I Debated UFOs With America’s Top Skeptic (It Got Ugly…)

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25:14Michael Shermer:Thanks to Raycon for sponsoring today's episode. What would your base rate be for things going wrong with nuclear weapons? Because mine would be pretty low. Well, things go, okay, no, mine would not be low. Look at all just the literature on accidents, nuclear accidents since the end of the Second World War. There's dozens of them. These are the list of close calls, like the Russian guy, Petrov, who— Oh, of course, close calls. But I'm not talking about manual— The B-52 crashes, and there's two nuclear weapons at the bottom of the ocean. There's another one in Greenland. But these things are— I mean, weird shit happens.

25:55Just entropy. You have the best cryptography of the NSA.

25:59Michael Shermer:You have Faraday chambers surrounding these things, and they are guarded in extremely intensive ways. And so to me, when I hear, you know, the two times I know of where nukes getting, you know, going down, being decommissioned and getting tampered with, one is 1967 Malmstrom, the other is 2010 F.E. Warren. And both, if you actually back channel and do a little digging, the people on site are saying they're associated with things that are flying around in the local airspace that seem to break physics. In the 2010 case at Effie Warren, it was this Tic Tac flying around. Then I'm like, OK, maybe there's a correlation here.

26:41Michael Shermer:Maybe there's something going on. Maybe. Yeah. Might be future science. I'm not saying it's some woo-woo thing. Let's hang on. Let's not go there yet because time travel has other problems with the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. You can't. Far future humans can't come back here. But our current physical model of reality always gets overturned. So saying a thing— Not always. No, no, no, not always. Of course it does. No, no. So Einstein did not overturn Newton. Newton's works. It's couched within Einstein. Newtonian mechanics works very well for most things. If you want to fine-tune it, you want to land right there instead of right there.

27:21Okay, you got to use Einstein.

27:23Michael Shermer:You have time dilation. You have observer dependency for a lot of things. Okay, hang on. Where are we going with this? I know where you're going with this. So let me back up for a second. So we have a lot of anomalous, unexplained phenomena, UAPs or UFOs, whatever. And we have 99 % of them have been explained, even by the ufologists. So we're down to just not a handful. There's still hundreds and hundreds of unexplained things. All right. What are they? Okay, so I have three categories, ordinary terrestrial, extraordinary terrestrial, and then extraordinary extraterrestrial. So the first one is, can you hand me my book in?

28:03I'm going to read to you since we have plenty of time. Yeah, let's plug it. No, I don't want to treat the book. I just want to talk about the aliens here. I'm going to give you Leslie Keen's list of ordinary terrestrial explanations. This is from her book, UFOs, Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. So she says, quote, roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained as weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddy, sun dogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off the clouds, lights on the ground.

28:49Lights reflected on the cockpit window. Temperature inversions. Hole punch clouds. And the list goes on. In other words, so medical students get this reference. If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Now, Nick Pope famously on my show said, unless you live near a zoo and there's a lot of zebras. Yeah, okay, fair enough. So 90 to 95 % or something in that list. Now I would add drones because commercial drones are so popular. How does something that's big and going really fast suddenly turn and go like, well, drones do that all the time? Extraordinary terrestrial would be like the Russians have this super advanced technology, the Chinese have it, or the CIA, DARPA has this advanced technology or so on.

29:33Okay. First, if that were true, what else would be true? Why wouldn't the Russians use it in Ukraine? Why wouldn't we be using this in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran? Oh, I'm not saying we can use it.

29:43Michael Shermer:I'm not saying it's us. I'm saying it's not us. Or maybe it's not, but a lot of people do think that could be it. So I debunked that saying that can't be because if the Russians had this, we would know because we steal their stuff. They steal our stuff. I think you're arguing for this being non-human. Well, it could be. Okay. So, but if it's non-human, what would it be? Okay. So then, so my third category is extraordinary extraterrestrial. So these are aliens. These are, okay. Now I know non-human intelligence does not mean alien. So the people on the UAP panel are going, Shermer, don't say aliens, because it could be something else.

30:17Like, OK, what else could it be? Interdimensional beings or far future human time travelers. All right.

30:22Michael Shermer:Now I think we're really getting into speculation there. But you mentioned up top that it's important to have epistemic humility, which I agree with. And so we have a limited scope of reality as humans. How many of the millions of species on Earth think that they're apex predators when they're not? Because the apex predator above them just exists at a higher scope. And you know that the history of science and cosmological models building is all the history of Umwelts and the ability to, you know, scope out new territory, whether it's James Webb on the macro scale or, you know, room at the bottom.

30:58Michael Shermer:You know, as Feynman said, you know, we have, you know, increasingly granular electron microscopes and we're doing the Large Hadron Collider and stuff like that to detect sub-quark stuff. So, you know, to say that we won't bump into, you know, some sort of species above us and then you have all sorts of observable anomalies that we're seeing. So, like, why not? I'm not saying that. I agree with you. We could. OK, if it's. So this is the last chapter of my book, my God gambit. If we encountered extraterrestrial intelligences, they're not going to be just like five years ahead of us where, you know, we back engineered and upgraded our computers from, you know, vacuum tubes to computer chips.

31:40Like, really? The aliens are just five years ahead of us? They would be hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us, millions of years ahead of us. They would be like gods to us, right? Like the iPhone to the Neanderthal. It feels godlike.

31:54Michael Shermer:I think that's how people who are in the quote unquote UFO legacy program talk about UFO materials. I know. I know. Because I talk to them. That's fine. If we encountered aliens, they would be far advanced. That does not mean that that's the explanation for the anomalies. Yeah. It's just one of multiple possible explanations.

32:41Michael Shermer:For sure. showing up in our most sensitive airspace, specifically around nuclear. There was, in fact, a project called Project Twinkle. You're picking the winners. What about, what's the base, right? We're picking the winners. Okay, let me back up one second. On the history of science, you're picking the winners there, okay? Everything you said is true. Yeah. This theory overturned this one and so on and so on. That has happened. But that doesn't mean the new theory is going to be overturned because it is also wrong, the current paradigm. I mean, they may be wrong. The Big Bang Theory might be wrong.

33:11The theory of evolution might be wrong. Maybe quantum mechanics isn't right. It would be a bet. But that would be very surprising given how well supported these are. But Michael, we're

33:19Michael Shermer:never at the end of history. It would be an ahistorical thing to say flash freeze frame now. I know. We're done with knowledge. At the end of the 19th century, electromagnetism had the last laugh. I know. I know. And it obviously didn't. Okay. So all this is possible, but that doesn't mean that is the explanation for these anomalies. I don't think that we have a good explanation. But I do think they're genuine anomalies that aren't explained away through prosaic means. That's all I'm trying to say. I don't think we should snap to grid, say these are aliens from Zeta Reticuli because we don't have a lot of evidence that they are.

33:53Michael Shermer:But I do think we have a ton of evidence that intelligently propulsed things that don't seem to be human are moving around in our sensitive nuclear airspace. And then you could take it a step further and you could come up with some sort of like, okay, it's, you know, the people working at these nuclear bases are MKUltra patients and they've been tested on with mind control experiments. No, I don't think that's it. You don't think that's it. And then, you know, you can't really come up with the drone thing, but you could come up with some sort of maybe some spoofing technology in the sky that's sensitive, that's co-located.

34:31Michael Shermer:It's really hard. But then you get into the fact that in Japan, next to their civilian nuclear energy grid in Fukushima, they have a mountain called Mount Sengun Mori, which is dedicated to UFOs. Bariloche, Argentina, next to their civilian energy grid, you have UFOs showing up and you have a famous case in 95 with a commercial plane. You have similar accounts at Chernobyl. Here's another example of commercial airline pilots in the 1960s and 70s being startled at UFOs that are streaking above them at like three or four times their speed, two or three times the height that they're at at 35 ,000 feet.

35:08They were seeing the U-2 spy plane or the SR-71 Blackbird, but they didn't know about that because that was secret. Okay. So how do you know that some of these are not, some of them are not like the next generation of DARPA CIA type spy planes or whatever that we haven't heard about?

35:24Michael Shermer:Again, between 1945 and 1953, before the U-2 spy plane, I just don't know. I understand all of the like, oh yeah, we used to mistake the U-2, the SR-71, things like that. But we're talking about before that, we have thousands of documents that comport exactly with the stuff in this book that occurs later on. So I just, you know, as early, the first case in this book is 1945 Hanford plutonium. When we got down there, they told us that this boat, he was out there right over the Hanford Ordnance Works and directed Lieutenant Commander Brown to take off and challenge him. He said, all I can see is a bright red or reddish orange fireball right up in front of me.

36:06OK, go ahead and give me your best speculation about what you think, whatever it is, is doing at our nuclear site.

36:12Michael Shermer:I don't know, but I don't think our current science explains it. And I think it's worthy of further inquiry. And I feel like the skeptical mode is shutting down the conversation. The government would care. They would care deeply if somebody was messing around. And they do. And so I think Blue Book was a front-facing, basically, decoy that was meant to throw the public off. And then underneath that, and this is now publicly admitted, because Jacques Vallée was J. Allen Hynek, the chief astronomer of Blue Book's assistant, and he found this thing called the Pentacle Memo, where it looked like Battelle Memorial Institute, which works hand-in-hand with our nuclear sites all over the country, even back then, on basically a more granular mapping of UFO instances across the country.

36:56Michael Shermer:country, even in the 50s. Project Blue Book was the best I could do at the time because I felt they had a real project going on that was secret. Is that true? And the Air Force did. Oh, I didn't know that. And so I think they care intensely. And I think the reason to not disclose this is you don't want things that you don't, that flying with impunity, you don't want things that you can't attribute flying around our nukes and tampering with them. I agree. So one of the goals of the UAP Science Advisory Committee is to get more information so that we can figure out what it is. If somebody in the inside knows, then tell us.

37:35Now, what we're worried about, okay, so this is a point of discussion in our first Zoom meeting, was what if they misdirect us and go, hey, Avi, here's some stuff. Now go spend a few weeks analyzing that. Meanwhile, we're going to invade Cuba or whatever. Okay, so we're aware that this could be. Avi's a pretty savvy guy. I don't think that's going to happen. But yes, they would care. So why are they not doing something about it? Why do these things keep happening? And so every president that gets in there, you know, Clinton and Obama, Trump, you know, we're going to find out what's going on. Right.

38:07And then you see, you know, like Obama on these shows or Clinton on these shows going, I got in there. I sent my people in. We didn't find anything. Anything having to do with UFO or related material, and we're going to be releasing a lot of things. There's footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are. Did you go through the UFO documents? I'm not telling you.

38:31Michael Shermer:But that's the thing. I think that's why disclosure is a misnomer. I don't think they have an ontological model of truth. And let's just simulate this. You're Obama and you're like, I really want to understand what's going on. You send your best people at it and they say, there are things flying around our nukes and we have no idea what they're doing, why they're here. And sometimes they turn the nukes off. And there we do have multisensory data against this. We know it's a real thing. We know it's not kind of illusory. Of course, you're not going to disclose that to the American public. That's crazy.

39:03So now you're accusing Obama of lying. No, not at all. Or he's silent.

39:07Michael Shermer:No, I'm accusing him of doing the rational thing, which is not touching off mass hysteria. If that's all you know. I see. I see. So you're saying he's siloed from some other people in the government who know what's actually going on and they just don't tell him. Yeah, I don't think this is your day to day concern as president, you know, but I think if you if you want to do a deep inquiry and then you find out that these intelligently propulsed things are flying around our nuclear assets, you know, totally like, you know, we have no no attribution on that. We have no idea where they came from. They're flying, you know, in ways that break our modern physics and our understanding of physics.

39:44Michael Shermer:You're not going to willy nilly disclose that. That then creates a green field for adversaries to try to, you know, do recon against our sensitive sites because it becomes this real, you know, then it's we we we're admitting that we don't know about these these certain things and they can sort of muddy the waters by by throwing, you know, more mud at us. But who's the they? No, I'm saying adversaries can then throw a bunch of their most exotic drones in the mix. And then it's like, oh, we don't know whether it's the NHI. So you'd never disclose it. We know the Russians do. They muck with stuff all the time.

40:22They're doing this social media. For sure. Absolutely.

40:24Michael Shermer:And we do that with them. Our spies do bad stuff, too. But you get what I'm saying. The public would freak out. You would never want to do that. I don't think the public would. Okay. You don't mean like if we discovered aliens, the stock market would crash and religiously? No. No, no, I don't mean that. I mean, if you're Obama and you find out that all we actually know about this stuff is, yeah, maybe some material was dropped. Maybe we have some remnants of actual physical evidence. But like, ultimately, one of the core truths about it is that these things are flying, you know, with complete impunity around our most sensitive defense.

40:56Michael Shermer:Maybe. So what's the what's the criteria cut off to tip over on that particular issue of because power goes out at stations all the time. This happens. So maybe the power just went out for some other reason at the Maelstrom site and it wasn't these orbs or whatever. So how many does it have to happen? And we go, OK, this is not just some random electricity occasionally goes out and shuts off the nukes. It was something else. The reason I think that it was actually UFO related is there was a Boeing Strategic Air Command report where they actually looked and they tried to recreate the effect. And this is on the Echo Flight incident.

41:35Michael Shermer:So this was eight days before the Salus incident, just to be clear. But it was at Malmstrom. And they couldn't recreate the effect and they couldn't understand. They had no idea what it was. And so they concluded that it was anomalous. Then cut back to a year or two ago, the Wall Street Journal reports this clearly disinfo hit piece on UFOs. And it's around this event. And they say that an EMP in 1967, like a 60 foot EMP, was wheeled up to Malmstrom. And we shut down our own nukes in some sort of experimental testing, which has all sorts of issues. The nukes wouldn't go back online if they were they'd be fried, you know, from the EMP.

42:18Michael Shermer:You would never do that with people present. We didn't even have operational non-nuclear EMPs in 1967. So that's checkmate in one, you know. So so whenever you know of maybe the CIA DARPA has some. I don't think that I don't think that reminds me a little bit of that. Bluegill Triple Prime was four years before where we incidentally created an EMP in the Starfish Prime series. I don't think we had. And I don't know. OK, maybe. So the question would be, how can we get to the bottom of this? OK, so part of my problem is that, you know, I've been hearing about disclosure coming any day now for 40 years.

42:53When's it going to happen? Right. And so every time Clinton or Obama and Trump, OK, we're going to get to the bottom of this. I looked into it. I didn't find anything. And then the UFO people go, oh, OK, he's siloed or he's lying or they're lying to him. No, they have different criteria.

43:07Michael Shermer:They probably personally believe in this. That's why Obama thought about producing Betty and Barney Hill's documentary. That's why he's on set at Spielberg's Disclosure Day. It's because he's into this stuff. But he can't talk about it publicly because it's sensitive. I was on that podcast. This is what triggered the UFO files dump was, you know, he said the host asked him, do you think aliens are real? And he goes, yeah, I think aliens are real. Are aliens real? They're real, but I haven't seen them. And they're not being kept in. What is it? Area 51. Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they they hid it from the president of the United States.

43:49Then he clarified, I meant they're out there somewhere, like what I said.

43:53Michael Shermer:Not that they're here. Yeah, but the revealed private preference is that if he's funding documentaries about the first abduction case in the United States. I mean, Spielberg's a filmmaker. If the director of his CIA, Brennan, and director of national intelligence that oversees all intelligence agencies under him, James Clapper, is on record, you know, in the age of disclosure, saying that, you know, we were at Area 51 and we were systematically detecting UFOs in that sensitive airspace. So obviously Obama knew. Detecting what? detecting something, an anomaly. That's not aliens. But again, I think if you go back to the pre-U2 spy plane and then it comports with all of this data, you have eyewitness accounts, you have radar, and you have all sorts of evidence that this is happening.

44:40Michael Shermer:Clearly, you have an abundance of evidence. Evidence of something, but what? I don't know. I don't know. No, no. But I think what I'm saying is that that's obviously worthy of further inquiry. That's obviously warrants science because the skeptic thing shuts down the conversation, you know? No, I don't want to. So you admit that this is phenomenologically real and hard to explain by any prosaic means. I'm not sure that the nuclear thing is beyond statistical chance. See, like in the social sciences, you're familiar with the null hypothesis. Of course. The hypothesis is not true until proven otherwise.

45:13You run the experiment, the randomized controlled trial and so on and so forth. You get to the 0.05 or 0.01 level statistical significance. You go, okay, I think we have a real effect and not. Sometimes that holds up and it's replicated. Sometimes it's not. Maybe you manipulated the stats or whatever. In other words, there's a method, of course, to get there. What would be the method for that to say, okay, something weird is happening in our nuclear sites and it's predictable and here it's repeatable and you can see it versus some weird stuff is happening. Let's look further. Okay. But then what?

45:46Michael Shermer:I think this is happening far more frequently than if you were to like stand in random locations, you know, all over the globe. Well, but not random because you got to be where there's a lot of people looking up. They're interested. There's observers. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. I mean. While being hypervigilant about what's going on, controlling for all of the other variables. Yeah. So here's an example. Like the Navy pilot David Fravor talks about the UAP going from 80 ,000 feet to sea level like that. Right. Like one second. How could this possibly be? It rapidly accelerated in front of us and disappeared.

46:21Our wingmen, roughly 8 ,000 feet above us, lost contact also. We immediately turned back to see where the whitewater was at, and it was gone also. You know, Avi does a calculation saying this is not possible for any physical object to move through the air at that speed because it would burn up, it would release an explosion, break the sound barrier. the people on the aircraft carrying Nimitz, they would have heard it. They would have reported it. None of this happened. So whatever he thinks he saw or people think they saw the radar, whatever, that's not what happened. It cannot have happened. That is physically impossible.

46:56This is Avi Loeb saying this. He did the calculation. Can't happen. We know what happens when bolides and meteors come through the atmosphere at that speed. They burn up, they explode. It's a big thing. This never happened with that UAP. So whatever the story is, 80 ,000 feet to sea level, oh my God.

47:12Michael Shermer:okay you're wrong so yeah but that's the point that it's flying in ways that defy our current physics and so that means we should study it and figure out if some future physics might be able to explain it or that's not what happened it one or the other a sizable object did not drop from 80 000 feet but when you when you have somebody like it was a camera effect or it was a lens effect or the zoom effect yeah but when Okay, so these are our choices. It was a normal camera lens, something weird effect, or all of our physics is off and we need a new physics. Okay, let's go with this one first. Well, fair enough.

47:50Michael Shermer:But I would say, I don't know if you know Miguel Alcubierre is. He's at the University of Mexico and he figured out a way for faster than light travel within the scope of general relativity. It requires negative energy. But you have things like the Casimir effect, which allow for essentially show negative energy. And then you have somebody like Sonny White at NASA who's figuring out how to harness the Casimir effect to light up a small chip. So you can make the Casimir effect useful. Okay, but you're doing these calculations to explain something that may not need explaining. It's not what you think it is.

48:21Michael Shermer:But it needs explaining because you have Commander David Fravor, who is an extremely esteemed person, who is in charge of flying an F-16, is extremely, extremely experienced. You have this whole squadron. And you have Chad Underwood catching the thing with forward-looking infrared. You have Kevin Day, who's catching the thing with radar on the USS Princeton. You have a whole chain of custody and you have all these different kind of, you know, multisensory corroborating things. You have the radar, which was confiscated. And then again, there's a nuclear connection. Tactical nukes were likely on board.

48:57The Nimitz was still adjusting a new radar system for that particular one. Was it the Tic Tac one?

49:03Michael Shermer:It was a spy radar system. Yeah. So maybe it was inaccurate. Maybe it was still being adjusted. They thought that and then they repositioned it and it was total. It was reading the same thing. And it's been fine ever since. And it's this it's been the state of the art ever since. OK. And how many of these do we have? And by the way, how come we don't have? We have tons. We have tons in this book. How come we don't have good photos? What's your answer to the where's all the clear and unmistakable photos and videos? We do have some good photos. Maybe the Navy needs better cameras. Do you know? Do you know about that?

49:34Michael Shermer:Do you know about the lake coat photos? No. And in Costa Rica, they were doing aerial mapping around this arenal area, Lake Cote. They were trying to do this hydroelectric project. And this guy, Sergio Leozzi, I always mispronounce his name. He was this guy, you know, flying this plane, doing the aerial mapping, you know, it was with a professional grade cameras for their geographical institute, which is in their, you know, Ministry of Public Works. They're developing the photo and they see this UFO over, you know, over the region that looks like this perfect UFO that they didn't even spot while they were taking the picture.

50:12Michael Shermer:And Jacques Vallée and Gerald Haynes looked at the negatives and the negatives looked perfectly fine. The Costa Rican government has never denied it. So this is an official photograph that's been taken. There are other cases like McMinnville where it's really hard to debunk. The McMinnville one, I mean, really, this looks like a hubcap tossed into the air. But there's no way to ultimately debunk it. It's unfalsifiable in either direction. And Paul and Evelyn Trent were these hapless farmers. I know. I know. And they took two different angles. I have fake UFO photos. It's super easy to do. But my point is there are a bunch of these things that sit in liminal space where you can't say that I'm definitively wrong and I can't say that you're definitively wrong.

50:54Michael Shermer:It's not even wrong. Right. You end up in this impossible argument and then you have eyewitness accounts and then you have FLIR and then you have radar and then you have materials. And it's like we have a tapestry of really good evidence beyond the threshold, for me, at least, as far as, OK, this is really worthy of further investigation. OK, you know, the Tic Tac video where you see the little white thing in the middle, all of a sudden it zooms off. Yeah. OK, this would be in that direction for you. That could be the lock losing target. We don't know what that is. Well, but Mick West pointed out that if you look on the vertical axis, you'll see zoom, 1.0.

51:25And the moment it goes like that, it goes from 1.0 to 2.0 zoom. In other words, the lens is zooming in, not the object moving. All right, so he was the first to point that out. Also, the triangular. All the shows show these triangular green-shaped UAPs near LAX. They're not. They're blinking in the exact same pattern as a commercial airliner. These are commercial airliners coming into LAX. it's the um the bokeh effect on the triangular lens that's causing it to look triangular but

51:53Michael Shermer:context matters and so the nimitz case is really important because not only do you have commander david fravor you have alex dietrich you have you know uh underwood who's doing the flare i'm glad you know who caught it on flare you have you have radar catching it for days before and after you You have the fact that the UFO showed up at the rendezvous point at the cap point 60 miles away on radar that that, you know, Fravor was headed to. So I just think this is hard to argue with, like the overall tapestry of evidence, at least that it's worthy of further investigation. Absolutely. Could could could this have been some secret American technology red teaming our systems?

52:34Michael Shermer:Possibly. I'm open to that. Okay. I am. But I think the nuclear stuff, again, going back to the 40s, is just really, really hard to debunk. I think you're on very, you know, not solid. I don't know. Maybe. You know, it's just. Okay. So you brought up Dietrich. So I'll give the last. This is the end of my chapter on aliens. I'll give the last word to Dietrich, who witnessed the 2004 UAP incident from the USS Nimitz fighter jet, as I think it well sums up, 75 years of ufologists' search for aliens. Quote. I think they enjoy the anticipation more than actually finding answers. And that's been my frustration because I've been hearing about this for decades.

53:12It's like Stephen Greer. Boy, we're going to get to the bottom. Okay. All right. And it never happens. Okay. So what I'm hoping for the UAP committee, advisory committee, is that Avi knows people who know people on the inside. Like he's friends with Anna Paulina Luna. Okay. She seems to be an insider. She just yesterday had a big congressional hearing on MKUltra. All right, let's get to the bottom of this. I happen to know a lot about this, that Gottlieb destroyed most of those records. I don't know if there's a bottom to get to, but fine. Okay, so I'm hoping that Ana Paulina Luna or somebody that Avi knows on the inside could go, all right, damn it, I'm going to go in there and I'm going to get the stuff from the nukes or the whatever, and we're going to bring it out and show it.

53:55Will this happen? I don't know. So I'm prepared to be frustrated and, you know, but I so I will I agree with you.

54:04Michael Shermer:And I think this is important for the audience to be more discerning in cases. I think you serve a very valuable role there. And there is a dynamic with this whole field of kind of Lucy with the football. So I think it's, you know, it's constantly like, you know, disclosures around the bend sort of thing. But I also think if you are familiar with, obviously, you know, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of scientific revolutions, I think consensus thought and science moves as much due to politics as it does due to truth. You know, famously Aristarchus was the first person who thought that, you know, we lived in a heliocentric universe, but it took the, you know, Galileo and Copernicus measuring it, you know, Copernicus theorizing it many, many years, centuries later in order for the consensus to shift on this sort of topic.

54:50Michael Shermer:And then if you look at the money that's been historically spent on UFOs, it's basically nothing. And then you look at, you know, the Robertson panel documentation, which is was meant to be classified at the time, saying Blue Book's literal explicit motive is to throw the public off and systematically downplay, suppress and rationalize UFO sightings. Of course, you're not going to have made good scientific progress on these things that seem to be breaking our physics. Like you're not going to because you You haven't spent the proper resources or money. You go just now, certain academic institutions are starting to take it seriously.

55:26Michael Shermer:You have, you know, Avi Loeb and Gary Nolan, Stanford and Harvard, you know, respectively. But like this is we're talking about the last four or five years. So I think, yeah, on the one hand, yes, it's Lucy with the football. And then on the other hand, it's like, give us a chance. All right, I'll give you some more stories. So when Darwin published on the origin of species in 1859, you know, he was right. That theory has stood the test of time. But he was not the first. There were many other people speculating about the origins of species, and they were wrong. One reason Darwin waited so long, because he returned from the Galapagos in 1835, and he opened his first notebook in the fall of that year.

56:03And it was not until 1859. What took him so long? Well, because a guy named Robert Chambers wrote a book called Vestiges, in which he had his own theory of evolution that was widely criticized and completely wrong. So Darwin thought, oh, I don't want to be like that guy. And, you know, everybody laughs at me. I want a career in science. I got to really take my time and build up tons of evidence. So he does it. Right. So that's what it takes. The famous French astronomer who discovered Neptune. He discovered Neptune by seeing perturbations in Uranus's orbit. And he said, there's got to be something right around there pulling it that direction.

56:39The telescope's there. Eventually, oh, it's a planet. Right. That guy. Also saw perturbations in Mercury's orbit. He's like, OK, here we go again. There's another planet in there. It's planet Vulcan. And he twice found it. He never found it. Right. He was mistaken. And it was Einstein that figured out, oh, Mercury is very close to the sun. It's not the perturbation of another planet. It's the distortion of the space time around the sun causing Mercury to general the relativity theory. OK, so you're picking the winners. Those are all true. But don't forget, most of the ideas in the history of science are wrong, right?

57:15I mean, Copernicus was right, but Brahe had an alternative theory to Ptolemy, where the sun and the moon go around, but then that whole thing goes around the sun, right? So it was kind of a modify between Ptolemy and Copernicus. Brahe was wrong. Most ideas in science are wrong. So the people that discovered this or that about bacteria and virus, you know, like cancer.

57:37Michael Shermer:But I'm not presenting an idea. I'm presenting a tapestry of evidence that wants further investigation and a theory to explain it. Okay, Jesse, I agree with you. Okay. So there's no daylight between us. I've always supported the SETI program. I've supported the Galileo Project. I'm on the Galileo team. Yes. Since the first week, every Monday, the first Friday of every month, we meet on Zoom. I never miss a meeting. I'm there. Yeah, yeah. I want to find out. Okay, I love it. Now, I don't have enough pull, Avi, because of his Harvard connections. I think, OK, maybe this guy can actually make it happen.

58:09In other words, the Stephen Greer's of the world are like, we're going to get to the bottom. And it never happened. Even Clinton, Obama. It never happens. Damn it. Show us.

58:18Michael Shermer:Greer's theory is that they're all love and light and good. And it's, you know, almost like a play on the great filter theory that they have to be perfectly altruistic to have, you know, to go interstellar or something. And they, I don't know. So that would be an example of a thing where I'm like, that is not going to probably stand the test of time. like what you're talking about. But I think just getting off first base because some people, and hopefully you'd admit this, in the skeptical position have just tried to shut down the conversation. No, of course we don't. I would love the conversation.

58:47Michael Shermer:Okay, good. Here I am. So that's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. I know you do. And I appreciate that. And I have immense respect for you. And I'm glad. And we've always had great conversations. I mean, personally, I don't think the discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence would disrupt anything. I think it would be great. I think the stock market would go up. Every religious person I've ever talked to and all the surveys that have been done over the decades of religious people, would this upset your religion? Nobody goes, yeah. Everybody goes, well, of course, God can make as many species around the globe as he wants.

59:19And maybe Jesus goes to different planets to save people. I don't know, but it's not a problem. And if we discovered aliens, I mean, NASA would go straight to Congress and go, hey, we got to double our budget. Look what we found, right? And the military would go, hey, what if they're dangerous? We need a bigger budget. So contrary to the myth that, you know, the world will fall apart, or in the new film, Spielberg's film, you know, the geopolitical stability will be disrupted. I don't think so. I think if anything, the Russians and the Chinese and the Americans go, okay, we now have a common enemy, the Reagan thing.

59:52And so we got to stay close together here, work together on this problem.

59:56Michael Shermer:I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. I will admit that I want to believe. Will you admit that you want to disbelieve? I don't want to disbelieve. No, I would like Sagan. I would love to know there's aliens. I would be surprised if we were alone. As Carl always said, it would be a terrible waste of space if we were the only living intelligent organisms in the entire universe. Would you be surprised if we were being visited, though? I would be surprised because, again, the vastness of interstellar space, it's just—you would need this new kind of physics that you're talking about because— But we always get new physics.

1:00:40Michael Shermer:That's a safe bet. No, not randomly. It's a safe bet to say we always get new physics. I'm not saying randomly. I'm just saying we always get new physics. I mean, here's one of the things that Avi Ovi says in our new meeting. Do you think this is— No new physics. Quit bringing up new physics. You think we're at the end of history of physics? No, of course not. But we just spent a billion dollars at CERN. They found no new physics, right? There's nothing new. Yeah, but it's often the wrong framework. We're just smashing particles together to get to smaller and smaller. Maybe you find the Higgs field and then what do you have left?

1:01:14Michael Shermer:But then, as you know, if you read Structure of Scientific Revolutions, often it's going down the tree trunk, finding another branch. And then that's where the new physics comes. It could happen. Yeah. It could happen. Okay. But I mean, Avi's point is, you know, no new physics. What he means is we're not, we're not Star Trek here. We're not just writing new crazy stuff to explain. Let's get the bottom of it. Show us the thing that we're looking at. Give us the film. Give us the, like on the UFO files that Trump has dumped, three of them now, all the photos and videos have these big blacked out rectangles.

1:01:46Okay. What are those? Those are the numbers from the cameras. Where was the camera? Which camera was it? What was the distance? Was it triangulated? All the details we need. Yeah. Otherwise, I don't know what I'm looking at. Totally. You see this blurry thing going around? Like, what is this? I'm right there with you. I think we need more.

1:02:01Michael Shermer:Did you look at the Gemini 7, Frank Borman, by any chance, that audio? Yes, and Buzz also. So we have a bogey at 30 o 'clock time. Roger. Okay, so I forget on the Borman one, but Avi had a good explanation of this as cosmic rays. Okay, so cosmic rays ping your retina. They also land on film and they can cause film to record something. So he thinks, and I think he's probably right, that the lunar photos where you see the little blue lights in the distant sky on the moon and Buzz Aldrin's report that inside the cabin, he sees lights. Even with his eyes closed, he sees light. Well, that's cosmic rays.

1:02:47It's like if you press the side of your eyeball, you'll see a little white light. And then the third one that I'm not sure about, but the Palomar telescope, the 200-inch telescope there, in the 1940s developed film there of things in the sky. There's nothing in the sky. This is before satellites, as far as Sputnik. So 1940s and 50s. This is Beatrice Villareal's Project Vasco. Avi says, I'm pretty sure those are cosmic rays. And she says, I'm pretty sure they're not.

1:03:15Michael Shermer:So this is an amazing astronomer from Stockholm University. She's also a physicist. and she saw all sorts of light reflecting transients, basically objects in the sky, seemingly objects, flashes. You're talking about the film now or you're talking about eyeballing? I'm talking about, no, in the plates, the astronomical plates at the Palomar Observatory. And you have all these people saying they're plate defects, but then she showed that there's actually a drop-off in the Earth's, you know, obviously you have a side of the Earth where there's shadow from the sun, so, you know, where the sun doesn't exist.

1:03:52Michael Shermer:And there's a massive, you know, drop off. 30 to 35 % of the objects we are working with come from solar reflections. And not any solar reflections, because the short flashes and not streaks, they're associated with things that are extremely flat and extremely reflective. Wow. Like mirrors. And that makes it more fun. Like mirrors. So that seems like, okay, we're looking at physical objects at that point. And I don't think solar or cosmic radiation is a good explanation, actually, because there's ambient solar radiation all around the Earth due to solar radiation. And you wouldn't have these sort of, you know, pointed spots.

1:04:28Michael Shermer:Not solar radiation, cosmic rays from distant space. So they come in in parallel. They're so far away. These are quasars or distant galaxies. That's what Avi thinks. And he thinks that the light reflecting specific transients are based on that? That's what he thinks, yeah. I don't think that's right. It's not a great theory, but hers, she doesn't really offer a theory. She goes, this is just some weird stuff. Well, I think her theory implicitly, and she's obviously, you know, kind of reigning it in because she's an academic. And this passed peer review, by the way. But, you know, I think implicitly we're talking about UFOs, especially given that you look at.

1:05:02Michael Shermer:What do you mean by UFOs? Well, this is the thing. You look at CIA documentation at the time and it says flat mirror-like objects that reflect light. So, like, that's how they're describing these things. And then that sounds a lot like these transients being described as well. All right. So here's the bigger issue. You mentioned the word liminal. You know, in any field, there's always a residue of anomalies that can't be explained. Every scientific field has these. So back to Kuhn. Do enough of them build up? It's like, you know what? There's something really wrong with this theory. We need a new theory.

1:05:32OK, so how does this happen? Well, if you are an outsider, you just want to challenge the mainstream, which is good. This is what young scientists should do. So your new theory has to explain all the stuff the old theory explains pretty well and some of the new anomalies. Of course. And this has always been the problem with these kind of fringe physicists or whatever, the people that say, I have a theory of physics that overturns Einstein or whatever. All right. Can you explain all this stuff over here that current physics explains, you know, the standard model that explains quarks and this and that, whatever.

1:06:05And usually, no. They just say, well, they have some model of space and time and whatever. It's like you have to do that. And then also here's some the rest of the anomalies. We don't know what they are. Can you explain any of those also? Of course. That's the test.

1:06:18Michael Shermer:Of course. And I don't think anything is adequately passed that test to my knowledge. This is so common. Michio Kaku has a Web page in which he says, if you're writing me about your alternative theory of physics, here's what your theory has to do. Here's a bunch of stuff it needs to explain. Absolutely. But there are ways of explaining what seem to be anomalies. Like, again, the existence of dark energy and quantum vacuum fluctuations and quantum electrodynamics. You have the Casimir force and you have somebody who's harnessing the Casimir force seemingly on small scales. You know, we're talking about sunny white here.

1:06:49Michael Shermer:So then could you end up with some larger scale propulsion due to that? Like, possibly, you know, we have to keep an open mind there. And that fully comports with our physics. So, yes, I don't think we necessarily need a theory of everything to. Yes, I agree. I mean, let's take dark energy, dark matter. Okay. These are linguistic placeholders by cosmologists. That's right. Do you believe in dark matter? Well, I believe it. I believe there's a mystery to be explained. Okay. So it's the same thing as UFOs. So what is it? You're indirectly measuring it. Yes, that's right. Okay. Fine. So you believe in UFOs as much as you believe in dark matter?

1:07:26Michael Shermer:I don't like the word believe in. I just, it's like, what is it we're talking about? So you don't want to believe. I don't like the word believe. I like to say I don't want to believe things that have to be believed in to be true. They're just true. Yes. Okay, so when astronomers tell me galaxies should not be held together the way they are. But they're true according to you. Ultimately, we're all pre-leveraged by our own epistemics. Well, true. What do you mean by true? So I define it in my book as something confirmed to such an extent it would be rational to offer your provisional assent. But do you think human beings are rational?

1:07:59Provisional assent.

1:07:59Michael Shermer:Yes, pretty, pretty rational. I would say they're pretty irrational. Well, my whole life is spent showing how irrational humans are. But now I've had a bit of a turn of heart here that most people most of the time are fairly rational. This is how they maintain jobs and families and they keep gas in the tank and food in the fridge. And they lead a normal life where it happens, like with conspiracy theories. It's in areas where they can't know. Like, how am I going to fact check if the 2020 election was rigged or not? I don't have time to go to Arizona and go to the voting booth and see what... I'm just going to trust the Department of Justice.

1:08:34And Attorney General Bill Barr, who loved Trump, voted for him, looked into it and said, nah, we didn't find any fraud. But this is an epistemology question. How do we know about anything in the world? So dark matter is a conspiracy. Okay, so back to the dark matter. My astronomer friends tell me that there has to be more stuff in the galaxy to hold it together. Okay, what is it? And their answer is, we don't know. Could be neutrinos, could be dark, whatever, these dark stars, brown stars or whatever. Okay. Keep working on it. We'll just... So to me, I just set that aside and go, okay, that's a mystery to explain.

1:09:07Same thing with dark energy. So, and same with UFOs.

1:09:10Michael Shermer:Okay. So you're placing it in the same category. And by the way, UFOs are even more accurately and epistemically humbly framed because they're called unidentified flying objects. Yes. Whereas with dark matter, we're calling it, you know, this thing, like we're acting like we know what it is. when we can't detect it. Let's say astronomers all decide, 99 % of astronomers, okay, now we know dark energy is neutrinos. Just make that up. Okay. Then I go, okay, then that one is pretty much solved. Now, if the UFO people go, okay, we figured it, put it out. It's the ball lightning or it's the orbs or whatever it is.

1:09:42And now we know the CIA had this thing or the Russians or it's the aliens or whatever. Then I go, okay, then that one's solved. Okay, we're not there yet, right? Again, you got 90, 95 % of them are explained. You got the five to 10 % like I don't know what that is. The nukes, the orbs, the could be this, could be that.

1:10:01Michael Shermer:OK, now what? But say you say you have like a criminal case. You have like a dead body. Right. And you need to have the detectives work on finding what happened, you know, in this criminal case. And then you have one person being like, I don't know if the body's dead. And you're like sort of you sort of just like poo pooing the field overall. all. And I feel like the skeptics role in ufology for the last 20 years and maybe now it's starting to shift. And, you know, with Neil deGrasse Tyson is taking it more seriously. You're taking it more seriously. When these people of high rank started reporting, I said, all right, I have to jump in here.

