what they've done their experience kind of their uh their specialties and why they were chosen for this panel and uh you really stuck out i think to a lot of people uh primarily because of your your knowledge and your expertise in oceanography which uh was very unique and refreshing i think for people who are kind of used to train in their eyes on the skies. I mean, look at the name of my podcast.

But yeah, so I was so happy that you were willing to come on here today and speak with us. Sure. No, thank you for the opportunity. It's my pleasure. Always happy to talk to, you know, the public in any capacity. And yes, no doubt when I was assigned to the panel and the request for my, you know, you know, participation came in, I was like, hmm, you know, I looked at who else was on the panel and thought, you know, you use the word stick out. I mean, social media was lit up like, what is the purpose of an oceanographer on this panel? And I kind of also had the same question. But I had spent 18 years at NASA headquarters and had just left two years prior. So, you know, it was an interesting topic and I was game for seeing, you know, what everything was about. Well, I'm so happy you did. I do want to kind of dig into the panel angle to all of this in just a bit.

But if you don't mind, I'd love to rewind and kind of get an idea of who you are. What kind of got you interested in our oceans and what eventually made you want to become an oceanographer, the origin story, as we call it. Yeah, no, I appreciate the question. So it's pretty simple. Apparently the story goes when I was like four. I said to my parents one day that I wanted to study the ocean and they were like, you know, I remember my dad having this really big smile and my mom being really angry and I, you know, I just remember, you know, that kind of thing. And it's just something I knew I wanted to do. And I later found out, you know, that my father's family were commercial fishermen in Italy and emigrated

to the U.S., you know, in the hopes of a better life when several of the relatives had died at sea. And I think that was the root of why my mom was so upset is that that calling was just part of who I was. And the rest is history. I went to undergrad and graduate school twice for advanced degrees in ocean science. And the funny part about the NASA link is that I was studying phytoplankton ecology and their very tiny plant-like single-celled algae that live in the ocean. they're the bottom of the food chain. And I loved studying them for my master's degree, and I went into satellite oceanography,

quite frankly, because I thought the whole thing was BS, you know, identifying phytoplankton and looking at them through a microscope. How could you possibly do this from space? And the rest is history, and it's my fault, because I joined NASA headquarters in 2003, and I stayed there for 18 years until I went back to academia. So I've always had to draw to the ocean. I've always had an interest in how the ocean is part of the Earth system.

And definitely my time at NASA headquarters made me not only a better Earth scientist, but to think about oceans across the solar system. You know, what's the purpose of our oceans on the Earth? How could that be an analog for studying oceans that we might discover on other worlds, the life within it, potentially, et cetera? So it's all linked and it's all very, very, exciting and all new frontiers of exploration. Oh, that's fascinating.

You know, we're learning more and more each day, you know, things like these exoplanets or the moons of planets within even our own solar system, possibly having oceans or signs of previous oceans. So I love that link that, you know, you're kind of looking at biological life in our own oceans and what that could possibly tell us about. possibility. I like to make that clear to people, the possibility of life on other planets in terms of how we kind of structure that here on Earth, right? Yeah. I mean, the question that people always ask, right, is have we discovered life elsewhere? And we haven't yet. The, you know, the universe is a really big place, right? In my mind, and this is just, you know, Palo Ban pe human thinking about it, it would be really depressing if we were the only organisms out there. And Earth was the only planet with any life whatsoever. But what I love is the advances in

technology that people develop, like in James Webb Space Telescope, building on Hubble Space Telescope's history, to peer really far into our universe and beyond, the opportunities for people to explore all the edges of everything that we know to exist. you know, all the opportunity for industry and philanthropy and nonprofits to get together, all of the agencies of the world to get together and really think about where there are opportunities for new technology and innovation. And this is what gets students really excited, right? Like, we want to inspire the next generation of explorers. So how do we do that? We show them things we never thought existed. And then they're bitten. And they just want to explore as well.

So, you know, those are the links that I think are really incredible and certainly want to be opportunities for everybody. Right, right. Well, I guess that kind of brings us up to today. You know, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your time at NASA in terms of, you know, those 18 years spent there and kind of what you did there. So I guess, yeah, before we get to the panel, I know that's what everyone. wants to hear about. But I'm more fascinated about that link that you mentioned. So what did like a typical day-to-day look like when you were working at NASA? And I don't know if I even asked, what was your actual position there? Yeah. So I was hired as the program manager for ocean biology and biogeochemistry.

And that's a, that's all the biology and the chemistry linked to the biology and ecology of the ocean. And I sat in the, then we were codes, but now it is called the Earth Science Division. And the Earth Science Division was about 72 people who managed all of the research associated with Earth science, and then all of the satellite missions, the Earth observing satellite missions, that were current and in development or formulation associated with looking at different aspects of the Earth. So that could be the land, the ocean, the atmosphere, ice, et cetera. So going back in time, one of the big discoveries, I think, that everybody knows that's associated with the NASA Earth Science Division now is the hole in the ozone layer from the 70s and 80s. That is definitely something that was, you know, generated by NASA fieldwork, using aircraft to look at what was happening in the atmosphere.

And so we also added an aspect in Earth science that's called Applied Sciences, which is taking the basic research. research, the discoveries that happen in the research programs and transitioning it into operations or management, meaning can it be used for active management of aquatic resources, atmospheric resources, treascial resources, in support of sister federal agencies that do that kind of work and lead into new policy potentially. So it's sort of management and policy relevant science. So it was building satellite missions, it was funding research, it was high risk, and high risk, high yield. It was developing new observational technologies,

institute and remote, and it was just fun. Really inspirational. That's awesome. That's so good to hear. So I guess, okay, let's do it. Let's get to the need of it. The UAP panel, this live stream that I know hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people watched. What do you feel was your key takeaways from the panel? Well, I know we still have pending report that's going to come out.

I'd love to touch on a little bit later, if there is anything I can share. But yeah, what are sort of your key takeaways from the panel? So I'll tell you, one of the things that really struck me going into it is we would have this conversation around data. Do we have enough data? Do we have enough information? They gave us a couple of test cases to look at. All of them are public, the USS Nimitz event, things like that. And we heard firsthand accounts from people who had witnessed something. Okay. And could we confirm it was an unidentified anomalous phenomenon? Or, you know, was it something that we were like, oh, if you look at this information and that information and put it together, we can tell you that

it isn't something traveling over the surface of the ocean at, you know, Mach 20. It's actually, you know, an artifact of the camera that you're using to look at it, plus what your eye limitations are, you know. So we did explore a little bit like that. And I think one of the panelists, Josh the metter, gave an example at the panel of the parallax error, you know, that one used in and to go fast anomaly. So that was a really interesting thing. But what struck me is everybody said, we don't have enough data, we don't have enough data. And I'm sitting there thinking, oh my God, we have a ton of data through NASA. You know, what are they talking about?

We have these big debates. And the key part was we don't have enough of the right data. Okay, we don't have enough information. We have a lot of information about the Earth system. We have a lot of information about certain things associated with space, but we don't have the right information to examine and understand all of the, reported unidentified anomalous phenomena out there. So one of the panel's charges was, well, what do we need? Where is the opportunity? What should we do? So more and higher quality data

dedicated to UAP was definitely one of the big takeaways. The other big takeaway for me was the stigma associated with reporting. Now, if one thing has happened, especially in the United States of America, if not worldwide. It's just you witness something at work, you witness something every day, and it could be an event of harassment of some sort, a crime, and you go, oh, my God, what do I do with this information? I'm scared. Well, it's times a million when it comes to reporting UAP, right? Because people say, oh, my God, people are going to think I'm crazy. I'm going to lose my job. I'm going to lose my family. They're going to think I'm nuts, you know, and that's something that we have to work on. So how do we remove that stigma for reporting? That was the other big thing we talked about.

Yeah, yeah. I think those were two wonderful takeaways. The destigmatization, stigmatization. I can't even say the word, Paul. No, I'm with you. You have to be stigmatizing. Yeah, I know, this topic. You know, I've been interested in UFOs for more than half my life. And that was one of the biggest challenges that I've struggled with my entire life, Who do I talk to about this? My father and I saw something when we were younger, and he kind of just stamped it down and decided not to pursue trying to figure out what it was, where clearly my life went a completely different way.

But it was hard. It was lonely. I tell friends and they'd make fun of me. But now it seems we're living in a world where NASA is doing a panel on UAP, the Department of Defense has opened a office to investigate this and is now working with NASA. And this topic seems to be more widely accepted gradually. We're kind of seeing that stigma, I think, shed. And it's wonderful for people like me and, you know, the hundreds and thousands of people all over the world who've seen things they can't explain.

But like you said, what do you do with that? Who do you turn to? So yeah, it's great. So the who do you turn to, right? I mean, that is something we spent a lot of time discussing. If you're a commercial airline pilot or even just a private airline pilot, right? You have your own plane. You like to fly.

You see something. What do you do with that? And you go, well, if I call the FAA and report it in the United States, you know, are they going to pull my license right away? Right. And so how to destigmatize that? if you go across social media, you know, you can start to sort of crowdsource a little bit when events happened, right? You can see clusters of people saying, my God, did you see that over

Cincinnati, Ohio, you know, today? Not that that's something happened there, but, you know, and people start to talk about it. So I think like social media has facilitated people who have seen something and want to report something in groups. And at least there's that bit of support there. And And that's important, right? And what happens next is really up to a number of different national and international agencies. Where do you go to report an event? What might that look like? Should there be a website?

Because my inbox, like all the other panelists, is just filled with people who have witnessed something and want to share their photos, their experience, et cetera. They want to give that experience to somebody and be told it's okay, we'll look into it, right? and making that connection for somebody, if that is something that, you know, the United States federal government, the international governments together can do, I think that will be an important step. Absolutely. Well, and you all stated, I think, very eloquently, the right data that we need to continue to try to understand these UAP and the challenges that you've all faced. So that's kind of, you know, I feel like this panel was more of showing what the challenges

are in terms of what you're trying to do. And now it's a matter of what will this report be that comes out, you know, hopefully later this summer. So I guess my next question would be, I guess a two-prong question. What did you make of the DOD's involvement with your panel with the head of Arrow, Sean Kirkpatrick? And I guess on the flip side, now what happens? What happens next? And kind of what is the team doing to distribute this eventual report? Good questions.

So Sean Kirkpatrick is a great guy. He was very transparent and open with us. And he's got a very challenging job, you can imagine. And so, you know, he gave a commentary at the May meeting, the public meeting. for the independent study team that was very clear. You know, there have been over 800 UAP reported, and they're able to use existing data to understand all but maybe two to five percent of them.

And that two to five percent, the question becomes, what data do we need to actually really examine those? Because there are lots of things that go into reports, right? Like, everyone knows when they've seen something odd, they're like, did I see something? or am I just tired? You know, so the human eye, the brain when we're tired, when we're under stress, you know, can make a lot of funny things seem very real, right?

That could be explainable by existing data or natural data in the natural environment. So that is one thing I think that the panel discussed is, you know, for that two to five percent, what do we need to look at? Where are the opportunities? What should we be collecting? where should we be looking? Where are we not looking that we already have data? So we did discuss that quite a bit. And forgive me, Ryan, remind me in the second part of your question. Of course. No, not at all. What I guess kind of, I'm actually going to edit the question.

What does the process look like now for the team to present? Yeah, the next steps for this eventual report. And I guess off of that, your involvement. Like what are you kind of bringing to the eventual report? So right now the team is in the last pieces of debating, you know, the final wording, right? We're looking at our recommendations. We're looking at our findings. We're making sure that they are clear, understandable, and implementable, that there aren't any, you know, potentially unfunded mandates in there, right? Where the United States will tell NASA or some other, you know, agency or division, you must go do this without the funds to actually do it properly, you know, that kind of thing. And that does happen in governments across the world all the time, right? You

receive direction to go and do something, but there's really not enough money to do it properly. And the scientists and engineers and personnel associated with the independent study team are really focused on just making sure we've heard you know from the public we've heard the information that we have from the experts that we have we've held you know this public meeting we've gotten feedback and we want to make sure we address as much of it as possible um what happens with the independent study team the next steps is really up to NASA and the united states government right do they want to i'm making stuff up now speculating you know do they want to keep this on as experts the future as NASA and the US government go forward and try and implement a UAP type program

for reporting and study. Do they disband us and we're done and they think about next steps for the future based on the report? For me as an oceanographer, you know, about six or seven months into the UAP independent study team process, the National Defense author of the national defense author of the, Act redefined the A from aerial to anomalous. And that means they're not just looking at what's in the atmosphere, but they're looking at what might be under the ocean

and what might be in space, right? So we didn't have enough time when that pivoted to really look at anomalous phenomena, everything that might have happened under the ocean, everything in space. So maybe there's a next step there for the panelists or for a new panel to actually examine that. But we tried to address everything as best as we can and keep the report short.

You know, I don't think it'll be 400 pages long. It'll be actually, you know, readable and implementable and the recommendations is our hope. Awesome. Well, that's exciting to think, you know, that that simple switch of one word broadens the entire, you know, scope of what you will be looking at. So I look forward to hopefully your involvement actually increasing on a lot of that as this moves forward too, right? Yeah. I have a really funny story about that. If you have a second, I'll tell it to you. I was, you know, we really, you know, did not talk to, you know, there were many things. There was nothing that wasn't transparent about this panel, but, you know, I definitely learned a lot of information that as a notionographer

and a scientist, I would go home and I would be like, you know, my husband would be like, what's the most interesting thing? You heard it at this meeting today, you know, and I was like, oh well i don't know i really have a lot to digest i have to think about it but i was talking with a friend of mine who's also an optical oceanographer right so looking at um the transmission of light under the ocean and what we can see in detail from space and things like that and um she and i were chatting and i said you know what if there are reports uap reports from under the ocean and she goes well think about it this way the ocean is a really big place right so if you integrate vertically it's 96% of the available living space on our planet and just at the surface it covers 71% of the Earth's

surface. And she goes, do you actually think that if there is a person or a craft that encounters a UAP under the ocean that that's random? And I was like, I don't know. I never thought about it. And she goes, you don't think that would be intentional? And I was like, I don't know. You know, I never talk about it. So it is funny to think about like how big the ocean on our earth is. And if people are encountering things and reporting them, you know, let's say they're a, like a submarine pilot or something like that, right? And they see this odd thing. Would they report it? It's the same kind of stigma as it would be if an airline pilot saw something. So, but that begs the question, you know, she's always said this, we, we,

We've always talked about this and I'm like, I don't know. I've never thought about whether, you know, a chance encounter is really random or whether that's intentional by whatever's encountered. And it makes you a little like, hmm, that can't be, can it? And when I tell that story to other people, other scientists, you know, some are just like, fuck, you guys are so funny, you know, and others are like, I don't know, it's a good question. Like the ocean is a huge place. What would it take to have a random encounter in the ocean?

Has anybody ever thought about that? I was like, I don't know. So. Yeah. It's not. It's kind of, I'm sure you think about this all the time, but for me, it was kind of mind-blowing. You know, I hadn't thought about our home planet like that, you know. Right.

Well, it is mind-blowing to me even still because, again, you know, as a UFO researcher, again, we're so trained on the skies and what's happening around us. and we don't necessarily think of UFOs happening below us in terms of our oceans. And I know, you know, the cliche is we know so little about our oceans as much as we do outer space. And I do want to touch on that whole other angle to all of this as well, Paula, in terms of the mysteries of the ocean. But it does blow my mind to also think, yeah, if there was some sort of encounter with anomalous phenomena, under the surface of the ocean, um, astronomically,

statistically huge in terms of, was it happenstance or was it on purpose? Um, we truly do have to wonder. So man, yeah, that blew my mind when you said it too, to be completely honest.

Yeah. I mean, NASA, NASA's, you know, mission is to explore, right, um, and discover and research.

And that may be the furthest reaches of the universe, or that may be our home. planet where that unknown is. So they are squarely in their mission. You know, I think a lot of people don't know that NASA studies the Earth and I hope, you know, more due after this podcast, but I certainly have always gotten the question when I travel. You know, people say, you're an oceanographer and you used to work for NASA and they look at you like you have six heads, right? And you go, yes, let me explain why, you know, and what we do and how we work with our other sister agencies in the U.S. and across the earth in other space agencies. And, you know, if we can take

the time to educate people as to the full breadth of NASA's mission and that link to the unknown and new technology and science and honestly the rigor that is required to do the research that they do, I mean, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and what that data is to substantiate, forgive me now I can't talk. Those extraordinary claims, I think, is important. And that was part of what we looked at. Well, kind of to wrap up the NASA UAP panel portion of this, Paula, there are a lot of people, especially in the UFO community, quote unquote, who kind of have always looked at NASA as an enemy, that they're covering up these, you know, these photos and these videos of spaceships from other planets coming into our,

you know, our solar system and into our atmosphere and, you know, images have been scrubbed and they're keeping the data from us. And in the panel, you guys did touch on this, actually. What is your take on kind of that whole conspiratorial aspect to NASA's involvement with the UAP and maybe sort of demystify that for us, if you don't mind? Yeah, I can try. So I appreciate that question. the, you know, I have never, in my 18 years at the agency, I have never felt like we weren't being transparent about something. As I said, you know, the scientific rigor that NASA puts their findings through, through the peer review and otherwise are absolutely enormous. So if they're going to go public with something and they go, like all of the data that are collected by all of the instruments that taxpayers pay for is public. There's no embargo period. Everything is freely available. You know,

you and I could log in tomorrow to one of the NASA databases and download the exact same thing and use it for completely different purposes. And that's one really key part is the free and open data access. The other is, you know, the public affairs component of NASA is very, very good about telling stories. Discoveries, ideas, high-risk, high-yield science, technology development. Like, I have never encountered somebody saying, we're not going to show this or we need to change this, not in my career. And I think at the panel meeting in May, Scott Kelly, told a story.

Somebody asked that question, and I think he answered it and said, never in his experience as an astronaut, you know, had he ever been directed or, experienced someone who said, you know, no, you can't show this photo, you can't show that, you know. So I understand, you know, that some people may have a reason for having those conspiracy theories or those ideas that that's happened. But I cannot say that that's ever happened in my time. That's fair enough. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm going to say, I take your word on that. Well, okay, moving away from the UFO panel, again, like, Like we mentioned earlier, the oceans are so mysterious. And I was actually having this conversation with a fellow UFO researcher recently about the oceans and how undiscovered they are. So I guess my question would be in all of your time, you know, as an oceanographer, as working with Earth science. Have you ever come across any sort of unexplained phenomena when, you know, within our oceans or what are some of the more mysterious things you've encountered in our oceans?

Yeah. So the ocean is a big place, right? And one of the most fascinating things to me is when someone says, oh, no one has seen ever gotten video footage of a giant squid, right, live. And then maybe 10 years ago or so, all of a sudden, a group of researchers were diving in a submersible and they appeared a giant squid, which were like these mythical things that wound up in stories and people were pretty sure they existed, but nobody had ever encountered one, right? And that kind of ties back to the earlier story about like, is it chance?

You know, is it random? How, what were the conditions that brought them together? But the bottom line is that there are always new discoveries to be made when we explore our oceans. It is, you know, largely unexplored compared to, you know, mapping the surface of certain heavenly bodies like the moon. Certainly, I don't think we've gone drilled deep into the moon to explore what's on its interior, but the oceans itself, like exploring down deep is such a challenge. And I think the life, I think what's happening down there physically, I think the sea floor, there's a lot of discoveries waiting to be made. made. Plus, I think that from the moment we're born, we're touching things to see if they're hot or cold or smooth or rough. And we're just, it's in our nature to just reach out and want to

see what's out there in the world. And I don't think the ocean is any different. So people are really fascinated by this. I'd say the other piece of that is, you know, and I don't know whether this is okay to bring it up, but the world is changing. The climate is changing of our Earth system. Everybody around me knows it. They see it. They knock on my door and say, you know, Paula, I don't see nearly as many honeybees or monarch butterflies or things I used to see in the neighborhood. You know, in the month of June, what do you think is happening? It's awfully warm too. It's never this warm in the state of Rhode Island, you know, and I'm like, well, you know, one data point doesn't point to anything in one particular day, but when you look at something over time,

you can see how our Earth is changing. And one of the key parts about the deep ocean is that it's very difficult to get to. So there could be lots of changes happening down there. You know, what's normal, what's regular, what's something anomalous. We don't know enough about our home planet yet to really describe that or understand it.

So there are a lot of discoveries waiting to be made here as well as abroad. Absolutely. You know, the Earth seems to be screaming. to us that things need to change. So I'm definitely with you on that. And I think you're right, kind of zooming out and looking at the bigger picture. You know, I live, breathe, sleep, UFOs. That's my entire life. But it's conversations like this speaking to you where I'm like, okay, we can talk UFOs, but we can also link that to the bigger picture, the bigger questions.

What is this earth? What is this planet? that we've, you know, evolved on. And where did we come from? Where are we going? There's so many big, profound questions that I think can come from something like this. You know, the question of, are we alone or not? When we're still asking that same question on our own planet, are we even alone? Have we discovered all there is to discover on our own planet? And I think, I would hope and assume you agree that, no, we have not. Yeah, no, we haven't. And that's the really fun part, like, um, thinking about all the, like, if everybody out there just sat down and listed all the places they wanted to travel to, right? You know, what would be on your top three list where

you're like, I've always wanted to go here. You have to ask yourself why. And when I talk to people, it's almost always like, oh, I would love to see, you know, K2. I would, I would love to see Mount Everest. I would love to see the great wall of China. You know, something is always like this unknown discovery, this unknown world that people just want to experience. And there's a lot of that under the ocean. You know, you go to a conference with 3,000 oceanographers and they're talking about these unbelievable nuances that they've discovered in the ocean's chemistry, the ocean's biology, the ocean's ecology. We have things like marine heat waves occurring. What does that do, you know, to what's happening to all the living parts of the ocean? Sea level rise, um, whole,

governments are dedicating their lives to can we build sustainable structures that are natural? So the intersection of the natural and the built environment is not so stark and impactful in the sense of damage we're doing to the environment. That's even more or greater than we would have otherwise. And so it's an interesting question, depending on whether you're an engineer, a scientist, the health professional, you know, whether you're just a person who's like, I love living on the water. What can I do to protect my property? You know, how can I garden more efficiently so I don't have an impact on our planet? And these are the large numbers of questions I get all the time as people are like, what can I do? You know, this is what I'm interested in. Can you

connect me with opportunity? You know, and finding someone's passion and matching them to something that they can do to sort of explore new dimensions of their passion, that's very fun. Absolutely. I think kind of harnessing people's curiosity and interests can really benefit everyone. And I think that's pretty cool. Well, I guess that's to kind of wrap things up, what can people do, both in terms of when it comes to this UFO panel, you know, you stress that this is for the public. NASA is being transparent. This is an independent study. This isn't going to be put in a file cabinet back in the Department of Defense's office.

I hope not. Yeah, right? In the covenant at the end of readers of the last arc. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So what role does the public play, I guess, in terms of that? So to me, like, citizen science is a huge thing, especially when it comes to UAPs, right?

You know, there was that tagline, if you see something, say something. And somehow the government has to normalize that, right? Show people that there's a pathway for reporting where there isn't a stigma. Also, as I said, I think social media is one place where people can witness something collectively that they don't understand and start talking about it. So scientists out there, budding scientists, the public, students, you know, K through 12, all of them, you know, have a role to play. If you can take a photo of something, if you can describe it, if you can think about it, if you can examine it with your telescope, if you're, you know, a budding astronomer. You know, I think that the one recommendation that the panel made was, you know, that there is a pathway somehow for reporting things like this and people can start to normalize.

that that will absolutely lead to some new discoveries, which is the other really cool part, right? How many times do we hear about amateur astronomers discovering new stars or new bodies that are orbiting out there in space? And I think that, you know, keep exploring is how I feel about it. And I think the public should feel like they have a real goal in that. Absolutely. You know, I was so invigorated when I think it was yesterday, we discovered that perseverance, on Mars was going to be bringing back possible organic materials. So I guess kind of putting you on the spot here, Paula, what did you make of that news?

I know there's still a lot to be discussed and deciphered with all of that. But yeah, any thoughts on this kind of breaking news on Mars perseverance? I mean, for me, I just think that's awesome. That is awesome. Like, I hope, you know, I'm sure all the scientists have thought about, okay, if we really do bring back organic material, you know, How do we make sure that we don't possibly contaminate, you know, the Earth with organics that weren't meant to be here? And certainly transporting material back.

I mean, this is like, let's think about that. That is mind-blowing that we are able to send technology to another planet, sample it, and bring it home. Like, talk about sliding pieces of the puzzle of what's out there, where we come from, what might be on. another body could we one day travel there um you know that is like talk about head exploding that is the absolute frontier of exploring the unknown you know and that is the thing that that is how we generate new scientists and engineers and our students they go that i want to do that like i remember the first time i taught the astronaut training class i was chatting with some of the junior astronauts and they that the core members and they were like i was

I want a cross-country ski from one pole of Mars to the other. And I was like, awesome. You know, I was like, you're nuts. I love it. That's awesome. So that kind of opportunity to sample organics, bring them home, study them, understand Mars, understand our solar system, our planets, potentially even our Earth. That's amazing.

Absolutely. Frontier. That's kind of where I want to leave things. Paula. What are you most excited about with the future of oceanography, of our continued exploration of both space and our oceans? What comes next, both for you personally, as a oceanographer, as a professor? What comes next for you? And what do you think comes next for the entire scientific community in terms of our oceans? So I'm a satellite girl, right? So for me, NASA is about to launch a mission called PACE, the plankton, aerosol, cloud, and ocean ecosystem mission that'll launch in January of next year.

That's a 20-year labor of love by me and many, many other people, hundreds of other people, and they are phenomenal. And that will be the first time we will have what's called hyperspectral views of not only our oceans, but our atmosphere simultaneously. and we'll be able to look at down to almost a cellular level, like what's going on in the ocean ecologically. And that's going to be amazing for understanding how our ocean ecosystem actually functions, and that will lead to supporting information for things like major fisheries and seafood security, as well as understanding things like algal blooms and the role that they play in the ocean. So I'm excited about that. If I wanted to be really pedantic, I would say the next thing would be a blue

LIDAR, actually a laser maximized for ocean observations that penetrates the ocean down to three optical depths. That's a really fancy way of saying a whole lot deeper than we can get with traditional ocean observing satellites from space. Very exciting to see what's going, what's happening really deep in the ocean from space and maybe have that view every couple of days, which would be incredible. The other thing, is now you've got me on a roll, right? I think Earth data are exploding. We are gathering so much information about what's happening in our Earth system and to actually have the modeling and analysis capability in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and just overall, you know,

high performance computing. I think it's going to be really important. So there are all sorts of frontiers out there that, you know, we should be pushing that will give us information about bringing all those aspects of our Earth system and our planets for that matter together and looking at things holistically and again you know the Earth is an analog for life elsewhere oceans potentially elsewhere and so there is relevance on a larger scale um and the last thing i'll just say you know with that with regard to that is you know think about your body my guess is a lot of people probably wear apple watches aura rings you know all sorts of things um that they look at a thousand times a day and the number one thing people use their smartphones for if i believe a quick

internet search is to track their fitness and their health and if you could gather all that information about yourself every day simultaneously and make sure that you were doing everything to make sure you were healthy you do it and we need to look at the earth the same way holistically like that um so in that sense for me sustainability is really important um you know i'm sort of an infrastructure person to i'm looking across my campus going how do i convert all of my my um vehicles to more sustainable fuels do i make them all electric how do i convert my buildings to carbon neutral or carbon negative um you mentioned you live in edinburgh i was just in glasgow and i listened to a presentation about how they're making glasco and the surrounding area carbon negative and i was riveted i'm like

tell me and they're doing it by harnessing the river that goes through the center of the city, you know, without like altering anything, changing anything, you know, making sure the natural environment is allowed to be the natural environment and just harnessing the natural power. I'm obsessed with that, right? Like, how can I do that at home? How can I do that where I work? So hopefully that's not too long an answer, Ryan, but there are a lot of really exciting frontiers out there. I love it. Yeah, I'm very proud of Scotland. You know, there are also doing this reforestation project as well. So they're doing things right. And I love this idea of like we focus so much on ourselves, our own health, our own sustainability when we're forgetting

about the ground below us, the water below us, the skies above us. So I love that. I love the passion you have for all these projects. And that's very exciting that there's a space mission that you're going to eventually be involved with. I can't wait to see what comes with that as well. Well, Paula, is there anywhere where are budding oceanographers or NASA enthusiasts can possibly reach you if they've seen anything or want to learn more about the work you do? Sure. I mean, you know, I am absolutely fine making, you know, my email, you know, available. It's no problem. Anybody can reach out. lots of people have already.

I can't respond to everybody simultaneously. I try very hard to do it. And I think, you know, the one thing for the citizen scientists out there, especially related to UAP, I think as this report is received by the public and NASA and implemented, you know, I know the panelists from the FAA are working a lot with their management. If you're a commercial pilot or, you know, a private pilot and you see something, they're trying to make it more mainstream how one would go about reporting. So I would just say, hang in there.

You know, I think you'll have your time and your due. If I can connect anybody with anything, I am certainly willing to do that. I am not a UFO expert myself, but certainly, you know, if there are resources to connect people to and I can do that, I'm happy to try. Awesome. Thank you. Yes. And for any of our viewers, listeners. If you want to reach out to Paula, I can even be a middleman for that if you want to give me your email address, Paula, after this. But this was so fascinating. I knew going into this, like I came for the UFOs, but I stayed for the oceanography because I feel like I just had like a crash course so much. So it was very refreshing to not talk about, you know,

Roswell UFO crashes or, you know, these historical cases of UFOs, those are fine. We're looking at what's going on now. We're looking at what's going to happen in the future with both the UFOs and our world around us. So, no, I have to thank you for this refreshing conversation on the show. It was truly something special. So thank you. Thank you for joining me on Somewhere in the Skies. It's my pleasure.

And thank you for the opportunity. It was fun. Greetings everyone, Ryan Sprague here, host of Summer in the Skies. For over seven years and more than 400 episodes, the Summer in the Sky's podcast has always been free to listen to, but it's not free to create. So we offer several ways to help support our efforts and get rewards in return. If you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can click the subscribe button at the top of your Summer in the Sky's feed to become a premium Apple subscriber. Or you can join our Patreon campaign with several tiers available. Both of these options give you the same benefits and rewards,

add free episodes, early access to the main show, and bonus episodes and content. Help keep the lights on at the Summer in the Skies HQ and help us continue to grow by becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Or by clicking the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support and keep looking up. Also here in Washington is Stanton Friedman, a physicist who's been involved in nuclear space and research for such companies as General Electric,

Westinghouse, and General Motors. Mr. Friedman, there are books, there are magazine articles, there are television interview programs which have very little time such as this one. Give it your best shot. If you are seeking to convince the skeptical, what do you point to? I'm seeking to convince the healthy agnostics. The skeptics don't want to. want to listen to the data in my findings. I point to the 2,400 plus landing trace cases, physical changes in the environment collected from 65 countries. I point to the 3,200 cases in Project Blue Book Special Report 14, 20% of which couldn't be explained and at all the characteristics we attribute to flying saucers. I point to the 3,500 pilot sightings collected by a NASA scientist on the

West Coast. I point to Bud Hopkins 140 abductees with a waiting list of 200 and an enormous amount of data in the form of documents, some of them obtained from the government directly, some not so directly, clearly indicating that our planet is being visited, that some UFOs are alien spacecraft, and that we are indeed dealing with a cosmic watergate. This is somewhere in the skies with Ryan Sprague. He worked for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for companies such as General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse, and MacDonald Douglas. He was a member of the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

He held top secret clearance and worked on some of the most influential, classified projects in the United States. But in 1970, he left the professional world of nuclear physics to pursue something completely different. UFOs, convinced of a legitimate phenomenon and cover-up by the... United States government, he spent the next 40 plus years scientifically investigating the UFO phenomenon. In that time, he lectured at over 600 colleges, all 50 U.S. states, 10 Canadian provinces, in over 20 different countries. Respected by scientists, academics, historians, military branches, and researchers alike, he has been deemed the dean of uphology. And in March of this year at the age of 84, he announced his retirement from the UFO research field and public speaking

arena. Today, my guest is Stanton T. Friedman. To help celebrate my 50th episode, I sit down with Staten to talk all about how he got involved with the UFOs to begin with, his most memorable experiences throughout the years, and just exactly where we are heading in the unknown future. So, without further ado, here is a retrospective conversation with the one and only Stanton T. Friedman. Stan, thank you so much for joining me today on Somewhere in the Skies. Well, I enjoy doing interviews, and I certainly enjoy talking about what's going on in the skies. Yes, I would say so, and we will definitely get into that. I mean, Stan, so the first book I ever read on the UFO topic was Crash at Corona, written by both you and Don Berliner. And I was terrified.

Terrified as a 13-year-old to think that, you know, UFOs are flying around in space, but now they're also crashing on our planet. And that fear turned to obsession. I've been researching ever since. So I would love to hear, you know, for our audience that may not know this story, your origin story, as it were, of how you got involved in all this to begin with. Well, it was one of a number of topics I was interested in. I was a, as a kid, I read science fiction. You know, when I was 10 years old and the pulp magazines, I'm old enough to remember the popes and all that sort of stuff.

And then I got into more serious science, and I got a couple of degrees. And I had a habit of buying books and new stuff. And I needed one more book. It's strictly unintentional. Life just moves on. I did one more book so I wouldn't have to pay shipping on an order for marbles. borough books in the york uh... there's a report on unidentified flying objects

this is nineteen fifty eight mind you by your force captain edward j rupert now i was working on air force sponsored program the aircraft nuclear pollution department at general electric so i had a great deal of respect to the air force then anyway and uh... uh... i got the book figured it was two two ninety nine or something marked down to dollar and because it saved me the shipping costs on that big order of books it really wasn't costing me anything so what the heck we could afford it if it's not so okay so I read the book and it intrigued me it didn't convince me but I read 10 more books and

then in the early 1960s at the University of California Berkeley Library I lived at that time I had moved from General Electric to Arrowjet General nucleonics, which is east of San Francisco. So I'd go over to Berkeley and I read 10 more books. And then I made the, had the great epiphany, if you will. I found a copy of something, Project Blue Books, Special Report Number 14. And a surprising thing was it hadn't been mentioned in any of the 10 books that I had read. So that seems strange.

Where the heck did this come from? You know, and it was an official government report. And the work I found out later was done by Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. And as it turns out, I have a dealings with Battel. I did a study, how do you like this title for a study? Analysis and evaluation of fast and intermediate reactors for space vehicle application. One important word was left out, Soviet. I was looking at the literature that I could get on Russian publications in the scientific areas

that would be concerned with developing nuclear power systems for space. And I would go back to the people who had the best collection of Russian literature were Patel Memorial Institute. And turns out they were the people who did Blue Book Special Report 14, even though their name isn't on it. Interesting. Their connection was classified as it happened. So I was intrigued with Patel. I would go back there once a month or so to talk to the people of Patel,

and then also Air Force people that write Patterson Air Force face. So I would go back there. I was very impressed with Patel, but I also would be looking at their UFO stuff while I was going to it. Right. And that got me really tooling along because Blue Milk Special Report 14, the biggest study ever done for the United States Air Force, mind you. They looked at 3,201 sightings.

The report has hundreds of charts. tables, grabs, maps. I was in data heaven. I'm a data fiend. And what I found was I also discovered, how should I put this, official lying, that's a nice way to say that. The press release, which the guy who put this privately published version together included, dated 1955, in the press release, it says, on the basis of this study, we believe that no object, such as I was properly described as flying saucers, have overflown the United States. This is the Secretary of the Air Force, my name was Coral. We believe no objects such as properly described as flying sources

have overflown the United States. Even the unknown 3% could have been identified as conventional phenomena or illusions if more complete observational data had been available. Well, if you only saw the press release, that sounds pretty damn good. But I had to report, and I'm a data hound, where'd they get this unknown 3%,

unknown 3%. The unknowns were 21 and a half percent. And 21 and a half is not three rounded off. They also further saying that they were full of baloney was they did a cross-comparison between the unknowns, the only ones were interested in, and the knowns. Remember, the question isn't our all UFOs alien spacecraft? The question is, are any? Are all isotopes fish? Well, of course not.

But fortunately for us nuclear guys, there's something. that they also did a quality evaluation, the better the quality of the sightings, the more likely to be unexplainable. And a cross-comparison between unknowns and knowns showed that the probability that the unknowns were just misnones was less than one percent. The groups did not have the same characteristics at all. So I was shocked by this. And the duration of observation was longer for the unknowns than the knowns and all kinds of other data that says these darn things are real. And so I don't like being lied to. I worked under security at that time, and I, you know, I sometimes have to, how should I say,

tiptoe around the information, but flat out lying, that's another story. So I got determined. I want to find out why we're being lied to. I don't like being lied to. And as a scientist, especially. And so I started digging into the literature and digging. and digging out more information. And the quest hasn't ended to tell you the truth.

But I joined, the first thing I did it was join APRO and NYCAP, the two big organizations, which are both defunct now. I joined them to get their monthly newsletters or bi-monthly, whatever it was like that, and try to keep up. There was an active group in Pittsburgh. When I finally moved there, I was one of these, you know, life doesn't take the path you expect it to.

My dad worked for the same company. for 37 years. So, okay, my first job out of college, General Electric. Well, they're a big company. I could work for them. I looked that up. I could retire because I started going

when I was 57. That's great. And they got several nuclear divisions. No question at all. It's a lifetime career. Wow. Three years later, the program was going down the tubes. I saw the handwriting on the wall

and got out, joined another company, for three years and then realized they were going down and got another job, three years. Totally unexpected, you understand. Because I was having to move my family. It's not just walking down the street. Okay, well, drive two miles this way instead of five miles that way. Yeah. Moving across the country, get to see the country, I guess.

And so I spent 14 years in industry. And on the UFO scene, you know, I was reading the books and stuff. And we set up a group in Pittsburgh, a NYCAP subcommittee is what they had at that time. Then we set up on our own because we didn't like them telling us what we should be doing from the NYCAP was headquartered in Washington. That was Major Kehoe. And we had a bunch of us of professional people, mostly from Westinghouse where I were. So we set up the group. And I didn't, I called Frank Edwards.

I had gotten to know him when he was in the, he wrote a book, Flying Saucer's serious business. He was a journalist from Indianapolis. And on one of my stints, I worked for General Motors, Allison Division, which is working on military compact reactors.

Nobody thinks of GM and nuclear reactors, what they were. And got to know, Frank. And when I moved to Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, I told Frank, I want to go public. You know everybody. Give me some names.

of the media people because our group was good things were happening I felt very good about the group so he gave me a bunch of names he was a wide-ranging journalist let's put it that way yeah and one of them was the producer of a radio show with a great name contact perfect for KDKA Pittsburgh which is the big station in town the big media outline so I called this producer and thought that I heck, I'm a Westinghouse nuclear physicist. Pittsburgh's kind of a Westinghouse town, or it was. Westinghouse's kind of gone down the tubes, but at some extent.

And so, I thought you might want me to have me as a guest on your show. Contact. Don't call us. We'll call you. Okay. What the heck? Well, less than a month later, at 6.30 in the evening, I get a call from this producer. We had a cancellation.

Any chance you could do the show tonight at 7 o'clock? talk. Well, I live close enough the station. I have to go down there. Now, they didn't do it by radio, by telephone at that time. So I said, yeah, yeah, I can do that. So I went down to the show. Admittedly, I wasn't as sharp at dealing with nasty, noisy, negativists as I am now. I've heard all the entire argument. Right. You acquire that as time goes on, right? Yes. But anyway, I did the show. And as it happens, a woman at Westinghouse, where I worked at the astronaut Kooland, called me afterwards, she happened to hear the show, and said, Stan, we're reading Frank's book and my, Frank Edwards' book, and my book review club,

any chance you could give us a lecture in my living room? Sure, why not? It wasn't too far away. I lived downtown and so forth. So my first talk was in her living room, a few dozen people. And the word got out and I did more And then I did the show again And one day

Only two days and three years did I drive to work from downtown with Joanne Who was the supervisor at Westinghouse astronaut lab And we were talking I was saying Gee I'd sure like to speak at Carnegie Mellon University The big university in town And well did you talk to the dean No I talked to so-and-so and

he wasn't interested. She said, Stan, the dean's my husband. Give him a call. He's heard you on a radio. Oh, okay. And so I called Gene, his name was. And we set a date right away four weeks later. And the last question was, how much do you want? Well, it was during the day, so I'd have to take some time off work. So I figured I ought to at least get recovered of my loss of pay. And so I, how about $100, thinking he'd knocked me down to $50, you understand? And sure. And then he told me, because I knew his wife, what he was paying the other speakers in the series, 1,500, 17. Wow. So, but the talk went extremely well.

We had a big crowd, no nasty questions for anything. And he wrote a nice letter to the agent from whom we had booked all these other people. And they booked me at a breakthrough talk, the engineering society. Society of Detroit. $300 and expenses. I'm in the big time here. Big top, yep. Well, what really shocked me,

and I must admit I was surprised, they were sold out two weeks in advance for 1,0008 people for dinner and a tar, and there were no negative questions. Now, that couldn't help but impress me. In the Engineering Society of Detroit, we're not talking about little ladies in tennis shoes, you know, or cooks with pin hats on.

Yeah. And again, there were no negative questions. And then another talk that really impressed me was the local section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics got together with the, I guess it was the Nuclear Society. There were two groups sponsored a joint lecture. We had over 400 people there. And again, some management at Westinghouse was there because it was all publicized. and no negative questions and stuff. That had an impact because I got a call from somebody at Los Alamos.

Stan, I understand you're giving lectures about flying saucers. Typically as flying saucers aren't real. I said, oh, yeah. He said, well, how about speaking to the local section of the American Nuclear Society? I said, oh, I'd be delighted to. No, I mean, on an expense account, Stan. Well, I don't make those decisions. I'll ask management.

Now, I'm a member of the American Nuclear Society. Westinghouse was a corporate member. And of course, Los Alamos was as well. And they said, yes. So they paid for me to go on an expense account, from Pittsburgh to Los Alamos, to give a lecture. And that was pretty neat because they had over 400 people, one of the best crowds they ever had.

And how can I not be respectful of that audience? I had been to Los Alamos on business, nuclear rockets and things like that. These are professional people, you know. Yeah. So when I got a good response from, these kinds of people. That affects me.

I'm doing something useful in sections of the American Institute of Aronics and Astronautics and Engineering Society. Right. You know. So it was in these circles, and I stress that because people tend to think, well, the only people interested were nutty groups, you know, of the tin ad crowd. Well, it wasn't like that at all. Absolutely. And I mean, I mean, since this state, you've done like, got, 600 college campuses, every U.S. state, 10 Canadian people. provinces. Like, I've heard you, you know, 19 other countries. 19 other countries. That's incredible.

These aren't just, I think, like people think, these small little groups of like 10, 12 people who are all hardcore believers. These are people that have genuine questions and they want answers. And, you know, the fact that, you know, the people you're speaking to, you know, at Los Alamos and all of these prestigious places, how, how was their response? You said, you know, it, It was great. Yeah. Well, I judged by the question and answer period. Right, right.

Am I coming at me? And I remember at one lecture, first guy up in the question and answer period, I've never heard so much nonsense in one night in my life. That's a great way to start, you know. And how do I pick him? And I said, can you please be more specific, sir? I'm glad I said that. I don't know. If you would have asked me, I don't know what.

what I would have said I would say, but that's what I did say. Well, you said that Betty and Barney Hill were taken to Zeta Reticuli and back. I said, no, sir. What I said was they were taken on board a craft. They didn't go anywhere. And then there were a couple more equally uninformed questions. And then finally, after the third one, somebody in the, which I had answered, and somebody in the audience says,

How about taking some sensible questions? shout out. This guy got up and left, and I said, I'll take your question, but who was that? Obviously, I irked him. But it turns out he was a professor of physics. Okay. He hadn't heard what I said at all. So it alerted me to the fact that you can come on pretty strong, and you won't get a hard, respectable hard time from people.

You know what I mean? Yeah. There's nothing wrong with asking questions. And one guy in a question and answer period, I had given some data on a gallop polls showing that the greater the education are more likely to believe in flying sanctions, which comes to a surprise a lot of people. He said, how about polling this audience? I said, well, this is University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. About 600 people.

They were sitting in the aisles. I said, well, normally, I'm the one who sticks his neck out. I'm not asking the audience. So he said, I don't think anybody's mine and people clapped. They'd hurt my lecture ready, you understand. And so I said, okay, I'll ask two questions. How many believe no UFOs are intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft? And how many believe some UFOs are intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft?

I asked those two questions. I told them what I was going to ask. More than 90% said they come out somewhere. It's reassuring to me, in other words, having gone through all this with all these places and stuff, that even though people are always saying to me, oh, you must get a hard time. I don't. I really don't.

I'm not a masochist. I don't do this, you know, the strain, the nasty, noisy, negative, as I do this to present information. And, you know, I'm a little sneaky. Usually about five large-scale scientific studies. Describe what's in them, show us why they can go with and so forth. And then I casually asked how many people here have read this.

So typically, you know, I might get five. if you're lucky yeah yeah and so i know that most people haven't looked at the evidence and i've been told by people that they were completely unaware of all this data that i present because i'm a data an evidence man uh i talk about not only blue book special report 14 i have copies for sale because it wouldn't be fair for me to say oh this wonderful study well i don't know if you can get a copy But that's not crooked because then maybe you're lying. You know, maybe it doesn't say what you say it says, et cetera. So here, here are copies.

I'll autograph. Yeah, yeah. Backing it up, I think that's important. And, you know, next week we have Cheryl Koste on the show who wrote a book about data. And she told a wonderful story about showing you the book. And you told her, finally, someone's doing data. I thought that was hilarious. Well, it's true.

That's a rare book because it's got. all kinds of information about who see things and stuff. And it's a big fat report. That's not 20 pages kind of thing. Right. And so I hope she sells a ton of them because darn it, conclusions about controversial subject should be based on evidence, not feelings, not theoretical, not research by proclamation,

which is what I run across a lot from the noisy negative, And so I like to have the data in my pocket, so to speak. Why is it that most people don't believe in UFOs? Well, you know, what's a reasonable number? Yeah. 20%? That's a lot. Especially when the airport says 3%.

Right. I've found this great interest all over the world, and people are interested. They ask reasonable questions, and sometimes I have to say, I don't know. you know, I don't tell them. Why does the government do that? I say, well, in the first place, let's make clear, I do not speak for the government. I speak for me. So I can only hypothesize. On the other hand, I do have some advantages as a speaker and writer about this subject. One, I worked under security for 14 years. I know how the system works. I had clearance for 14 years. Acute clearance given me access to nuclear data and stuff like that. Two, I worked on advanced propulsion systems. One of the biggest objections from, quote, scientist, unquote,

you can't get here from Stan. Have you forgotten? You know, things can't go fast in the speed of light, and they'd have to come from hundreds of light years away, which is nonsense. That's one of the things that's changed, our perception of where we fit in the scheme of thing. You know, when Frank Drake in about 1960 first talked about

searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. He met with radio telescopes, of course, but listening for signals, because the astronomical community can't imagine how anybody could go the astronomical distances. But he thought there might be 6,000 places in the galaxy that could be sending signals. Wow, 6,000!

Well, because there aren't many planets, you know. There are many people saying, hey, we got the only solar system, man. That has changed with the Kepler satellite, This incredible device, which goes out and back into this for several years, looking for planets. Not easy to find, even with a fancy piece of equipment, but if you're above the atmosphere, you can actually spot the planet going across the face of its star. That's pretty sensitive, is what I'm a great admirer of the technology.

And so when you do that, holy cow, there are planets all over. the place. Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence. That holds for flying saucers as well. The fact that you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not true. And so the latest numbers suggest that there's 1.6 planets per star on the average. Now, what does that mean to give you a neighborhood surveys, so to speak? There are about 10,000 stars within 100 light years of here. It's not that I counted them. The astronomers count them. That means there are about 16,000 planets within 100 light years. So we go from Frank's 6,000 planets to at least 6 billion in the galaxy. So there's several things that our understanding has causes to change

in our review about. One is a number of planets. One is, and the number of stars, too, for that matter. Remember at one time we thought there was only one galaxy. Right. Sorry, billions of them, too, folks. But beyond that, we also, in 1920s, we thought the sun, our star, was a mass of burning gas. That's how the energy is produced. By 1938, we suddenly realized, ain't no way to get enough energy by, we know the mass of the sun, and we know the energy output and stuff. Somebody's very smart physicist figured out that it was nuclear fusion, which nobody knew anything about before. that really hydrogen and helium and heavy hydrogen and stuff like that and they were talking about

an incredible increase in the amount of energy per pound of stuff and then you can see that if you take a big bomb in world war two it release the energy of about 10 tons of dynamite and make a big hole in the ground too it's called a blackbuster well the first atomic bomb efficient of device in 1945 released the energy of 15,000 tons of dynamite, not 10, but 15,000. The first fusion device, fusion is what powers all the stars. The first fusion device released the energy of 10 million tons of dynamite. That was in each bomb in 1952. And a Russian sent one off in 61, I guess it was.

