Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Evidence for Aliens, the Afterlife, Bigfoot, Sea Monsters, and More | Miguel Sancho

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

An investigative journalist on why reincarnation, ghosts, and unexplained phenomena deserve more scrutiny; plus, why our need to believe in something bigger isn't something to be embarrassed about. Miguel Sancho is an Emmy Award–winning television producer and author. He is a veteran of ABC News, where he helped run 20/20, and he is now the executive producer of The Proof Is Out There on the History Channel. His latest book is Evidence of the Extraordinary: Discoveries from the Series The Proof is Out There. In this episode we talk about: How to walk the line between skepticism and credulity Why most UFO footage falls apart under scrutiny The scientific case for Bigfoot Why kids who remember past lives are hard to dismiss How to spot a fraudulent psychic Pascal's "God-shaped hole" What unexplained ancient rock structures reveal about our history Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel This episode is sponsored by: MasterClass: Get at least 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/HAPPIER.  OneSkin: Get 15% off OneSkin with the code HAPPIER at www.oneskin.co/HAPPIER. #oneskinpod To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. We talk a lot on this show about the value of having an open mind, about intellectual humility. But how open-minded should you be when it comes to things like Bigfoot or UFOs or the afterlife? Today we're talking to an experienced journalist, a hardened skeptic, my old friend Miguel Sancho. We used to work together at ABC News, where he helped to run the legendary news magazine. show 2020. Miguel has gone on to become the executive producer of a show called The Proof is Out There, which is on the History Channel, and he's got a new book, which is called Evidence of the Extraordinary. We're going to talk about how Miguel has gone from, as I said, a hardened skeptic to somebody who is a little bit more open-minded. Miguel Sancho. Welcome back to the show. Dan, great to see you. Honored to be on your show and grateful, of course, to your audience for lending us a little bit of their time. Let's make it work. wild. Let me just start with your story. So, I mean, I worked with you. We started working together,

like, I think the late aughts. And we did a bunch of investigative stories together. We took on self-help fuckeroo's and we took on the Church of Scientology. And my memory of you is of somebody who was pretty hard-bitten in his skepticism and atheism, et cetera, et cetera. But now you're the executive producer of a show called The Proof is out there and you've got this new book. So, like what has happened? Give me your arc. Yeah, so it would be great if there was some sort of dramatic, you know, Damascus Road epiphany, and I could kind of complete the stereotypical Hollywood arc of the cynical, hardened journalism professional who has some transformative experience that leads him to embrace every single

corner of the woo that's out there. I would say this in my own defense as a reconstructed cynic and skeptic that back when we were doing our stuff, and I thought it actually was not just worthwhile, but some of the most important work I've ever done in my career, we weren't necessarily cracking on any particular belief per se, but rather the degree to which certain charlatans and unscrupulous exploitors of people's desire to believe in something bigger, not only kind of drain people of their money, oftentimes,

but also their autonomy and their identity and their grasp on reality. So I'd like to kind of separate the two questions about whether or not there is something more than straight up, hardcore scientific materialism as a lens through which to understand our world or universe and our experiences. And the nefarious ways in which some of the gullible and credulous are taken advantage of. because fundamentally I do conclude in this book that the desire and the need, if you will, to believe in something bigger is not something that we should shun or be embarrassed about or try to evolve beyond, but something that is in fact crucial to the process of evolution of progress itself. I want to come back to that, how the desire, dare I say, need to believe in something bigger

is important. But let me just stick with you for a second. Yes, we know I'm infinitely interesting. So let's talk about me. You are at least, me, me. You're interesting to me. It may be a local concern because you're one of my friends. But I take your point that you and I in our roles at ABC News as investigative journalists,

we weren't taking on belief itself. We were taking on unscrupulous exploitation of the human propensity toward belief. And yet, you know, you were, you know, I think by your own description, pretty skeptical about all sorts of claims, and now you executive produce a show that is taking a journalistic look at the paranormal. Talk about that, and has it shifted your view on things that often have been like reflexively rejected by the mainstream, like UFOs, etc., etc. So in a nutshell, I can tell a condensed version of the show and how I became intricately involved in interwoven with its manifestations. So it was COVID. I'd been working after ABC at A&E and its various other networks, including the History Channel, on the stuff that I usually do, which is pretty much documentary style investigative reporting.

I've done a series of specials with them. And I had other stuff in the works. Some rather, as I recall, some rather hardcore stuff about like American prisons was the show I was working on when COVID hit and shut everything down. and I was, like many people, facing an extended period of underemployment due to the fact that field work itself had been banned for quite some time. So wonderful people at A&E networks and history approached me with this opportunity to this show. That was an attempt to, as you just said, quite articulately, to apply journalistic standards, scientific rigor and a healthy dose of skepticism. to this immense and growing pipeline of videos that people claim to be documentation of anomalous events that substantiate claims in the supernatural or paranormal or what have you.

And my first reaction was, thank you for the opportunity. My second reaction was, are you sure I'm the right guy for this? Because there are plenty of people who have spent decades producing TV shows in this genre, in this space. I was not one of them. But they said, again, no, we want somebody with your. background because that's the lens through which we're going to be approaching this content in this space. So it turned out to be a very felicitous marriage and it was a wonderful opportunity

because in addition to remaining employed, I was able to learn a heck of a lot. There's a lot to learn in this space. It's not just campfire stories or superstitions or folklore that you can kind of ethnographically sneer at down your spectacles, but it is a very diverse, very well-researched, very fascinating field that was entirely worthy of my attention. Okay, so let's walk through some of these, because that's what happens in your book, which again is called Evidence of the Extraordinary. Let's start with UFOs. This episode is airing in August, but we're recording it in late June.

I just watched Disclosure Day with my son, the Steven Spielberg movie about aliens and the government or quasi-governmental organizations attempt to cover up UFOs and aliens that are held in captivity, et cetera, et cetera. And also there's been like a mainstream treatment of UFOs in the last cup. There was there were congressional hearings, et cetera, et cetera. So like you've looked at many of the most famous cases of alleged UFOs. sightings, where do you come down? Right. So yes, you're absolutely right that we've seen, and one of the kind of justifications for the book is this ongoing mainstreaming of many of these topics, none more so than UFOs. To the point that just last week, it was announced that the White House is forming a a UAP investigative committee that's basically going to do the same exact thing that my show has been doing for six years with indeed some of the people who've been on my show.

So there's, to the degree that I was involved in this mainstreaming, it's interesting to be kind of part of that wave, that movement. Where do I come down on this? Okay. So I have a more nuanced and possibly disappointing take on this than some people who are very committed to the UFO disclosure cause and get upset if one doesn't subscribe and endorse every single tenet of what I referred to in the book as the UFO. so I think many things can be true. First of all, you start with the basics that everybody says kind of to avoid the topic but happen to be true. One is from a statistical standpoint, it's almost impossible for us to be the only intelligent civilization that has ever existed in the history of the universe. The second very obvious, very easy thing to agree with is that there is

significant documentation of aerial phenomena, which our own government has not yet identified. Okay. But it requires a certain concatenation of highly contingent circumstances to get from those two propositions to firm and unshakable belief that there is an alien civilization that exists in the same time that we exist, that is advanced to the point where they have achieved technical mastery to achieve either interstellar or interdimensional travel. and has decided to come to our planet and our space and visit us as regularly as some of the hardcore believers think that we've been visited. What we can say is that this show, my show, and others, have taken very hard looks at several of these videos

and determined that while, if you have a pie chart in your mind, you know, 70 to 80% of them can indeed be dismissed as either misidentifications, or hoaxes, there is that sliver that truly defy the most rigorous attempts of the skeptics to debunk them, including some very well-credentialed people who have reputations to maintain, who have been on our show and has said, not every time again, but, you know, once or twice, I honestly don't know what this is. Again, it's a leap to go from that to, therefore, it must be an alien spaceship piloted by Little Green Men. Just to put a fine point on this, because there are other, because I want to talk about Bigfoot and other things too, but on UFOs, aka UAPs, you Miguel Sancho cannot say or pound the table and argue that for sure aliens have visited us and maybe taken random dudes from Iowa on board their ships and giving them anal probes, you're not going to argue that all of that is for sure true. however, you can point to some of these videos, some of which were recorded, I think, by the U.S. military itself and say, something's going on here and we don't know what it is.

Now, again, many things can be true. It can indeed be the case that some of these unexplained videos are indeed alien craft. Fine. But it can also be the case that some of them are high-tech assets of rival militaries that are intentionally trying to probe some of our air defenses or other technology to, gain Intel and reconnaissance capacity. It can also be the case that a small sliver of these things might be instances in which our own government is intentionally disseminating disinformation to keep us from knowing about and getting concerned about incursions in our airspace or technological advances of our rival militaries. Just yesterday, there was this big disclosure about the United States pilot who claims that he was downed by something called jellyfish drones over Iran.

So again, we live in an age where the drone has become a cutting-edge technology that represents the future of asymmetrical warfare. We need to accommodate the possibility that some of these UAPs aren't piloted by Martians or aliens, rather, but possibly by members of the IRGC. A few things before we hear from our sponsors. I don't know if you know this, but I've been writing a newsletter for the last couple of years. I would love for you to come check it out. It's free. You can sign up at danharris.com. Every Monday, I drop into your inbox a little nugget of wisdom and sanity that you can

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All right, let's go to Bigfoot. You've investigated that story. Have you seen, you're both laughing here, so I suspect I know where this is going, but have you seen any evidence to suggest that there's, there are legitimate open questions about the existence of Bigfoot? Okay, here we go. Are you ready? Yeah. I can give you, I can give you small, medium, extra large versions of this, of this exegesis. In this day and age, with literally billions of cell phones and trail cams and LIDAR scanning every, you know, jungle canopy on Earth, the fact that the best. bigfoot footage we have is the Patterson Gimlin film, which is the famous, you know, Patty

footage shot in 1967 and now has recently been debunked yet again in a Bigfoot documentary, is a problem for Bigfoot believers. Let's not pretend that that's not a problem. But let's proceed. First of all, the people who study this stuff and devote a fair amount of time to it have answers for all of the dismissive questions. And I'm happy to recite them. But the bottom line is, yes, it would be great if there were more video, but there's reasons why there isn't video. And there's all sorts of reasons why we can't just assume

that a undiscovered species can't be discovered or it doesn't exist now because we're discovering new species all the time. The second thing I would say is that, believe it or not, there's documented evidence that more and more scientists, people with PhDs, again, people with reputations to risk, are endeavoring to study Bigfoot in one way or another. The closest thing I came to a big epiphany in this entire project was, I want to say sometime in the fall of 2022, it's correct in the book. I might get it wrong, the exact date in this podcast. But when I was at home, at breakfast, eating a bowl of honeynut Cheerios, reading the Wall Street Journal, reading the Wall Street

journal, the actual paper subscription that I had at the time, and I flipped it over and just below the fold was this page one story about how legit scientists, meaning anthropologists, primatologists, paleontologists are going out in the woods and going on Bigfoot hunting expeditions because they think there's a chance that it might exist. Why? There's a whole thing that we can talk about that involves a kind of paradigm shift in paleontology and anthropology, that now is more hospitable to the hypothesis of what is called relict hominids, meaning other branches of the evolutionary tree that have turned up in places like Flores Island, where a species of early man known as Flores Man was discovered in a cave,

or the Denisovans, another branch of the evolutionary tree, who were discovered in a cave in Russia. But not alive. Their bones were discovered. Their bones were discovered. Indeed. So the working hypothesis, okay, is that at one point there was a common ancestor, you know, some relative of gigantipithecus or Australopithecus, that branched out and migrated.

And that's how we get the Yeti, the Yowie in Australia, and by dint of the Bering land crossing, the creature we know as Bigfoot or Sasquatch that either currently inhabits or at one point did inhabit the Pacific Northwest and other parts of the North American continent. Are you with me? I'm with you, and I'm just going to see if I can sum it up. There are serious people who are open to the possibility, but if I'm hearing you correctly, they're open to the possibility that some creature like a Bigfoot or a Yeti or a Yowie existed past tense and we might find their bones but the video from 1967 of an alleged

Bigfoot is probably not you know like he or she is probably not out there in the woods right now those two positions can be harmonized uh meaning that just because it existed at one point you don't have to be committed to the idea that it is extinct now why why because of this interesting phenomenon called relicked species, meaning a species that we all thought was extinct, and then bingo, it pops up. The prime example is a fish called the Keelakhanth, and people thought that died out hundreds of millions of years ago. And then, I want to say in the 1930s or 40s, wow, one pops up in the fishermen's net of

the coast of South Africa, and it happens a lot. there's birds, mammals, reptiles, fish that scientists are convinced died out hundreds of millions of years ago, but nevertheless pop up in the real world. So, again, you have the theory that Bigfoot migrated from an original ancestor in Asia, came over here. Yes, it may well have gone extinct, or it still might be out there but has yet to be discovered. Okay, let me move on to the next topic. You're just checking them all off one by one. This is great. It's like rapid fire. I mean, it's more fun for me probably because I haven't thought about this stuff at all. You live in this world. The next thing is something called cryptozoology. I don't even know what that means, but you cover it in the book.

Well, it's the overarching study of what are kind of considered legendary creatures, Bigfoot among them. And of course, you know, Bigfoot walks arm and arm with the other most famous legendary creature on Earth, the Loch Ness Monster. and quite frankly, whereas I, sometimes, in fact, maybe just a few seconds ago, ventriloquized the arguments of the believers when it comes to sea monsters, now we're talking about things that I actually believe. That's a very easy one for me to get behind. So you're saying the Loch Ness Monster is real? I'm saying I don't know about the Loch Ness Monster. But, and again, given the major exertions that have been. been made to find the lockness monster over the past 100 years, the fact that they haven't found

the thing indicates to me that you have to take that into account. That indicates to me that the thing probably isn't there. Okay. But the broader proposition that there are massive sea creatures that we would call monsters a few hundred years ago still existing in our oceans today is a very easy hypothesis for me to embrace. Why? Well, again, because we're always discovering them. They discover a new species of shark pretty much one or two every year in my brief lifetime. Probably the most famous is called the Megamouth shark, which is this thing that was pulled up from the anchor of a U.S. Navy vessel when I was still a kid. And the thing looks like a cartoon monster with this big huge grin and it's 20 feet long.

And nobody had ever seen it before. There's other evidence. Okay, scientifically valid that indicates that there are large, larger than we know, see creatures swimming in the depths of our oceans today. That's an easy one. That's a give me. That's a layup. Okay. I can get down with that.

Where I start to lose my footing, though, is I was listening to you on some paranormal podcast. And the host referenced in passing as if it was like a totally established. thing that there might be alien civilizations living at the bottom of our oceans outside of our visibility. Yes. Any evidence for that? All right. So how do we get there?