1:10:42Michael Shermer:I can't stay silent. Historically, it's been like, I don't really think there's anything there. And it's like, don't trust the witnesses. And so I just want to acknowledge, would you say that you're now shifting to like, we kind of trust the witnesses and we think this is worthy of investigation? No, I'm very leery of witnesses by themselves. But it's not witnesses by themselves. Well, okay. If it's more than just the witnesses that you have - We have cases with witnesses and radar. Yes. Okay. You have 45 minutes on it. Okay. So that nudges it from here to here. Japan Airlines. And then we got to get up here.

1:11:14Michael Shermer:We have Japan Airlines pilot flying for 45 minutes with radar that was confiscated by the White House. And the radar is publicly available. And physicists have looked at it and be like, Jesse, what's the whole point of these UAP congressional hearings? The point is we want to get to the bottom of it because we're not there yet. We want to get to there and figure out what the hell it is. And we're not there yet. Everybody knows we're not there yet. Of course, I agree. All right. So I'm in favor of that. Okay. But you're admitting, you're admitting, you know, a la the criminal case example, you're admitting a crime has been committed.

1:11:42Michael Shermer:There is a there's a hole here that we have to find. That's right. If you say are UFOs real? Yes. I mean, there's an unexplained. Okay. Yes. So they're they're as real as dark matter. It's a little bit like when the government said in 2017 that UAPs are real. And Lou Alexander goes, the government says they're real. The government said the videos are real. We didn't fake these. These are not CGI. These were actually filmed by our jets. So we are indirectly measuring them like we are indirectly measuring dark matter. And those are equivalents. We're measuring something. Yes. There's something to be explained.

1:12:14Yes, I agree.

1:12:15Michael Shermer:So you would put dark matter, UFOs, same category. I guess so. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Okay. I like it. On the eyewitness thing, the problem—OK, so let's go to the court case. Yeah. So how do we determine truth in the legal system? All right. We have an adversarial lawyer's method, right? So the goal of the lawyer is not to find out what actually happened. Did this guy actually kill this person or not? The goal of the lawyer is to win the case. The goal of the other lawyer is to win the case for their side, right? It's the prosecution and the defense. And so in this case, the peer review system is the judge or the jury.

1:12:53They're the ones that decide, okay, I've heard your evidence. I've heard your evidence and arguments and so on. I think this is the right one. Now, did they get it wrong? Yeah, they get it wrong, right? So here's how I do it. Just picture a two-by-two grid, right? So we've got four sales, one, two, three, four, right? So I did this sort of a fun example of cursed horror films, right? So I'm doing a documentary, talking head for a documentary on cursed horror films, like Exorcist and other horror films where bad things happen on the set, the actor dies, like what was the famous one with The Omen, and so on.

1:13:27There's a good half dozen really popular horror films in which bad things happen, so cursed horror films. That's cell one. So my answer to them is, well, what about the other three cells? Cursed films where nothing horrible happened, like The Shining and so on. these are really scary. And then what about the non-horror films that were cursed? You know, like Apocalypse Now, you know, what's his name? Has a heart attack on set. Charlie Sheen. No, the father. Martin Sheen. And then the non-cursed, non-horror films, right? So in other words, you have four cells. Like, so in the case of the missing dead scientists, ooh, spooky, right?

1:14:07Well, okay, first of all, we have to quantify. What do you mean by a scientist? What do you mean by They work for NASA. They work for propulsion systems. They work for the military. They worked on a nuclear site. This is all over the board. And then dead or missing. Well, okay, what's our base rate? How many people go dead or missing every year? In any case.

1:14:24Michael Shermer:You're talking about the missing scientists, right? Yes, yeah, yeah. So you have four cells. You got the non-scientists who go missing or commit suicide or are killed. And then you have the scientists who just live fine. How come no one's murdered you? Jesse, you're a big UFO guy. You don't have personal security here, do you? Knock on metal. And then the fourth category. So in other words, we have to keep all of these other possibilities in mind. So that's what I do when I hear anomalies. Okay, what's the base rate? Okay, the nuclear, what about the other cells? The nuclear sites where nothing weird has happened?

1:15:00Or the non-nuclear sites where weird orbs or something happens? So you have to keep track of all that.

1:15:05Michael Shermer:Of course. And so my nuanced take on the missing scientist story is that is there some statistical speed up of scientific suppression? No, I can't say that for a fact at all. I don't know. Are each of those cases and some of them are, you know, are they all non stories? Absolutely not. And that is what some people are implying. The idea that Nuno Lurero, who is probably the tip of the spear on magnetic reconnection, which is the number one thing around making nuclear fusion work, is him getting gunned down at his doorstep as a non-story. Or Carl Grillmere, the genius polyman. Okay, but that guy that shot him was himself deranged, and he had already harassed him before.

1:15:48So each particular case has an explanation. He was an old classmate. Yes, but the deeper question is, how many people commit suicide every year? About 45 ,000 in the United States alone. How many people go missing? It's thousands.

1:16:02Michael Shermer:Yeah, but that's neither here nor there. No, no, it is because - No, because I'm admitting that. I'm saying that there might not be a statistical speed up, but what about General Neil McCaslin, who's responsible for a lot of modern UFO lore? Why doesn't anybody kill Lou Alexander? He's going to tell everybody everything. He dealt with Tom DeLonge at the highest level when it came to writing secret machines. He's going to expose everything. Why isn't he hiding? Well, General Neal McCaslin was on the Special Access Program Oversight Committee, and he ran Wright-Patterson's Air Force Research Laboratory.

1:16:36Michael Shermer:So he's as top of the pyramid as it gets, more so than any of the people you just mentioned, including me, Tom, even Lou. So, you know, I think there are distinctions to be made. And this is this is a few days after Trump said we are going to be looking into UFOs. Speaking of which, oh, they did try to kill Trump. But but for other reasons. So there you go. So so so. Yeah. Is that not significant? Of course, it's significant. In isolation, that story is completely significant. No, I don't. It's just totally random. What do you mean? He I mean, I was missing and his wife then his wife said he was suffering from depression for years.

1:17:13Michael Shermer:His wife also said the only explanation might be that an alien took. took him on the mothership. She was joking. Why would she joke about a missing husband a week later? That's weird behavior. Because of all the weird conspiracy theories around it. Oh, it's a strange joke. Well, I mean, come on. It's not nice for these families who have just suffered a loss. Like Elizabeth Weiss, her husband, Nick Pope, died of cancer. Of course, yeah. Yeah. She's not vibing the, oh, Nick Pope was an insider and he was killed. There are people that think this happened, and she's not vibing this at all. That's not funny.

1:17:45Michael Shermer:All I'm saying is the fact pattern in the McCaslin case is extremely, again, do you not think it warrants further investigation? You don't think you think it's case closed? I think his own family. He goes missing. There's no footage of him. There are no, there are ring cameras all throughout the neighborhood goes missing. OK, where's Nancy Guthrie? And everything that would. Why are you? Why not? And a gun and a gun is. Why not? Why not Nancy Guthrie? Where's she? What if Nancy Guthrie? Yeah. But she's not related to nuclear. Oh, that's that. That's the mother of the reporter. I mean, that's also correlated with Savannah Guthrie looking into Epstein.

1:18:19But this happens all the time. The reason this is getting attention is because the daughter is a celebrity. No, I think that should get attention, too.

1:18:24Michael Shermer:I think that should get it. Our daughter is investigating Epstein. But again, how many people die every year? 2.6 million in the United States. All causes, all ages, all causes. Yeah, but wasn't, I'm not super familiar with that story, but wasn't she kidnapped, the mother? Well, okay, there was, yeah, it's a big mess. Okay. She was probably kidnapped. We don't know who. There's a ring man. There's a ring camera footage of this guy. It looks fake. And then there was a note sent to TMZ. Yeah, that's obviously that that obviously warrants further investigation. As does the McCaslin thing. That's fine.

1:19:01Yeah. But they are not non stories. But OK, they're stories for the family to figure it out or the local police or the FBI if they think something's up.

1:19:09Michael Shermer:Yeah, but it's part of the public conversation at this point because he's, you know, put himself out there as a collaborator of people who are disseminating UFO information. You're picking people that worked in some area you're interested in that also died mysteriously. Oh, he's missing. We don't even know if he's dead. You're now jumping to the conclusion. Okay, yeah, he's missing. Okay, fine. But people go missing. Okay, so you just look it up. How many people go missing every year in national parks in the United States? It's like 1 ,000 or 1 ,200 a year or something. It happens all the time.

1:19:35And they can't fight them. They fall off the cliff. They fall into the bushes. The animals get them. There's nothing unusual. You can use that one because he's an interesting character.

1:19:44Michael Shermer:You can always use heuristics like laws of large numbers. You can always use these sorts of things. I think that is a poor excuse for thinking about the idiosyncratic case with all of its complexity. You can always sort of overfit some sort of like, oh, yeah, it's survivorship bias or it's file drawer or it's pee hacking. You can always do that. Yes. Or you can look into the specifics. Yeah, but why are you interested in that particular one? Because of who he was. Yes, I know. That's it. He was privy to the most sensitive science in the country. Okay, but lots of people are - And he's talking about UFOs with Tom DeLonge.

1:20:23What about all the people that work at NASA now or work at the nuclear site?

1:20:26Michael Shermer:I think anybody working in an extremely sensitive capacity who goes missing without a trace should be investigating. And it's not a non-story. The counterfactual. If this is true and there's something spooky happening - I'm not saying definitely there's no Occam's razor explanation. I'm just saying. Why aren't all the heads of all the nuclear sites or the generals, why aren't they all going missing? Because I don't know. I don't know what happened. I'm not impugning a motive or coming up with some fake story. I'm just saying it warrants further investigation. That's obvious. Only because we're interested in whenever there's a dead body or a missing body.

1:20:56Michael Shermer:No, because of this specific case, because of his specific access and credential. Obviously. I don't think so. I think you're fine. I think that's you not wanting to believe. You want to disbelieve. No, I think you're finding you're just as a pattern is it. He's like, I love this story about power and propulsion and nuclear. And here's something weird that happened to somebody in that field. OK, what I'm saying is if that was true, what about all the other people that that are in that field that are high up, that are classified and so on? I think I think I think everybody involved in sensitive national security work that goes missing in a way that Neil McCaslin should be investigated.

1:21:34But after the fact, you're picking it. Now, let's go forward. Who do you think is next?

1:21:40Michael Shermer:I'd have no way of predicting it because you don't have a story underneath it. You don't know what happened. You don't know if somebody took him or what. You need more information. My point is we should try to get more information. Okay. I think, yeah, the local police, the family, sure, they should do that because they want to do that anyway. I mean, Elizabeth Weiss knows why Nick Pope died. He had cancer. Okay. Nobody planted cancer in Nick Pope's body 20 years ago as part of a plot against him because he believes in UFOs. Of course not. This is random. In that case, I agree. Okay. But, okay, shifting gears a little bit, what do you think is the strongest UFO case based on the evidence?

1:22:24Well, so like in the UFO files, I think a lot of the sort of orbish looking ones, it's not clear what they are. I would like to get more to that, like there's something there. Some of the stuff you brought up, I think, again, I just call them anomalies, but it would be good to get explanations of the Foo Fighters during World War II, the pilots that saw these things. Oh, it's ball lightning. Okay, maybe. I don't know. Some of the stuff they described doesn't sound like ball lightning. Yeah. So, all right. And we know the Nazis, they could not possibly have been that far advanced to have these things that are observed to move in strange ways.

1:23:00So that one would be a big one. I think historically, I enjoy all the, you know, the kind of almost mythological, the stuff that Jacques Vallée talks about and Jeffrey Kripal talks about of historically people seeing weird things. Now, most of this, I think, is just sociological or whatever, psychological effects, but not everything. So back to your liminal case, you know, this is what I do. I'm kind of on the margins of science. I can't quite explain it. So it's probably this, but it may not be, you know, let's keep looking. So I do think all of that. Now, you know, can we get to the bottom of some of these historical events?

1:23:40You know, probably not. You know, you look at these medieval paintings with the thing in the sky that looks sort of like a UFO. Now, art historians go, no, no, this is what it is. This is what the painter was doing. And so these are religious symbols. Okay. So, but the rebuttal is, yeah, but the religions didn't have the language to describe what's actually going on. You know, this is like the ancient alien stuff or the Vandonegan, you know, the ancient alien gods that are actually, you know, spaceships. Right. So, OK, maybe. I love all that stuff. I've read all those books. I watch all the shows.

1:24:11You know, it's like that would be super interesting.

1:24:13Michael Shermer:But, you know. They're inserting placeholders. They're looking at anomalies and then they're inserting explanations. They're not. Just like scientists are inserting. Unfortunately, they don't do that. Okay, so one of my criticisms of the ancient aliens, for example, is they almost never have on like an archaeologist that goes, oh, the Easter Island statues. Here's what we know. And then they get the other guy that goes, no, I don't think it's that. I think it's the space aliens or whatever. They don't do that. Do you think like people like Graham Hancock or Randall Carlson, do you think they've contributed anything to the field?

1:24:43Michael Shermer:I do. I do. Yes, I like people on the margins and fringes because they push us, the mainstream people, to better define what it is you're talking about. Do you agree with them on that? Better evidence? No, not really. Like in the case of Graham, I know a lot about his theory. I've been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization in prehistory for more than 30 years.

1:25:10What he's missing is his positive evidence in favor of his theory versus negative evidence against the mainstream theory, right? So mainstream archaeologists say this is how the pyramids were built or this is what happened with the Easter Island statues. This is the Nazca lines explanation because you can see him from the local mountains. It's a water god or whatever. Okay. That's the accepted dogma. And Graham comes along and go, okay, I'm going to challenge that. Okay, good. You know, and his little line he uses on X, you know, stuff keeps getting older. He has a t-shirt. Stuff keeps getting older.

1:25:40And he's right. Stuff does keep getting older. He's right about that.

1:25:42Michael Shermer:You would admit that. Yes, but. You would admit Gobekli Tepe rewrites the map as far as how old human civilization. But know what's happening. I mean, archaeologists are responding to Gobekli Tepe by going, huh, I guess these hunter-gatherers were more sophisticated than we thought they were. I guess they were more advanced. They could build monumental architecture without thousands of people. But that seems like as unfalsifiable a conclusion as you actually just have to go a little farther back for civilization. So the alternative to that is, no, actually, this was a deeper, advanced. I mean, Graham thinks these were built by ancient peoples, the Atlanteans or whoever.

1:26:23Michael Shermer:Yeah, he thinks it's a holdover from before the Ice Age. From like tens of thousands of years before. Transfer of technology, yeah. Okay, all right. Okay, if that was true, what else would be true? Well, first of all, we should find out where do they live? Where's their trash? Where's their tools? Yeah. Now, if they're advanced, do they have any technology, any metal? Do they even have pottery? And the answer is no, there's nothing. But you'd have to admit that that's a tall task to put totally on Graham in a single lifetime of investigation. And he says he's pushed us farther. We wouldn't be talking about Gobekli Tepe if it wasn't for him.

1:27:00Michael Shermer:And I don't agree with the fingerprints of the gods. Oh, yeah. Schmidt, you know, the German archaeologist in archaeology circles. There's no mystery about Gobekli Tepe. They all know about it. It's only to the public, you mean. Yeah, but that was, you know, it was a discovery. It was really popularized in the 90s. And it was, and Graham Hancock has really helped popularize it. The National Geographic did a whole cover story on Gobekli Tepe. I remember when this came out. They described it as like the world's first religious ceremony place. Well, okay. We don't have to argue about like who's responsible for making it more famous, but I do think Graham is very responsible for it.

1:27:35Michael Shermer:Okay. I know Graham pretty well. Okay. So he's a very likable guy. He's a great writer. He's one of Rogan's first guests. Oh, I know. I know. I know. I've seen all that. I spent four hours with him in the studio. Yeah, he's debated. Okay. But part of the problem he has, this is what I tried to explain to him, is that you have the mainstream archaeologists, and they're just working away going, this is what we think happened, and this is what we're working on. And then Graham comes from the outside and goes, I think you're all wrong. They're like, okay, where's your evidence? And are you going to publish a paper about this?

1:28:02And here's our peer-reviewed journals, here's our conferences, and so on. This is how we do it. And he's going, I'm not going there. I'm not publishing there. I'm going to do an end run around you. OK, so what irritates professional scientists is, but this is how the game is played. You don't get to cut to the front of the line and become famous for your alternative. You got to you got to do what the rest of us do. You got to work at it.

1:28:24Michael Shermer:But so I will admit that podcasting independent media engages in way more type one errors than type two errors. We are falsely accepting bad hypotheses probably all the time. Right. And so that's the problem. Mainstream media blocked out too much. There's an overcorrection. And, you know, I'm still pro independent media because everybody can just say what they feel. And I like that. I'm more biased in that direction. But that is that is a real externality or issue, you know, with that. But let me just finish the point. If there was a civilization that lived 30, 40, 50 ,000 years ago. Now, we do have lots of finds of hominids that lived then.

1:29:07Neanderthals, we got lots of stuff from them. The earliest Homo sapiens, we have lots of stuff from them. All living in small groups, okay? So, first of all, if there was an advanced civilization, what do you mean by civilization? And what do you mean by advanced? And where did they live? Where's their trash? Where's their tools?

1:29:23Michael Shermer:I will be the first to say that inserting—and he will say that, too. He'll say inserting Atlantis as a placeholder is speculative. And so that's fun to speculate about. And I think all he would say is that there was likely some sort of antediluvian civilization with common architecture from all over the world and that there's mounting evidence for that sort of thing. I think that is more speculative than just rewriting how old civilization is around Gebekli Tepe. But then you also, we have to be epistemically humble, right? You know, archaeology as a field was invented 200 years ago with the discovery of the Babylonian cities.

1:30:02Michael Shermer:And so it's almost like you could probably create a law around like the farther we go in archaeology, the older things get. In fact, lower in the sediment layer, the deeper you dig, the older things get. So almost definitially, that has to be true. Also, Graham pushes this meme that, you know, scientists are closed minded or whatever. I mean, nobody believes in the Clovis first hypothesis. Everybody knows that humans came to the North American continent and South American continent long before 13 ,000 to 13 ,000 years ago. Okay, nobody's arguing that. They've all shifted. Everybody admits Gobekli Tepe is 11 ,000 years old.

1:30:35Nobody's going that never happened.

1:30:37Michael Shermer:That shift was slow. We thought that they crossed the Bering Strait. I learned that. Oh, I know. It was probably multiple migrations. So people like Graham are serving a vital role. And then just to defend him further, as far as his career decision, you can travel the world, write books, have fun, make money and contribute massively to the field. Or you can be constrained by this publisher parish. You know, Kissinger had a famous quote about academia, the lower the stakes, the harder they fight. Whoever actually said that. Whoever actually said that. But you can be stuck in this like petty, sharp elbowed thing.

1:31:13Michael Shermer:Or you could be famous and have fun and make money and contribute. Many are called, fewer chosen. Graham is one of the few alternative people that have made. There's lots of them. Lots of them. I mean, you talk to like, what's his name? Havas. Zahi Havas. Zahi Havas. So, I mean, you know, how come he doesn't talk to Graham? He's not nice to Graham and other friends. I don't know, whatever. But there's hundreds of guys like Graham who show up at the pyramids and go, I have my alternative. The pyramids were a nuclear power plant. But I think the pyramids are another one. The pyramids are another example, as with the JFK assassination, a lot of these things where it's like, I don't know the ultimate answer.

