Somewhere in the Skies - Sarah Scoles: THEY ARE ALREADY HERE

Episode Date: February 23, 2020

On episode 149 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan is joined by science writer, Sarah Scoles, to discuss her upcoming book, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers. The book is an anthropological look at the UFO community, told through first-person experiences with researchers in their element as they pursue what they see as a solvable mystery―both terrestrial and cosmic. In the book, and in this conversation, we meet the bigwigs, the scrappy upstarts, the field investigators, the rational people, and the unhinged kooks of this sprawling community. How do they interact with each other? How do they interact with “anomalous phenomena”? And how do they reflect the politics and culture of the larger world around them? Guest Bio: Sarah Scoles is a science writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Popular Science, Discover, New Scientist, Aeon, and Wired. A former editor at Astronomy Magazine, Scoles worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the location of the first-ever SETI project. She is also the author of Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Preorder Sarah's new book by CLICKING HERE Ryan will be speaking at Contact in the Desert this Spring. For tickets, CLICK HERE Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at www.CWseed.com Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is part of the eOne podcast network. To learn more, CLICK HERE 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

This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprague. And today, we're talking to science writer, Sarah Skolls, about our new book. They are already here. UFO culture and why we see saucers. This book, which will release on March 3rd, is an anthropological look at the UFO community, told through first-person experiences with research.

in their element as they pursue what they see as a solvable mystery, both terrestrial and cosmic. More than half a century since Roswell, UFOs have been making headlines once again. On December 17, 2017, the New York Times ran a front-page story about an approximately five-year program by the Pentagon called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The article hinted, and its sources clearly said in subsequent television interviews, that some of the ships in question couldn't be linked to any country. The implication, of course, was that they might be linked to other solar systems. The UFO community, those who had been thinking about seeing and analyzing supposed flying saucers,

for years, was surprisingly skeptical of the revelation. Their incredulity and doubt rippled across the internet. Many of the people most invested in UFO reality weren't really buy in it. And as Sarah did her own digging, she ventured to dark conspiracy-filled corners of the internet, to a former paranormal research center in Utah and to the hallways of the Pentagon. In They Are Already Here, we meet the Big Wigs, the scrappy Upstarts, the field investigators, the rational people, and the unhinged cooks of this sprawling community. How do they interact with each other?

How do they interact with anomalous phenomena? And how do they, as any group must, reflect the politics and culture of the larger world around them? We'll tackle this and so much more in our conversation with Sarah's skulls. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me today and somewhere in the skies. Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Ryan. Absolutely. It's such a small world. I had read one of your books a few years ago. And then I would say a few months ago, I heard you on one of the podcasts I listened to, the Mad Scientist podcast. And I started doing some digging. And I was like, oh, my God,

that's the author of the book I read. That's so cool. Yeah, I mean, it's awesome for me as a writer to hear that anyone has read my book. So I'm glad you didn't. I'm glad you liked it. And now that I've been on the Mad Scientist podcast, I listen to it all the time. Yeah, yeah, that tends to happen. Yep. And now you've been pulled into this UFO subculture, which we're going to get to.

But I hope this will be an easier one for you because, you know, I'm not about the hardcore belief and woo-woo and all that stuff. I like to take a grounded objective approach with the show. And that's why your work resonated so much with me. So we will definitely talk about that in your new book. They are already here, UFO culture and why we see saucers. But before we even get to that, Sarah, could it's maybe for my audience who's never heard of you? Could you give them a little feel of who you are and what you do?

Sure. Yeah, I'm a freelance science journalist, and I'm a contributing writer at Wired Magazine in Popular Science, which is where probably most of my stuff appears. And aside from this book, I mean, I don't actually cover UFOs full time. I mostly write about space. businesses, the satellite industry, and kind of culture within astronomy and science. So that's what I do most of the time. And then other times I go down this rabbit hole with you. Yes, yes. It's good to get in and out of that rabbit hole. I mean now and again. But yeah, so like I said, I first heard about your work through your book Making Contact. So could you tell us maybe a little about that book and what inspired you to write it?

Sure. So this book, Making Contact, it's a biography of a scientist named Jill Tarter. She's a radio astronomer, and she has spent the past, let's see, more than 40 years working in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, study, mostly looking for radio signals from maybe alien civilizations. We should be searching for life beyond the Earth because we want to understand what the laws of chemistry and physics have produced in this universe. Are we the only life there is? Are we the only intelligent species? Or are we one of many? How do we fit in? It's a very old question. Humans have asked it.

And we want to find the answer. And I first encountered Jill Tartar's work in fictional form. She was the basis for the main character in the book and movie Contact. And I saw the movie Contact when I was like 12 years old. and I became totally obsessed with it. I made my parents just rent it from Blockbuster all the time when Blockbuster was a thing. Those were the days. Just imagine if I could have streamed it when I was 12 every day.

But it was the first time I realized A, that radio astronomy existed, and I thought it was so cool that you could get invisible information from the universe. And also that there were scientists whose job it was to ask big questions like, are we a lot? what else is going on in the universe, what are we doing here? And I just thought that was so, so interesting. And it led me in the direction of, I wanted to be a radio astronomer at first, and I did some schooling and internships in that direction. But eventually I got into writing instead. And so then when I thought, hey, maybe I want to write a book,

I was thinking about, you know, what is a subject that I would love enough to spend enough time on it to write 250 pages or whatever. And I went back to this first thing that had inspired me so much. And I just wrote Jill Tarter an email. And I said, hey, you've kind of, you don't know me really, but you've been my inspiration for, you know, a long time. And no one's written your biography. Maybe I could do it. And she said, uh, let's give it a shot. What was it like? I mean, I would imagine you, you were talking to her all the time. Every day, the book was so descriptive and, and accurate to her life. And it was very inspirational. So what was that like? Did you ever meet her in person? Yeah, I actually, I was working at astronomy

magazine at the time when I first got the idea, and I actually quit that job just to move to California and be able to be around her and interview her all the time. So that's when I started freelancing. And I would just go over to her house in Berkeley, and we would go through her photo albums. And she actually had this list of her 100 top moments in life. So we kind of just went through her 100 top moments and figured out, you know, what what the search for extraterrestrial intelligence had been up to for the past 40 years because she was the person who had kind of been there the whole time. And we're definitely, we're going to revisit SETI, I think, a little bit in this conversation.