Tsarbomba! Fifty million tons of dynamite once in 18 million tons of dynamite once, Lincoln whip. I mean, and the important, the reason I go through this is that suddenly you've got not only a way of mass destruction, but propulsion to the stars. Exactly, yeah. And I worked on a study of fusion propulsion for deep space travel in 1962 at Eurogeneral nucleonics. My boss was John Luce. Dr. Luce was a brilliant guy. He had worked. He was head. did the fusion work at Oak Ridge and we hired him away and he had 40 patents this was a clever man gentleman too and we did a study and concluded that well if you want to put out the

dough you can go I put it simply it won't be cheap and when I was working when I say it won't be cheap many people have no idea because they don't work in that crazy world of advanced technology development. I was working on nuclear airplanes in 1958 at GE. Our budget that year was $100 million. We employed 3,400 people of whom 1100 were engineers and scientists. We're not talking about six professors and 12 grad students here. They're big programs. The stealth aircraft left about $10 billion over 10 years in secret for locking. So that's an important part of this, in other words. If you guys can't, it's not a question of few guys getting together and deciding how, let's see what we can do about this. It takes a major effort.

And the taxpayer, you know, we've had a lot of these big programs. Most of them have gone nowhere. Some of them have gone everywhere kind of thing. I mean, I had a project, for example, with your weapons, the stuff, aircraft. The first spy satellite, the Corona spy satellite. And I have no idea whether that name. came because the Roswell incident actually happened just outside Corona. Right.

But the Corona spy satellite, the first 12 launches, they knew that the U-2 was going to get shot down as it did, because the Russians were getting smarter. They started in the 50s. The first 12 launches were failures. Those are expensive. In secret, nobody knew about it, Cesar. Nobody can say, what are you spending our money for, blowing things up? The 13th one was a success and got more data than all the U-2 flights that had preceded about what was going on in Russia. I mean, a satellite, you know, is in constant operation and spend a lot of time going right over the Soviet Union. The whole program was done in secret. And I'd love the way they got their data back. They deorbited the film canisters, which were caught in the air by Air Force flying. and he released them over the Pacific.

And, of course, he knew where things were going, and the orbits are predictable and so forth. Kind of a different way of getting data back, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Well, you've got a problem. You've got a solution. You don't have a better solution. We need the information. Let's do it.

And when it comes to national defense, cost is not the paramount concern. You know what I mean? Yeah. How much is it going to cost? Oh, okay. If that's what it costs, that's what we'll spend. because it was absolutely essential that we know whether the Russians were gearing up to attack us. There were many people who said they were.

And so the fact that we could get actual data, evidence that showed that they weren't building up all over was very important and probably kept us from having a war because there were many people who would say, well, if they are, we better get them before they get us. Exactly. Can you imagine what that would have resulted? you know, I'll drop my bomb, then you drop yours. And, you know, we have a long history of underestimating the Russians. In 1948, General Leslie Groves, who headed our nuclear weapons, the Manhattan Project, was asked,

how long do you think it'll take before the Russians build the nuclear weapon? Well, he went on for some time that the Russians, you know, they had lost 20 million people during the war. They didn't have the industrial capacity we had. They've been bombed all that. It'd probably take them at least eight years. Well, said this in August of 48. About 13 months later, the Russians set off their first bond. We had vastly underestimated them.

We did not have, in two ways, we didn't have a radar net. What do we got to worry about? And then we thought they didn't have any big airplanes. They certainly didn't show any during the war. And then all of a sudden that one of these big May Day, celebrations I'll call it. Here come all these big airplanes. Son of a gun.

They looked just like B-29s. What they had done, we had left the B-29 over there, was bringing Lenleese stuff, and there was something wrong of it, and they couldn't send it back. And they copied it, Chinese copies, if you know. And they built a whole bunch of these stupid, you know, Eastern Europeans.

They don't have Harvard and Yale, Well, after all, well, that was very much the attitude, and it cost us, because that gave them a chance to catch up much more than they would otherwise if we'd recognize that they had a capability. Yeah, they'd gone through a war, but that didn't mean they were stupid. There'd been Nobel Prizes given to Russian scientists, believe it or not, guys. But I'm sensitive about this because my own four of my grandparents were Russians. That's understandable, absolutely. What I'm saying is things move in mysterious ways. in this world

of our why things get done or don't get done who does them and so forth can be totally wrong

and you know I've talked my uncle had come over the United States from Germany in 1938 and he had tried

to get more of the family to come with him because he saw the handwriting on the wall and Hitler was talking

about what he was going to do and Jews were not in good shape over there but he couldn't get relatives

this is Germany the land of Gerta and Bariah and B Beethoven, you know, they wouldn't do stuff like that. That's crazy. So they wouldn't leave when they got slaughtered in the concentration camps. Because it's hard to believe that other earthlings will behave that badly toward other earthlings, you know? Yeah, until it happens.

Yeah, after it happens. Oh, yeah. I guess we should have realized that. What I'm saying is we make judgments often based on insufficient information. It's one of the things that characterizes the attitude of the astronomical. community about UFOs. They don't think you can get here from there. They don't think people can keep secrets. They don't think there's any evidence. And so therefore, they're not going to look for any evidence. And it's a constant problem. When I look at astronomical text, where's the reference to a large-scale scientific studies about UFOs? Although dismiss UFOs are right. And my high, my college classmate, Carl Sagan, for three years, and two different

books said there are interesting sightings that aren't reliable. There are a reliable set of things that aren't interesting, but there are no interesting and reliable sightings. No evidence was provided to substantiate this totally false statement. It's exactly the opposite. The Blue Book Special Report 14 showed the better the quality of the siting, the reliability, the more likely to be unexplainable. But don't bother me with the facts. My mind's made up.

And that same applies, so you can't get here from there. Now, why would anybody expect an astronomer to know anything about advanced propulsion systems? Think about that. That's not as Balawick. Well, I worked on nuclear airplanes, nuclear rockets, and I wonder how many people listening are aware that in 1969, three different organizations operated nuclear-efficient rocket reactor propulsion systems on the ground. These weren't little toys. At Westinghouse, we tested the NRXA6 fancy type.

It was less than eight feet in diameter. Liquid hydrogen propellation. went in very cold and came out at 4,000 degrees. The power level was 1,000, in our case, 1100 megawatts. Now, Hoover Dam produces 2,000 megawatts. Hoover Dam is enormous. Ours was 1100 megawatts. Eurojet tested one of the 1,000 megawatts.

In Los Alamos, scientific laboratory, tested the Big Daddy, Phoebus 2B, nuclear rocket reactor, proportion system, also under 8 feet in diameter, and also with an exhaust temperature of 4,000 degrees, not much works at 4,000 degrees that we know how to make. I better add. And the power level was 4,000 megawatts, twice over time. Now, these were all successful, and we were so delighted because we listened and we didn't know whether our system would work well. Nobody had done it before. Yeah, right.

And what joy? And they canceled the damn program. You know, that's weird. Why would you do that? Okay, so we have this idea of, like, you know, the physics and the propulsion behind it. And then you have the people who relate this to the UFO topic. And one of the cases you brought up was Betty and Barney Hill in the idea of, like, how could they get here, this, that, where did the hills go? I would love to know how you got involved with a Betty and Barney Hill case and with working on your books with Kathleen Martin.

I read the book, The Interrupted Journey by John Fuller, the Betty and Barney Hill story. And then I had the lucky opportunity going back to Westinghouse again. I did media stuff there, and the guys from the same talk show that I had been on that caught me moving along, called me and said, And we're bringing Betty and Barney Hill to town. We thought you might like to know. And they told me where they were staying, which is very unusual. That's usually not stuff information you can about. So I called, and I had dinner with them.

This is about 65, 1965 or so. And I was listening to see if they'd said anything that expanded upon what was in the book, you know, where they're going to exaggerate. And they weren't. I was very favorably impressed with them. I mean, Betty is a social worker. Barney's his civil rights, I mean, activists and work for the post office, but I was very impressed. And then I was the first to do work on, I encouraged Marjorie Fish on the Betty in Barney Hill StarMap. I got a call from Coral Lorenzen at Apro, a very phenomenal research organization.

Marjorie asked her for the names of any scientist that could maybe, and she could work with or talk to or so forth. And she called me and, you know, can I give her your name and so forth? And I said, oh, sure, I'd be delighted. And so I was traveling a great deal. And I was near Toledo, Ohio. I stopped by to see mortuary. I saw some of her star map models.

I was the first to publish about her star map models, indicating that came from Zeta 1 or Zeta 2, reticuline, in the constellation of reticulum, 39 light years away as it happens. So I got involved early on, published a paper in Saga magazine about the StarMap with Bobby Antsley, Taranda. I wasn't writing much myself at that time, worked with other people. Then I encouraged Terry Dickinson, who was editor of astronomy magazine.

I'd gotten to know him. He came to one of my lectures in Milwaukee, and he's still around. He's not editing. He's retired, like I'm supposed to be at the end of this year. Oh, yeah. We'll get into that a little later. for sure. Don't think I wasn't going to bring that up. Well, the kicker is that

the response to the article in Astronomy magazine, which he did at my suggestion and talked to a lot of people, I didn't force his hand at all. Got more reaction than anything they'd ever published before. So they published a number of letters over the next year, and then they put out a 32-page full-color booklet, the Zeta-Rituclei incident.

They immediately sold 10,000. copies, which is unheard of for this kind of thing. And then the publisher was put under a lot of pressure, and they decided to sell the rest of them. They printed 30,000 copies, I think, and they made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and I wound up with 16,000 copies in my garage. Sold them all. Wow. I'd sell them again.

Beautiful color, 32-page, full-color. There's a day of reticulence. But meanwhile, I had seen Betty. I was working on a movie. You upload her with the camera crew. We had done the tomorrow show together, Betty and I, with Tom Snyder. And I have to give him credit for something.

Some media people are really worthwhile. He was one of them. Murph Griffin was another. But with Tom, he brought Betty out first. Then he brought me out. I was in the green room. And there was no audience, and we were taping segments. And I said, you know, I told him, I said,

the public won't know that Betty's a social worker. Is there a very respectable individual? She's not the woman who's scrubbing the floor. And so the first question, when we came back on, is he asked Betty about her background. So I give him credit for that. Not everybody would do that. Right.

And then something else. At the end of the show, he stood up. He had been sitting down all the time. Son of a gun, he's about six foot seven. Betty is five feet, and I'm five, nine and a half on a good day. What I'm saying is he could be a very intimidating presence if he chose to use that, but he didn't, and I give him a lot of credit for listening to my suggestion in the first place and for not intimidating us.

It was a good discussion, a good program. I really enjoyed doing it. And with Merv, he was a pleasure. He asked such sensible questions. And I did a show twice, actually. But after the first show, we had a live audience. I asked him, I said, gee, that was fun. I really enjoyed that because he was sharp.

And he said to me, just the two us standing there, he said, I try to keep the show at a level of after-dinner conversation. and you're having friends over for dinner. And what kind of questions would they ask? And he did a great job of that. Mervis isn't a scientist, but boy, he was a very bright guy. You know, I really appreciated the fact that he had done some work. He asked sensible questions.

He was cordial. He represented the audience in a very clover kind of way. So some of these guys really serve a useful purpose. Not everybody. But so I've been to Betty's house. It had been several times. And that's how Kathy got to know me. And she once told me that,

they'd said, if you ever need any help, there's one guy you can trust, and that's Stan Friedman. So we did three books. And they were all listed at my website, incidentally, triple-w.

dot Stantonfriedman.com. And the ones by the three of us are autographed by both of us, we use book plates. So everything I sent out gets is autographed. Look, I know I put myself in the people's place. They're buying a book.

We have discount prices, but still, don't they deserve an autograph? Just so they know, it's coming from me, not from some bookstore. I got nothing against bookstores. They sell my book. Well, that's a good point, though. It's that extra personal touch. Yeah, and I can say I'm on the Internet. www. stanton Friedman.com.

I just spell Friedman right, though, F-R-I-E-D. Well, Stan, one of the other ones cases I wanted to get in with you, which you know more than anyone else on this one, what I always found fascinating is how you basically helped break the story of Roswell. When you met with Jesse Marcell, I would love if you could tell us that story before we move on here to some listening. Well, I was doing a television interview in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, before speaking of Louisiana State. University. There's at the local television station. I was supposed to do three interviews. And the guy was very helpful and nice. And he said, you know, the guy you really ought to talk to was Jesse Marcel. I said, oh, who's he? I'd never heard of him. His next sentence changed my life. He handled wreckage of one of those saucers who were interested in when he was in the military.

What? And he wasn't joking. There was nobody around. He wasn't trying to impress anybody. He was telling me the fact. Well, what do you know about him? He lives in H-O-U-M-A. I didn't know where Homa was in Louisiana, but he's a great guy out to talk to him. So the next day, I was at the airport early, and I called information. Some listeners may not be aware. That's what you used to do when you wanted a phone number, and you didn't go to a computer because you didn't have one to go to. Call the operator in Homa, and there was a listing for a Jesse A. Marcel,

and I called him. Told him I was a nuclear physicist. I had a clearance for 14 years and so forth. I tried to impress him that. you know, I'd been around a bit. And so he told me his story. People said, why'd they talk to you? Well, I wasn't threatening to him.

I impressed him with being nuclear. Remember, he was the intelligence officer for the only atomic bombing group in the entire world, which was based at Roswell. The noisy negative is forget to tell you that usually. Yeah, a bunch of D.Is. But, yeah, they happen to be the guys who dropped the bonds on Alamogordo, they set off the bomb. and then the Hiroshima and Nagasaki and two more in Operation Crossroads and so forth.

I was the only group in the world like that at that time. And so I was very impressed with Jesse. This is a phone conversation. I got other names of people I can talk to. In the next, I shared that with Bill Moore, and in the next year or so, we talked to 60 people connected with the event. And, yeah, I got lucky when I called the,

I had a look in editor and publishers. There in newspaper in Roswell? What do I know about Rosco? I'll be there in July. But, yeah, the Roswell Daily Records. So I called the record to find out something about the town. And the fact that it was the 509th was there, the only atomic bombing group in the world.

And I called the newspaper. And I found an article. we found a date, we found some articles in newspapers. So I called the newspaper and I said, I've got an article here that says, a guy named Walter Houtter Hought, was the public information officer for the base, and before I could finish the sentence,

oh, his wife works here. What? So I talked to his wife, and then I talked to Walter, and then he was a huge help, because not only was he a public information officer, he was for the base. But he was a World War II bombardier,

more than 20 missions over Japan. This wasn't a dink again. And remember, he actually dropped the instrument package over when I was Adam bomb test. Yeah. Yeah. And he used your best guys to do that because if you don't get it in the right place

at the right time, you've wasted a bomb, and at that time we didn't have bombs to waste. So Walter was more than a public information officer. And he knew many of the people help me find other people. And big thing is he had a base yearbook, which he made a copy of for me. And I'd call him and say, hey, you know where any of these guys are? Well, I remember Joe and last I heard he was in Oshkosh, or, you know, that was a big help. One thing I learned, and this is a lesson for investigators, which I didn't know when I started, you talk to somebody.

Yeah, I was there at the base at that time. They'll remember Colonel Blanchard, and many of them remember Jesse Marshal because he was the intelligence officer. You remember anybody else who was there? Oh, come on now. It was 40 years ago. You know, no, I don't. And then you talk. Keep them in that time frame for another five minutes.

And then, so they said, hey, did you talk to Joe Smith? He was there. I remember him. And then come up with three or four names. He wasn't lying to me when he said he didn't remember. And he didn't. He had to think about it. You know, how many of us can, you know, rattle off?

I can tell you who I went to high school with, but not the other people. So it became an immense amount of labor, and I certainly was convinced that we're dealing with a true story. And there have been people who make up all kinds of phony baloney stories. Jesse was very impressive. Look, you don't get to be the intelligence officer for the only atomic bombing group in the entire world by being an idiot. And, of course, his son, who was deceased also, was a medical doctor? and served in intelligence work, and I still can't believe. Jesse Jr. was called back in at age 68 in the reserve he had been,

and there was flying combat missions in Iraq, in the Middle East. Yeah. After each 30 flying hours over there. We were that desperate. Right. Because I think they were trying to get him shot down, so he'd shut up. Yeah. Wouldn't be the most crazy way they've tried to have.

have a cover-up for sure. That's right. So, yeah, Roswell has been my, and I'm a member, I was elected into the Roswell UFO Hall of Fame. You'll see you at the museum. And for people who wonder, just to prove that there's interest, last year, the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, Mexico, had over 205,000 visitors. Yeah.

And it's in the middle of nowhere, believe me. Oh, yeah, I've been there. And my God, that was one of the lengthiest drives through a desert I've ever experienced. Yeah, I believe it. Look, it's 200 miles from Albuquerque. Yeah. It's 200 miles from Amarillo. It's 200 miles from El Paso.

Look, I grew up in New Jersey. There isn't anything in New Jersey that's 200 miles more. That's a good point, yeah. Well, it makes for a perfect place for something to crash or be tested. That's for damn sure. Well, I'll tell you. People say, well, why, and I had an astronomer England, say to me, why would an alien, got him around to New Mexico, all there is sand? I said, you ever been there? Well, no. I said,

well, I have, I take it you're not aware that two of our three nuclear weapons labs are in New Mexico, and that White Sands Missile Rangers were firing all our missiles. And they're both there because there aren't many people there. You don't fire missiles, with a lot of people around for good to say. You make a mistake. The Curtland Air Force Base is there. It's a natural place to put military installations. Alamogordo Army are fueled and stuff like that.

So Roswell was there for that reason. And, you know, crazy politics. The base was shut down by Lyndon Johnson because New Mexico didn't vote for him in the election when he won the president. Oh, wow, that's a vendetta. Well, Lyndon was known to have strong feelings like that. Yeah, that's very true.

You know, how fair was it to the town? Many of the people worked at the base was a big base. Yeah. They had a 13,000-foot runway, and typically runways are 8,000 or 9,000 feet. And that was because they had big B-36 bombers carrying nuclear weapons, and they needed six feet of concrete for a runway. If you go out there now, you go out to where the base was, which is south of town, and you'll see airplanes being cut up.

It's a burial ground, if you will, except they don't bury them. They cut them up and sell the parts. Okay. And I don't know of any other place where he can do this. Yeah, really? All kinds of airplanes, big ones, small ones, et cetera, et cetera. So it's been a fascinating story for me, and I will be there again, than probably the last time on the anniversary.

They have a festival. That's the word. That sounds strange, but in July, around the time of the crash anniversary. And I think last year, I don't know, 9,000 people there for the weekend, something like that. That's incredible. And people don't realize, like,

how much revenue that brings into that small town every year. They earned it, you know. Yeah, oh, absolutely. Cancel the base, which the German Air Force used to fly out of there. It's a great place for flying. It's at 3,500 feet feet, no mountains close by. You know, why would you close the facility? Because they didn't vote for him, of course.

Right. And where did they move it? To Texas. That sounds appropriate. Yeah. Instead, well, the other thing that kind of connects here to Roswell, not kind of, this is a big part of the Roswell case as well, is another thing that you worked with and investigated.

And I'd really love to hear your thoughts on where you stand on this now. It's the MJ12 documents. Now, we've had so many people argue this for so many years, but you wrote one of the most definitive books on these documents. So I'd love to hear, you know, now in 2018, what is your stance on these documents? How much is real? How much is baloney? Where do you stand on that?

Most of the MJ12 documents are phony. Okay, that's true. Most isotopes aren't fissionable either. You know, like it or not, most people can't run a mile. four minutes. Nobody can. So there are at least three documents that I believe are genuine. The

Eisenhower briefing document, the Cutler-Twinning memo, and there's another one which doesn't come to mind at the moment. And as proof tells you something about research in the field, Philip Klass was Mr. Noisy Negativist

himself, an abeionics editor for aviation week in space technology. No, flying saucers are really in Spicecraft, non-s, nonsense. And he challenged me on those documents, the Cutler-Twinning memo in particular. Obviously, the memos are fraud because it's done in the large PICA type,

but I've got nine documents here done from the National Security Council, which name is at the top, and they're all done in elite type. So I challenge you to find any other genuine documents found in the same size and style type, and I'll give you $100 each up to a maximum of 10. He did this rather publicly,

And you have 60 days. Well, okay, I immediately went to my files. And unlike, it turned out, I didn't know this at the time, it turned out until it never been to the Eisenhower Library or the Truman Library. And I spent weeks at them. And I immediately went to my files, and I had the 20 pages done in the same size and style type. They didn't meet all this criteria, but in time frame, et cetera. So I was going to the Eisenhower Library and might as well check us when I was.

went there, it's easy to spot the difference because one type is much bigger than the other one type place. And so I made copies of 14 documents, no doubt about they're being genuine. I found them out the Eisenhower Library and made copies of all of them, sent him the copies and an invoice for $1,000. He would only pay me for $10,000, and he paid me. And then he got maddened in hell when I included a copy of his check in my book. the audience loves it but you know it's typical of the intellectual bankruptcy

of the pseudoscience of anti-euphology don't bother me with the facts my mind's made up and it's such a splendid example that he had never been to the library and it turns out they have like 250,000 pages of NSC documents and you're telling me they're all typed on the same typewriter I hope people recall

We used to use typewriters before computers were around. Well, the MJ12 documents, in other words, I'm convinced I did rather extensive work on the 12 members of the group. And I'm especially proud of my discovery, to my total surprise, I will admit, that one of the members was Dr. Donald Howard Menzel, and he was a debunker. He written three anti-UFOs. How could he be a member of a group that knew about crash saucers, alien potties, all that sort of stuff? Well, I saw a mention of his name in a document in the Ben of Bush files. He was the chief science advisor in the United States in this time frame. Outstanding an individual.

And so I followed up on that and had to get permission with three different people to look at his papers at Harvard. The Center for UFO said, no, UFO, whatever the name of the group was at that time. I got a research grant, and I went to the Harvard Archives after getting permission for three different people to see his papers, written. permission pain in the neck but anyway i didn't know what i was looking for let's see what we find and there was a jfk file oh that should be interesting i know it was ufo papers were elsewhere and i've been there too kathy and i've gone to the uh archives immer philosophical society library has his papers and uh also have those classes papers and so forth anyway and one of the first things i opened up in the jfk files there's a letter from um mensel to

Kennedy, dear Jack, turns out they knew each other quite well, even had breakfast together on occasion, both living in the Cambridge area. And this is one area, this is after the election of 1960 when Kennedy was elected president. There's one area where I may be of assistance to you. It's with regard to the National Security Agency. I've had a longer continuous association with them 30 years of anybody. When we are properly cleared to each other, this is telling the president, when we are, properly clear to each other. I can tell you more about this. So he did a lot. It turns out he was a world-class cryptologist. Nobody knew that. He did all kinds of classified work. And I was the first

to take note of that. And so suddenly it made sense that he was part of this group. But it was such a shock. And there were people, oh, he couldn't lead a double life. I wrote a paper, the double life of Donald Menzel. There are loads of people who led double life. Think of Burgess Philby and McLean, Russian spies who work for British intelligence. for like 15 years, you know. Yeah. And you've got to be very careful when you're a spy that you don't reveal, you know, you're having access to information you shouldn't have access.

But once I found Menzel and then saw the connection with the other people, I was able to show that it made absolute sense of those three documents and clasping me $1,000 that didn't hurt any in terms of the overall picture. And so I think I've dealt with all the arguments, but the people say the documents are fraudulent. Yes, I've showed that a number of documents are fraudulent. So what? I'm not denying that.

It'd be natural if some good stuff gets out, you flood the market with crap, and I hope it rubs on. Yeah. Well, and we all know, these sort of campaigns have been used for years in terms of disinformation of putting some truths amongst the lies, and that's the only way they can sort of get it out. It's extremely frustrating to have to wave through that, but there are people who will do that due diligence to do that, people like yourself.

Many other researchers who aren't out there, you know, speaking or, you know, on television. They're doing the hard work underground and finding the truth to those things. Well, I have to have evidence in hand before putting my mouth in tears, my feeling. As a scientist, I have that requirement on me. Show it. I'll just tell it. And so frankly, I've been disappointed that so few people have visited all the archives. I've been to 20 archives, some of them many times.

And it's the documents that make the difference. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I mean, Stan, no, you mentioned this a little bit earlier. You made an announcement about what, maybe a month ago now, of your retirement from the field. And I mean, people were, you know, mixed reactions all around, but everyone was like, oh, my God, it's finally happening. Are you kidding me? Like, no. Am I not entitled?

Yeah, I know, really. It's funny how that story came out. I had been interviewed by, I know the reporters at the local paper here, the Frederick and Bailey Gleener, and I called one. And I wanted to promote the fact that I was, and he thought it was an interesting story. I was going to undertake the debate of this century with Dr. Michael Schumer of the Skeptic Society. We're supposed to have a big on-stage live debate in Vancouver, British Columbia on April the 8th, and an auditorium seating maybe a thousand people from which they were charging a good price, and they were given us good fees for the two of us.

And so I talked to this report that I've known. He said other articles about me, and he wrote a nice article. And then I got told the debate had been canceled. No good reason. There wasn't enough interest or something like that. And so I contacted the reporter. And so he said, well, is there anything else any way I can salvage this? Got anything else that's talking about or, you know, any events going on?

What can we do? I said, well, yeah, I'm seriously thinking of retiring it before the end of the year. Oh, well, okay. So we talked about that for a moment. And so that became the focus for the article, only because the debate had been canceled. We needed some other shocker in there, I guess, right? Yeah, a hook, if you will. And look, I'm going to be 84 in July.

Now, I'm still young for my age. It says here in small. But it's time. Like I said, I read that first book 60 years ago. Yeah. That's a long time. time. And, you know, it's getting harder to get around, and my mind isn't as sharp as it used to be. Don't tell anybody that. It's true, though.

I mean, you sound as sharp as a tech, but I understand that. I understand you, in terms of entitlement, yeah, I would say so at this point. I mean, you've broke some of the biggest stories in euphology. You've put in the work, and as a younger researcher, I mean, it's paramount to understand that there was an age without the internet, God forbid, where we can just Google something now and it's right there in front of us. The fact that you went to these archives, you went out and you spoke to individuals face to face, that's a rarity for the younger generation these days. So in terms of earning that, I would say so. I guess my real question would be, Stan, you know,

with this news of your retirement, I'd love to know what some of your most favorite or most memorable moments were throughout this entire, God, 50 plus years of research. I mean, Was it a lecture you gave? Was it a debate? Was it a witness who spoke to? I know it's probably a very broad question. When it comes to lectures, I'll never forget in Hawaii supposed to speak. And we lived near San Francisco and took my wife. What the hell? What's called Hawaii? I got five days and only have to be there for an afternoon lecture and stuff.

And I called them when we got there and said, you know, you need me to do any radio or television programs? You know, I'm available. I'm here. No, no. Just show up. was an afternoon talk. Here we are in a hall seating over 900 people, and there were 20, like, 26 people at my lecture. That was, I mean, I gave a good lecture. It's not their fault. But that was an embarrassing moment. On the other hand, I had an audience of more than 2,000 in Turkey. Wow. Had a great audience. Saudi Arabia was interesting.

Oh, yeah. What was that one? Something like a world competitiveness forum or something like that. And I'd never heard of the people who called me, and I did some checking around. Is this thing real? And then as time went on, and people said, man, you're going to Saudi Arabia? Are you crazy? You've forgotten you're Jewish? They haven't even let you in.

So I called the person that I was in contact with. It was a woman, incidentally, which tells you something. Some people think women don't get a chance to hold any positions what they do. And I explained to her, I said, look, people are saying, you're going to get there and say, you can't come in here. And she said, look, we've had many Jewish speakers at these things. No problem at all. And so I went, and there wasn't any problem at all. It was like I was at a meeting of my father's cousins club.

People forget Jews and Arabs are both Semites. So that was an interesting experience. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed the visits to places I never would have gotten. In other words, I've spoken in Hong Kong. I've spoken in dairy and China. In South Korea, in Australia, Argentina, places like that. Got into Israel, Germany, France, England, Ireland, Scotland, Finland.

So seeing the world, Hungary, my last foreign talk was Bulgaria. Who would ever, how would I ever get to Bulgaria? I spoke in Poland and Warsaw. The Warsaw UFO Society had a big crowd for me. Geographically, how people respond to your talks or the theories you're bringing forward, does it vary from region to region at all, you know, due to like cultural emphasis? I mean, sometimes when talks have been translated, like I didn't speak in Polish, you know. But I seem, remember, I'm talking about evidence, not beliefs.

So when I can show, Sholumbulow Special Report 14, shows the numbers, numbers tell a story after all. Back up what I say, it doesn't seem to matter. Because the universal responses, I didn't know about that. I never saw in that report. You know, that's standard. So it's very hard for people to reject what you're saying when they have to admit, no, I wasn't aware of that.

And when you show it to them. And so I found it's a way to see the world be a uphologist. Who would I ever thought? Not me. I'll tell you, my classmates at the University of Chicago would certainly have. What are you doing, Stan? I'm looking about flying sausage. What would you expect?

So as a new generation of UFO researchers start to crop up, you know, I'm 33. So I'm no, you know, I'm no young chicken, but I'm also sort of in that, that midway point in my research here, what advice would you give to people younger, even younger than I am, in terms of the future of both the UFO field? And I guess humanity in general, what advice would you give them the hope, you know, that this is a topic worth pursuing? Well, I think the biggest thing is to make people aware that our understanding of where we fit in the scheme of things has changed drastically. Frank Craig was talking about maybe 6,000 planets that could send signals. That number today might be 6 billion. The fact that there

is so many planets is a total surprise to the astronomical community. And the fact that we have the technology, when the British Astronomer Royal in 1956 was asked about space travel by Time magazine, it's utter bilge. What good would it do? Who would pay for it? Well, we need his better equipment for astronomy. It was a year before Sputnik and the field that's benefited the most, of course, has been in astronomy. So our attitude about how old the universe is, how big the universe is, how many planets there are. You know, Bishop Usher in 1650 or so was saying that the world was created in 4004 BC. I don't think he said on a Thursday afternoon, but he went back through the Bible about begatting.

Now he say, well, they left six zeros out of that. It's four billion years ago that the Earth was created four years. and a half billion. What's a half billion between friends? And so these concepts, the 1920s, the Sun produces its energy by burning gas. What do we know about fusion? But fusion is what produces the energy throughout the universe, all the stars. But there's an enormous difference. And so, suddenly what seemed impossible is now possible. Space travel. And it was just like a great astronomer in 1902, that 1903, October, that if there was one thing he was sure, man would never fly any distance in a vehicle, maybe with a balloon, but that was two months

before the right brother's first flight. We assume what we don't know doesn't exist. There ain't nothing we don't know. We're smart guys, you know, with the cream of the cream. And throughout history, that's been shown to be wrong. Jet engines, for example, were left out of town. Space travel was thought to be absurd. And I've seen numbers, you know, how heavy a rocket would have to be to get a man to the moon. A million, million tons would have to be. But if you make enough stupid assumptions, you can prove anything as impossible. Well, assume a single-stage vehicle with a very low exhaust velocity. Pretty soon you've got a huge rocket. That's not how we do things. Engineers' job is to get it done, not to show you all the

ways in which it can't be done. That's not in much use. And so people often aren't aware of their biases and prejudices getting in the way of their evaluation. Thank goodness there are people who say the heck with that. I mean, Billy Mitchell, remember, was court-martial. He said man would be sinking ships from airplanes. That was in the 20s.

In 1941, late November, there was an article in the program for the Army-Navy football game and showed a picture of the USS Arizona's huge battleship. And in the text, it said, nobody's ever sunk a big ship from the sky. That was eight days before Pearl Harbor, and there went the USS Arizona. I'm killing, I forget, 1,100 people, something like that. Yeah. I don't know how to do it, therefore it can't be done, right? No, wrong. And so there's a word of caution whenever you find the noisy negativist, because it usually means flying sauces can't be real. Because if they were I would know about it, it seems to be the attitude.

Right. But when I, I'm sneaky. I check my audiences. When I talk about this large-scale studies, I ask how many people have read them. And I think it sober is the audience to realize I'm not the only one who hasn't read that stuff. No, these people are just about it. Yeah. Maybe I better listen to this guy.

And I show them the documents and the reports or whatever so they know I'm not just making it up out of my head. And so we need to be very careful about presuming we know what the future is. And if you look around, look at radio. There were people who were saying they would never communicate any wrong distance with radio. What are you kidding? And that goes back to, say, 1900. And look at where we've come from with that. And every direction you look, you find a progress comes from doing things differently.

in an unpredictable way. The future is not an extrapolation of the past. You have to change how you do things. And if we forget that, we step into the potholes of it's impossible. Yeah. What we really mean is, I don't know how to do that. But maybe somebody else does, you know, like aliens. And the kicker is, again, if there's been intelligent life in the neighborhood for a billion years,

why would it be surprising that they're doing things that we can't do? And that business of how many places there are, we assume because Earth is 4.3 light years from the next star over after the sun, that everybody is stuck with. There are loads of stars that have other stars less than a light year away. My favorite stars in the whole case, is 8 to 1 and 92 over 10th. They're an eighth of a light year apart, for goodness sake. You know, we're 39 light years from here. That's just an entirely different perspective. We've got people saying anybody coming here and have to come from 1,000 lights.

years. Absurd. Give me five, ten, and twenty. Exactly. Wow. Well, Stan, I mean, I'm going to be seeing you in Halifax, Nova Scotia, this upcoming May. I'll be speaking at the Sotericon, where you're going to be the keynote speaker at that event as well. So, I guess, you know, for any of our listeners who live in that area, I hope they'll come out and see you give this talk. It's free, too, I'm told. Yes. How rare is that? It's, Yeah, it's being put on by your nephew, Paul Kimball, who does so much amazing work in Halifax, you know, with local government and was able to obtain all these speakers to put on a conference for free for the public, which I think is an incredible feat. It's my celebratory swan song, how's that? Absolutely, one that I'm so honored to be a part of and one I hope everyone will come to.

Well, that being said, Stan, one more time, where can we find all of your work, your books? Give that to us. Okay, they're all listed on my website, www. stantonfriedman.com. You got to spell Friedman, F-R-I-E-D-M-A-N. And it lists my books and other sources like Blue Books Special Report 14. I don't believe it's proper for me to talk about something and say, well, I don't know where you can get that. That's why I've sold a lot of copies as a Special Report 14.

And so if you want an education, incidentally, in one of my books, top secret magic about the MJ-12 documents, I list a dozen PhD thesis that were done. more than 10 years ago, so that more now. So there is information out there, and I have loads of references. I just finished looking at an old book, First Contacts the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which was done more than 20 years ago,

and there's nothing sensible about flying saucers in it, no references to the big, large-scale scientific studies, or any of the technology stuff or whatever. Why don't they put pictures of nuclear rocket engines, for goodness sake? They're available. So my website has the information. So, you know, I believe in interacting and communicating. I've been doing this for a long time.

If I didn't enjoy what I was doing, I wouldn't be doing it. You know, after the first 500 lectures, you'd say the hell of it. Yep. I'm over 700 down. Yeah. Way we go. Well, it's extremely invigorating, you know, as someone who has a couple times been like, I want out of this. It's invigorating to see that it's worth the study. It's worth the research

to keep doing it, to keep looking for those answers. No matter what it is, like you said, the future is unpredictable, and I think that's extremely exciting. So I can't wait to see where it goes. And I know this isn't the last we've heard from you, Stan. It might be, you know, your retirement from research, but it certainly isn't your retirement from the field overall. So I have to thank you so much for coming on somewhere in the skies today. It was an amazing It's pleasure and honor, and I will see you in May. I will see you there, and there won't be any snow. I hope there won't be any snow on the grass.

I hope at that point. The Somewhere in the Sky's podcast is part of the Lionsgate Sound Network. Please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever possible. Thank you for listening. Greetings, everyone. Ryan Sprague, your host of Somewhere in the Skies. For over seven years and more than four. 400 episodes. The Summer in the Sky's podcast has always been free to listen to, but it's not free to create.

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continued support and keep looking up. Hello, I'm David Marler, author of Triangular U.S. UFOs an estimate of the situation and the executive director of the National UFO Historical Record Center. And you are now somewhere in the skies. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome everyone to Somewhere in the Skies. I am your host, Ryan Sprague. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you see the gentleman right next to me. And that is the one in only Robert Powell. He is the executive board member and one of the founders of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, and he is the author of his most recent book, UFOs A Scientist Explains What We Know and Don't Know.

So I want to welcome, I believe, for the very first time, Robert Powell, is somewhere in the skies. Well, thanks, right? I mean, I know you so well that it just seems like we've probably done a podcast, but maybe not. Isn't that crazy? I'd have to go back and really look. We're up to almost 400 episodes, Robert. Wow, that's impressive. It's been a journey. I'll put it that way. But I love it and I love talking to people like you. And there's so much to talk about. I mean, not just, you know, what's going on in the world of UFOs today, but what you guys have been doing over at the SCU, what you've been doing individually. I've been seeing you all over television and in all of these papers and everything. So it's exciting. But I let's start with, I guess,

kind of what a lot of people probably know you for. And that is your work with Mufon and also now with the SCU. So would you mind painting us just a little picture of who you are and kind of what got you into UFOs? And fast forward up through Mufon and the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. Sure. So Ryan, and when I was a kid, I was what you would call a geek, right? have a chemistry set.

You know, I got it taken away a few times for making an explosion in the garage. You know, so that was my life as a kid. So I grew up and I really wanted to be an astronomer, but there weren't any astronomy jobs, really, back in the 1970s. So I went with my second favorite love chemistry, but I wound up in the semiconductor industry, which makes all of, you know, the submicron names, and a scale computer chips that we use in our phones and our laptops and everywhere.

And so I love that. That was really great. And I was able to retire early. So I said, okay, what all do I want to do? And one of the things I wanted to do was to go back to a book I'd read in high school by J. Allen Heinek. And that was the UFO experience. And it's written in a scientific manner.

So I always thought, well, you know, there's a same. like there might be something to this. So I said, okay, one of the things I'm going to do now that I was fortunate in retiring early is that that's one up. And so I joined the organization Mufon. And within a few months, I was their director of research. And I think that that happened because I was a director of a R&D lab at advanced micro devices, which is where I'd work. And so I guess, that impress them. And so they may be director of research. And so I spent 10 years at Mufon, really.

I probably interviewed several hundred people. I've read thousands of the Mufon reports. And I tried to instill science into Mufon. And I had some success, but I finally gave up. And so in 2017, myself, and three other individuals created the scientific coalition for UAP studies. And our basic mission is the scientific study of UFOs or UAP. And today, and this has been only seven years since we were formed,

we didn't go out and try to grab a bunch of people, but they've come to us. We now have over 350 members of our members, Over 30% have PhDs. Meanwhile, me, I've got a lowly bachelor's in chemistry. But over half of the SCU membership have advanced degree. So either a master's or a PhD. Engineering is the number one field of our membership. That's the most common.

But we also have astrophysicists, biologists, chemical engineers. I mean, you name it, we have it. And in terms of work experience, we've got individuals from the FBI. I know that's going to start the, you know. Oh, yeah. People talking on the rumor mills. We've got members from NASA. We've got people that work in the semiconductor industry.

People have worked in the defense industry. So there's some more rumors that can get started. But there's really a, what it shows you is that the scientific community is really interested in this subject because those are the people that are basically joining the SCU. So that's kind of, you know, 20 years squeezed into a nutshell for you, too. I know. It's so hard to do. And the accomplishments just are nonstop. But I have to ask, you know, with the scientific coalition for UAP studies, I mean, it's in the name, science being the, you know, at the forefront of the organization. But what sort of is the mission of the coalition? And maybe could you give us a little a snapshot of some of the work that you guys have done thus far? I know you've been, you've worked on some highly visible UAP cases. So, yeah, what exactly is the SCU? And what are some of the

cases you guys have worked back. Yeah, so let's start a little bit with the mission, which is the, you know, the scientific exploration of the UAP subject. And then we've got goals and submissions that go with that. So the basic way that we look at doing that is examining case reports where there is sufficient evidence that we can do a scientific examination. So that means we need something like a video or trace evidence or multiple witnesses. We need a lot of good evidence in a case in order to evaluate it. So that's one area we look at, and I'll talk about that a little more. But another area is academia. So one of the important things that we feel needs to be done is bring more of academia into the study of UAP. And we started on that in 2017,

and I think today there is a lot more of people out of academia that are interested in a subject. And just the membership in SCU tells you that's the case. So we look at that. We have projects that we develop. And then we also try to get the younger people involved. So that means, for example, we have individuals who will go to university campuses and maybe give a presentation if there's a UAP organization there. For example, recently, one of our members, Michael Glosson, whose PhD in philosophy, gave a presentation to a Yale student body, as well as Vassar College student body, all on the subject of UAP. So there's a lot of interest with the younger people. Now to jump back to, you know,

some of the cases that we've looked at over the last seven years and some of the papers that we've written. So, so for example, some of your audience may be familiar with the Stephenville report, which that was actually written just prior to the formation of SCU. And that, case involved radar data as well as multiple witnesses. So it had sufficient information that you could do a scientific type of report. And then there's the Aguadilla case, which we could talk about a little bit later, which because arrows, you know, come out, talked about a little bit. And that was a case where we had witnesses plus some radar data, plus a three-minute video. Also, there was the coming to mind is the Nimitz incident, right, 2004.

Probably most people don't know. We began investigating the Nimitz USS Princeton incident that involved the F-18s and our pilots in the year 2016. So almost a year and a half before you saw the New York Times article. And so as an example, I had interviewed, oh, Gary Boris and the senior chief, his name escapes me at the moment. Kevin Day. Kevin Day. Thank you, Ryan.

Yeah, Kevin Day. I was actually the first person interviewed Kevin Day. I interviewed him within, I think, six to eight weeks of the New York Times article. Oh, wow. And I interviewed Gary Boris shortly after that. And I also interviewed James Slate, who was the, he was the command, the second commander or the lieutenant commander for a favor. He was in the plane that stayed up above. So that, so I talked to him about it.

He hasn't been in the press much. He was. Yeah. I don't recall that name. And there was, he got so. much, so many phone calls and so much headache from it and to his family that he said he wouldn't talk to anymore. And actually, we've never, his testimony is in our report, which is on our website, you know, on the Nimitz case. It's, it's like 250 page report. But he, uh, has never authorized

me to release his, uh, audio testimony to us. So, you know, we honor that. So until he, does, we're not going to release it. But he's kind of like Frager. He's just a very matter of fact. No, he was a lieutenant commander. And, you know, in a nutshell, it was like, never saw anything like this in my life, never, you know, never again. And whatever it was, wasn't made here. You know, and that was, that was his take. And then, you know, he ends the interview. Meanwhile, I had to go to Iraq. So I didn't have time to think about the Tic Tac. Right. You know, we had Alex Dietrich, the other pilot on the show a while back. And, you know, it's hard with these pilots because you want to try to get them to theorize

about what it might have been that they saw this technology. And everyone wants to push towards NHI, NHI. But I do really appreciate that neither Fravor, Dietrich, Slate, or I believe Chad Underwood as well, the gentleman who, filmed one of these objects. Yeah. None of them are willing to go as far as to say, oh, yeah, it was, it was alien or we think it might have been alien. You know, they might skirt around, well, it's definitely not technology that we are familiar with. But like you said, what's most interesting is I remember even Alex Dietrich

telling me, you know, yes, it was an interesting event. It definitely was something I will remember forever, but I had a mission to go on. I had a mission within days of this that I had to prepare for. So I couldn't worry about what the Tic Tac was. And that's interesting. The dichotomy between possibly seeing one of the most famous UFO events in the past couple decades and saying, yeah, it was interesting, but I had something else to do. Right.

And, of course, that something else they had to do was something that could easily have lost their life in. Exactly. So that usually takes precedence. Yeah, yeah, I would say so for sure. Now, you did mention Aguadilla. I do want to get to later in the conversation, sort of the analysis they came out with Arrow, who just came out with their annual report.

We just got a Senate UFO hearing a congressional. It's crazy. It's been a heck of a week for UFOs. But before we get to all of that, Robert, I'd like to talk a little bit about your newest book. And I want to get the title right here. UFOs, a scientist explains what we know and don't know. So what kind of what inspired you to write this book?

Right. So this book, what inspired me was I was like, okay, I've been doing this for 16 to 17 years now. And so I want to write a book that encompasses what I truly believe about the phenomenon and what I think it is. or what I think it's most likely to be, right? Because nobody truly knows what it is. But we can hypothesize as to what it might be. And so in the book, I've written it so that it's useful both to someone who has background knowledge on the subject, as well as someone who perhaps has never picked up a book on

the subject. So I start off in the very first chapter giving a little historical view by giving a giving cases throughout history, some of the most interesting cases that have occurred. So I give the reader of background in that. And then I have a chapter where I explain why this is not just a figma of people's imagination, right? So as an example, I have a graph that shows number of UFO reports by time and it's going along, right, starting way back in the 1800s going forward. And then all of a sudden in 1942, you get this blip going up.

And it never stops after that. From then on, you have constant UFO slash UAP reports. So you have to, when you look at that data, you have to say something happened in 1942, either that or the whole society, not just in the United States, but throughout the world, got onto a kick of wanting to believe in like UFOs, right? So I fall on the side that something happened and that this is a real whatever it is. And then it's a scientific question to figure out what exactly did happen. So what is some of those theories about what happened in 42?

I mean, a lot of us always go to 47 with the kind of Tharnell citing kind of being the kickoff point of the flying saucer craze. but I mean, you were able to date it even further back to 42. So do you have any theories on why that might have been? Well, you know, of course, 1942 is when the food fighters, that first started was in 1942, which, by the way, is just a piece of trivia information. The band the Food Fighters was named that because the lead guy, his dad, was familiar with food fighters from the Second World War. So that's where they got that name.

Okay. But that's what the pilots, not only American pilots, you know, and British pilots, you know, saw these food fighters, but they were seen by Japanese and German pilots also. Both sides thought it belonged to the other side. Right. So that's what starts that initial, you know, upward jump. So the question becomes why, you know, and, you know, and it's, you know, and it's, you know, And that's really difficult to know why, right? Because, I mean, we could theorize.

You might theorize, for example, in the 1930s, the dark side of planet Earth began to be lit up with lights, right? That's when we started lighting our cities. Well, if you have a civilization far out there and they have telescopes just, let's say roughly 20, 20 to 30 years more advanced than where we're at today, they could look at our planet, right? They could block out our suns so its brightness didn't affect their spectrometers. And their spectrometers would see this planet and they would see that there are light emissions coming off the dark side of it, right? And they would be this wavelength of incandescent light.

So then you're going to be, if you're going to be, if you're, out there, you're going to say, okay, I don't know who's on that planet, but clearly there's some level of intelligence on that planet. Right. So then it's just a question of can they get here, right? Yeah. Because, you know how we are. I mean, once we discover an exoplanet that we say, hey, there's a civilization on that

planet. If we could get there, then that's what we would do. Now, if we can't get there, all we can do is continue to. observe it and, you know, draw conclusions and write papers about it. Right. Yeah. Well, I will, okay, so you mentioned other civilizations. I'd love to get your thoughts on this.

Now, we've had something like SETI that's been around for a really long time, trying to search for radio signals and whatnot. But we have this new sort of resurgence of trying to reach. out to or trying to, I guess, capture certain signatures of another intelligence or civilization. And that's sort of taken the form of techno signatures. Right. What do you make of this whole new search for ET when it comes to tech new signatures? So this is one of the two items that I feel really has driven the desire to understand more about

UAP from the scientific community even, as well as the public, of course. And you know, you've got the most common thing that people talk about, which was the December 2017 New York Times article, right, about the Nimitz event that we just talked about. But the second part, to me, is more subtle. And that is the two generations, the youngest generations today, which is the millennials, and if I recall right, it's generation, is it Z? I believe Z. Yeah, zoomers or something.

Think about both of those generations have grown up knowing that exoplanets existed. Right. And like when I grew up, there were no such thing as exoplanets. I mean, the first exoplanet wasn't discovered until 28 years ago. And the most common thing that CETI and other people, other scientists would always argue, is that our solar system may be unique. There is no evidence that there is even another solar system like ours out there, let alone that there are thousands of exoplanets, right? But that's where we're at today. Today, we know that there are literally thousands of exoplanets.

So I think that's the subtle part is people go, okay, there are thousands of exoplanets. You know, we know now also that water is the most common molecule in our galaxy. We know that the building blocks for life exist on asteroids and meteorites and comets. So it's not too difficult to say, okay, we believe there's. intelligent life in the cosmos, and we believe there is a lot of intelligent life in the cosmos. So then the only question is, can that intelligent life get here? Right. And if you look at SETI, for example, when SETI first started, and I think that that was an excellent thing to begin doing, is they were looking at a very specific analog wavelength, right? And look at where we're at today,

50 years after SETI began, I mean, our civilization has moved away from analog towards digital. Another 20 years, we may not even have analog signals going out into space. Right. So to really search for life and space, I think you have to do what we're doing now with the telescopes that we send up where we're trying to look at the atmosphere of a planet and look at, okay, what are the molecular components in that atmosphere, right? And do they indicate the presence of light? And our next step will be once we develop what's called a coronagraph where you can block out a sun, a star that's out there, right?

So once you can block that out, that allows you to look at any wavelengths being, you know, set off by the planets around that star, right? Because that star heats those planets and those planets are sending out wavelengths of light, infrared light, ultraviolet light that we can then begin to detect. And I think someday we're going to look at a planet and say, we are detecting a particular wavelength of light coming off that planet that is not consistent with what we would expect to see based on the star that that planet's moving around. Interesting. So would that, in your opinion, say that we're not so much detecting a biosigniting a biosigniting. but a techno signature, like whatever that is is almost like artificial or made by something. Imagine if you had an advanced civilization looking at our planet. Yeah. And if their spectrometers are sensitive enough, they're going to detect the isotopes of uranium and plutonium and strontium from our nuclear detonations in our atmosphere.

over the last 60 to 70 years, right? So if you're that civilization and you're looking at Earth and you say, hey, these guys have got isotopes of uranium and plutonium, you go, well, someone has figured out how to make nuclear energy, right? Because it's not natural to have those isotopes in your atmosphere. The only thing you wouldn't know absolutely was, was that civilization still in existence or had they blown themselves to smithereens, right? Yeah, yeah, good point.

And that begs the question, is that why so many UAP are seen over these nuclear installations too? At an alarming rate, it would seem, at least according to many out there. But that's interesting. Yeah. What else does the book sort of dive into, if you don't mind. It dives into some of the very strange parts of UAP or UFOs. For example, how they're totally non-aerodynamic, right? So if you've got a witness who gives your report,

and they say they have a disk-like object that's moving through the atmosphere, and then suddenly it turns vertically and moves to the atmosphere at rapid speed in a way that that's not how we would move a craft through the atmosphere, right? We would have it on the side. Or someone, like one of my favorite cases, that I had from a R&D scientist who has contracts with the DOD reports a barbell-shaped UFO, right? I mean, if you're going to make up a UFO story, why would you make up, oh, shape like a barbell? And I'm just hanging in the air, right?

Yeah. So that's why I talk about in the book these stories, right? I've got this disc and he's coming down and he's just fluttering like a leaf as he falls towards the earth. I mean, who makes up stories like that? Right? So if the object's close enough to the witness, and that's what I talk about in the book, cases where the object is so close that you can't really, you can argue only one of two things. Either the guy made up the story or it happened.

You can't say he misidentified the planet Venus, right? So I go through that in the book. I talk about EM, is. electromagnetic issues like when a car stops or your phone turns off in the presence of a UFO. And I talk about some of the really wild cases where there's reports of a person's headlights bending towards a UFO, right? There's no physical, I mean, there's no simple physics explanation for why that could happen. So I go through those type of cases and I also talk about a challenge for academia, right? So I don't know if you've heard the term soft science and hard

science. Yeah, for sure. And I don't like the terms because it's it's the hard scientists kind of insulting the soft scientists by using such a term. But basically the hard science, like my background chemistry or physics, where if you mix sodium bicarbonate and vinegar, for example, you will get carbon dioxide and I can repeat that experiment over and over and over, and I get the same result. And that's what a hard scientist loves, right? I repeat my experiment. But in soft science, take, for example, you have, take biology, you have a petri dish, And if you control the temperature and all the variables, you can predict how fast this bacteria will grow on your petri dish, right? But what if you switch from bacteria to chimpanzees, right?

And I do an experiment with a chimpanzee. You try to repeat the experiment. Well, you may not get the same result because your chimpanzee may not have the same, you know, view of things as my chimpanzee did, right? And move that up now to human beings. Okay, this is where you talk about psychology and sociology. It becomes very difficult to repeat an experiment, right? Or like in the most recent presidential election, right? Just trying to predict how people are going to vote.

And the problem is you're dealing, the higher the intelligence that you're dealing with, the quote, softer the science, because you can't, control it. So now assume, make the assumption that we're dealing with an intelligence that's hundreds of years more advanced than us. So how do I make the assumption that I can repeat an experiment on that intelligence? I mean, how am I going to go do that? As a matter of fact, I have to suspect that the experiment's being run on me. Right? Yeah, good believe. Because I'm the lower intelligence, not the thing I'm looking at. Yeah.

So that's a challenge for academia that I talk about in the book. And then the other thing I talk about in the book is how we've gone about it today, right, which is through the military. And how if we really want to solve this problem, we really need to do it by funding academia to study it, right? Because the military, they have national security, and that requires closeness, right? Not openness. Right. Science, on the other hand, requires openness, right? It requires that you write a paper. Someone reviews it. They critique it. They write another paper. They give their views of things. And that's how things develop. And I think that's the only

way that we are going to get a final answer on the UEP question. Plus, and this is a kind of philosophical thing, someday, you know, whether you want to believe that it's one year from now or it's a hundred years from now, we will make contact with an intelligent life form from another star system. So the way we are situated today, that contact will be made by a military organization, not a civilian, not a group of scientists, but a military organization. And is that the way that we want humanity to be represented when that day finally comes? I say no. And so I think we need to make those changes now. Yeah, that's a little scary. Yeah, I would much rather have an academic and a scientist there

than just a army general or something like that. Very good points. Well, you mentioned sort of sociology and in terms like that with the soft sciences. This is interesting. I was at a UFO conference somewhat recently. And I had a couple parents come up to my table who either listened to the podcast or have read my books. and they had their kids with them. And we're talking like eight, nine-year-old kids.

And, you know, and the parents saying, yeah, they listen to your show. And I was like, oh, you don't think about those things when you host a podcast or you're doing television of the amount, not just the amount of people you're reaching, but the demographic of people you're reaching. And that really took me by surprise. And I was really fascinated to see a tweet you put out really. recently, actually, that had to do with a, I believe it was an email you got over at the SCU from a grandmother who said that her grandchild was getting interested in UFOs, but was hearing all about the Pentagon and, you know, these things could be a threat and all these.

And abductions and all this kind of stuff. Yeah. And it can be very alarming for a kid to hear these things in a world that is now saying UFOs do exist. And your response was perfect because it wasn't like you just said something. You wrote a book about it. So I want to get the title right of this one. The Truth About UFOs A Scientific Perspective.

And this was a book for children, which I don't think had ever really been done in the world of UFO. So yeah, tell us a little about that. Yeah. So this book is written for the kid who has kind of a scientific bin to him, right? So it could be as young as a seven-year-old who's super-year-old. sharp and like science to, you know, a 12 or 13 year old. But, and as a matter of fact, Ryan, I've had a bunch of adults that weren't familiar with the topic told me they love the book. I mean, it was perfect for them. So, yeah. But what caused this book is when my, my middle grandson

was eight years old, it comes to me because he knows, you know, grandpa studies UFOs. So he checks this book out of this. school library. And I look at it and it's got a picture of a gray on the front. And I can guess what's inside this book. And so I say, Gavin, Gavin, don't read this book. I want you to take it back to the library. I don't want you to read it. I said, I will promise you, I'll write you a book that will tell you the truth about UFOs and you don't need to read this book. So that's what he did. So I lived up to my promise. And so what I did is I wrote the book to kind of inspire the mind of children.

It doesn't say they have to believe UFOs are real or not real. But I give them, you know, cases that have happened. Like, for example, the McMinville case. I talk about that. I show a picture of an old-fashioned camera. And I tell them what happens, you know, the farmer comes out, takes a couple of pictures. They see the pictures in the book. And I said, so what do you think happened? Right? And I say, talk to your parents and discuss it with them. And did, you know, did the farmer fake the picture? Do you think he faked it? Or did it? Was it really there? And if it was, what could it be? Right. And I also talked to them about things like, like Skyland. If they see, you know, a bright light going over and how that could be.

sky lab and that they should talk to their parents to get a feel for what they're looking at. And I explained to them that in that very first millisecond that you see anything in the sky, that first millisecond, it's a UFO because you don't know what it is. But your brain starts thinking and it says, wait, did that be a bird? Could that be a kite? No, oh, that's a bird. So within a short period of time, your brain takes that from a UFO to an identified flying object, right? And that's what we do with all things.

And what we have left, right, in the true study of the UFO phenomenon, is those few cases that we can't explain. It doesn't matter how long we take and think about it, we can't come up with a rational explanation for what it was. So that's kind of what I go through in the book. And I just try to get the kids to talk to their parents about it. It's a good book for a kid and a parent to sit down and kind of read together. It's something I wish I had when I was a kid. Yeah, me, clearly, I wish I'd had that. I love it.

You're almost training the younger generation to be iphologists instead of euphologists. Like, let's explain these things conventionally as best we can so that we don't use all of that brain energy on the, quote, unquote, UFOs. Like you said, when you go down the list and you're left with an unknown, those are the cases that we truly have to dig deeper into when we have all of the data and the evidence. So that's cool. That was really cool to hear. Well, let's move, Robert, maybe a little to modern day. Uphology. What's going on right now?

Like we mentioned at the top of the show, it's been a crazy couple weeks in the UFO world, not one, but two. hearings in the United States, a congressional hearing, a Senate hearing. The annual report by the Pentagon's UAP investigative group came out. So, oh, man, my head has just been spinning. We covered it all over here at somewhere in the skies. But I'd like to get your thoughts on everything that's going on. And the first kind of major thing that has happened as of late was the House congressional hearing, where we had a representative. Senator from NASA. We had Luis Elizondo, who everyone who listens to this show is quite familiar with at this point. Tim Gulladet, who's a former Navy Rear Admiral, I believe. And the last

gentleman was a journalist, Michael Schellenberger. So again, this was the second congressional UFO hearing we've had in the past two years where a lot of big claims have been made about UFO crash retrieval programs and reverse engineering technology and stuff like that. So I guess let's start there. Were you able to watch or absorb the congressional hearing? And what were your takeaway? Yeah. So I've watched the hearing.

Okay. And my first take, and this is not to slight the witnesses that were there at all, because, you know, like Tim Gallaudet, I is a really good guy. I liked him. But my first thought was, you know, why couldn't they have gotten some really juicy witnesses, right? I mean, we've all heard from these guys and we already know, you know, what they're going to say. And let me back up just for a moment. So from a science viewpoint, right, like with the SCU, the question of does the U.S. government have

craft or are we hiding alien bodies, right? That's not a science question. That's a black and white. We are or we are not. And that's really up to Congress to subpoena the documents that people claim that they have, right? And maybe they do. But we can't do anything about that from a scientific viewpoint, that's Congress's job. And I will say, as of right now, of course, we don't know everything Congress has done. I think David Grush was the first who said he's seen government documents. I'm not aware that Congress has done anything to investigate that. So I would much have preferred that, for example, the House committee had gone and looked for the those documents, subpoena the people who own those documents and put them under oath to say,

do those documents exist or not? That's to me what they should have done. And if they want more witnesses, I would have subpoenaed the admiral in charge of the USS Roosevelt Strike Group, which that's related to the 2015 incident of the Gimble video and the GoFast videos, right? So that guy should have been brought in. The pilots, right, who videoed the gimbal and who claimed that on their radar, there were a lot more of them. So this guy should have been brought in. And if I was Congress, I would have said, where's the radar data? I want the radar data.

And they better not say I threw it away, right? So that's what I would have done in that congressional, you know, here. to me that would have been much more valuable. I would have to agree. You know, the, anytime these things happen, it's exciting when you're seeing these guys swear under oath and talk about UAP and your adrenaline's pumping and you're like, wow, I can't believe this is actually happening. But then when you sit with it for a little while, you do sort of wonder these things.

Like it's been over a year since Gresh has come forward with all of these claims and we're no closer in the public, at least, of knowing if any of this stuff is true or verifiable. And like you mentioned, these Congress members saying we haven't been able to get any further information in a classified setting or in a skiff with David Grush about these things. And I'm sitting here like, why not? You know, you have people like investigative journalist George Knapp who says, I've been in a skiff with some of these people. Jeremy Corbell and I have been in skiffs. So if us two, us two schmows can get in there and talk about these things in a classified setting, why can't these Congress members? So you do have to wonder like what is really going on here.

Is there a huge, you know, stamp down when it comes to these members? You had representatives like Jared Moscovitz saying at the top of this hearing, we were, some of us were pulled aside. before this hearing and told not to ask some of you specific questions. If that is true, that is, that's a little alarming to me, that in an open congressional floor, that you are being told not to ask these witnesses certain things. Again, you know, you can always pull the national security, security oath classified. You can pull those cards, but at the end of the day, it's troubling if that is the case. So, yeah, did anything else really stand out to you with any of these representatives from a scientific standpoint?

We did have Mike Gold, who worked with NASA, worked on the NASA UAP study group. Yeah, yeah, anything positive come out of this thing. Yeah, I thought and SCUs released a press release about both of them. And the basic thing that we said, and we took pieces out of both the Senate and the House subcommittee discussions was when there were points made about providing funding for academia or scientific groups, because that's where we feel that this needs to go. If we want a solution to UAP, then put the money there for academia to go research it. And it's going to take, I would say, hundreds of millions of dollars each year to properly research this subject. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

A lot of this unfortunately comes down to funding. And that's, I guess that's where we could go next. funding when it comes to the official Pentagon UAP program, which is now called Arrow, we had a Senate hearing that was headed by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who was speaking with the new head of Arrow, John Kozlowski. And this came right on the heels of Arrow releasing their annual UAP report. So let's move to that. What did you think of the Senate UFO hearing? What do you think of John, our new director, who seems to be taking things a little bit differently than the past director. And yeah, yeah, what did you make of the Senate? So, yeah. So let me just put a little bit of

a background on that. Yeah. So the previous head of arrow, right, which was Sean Kirkpatrick. Yes. With all due respect to him, I just don't feel that he did the right job at Arrow. And for example, that first report that came out that was supposed to look at the history of the UAP subject, it was horrible. And I actually wrote an entire post on my ex-account, formerly called Twitter, about all of the errors that were in that report. I mean, I don't know who wrote the report. Maybe they got an intern to write it for them, but it was just filled with mistakes. So that's where we were.

And I like John. I think there's a good chance he may do well, right? And so I'm willing to realize that some of what, like, he presented in this last meeting, was left over from his previous administration, right? And so I think everyone should give him an opportunity to, you know, run Arrow in the way that, you know, he thinks it needs to be a run. And I'll say we've had communications with Arrow and prior, under the previous administration, we never could get any communication out of Arrow.

So I think there's improvements that are happening. Yeah. So in terms of that, now a lot of people have been talking in the UFO research community about some of the determinations that error has made. And this came in the form of them talking, John, specifically talking about some anomalous cases that have yet to be resolved, in some cases that they believe. they have resolved, two of which being the GoFast video and the Aguadilla Puerto Rico incident, now both of which the SCU has looked at in tremendous amount of focus and attention in analysis.

So what do you make of their determinations with both of those, Robert, and where do you stand when it comes to? Right. So that's a good question, right? So in the Aguadilla case, and I don't remember the length of our report, but it's somewhere around a 150 page report because of the appendices. But we looked, we took a year and a half to evaluate that case. And it's been put into writing. It exists on her website. And Arrow, you know, John has, you know, presented basically,

I guess some summary points out of his case. But we don't really want to reply until we've seen their final report. Right. And so we contacted Errol. They responded back within 24 hours and said, we will get you a report as soon as it passes through our publication process. And so what we're going to do is we'll look at that report and compare it to ours. And if by chance they're right.

then we will release a statement that, you know, it's correct. If there's discrepancies that we see in the report, then we'll put that in what we write up. But we're going to treat it in an academic fashion. We're not going to jump on social media and start listing, you know, here's all the errors in, you know, a given report. Yeah. And I suspect that report was probably in. initiated back under the previous administration. So even if there's errors in it, that doesn't, you know, and there's nothing wrong with

errors, right? Any science-based report can have errors in it, right? I mean, our report on Audubody could have errors in it. So that's what we'll look at. We'll look at the report and see if they found some errors in ours and then we'll, you know, do a write-up on it. Right. Yeah. Isn't that what they call kind of like a poke hole situation where you put all the scientists in the room? I heard this on another show recently. My good buddy Andy McGillen over at that UFO podcast talking about this concept of like, yeah, put all the people in the room with all the data, all the evidence and see if you can poke holes in it. If you can't, that's the closest you can come to a definitive explanation. Exactly. And what we did, and hopefully this is what they did, you look at all the data you have. So in that video, you look from beginning to end and you put together your hypothesis, right? Okay, does it fit the information we have from beginning to end? And if it doesn't in one or two places, is there a reason, right? And is it a legitimate reason? Or are we going to have to go and

grasp, right, for something crazy in order to explain something, right? So that's what we'll look at. In the case of GoFAST, SCU has not actually done a report. We've looked at it internally, but the problem with the GoFast video is that we have not been able to interview the pilots, right? Because my understanding is there's probably still active duty. This happened in 2015. The same thing with the gimbal video, which Arrow did not comment on, but we have not done a full report on the gimbal video because we have not had access to the pilots. And we feel it's important to be able to talk to the witnesses because a witness's testimony is just as valuable as the equipment's testimony, right? because our eyes can see things across multiple, you know, wavelengths and we're seeing it 3D. And there are things we can do that that equipment can't do.

Of course, the advantage of the equipment is it's not going to change its mind on what it saw, right? And sometimes we can do that, right? we can or we can input our prejudice into what we're seeing. But there's pluses and minuses to both. But that's why we would want to be able to talk to those pilots before we would want to spend the time investigating the video. Because it takes a lot of work to investigate a video and to go do that and not have had access to the pilots. It's in our view, it's not not worthwhile. Right.

Yeah, I think when you have the data and the evidence from, let's say, radar or different instrumentation on an aircraft, and then you can triangulate that with the witness testimony, that's when you can really get to the core of what this could be or couldn't be. Robert, I love your thoughts on this. Now, there are many skeptics out there. Well, not just skeptics, but people in general who will argue that. that pilots are no greater witnesses than, you know, the person on the ground seeing a UFO. What do you think of that idea that pilots are no more better at identifying or a UFO than the average person back here on the ground? Right. Yeah, there's some truth to that, but there's also a lot of untruth to it also, right? So if you're talking about, let's say, a pilot's flying at night and he sees a distant light, right?

And he doesn't know for sure what it is. I mean, his testimony is probably no better than anyone else's. And your best testimony would be an astronomer sitting in that scene, right? But if you're talking about an object that pulls alongside his aircraft, right, Like with what Frager had in Frager's example, right? He's actually dives down towards his tic-tac and engages it and he's flying around it. Well, at that point in time, your pilot is your best witness because he, his mind, he has looked at objects that he's engaged at close distance.

So he is better equipped to estimate the size of the object. Was it 15 feet, 30 feet, or 45 feet in size, right? He's also better equipped to judge the distance because that's what he does all the time in his profession. So, you know, it depends on what he's looking at. He's looking at a far off star. No, he may not be the greatest witness. If he's engaging an object or an object's off his wingtip, I'll take the pilot's testimony over an astronomers or a physicist or anyone like that. in that situation.

Right. Yeah, that's a very good point. I would too, rather than someone just seeing it from afar, for sure. I do have, if you're okay, some listener questions that came in. Are you willing to stick around for a few? Yeah, I always enjoy the listener questions because you never know what you're going to get. You never know. Like a UFO investigation.

Exactly. Always a land of curveballs. Yeah. Cool. Well, our first one comes from Ricardo over on our Patreon. Now, our patrons get priority to ask our guest's listener questions. So he goes to the top of the line here. So thank you, Ricardo. And his question for you is, is the SCU planning on opening up its doors to citizen scientists? I'm thinking of something along the lines of SETI at home or tagging images on a web portal to create a database for training. AI system. So yeah, any plans to start working more with the public? I know you guys do a lot with the public, but yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we're not averse to working with the public. As a matter of fact, we have a one of our projects is development of a database, right, where we'll collect all the data that exist on all UFO reports that we can get our hands on. And we'll put them into a database that the public would have access to.

So if the citizen scientist wanted to, you know, do a research project using that database, they could do it. So that's one area where, you know, we're looking at working with, you know, the public. Cool. Awesome. That's good to hear. That's always exciting when you can get the public more involved with these things. Because I think a lot of people feel helpless.

when it comes to these things. Like they see a UFO, maybe they report it, but then, you know, where does it go from there? And that can be even true for things like whatever, sending a report to Mufon or, you know, this new Enigma initiative that's out there. Or even Arrow. We've heard rumors that some military people

who've reported their accounts to Arrow, it just gets swallowed up and they never hear from them again. So it's good to hear. You know, I'll have one more thing. to that, Ryan. And that is, SU is not, although the bulk of SCU are people with science backgrounds, we have people, we need people in other areas too, right? For example, we all, sometimes we need a social media manager,

someone who has the time on their hands and has experience, for example, with managing our social media accounts, right? Or someone who is experienced in writing grants, or someone who has, you know, experience and going towards, you know, corporations that might provide a seed money, for example. So if someone has those skill sets, they're always welcome to go to the SCU website. Right, which we will have linked in the show notes for you guys. I highly suggest checking out the papers you guys have published and how you guys can possibly get involved. as well. This is an interesting one to bring us back to Stephenville, Robert. We didn't talk much

about that, but Tanner on Patreon wants to know where does that stand now? Where do you personally stand on the whole Stephenville event? And yeah, he asked, I know a lot of people might not be familiar with it. So I guess maybe a brief rundown, if possible. I know it's a pretty complex case. A real brief summary on Stephenville. In January, excuse me, get some water. Yeah, no worries. It's in January of 2008. And this happened in Stephenville, Texas, in the surrounding 20-mile area.

Statenville is in northern Texas. So if you know what, if you've ever been to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, there's what used to be called Carswell Air Force Base there. And that's where there were jets from there involved in this. And 70 miles to the southwest is Stephenville. And a little bit past there is a military operating area where these jets normally fly and drop flares to various operations. So in January of 2006, or it was 2008, 2008, we got reports from, oh, two dozen people within a matter of hours of these very bright lights that were moving at a high rate of speed and that various people had seen. So I went to Stephenville and I personally

interviewed a lot of the witnesses and I got radar data from the FAA for that day. And so what I was able to do, and this is, as far as I know, the only time this is a result. probably the only time this has ever been done is I was able to match up witness testimony with the radar data. In other words, for example, there was a constable who was at his home and he says, I look to the south and this is the time of night it was. And there's this object that's hovering. And I go back, you know, into the house to get my wife. She doesn't want to leave her favorite TV show. so I come out with my son. And now this object that was to the south is directly above my home.

And it is just about a dozen lights just moving in random fashion. Then suddenly the lights come together and they move to the northeast towards Stevenville at an extreme rate of speed. And he used the term like the speed of life, but he was being facetious. So I get the radar data, right? So on radar, I know where the guy's home is, where he was standing. I know what time it was. So I look at that on the radar data.

Well, what's on radar? There's an object to the south of his home, just like he said. And it sits there for six or seven spins of the radar, which is every 10 seconds or so. And then suddenly you see on radar the next week, this object is to the northeast. And the minimum speed, right, was 1,900 miles per hour. And it could have been much faster than that. And we don't have anything that can hover and suddenly go to 1,900 miles an hour in less than 10 seconds. That's approximately 9 G forces, right?

And that's in direct what we call linear acceleration, not like an F-18, which he generates 7 or 8G forces because he's banking. This is straight ahead. That F-18 going straight ahead won't generate more than maybe one and a half G-forces. This guy was over nine G-forces. And so we don't have anything that can do that. And it's on radar. And I have a witness who saw it. And they all match up the kind, the location, you know, the extreme speed.

So I don't know what it was, right? There's no way I can know what it was. The only thing I can say is what it was not. And it was not, we have nothing, you know, in 2008, nor 16 years later in 2024 that can do that. So, Stingville's a true total unknown in my book. Wow. And there was one other witness where we had radar data that matched up with him, too. And so that was what made that such a neat case.

I love that case. That's, yeah, that's all you could ever ask for, except for an answer. Except for the answer, yeah. Yeah, except the most important part. But, hey, we like living in the journey. It's not always the destination, I guess, Robert. Yeah, it's hard to get the answer sometimes if, unless you can grab whatever it was, it was there. Exactly.

And put it on the congressional UFO. floor. Yeah. Thank you to Ricardo and Paul for those Patreon questions. I'm going to move to Facebook here. We have Paul and Paul wants to say in a recent interview, Dr. Kevin Canuth speculated there may

be a gap in our understanding of the quantum relationship with inertia. To what extent do you, Robert, think inertia may play a role in UAP craft? The only Okay, so inertia, right, is our mass as we sit here.

And since we're sitting on planet Earth, it's one G-force of, you know, force on us. And inertia is that, you know, we're going to remain sitting here unless there was a force acting to push me up, right? Which is the way a rocket works, everything else does. Well, the problem with high G forces is that your craft will begin to tear apart. An F-18, for example, is not going to withstand more than maybe 15-17 G-forces, then the wings rip off of it. And the human being inside it is going to be smushed into jello if you go much beyond, you know, 17-20 Gs. Well, like these objects, and we have data where they go much faster than that, like in the Nimitz case, we had a calculation based on how fast the object disappeared from those four pilots, Fraber and the other three.

That was over two to 300 G-forces, and I think this is what Kevin is referring to. So how can you do that, right? So one theory is that somehow you reduce the mass, the inertial mass of an object. Now, science today, as far as we know, there has been no evidence to say that you can reduce the inertial mass of an object. In other words, I have a given amount of mass, right, and you can't make me weigh an object. an ounce while I'm sitting here in this chair. But as far as we know. But the concept is that there might be a way to lower what we call the inertial mass of an object.

And so think about this. If you could, let's just say, if you could reduce my weight to a fraction of a gram, right? Well, now you could just about shine a laser on me, and I would take off it near the speed of light, right? Because there's no mass that the laser has to overcome any significant mass. And that would explain a lot of what we see, right? It explains the ability of extreme acceleration. It explains the lack of interaction with the atmosphere, because there's no mass interacting with that atmosphere.

And it would explain how an object survives that type of acceleration. Because if you have basically no mass, you are not being endangered by that extreme acceleration. So that is one concept that to me fits all the facts of what we see. but as to how you, you know, reduce the inertial mass of an object, nobody knows how. Yeah, it's just a theory at this point, right? It reminds me of, you know, we have these ideas that some of these craft aren't really even being pushed or propelled, but pulled instead. Yeah. Like, you look at something like the Tick-Tac that's going from like the surface of the water,

up to the, you know, the rumored cap point back down and then presumably maybe off into space. I don't know. But you have to wonder, like, what could propel something that quickly and that rigid? It just astounds me every time I think about it. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Let's move to, I believe this is our last listener question for you, Robert.

Kate on Facebook asks, why is the government? so afraid to reveal the truth about UFOs. Certainly no government on the planet owns them or controls them. So, yeah, why do you think they're afraid to reveal the truth if they actually know that true? Right. And that's a good question. And it's one that I'm just speculating on, right?

Because we don't really know, you know, as to why they won't reveal everything. I'm fairly confident there is information they haven't revealed exactly what that information is, I don't know. But I suspect that the main reason is this, that if you're dealing with a technology that's far advanced, there's probably some level of hope that, okay, maybe we could figure something out on how to reverse engineer that technology. And we don't want our adversaries to learn anything from us. Right. So we don't even want to tell them what the shapes of the objects are that we think are the real objects versus maybe the unreal objects. And so that's one possibility right there, right, is that

because of all these nation states that make up this planet and all of them constantly at war with each other, then you don't want your enemy to know anything. Now, another possibility would simply be that, well, there was a concern of how the population would react to it, right? But I kind of favor the former that it's just related to military and not wanting to give out any potential information to your adversaries. Sources and methods, you know, that seems to be the wall they hide behind when it comes to, you know. It is definitely a wall that they hide behind. Yeah, it's not even like the craft itself that they're not willing to share with the public.

It's, you know, we don't want any information to get out of where we have these sensor systems, the advancement in the technology we're using to capture some of these UAP. And of course, you know, the technology itself. And look at some of these leaked videos we've gotten from like in the Middle East and whatnot. Like these are being taken by spy drones, like things that technically shouldn't even be there at the time. So it's, it is. It's frustrating because it's like, yeah, we want to know the shape. We want to know what the craft did. And we're sick of getting like these very quick whatever 20, 30 second clips of a craft.

And then what? What happens after that? Like what happened after the Tick-Tac that Chad Underwood caught went off the screen? Like, these are things we want to know. Are these longer videos out there? And what did they actually show? Yeah, and you know there are because just take the gimbal video, right? These guys are screaming like crazy about what they're seeing.

And then all of a sudden the video ends. Now, why would he have stopped videoing? Right. Yeah, it just makes no. Yeah, that's enough of that. All right, we got to go land. I got to go feed the kids. Yeah.

I don't know. I don't know. Well, okay. So to sort of wrap things up with you, Robert, and thank you for your time. We've had two UFO hearings. We had the report come out. We have the work you guys are doing over at the SCU. We have things like the James Webb Telescope doing its thing. Galileo Project over here with Avi Loeb. Americans for Safe Arrow. Like every morning I wake up, there's a new organization looking into the UAP. It's so cool. It's so exciting. But what comes next? Where do you think we need to be focusing our attention in the UFO, I guess, research community and the public at large when it comes to this every elusive topic of UFOs? Yeah, I really support pushing on Congress to provide more resources and funding for academia and scientific organizations. organizations to study the subject. I think that's the way we need to go. That's where it's at. I would have to agree. And you are seeing UFOs making their way into classrooms more and more

each day. Like you mentioned, hard sciences, soft sciences. You have Harvard University students all getting involved with the Galileo project. I know that you guys work with a lot of different institutions and it seems like you're partnering with new people every day, which is super exciting, not just in America, but globally, which I think is very important. You mentioned that, right? I forgot to even mention one of the papers that we just wrote was we partnered with some University of Toronto students. And it's basically a paper where we took the very best of the best cases across history. So in other words, the object was very close to of the witness. We have multiple witnesses, right? The cases that either somebody made it up

or it's real. There's nothing in between. So we took those. We came up with 301 cases. And then we looked at, okay, what are the characteristics of these objects? And so in the paper, we, you know, we show two, actually three basic disc shapes and two different triangular shapes. And those are the most common of all the shapes. Interesting. And that paper's on our website also. So all of these are available. Oh, perfect.

Okay. Well, again, guys, we will link to the website for SCU where you can read all these papers. Well, that leads into my last most important question, Robert. Where can we find everything the SCU is up to? And what do you have going on in the world of UFOs and where can we find? everything you're up to. Well, yeah, probably the best place is is on our website. And, you know, that's explore sCU.org. And we, there's papers on there. There's papers written by others that we think are very good papers that we recommend people read. People can also go to, for example,

to our Twitter sites. There's an SCU Twitter site. And then I have a Twitter site also. where I post things. So across all of that, they can, you know, stay up to date with what we're, you know, doing and what we're working on. Probably one of the next things we work on will be the, you know, looking at the paper that Arrow wrote. You know, that's on our radar screen. And then we have a conference that will be, we'll be in June of this year. Okay. We're working on that. Okay. Perfect. And again, we'll be sure to link to all of that. And I hope people can make it out.

I've had many friends and colleagues who have made it to your events. I unfortunately being in the UK now, it's a little tougher. But yeah, I plan to make it out there at some point for sure. And of course, guys, I can't recommend it enough. The new book, UFOs. A scientist explains what we know and don't know by Robert as well. go check that out wherever you get your books um is that available in audiobook as well robert or is that just it's not it's not yet available an audio book okay but ebook i would assume

the publisher on that got you try to convince them to do that i know it's not easy trust me i've been struggling with the audio book for a while now for mine too but uh i can't recommend the book enough and um yeah yeah everyone please go visit and explore the SCU. I love the link you guys have for that as well. And we have the Soul Foundation event that's taking place as we're recording this. I know you guys have representatives at that as well. So we will be having an insider's perspective of that event from our wonderful moderator,

Suzanne, who is at the event right now. She'll be reporting to us on the live stream this upcoming week. So be on the lookout for that. And be on the lookout for everything that Robert does as well, guys. Go follow him on Twitter and all of that. And I have to thank you again, Robert. I can't believe this is the first time you've been on the proper podcast. But this has been so refreshing.

I've enjoyed it, Ryan. I enjoyed this just like I enjoyed your books. Oh, thank you. It's great. Thank you so much. And next time I'm in the States, the beers are on me, my friend. That sounds great. Thank you so much for joining me.

me today and somewhere in the skies. All right. Thanks. Take care of.