No, I, I, the point, by the way, for your listeners, the point of this book, okay, is not to convert you to any of this. It's just to give you the vocabulary as you can have these conversations at your next cocktail party. It's the quickie kind of, you know, matrix-like upload of every little bit of layman's knowledge you need to have to swim in this ocean, so to speak, intellectually, without having to spend six years producing a TV show about it. This stuff is just interesting. And the fact of the matter is some of this stuff may sound ridiculous. And some of it actually is ridiculous.

And I know it's harder for you to say that than it is for me because I don't produce the show. But it is also true that there are anomalous. us things that we cannot explain. So it's, it's, it's two parts. It's just interesting on its face. And there are some areas where we really just can't answer the question. Yeah, but I take it a step further, Dan. First of all, don't you know, you're supposed to say the name of the book seven times, at least, in order to sync in with the viewer. It's called Evidence of the Extrorty. We should just say it seven times in a row and we can then have a normal conversation. But yes, this book, Evidence of the Extraordinary, is supposed to be kind of tickle your, your, your,

intellectual curiosity. And by the way, it's a fun book. It's not heavy lifting. It's not like Dan's books. They're not very serious. It's light reading, beach, fine, bathroom, fine. But I want to say, I am going to say, I'm going to insist that, yes, while some of these ideas and hypotheses are prima facie ridiculous, guess what?

Every radical theory that has turned out to be true and shift paradigms in the history. and the history of science was once considered ridiculous and absurd, if not dangerous and worthy of suppression. So that's why the overall posture of the book is to take a step back a little bit from the hardcore, skeptical, cynical, asshole that I was when I was working at ABC and try to, again, be more humble in the face of the unknown, more hospitable to off-the-wall theories, because whereas, sure, 90% of them will, be either silly or misguided or puerile or even dangerous. There's that little sliver that we need in order to actually make progress as a civilization and to improve the world.

And I say plenty of examples of cases where, you know, crazy ideas turns out to be actually central to the progress of human civilization. How about this one? Doctors washing their hands before they deliver babies, right? Ignuss Simmelweis and the whole germ theory of disease was considered so radical and dangerous that he ended up getting fired,

getting locked in a mental institution, and ultimately beaten a death by the guards of the mental institution. So it would be nice if that hadn't happened. How do you and how do we, how can one walk the line between openness and credulity? You do want to

maintain some standards, right? So when we talk about, you know, discovery of a new species, scientists and biologists, you know, they go through a very rigorous process before they just declare a new species exist. It has to be proven. It has to go through peer-reviewed research analysis, all that stuff. So we should still be doing that. The point is, though, when the first kind of shreds of evidence, the evidence that would either kind of tickle your fancy enough that you decide that a given hypothesis is worthy of more attention and research and resources, or so silly that we should just move on and kind of leave it outside with the galoshes and umbrellas as we proceed with serious scientific investigation, we should

be more hospitable to these things. We should not eliminate the possibility of something truly anomalous being the case just because of our own empirical prejudices. So maintain your standards, okay, but don't be poo-pooing some of the stuff that you normally would think of as kooky. And frankly, you know, there's now all sorts of people who think that things such as quantum physics, quantum computing, almost necessitate a non-materialistic understanding of the universe and reality, and require us to think of things as time, not just necessarily moving in one direction, not just present to future, multiple chronologies potentially existing at the same time, all sorts of things that kind of lean towards the potential of a grand unified theory of

everything that could explain everything from UFOs to ghosts to psychic powers. And believe me, there's plenty of people who want to do just that. Did you want to get back to the cryptotrestrial thing, the underwater aliens? Was that just a little sprinkling and we're going to move on? No, I do want to come back to underwater aliens, but let me just stay with this line we're talking about between epistemic humility and gullibility. The conversation I've had many times in my own life with my longtime friend and meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, when subjects come up about the deep end of the pool, the sort of more mystical ends of Buddhism, where there are these beliefs not only in reincarnation and enlightenment, but also, also in the existence of superpowers, if you become a meditative adept, the idea is that you can manipulate the laws of physics. And I, my knee-jerk reaction to that is to scoff. And Joseph often gently argues for what I believe the poet Samuel Collarage called the willing suspension of

disbelief. That does not mean you believe with no evidence, but that you suspend your disbelief so that you can play with ideas, even if ultimately you're going to put them down. How does that land with you? Does that rhyme with what you were just talking about? Yeah, I mean, it kind of sounds like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too, right? You're trying to say that I don't necessarily believe I can levitate if I meditate long enough, but if some people can or if they say they can, far be it for me to completely dismiss their claims. And okay, I mean, that's kind of where I am.

I would just say that it is a problem. This is a classic slippery slope problem that you see everywhere from religion to uphology, the study of UFOs, right? I mean, we can agree, I think, that there are things flying around the skies that we haven't identified. But many people who are actually much more serious about the topic, and I am much more credentials and frankly much more honorable people because they've served our country in the military, take it many steps further to the point that they're saying, not only do we have these unidentified things,

we can't explain to investigate, but they're aliens, but the United States has been in an alliance with them, and we've reverse engineered their technology, and this entire vast, long, enduring conspiracy theory that strikes me as just statistically unlikely, because conspiracies are very hard to pull off and maintain. So, yes, it's okay to meditate as much as you want with the hope that someday you'll be able

to levitate. And by the way, there was actually a really interesting book about levitation from a Yale professor that came out a few years ago. It studied cases of medieval and Renaissance levitations in which he kind of came out thinking something happened. He wasn't just poo-pooing it or dismissing it as superfluing. superstition. But always, let's just keep our critical facilities at the ready. Well, I think we're saying, and I think Joseph's saying a similar thing, which is, yeah,

keep your critical facilities and maintain what the Zen folks called, don't know mine. You know, like, ultimately, I don't know. Maybe they haven't found the lock nest monster. I don't personally think the animals in there. I don't personally think one can levitate, but at the end of the day, I really don't know. So it is having your cake and eating it too, but not in the pejorative. Yeah. Maybe that's the true lesson in Buddhism, that you can't have your cake and at least nibble on it too. But I think it's a wonderful part of being human that you're able to, in fact, obligated to maintain a sense of empiricism just to kind of cross the street. And yet, we all have this yearning for there to be something bigger.

In the book, I reference and somewhat lionized Blaise Pascal's and his concept of the God-shaped hole in his heart that we all need to fill. And whether we're filling it with actual religion and God is traditionally practiced or ufology or the deep end of the pool of Buddhism or what have you, it is, I would submit to everyone a positive Darwinian adaptation. It's a good thing we have. It's not something that we should want to outgrow or amputate. Say more about that. Why not? Because there are folks like my friend Sam Harris, who would argue that religion has been a purely, if not purely, largely negative and noxious force in human affairs. Yeah, well, I'd be happy to talk about that with Sam Harris.

If we want to talk about God, sure. To the degree that religion can be criticized for its deleterious implementations, absolutely. No question about that. But you have to weigh the good with the bad, right? Like when Cromwell said, paint me warts and all, he meant paint the warts, but also paint the and all. So, yes, a video camera can be used to make kitty porn. It can also be used to make an award-winning documentary about Navajo basket weavers or whatever, you know, righteous social justice cause you think needs to be documented.

A, you know, a gun can be used to kill Adolf Hitler. It can also be used to shoot up Columbine. So the question isn't what is the thing in and of itself. It's a question of how it's applied and what is the, you know, aggregate utility to the species over the course of millennia. What good has religion done? Well, I would submit to you that in this country, at least, has been a very helpful counterbalance to the ravages of unchecked capitalism. You know, just again, the microcosm of the history of the United States,

we have this economic system that incentivizes and rewards relatively amoral self-interested behavior in the marketplace. And it is countervailed by this Puritan tradition that includes, some degree of altruism and self-sacrifice and humanity and concern for your fellow man. I would also argue that you wouldn't really have, I'm happy to be contradicted, I'm often wrong, but in the way I kind of understand human history, at least, you wouldn't really have much of a civil rights movement or a human rights movement if you didn't have a religious tradition from which it sprang and sprouted

to the point that you might argue that we now no longer need religion because we have a, an understanding and architecture of basic respect for human beings that makes the divine a, you know, like training wheels that we no longer need to ride the bicycle. But I would only tell you that I was meditating quite frequently and I still do it, not as frequently as I used to, maybe two or three times a week. But I go to church every Sunday and it's really fulfilling for me. And there's a reason for that, I think. because it speaks to and underscores many of the things that I want to improve about myself.

It helps me just kind of think, okay, I know I could be a better person. Let's just kind of focus on that, at least for, you know, this one time a week and try to assimilate these principles into our daily lives. There was a, I forget where I saw it, but, you know, Stephen Fry, you probably actually do know Stephen Fry personally, but there was some sort of debate he was in. I'm getting foggy in the details. but he had this great parable or examples. Like, imagine yourself walking down the street of a city that you don't know by yourself.

It's dark. And there's five men walking on the same side of the street straight at you. Would you be more or less put at ease if you knew that they were coming from a church meeting? So, again, yes, the practice of religion has led to jihad. it's led to crusades, it's led to the bombing of abortion clinics, it's led to all sorts of things that I would abjure categorically. Those are

the spectacular things that we would attract a disproportionate amount of attention. It's also responsible for a million different small, quiet, silent, and unannounced acts of kindness and compassion and patience and forgiveness

on a daily basis, without which I would submit the human race would be even more barbaric than it currently is. Yeah, I mean, I agree with, you know, 75% of what you just said. The area where I, and I think it's just a healthy disagreement, I'm sure many people listening to the show will disagree with me on this, that I think the capacities that religion teases out of the human mind, altruism, compassion, kindness, et cetera, et cetera, don't have to be connected to. metaphysically infused allegories from the Bronze Age. Like, I think we have these capacities in us. It's how we came the apex predator on the planet,

our ability to cooperate, collaborate, and communicate. And I don't know that belief in something we can't prove is a sine qua non for that. It's a shame we can't make this more of a bitter disagreement because that's what people like. But if I'm resigning myself to the fact this is going to be an amicable conversation, I would agree with you to the extent that I would even say that me personally, and I've said this in other forms, you know, when it comes to Christianity,

Catholicism specifically, the religion I practice, whether or not Jesus actually walked on water or turned water into wine or rose from the third day, I get that it's very important to a lot of people to practice the faith. For me, it's really not. If you did all that stuff, good for Jesus. But what helps me is the actual gospel, the teachings, the ministry, the ethical teachings that kind of can stand on their own with or without the quote-unquote magic. So I guess I'm kind of aligned with Thomas Jefferson on that.

You know, the famous Jefferson Bible kind of edited out all the miracles and divine elements and just basically brought it down to the teachings, which he. apparently believed to be self-evident. Except for did not apply them to African-Americans. Thomas Jefferson was a work in progress, a complicated man. No doubt about that. So, yes. Are there aliens living under the seabed in the Mariana Trench?

So where does this whole thing come from? So the UFO people have a problem, okay, that they need to solve, which is, let's take, let's work it backwards. Let's agree that the Nimitz Tic Tac or the Omaha USO or any one of these kind of iconic UAPs, as they're called these days, are indeed the technology possibly piloted by aliens themselves or dispatched by aliens themselves. How do they get here? Where do they come from? And you have a number of cosmological challenges and challenges of physics that you have to surmount out. one is known as the Fermi paradox.

And that is basically the supposition, or I should say the observation, the remark that's attributed to the great physicist Enrico Fermi, which basically comes down to saying, yes, we know that statistically the odds are that the universe is indeed populated by other folks like us, or maybe not like us, but other intelligent civilizations,

with you there, But if it is indeed impossible that we're alone and that there are others out there, where the fuck are they? Why are we not seeing them when we have our radio telescopes looking out there, when we have a million people looking up at the sky, and they're not landing on the lawn of the White House and announcing themselves? That's a bit of a problem. The other question is posed by what's sometimes referred to as the Copernican concept or the Copernican principle, which is we're not at the center of the universe, right? We're not like some huge beacon attracting people. So that means if life is evenly distributed and there's huge distances,

even if there were intelligence life, why would they be coming here and how would they get here? How would they traverse these gigantic distances? and why would they choose to come here? And if they were to do so, how would they overcome some of Einstein's challenges like traveling faster than the speed of light? Okay. So there's a number of ways that people kind of solve these problems.

One is interdimensionality, right? They're not traveling through space and time, as we normally understand it. They're punching in and out of different dimensions. They're kind of toggling into out of a different position in our dimension that obviates the need to move faster than the speed of light. Okay. Another one is that they've been here the entire time,

that the distances are not exactly that problematic because it's not interstellar travel to begin with, that there was a meteorite or some other origin encounter whereby alien life seeded this planet, billions of years ago, and evolved to the point where there is indeed life forms at the bottom of the ocean that do not live by things like photosynthesis, but rather through things like chemosynthesis. And they have evolved to the point where, like in the movie The Abyss, they are now able to engage in what's often referred to as transmedium travel, meaning from the water into the air. And that's what explains a number of these UAP videos, which are alleged to have documented objects not only flying in the sky,

but traveling from the ocean into the air and vice versa. Got you there. Look, he's struck dumb, struck dumb by the knowledge, by the theory, by the preaching. What I was going to ask is, where do you come down on this? Well, again, it's interesting that you ask me because I'm the guy who was just saying 20 minutes ago that I think that deep sea life is definitely much more diverse and is much more down there to discover than some people think. So I believe there are large creatures swimming in the depths of the ocean

that we have not observed yet entirely. I think we've observed parts of them, but we haven't observed entirely. So you would think that I'd be ready to embrace the cryptotorrestrial theory as well. Look, there are, again, very intelligent, very well-trained, very honorable people who believe this stuff. One of the heroes of my book is this gentleman, Lou Elizondo. And I know people crack on Louis-Lizondo left and right, but he's a good guy,

and he's really been helpful and a good friend to me. And I will not abide the bad-mouthing of Lou Elizondo. I don't even know what that is. Oh, so good. You're not in a position to bad-mouth. He's the godfather, the founding father, if you will, of the current UFO Renaissance. He's the gentleman who used to work for the Pentagon. program called A-Tip that he ended up leaking the original Pentagon videos, the most famous of which is this Nimitz-Tick-Tac, and was behind the publication of the seminal article in New York Times in 2017 that broke the whole story wide open that despite its decades worth of poo-pooing UFOs or UAPs and studying them largely for the purpose of debunking them, indeed the Pentagon.

been taking them seriously to the tunes of millions of dollars in budgetary outlays for quite some time. And that was the initial, if you will, snowflake that has subsequently snowballed into the state, the current affair that we're in now where both the Pentagon and the White House are completely open about the fact that they're studying UAPs and want to know more about them and want us to know more about them, which I consider a big sign of progress. But yet, I am not fully convinced that there are aliens living at the bottom of the ocean, although I admit that it would solve many of the puzzles that the UAP issue presents us. Okay, let's move on to the afterlife.