1:31:50Michael Shermer:I'm not claiming to be the source of ground truth, but the prima facie story is so obviously a lie. So people are tired of being gaslit. If you watch that Zahi Waz interview with Joe Rogan. But are there photographs online? Yes, in my book. I don't go online. Why do I have to go online? I go to my book. It's like, come on, this guy is gatekeeping all of our information. It's in my book. I wrote about it. It was a little painful to watch. Very painful. Yeah, I know. Very painful. So same with the JFK assassination, where it's like people are tired of being lied to. There's obviously something more than the Occup's Raider Loans gunman.

1:32:30Michael Shermer:I don't think so. And JFK? Do you know about the JFK conspiracist who died and went to heaven? And God says, you know, sir, you were such a pious man. I will grant you any wish you want. I'll answer any question you want. He goes, all right, who really killed JFK? And God says, Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, using his Carcano man liquor rifle. He goes, oh my God, this goes higher than I thought. That is a funny joke. In my 20s, I loved the ritual of drinking coffee. But then my sleep started to suffer. Energy would peak and then it would drop. It felt like I was just taking credit out on my future energy.

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1:33:49Michael Shermer:That's M-U-D-W-T-R.com. Now back to today's show. But this is what happened. But you don't think... How did we get to the... I saw you made a tweet about my friend Tom O 'Neill today. Yes. And he's... Because there's MKUltra hearings. Yes. And he has this theory that maybe Charles Manson was an MKUltra patient. I read his book. At the end of the book, he goes, damn it, I didn't get a smoking gun. Here's a bunch of little things. Yes. But if you read the book as a reasonable third party, then you have to think your base case has to be that Charles Manson was probably an MKUltra mind control patient.

1:34:27Either that or cult leaders can use sex, drugs, and rock and roll to get people to do crazy shit for them. And this does happen.

1:34:32Michael Shermer:Yeah, but he's going into the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic where Jolly West, who's definitely the head of MKUltra. I know. There's enough of these weird connections, I will admit. Manson's an interesting case. And O 'Neill did, I think, properly debunk the Helter Skelter. He did. For sure. Vincent Bugliosi. Bugliosi. I like Vincent Bugliosi. I knew him. I think he sold a Sibylla Goods. Because I bought that. I read the Helter Skelter. Oh, my God. This is a great story. Yeah. And I think Tom O 'Neill showed that was a bunch of bullshit. Well, you know what else he revealed, a la the JFK assassination in that book, is that Jolly West saw it.

1:35:09Michael Shermer:So for the people that don't know, Lee Harvey Oswald, supposed lone gunman, probably not lone gunman in my opinion, of JFK on November 22nd, 1963. 53. He then gets killed right outside the courthouse by Jack Ruby, who's this like nightclub guy, you know, and and he ends up in jail. Jack Ruby, but doesn't actually remember having shot Lee Harvey Oswald. It's this very strange circumstance. That was a later story. He now he shot. Well, he's that's what he said. And he was confused at the scene of the crime. He's in jail for six months. And you know who sees him in jail? And this is according to Tom O 'Neill.

1:35:44Michael Shermer:I know Jolly West. Jolly West, who's the head of MKUltra. And then he has a... He was one of the guys, yeah. And then Jolly West comes out and he does a press conference and he says, Jack Ruby has had a psychotic break. Yeah, he might have. I mean, he admitted I was really upset because I love Kennedy and I felt bad for his wife and that's why I shot him. But line in the sand, you have a psychotic break after you see the guy who's the architect of MKUltra? Come on. I know, it's weird. I know, it's weird. No cameras? I recommend reading Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed. He goes through all this stuff and shows why Ozzie.

1:36:16I don't think he went through the Jack Ruby thing. That's a more recent revelation. Well, yeah. Okay. But the Ruby case, he was a short-fused, angry guy. He got bites all the time. He acted just spontaneously.

1:36:29Michael Shermer:The perfect MKUltra candidate. Maybe. I mean, if you were the CIA, would you really want to hire somebody, a lowlife like Lee Harvey Oswald, and nobody to pull off the greatest. Yeah, and that's why he said, I'm a patsy. That's exactly who you'd hire, somebody disposable. I mean, but somebody who's incompetent. I mean, he got lucky. You know, he got the job at this cool depository building before they announced where the motorcade was going. That was just pure luck. Do you know who the mayor of Dallas was? Do you know he tried to assassinate Edmund Walker? I do, six months before. Six months before.

1:37:04He was a nut job. He wanted to be famous. He wanted to kill somebody. He was going to kill Nixon. at some point, and his wife locked him in the bathroom and took his gun away from him. Do you know who the mayor of Dallas was?

1:37:14Michael Shermer:I forget. Earl Cabell. I forget who that is. He was the brother of Alan Dulles' number two at the CIA, the deputy director of the CIA. That's just random get - That's just catarnicity. I don't think so. Come on. We'll check with Gerald Posner on that. I don't think that's the case. It seems somewhat significant. No, it is the fact. Those are facts. Those are facts. I know. Those are facts. I know. Oliver Stone's movie, JFK. He has all these things in there, half of which are just made up. I mean, there's a whole webpage dedicated to JFK. I think Oliver Stone's pretty good. What did Oliver Stone make up?

1:37:47Oh, well, there's a bunch of stuff. Like Lee Harvey Oswald could not shoot very accurately. And he shot Maggie's drawers when he was in the Marines taking rivalry. Not true. He got the second highest rating. And Posner shows in his book, his report from the rivalry training, he had scored the second highest you could get. He was a sharpshooter.

1:38:06Michael Shermer:Okay, so Oliver Stone got one thing wrong. Not just one. But then he also— There's pages of this. You said he was incompetent before, and you said he couldn't kill Walker. If you go to Daly Plaza and you look out the window, there's two Xs in the road. And you can stand on the Xs and look at the sixth floor room, or you can look down. It's close. It's really close. There's no way you could miss, right? And he was a sharpshooter. And they've tried—sharpshooters have used the same rifle, and they can hit it no problem. We can get the three shots. So you have one shot already cocked and loaded. Boom.

1:38:41And then you only have to do two more. And then end of story. Eight seconds. No problem.

1:38:44Michael Shermer:We get deep into the issues with the autopsy that the coroner himself had and the idea of the magic bullet. And there's missing frames that were published in the video in the Zapruder film. But I want to get back to UFOs. So the Gemini 7 case, I found the, you know, Pentagon kind of UFO drop to be lamer than I would have liked. I would have liked to see much more higher signal stuff. So I sort of agree with you there. I think some of the astronaut sightings were interesting. Maybe some are explainable by cosmic rays. You know, I'm very open to that. But I think. Or like John Glenn, you know, with the little ice crystals.

1:39:25Yeah, sure. Ice crystals, yeah.

1:39:26Michael Shermer:Which come off. And he sounds like, whoa, what is this? Of course. So Houston goes, pound on the wall. So he pounds on the wall and they come off. It's like, oh, OK. So one of my favorites, because it so clearly separates any sort of false positives with, you know, other misidentifications, Gemini seven, Frank Borman, um, they were actually specifically trying to travel the second stage alongside the booster. Yes. Right. And so for the rest of his life, he was like, I, you know, this was not a UFO. Like he downplayed it. And he was like, we were trying to travel, you know, right next to the booster.

1:40:00Michael Shermer:It was just the booster that I saw in the audio. he clearly delineates the booster and he says that that's at you know two o 'clock and then he says there's there's a real object and he calls it a bogey which is basically code for unknown unknown object and he says that's a 10 o 'clock high right it was too far away and it was off the right and it could not have been the booster i'm gonna read you another um and so then you're like he was probably lying for the rest of his life that doesn't make sense all right i'm gonna to read you another. And it couldn't have been part if it had been part of the booster, you would have seen that part of the booster, which was originally traveling next to the booster, as you would in a zero G environment.

1:40:43Michael Shermer:You would see it slowly move to 10 o 'clock high and you would know that it was the booster. And he goes, this is an actual sighting. Yeah, I know. I understand. Okay. So what is that? What is it? I don't know. I'm going to read to you. This is a part of the problem. This is eyewitness testimony. I don't think he did either. That was a UFO. All right. So here is Scott Kelly, NASA astronaut and pilot, right? His brother, Mark, is a senator. They're twins. They've both been in the space shuttle. So during the hearing like two years ago at NASA about the UAP videos, okay? And he gives a little speech.

1:41:21Just takes 30 seconds. In my experience of flying over 15 ,000 hours and 30-something years in airplanes and in space, the environment that we fly in is very conducive to optical illusions. So I get why these pilots would look at that GoFast video and think it was going really fast.

1:41:46I remember one time I was flying off Virginia Beach military operating area and my RIO radar intercept officer, who sits in the back of the Tomcat, was convinced we flew by a UFO. I didn't see it, so we turned around to go look at it. It turns out it was a Bart Simpson balloon. My brother Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and also now a U.S. senator, shared a story with me about an experience he had years ago that when he was commander of the STS-124, they were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the space shuttle, and they see something in the payload bay and they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt.

1:42:25They couldn't figure it out. And they would potentially have to go do a spacewalk to retrieve it. But before they did that, my brother grabbed the camera and they took a picture of it. And when they blew up the picture, they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay. It was actually the International Space Station 80 miles away. These are cases where pilots have rendezvoused on a buoy because they thought it was their wingman. It's just a very, very challenging environment to work, especially at night. Of course. This is a problem with these. Of course. Oh, he was a pilot.

1:42:57Michael Shermer:I'm sure there are all sorts of false positives. Yeah. These people are under duress. But the idea of being, I'm a trained observer. Yeah. But you still get stuff wrong. Yeah. But even Jared Isaacman, the current NASA admin, is admitting that some of these cases are unresolved. Yes. Okay. I like him. I like him. I think if we're going to expose anything, he would be on board with releasing it. Yeah. No, I like him too. But NASA from 1958 till now has been, it's basically an intelligence agency. If anything involves national security matters, it's not going to let the thing out. Well, so, I mean, he's one of Elon's men.

1:43:33Okay. He says, we're going to be transparent. All right? Good. Yeah. But here's the problem, Jesse. Yeah. Let's say he goes, all right, I went in there and you know what? We didn't find anything. Now, you know, you have people, you will go, OK, he's covering up or he's not telling us everything.

1:43:49Michael Shermer:Well, I mean, at this point, I have enough evidence in the open source world and everybody listening does to say, for example, with the Frake Borman case, we need an explanation for that. Because, again, there are sparks coming out, and he delineates that from the booster, and he delineates both of those things from what he calls an actual sighting at 10 o 'clock high, and he calls that a bogey, which is the nomenclature for unknown detected object. And so and he says it's an actual sight. And like you see, you actually hear the guy in mission control. He wants to say UFO. And he goes, is it an actual sighting?

1:44:26Michael Shermer:And he goes, yes, it's an actual sighting. It's so clear that it's something that he, you know, is confused by and doesn't understand. So so all I'm saying is we should have all of the data in that specific instance. If Jared Isaacman is going to say, yeah, this is definitely prosaically explained, give us all the data in that instance and then I'll be satisfied. But here's the problem. We're probably never going to get explanations for a lot of these. This is a one-off event. There may be nothing to find. In other words, maybe NASA doesn't have the explanation. They can explain some of the stuff.

1:44:56Do you know who does? You know, like with the case of Buzz Aldrin. I was on Larry King Live once with Buzz Aldrin and a couple of UFO people. James Fox was on there too. Yep. and Buzz launches into this long story about when they launch the Apollo 11. He's going out there, and he reports to Houston, oh, I see this thing out there. But he went into a long thing about the panel of the second stage of the Apollo, and it was also just going alongside them. That's what it turned out to be. But it took him like 10 minutes to get this story out. Larry King is like, come on, get the story out. We've got to go to a commercial break.

1:45:24It was really a funny moment. But that's all it was. Okay, so that one is explained. The Barman one, maybe NASA doesn't have an explanation for that. Maybe they have one and they're not telling us.

1:45:35Michael Shermer:Buzz Aldrin got pretty uncomfortable on air. Buzz Aldrin had a sister that said that he was very into UFOs in his private life. And James Fox actually chased Buzz Aldrin all around the world, finally cornering him in Monte Carlo. And he was about to interview him on UFOs because apparently he had had a sighting as a fighter pilot in World War Two. And basically Buzz Aldrin said to him, well, you know, I can't do this, you know, mess with my reputation. And, you know, I think it was actually around Paul Allen getting it. He was one of the co-founders of Microsoft. He was getting a lot of flack at the time for being involved in SETI, which shows you how far the conversation has moved on this topic and where the Overton was.

1:46:13Well, he funded the Allen array of telescopes. Right. SETI. Right.

1:46:17Michael Shermer:So this is Buzz Aldrin being really fearful about what's going to happen to him. And he says, I can't jeopardize my initiative. I'm working with Congress right now. I'm trying to get money to develop a rocket that's going to help put civilians into space. and how's my story going to change anything anyway? Which to me is implying that there's something real here and that you're worried about your own reputation as a result of going out on the record on a limb in this case. Edgar Mitchell did just that. He was an Apollo 14 astronaut and he ended up being marginalized. Is he marginalized? I mean, he's a famous Apollo astronaut.

1:46:50Michael Shermer:A lot of people said he went crazy and lost his mind after that. And anybody didn't. I don't know. You saw what Buzz did to Sibiril. They said he punched him in the face. Never went to the moon. Give him a knuckle sandwich. Okay. I have a hard time believing Buzz would be afraid of anything. He seems pretty fearless. One more interesting NASA data point is, do you know who Gary McKinnon is by any chance? So this was a guy who was working in bank security. He had basic IT skills. He was in the UK. This was 2003, I believe. I read the Disclosure Project book. Steven Greer and his team. And they told you installations, locations.

1:47:30And so I thought I could use my basic networking skills just to do a scan, you know, a light scan on American

1:47:37Michael Shermer:military networks, which is mad now. But back then it was just kind of like a playful idea. He was interested in building eight because a whistleblower named Donna Hare had come out saying that she had met somebody there who was responsible for airbrushing out. She was a NASA employee. This is on record. She had met somebody, you know, in that building who was responsible for airbrushing out UFOs from real photos. And she had even seen one of these photos. I said, is this a UFO? And he's smiling at me and he says, I can't tell you that. And he said, well, we always have to airbrush them out before we sell them to the public.

1:48:15Michael Shermer:And McKinnon hacks in and he starts to see a UFO pop up and populate on a screen. It's a tic-tac UFO and it's orbiting earth and the U.S. goes after him hard and he is still on the Interpol watch list. And for 20 years, there's this crazy sort of witch hunt. They're trying to extradite him. Eventually, Theresa May ends up sort of protecting him. Why would you go after somebody that hard when there are actually other hacking cases where people broke into even more sensitive areas in the U.S.? What's their source for this story? If this UFO thing wasn't true. And it, again, comports with the Donna O 'Hare.

1:48:50Michael Shermer:But what's the source? The source is McKinnon. Yeah. Well, okay. And why would he play up the thing if they were witch hunting him? Maybe he's mistaken. I don't know. He almost committed suicide because they were trying to extradite him. So he's not lying. Why would he try to play up the thing that they're getting after him for? People are lying. Maybe they're genuinely mistaken. Maybe he thought something was happening and it wasn't. I don't know. I don't know this case at all. I'm thinking of the David Grush case because people have been bringing him up a lot lately. Yeah. Yeah, you said David Grush is...

1:49:20Michael Shermer:No, no, no. Is that Codswallop? No, did I use that? Yeah, yeah. I deleted it. I used to do a couple of tweets. I deleted him. I mean, you know, he's just X. You said he's a top 10 all-time bullshitter. Oh, yes, that's right. The bullshitter. Buncombe, Blather, Codswallop. Yes, Codswallop. I find David Grush to be incredibly smart and above board. Oh, I do too, yes. But his stories. So you take those back. Come on, enough of the stories. But they're not stories. I'll give you an example with Grush. Okay, but one thing. Yes. He says he's never seen anything himself. He actually doesn't say that.

1:49:49Michael Shermer:He said in his original testimony, because you have to clear certain things that you say, everything that you say for somebody in his position through Dobser, which is the pre-publication review for the Defense Department. You mean in a congressional hearing? Yes. And he didn't clear one of these things. And I think he did later that he actually does have firsthand experience with this stuff. I'm not aware of that. He also gave hundreds of pages to the intelligence community inspector general who called his claims urgent and credible. So why are you calling him an all-time bullshitter when the intelligence community inspector general says he's legit?

1:50:22Michael Shermer:But they don't think that. The intelligence community inspector general doesn't think that. Then show us. I would like to see that too, but clearly it's too classified to let out. There's a reason that it's sensitive. I'm frustrated hearing these people going, I talked to somebody who saw the bodies interactive. I talked to somebody who went inside the spaceship. Can I give you an example of a thing to us? No, we can't. Come on. But think about he's he's this guy who's obviously operated in sensitive areas. He's handled the presidential brief, but he he knows that he's not doesn't have an understanding of all of the equities when it comes to the kind of American situation.

1:50:58Michael Shermer:He doesn't want to go full Ed Snowden. Ed Snowden did a lot of amazing things as far as showing, you know, overreach on the part of the NSA when it came to Prism and Bull Run and all, you know, harvesting consumer data, but he also, you know, compromised a lot of Americans' lives abroad. So Grush is making this explicit decision to not do that and to go as far as he can and to try to push the president to make, you know, do all sorts of executive actions around this stuff and to make speeches around it and to make it clear, you know, from the top down. So that was his explicit strategy. What's wrong with that strategy?

1:51:33Michael Shermer:Nothing. Show us. Come on. Okay. But again, And Jesse, I watch all this stuff. It's like interview after interview after interview. I can't show you. I can't tell you. I can't classify. I got to tell you. Can I can I give you an example of something? So frustrating. Aren't you frustrated? Like, damn it. Show us. Well, I'll give you an example of something that he explicitly did say in coming out. He talked about a 1933 Magenta, Italy crash. 1933 was the first recovery in Europe in Magenta, Italy. They recovered a partially intact vehicle. News Nation itself went to the Vatican and checked in the Vatican files, said we couldn't find anything.

1:52:09Michael Shermer:Well, guess what? 1933 Magenta, Italy. I spoke to a man at the end of his life. His name was Harold Malmgren, who said that he was briefed by the number two in the CIA, Richard Bissell, who founded Area 51. And Richard Bissell told him about the Magenta crash in 1933. Yeah. What else did Richard Bissell tell you? You said this didn't start last week. This has been going on. He mentioned 1933 magenta. He did? Yes. Richard Bissell mentioned the 1933 magenta crash? Yes, yes. That's amazing. So all of a sudden you're spanning generations. Now let's go continents. So you mentioned the Vatican thing.

1:52:50Michael Shermer:I tracked down Marconi's grandson, Marconi being the inventor of the radio. And I met his grandson because Marconi was supposedly part of this RS-33 cabinet, the special research group under Mussolini that was dedicated to studying UFOs. And I wanted to see if this was actually a real historical artifact, this group was real or if this was all BS. Okay. Marconi's grandson said that he knew through the family, not through any sort of circular reporting BS, you know, zero collusion with David Grush, that he was part of RS-33, the special research group under Mussolini, studying UFOs. In 1933, the Italian government set up this group, the Secret Research 33 cabinet, where Marconi was the president and Enrico Fermi was the vice president.

1:53:44Michael Shermer:And they made some searches and studies on this phenomenon. So then you have to come up with this crazy thing of like Harold Malmgren is colluding with David Grush and they're colluding with Marconi's grandson in Italy. And David Grush went out on a limb a few years ago and said this, and it's proving to be true in the open source context. How come no one else has brought up this Vatican UFO 1933 story except for Grush? That's not true. You have Roberto Pinotti who wrote a book about it. He's an Italian UFO researcher. He wrote a whole book about it. He shows telegrams at the time that clearly indicate there was some sort of press blackout and they were trying to cover it up.

1:54:20Michael Shermer:And the most important one is the third one, this one. and he says, you see, on the personal order of Il Duce, absolutely no mention is to be made of the alleged landing of an unknown aircraft on national soil. The same applies to today's news for publication by the Stephanie Agency and individual journalists. This is much evidence for like any other, you know, thing that was, there was an attempt to hide it that's that old. It's 90 plus years old. Okay, let's talk about crash retrieval programs. Let's do it. Okay, those are not abnormal. All governments have them because we want to know what the other side is doing.

1:54:57So famously, like during World War II, when a B-17 got shot down, they had to try to destroy the Norton bomb sight finder so that the Nazis don't see how we were doing this, right? Of course. And we captured some zeros in the Aleutians just before Midway so that we could find out how come these zeros are such great planes and ours are way slower, you know? So in other words, governments do this to find out what technology the other side has. That has nothing to do with aliens or orbs or whatever.

1:55:27Michael Shermer:Naturally. But then it gets weird when the same people in charge of those prosaic crash retrieval programs, people at places like Wright Airfield, which was responsible for recreating the German pulse jet engine in 1943, are talking about material they've never seen before with weird hieroglyphics that's malleable. You're talking about the Project Mogul balloon, high altitude balloon? That's clearly not Project. That's the funny thing about the cover story for Roswell. So we're talking about Roswell now, 1947, July, a flying disc came down. Roswell Army Airfield. A balloon crash. Well, they published flying disc and then they retracted it, which is strange if it were a balloon.

1:56:10Michael Shermer:But it was secret. So they go like, well, we got to make up something. They've changed their story three times now. And the government admitted that. First, they said it was a weather balloon. Then they said it was Project Mogul. Now they're saying that it's progeriatric crash dummy children. That was Annie Jacobson. There's two different reports. So there was the 94 report and then the 96 report. The 94 report was about Project Mogul. The 96 report was about years later, they were throwing these anthropogenic dummies out the balloon thing at high altitude. to test how pilots would do. And so their explanation was that when people said they saw these humanoid bodies, they were probably seeing these crash dummies.

1:56:52Michael Shermer:Yeah, but you can't have it both ways. It's either Project Mogul or it's a crash dummy. Well, no, no, it's both. The crash dummies, so their explanation was... the Occam's razor explanation sounds a lot more ridiculous than the... I have my doubts about Occam's razor anyway. But their explanation was there was a conflation of memory because this is decades later. I mean, don't forget, Roswell is an incident It didn't become a thing until 1980 when Rolitz wrote his book about it. And then Stanton Friedman and others got involved and started writing books and films and so on. You know, in 1947 to 1980, Roswell was nothing.

1:57:26Michael Shermer:Exactly. Because you were living in this Cold War era of secrecy where everything was shut down. But you have, you know, somebody like Lieutenant Walter Haught coming out with an affidavit, you know, to be released upon his death, saying that he actually witnessed a craft. He saw bodies under a tarp. And, you know, this was this kind of memory metal thing, which totally comports with what Army Intelligence Officer Jesse Marcel said. Jesse Marcel's son said that he took the material home. If you go there, I was just speaking to a physicist friend who works at a venture capital firm and is like totally like, you know, hardheaded, you know, really smart guy, materialist reductionist.

1:58:05Michael Shermer:And he was like, yeah, I went to, you know, the Roswell site and I saw that a boulder had clearly been pushed into what was probably a sapling at the time. So the tree was growing abnormally around this boulder. So he was like, it seems like, you know, maybe the craft crashed into the thing and it was split down the middle. And he was like, what could have, you know, caused this boulder to split down the middle? There is so much evidence when you actually look into Roswell. I don't know. I think it's Project Mogul. What do you think it is? I think it's worthy of further investigation and that this memory metal, I believe Jesse Marcel, I believe Walter Haught, I have no reason to disbelieve them.

1:58:42Michael Shermer:I disbelieve these BS cover stories that keep changing over decades. And so I think it's something crashed that was anomalous and it's worthy of investigation. And that's all I want to say. I don't want to say it's definitely alien, but it's weird. But what if the government, let's say the UAP committee and Avi comes out and goes, OK, we got to the bottom of Roswell. It was this Project Mogul. Would you then go, Avi's just not. He would need to. No, no. If he explained to me how he got there in a first principles way, I'd be like, Avi, you got me. OK, so the boulder split apart like this. Cool.

1:59:15Michael Shermer:So the memory metal, it was actually this material they were using for Project Mogul at the time, which is especially reflective and helpful for detecting radar. Boom. I'd be like, easy. Case closed. The story of the moving boulders in the Mojave Desert? No. It was one of these mysteries. They're like the size of this table. And then, you know, like the next day, it's like way over there. I mean, there's like a two-ton boulder. And anyways, it was finally figured out that the rains or whatever, the moisture from the night freezes. And then the thing slides on the ice. And then it unfreezes. And then people come out and go, oh, my God, look.

1:59:47There's this. So it's called the Boulder Racetrack or something in the Mojave Desert. Yeah. So it looks kind of spooky. For a while, it was like, ooh. there's something mysterious like oh never mind i don't know it's a little bit like the crop circles

1:59:59Michael Shermer:you know we've seen people fake them why do you why do you think uh people who are at the top of the pyramid when it comes to american intelligence people like james clapper you know people like brennan why do you think they would come out in a movie talking about roswell being real and there being you know a surviving being from roswell like why would why would they talk about and implicitly sort of endorsed those cases if they were going to be looked at like sycophants years later, and they didn't have some asymmetric intelligence that Roswell actually happened. Okay. My explanation for all these is that they're not making it up.

2:00:34They're genuinely reporting as best they can what people told them. So let's take the case of Grush, say, and I talked to somebody who interacted with this spaceship. He told me it was a spaceship. Maybe Grush is being truthful. This is what he was told. And the guy that told him that saw something that he indeed couldn't explain. Maybe it was a CIA DARPA test drone or something. He's like, oh, my God, I've never seen this before. It looks alien or something to me. So he reports that to Gresham, then reports it to Congress saying, I know somebody that went.

2:01:05Michael Shermer:But the Roswell Army Airfield published Flying Disc and then retracted it in a panic. It's the Cold War. They're making shit up because governments do that. So do governments lie? But that's right. They were making the cover story up. Probably, yes. Okay. In the two 1990 reports, they said, yes, we made this up because it was the cold. We didn't want the Russians to know we were launching these high-altitude spy balloons. It just doesn't work. And it doesn't work when the story keeps shifting. Then you get into the crash dummy thing, which is the most recent story. So the crash dummy thing. The skeptics have to get their story straight.

2:01:43They're saying it's two different things and that people are conflating memories together and that they're separate. That's all they're saying. Human memory is not reliable. And people are saying, at the time of the Roswell crash, I saw these bodies. And the government is going, no, you're conflating a later memory of the crash dummies with the Roswell balloon crash.

2:02:02Michael Shermer:The human memory not being reliable is also, you know, just as true for the skeptics case. Yes, of course. Yes, of course. Yeah. OK. And then you have like a whole host of like I would now say on the UFO issue, you're a contrarian. I would say seriously. In terms of the scientific community, no. Most scientists don't think so. In the UFO community, yes. The science is lagging, I would admit that. But otherwise, you have presidents, you have Navy fighter pilots, you have astronauts, you have civilians. So Trump says we're going to get to the bottom. Part of that is because Obama gave that interview.

2:02:36He also told his son that something very interesting happened at Roswell. Would you ever open up Roswell and let us know what's really going on there? So many people ask me that question. It sounds almost ridiculous, but it's actually the real question. It sounds like a cute question, but it's actually there are millions and millions of people that want to go there, that want to see it. I won't talk to you about what I know about it, but it's very interesting. But Roswell's a very interesting place. I know. All right. Let's see it. I mean, I do trust that Trump means it when he says he wants transparency.

2:03:07He did that sort of begrudgingly with Epstein files, but he did that with the JFK files. There was no smoking gun. And now he's doing it three times. We're promised a fourth dump here maybe this week.

2:03:18Michael Shermer:There's no smoking gun with the JFK files because we're already oversaturated in data. We have everything on. We know. So you have people like. But wouldn't there be a paper trail like somewhere in the CIA? We got to pay Lee Harvey Oswald, send him some money or send this guy with cash. Especially no, especially not if, you know, JFK said I want to scatter the CIA to the winds. Yeah, he said that. Dulles had a lot of power. But he was outside of the CIA. People say shit all the time. The CIA lied to him and they said, if you invade Cuba, it's going to go great. Yes. And it didn't. So he's like, that's when he said, I want to.

2:03:51He's just pissed off at the CIA.

2:03:53Michael Shermer:But he fired Nullis. He actually fired Nullis, the director. Trump has fired, you know, most of his cabinet members in his two terms. Yeah. But that's not unusual. Yeah. But but but usually president versus, you know, Intel world, Intel world wins historically, whether it's Nixon, JFK. Maybe. You know, yeah. I don't want to get it. into what might be happening. You know, my concession to conspiracy theories is like when you get elected president, they take you in the back room and they go, OK, here's what's actually going on. You know, you can't close Gitmo because of this. You can't stop the war in Iraq because of that.

2:04:26And they're like, oh, no. But I said I would. And then they don't. I mean, this is the explanation. How come Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on nuclear weapons? He didn't do anything. And my answer is like, well, they must have taken him in the back room and go, look, all our allies are saying, you can't end, you know, launch on warning. This is what they're depending on this. No first use. We can't get rid of that. We have to threaten the Russians. And they're like, oh yeah, okay, nevermind. Yeah.

2:04:49Michael Shermer:There is, there is this thing where you run on this Mr. Smith goes to Washington campaign and it's like, you know, no, no, you know, you need FISA warrants, no wiretapping and you know, we're going to close Gitmo, no more drone attacks, you know, this is kumbaya. And then all of a sudden you go in and you're like, oh, you turn into a neocon overnight something happens i so i yeah i hear you i know um i know but if anything it's a it's a a tip of the hat to you and the conspiratorial uh movement because i think there is a lot of stuff like that that happens you're a you're a tough uh nut to crack okay i'm gonna read you something else i feel i feel like i can't uh well i mean i can't get in there we're just talking But what is it you want to get into?

2:05:33Michael Shermer:I want to, I almost think an interesting inroad is like your relationship to the topic because you were once abducted by aliens. Yeah. So, I mean, have I had experiences? Yes. I've had a lot of anomalous experiences. I have seen UFOs. You know, most of them I think I can explain. Like one of them looked like a V-shaped shiny object out in the desert. Turned out it was a flock of geese. site. We drove further during Race Across America. We drove further down and went, oh, it's okay. But it was like, whoa. And other examples I use, like seeing the stealth bomber fly over my house when I lived in Altadena, every January 1st at 8.05 AM, because the stealth bomber flew from Edwards Air Force Base over the Rose Parade.

2:06:18But if I didn't know what it was, it'd be like, whoa, because it was really spooky looking. It's this delta shape thing. It's super black. It looks like a hole in the sky. When it comes at you, it makes no sound. Now I already know what it is. So I was like, okay. But I can imagine being in the desert, like in 1950s going, whoa, what is this? Okay. I did have an alien induction experience in 1983. I was traveling along a lonely rural highway near Hagler, Nebraska, and a big vehicle with bright lights pulled me over and the aliens got out and they abducted me into the ship where I lost 90 minutes of time, I'm missing time.

2:06:56Okay. Anyway, so this is during Race Across America. The big spaceship is my support crew, big motorhome with lights. And the aliens are my support crew, my girlfriend, my best friend, my mechanic, and so on. And I had transported in my mind, and I'd ridden 1 ,280 miles from Santa Monica Pier all the way into Nebraska, nonstop on a bicycle, right? Except for a few bathroom breaks, but just no sleep, right? So I'm sleep deprived, going like five miles an hour, just sort of wobbling down the road. and they go, we got to pull Shermer over. He's going too slow. So they get out to put me in the vehicle.

2:07:31And in the 1960s, when I was a child, there was a CBS show starring Roy Thinnes called The Invaders. And it was the aliens had invaded this small town and snatched the bodies. It was a body snatcher story. And the humans that lived in the town looked just like Roy Thinnes is the hero of the story, just like his neighbors and his friends. But you could tell that they were actually aliens because they had bent little fingers. Right. Somehow they could clone humans, but they couldn't bend their fingers anyway. So I thought that. And then the next day after my sleep break, I'm like, well, that was wild.

2:08:05So you can go on YouTube. You can look under Shermer, Abducted by Aliens. And you'll see an interview with me with Eric Heiden. Eric Heiden is the Olympic speed skater. He was also a bike racer and he worked for ABC Wild World Sports, who was filming our race. And so he pulls up to me when I'm crossing the Mississippi River the next night. And he's like, how's it going? I go, not so good. I got abducted by aliens last night. He's like, what? That's a very strange thing happened to me last night. Thinking my crew was aliens from another planet trying to capture me. So I told him all about it. So I've always used this example of people that have experiences, really have them.

2:08:47Schizophrenics really hear voices. that are out there, not in here. You know, the people that have abduction experiences. It's sleep paralysis almost early. Do you think it's always explainable by sleep paralysis? Well, I try to explain. Yeah, because most of the cases—

2:09:04Michael Shermer:What about John Mack, head of the Harvard Psychiatry Department? Yes, I think he was a little too open-minded. I don't want to use the word gullible, but I think he took people's stories at their word instead of this person that's telling me this story had sleep paralysis. And they're reporting it as if this happened to them because they don't know I was asleep. So Edgar Mitchell, six man to walk on the moon, who we mentioned, you know, Apollo 14 astronaut, he has a database of 5 ,000 plus, you know, abductees. You were saying that all of those abductees— Either sleep deprivation or another popular theme with like Bud Hopkins was using hypnotic regression.

2:09:43Okay, we know from cognitive psychology, hypnotic regression is not reliable. People use their imagination and just make stuff up, right? So I'm fond of saying, do you think, you know, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is true? He's like, no, what are you talking about? He just made it up. I know. People have fantastic imaginations to just make stuff up.

2:10:01Michael Shermer:Do you not think that it's a viable and real method for recovering memories that are shattered due to a traumatic experience? No, we know it's not. We know this from the recovered memory movement in the 1990s. Do you know about the recovered memory movement? Tell me about it. Okay. This is a dark chapter in psychology history, but it's sort of a Freudian idea that if something bad happens to you, you bury it, you repress it. Yeah. And that in therapy, you can recover this repressed memory of this horrible thing that happened to you. Okay. This was long debunked, but it came back online in the late 80s and early 90s.

2:10:36These are adult people going to therapy for various issues, depression, anxiety, sleep problems, and so on. The therapist is saying, okay, it could be this, could be that. But, you know, a lot of people who were molested as children repress that memory, and they have these symptoms similar to yours. And a person's like, I don't think I was ever molested. Well, you think about it, dream about it, we could talk about it. Six months later, they're accusing their father, grandfather, uncle, whatever, of molesting them as children. These are mostly women in their 30s now. There were hundreds of cases.

2:11:09Michael Shermer:So I do think I think memory is not reliable. Those guys were all the people that were convicted based on these recovered memories alone were let out of jail. Some of the women sued their therapist for planting false memories. Would you admit that due to your own experience, you're looking at John Mack's whole data set and you're you're biased because of your own experience? Could I be biased? Of course, anybody can be biased. But what's more likely? Right. We know tons of examples where people falsely remember things. They conflate memories. Yeah. But when those memories involve real missing time, sometimes physical marks on the person.

2:11:48You think it's missing time. People have marks on their bodies from various things.

2:11:52Michael Shermer:No, I mean, I literally there's in this book, there's a friend of mine at Ellsworth Air Force Base, 1977, woke up nine miles away. Well, it was the backside of the New Lake Reservoir Dam. And that is about on the map about eight miles, eight and a half miles away from November 5th. He says he did. From the base. No, he and a partner both did. Okay. And both of them weren't into aliens at all. Or like the Travis Walton case. I think he just made it up. I think he was just late getting the job done. And he didn't pass a lie detector test, by the way. I was on a show with him in which it was called, I forget what the name of the show was, but you had to be tested.

2:12:29Michael Shermer:Do you think those are fully perfect, the lie detector tests? No, you can beat them. Yeah. But he said, I want to take a lie detector test, and he failed it. Does it mean anything? Probably not. I mean, you can't use a medical test. They measure stress, specifically. You can't. And thinking about being on live television. We did whole issues of skeptic on lie detector. It's not reliable. This is why they're not allowed in court. Okay, okay. So you were using it as a rhetorical argument that you're now retracting. Not retracting. He said, I'm telling the truth. I'll take a lie detector test. He didn't pass the lie detector test.

2:12:59That's not why I think he's lying. I think he's made it up because he was late finishing the job.

2:13:03Michael Shermer:So you think like the greys, for example, that seem to be just a common, consistent archetype of what people see. Well, not just the greys. Don't forget the Norwegians and the lizard people. No, no, that's right. So there are others as well, but they're often fairly consistent. You know, it's those two. Well, but some of that is due to cultural influence, right? The moment that Bud Hopkins publishes his book with the alien, with the bulbous head and the almond-shaped eyes and tiny nose. You mean what was Streber? Streber, yes. Sorry, Streber, yeah. I met him in the green room at Bill Maher's show, Politically Incorrect.

2:13:38So I'm just chatting. Like, what do you do when you're not writing about being abducted by aliens? He goes, I write science fiction and fantasy. I went, oh, okay. He's got a vivid imagination. He thinks this happened to him. Okay. I'm not saying he made it up. Yeah, but that you can't.

2:13:52Michael Shermer:People have experiences. You can't rule it out entirely just because of that. I would say the vast majority we have explanations, and it's okay to say maybe there's some that this doesn't fully explain. Maybe they weren't using hypnotic repression. Maybe they weren't asleep when it happened. Okay. So then what? And your belief that is biased from your own experience, which was clearly an alien overlay on a real thing. Yeah, maybe. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, at least you can admit that. But I mean, okay, none of this is reliable. This is why eyewitnesses are so bad. When I was writing my book on the Holocaust deniers, they would use survivor stories to show how wrong the survivors are.

2:14:31And they were right about that. I mean, the survivors of Auschwitz have all seen Schindler's List and all the movies and so on. And they have this, oh, I saw Mengele on the platform when I got off the train. I fact-checked one of these stories I heard. It's like, but he wasn't there when you were there? This woman's remembering seeing the movie about Mengele, right? And, you know, I saw the flames coming out of the chimney at Auschwitz. No, that's not possible. The crematory is over here with the ovens and the chimneys are over here. that has to go through. You could not have seen the, okay, this kind of stuff.

2:15:04So people, they're not reliable. And this is why in the - But that's a good example

2:15:08Michael Shermer:because the Holocaust, you're saying the Holocaust happened, right? Oh, yes, yes. But then the memory, the specific memory is not reliable. So you could say that an alien abduction happened, but the specific incidental, you know, details are often wrong. That could be. But if that's the only thing you have, but we have way more than that for the Holocaust. The Holocaust is only tiny supported by eyewitness testimony. Yeah, yeah. I'd love to move away from this analogy. I know, I know. If at all possible. But just one more point. I mean, if the other side says, yeah, we did that. And that's true.

2:15:39No one in the German community today denies it. They all go, yeah, we did that. Yeah, of course. I know. So, okay. Anyway. So, I mean, okay, this is my point about epistemology. No arguments there. This is my point about epistemology. How do I know the 2020 election was a rape? I didn't check myself. I trust Attorney General Bill Barr, who was a lifetime Republican, twice voted for Trump, said, I'm going to look into this. If anybody would find it, he would find it. He didn't. Okay. So this reminds me of Christopher Hitchens' line about what she got from somebody else, that when you hear Mother Teresa saying that she believes in God today, you think, well, yeah, that she's doing her job today, or the Pope.

2:16:19The Pope says, I believe in God. You think, well, the Pope's doing his job today. If you hear the Pope saying, you know, I'm having some doubts about God's existence, you think, oh, Pope might be onto something. Because if anything, he would believe one thing if he says the other, right? So if somebody like, again, a Marco Rubio, you know, goes in there and goes, okay, we have something, that would get my attention. You know, not another one of these third level, I know somebody who knows somebody, you know, just somebody more direct, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Trump, you know, the head of the CIA.

2:16:51Somebody that would have reason to know then says, yes, I found it. Okay. Now, maybe if Marco says, I can't show you because it's actually what we have is CIA, DARPA, top secret. I don't want the Russians to know, but we do have something.

2:17:10Michael Shermer:Can I give you an example? That would get my attention. Can I give you an example of why I think that's not always the best scientific methodology? You're familiar, obviously, with Thomas Bayes. Yeah, Reverend Thomas Bayes. Reverend Thomas Bayes, you know, who is, you know, famous statistician as well, came up with Bayesian logic. I have a whole chapter on it right here. There you go. And I think it's a very important way to think. If you start to build up, you know, mounting evidence for something possibly being real, I think that should warrant further investigation. So a good example is if you have some circumstantial evidence, say, around Epstein circa 10 years ago or around directed energy weapons and, you know, Havana syndrome, Skeptics magazine in 2022 said, you know, this is all psychosomatic and this is not serious.

2:17:59Michael Shermer:And we shouldn't, you know, these diplomats are experiencing kind of mass hysteria or vertigo or whatever or vertigo. And in fact, we realized that it's, you know, Der Spiegel, 60 Minutes, do this piece. In 2016 and 17, 25 Americans, including CIA agents, suffered serious brain injuries. We have been collecting evidence of what appears to be a hostile foreign government's plan to target Americans. And we realize that it's a real directed energy weapon. We still don't have a directed energy weapon. Where is this weapon that could do this? Do we have this? I mean, Mike, I think it's pretty clear that microwave, you know, weaponry can can do this.

2:18:39Michael Shermer:And this is being admitted at the highest levels of intelligence, again, on both sides. But it's similar to the UFO thing because you don't have a smoking gun. But it's, you know, if I were a betting man, I would bet that it's that and that it's not psychosomatic. Would you now bet that it's psychosomatic? Again, I'm withholding judgment until I see, I don't know, somebody in the FBI or whatever goes, we found the sonic weapon, the acoustic weapon or whatever that the Russians were using. I'm sure they have it. They're not going to release that publicly. Why not? Because that's a literal tactical trade secret.

2:19:09Michael Shermer:That literally confers an advantage. But this is the problem with UFOs. What if UAPs are actually just weapons that our government has? I think in certain cases there are conflations, but I think a lot of the stuff that we've outlined today cannot be explained by advanced human technology. And maybe some of the nuke stuff is Russian tech spying on our nuke sites. In 1945? Well, they had nuclear weapons by 46. They already knew that we were working. Not by 46. It was— In 1943, Klaus Fuchs was a Russian spy. From 42 to 50, yeah. Working at Los Alamos. That's right. But they ended up building the weapon later than 46.

2:19:45Michael Shermer:I believe. The Russians, yes. 47. 47. Okay. Yeah. So, but, but I mean, the point is, yes, they do spy on us and we spy on them. So maybe some of the weird shit people talk about with anomalies, maybe that's just Russian assets or, but again, the Russians are not going to have. Stuff that's breaking our physics in the late 40s. They would not have that. Yeah. Okay. They would never have that. Okay. That can't be. This is why I reject that in my chapter on that. Is that no country gets far ahead of any other country. So would you admit you got the Havana syndrome thing wrong? No. I still think. Really?

2:20:19Yeah. No, I still think it's mass hysteria. Oh. Vertigo. Oh, yeah.

2:20:22Michael Shermer:Oh, okay. So you're in the real minority there. Well, you know, I think the 60 Minutes, I really think they got it wrong. Yep. That's wild. I usually trust them. I just think. Anyway, I don't know. I think. I could be wrong. Show me that. I think they got it very right. Show us the, again, they're anecdotes. People saying, I had these weird things happen to me, and I'm a diplomat in Cuba. But that gets our attention. Okay, fine. Yeah. Now we investigate. Yeah. All right. Where's the weapon? Where's the people that did it? We don't have any of that. I want to speak about a mystical experience that you cannot explain.

2:20:56Michael Shermer:And this was with your wife. Oh, the radio story. Yeah. Okay. Can you tell that? That's fine. Yeah, sure. No problem. I mean, this is a popular... Because I wrote about this in Scientific American because I do want to keep an open mind. And I want people to also keep an open mind just in case. Right. So, yeah, so I got remarried in 2014. So when my wife, Jennifer, moved to the United States from Cologne to be with me, which I still think it was a big mistake. But, you know, don't tell her that. So she, you know, so she'd come here and I went there and back and forth, back and forth. And I tried to navigate the immigration system and it's a mess online.

2:21:37So I just hired an attorney and we went to see the immigration attorney. They're like, if you keep this back and forth stuff, they're not going to let her back in. So I'm like, oh, OK. And what should we do? Well, you should get married. If you're going to do that anyway, we're not telling you to do that. But if you're going to do that anyway, sooner is better. So we said, all right, let's just go down to the courthouse, Beverly Hills Courthouse, and just fill out the form, get married right there. So we did that. And it's like, but this is not very romantic. So then go back to my house where she moved in and we're going to have a little ceremony.

2:22:05So this is all my friends and family, and she doesn't have anybody there from Germany. So she's feeling kind of blue. Now, you know, months before, she had shipped out all her stuff, including a little 1977 Philips transistor radio from her grandfather. Now, she didn't have a dad. A single mom raised her, so her grandfather was sort of a surrogate dad, and they used to listen to the radio together. So she always kept that and sent that to me, and I tried to get it working. I couldn't get it working. I put new batteries in and did the, you know, the slap it on the table test and all that stuff, nothing happened.

2:22:34anyway so before she even got there i just threw it in the back of the drawer in the bedroom in the big uh you know desk and nothing ever happened for months and months and months the day we get married uh we're just kind of standing around we're hearing music and so we go back to the back bedroom and it's like there's music and it's a is it the house music system i don't really have one is it my laptop with the itunes no it's not is it the neighbors no and it's like i get closer to the desk it's like it's coming from the desk so i open the drawer and there's the radio on perfectly tuned to a station playing beautiful romantic music.

2:23:08It's like, whoa, this is fucking weird. What song? I don't remember the song. I think it was a classical song. Jennifer and I like classical music. And anyway, so it was something like that. It was perfectly tuned. And it was just kind of a moment of like, oh, so it's sort of a connection with the grandfather. Did we think grandfather's in the bedroom with us? No, that would be kind of creepy, right? But it was just like an emotional anomalous event. Anyways, I wrote about this. in Scientific American. And to my utter surprise, I got just like hundreds of letters from people saying, you know what?

2:23:39I had something similar that happened to me and they would tell me these stories. I mean, one went on and on about, you know, well, I had this necklace and I was going to marry this guy and I didn't. So I got rid of the necklace and then like 25 years later, I'm in Jakarta or somewhere and there's the necklace. It's the actual necklace. Wow. Yeah. I mean, there's like hundreds of stories like that.

2:23:56Michael Shermer:Do you think it's possible that her grandfather was in the room with you guys? In a connection, maybe. Maybe. Yeah. I just keep a little, Door open just in case. I like that. Yeah. Would that be a nice reality? I think so. As long as it's not creepy, like grandfather's in the bedroom when we're, you know, fooling around. That would not be cool. No, that wouldn't be cool. But, you know, there's some rules about that yet. I don't know about the afterlife, Jesse. You know, I wrote a book about this, Heavens on Earth. I concluded that nobody knows what happens after you die. We don't know. I'd be happy to wake up and I'm going, oh, so this is what it is.

2:24:31Okay. Because we don't know what consciousness is. We don't have the solution to the hard problem of consciousness. I write about that in here. It's like, nobody knows. And you look on Wikipedia, there's like two dozen theories for the hard problem of consciousness. It's like, well, okay, we don't know what's going on here.

2:24:45Michael Shermer:So I guess in that sense, we're seeing everything through a headset, through this like very limited scope. And so then you get into this area of kind of radical Cartesian doubt. And, you know, there's a whole host of possibilities as far as non-human intelligence. But also, are we even seeing? Didn't you have Hoffman on your show? I did have Donald Hoffman. Yes, I know him. And he says the likelihood that we see base reality is zero. I think he goes too far. His stuff about species-dependent perception, that's correct. Particularly colors and smells. Yeah, like the beetle in Australia that sees the brown beer bottle.

2:25:23Yeah, the beer cap, and then thinks it's the mate. Yeah, the model beer bottle looks like a female. That's right. Okay, that's true. You know, but so my response to that is, let's say a bat sees this, whatever it's seen with its sonar echolocation, it's not what you and I see. It's a different icon on its brain. But there really is a mic there. And if the bat flies, it's really going to do this.

2:25:50Michael Shermer:It's going to go around it. But the characterization of the mic is fully dependent on your conception of a mic, which is based on your observation of the mic. And that's not the bat's mic. Yes, but there's something there. So philosophers make a distinction between colors and sounds versus physical objects, like touching a physical object. This isn't species dependent. The bat, the dog, whatever is going to feel it that's really there. Even though it's different, it looks different. Like a shark icon. Whatever it's like to be a dolphin, I don't really know. But whatever a shark looks like, it surely doesn't look like what it looks like to me.

2:26:27But there really is a shark in the water, and it really should avoid it. Yeah, that's right.

2:26:32Michael Shermer:Well, and for in a species context, you know, there's there's obviously resource allocation when it comes to evolution to detect certain predator and prey. And they're definitely species, you know, higher up and lower down that aren't adaptive for you to perceive. And so they're likely species that exist outside of our scope. Would you admit that? Oh, yes, absolutely. But I do have a thing on Donald Hoffman in the book, and I have a picture here of M.C. Escher's The Waterfall That Flows Uphill, right? Oh, yeah. Okay. So illusions only work because there actually is a reality, and water never runs uphill by itself.

2:27:12There's something off here, and we all recognize that. Okay. So predators, or I should say like prey animals that look like predators, you know, they have the eye spots or they have the fake rattles or the fake wings or whatever. They evolve those because there really are predators that look like that. And there are prey that are afraid of those predators. And so if you can be an organism that looks like the predator, that can be adaptive. But that only works if there really is a reality that there really is a predator. There is.

2:27:44Michael Shermer:It's a reality, but it's a reality that it's hard to say a lot about. Science is only true insofar as it's useful. And so, you know, it can be predictive and you can create technology from it. But there are things in physics, for example, like, you know, the Planck's constant or, you know, gravity that seems so finely tuned. You know, this is the anthropic principle where if they were slightly different, you know, we wouldn't have a habitable earth. And you could say that's a bunch of rolls of the dice and we got lucky. Or you could say that this is all an interface and that physics actually comports with what is, you know, adaptive for our survival.

2:28:20Michael Shermer:And so physics is actually downstream of our biological needs to survive. I disagree with him there. Why? It's really hard to argue. Let me use another argument. Okay. So when you see Penn and Teller or David Copperfield, I don't know, Penn and Teller, Teller walks through a wall or Teller makes the Statue of liberty disappear okay this is fun it's when people like whoa where did it go does anybody actually think teller can walk through a brick wall no does anybody think copperfield is actually moving the atoms of the statue of liberty and an extremely like unlikely instance of you know electron coherence where you don't get electron repulsion these are magicians they're not doing no but this is my point because you what would you say quantum mechanics is fake no no it's real right but it's but it implies that all subatomic particles are probabilistic in nature.

2:29:08Yes, but what does that mean? This table is solid, even though the atoms that it's made out of are mostly empty space. But what is an atom? Because the jiggling of the atoms makes it solid.

2:29:16Michael Shermer:But these are all just placeholder names that we attach to things. But Jesse, you know, the movie and book, The Men Who Stare It Goats, right? Yeah, yeah. So General Stubblebine. I interviewed the guy who was the basis of that character. Oh, you did? Stubblebine, that guy, or the other one? No, so not General Stubblebine who's head of Army INSCOM, but Kerry Cassidy is based on a guy named Lynn Buchanan who's a famous kind of army psychic spy remote viewer. And I just interviewed him. Well, in the movies, they show him, I'm going to run through this wall now because it's mostly empty space. And he runs into the wall, splats back.

2:29:47Because of course, there really is a reality. You cannot walk through walls. It doesn't matter what the quantum physics says, you can't do it.

2:29:53Michael Shermer:I'm not going to die on that hill, but I'm just trying to imbue this conversation with a little epistemic humility on what we can say about reality itself, ultimately. I do want to, just going back to your story, the Phillips Transistor Radio. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I want to quote you to you because you were this is so eloquent and beautiful. You wrote in The Scientific American, if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive, we should not shut the doors of perception. Quoting Aldous Huxley or William Blake, actually, originally, when they may be open to us to marvel in the mysterious.

2:30:29Michael Shermer:That is so beautiful. I wrote that. Yeah, you did. I think you're running from your shadow You're a secret mystic Do you want to have a mystical experience? Okay, alright Yes, it could be No, no, I meant that I do believe that I do try to keep an open mind I'm not as dogmatic I'm not like one of the angry atheists The new atheists I'm not like these hardcore materialists That say never, ever, ever, ever Just in case, right? Yeah I think a lot of things can be explained But not everything Okay Alright, so there's always these anomalies I'll read you two examples. Okay, let's do it. And that's why I enjoy talking to you about it.

2:31:05These are coincidences, right? Yeah. So here I'm discussing statisticians Percy Diaconis and Frederick Mahler about coincidences. So here's an example from the skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner. One day, Martin was perusing a used bookstore when he came across a familiar title. His father had given him a copy of that book when he was a child, but he had lost it during a move many years prior. many years prior. As he considered purchasing this replacement copy, Gardner flipped through the pages and found his own handwritten notes in the margins. It was the very book Gardner had lost. Okay, this is even spookier.

2:31:42A coincidence that happened to the actor Anthony Hopkins, who in 1972 was signed to star in the film adaptation of George Pfeiffer's novel, The Girl from Petrovka. Hopkins went to several London booksellers to purchase a copy, but none had it in stock. Heading for home, he chanced upon a book on a bench at the Leicester Square tube station. Unbelievably, it was the girl from Petrovka. Two years later, when Hopkins met Pfeiffer and mentioned the coincidence to him, the author noted that he had lent his last copy to a friend with handwritten edits in it for the American edition, changing labor, L-A-B-O-U-R to labor, the American spelling.

2:32:18For example, when Hopkins flipped open his copy, he saw Pfeiffer's annotations. It was the very same book.

2:32:24Michael Shermer:Wow. Okay. That's pretty spooky. All right. So then I discuss, well, it could be this, could be that. I mean, how come he didn't find a copy of Silence of the Lambs, you know, or something like that. We remember the hits, we forget the misses and so on. But there's enough weird stuff like that. And again, I've received hundreds of stories. And I mentioned Jeffrey Kripal and Chuck Belay collects these as well. There's thousands of these. So just in case, you know, there's a lot we don't know. you know the consciousness problem is one the God issue you know that you mentioned fine tuning we have explanations for that but they're not great the multiverse is not it's not great it's as unfalsifiable it's kind of science fiction sort of metaphysics you know string theory even Avi goes string theory is a bunch of nonsense well okay it's not my fields it's like well okay no one seems to vibe this anymore so what happened this was the big explanation.

2:33:19Okay. And, you know, Martin Rees wrote that book, Just Six Numbers, about fine tuning, but he doesn't believe in God. So, but he doesn't have a final answer either. Why is the universe this way? So I think these are what I call known, maybe unknowables. Okay. We're coming at it the wrong way. We're asking the wrong questions. Like the consciousness problem. You know, what's it like to be something is what the hard problem people talk about. What's it like to I think that's the wrong question. I can't know what it's like to be a bat or a dolphin or my dog or you. Right. I can just. And the implication in this question is that the little homunculus in my mind can jump out and go over to your head and look inside and see if the red looks like to you what it looks like to me and go, oh, Jesse's red looks like my red.

2:34:03This is not possible. You know, I have to make assumptions. So all the stuff you're talking about, like, you know, consciousness or these things happen. Okay. Could be.

2:34:12Michael Shermer:There's a lot we don't know. But there's and there's so much we don't know about consciousness. I mean, the government for decades has spent money on remote viewing and taking it very seriously. Remote viewing, yes, I know. Again, this is one of those areas. A real modality. Yeah, yeah. You know, they gave another past interviewee of mine is Joseph McMonigle, who was given the Legion of Merit for helping, you know, aid in intelligence collection and all sorts of, you know, you have Jimmy Carter on record in 1976 saying the craziest thing I ever experienced in my presidency is a woman named Rosemary Clooney, who was a psychic spy, a remote viewer.

2:34:46Michael Shermer:They were looking for a downed TU-22 Russian cargo plane and Africa was the entire target That they gave these psychic spies. And Rosemary Clooney circled a three square mile radius in Zaire and they found this plane under the treetops there. Okay, so here's the counterfactual to that. Okay, so during the CIA program, Stargate, where they were using the remote viewers. So, yes, they got some hits. But what else would be true if they could really do this? Like, you know, where were the Russian missile sites? You know, where was, I don't know, Osama bin Laden? That's probably too late for that program.

2:35:26Michael Shermer:But A, how do we know that remote viewing wasn't used in certain instances? We don't know about the hits. We might not know. That's possible. And then B, there was actually a meta study done by Jessica Utz, who was president of the American Statistical Association, and a fellow skeptic, Ray Hyman. Yes. And Ray Hyman did not agree with her on that, though, if I recall. Well, he agreed that it was statistically significant. And then he was like, but I think this will get explained down the line, which Karl Popper, a great philosopher of scientists, he would call that materialist promissory notes.

2:36:00Michael Shermer:He would say that that is taking out debt on materialism and assuming it'll stand up. Ray's pretty good at these things. But he admitted it was statistically significant. Jessica Utz and him and also Richard Wiseman, the psychologist from England, he's also disputed her and what's his name? The people that stare at the back of your neck, Rupert Sheldrake. Yes. So like Rupert Sheldrake has this whole theory about, you know, perception is your eyes sending stuff out and it tickles the back of your neck if I'm staring at you and you pick that up. Scopesthesia. Or the dog, your dog knows when you're coming home and you're miles away at work or whatever.

2:36:37Okay, so he has all these stories and books about it and experiments he's run. So Richard Wiseman tried to conduct the exact same experiments with the dog, and he's published these, and he gets no results. Okay, and then Jessica comes in and is like, well, this or that problem with the methodology. It gets complicated. And so, you know, Rupert is gone. It's a skeptic effect. You know, the skeptical energy interferes with the very weak power of the psychic, whatever. Okay, so here's my problem with all this is that so many of these things are not replicated. So we know that in psychology, probably half of all studies ever published should never have been published.

2:37:12This is the replication crisis. This is very disturbing and worse than psychology and medical research. These studies are so complicated and so expensive to run that a lot of things passed peer review that probably should have never passed or they were p-hacking or whatever. So ever since the replication crisis started in 2010 with Daryl Bem's research on the backward causality, that's how it began. And so for your viewers that don't know this story, because I would always be asked, what would it take for you to believe in psychic ESP, psychic power, whatever it's like? Well, how about a real scientist at a real university that conducts a real experiment and publishes it in a real peer-reviewed journal?

2:37:52And that happened. Yeah. Okay, Ben did this. Okay, not very many. This hasn't happened very often. But in the psychic context, that's happened. Well, but they're psychic journals, but this is a mainstream journal. He published this in Social and Personality Psychology, which is like the top journal in psychology. He's at Cornell University. He's the great Daryl Bamm that has a stellar record. So he sets up subjects in front of a screen. And on the screen, you have to take a pick. You press one key or the other key. Will the image come up on the left screen or the right screen? So one image is an emotionally neutral image.

2:38:24The other one is an emotionally arousing image, like a pornographic type image. And so the subjects guess which one it's going to be. It should be 50-50 is your prediction. So it comes out statistically significant that they did it above chance. That was his finding. Before the computer decided with this random number generator which side of the screen the image would appear on. That's the key. So this was what he called backward causality. They knew before the computer even decided which side left or right that the image was going to come on. All right. So that was a big story. It got a lot of media attention.

2:39:03Daryl Bem went on Colbert Report and told this story. And he famously joked, it's, you know, extrasensory pornception. Right. And I remember thinking, OK, backward causality, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, there's an arrow of time. What are the chances that a social psychologist has overturned 400 years of physics by showing pornography to college students in a lab? Come on. And so Ray Hyman famously went through the whole paper. And then the journal also published a critique by somebody else. This is the methodological problems with the study. No one was able to replicate it. Richard Wiseman and Stuart Ritchie replicated the exact experiment and got null results, sent those results, their paper, to the same journal who rejected it that said, we're not interested in null results.

2:39:53Another problem with psychology. Yeah. Null results are important, right?

2:39:56Michael Shermer:They are, of course. And I think we're in the Stone Age on whatever is going on with extrasensory perception. So I think there are very weak effects beyond the standard deviation, as shown by this statistical analysis of the Stargate program and the Gansfield method that Ray Hyman and Jessica Utz actually looked at. But you look at the Princeton Engineering and Anomalous Research Lab, which was started by Bob John, who was the dean of the engineering school. You look at what Stanford Research Institute was looking at. And just the very fact that the U.S. government is willing to pay for this year over year, even despite the optical scrutiny of remote viewing seen as sort of this super quacky thing, I think.

2:40:41Well, the government's done a lot of programs like that. MKUltra came out of the fear that we're losing the race to the Russians on mind control, the Russians, Chinese and North Koreans.

2:40:48Michael Shermer:Yeah, and it was and it was a vital program that's now being investigated by Congress. It turns out you can't control people's minds. You can't create a killer like that. How do you know that? Oh, there's tons of research, cognitive psychology now, that can you actually control people like this? And the answer is no, you can't. There's no magic drug. There's no hypnotic formula you can use to make people kill the president or whatever. How do you know that? Well, the research shows you can't do it. I don't know if that's right. Yeah. Now, you could do it, I say, more globally, like religion. Take 9-11.

2:41:19How can we design these missiles to take down the World Trade Center building? It's really expensive. It's hard to do and so on. I know. Let's just get some guys to take over some planes and fly them in there. How do we do that? We promise them an afterlife. Religion can do this, right? That's a kind of programming that probably doesn't work for most people, but it works for some.

2:41:41Michael Shermer:Right. But I'm just I'm trying to make a larger point, which is that science needs to be perfectly repeatable and it needs to be able to be turned into math. And that's really our criteria for calling something science. Something could be phenomenologically very real, show weak effects, and we can't perfectly manipulate it in a lab setting over and over again. That could be a problem. And so and so science has this very limited criteria. And I would I would put ESP in that bucket. It could be. OK. Yeah, it could be. I mean, there are limitations to science for sure. I mean, there's a lot of progress, a lot of good stuff we've done, a lot of things we don't know.

2:42:17Again, these known unknowables, I think. Free will and determinism, consciousness, God's existence, why there's something rather than nothing, the fine tuning of the universe. These are all really hard problems I talk about in the book that, you know, that we may not solve them the way we're going. This is why I wouldn't mind being chronically frozen and brought back 500 years from now. Oh, so that's what dark matter is. I see. Okay. That was obvious. You know, something like that. Much like if you and I can imagine traveling back to the Middle Ages before Newton and Galileo and all that and go, wow, these people think completely differently than us.

2:42:52Totally different worldview. I can't help but thinking, what if I live 500 years from now? It's like, oh, Einstein was interesting, but he completely missed whatever. Well, it would be quantum physics, I guess. But whatever comes after that. that we're not thinking of. Totally.

2:43:07Michael Shermer:No, well, I think that's important to say. And another place I would, I don't want to say challenge you, but I'm curious what you would say here. Historically, present day heretics get vindicated as future pioneers. Most don't. Okay, most the fringe challenge heretic people, they're wrong. Most, that's correct. We have survivorship bias. Yes, yeah, yeah. But many people who have contributed to science were considered heretics in their time, anti-establishment thinkers. I mean, like Einstein, yeah, he worked at a patent office, general relativity, all that stuff. But he went and got a PhD at a normal university, published in peer-reviewed journals.

2:43:49He knew all the top physicists. He was an insider. He wasn't just some...

2:43:53Michael Shermer:Relativity was seen as a total novel curiosity. It was completely marginalized until the 50s in the golden age of relativity. No, I'll tell you when it happened. It happened in 2019 with Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington led the expedition for the solar eclipse test of the bending of the starlight around the sun from the distant stars, which you can't see during the day. But during eclipse, you can see the stars take a photograph of them compared to the photographs taken at night. And you can see they bent just the exact amount that Einstein said they would be bent because it's not gravity pulling the light.

2:44:28It's the bending of this.

2:44:30Michael Shermer:That's experimental proof of the theory. I think it was. Well, there's a there's a New York Times headline. The universe's light is all askew. Einstein discovers whatever it's. So he became famous after 1919. But it was not canonical physics like quantum mechanics was, which he was also contributing to. Well, but he didn't. So he became a bit of a grumpy old man and had a hard time accepting spooky action. Can I give you another example? Marconi flunked out of all of his classes and he tried to send a radio signal across the Atlantic. And he thought that that maybe radio signals bent and curved with the earth.

2:45:12Michael Shermer:And he was totally wrong, but he tried anyways. And in fact, the radio signal bounced off the ionosphere and it worked. So he was he was right because he was wrong. And like I can't tell you how much of, you know, like Eric Weinstein, my former colleague, you know, he would call it like cowboy science where like you're you're going out on a limb and you're trying a thing and maybe even for the wrong reasons. And then you get it right. And so. OK, but at some point, you know, he's right because it works. But you have experimental proof or market proof. Is there one non-consensus thinker now that you would get behind?

2:45:49I don't know, because if I knew I would get behind him.

2:45:52Michael Shermer:But it's important to do that work, right? To take bets on. Yes, absolutely. Okay, so I'm in favor of, you know, the Graham Hancocks of the world going on Rogan and telling their story. I think this is great. Okay, good. Totally fine. I mean, Joe talks to all these people. Yeah. I've been on there seven times. And, you know, he's going, here's my opinion. He doesn't agree with me. Whatever, fine. That's fine. Let everybody have their say. I mean, I watched Robert Malone on his show. It's like, all right, I'm not really vibing this, but, you know, okay, I'll listen to it. I'll go look it up myself.

2:46:21I don't like these people to go, Rogan shouldn't platform these people. Why? I mean, it's kind of condescending. Like, you're too dumb to go look it up yourself? Really? I mean, come on. Right? Nothing wrong with that. And Graham has gotten the attention of archaeologists who have now responded. Okay, good. Right? That's good that they're doing that. This is how we make progress. So I'm in favor of that. Yeah. So you're pro-Socratic method. Now, part of the problem in science is just a practical one. Most scientists don't have time to deal with the challenges. Like the archaeologists are busy working and reviewing papers and teaching classes and getting grants.

2:46:55And like, well, here's this Graham Hancock guy. He's like, I don't have time. I get that, right? It's like, but that's what we're for. We deal with that. Skeptic Magazine deals with that, right? Or you mentioned Eric Weinstein. I love Eric. But a number of physicists have said, all right, show us. Publish it in a journal. Come to our conference and so on. And he doesn't do it. So to me, that says, OK, there's something off here. You don't get to do an end run and go to the front of the line and skip all the steps that everybody else has to go through. You've got to present it. Here's my theory.

2:47:31Here's my evidence.

2:47:32Michael Shermer:Now, what do you think? Yeah, but like the politics of academia, like if I tried to write, I was some garden variety professor and I tried to write a paper about a UFO crash, I'd be laughed out of the room. That's starting to change. But there's still real stigma. Okay, okay. I will admit it. So Avi's talked about this. Like he wrote a paper about 3A Atlas. And, you know, it's probably a comment, comment, comment, comment, comment, comment. But it has these weird anomalies. So last paragraph, let's not rule out the possibility it could be an extraterrestrial light sail or spaceship, whatever he called it.

2:48:06And so he said, he was telling this on a Zoom meeting, the journal editor goes, okay, this is a great paper, but you have to take out the final paragraph. He goes, well, that's not science. I mean, the whole point is like, here's what we know. Here's the methods and so on. Here's our final speculation. That's okay. Because what if that's the right one, right? So I don't like that. I admit that that does happen. The other problem with peer review, again, time. You know, a lot of papers get pushed through because they're not really read. And I know this. I get sent papers for review. Most of them I don't do because I don't have the time.

2:48:40The fewer review, it's like, damn, this is taking me hours to read this. And here's all these statistics. And I'm like, geez, if I really run through this, I'm going to spend like two days on this. I don't have time for this. And so you're tempted to just go, oh, it looks good to me. And then so stuff gets through. And I'm sure this happens. I'm absolutely sure. And here's another complaint. So these peer-reviewed articles are blinded. You don't know who the author is. You just flip to the references and you can see exactly who the author is. There's like 27 citations on one name. It's like, that's the guy.

2:49:15It's like, this is not right either, right? You'd have to leave off the references. And the p-hacking and all that stuff and the file drawer problem, you know, some of that's. So now you're supposed to post what you're going to do ahead of time on these sites. Avi does this. which is good. You know, these are all the things I'm going to do, and I'm going to report all of them, and you can see what happens.

2:49:36Michael Shermer:I think prediction markets would be a really interesting use for, you know, some of these, like, nature of reality truths. Like, oh, you believe in it? Okay, bet on it. And this is based on, actually, the work of, there's this guy, Philip Tetlock, who wrote a book called Super Forecasting. Oh, yes, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was all about how, you know, if you predict a thing and you put skin in the game, this is Nassim Taleb 101 as well, you're more likely to make money, you know, to be right, rather, than one of these sort of armchair pundits that's like wrong all the time. I have a discussion of this in my book because the prediction market people, the super forecasters, Phil calls them, they're more Bayesian.

2:50:13They're like, instead of a pundit on Fox News going, I think Putin's going to invade or I don't think he's going to invade or whatever. And no one like a week later goes, well, he invaded and you said he wouldn't. No one fact checks them and go, you lost. You lost your money. But if you go, OK, now you have to place a bet. But all right, now, how often does Putin actually do these things? Or what is the base rate of terrorists? Like, when's the next terrorist attack going to happen in Gaza or whatever, Israel? Well, there's prediction markets. So the guys that make money are Bayesian. They're like, OK, how often does Hamas actually attack?

2:50:44What's the base rate? And then are there any tensions now? And then they put probabilities on it, and then they place their bets. That's the value of prediction markets. What I don't like about them now is the insider stuff is a little like, OK, you knew this was going to happen

2:50:57Michael Shermer:because you're part of it. Totally. You get, you know, government actors betting on, you know, wars and that sort of thing. And that's totally, you know, that's what Nancy Pelosi seems like she's been doing for the last couple of decades. I want her investment program. That's an inside joke. Track her portfolio. You looked into the Virginia UFO crash of 1996. A little bit. I mean, I only mostly know through James Fox's work. Again, eyewitnesses and so on, maybe. 15 to 20 witnesses who were alive. I know. Yeah, I know. Same thing with the, what do you call it, the miracle of Fatima. You know, there was 50 ,000 people, 70 ,000 or whatever it was.

2:51:36Yeah, but in this case. Saw this. Okay, so what is it they're seeing? That's the question. They're not hallucinating. Okay, fine. Okay. Yeah.

2:51:42Michael Shermer:But they saw 15 to 20 people. They've triangulated the flight path of this Tic Tac UFO, which had seemingly like steam coming out of the back because it maybe it had been punctured in some way. It crashes on the Maialini farm. This ultralight pilot and geography teacher Carlos de Souza finds it. He picks up part of the material. This whole military crew comes from the ESA base, which is right nearby. They confiscate the material from him. And then you have a being coming out of this craft. It's seen all over the city. These three little girls at the time, now they're women, all testify to having seen this being.

2:52:19Michael Shermer:It's kind of curled up in a ball and it seems scared and it has red big eyes. And then you go to this specific hospital, the regionale hospital, and you can literally walk in there today. And he goes, is this the hospital where they treated the ET? They go, yeah, this is the hospital. and their chief neurosurgeon, a guy named Italo Venturelli, says that he was face-to-face with the being for four minutes and he oversaw the work of this other guy, Marcos Venesis, who, like, helped the being with a puncture wound. And then you have all sorts of evidence that the being was carted off and taken to the U.S.

2:52:51Michael Shermer:And I just interviewed a former defense minister and a current presidential candidate, a guy named Aldo Ribello, and he was like, yeah, this happened. You said that fundamentally you do think something happened in Virginia in 1996. Believing that a phenomenon like this exists, of course, because these were phenomena that had the testimony of totally credible witnesses. So I'm like, what else do you need? Again, if this were a criminal case, which takes eyewitness testimony into account. What is the it? Okay, so something happened clearly. Yeah. The question is, what is it? And if it was true, what else would be true?

2:53:33What does the government say that they think it was?

2:53:35Michael Shermer:He thinks it's akin to what happened at Roswell, and this is all the rebel. And Carlos de Souza, in feeling the material, said that it was very light, and when he would move it around with his hands and perturb it, it would go back into its original shape. Very similar to the testimony of Army Intelligence Officer Jesse Marcel at Roswell. You mean like cellophane does? Like cellophane? Yeah, you crunch it up and it unravels back to solid peaks. Maybe it's not cellophane. Nitinol. Nitinol or nitinol. Yeah, whatever that stuff. Anyway, well, I don't know, Jesse. I mean, again, these are good things that would be good to know what actually happened.

2:54:15How can we get more information? Again, we don't have the body. We don't have the spaceship. We don't have photos, videos. And then the question is, why would the CIA want to hide that body? Why not just show everybody and go, aliens are here. We need to double our budget because we're going to protect you all.

2:54:31Michael Shermer:For the reasons outlined in the Robertson memo, you know, they would touch off mass hysteria. Hal Puthoff. I don't think it would touch up. Why do people think that? I agree with you. I'm just saying, if you have this old school mentality, do you know who Hal Puthoff is by any chance? Of course, yes. Famous scientist in UFO space, but also in sensitive kind of military world. And he says that he, along with Stephen Hadley, who is a national security advisor of George W. Bush, they did this whole kind of, you know, review panel of like, what does disclosure look like? And they were all they all came in pro disclosure and they waited, you know, everything from economic destabilization to sociological religious destabilization.

2:55:11Michael Shermer:And they came out of it being like disclosure is not worth it. Again, I wouldn't make that call. I think it should all be out. No, they let it all out, yeah. But do you think that maybe that's been the case? I mean, I do think governments overcorrect on the security and secrecy and classification. They do do that. There's a lot of stuff they don't need to block out, especially old stuff. I mean, come on, the Soviet Union's been dead since 1991. It's time. What happened in 1947? I mean, who cares? They just show us, right? Right. Well, I'm hoping, again, part of the UAP Science Advisory Committee, that someone like an Avi Loeb with connections to people in the government, which he does, they really admire him.

2:55:53They're like, okay, we're going to show Avi what happened. I'm hoping.

2:55:58Michael Shermer:I hope so, too. And I hope you get access to the goods. How do you think you'd react if you were taken into a hangar and saw it? I would love it. It'd be amazing. I would love that. But again, I mean, you know, I'm of an age when Sagan was, you know, ahead of me by 15, 20 years or so on this whole thing. And it's like, I love this. The aliens are out there. Terrible waste of space if we were the only ones. I mean, let's go looking and so on. Absolutely. I mean, I think they're out there. If they came here, even more amazing. Sagan's interesting because he wrote The Demon Haunted World and obviously was a skeptic book.

2:56:33Michael Shermer:Yeah. Yeah. He's a fan of weeding out bad ideas. I remember Richard Dawkins blurbed that book. But in other ways, he seems kind of privately interested in UFOs and aliens. Oh, he is, yes. Although he hasn't covered anything. That was a myth. There was a story about him saying, I think aliens are real and that this was redacted or something. So I checked with his widow, Annie, who's a friend. She goes, that never happened. That's one of those bullshit, like deathbed confessions. I believe in God now. Yeah, it never happened. Yeah, yeah. Hitch always said, if anybody tells you I said it at the last moment, I believe in God, don't believe him.

2:57:07I'm never going to say that

2:57:09Michael Shermer:Yeah, yeah, yeah Well, he held high clearances You know, he was involved in this 1958 project called A119 Where we were going to nuke the moon as a show of force against the Soviets I don't remember that It's fascinating Is that in the bios? I don't remember that Yeah, yeah, yeah Okay, all right, I must have forgot that Okay, yeah Yes, I know Well, I mean, he was a major insider He, you know, got the Voyager, you know, the record thing he worked on Turned the Voyager around, took a picture of Earth I mean, he made all that happen Yeah It's a fascinating story. The audio version of their 1977 book about the Voyager record, 79, I guess it was published, about him and Annie and a few of the others that worked on it.

2:57:48It's really quite a slice of history because this is what they thought in 1979. This is what we were thinking about the universe and aliens and music and which music do you pick to put on the record. My favorite story of that was somebody said, well, we got to put Bach on the record. And somebody said, that would just be bragging. It's too good. That's fine. I thought that was funny. But yeah, I mean, the chances of the Voyager encounter anything, pretty much nil. But you never know. But just in case. But also, it's a slice of what we cared about, what we think is important about us for other people to know, even if no one ever finds out.

2:58:26It's kind of a look into what we think is important, art, music, language, what people look like, that kind of thing.

2:58:33Michael Shermer:Well, I'm excited you're on this panel. I think you're going to serve a very important purpose. And if anything, I want you to debunk harder. And what I mean by that is I feel like often our conversations are like, Michael, here's this data set. And you're like, yeah, but the data set is probably happenstance for all these, you know, kind of high level heuristic reasons. I want you to debunk the isolated specific cases and be like, actually, here's a conventional prosaic explanation, because otherwise we just have so much evidence sitting there in this liminal space. And I'm with you. I don't want to kind of preemptively pre-crystallize or snap to grid some conclusion.

2:59:12Michael Shermer:I don't know. Space aliens, I'm not sure. But like, is reality much weirder than we think? I'm pretty high conviction in that. I think I would agree with that. I think there's a lot we don't know about the physical world. Even these quantum effects, all the spooky action of distance stuff. You know, the hard problem of consciousness, you know, Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose theory about the collapsing wave function inside the microtubules of the neurons. Okay, I don't really buy this, but it's an interesting story because if it turned out to be true, then that would not be paranormal, ESP, psychic.