But, yeah, that was so exciting. So then this led to your second book. They are already here, UFO culture, and why we see Sosters. So you move to this, you move from making contact, SETI, a lot of us in the UFO field, no matter your thoughts on SETI, know what it is, what it represents. But then the new book came, and it started with your own admittance to a UFO sighting, which, you know, I can attest you too when I first wrote my UFO book. I was very hesitant to include my own story in the book.

I didn't know how people would feel about it, but, you know, I went full steam ahead and said, look, if I'm going to write a book about people having UFO sightings, I got to talk about my own. otherwise, you know, what's the point? So would you mind maybe telling us a little about the experience that you relay in the beginning of your new book? Sure. Yeah, it starts with the solar eclipse that happened a few years ago. And I went out to Wyoming. I live in Colorado. So we just drove up north, kind of near Jackson Hole in Wyoming. And my friends and I didn't want to pay like $5,000 a night for somebody's Airbnb. And so we were just camping out in the national forest. And we, we, you know, hiked up to the top of a mountain, saw the whole solar eclipse, which was incredible.

I'm sure some of your listeners saw it too. And it was just, we all talked about it like it was kind of like being on a different planet to see something like that happen and for the earth to change so much. So we did that. We hiked back down. And as we did every night on this trip, we went stargazing right before we went to bed. And as we were doing that, we saw this thing that looked like a satellite. it was moving like a satellite across the sky and we were watching it.

And then as we were watching it, this beam of light just kind of swept down from it and then came to focus right on us for a second and then went away. And none of us said anything as it was going on because we were just kind of in awe, like, what is going on? What is happening? How does the thing know we're here? And we were just very perplexed for a few minutes. And we, you know, we threw out the alien hypothesis. maybe this is the time that something truly mysterious really is happening to us.

And then eventually after a few minutes, we realized that it was actually an eridium flare from one of the Arridium communications satellites. But that sighting, even though we eventually figured out what it was, it really gave me a sense of what it's like to have a UFO sighting and what it means to see a mystery in the sky and to think, like just even just for a second, even though with you. figured it out. There's truly some mystery up there and like something cares that I'm here. I like that. Yeah. And I mean, you know, no matter what the the answer to a UFO sighting is, even if it's something conventional, prosaic, weather anomaly, what have you. That doesn't take

away any of the extraordinary power behind it, I feel, either. I mean, there's so many things here on Earth that continue to mystify us that probably aren't alien or probably aren't paranormal. So that's pretty cool. It was kind of like your origin story. into the UFO world. So I was happy to hear about that in the beginning of the book. Something really hard to hit us with at the beginning. So that was great. Yeah, thanks.

I guess from that, what compelled you to write this book, specifically on UFOs and sort of the culture that's born from this topic? What made you go from making contact to this? This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blog, Blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry.

And the best heavyweight in the world, Frances Ngano versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Yeah, I think a lot of people would like the answer to that question, especially maybe Jill Tarter. Yeah, but yeah, it really started a few months after that sighting in the solar eclipse. In December 2017, like for a lot of people, I read the New York Times article about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Earlier this week, the New York Times in Politico revealed the existence of a secret government program to investigate UFO sightings. It was especially focused on encounters by members of the military.

The program began in 2007 and ended five years later, but its former head, Luis Elizondo, is convinced that something compelling is out there. What we are seeing is something that is not traditional aircraft. It's not a drone. It's not something that we can easily say, oh, that's an airplane or that belongs to this country or that country. In fact, my submission is that what we are looking at is truly, by definition, exotic technologies beyond next generation technology. It seemed to me to be making incredible claims that would be, you know, one of the biggest stories in history of what it was implying was true. And since my job as a journalist is to go, you know, investigate and confirm things when my editor asked like, hey, do you want to go look

into this thing, the New York Times published? I said, yeah, sure. So I just, I started following up on what was in that article about the Pentagon's UFO research and the videos that I'm sure lots of your listeners are familiar with, just kind of going through point by point and seeing what I could find out. And that's a whole other story. But I guess the gist of it is that, you know, I was super new to the UFO field and there are people like you and others who have been in it for years and years and know a whole lot more than I do. And so, you know, when you're a reporter, you have the benefit of just being able to ask people about their knowledge so that you don't have to build it from the ground up. So I got to know just UFO researchers who had a much bigger background

and firmer context of what was going on. And they, you know, they weren't who I expected them to be. I had a lot of ideas about who cared about UFOs. We all do. And they weren't all flattering. And so because of that, I was surprised to meet people who were doing, who I thought were doing really great work who were doing a better job investigating than I was. And it made me just want to get to know more about, you know, their world and what fascinated them about this. And then also kind of understand why this New York Times story and ATIP were hitting such a cultural nerve right now. Yeah. It is, it's very timely. And we'll definitely get to ATIP and Tom DeLong and what he's done, whether people think it's good or bad for the UFO community or the UFO topic overall. But,

But yeah, so you started the book. You went into the belly of the beast, the UFO Congress. Now, this is something that is near and dear to my heart. I spent, God, how many years volunteering at this event every year? I would fly out to Arizona from New York just to volunteer. Go backstage, work the sound. I'll clean the toilets if you want me to. I don't care.