You have done some work both on your show and in the book on claims that there may be some evidence for a hereafter. What have you found? What do you believe? So what I found and where my kind of foundational beliefs came from, which I write about a little bit in the book, back in the 90s, even before I was working at ABC. I was working in the investigative unit of a syndicated television show. We would call it a tablet television show called Inside Edition, where I learned many, many great things about how to produce television and how to practice journalism. And also learned great many things about the hideous overpopulation. of charlatans and frauds out there who are willing to take advantage of people who are gullible

or credulous or simply can't really cope with some of the harsher realities of life, such as the premature death of a loved one. So I'd gone to Arizona and with a hidden camera to conduct a sting on one of these psychics who, for a hefty fee, would claim that he could either communicate with or more importantly direct you to the body of a abducted and deceased family member who had never been found. And of course, that's particularly pernicious, not just because it kind of plays on people's desire to communicate with a loved one. But if you're a family with a missing daughter and the police haven't found anything,

how can you possibly justify not giving money to a psychic? You'll try anything. And you very easily fall prey to these, I would have to say, scumbags, is the easiest word that comes to my mind, who will take their money. play on your hopes and deliver absolutely nothing. That's where I was coming from. Well, especially when we approach these kinds of topics on the proof is out there, okay, that's when I'm at my most critical and skeptical.

So what are we seen that have indicated anything to the contrary? Well, there have been these videos where children in particular, I'm thinking of one particular case where there's a video of a little girl whose uncle recently died under tragic circumstances, and she's looking straight into the space in front of her high chair and having this long conversation with him, and her mother is saying, who you're talking to? And she says, Tim, Tim, that was the gentleman's name. And this happens frequently enough that the mother started documenting this and came to believe that indeed the child was interacting with the spirit of her deceased uncle.

Now, of course, there's a skeptical position to occupy there. You can say the child just hasn't really developed enough of a mature sense of object permanence and impermanence. But there are people including a respective physicist, Michi Okaku, who said that indeed it might be the case that children can perceive and communicate things and layers of reality that go beyond the strictly empirical perceptions that we have as adults. There's also been a lot of work done by researchers at the University of Virginia, some of which has been documented on a Netflix show, which was called After Death or something like that. I remember watching it with the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein. I'll drop a link in the show notes to this documentary series. And one of the episodes follows this researcher from UVA, whose name I'm forgetting. And he goes out and meets some children who claim to remember their past lives, little kids. And he conducts the quizzes where he sets out like a bunch of pictures in front of them and says, okay, which is a picture of your old neighborhood and the kid can reliably pick it out? And so there seems to be some suggestive but not dispositive evidence of children remembering past lives. Yeah. So I have not seen this Netflix documentary, but you're talking about the studies out

of the University of Virginia. Yes, I referenced those in the book a couple different times. the initial kind of groundbreaking scientist, and that was a gentleman named, I want to say, Ian Stevenson, who documented hundreds of these cases, many of which seem to have, at least on an anecdotal basis, very compelling evidence. And he focused on children, of course, because children below the age of seven or eight

usually haven't learned or developed enough where they can read and retain information about somebody else's life who's deceased, enough to pull off an elaborate hoax, right? So when you're dealing with kids, where else would they be getting the information? They're a good group to use. And he'd come up with, I want to say something like 1600. I could be getting it wrong, but I don't think so,

cases that he considered somewhat valid. Now, he died and he was also criticized as not, you know, being as a rigorous scientist as perhaps he could have been. But to this day, there are people who continue to study this topic. And there are cases that are quite compelling. We interviewed a woman who was considered one of the kind of iconic cases, and her name was Babbro Carlin. She was from Scandinavia.

I want to say Stockholm. But she believed very sincerely that she was the reincarnation of Anne Frank. And she had stories and documentation about being able to, you know, know how to get to Anne Frank's house the first time she visited Amsterdam as a child and knowing where some of the furniture and wall hangings have been placed, even though they'd been taken down. decades ago and the house had been somewhat rearranged for the tourist purposes, and it's compelling stuff. But I've always had a tough time with reincarnation, just on the numbers, right?

How do you account for the fact that, you know, there's, you know, 8 billion people now and there were only 2 billion people before? I guess we wouldn't have to mean that a few billion of us were crickets or dogs or something before and not humans. But it is really fascinating stuff. and again, worthy of serious consideration and study in my book. Ancient archaeology? What does it mean? Everybody's familiar with some of the mysteries that surround, you know, famous locations like Stonehenge or the Naskolines or the pyramids.

And it's a touchy subject, right? Because on the one hand, it's very legitimate to wonder how could primitive cultures have pulled off such amazing feats of monumentalism. The danger, of course, and this is a criticism that's frequently and full-throatily vocalized by many members of the academic community, is I can very easily slide into a form of paternalistic, I'm trying to find a word more gentle than racism,

but I guess that's the word to use. The hypothesis being that, you know, how could these naked brown people have been smart enough and ingenious enough to make these impressive things they could never have done it it must have been aliens so that's something to be you know that's something to be very careful with as you tiptoe into these discussions one thing we know however that mainstream archaeologists uh openly acknowledge is that there are a lot of cases where primitive ancient societies moved massive rocks around that we have no idea exactly how they do.