2:59:48That would just be like quantum neuroscience or something.

2:59:51Michael Shermer:It would be part of science. And there are physicalist models around remote viewing where maybe, you know, in certain quantum interpretations, you have obviously have temporal non-locality with double slit experiments. You can reverse qubit positions in quantum computations. So in a working quantum computer, you'd be able to send information back in time on the application layer. So if there was some sort of, you know, room temperature quantum system in the brain, a la Penrose and Hameroff, then you could maybe access your future knowledge state. So if you were given confirmatory feedback on a remote viewing session, that would be a physicalist, materialist, reductionist explanation of remote viewing.

3:00:27Michael Shermer:You know, that would fully comport with possible interpretations of physics. Yes, if that happened, then it would become. So this is my point. If it became part of science, so the words paranormal and supernatural, they're just linguistic placeholders. There's no such thing. There's just reality. and if it turns out people can read each other's minds or the backs of playing cards or remote view due to these quantum effects, okay then that's just part of the world It's super normal, not paranormal Yeah, super normal or really cool or something like that Well, I love it and I hope we can make a lot of progress on this and I'm really excited to see what you do on the White House advisory panel I'll do my best I'm excited Just the fact that this exists I think is a really cool stamp of approval for the for the space um and uh yeah hopefully we can do this again because i always enjoy my conversations if nothing else it could expose how much governments keep secrets which is also interesting for conspiracy uh studies like like do they really lie yeah they really do right i used to make a joke about this like you know crazy conspiracy theories like we never landed on the moon the earth is flat 9-11 is an inside job and this rich guy has this island where he's bringing rich and powerful people to have sex with.

3:01:41Oh, wait, that one's real.

3:01:43Michael Shermer:Exactly. Because, you know, Rogan was talking about that way before any of this stuff came out. For sure. And it's like, oh, that one's real. Yeah, and a good example there is you have Pizzagate, which on the face of it looked totally ridiculous, but it was one step adjacent to the Epstein stuff. Yes, yes, some of the rich guys taking the blood of Adrenal. I think that was like QAnon and, yeah. So all of these things, while maybe prima facie shouldn't be taken at face value and they were wrong, they were almost meant to pre-stigmatize against a real truth, a really dark truth. So that's the problem with conspiracism is that conspiracy theorizing is that some conspiracies are true.

3:02:24That's right.

3:02:25Michael Shermer:And I think there's a healthy, efficient frontier of looking skeptically into conspiracies, which should be everybody's kind of a priori orientation. Because I think if you write it off and you say, oh, nothing to see here because it's called a conspiracy. There's a CIA memo from the 70s saying we're going to popularize the term conspiracy to have people look away. I don't doubt that they do this. Let's feed the UFO people this and this will distract the American public for a while. And then there's the flood. Then there's the opposite of the flood, the zone. Like you have these people, you know, coming out who are disinfo agents saying, oh, yes, we have six different alien races and they're from these planets or whatever.

3:03:07Michael Shermer:And that's every podcaster's dream to have those people on, you know. So it's important, I think, to to to go into the conspiracies, but with your wits about you. Yeah. Our latest issue of Skeptic, we look into the whole social media model and podcasting and the kind of attention economy in which you get people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens saying just crazy stuff. And I can't tell if they believe this or they just say this because it draws attention. And here I am watching it and writing about it. So I'm getting attention. It's like, did I just fall for something? I think I look, I think I'm sure they get a lot wrong.

3:03:42Michael Shermer:And then I think there's a general sense of being burned by the establishment institutions. And have we overcorrected? And, you know, is there, you know, blanket anger against like, you know, every institution, everybody with a third degree connection to like anybody who's done bad? Yeah, for sure. Podcasting is sloppy right now. And then and then at the same time, I understand they're tapping into something very real, like an emotion on the part of the American people. people that they feel ripped off and burned and clearly just. You know, ignore all the details. There was an extreme amount of undue leverage on the United States government by, you know, basically a pedophile.

3:04:24Michael Shermer:It was running a ring. And so, you know, that's all you need to know, right? Like to be like angry and want investigation. And then clearly, you know, people have been distracting systematically from that. And so like if you agree with those two things, like, you know, I get it as far as, you know, that sort of sphere of podcasting world where they're like, what else? What else are they lying to us about? I don't know. I know. I know. Yes. Well, so that's why I like independent journalism. You know, when something gets reported that I know a lot about, I know they're getting it wrong. It's like, what else am I watching that I don't know anything about?

3:04:59This happened in Iran. It's like, well, maybe that didn't happen in Iran because I know they got this one wrong. Right. That happens like in the New York Times, the CBS, whatever. Like, huh. So I do like having the independent journalists going, let's get lots of voices out there. And it gets time consuming sometimes. You know, it's like, OK, I have like 20 windows open. Like, I'd really like to read all these articles. I really should read all these. And it's like, OK, you can't do everything right. So that's all. But I think it'll winnow down. I think it'll become obvious. These are the good places to go, you know, and try, you know, left wing, right wing, libertarian, green, whatever.

3:05:34add them all up, divide by four, whatever. I love it.

3:05:39Michael Shermer:Exactly. Well, Michael, thank you for coming to my UFO. Oh, I love being here, by the way. This is, I feel like the Star Trek bridge here. Yeah, no, it's so fun. And no, this is a blast. I really appreciate it. And, you know, I now know that you're on record, right? That aliens are real. Yes, that's it. Yeah, they're here. Yeah, yeah. I've been zapped by the alien beam. Yeah, I know. I would love it. I mean, again, if I woke up and there's an afterlife, great. Okay, I'm not against that. I'm afraid of that. You know, if there's aliens, I don't want to be alone in the universe. Yeah. Okay, so let's do it.

3:06:14Michael Shermer:I think the only guarantee about the future is that we're going to be surprised. And so I would say - Oh, that's a good way to put it. I would say all the memes we have in our head, all the expectations of quote unquote alien life, it's probably going to be so much weirder than we ever expect, whatever is coming around the bend. Well, this is, to Sagan's credit, he didn't show the aliens in contact for a reason, because we actually don't know what they're going to look like. Right? I mean, how many bipedal primates are there on Earth? You know, there's four great apes, five great apes, that's it, out of millions of species.

3:06:47So if we go to another planet, what are the chances they look anything like us? Probably not. They're going to be very different.

3:06:52Michael Shermer:Well, I think the gray alien thing is a real archetype. I think it's consistently seen. You do? Yes. Bipedal. Well, that's the thing that I think points more towards something that's derivative of humans. If you're in North Sentinel Island, which is, you know, off the coast of India, it's completely uncontacted, you know, for centuries. Oh, those guys. If, say they've had, you know, a couple of missionaries have shown up with Bibles and stuff and I think a couple of them shot down. But, you know, maybe these North Sentinelese go back to the, you know, the inland tribes and they say, you know, we've seen aliens.

3:07:25Michael Shermer:They've attempted contact. Don't worry. We've nullified the, you know, the threat or whatever. And so if you're seeing something that looks like you, you know, it's bipedal, there's this sort of morphological consistency and there's evolutionary convergence, you know, the likelihood is that it's actually sort of like, you know, derivative of you and it's in your neighborhood and it's proximate to you. And so then you have to get into time travel. Obviously, you have paradoxes there, but you have to get into other weirder explanations. Or another one, do you know Simon Conway Morris, the paleontologist who countered Steve Gould's contingency argument for the Burgess Shale on a larger scale convergent evolution, that there's only so many ways for organisms to be designed in a world.

3:08:09If you have air, you have to have something like wings. If you're in the water, you need something like fins and a fusiform body. And then like, so you should have like most of your sensory equipment and your brain on one end, your waste disposal system on the other end. You got to have some limbs to move around on the land. You might end up with like a bipedal dinosaur or whatever, right? It wouldn't look completely like. So I read his book and I had him on the show. I was like, yeah, that guy actually makes sense. So this is because instead of joking about aliens are not going to look like us, he's like, you don't know that.

3:08:41Michael Shermer:That's fascinating. What's his name? Simon Conway Morris. Okay. So he's a paleontologist. I think he's at Oxford. And so when Steve Gould wrote his famous book, Wonderful Life, and he made his case for how contingent history is, which was a good correction, but he went too far. And Simon Conway Morris is like, you know, it's not all chance. You know, wings are going to look like wings because this is the environment they're in, right? And so most things converge to look certain ways for good reason. Like, oh, yeah, that's a good point. Interesting. Well, I would love to talk to him. He sounds fascinating.

3:09:12Michael Shermer:Oh, he's great. Yeah. Yeah, he's good. I do just think that radically different environments, right? Like we have like a nitrogen rich atmosphere. If, you know, you end up with, you know, some other element that sort of dominates the atmosphere. You know, gravity is a little bit different. I would imagine morphologically you end up with different, you know, patterns of life. I'm sure he has good counter arguments to that. So I'll put you in touch with him. Also, Charles Cockrell at Oxford. He works on extraterrestrial liberty. So that's kind of his big thing. like if we set up a civilization on Mars, what should be the political system or the economic system?

3:09:45What if somebody takes control of the oxygen production and then they monopolize it? So then he starts thinking, what kind of laws do we need on Mars? And then you take that out to an extraterrestrial civilization. What kind of system are they going to have? And then different planets are going to have different kinds of bodies, depending on the gravity. If you have gravity 10 times that of Earth, you can't have a giraffe. or the bones would be this thick, right? So anyway, I'll put you in touch with him too. These are super interesting questions.

3:10:14Michael Shermer:That would be awesome. But on the Conway example, you're kind of saying that maybe they are extraterrestrial. Maybe the greys are, in fact. Yes, yes. That's kind of the argument. At least it's not completely crazy to think they could be something like bipedal. They're going to be primates, but something like you've got to have arms and legs to move around and manipulate tools. and two eyes and, you know, the brain is up here and so on. You end up kind of like this. Yeah. It's also interesting to think of like lower species as far as, you know, they're less conscious than us, what they think of us and whether they think certain things humans do are actually scientific laws versus, you know, agency versus humans.

3:10:59Michael Shermer:So I know you have agenticity, this idea that we impugn too much sort of agency when it comes to things but are you familiar with like the farmer and shooter analogy from the three body problem do you know about which one is that it's fascinating so you have these like um 2d people who are living on this like flat surface oh and you have shooters in 3d world shooting at it and every 10 centimeters you get a little hole and they think each hole is like a crater it's this but it's it's this sort of just consistent phenomena it's like the weather or it's you know natural geological formation that just shows up every 10 centimeters.

3:11:35Michael Shermer:And in fact, it's discretionary. And it's because of these shots being taken. Oh, that's really, that's a great example. It's a great example. Another great example, thought experiment, is you have turkeys that, you know, every day they're fed at 11 a.m. Every day they're fed at 11 a.m. This is sort of this David Hume style thing. So, you know, they're fed, they're fed, they're fed. And then one day their head gets chopped off. And this is an analogy for the trisolarian aliens in the three-body problem, which are, coming to invade or whatever. But the point is, you think of these things as patterns sometimes that are out of your control, but it's the opposite of agenticity.

3:12:10Michael Shermer:There is actually agency and discretion behind some of these things that you're observing. Yeah. Well, that's Edwin Abbott's book, Flatland from the 1890s. Great book. So good. Yeah. You never know. I mean, I think that was also Sagan's point. We're carbon chauvinists, he liked to say. Don't think carbon is the only way to structure a living organism. And he would talk all the time about tesseracts and platonic. You showed it. You showed it on your show. I've showed it all the time. Yeah. He shows it. He goes, you can't see a tesseract, but you can just see the shadow. And so maybe some of these UFOs, because they actually seem to show holographic principle like features where, you know, about the holographic principle, of course, you just see the 2D boundary of a black hole, but it's obviously this larger 3D structure.

3:12:54Michael Shermer:So in this case, if you walk into the UFO and many of these reported instances, it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Yes, I've heard this. And so it could be this holographic principle. Yeah, yeah, it could be. Well, Fred Hoyle wrote that novel about a gaseous cloud in space thinking. You know, I mean, it's just particles that are interacting. Right. Like these drones. Now, the jellyfish UAP looks to be a group of drones. The drones are interconnected, you know, Bluetooth or whatever, and they're coordinated. Well, why not coordinate molecules of gas or whatever, right? That was his idea.

3:13:31And then Ray Kurzweil, there's a scene in that film about Ray Kurzweil where he's staring out at the ocean and he's like, what are you doing? What are you thinking? He goes, I'm thinking computation. All these little molecules, they could all be coordinated and computing and thinking. Don't think it's just neurons firing is the only way you can get consciousness, right?

3:13:48Michael Shermer:I think that's right. I think we assume it gets cut off and we just we don't know how consciousness works. There are all these things that in nature that could actually, you know, be not random. And I would just say also, like, yes, there are all sorts of mythologies that have led humans astray historically. But it's the epitome of human hubris to say that the Enlightenment is not another example of a mythology. Right? Well, it's a story, but hopefully a story based in reality. It's a story that involves an origin story, how things come into creation. It involves rituals and labs. You know, it's like all these things.

3:14:26Michael Shermer:And it's not immune to any of the consensus dynamics and herd-like thinking of any of the other mythologies. You know, Dan has an analogy with termites and thinking. So in his book, Bacteria to Brains, he has pictures of these gigantic termite mounds in Australia. I mean, they're like 20, 30 feet tall, big, lots of complicated things. Do any of the termites that spit the little dirt out and build this thing, do they have any idea that they're building this tower that looks like a skyscraper? No, they're just doing their little thing, right? But together, the whole collective builds this magnificent structure because that's what we're doing.

3:15:01Michael Shermer:Joe Rogan talks about this all the time. He says our need to consume things drives our need to make better and better, incrementally better things. And it's like the Tower of Babel or something where we're we're just trying to we're creating this like cybernetic sort of thing around us where our own consciousness is going to look fundamentally different in 100 years. And this is not, you know, this is not normative statement for me, because I think it's actually bad in many ways. Like, I'm sort of more of like a primalist in this context. But there are people like Noah Yuval Harari, who, you know, he's just he's probably I don't love him on a lot of other things.

3:15:40Michael Shermer:but he's just right about this homo deus thing where we're, you know, we're probably going to end up merging with technology. We are. The history of computation is the history of a lower latency, higher bandwidth relationship with this stuff. And then all of a sudden, that's a new aperture through which we see everything. And then and then what what do you detect on the other side? Is there an intelligence, you know, a non-human intelligence that that's maybe higher than us on the consciousness chain that you can then speak to? And have they been, you know, a la cellular automata, have they been poking at us and messing with us in ways to get us to just meet them and be able to communicate with them?

3:16:19Who knows? There was this line asked, I think it was to Ray Kurzweil, you know, do you think there's a God? And he said, we're working on it.

3:16:28Michael Shermer:Ah, that's fascinating. Wow. Well, that's the singularity, right? I mean, everything changes and they become essentially omniscient. Right. But then that also feels really heretical. Like it should be, there should be a God that created us. But he's been right on so many things. You have to take him seriously. He's also been wrong on a bunch of things too. And then he might be right on this again. But like, I don't know, I find that like, you know, the whole AI craze, it's like, I think this is a simulation from some higher sentience. And so why would you port yourself into a lower bit compressed, you know, simulation a la artificial intelligence if you can maybe ascend out of this one and maybe, you know, commune with a real God?

3:17:12Michael Shermer:You know, why would you why would you go into the tech thing? You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's a good Star Trek Next Generation episode about this where they, you know, the holodeck, they go in there and have these pretend worlds. Right. So one of the common themes in that series is Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty and the whole thing. And they go in there and they play act and do the whole thing with him. So one of the, in this particular episode, Sherlock Holmes and his sweetheart, they're in there and they're all interacting with the Star Trek crew people, Captain Picard and so on.

3:17:43All of a sudden, the holodeck doors open and he walks out, the holodeck guy, the, yeah, Bariardi walks out. And he's like, how's he walking out of the holodeck? He doesn't exist. So the rest of the episode, they're trying to figure out, how did he do this? I mean, how does he go from this digital figure that doesn't exist to actually living in 3D space, right? And then you get all the way to the end where they realize we're still in the holodeck. This entire Enterprise is in a little box in the holodeck.

3:18:15Michael Shermer:I love it. I love it. And then it ends where Barkley, the kind of character officer, he's wondering like, huh, I wonder if this whole, now they're in the real enterprise and it's wrapping up. And he's like, I wonder. And he goes, he kind of looks to the sky and goes, you know, computer and program. And it doesn't end. He's like, we're not living in a matrix because really we could all be in a little box on some, you know, computer programmer's desk. We could. And in almost every religious myth, we are. And so you have to ask, is there any semblance of truth in some of those myths? Do we throw that out entirely?

3:18:54Michael Shermer:Or can myth motivate real truth finding? I think it's I love myth. Myth is important. I think so, too. I love Joseph Campbell's stuff. I love some of Jordan's stuff about this, what they really mean. I discuss this in a book of my chapter on religion that maybe we're misreading some of these religious stories as being real. Maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point is, what's the story about? But but if myth, you know, if it sets this up as like a construct and we're a lower construct, maybe they're right about that. There are cases where myth gets vindicated. In reality, Heinrich von Schleiman went looking for Troy when it was relegated just to Homer's The Iliad.

3:19:30I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.

3:19:33Michael Shermer:That's right. And he found it. Oh my God, this one's real. And he found it. Yeah. So I wonder if they're right about that. The Hindu Maya, the great illusion is a real thing. I'll tell you a funny story. So in my book, Chapter on Religion, I talk about Jonah and the great fish. So the story is, he's living on this one land, and God gives him these instructions. You got to go over and tell these people, the Nineveh people, whatever they're, about whatever the religious message is. He goes, I don't want to do it. I'm not going to do it. So he gets on a ship and he sails away the opposite direction.

3:20:08But the ship flounders and he's about to drown and he gets swallowed by a great fish. And he lives for three days and three nights, very symbolic, in the belly of the fish and takes him all the way over the land, spits him out on the dry land. And he gets out there and goes, all right, God, I'll do it. And he delivers the message to these people. All right. So like hardcore atheists are like, that never happened. How could you live in the belly of a fish? It's like, of course it didn't happen. And it's the story that, you know, he's delivering this message of redemption, starting over, building a new society, forgiveness, this kind of thing.

3:20:41Right. And then most Christians, when I tell what I just told you, they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course that makes sense. And I go, maybe the resurrection didn't literally happen to Jesus. Maybe it's a story about redemption and forgiveness and starting over, creating a heavens on earth. And you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That one has to be true because we're Christians. Like, maybe it's not literally true. It's okay to, mythology has deeper truths that are valuable. But it could also be.

3:21:07Michael Shermer:But it could be, yeah, all right. Yeah, yeah. That's right. The face of Agnum on Troy actually existed. Yeah. Maybe. It's, you know, I don't know. It's so fascinating and we could go on forever. But I think your, the way you think is a very healthy check against probably the way a lot of my audience thinks, probably the way I think. And the great Bertrand Russell once stared up at the stars and he thought he was awestruck by how random the whole thing was. And you can be awestruck by the randomness and that can give you the proper kind of, you know, positioning and, you know, humility in life and sense of wonder.

3:21:46Michael Shermer:And then you can also be awestruck by, you know, an entity, a great creator God. And so I think there are failure modes on both sides. And it's really good to always check your thinking. So I really appreciate you being here. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. And you're welcome. This was a blast. Big fun. Let me know when you find the aliens. It's okay. You'll be the first person I call. Please. Yeah, I'll be the water boy. Jesse, Avi says we got it. I'll be on the next plane. all right all right thank you all right cool

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