But get me to the UFO Congress, the biggest UFO convention, pretty much in North America. And it is, it's an experience. I'm sure you can attest to me. So what did you take from going to this event, Sarah? And yeah, how was it going to the International UFO Congress for the first time? I feel like I should have volunteered to clean toilets. I might have learned something also. But yeah, I was a couple months into working on some stories for Wired about this.

And so I just thought, you know, I haven't actually met any UFO people, for lack of a better term. And I haven't interacted with anyone in person. And, you know, this conference is happening. And maybe I should just go. So I just got a last minute ticket to Arizona and a very cheap hotel room and flew out kind of on a whim. And so I wanted to get a sense of like the scope of the community and the variety of interests and also see how people were talking about these new UFO revelations. So the chapter is mostly just an account of what it was like to be at the conference. And I think my biggest takeaway, which I'm sure you found going there also, is just a huge spectrum of beliefs and interest that people have.

So I guess like one of the first talks I went to when I was there was by a researcher named Cheryl Costa. November 4th, 2012, and there's a little article that says UFOs have been declining since the 1980s. Maybe they were always just an urban legend. And being well read, I said, that doesn't sound right. So I went out to the National UFO Reporting Center, and I looked up the yearly numbers, and the chart went up like this. And I'm thinking, the first question I thought to myself, this is baloney. This is misinformation.

Shortly after that, I started reading some of these reports on the national databases from New York State. I was hearing very amazing stories. See, everybody had been told up until that point. Only cooops and crackpots logged these things. And I found it was mostly people who saw something amazing and wanted to tell the story and say, God, this is what I said. saw. I didn't believe in this stuff until I saw this thing. So I went to a couple of editors in 2013 and pitched the idea of doing a like a weekly UFO column for New York State. And I got throwing out a couple offices, laughed out of a couple offices. Finally I found an editor in Syracuse New Times and he said,

let's try this. So we tried it for a month. He calls me in. I figured he's going to take me off. He says, no, no, we're not taking you down. You're doing better than all the rest of the columnists combined. Who had done a statistical analysis of a bunch of sightings and kind of affirmed some ideas and had interesting information about like who sees UFOs which are people who have dogs

and people who smoke because they're outside and they know what it looks like in this guy and then found other things contradictory to what people think like that there aren't more UFO sightings around nuclear sites and things like that. But then there were other people like speaking about more dubious

things like a secret space program or showing documents that had already been proven to be hoaxes. And I just, I found it really fascinating that all of these different people kind of along different lines of evidence had gotten together at the same place and we're sharing all their information. And yeah, it took me a while to try to make sense of that. But at the end of the conference, I went to a talk that Robbie Graham gave, which, yeah, which was kind of about a little bit about how UFO culture is a little bit of.

bit like religion. And that made me go get a book that he'd edited called Reframing the debate, which kind of talks about that and the different spectrums of belief and how people treat stuff. And then that led me to a bunch of academic papers from religious scholars and anthropologists. And then, yeah, then I was in the middle of writing a book when I didn't mean to be. Yeah. That will often happen. The UFO Congress is definitely the Breakfast Club of Ephology. You do have every sort of belief there and type of person or topic. It's interesting. It's definitely a cultural or a sociological study in itself. I'm happy to hear you say, Cheryl Costa. For a lot of people who don't know, she actually was the focal point of an article that came out in the New York

Times months before the New York Times quote unquote, you know, bombshell broke with A-Tip and everything. So we truly do have Cheryl Costa to thank for getting the topic out to the mainstream in the New York Times months before that. Robbie Graham also, I did contribute a chapter to that book, Reframing the Debate, and this is another instance where you have someone asking new questions of UFOs. Instead of, like you said, these documents that have been proven to be phony or hoaxed many, many years ago, yet people are still touting these and sticking to their beliefs. And it's tough.

It's tough when you're dealing with people and their beliefs. systems because we know even mostly in today's world, you're not going to change many people's minds if they're passionate enough about something. But to know that there are people out there like you, not only studying the phenomenon, but the people who follow it, who believe in it, I think it's very important. We do have to put that mirror back on ourselves if we ever truly want answers. And you did mention atyth earlier, and this kind of bleeds into change. chapter two of your book titled The Black Vault versus the Rockstar. I love your titles,

by the way. Thank you. I had fun with those late at night. They just get wittier and wittier as go on. But yeah, you follow this all through throughout the first chapter, through the lens of John Greenwald, the Black Volt. A lot of our listeners know him. He's been on the show a few times. He has the world's biggest database of declassified documents for the government pertaining to UFOs, other top secret projects, everything you could possibly think of. So what was your biggest takeaway, I guess, when it comes to this narrative that TTSA to the Stars Academy seems to be pushing and the company they've created when it comes to UFOs? Yeah, I struggled a lot with this chapter actually because there were so many ups and downs

and changes and contradictions and spin from all sides. Like even as I was writing it and up to the very last minute before it went to the printer that just trying to get the A-TTIP story and the TTSA story just down in a comprehensive way for a general person who isn't familiar with any of this probably was really hard. And actually that ended up being my biggest takeaway was that it's complicated and confusing and that I think that that is on purpose. So TTSA right now is kind of pushing the narrative. You know, UIPs are here.

They're a national security threat. Here are these videos. We've been studying them. And the government was so dismissive of them that we've had to go to the private sector and bring this information to you through this company that also publishes, you know, books and movies and music. And they give everybody, like, just enough evidence to believe. believe whatever they already want to believe and not enough evidence to actually prove anything definitive one way or the other. A lot of people will probably disagree with me about that,

but that's where I stand on it. And then on the other hand, the Pentagon is in a lot of ways doing this a similar thing. They've gone back and forth, changed their story, given confusing statements, been cagey about the UAP videos, where they come from. And it's just kind of impossible for not just the average person, but for people who actually investigate UFO's full-time or as a really serious hobby to know from the outside what's actually going on. And so I guess my main conclusion was that it must be in everybody's interests on all sides somehow to only provide limited information and kind of let people run with whatever interpretation that they already kind of like. And I think if anyone is on your

UFO Twitter, they see that happen basically every single day in fights on there. Yeah. As with any, I guess, you know, subculture or community, we definitely have our squabbles. That's for damn sure. Well, yeah, I mean, moving away from that and kind of, you mentioned the Pentagon. Now, chapter three, the government's closet, this dives deep into the government's role in UFO studies and investigation, you know, covering everything from Project Sign, Grudge, Blue Book, all these things that all of us in the UFO field know probably too much about for our own good,

but it resulted in the Conding Committee reports. And this was pretty interesting. The government flat out came out and said UFOs posed no threat to national security, which kind of goes against everything atyp is saying now. And there's no true scientific examination that could be done any further with it. So this left a lot of UFO people out there not. believing the government and starting to really mistrust the government. I would say this is one of the first times we really saw this happen when we started to lose trust in the people who

govern us. So how did you feel after looking deeper into how the government itself, this all encompassing government as it were capital G, how they handle the UFO issue and how they've handled it throughout the years, I guess. Yeah, it's funny that you say the government capital because I've been saying it a lot now that I'm talking about the book and it makes me feel like I am a conspiracy theorist on the sidewalk spouting things about the government, but there's really no other way to say it. Yeah. Yeah, I came away with the impression that it's really reasonable for UFO buffs to not

trust the government because in the past, it's really proven itself to be pretty unreliable and not transparent about the subject. I think there's a CIA historian whose report, I quote in the chapter, who says something like that the way the CIA and other agencies behaved kind of in the mid-20th century really sowed the seeds of mistrust by kind of conducting UFO programs in bad faith, keeping a lot of information from the public. like it studies on the psychological impacts of UFO flaps and things like that. And then, you know, things like Roswell, which I think we might talk about later, but, you know, spreading bad information. And in John Greenwald's book that came out fairly recently, he documents really well with archival materials, ways that the government has covered up information about.

about UFOs and its interest in them more specifically. And so for me, I mean, that kind of gives us no reason to think it wouldn't be doing the same thing now. Like if we know one thing about the way people and governments behave, it's that mostly, you know, past as present. And if they did it before, they're probably doing it now. So, I mean, I guess do I think that in itself is evidence that, you know, they have an alien spaceship in Area 51?

No. But I think the capital G government is secretive. about a lot of things. You know, if you talk to national security specialists or people in the military and intelligence communities, they'll talk a lot about over classification and just that anything that could be a little tiny bit secret will be classified and that it doesn't actually need to be. So to me, a lot of this could just be the government acting the way it always does. So it's hard to draw any conclusions from that, in my opinion.

Absolutely. Yeah, some things never change. And again, we have to stress, you know, when we say government, the government's made of many, many people with different belief systems, different agendas, motives. So we got to keep that in mind, too, when we say, when is the government going to disclose the truth about UFOs? Well, what does that mean? Right.

We see it as this, you know, umbrella dark syndicate like the X-Files would have us believe. But, no, it's just a poorly run bureau. democratic thing like most things out there. Yeah, actually, when I talk to friends who work in, like, the aerospace parts of government and I say, hey, here's my crazy idea. Do you think that this is a thing that's going on? They kind of say, like, it would be really cool if we had the capability to pull something like that off, but our bureaucracy is just as much of a mess as anything else, and we're too

disorganized to have a cool project like that. Yeah. Sounds about right. Hey, y'all. Ryan Spreck here. As you all know, the Somewhere in the Sky's podcast is always free to consume, but it isn't free to create. That's why I've started the Somewhere in the Sky's Patreon campaign. On a monthly basis, you give what you think the show is worth.

You'll be helping the show continue, grow, and to be something truly communal. And remember, there are rewards for each level of contribution, and the list is only growing. So please, help Somewhere in the Skies now by becoming a patron to contribute, And to learn more, visit www. www. patreon.com backslash somewhere skies. Thank you for your support. And now on with the show. Well, moving to sort of organizations,

your chapter four title, The Patron's Fate, or Something, of UFOs. This is a guy we know very well in the field. We call him Biggolo, but we'll talk about him in his real name here, Robert Bigelow and his connection to UFOs and also the mysterious Skinwalker Ranch. So you kind of in this chapter cover everything this guy's been involved with

when it comes to the worlds we study on a day-to-day basis. So would you mind maybe running us through a little of what compelled you to write about this whole affair and what your personal experience was driving up to Skinwalker Ranch? This is crazy. Yeah. So I had written about Robert Bigelow actually like a year or two before all of this happened. And just because one of his inflatable space modules from Bigelow Aerospace was going to the international space station. And I just wrote a news story about that.

And when I was doing that, my editor said, you should read this feature story that someone wrote a few years ago kind of profiling Robert Bigelow. And that is when I learned about his interest in UFOs. Do you believe in aliens? I'm absolutely convinced that's all there is to it. Do you also believe that UFOs have come to Earth? There has been an existing presence, an ET presence. And I spent millions and millions. I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.

Is it risky for you to say, you know, in public that you believe in, in UFOs and aliens? I don't care. You don't worry that some people will say, did you hear that guy? He sounds like he's crazy. I don't care. Why not? It's not going to make a difference. It's not going to change reality of what I know.

Do you imagine that in our... space travels, we will encounter other forms of intelligent life. You don't have to go anywhere. You can find it here. Yeah. But I didn't really think about it anymore right away after that. I just thought, oh, you know, another eccentric billionaire, big deal. And then I started doing this UFO reporting, and pretty quickly I ran across an article

that noted skeptic Robert Schaefer wrote called, I think it was called Bigelow's Saucer Emporium. And it just kind of laid out all of the different initiatives that Bigelow had funded over the years and all of the different research programs and investigation collaborations that he had had his hands in. And I thought, wow, I had no idea. This guy was so pervasive in the field. And so I started trying to look at those connections myself. And that was when I learned more about his paranormal research group, the National Institute for Discovery. science nids. And then I learned more about Skinwalker Ranch. And anyway, what happened was actually not that far from the time when I went to the UFO Congress. I had a free weekend and I kind of live

within a long day's drive of the ranch. So I thought, you know, what the hell? Let's go see what this place is about. And so I mean, the story for people don't know is that this is kind of a hotbed of paranormal and UFO activity in Bigelow. this ranch to do some kind of systematic investigation of what was going on there. And, you know, I didn't expect to see anything when I went out there, not just because I was dubious about the supposed event, but also because I was only going to be there for a night and what are the chances that you'll see anything on any given night. I just kind of wanted to get a sense of the sense of the place. So on the way out there, I listened to the audiobook Hunt for the Skin Walker, which kind of

details, Nids' attempt to do the scientific research on these traditionally unscientific topics. And my main takeaway was like, these are very interesting stories, but none of these people, after all of this effort, were able to get any evidence. And the conclusion was, this phenomenon is slippery and we won't be able to find it. And I didn't find that to be very compelling. But anyway, I drove out there and just kind of waited. hung out at the gate, saw the security. No guys with guns this time, just a big camera in some gates.

And then stood on a spot overlooking the ranch for a few hours and waited for something to happen. As most of us do, yes. Yeah. Have you been out there? I have been in the area once or twice, but I also have never had an experience out there. But you know what? That's kind of how it goes.

Sometimes when you seek these things out, that's the time. time that they don't show themselves. When I say they, I have absolutely no idea what I'm actually saying because we don't know what's going on. The government. It's the government. Let's go back to that capital G, as usual. But yeah, some really interesting ties between Bigelow and Skinwalker Ranch and A-Tip and

everything that we're now really starting to connect the dots with. But you also, in Chapter 5, you return to something that all of us know about. and that is Mufan. And for anyone who has listened to my show, I've been very honest and vocal about my opinions on Mufon. But it seemed like you had a rather positive experience with one or several of the field investigators, which I've experienced as well.

There's many amazing people within Mufon, but as an organization, it has its problems, as many volunteer organizations do. But could you maybe tell us a little about your thoughts on organizations like this? this like Mufon, civilian-run groups who investigate UFOs. What was it like going into the whole Mufon part of all this? Yeah, I started out actually. My plan was to go get certified as a field investigator myself and see what that was like. But I talked to the, I met up with the director

of the Colorado chapter. And he was like, don't do that. It's too much effort. It's too much money. You should just, you know, follow us around a little bit. And so I took his advice. And so I, I hung out with him some and then another of their field investigators named Katie Grabowski. And I kind of felt like like any big organization and especially like you mentioned, a volunteer organization, you know, Mufon contains multitudes. It certainly has its problems at the top and has had its share of scandals. But I was mostly interacting with people at the local level, like going to the chapter meetings and meeting with people one-on-one.

And I found everyone I met to be, you know, you know, really genuine and kind and dedicated to what they were, what they were doing. And the, the meetings to me, you know, they, they had presentations about research that people were doing, but they also had a time for people to share their own experiences and ask questions of each other. And I kind of came to see it as like a little bit like group, group therapy in a good way, where it's just like, here's a space where people who have had incredible experiences can share them in a way that they maybe couldn't with people outside who wouldn't understand. And so I came to see it as valuable that way.

The question, though, is, you know, is that scientific? Are the investigations scientific, which is a totally different question? And for that, I talked to James Carion, who was a former director at Mufon. And he pointed out to me a lot of the ways that, you know, field investigations were kind of uneven and how rigorous they were. And that was something he tried to fix by standardizing protocols and things like that. And then he talked about how confirmation bias sometimes gets in the way because people usually join Mufon because they're interested in UFOs and a lot of people come with, you know, preconceived notions of what they are. And so those are some problems. And as far as civilian-run organizations in general, I mean, I feel like euphology really has no choice because it's outside of mainstream academic science.

And so it makes sense that people who lay people who are interested in it would go do this investigation themselves because no one else is doing that. But there is a reason that, you know, people go to 10 years of school after high school and then two postdocs and whatever. for their full-fledged scientists. And it's because there are things you learned about dealing with evidence and critical analysis and stuff that it's, it's not impossible to get from the outside, but it's hard. And so, but I don't, I don't know what other option there is. Yeah, you know, it is one of those things where the UFO, quote unquote, UFO community had to take things into their own hands. If a lot of scientists weren't going to take it seriously, we had to do it ourselves. And like you said, that's when you get the scrappy, passionate people with all different

belief systems and, you know, baggage. And again, it's just going to be a mixture of something that you can't really narrow in on and have one way of doing it. Yes, Mufon has a manual as to how to investigate. But, you know, I mean, that's going to change from case to case and whoever's investigating it. So it is. It's an interesting sort of facet to the entire UFO subculture are the civilian-run UFO groups. I don't know if they will ever solve the UFO mystery or even be a big part of that, but they have tried and they continue to try. So I guess we can only wish them luck, and hopefully they will find those answers they're looking for.

But you went on the road in the next chapter, Sarah, on the E.T. Highway, and this is out to Area 51. Now, all of us know the Area 51 mythos, Bob Lazar, nine soccer. all this stuff, but you went out there yourself. You know, again, boots on the ground, you got out there to actually look at this stuff. And you had some pretty interesting experiences. So what really resonated with your trip out there? And what do you make of the whole Area 51 site and all the stories behind it? Yeah, I loved going to Area 51.

I want to go there all the time now. I went out there with my sister and a friend. And kind of as soon as we pulled into the area, we started seeing what we later found out were flare exercises, but just these like hovering orbs in the sky in weird shapes. And it was just, it was really thrilling, even though I thought there was a conventional explanation to be like, I'm seeing something I'm not supposed to see. And it looks really cool. And it looks like a flying saucer. And, you know, after that, later in the night, we saw like kind of a quarter of the sky was taken up by the this big matrix of just white dots that kind of all moved in unison.

And we never found out with those where we had the guards come and try to intimidate us. We went up to all the gates. And I guess what was compelling to me about all of it is just, like I said, seeing something you're not supposed to see. And the whole area has this aura that it's hiding something from you, which it is. And it made me understand why people keep going back there. which I think, at least if there are anything like me, was to just catch a glimpse of something really mysterious and secret.

Whatever you think that secret is, if you think it's reverse engineering a spaceship or classified technology we'd like to fly over Russia, like no matter what, it's mysterious. And, you know, I don't find the Bob Lazar story very convincing myself. But what I did learn out there is, you know, if you go, you might see something and it would be really cool. And if you're into the alien hypothesis, then you're likely to interpret it through that kind of lens.

And if not, I don't know, I think classified military technology being tested in front of your eyes is pretty cool. And so, yeah, I need another road trip. I did go down for the Storm Area 51 event, too, although that's not the book. Really? I did. I got to ask, what was that experience? I don't know many people that made it out there. So you're one of those to survive and tell the story. Yeah, I went all the way inside, learned all the secrets, came back out, no problem.

Oh, awesome. Let's just skip that back then. We won't talk about that. No, it was fun. You know, it was more of a festival than anything else. And it was one of the few places I've been recently where I was one of the oldest people there, even though I'm not very old. And it was a lot of young people filming and taking pictures of themselves to put on the internet of being at Area 51, which is in keeping. with the origin of the event as a Facebook joke.

But it was actually pretty cool. They had police from all over, kind of all over the West, come out. And actually, they were, I think they were trying to keep it low-key because they would kind of encourage people to go right up to the gate and just make chit-chat. And I think they were trying to make it seem not mysterious so that people wouldn't do anything crazy. But I had a good time. Yeah. And you know what?

If that's what everyone took from it, just a good time out in the desert. That's all you can really ask for, whether it moved. needle in terms of like, you know, the public's perception of Area 51. Probably not, because we probably will never know what's going on inside there. But it is a mysterious place, and I'm sure there's some pretty cool classified stuff going on there. And I always tell people, you know, yes, we want answers and we want to know the truth about what's there. But end of the day, it's there for probably our national security purposes. And I am not someone who would say, go storm that gate and see what's.

going on because it's secret for a reason. Well, okay, so we move on to Chapter 7 of the book, The Mughals of Roswell, New Mexico, the mother load of UFOs. Roswell, again, you went out to Roswell to do this chapter, and you

cover the entire mythos surrounding the town, the stories that have arisen throughout the years. Some were pretty credible, others not so much, I'd say, in terms of what they contributed to the overall UFO conversation, but what did you walk away thinking of the entire Roswell affair and its place in euphology, I guess.

I started out, you know, knowing very little about Roswell other than what probably people just in the general public know. And so when I started kind of going to the original source material, what was honestly most amazing to me was how little there was at the origin of the story. And obviously, you know, people have talked to witnesses who have come forward since then. But if we're talking about just when it occurred, there was very little information. and there's this whole complex that spawned from it. Like Roswell is the alien town and it's synonymous with this crash. And so it was really just amazing to me how much had come out of that.

And what really put it in perspective for me was reading this book that two anthropologists and a physicist wrote analyzing the mutation of Roswell from that pretty small original story and tracing it through time as it changed and evolved. Headline edition, July 8, 1947. The Army Air Forces has announced that a flying disk has been found and is now in the possession of the Army. Army officers say the missile found sometime last week has been inspected at Roswell, New Mexico, and sent to Wright Field, Ohio for further inspections. New people came forward and new people wrote books, and they looked at it as a modern myth and kind of looking at it through the scholarship of mythology and how myths evolve and what

elements they hang on to and what they don't. And it was pretty amazing how it just followed the path of pretty much any myth in human history. But why I think it's important to uphology is because it shows the capital G government actually spreading false information, you know, saying this thing crashed, it was a flying saucer, psych it was a weather balloon, psych it was this, you know, nuclear test detector. And whatever you think of that chain of events, no matter whether your conclusion is it was a nuclear test detector or it was a crashed spaceship, regardless, there was misinformation put there on purpose by the capital G government to divert attention somewhere else. And I think that that is

critical to the way we think about UFOs today. Bringing up the idea of a mythology is also very important. The town of Roswell, without this event, who knows where it would be now in terms of even its sheer existence anymore? Yeah. There's so many towns like this. Look at Point Pleasant

with the Mothman. Without these events, drawing people in, what Roswell has a festival every year that brings in thousands and thousands of people. And it it kind of is the only money keeping the place alive, to be honest. So it is interesting that these events often have a commercial value to the places it took place in. Yeah, I mean, Bravo to the Roswell Tourism board. Yep, yep, they know what they're doing. I think they recently changed their like official logo too to like a UFO. So Roswell's not going anywhere and

we may never truly know what happened. But like you said, it is interesting tracing the mythology as it changes and unfortunately any first-hand witness involved is long gone at this point. So we'll probably never know the truth, but it did create, I would say, that in the Kenneth Arnold's citing of 1947, it created the UFO conversation, UFO phenomenon in the eyes of many Americans. So it is a fascinating place for sure, and I'm so happy you got to go there. Yeah, I highly recommend the festival. It's a very good time. It is a trip.

Okay, so Chapter 8, to the Stars Above Telecom. Scope towns. Now, this is an incident that happened that I don't think a lot of people really remember. Even I was like, oh yeah, I forgot about this. And this was the Sunspot Observatory. It sort of faded into obscurity after the story came out. So I was wondering, Sarah, would you mind maybe painting us a picture of what we know that happened there and the conspiracies that arose from the secrets possibly being held in this area? Sure. So Sunspot is a town in rural New Mexico, not far from Alamagordo, New Mexico. And it is home to a solar observatory with a bunch of telescopes that watched the sun. And one day, one fall day, a couple years ago,

the site shut down. They evacuated the whole town. The FBI was there. No one, including law enforcement, knew what was going on. And it was shut down for something like two weeks. And no one was allowed to go back and no one, not the telescope operators or the FBI, would say what was going on. So the FBI is investigating this one. It all started with staff and the public being evacuated last Thursday. There's no word when they can get back into the observatory. And the FBI is keeping very quiet. So, of course, the internet is positive. It must be aliens. Definitely aliens. Yes, go on. Well, this is weird because the employees at that observatory are not federal employees. They're just like you or me checking out the stars for a living.

And so when the feds show up, they gave them no information. And so obviously we're going to speculate about it. Let's look at some tweets. Charles Pierce, he's verified so you know that what he's saying is true. I'm definitely not saying it's aliens, but something weird is happening at a solar observatory in New Mexico. Let's see what DJ has to say. He's not verified so he can say whatever he wants. What in the world is going on in Sunspot, New Mexico?

Why have this observatory to post offices and nearby homes been evacuated for a full week now? FBI and Black Hawk choppers. Just saying, guys, the aliens are coming. And so people started to speculate as they should any time the FBI evacuates an entire town, which, to be fair, it's a very small town that is just dedicated to these telescopes. But, you know, people on above-top secret and, and, uh, the Reddit, the subreddit conspiracy and things like that, started to talk about what might be happening,

things like, you know, maybe somebody installed spy equipment to look down on White Sands Missile Range, which is just below where this is. Maybe there was a spy on the inside who was stealing some kind of data. Maybe there was a mercury leak in the telescope. But then what the media, my people, took from this, was maybe there's been an alien invasion. Maybe these solar telescopes saw aliens,

which doesn't really make any sense, because why would the aliens be on the sun? But nevertheless, that's what people thought. And because no one would say anything, these conspiracies just got to keep on growing and spreading. And I went out there. Living in Colorado, lots of things are within a day's drive. So I went out there and kind of snuck on site

by hiking around back and, you know, there was no one there. The FBI wasn't there. The police weren't there. No one was stopping me. And it was just truly a mystery. And it was driving me crazy trying to figure out what was going on. But anyway, what the story is now is that someone was distributing child pornography from the wireless network that was associated with the observatory.

No one's been arrested. That person hasn't been arrested. There's not been a trial. There's some holes, I think, in that story that make it pretty unconvincing to me. But what I found interesting was the ways that we form conspiracies around telescopes, which are like our window onto the universe and how those connect to aliens. There's some kind of alien conspiracy associated with most telescopes. And I thought this was a cool way to witness one just being born out of nothing. That is really interesting. Unfortunately, you know, the truth is often harder to take than the fiction we weave in our heads. So it's, you know, that's the reality of the situation. And at least we know what was going on there. And although it still remains a mystery of why it was going on there. But yeah, like you said, it says a lot about the conspiracies we create or the mythos we create when we're not given the answers to things. So really, really interesting chapter. I really enjoyed that one. And then in your final chapter, all along the Watchtower, so I'm gearing up, actually, for a trip out to the San Luis Valley in a few weeks and going to the UFO Watchtower. And not many people really know about it or the lore behind the area where it's located.

So could you maybe tell us a little about what you know of the San Luis Valley and what you took away from visiting this place? Yeah, the San Luis Valley is one of my favorite places in, in the west. It's this big, huge, high altitude valley that sandwich between two mountain ranges. One is where the Rio Grande starts and the other is this extremely rugged sub-mountain range of the Rocky Mountains called the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. And at the base of those mountains are these like 700 foot tall sand dunes that just built up there. So you have this very deserty valley, random sand dunes, giant rocky mountains. And it just looks like three geographic things that don't belong together were smashed into this place.

And it's at some point, in some poll, it was the place with the most UFO sightings per capita. And although we should note there's not a lot of per capita there, it's a pretty sparsely populated valley. But you can see forever. It's very dark. And there is a guy named Chris O'Brien who spent, I think, 10 years investigating alleged events of high strangeness out there and wrote three books, I think the most famous of which is called the Mysterious Valley. And so it kind of had this lore. Oh, it was also

the place where one of the first, maybe the actual first animal mutilation took place of Snippy the Horse. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's this woman named Judy Messaline who had heard about these events. She lived out there. She'd recently bought a ranch. And she didn't believe any of the stuff, but she was having trouble making her mortgage payments. So she decided to build this tourist attraction for people to come watch UFO sightings. And eventually she came to be a believer herself. And now there's like a mini museum of people's sightings there and a kind of

shrine area where people leave behind their own objects. And you can kind of camp out, go up on this platform, look for UFOs. It's, I like it out there. But what, what, uh, what, what, uh, what, what, what took from it, especially since so much of UFO culture is, you know, kind of very corporate, big, big commercial operations, big conferences. This is a really grassroots kind of off the radar piece of piece of place, I guess. And, you know, it brings together people who are hardcore UFO buffs who have seen a lot of things. And then just people who are casually passing by on the highway and brings them together to interact with each other, brings the community together because there's not a lot else in the San Luis Valley.

And I don't know, I found it to be a very heartening place. I liked it. Yeah, it definitely has a magnetism to it and intrigue. And it's beautiful, too. I mean, it's just endless, endless land where God knows what's going on out there. Yeah, really interesting. And that kind of wraps to the books, Sarah. I don't want to give away any of your conclusions or closing remarks or anything like that.

And we really only scratched the surface of each chapter. But I'd love to maybe hear a little about what you learned in writing the book. And did it change your thoughts or your opinions on UFOs or the subculture that kind of came out of that? What did you learn in this whole process? That's a good and hard question. I think, I mean, I come from the sciences. and I also, I was raised really religious and then left religion. And so I started out the book kind of having a lot of resistance to other people's beliefs

and not understanding why there were so many people who believed so many things that I thought had so little evidence behind them. But, I mean, I discovered that, A, a lot of people who are interested in UFOs don't have those beliefs. They're just interested in them and see a fun problem to try to solve. and they want to get to the bottom of it kind of agnosticly, and that's cool. And then B, I also came to feel like, you know, what do I care if people believe things that seem strange to me?

That's okay. Everybody gets to believe what they want, and I could be wrong. They could be right. We all get to live our own lives. And so, I mean, not to be a hallmark about it, but I feel like it made me a more empathetic person and like a better human being. And it, well, I won't say that, like, I don't think that UFOs are alien spaceships visiting Earth. But whereas at the beginning of the book, I would have said, yeah, I probably know that for certain.

I think the way it changed them from me was like, you can't actually know anything for certain. And it's really arrogant of me to say that. And even if it's a 0.001 chance that it's true, like, that's enough. That's, and yeah, so I guess I came away more open-minded, although my overall opinion didn't change. Well, there you go. I mean, we look at someone like J. Allen Heineck, the astronomer who worked for Project Blue Book, and, you know, he sort of turned around. He was sent in to debunk UFOs, and he came out on the other side, as his son would tell me, as an acceptor of the phenomenon, not a believer, which I think there's a huge difference. And I'm glad to hear you say that.

The door is still slightly open. that it could be alien or it could be a million other explanations. Sure. And it's to say there's just one answer to any of this. So I'm glad to hear you say that, that you're still at least willing to entertain the possibility. That's all we can ask, really, from those who are more on the skeptical side, especially those in the hard sciences or the scientific field in general. So that's really good to hear.

I'm glad there was still a glimmer of hope that it could be. Also, all the other explanations are also interesting, and like you said, it's probably a combination of them. But, you know, if it's classified military aircraft that do crazy things, like, I also, I think that's pretty interesting, too. Yeah, totally. I agree with you. And, you know, sometimes I wonder if it is aliens that are what are in control of these UFOs, that's actually probably one of the most boring answers, to be completely honest. But yeah, I guess we'll, maybe we'll see the answer in our lifetime, but I wouldn't hold my breath. But you recently came out with an article over at Wired that kind of ties both of your books together when it comes to SETI and the scientists and then the alien hunters, as you coined them.

So this is kind of mixing the worlds together of the two book projects that you've done. So could you maybe tell us a little about the article and how it relates to the work you did on this book and beyond? Sure, yeah, it takes a look at three groups, astrobiologists, who mostly look for biochemical and geological and, you know, hard data evidence of potential microbial life on other planets. And study scientists who look for these transmissions from alien civilizations and then UFO hunters who, as I specify in the article, we're not, this is specifically talking about the extraterrestrial hypothesis version of that, the other ones. And it kind of compares the way that astrobiologists think of study astronomers to the way seti astronomers think of uphologists, where they each think each of the others is a little bit less legitimate. And it's asking the scientists themselves, I guess, or just pointing out to the reader that the lines we draw about what is legitimate

science and what is not are a little bit arbitrary and cultural. and change over time and that the reasons that astrobiologists say study scientists aren't legitimate are some of the same reasons study scientists say euthologists aren't legitimate. And so I guess the takeaways, maybe we should all just be a little bit easier on each other. Yep, work together. It isn't any simpler than that. Well, people can read that over at wired.com. And Sarah, where can we find the book and when can we find the book and everything else you're up to? Well, the book comes out March 3rd. You can pre-order it right now on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or a website called Indy-Bound, I-N-D-I-E-E-Bound. And I put all my work on my website, which is sarahskolls.com. And then I am on Twitter at Skulls, Sarah. This has been awesome. It's so refreshing to see a writer out there who can see both signs of the UFO coin, as it were, you know, the phenomenon and the study.

of it. So I got to thank you for writing this book, first and foremost, and also for coming on somewhere in the skies. Yeah, thank you. It's been really fun. I enjoyed it a lot. That's it for this week's episode. Again, be sure to grab the book. They are already here on March 3rd, wherever books are sold. Speaking of books, check out my book, somewhere in the skies, a human approach to an alien phenomenon. Available on Amazon, in print, and e-book. I'll also be selling books at Contact in the Desert this spring. So if you're in Indian Wells, California, or in California in general, join us May 29th through June 1st.

To learn more and to purchase tickets, visit Contactinth the Desert.com. Check out the official store with merch at tepublic.com. And just search for Somewhere in the Skies. You can follow us on Twitter at Summer Skies and Instagram at SomewhereSky's Pod. If you have a UFO story you'd like to share, and to contact me personally about guest and topic suggestions, please reach out by using the contact app on the official website, somewhere in the skies.com. Thanks to the E1 podcast network, Roke Planet TV, Pegasus's books, and especially to you for listening. I'll see you here next week, and remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching somewhere in the skies. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions

in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network. To learn more, visit Entertainment One Podcast.com.