We can speculate that maybe they use some sort of pulley system or logs tied together. But it is really interesting that a number of ancient civilizations, some of which we don't even know the names of, we don't know their language, we don't know their culture, we always know is that there's places with these gigantic rocks. We can't explain exactly how they got there. or why they were moved to begin with. But why would people who struggled so much just to find a place to eat and not freeze to death

devoted so much energy and bandwidth to moving and assembling rocks that weigh thousands of pounds way beyond the capacities of the vast majority of their technology at the time? That is a profound, deep, abiding, nettlesome question of both mainstream archaeology and there's examples of it all over the world, some of which we've touched on in the course of the show. I just like what considering that does to my mind.

It puts you in a position of awe, like of genuine, not knowing, and even if the least interesting explanation is true, which is that they figured it out, that's just incredible, and we still don't know how or why. And so that's just a very pleasing mind state to inhabit, which is why people love, thinking about this stuff. And the past is a trip. It doesn't even have to be the remote past. I mean,

I'm still boggled by the idea that people once practiced journalism without cell phones. And I'm, by the way, and I'm old enough to have lived, you know, a good chunk of my life before the smartphone. It just feels like a foreign planet. And it's amazing how much stuff was actually accomplished. And that's why I kind of end the book saying that even if there are aliens and we're not alone, and all the most brokly, kooky hypotheses are true, we should still feel good enough about ourselves

as a species to take a little bit of a bow. I mean, we've done some amazing things that we should be proud of. And, you know, we haven't yet found another species out there that's, you know, figured out the history of the universe, the history of evolution, the human body,

invented the computer, developed AI, penicillin is a biggie. Come on. And at the very least, I think we should again be very happy with ourselves as humans and acknowledge that the reason a lot of that progress was made was explicitly because somebody had a crazy idea that they stuck with. You've heard the theory, I know, I'm sure that the reason why we haven't had confirmed to alien visitors is that all the advanced extraterrestrial civilizations developed AI, which killed them. It is, again, a big assumption, not only that an alien civilization would evolve long enough to be able to master interstellar travel or interdimensional travel, but to not annihilate itself.

I mean, you know, we have only, you know, been in possession of nuclear weapons for less than a century. And that's been a major concern from the get-go. So, and one thing we also know from the study of our own planet is that civilizations have a wonderful propensity for collapsing and wiping themselves out. Now, you know, you get the Kurzweil types who believe in the singularity and think the AI is going to, you know, kind of lead to a form of transhumanism and space itself is going to attain consciousness. So maybe it's a question less of, you know, collapsing and going extinct as to evolving into some higher state

of existence where our bodies themselves just become husks, which we outgrow. That might be nice, you know, but I'm not convinced it's going to happen next week. Two questions I ask at the end of every interview. First, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we haven't? We haven't talked about Scientology, Dan. It's been years. I don't feel like getting sued. Well, I'm here to tell you, you know, the Scientologists have kind of won. Look, there was a time when the fundamental principles of Scientology which have to do with UFOs and extraterrestrials and all their kind of core beliefs were considered so disruptive that they needed to be kept secret and nobody could know about them.

Well, not pretty much everybody knows about it. But they must be laughing double time because now the Pentagon and the White House and mainstream America is talking about aliens and things like that. the panspermia thesis, and it doesn't all align with the teachings of Elron Hubbard, which is probably disqualifying. But in terms of the larger discourse regarding aliens, you know, if anything, mainstream society has taken a step towards Scientology, not away from it. My problem, you know, if I were advising the Scientologists, which I've tried to do several times, to no avail, is their big mistake was making their bet noir, their number one,

enemy psychiatry. I would advise them. I always say this. I would advise them to make their number one enemy golf because there's lots of affluent people who have tried golf and hate golf and want nothing more than to turn their back on golf and find something else fulfilling. And if I were to start a religion today, that's what I would do is base it on an abiding bitter antagonism towards the sport of golf. Tom Cruise, if you're listening, um, reach out. Yeah, take a number, get in line. Final question. This is almost redundant at this point, but can you remind everybody in the name of your book and maybe also your past book, which you also came on this show to discuss and the show that you executive produce? Can you just plug

everything you got, please? Yes, so my book, published by Simon & Schuster in May of 2006, is called Evidence of the Extraordinary Discoveries from the Series The Proof is Out There. And it is about about, you know, my and my team's diligent efforts to try to apply rigorous journalistic and scientific standards to the investigation of paranormal phenomena. And my earlier book, which was called More Than You Can Handle, A Rare Disease, a Family, a Crisis, and the Break Through Medicine that Cure the Incurable, is about my own families and my son's personal journeys as we tried to diagnose and treat and ultimately cure this crushingly rare and lethal primary immune deficiency that he was born with. That set us on a whole journey that brought us through the miracles of

modern medicine right to the edge of science and belief and empirical data and its border between faith and hope and potentially the divine. So that's how that book is framed and there are certain parallels between that and my approach to the current endeavors to study the paranormal. Miguel, great job of this. Great to talk to you. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go, remember to sign up for my new. app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at Danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world class teachers, add free access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads, exclusive live stream events, which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week, robust discussion threads to connect

you with our team, with our teachers, and with one another. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace.