The Evidence for Aliens, the Afterlife, Bigfoot, Sea Monsters, and More | Miguel Sancho

33:05and okay i mean that's kind of where i am uh i would just say that it is a problem this is a classic slippery slope problem that you see everywhere from religion to ufology the study of ufos right i mean we can agree i think that there are things flying around the sky that we unidentified but many people who are actually much more serious about the topic and i am much more credentialed and frankly much more honorable people because they've served our country 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 they need 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 that studied cases of medieval and renaissance levitations in which he kind of came out saying something happened.

34:30He wasn't just poo-pooing it or dismissing it as 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 mind, you know, like I ultimately, I don't know. Maybe they haven't found the Loch Ness Monster. I don't personally think the animal's 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.

35:14Yeah. Well, maybe that's the true lesson of Buddhism, that you can't have your cake and 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 lionize 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 uh ufology or uh the deep end of the pool of buddhism or what have you it is a it is i would submit to everyone uh a positive darwinian adaptation it's a good thing we have and 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.

36:25Yeah, 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 kiddie 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.

37:08It 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 uh 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 an understanding, an 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 will 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.

38:48It's 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 can 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 uh 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 he there was some sort of uh debate he was in i'm getting foggy on the details but he had this great parable or example it's 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 straight at you, would you be more or less put at ease if you knew that they were coming from a church meeting?

39:40So again, yes, the practice of religion has led to jihads, 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.

40:19The 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. um like i i i think we 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 um 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 look if i'm resigning myself to the fact, this is going to be an amicable conversation.

41:17I would agree with you to the extent that I would even say that me personally, and I've said this, you know, in other forums, 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.

41:56So, 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 uh did not apply them to african-americans but thomas jefferson was a work in progress a complicated man no no doubt about that um so yes are there aliens living under the seabed in the mariana trench so where does this whole thing come from so the u the ufo people have a problem okay that they need to solve, which is, let's work it backwards.

42:39Let'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 did they get here? Where did they come from? And you have a number of cosmological challenges and challenges of physics that you have to surmount. 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.

43:40But 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 intelligent life, why would they be coming here?

44:27And 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 uh position in our dimension that uh 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 uh that problematic because it's not interstellar travel to begin with that there was uh a meteorite or some other origin uh 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.

45:39And 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. Struck dumb. Struck dumb by the knowledge, by the theory, by the preaching.

46:15What I was going to ask is, where do you come down on this? Well, again, it's interesting that you asked 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 crypto terrestrial theory as well. Look, there are, again, very intelligent, very well trained, very honorable people who believe this stuff.

46:58One of the heroes of my book is this gentleman, Lou Elizondo. And I know people crack on Lou Elizondo 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. So good. You're not in a position to bad mouth. No. 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, a program called A-Tip, and he ended up leaking the original Pentagon videos, the most famous of which is this Nimitz tic-tac, and was behind the publication of the seminal article in the New York Times in 2017 that broke the whole story wide open.

47:41that despite its decades worth of poo-pooing UFOs or UAPs and studying them largely for the purpose of debunking them, indeed, the Pentagon had 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 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.

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50:56Okay, 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 um 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 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.

51:57So I'd gone to Arizona 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.

52:44That'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 have we seen that have that has indicated anything uh to the contrary well there have been these videos where children in particular that i'm thinking of one particular case where there's 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.

53:50But there are people, including a respected physicist, Michio Kaku, 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.

54:29And he goes out and meets some children who claim to remember their past lives, little kids. And he conducts these quizzes where he sets out like a bunch of pictures in front of them and says, OK, 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 uh yes i i referenced those in the book a couple different times the initial uh kind of groundbreaking scientist and that was a gentleman named uh i want to say ian stevenson who documented hundreds of these cases many of which uh seem to have at least on an anecdotal basis very compelling evidence and he focused on children of course because uh children below the age of seven or eight usually haven't learned or developed enough the way 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 all right 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 uh somewhat valid now he died and he was also criticized as not you know being as rigorous a scientist as perhaps he could have been but to this day there are people uh who continue to study uh 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 believe very sincerely that she was the reincarnation of Anne Frank.

56:19And 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 had 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 8 billion people now and there were only 2 billion people before? I guess we didn't have to mean that a few billion of us were crickets or dogs or something before and not humans.

56:57But 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 Nazca Lines 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-throatedly 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.

57:51The 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 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, you know, logs tied together.

58:40But 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 all we know is that there's places with these gigantic rocks and 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.

59:27I just like what considering that does to my mind 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 by the way, and I'm old enough to have lived, you know, a good chunk of my life before the smartphone.

1:00:12it 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 baroquely 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.

1:00:59Come 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 is 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 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.

1:01:43I mean, we have only 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.

1:02:28That 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 get secret and nobody could know about.

1:03:05them. 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 the panspermia thesis. And it doesn't all align with the teachings of L. Ron 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, If I were advising the Scientologists, which I've tried to do several times, to no avail, their big mistake was making their bet noire, their number one enemy, psychiatry.

1:03:48I 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've 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 um 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 of the name of your book and maybe also your past book, which you also came on the show to discuss and and the show that you executive produce?

1:04:33Can you just plug everything you got, please? Yes. So my book published by Simon and Schuster in May of 2026 is called Evidence of the Extraordinary Discoveries from the series. the proof is out there. And it is 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 in Crisis, and The Breakthrough Medicine That Cured the Incurable, is about my own family's 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.

1:05:16That 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 with 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 Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

1:05:59Lauren 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, ad-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.

1:06:39There's a free 14 day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace.