'What They Didn't Want Me To Release' Trump Set To Publish Aliens and UFOs Files

19:20Jesse Michels:Pleasure to meet you. Thanks for covering this.

19:23Piers Morgan:Well, here to debate whether aliens really are amongst us is Dr Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine and author of the new book Truth, What It Is, How to Find It, Why It Still Matters, and the renowned UFO investigator, journalist Jesse Michaels. Welcome to both of you. So, Dr Michael Shermer, welcome to Uncensored. You've said that the vast majority, 95 per cent, of supposed UFO sightings can be put down to ordinary terrestrial explanations. Balloons, camera lens effects, visual illusions, or extraordinary terrestrial explanations. Russian or Chinese spy planes or drones capable of feats of physics and aerodynamics unheard of in the US.

20:10Piers Morgan:And you further said, I think it's highly likely that aliens are out there somewhere in the cosmos. In a galaxy of 100 billion stars, there will be 100 billion sun-like stars, a billion Earth-like planets, a hundred million planets with life, ten million planets with intelligent life, and a million planets with intelligent life capable of radio technology, which is kind of mind-boggling. But putting those two things together, I guess my first obvious question to you is, all right, you've covered 95 % of the sightings. Is it possible that the remaining 5 % are genuinely, you know this uh million planets was intelligent life sending stuff down to us

20:57Jeremy Corbell:oh yes of course it's entirely possible but is it true the fact that i would like it to be true uh because it would be the greatest discovery in the history of science doesn't make it true so it's unfortunate jeremy corbel doesn't want to hear what the skeptics have to say i've challenged him many times on x he doesn't even acknowledge me i finally got a thousand dollar bet with Avi Loeb that we're not going to find aliens, but Jeremy's, in my opinion, wrapped up in a religious fervor and faith-based. I mean, he mentioned Bob Lazar. Bob Lazar claimed that he graduated from MIT and Caltech. He didn't even attend either one.

21:34Jeremy Corbell:Stan Friedman, the ufologist, was the one who exposed that. So the moment you lie about something obviously checkable, like your degrees, your credentials, then why believe anything else? So anyway, that's just kind of the short answer to that. What you're after there is what Obama clarified after his initial statement was that, I mean, out there somewhere, there probably is intelligent life. And I would agree with that. Most scientists do agree with that. That doesn't mean there is. We haven't found it yet. But, you know, the telescopes we're developing now, we probably will. Eventually, within, I don't know, 50 to 100 years, we'll know for sure.

22:07Jeremy Corbell:But at the moment, we don't know. So all we have is probabilities, but that's a separate question from have they actually come here? So the argument I make in the book is that it's possible, but very, very unlikely. I'd give it less than a 1 % on a Bayesian scale. I think the distances between the stars are so vast. If the Voyager spacecraft, which is all in acid, like 60 ,000 miles an hour, if it were going to the nearest star, which it isn't, it would take 70 ,000 years to get there, which is a long time to sit there with your tray back and your chair back and your tray table down. You know, it's just unlikely that they've come here.

22:42Jeremy Corbell:And I think it's really a religious kind of impulse that there's somebody out there vastly superior to us that knows we're here. And that's religion.

22:53Piers Morgan:Of course, if there were entities that were vastly superior to us, then the time it might take them to get from where they are to us could be massively faster, right? So you're basing your logic about it on how fast we could do something. But I've thought it's highly likely that there are more intelligent beings and people on planets out there. Why wouldn't there be? Why are we the special one? And if they are more intelligent, if they are more sophisticated, then the timescales you're putting on why it seems so implausible actually would be irrelevant because they might be to get here like that well of course pierce i would change my mind in a

23:39Jeremy Corbell:heartbeat if tomorrow marco rubio or pete eggseth or trump himself says we have the aliens here they are and it's covered by abc cbs nbc u cnn fox everybody shows it just like the chinese spy balloon. No one doubts that. No one talks about the credentials of the pilots that shot down the Chinese spy balloon. We don't need any of that because we have the Chinese spy balloon. So I would change my mind tomorrow. I would pay Avi Loeb his thousand bucks and that would be it. But instead, we have yet to get that. And, you know, I've been hearing this since, you know, we started Skeptic Magazine. Here's volume one, number one from 1992.

24:15Jeremy Corbell:I've been hearing that since we started the magazine. Disclosure is coming any day now. And if you want to go back Before that, Carl Sagan in the 1970s was talking about that. You know, where is the evidence? And the answer is always it's classified. You know, we can't show it to you, the men in black, the whistleblowers, the grainy videos, the blurry photographs. Just show it to us. I mean, if we have the aliens, I'll change my mind tomorrow. Just show it to us.

24:44Piers Morgan:Okay, Jesse Michaels, he makes a good point. Let's see it. There are a lot of hypotheses about what believers speculate about alien sightings and what they may be. The top five, I'll just rattle through these and get your view afterwards. One is extraterrestrial hypothesis. It states that UFOs are physical spacecraft or probes piloted by intelligent beings from other planets. The second one is interdimensional hypothesis. This theory suggests that UFOs are not from other planets, but from other dimensions or parallel universes that coexist alongside our own. Then this crypto-terrestrial hypothesis suggests that an advanced non-human civilization might already be living right here on Earth in secret, perhaps deep underwater, underground, or even disguised amongst us.

25:38Piers Morgan:Time-traveller hypothesis. Some researchers purpose that aliens are actually humans from the distant future. Their humanoid appearance is cited as evidence of future evolutionary changes in our own species. And then there's the Earth Zoo Hypothesis. In this scenario, Earth is treated like a nature preserve or a zoo, where we are observed from a distance to allow our society to evolve naturally. So they're the top five hypothesis to try and explain alien sightings and so on. Before we come to what you think of those, you believe aliens exist, one, and do you believe they have visited our planet?

26:22Michael Shermer:I believe non-human intelligence exists. And so that's, I think, why that term is being used more than aliens, which is just one of the hypotheses that you mentioned. I think there's a preponderance, there's an abundance of evidence that should shift the consensus now in the open source world that there is some intelligence between man and, let's say, some ineffable god above us. There's an intelligence above us doing all sorts of crazy things around our nuclear facilities, our energy grids, our weapons installations. And that's been happening for the longest time, since the dawn of the nuclear age in the 40s.

26:59Michael Shermer:um so are you guys getting me by the way i'm i just see myself here yeah we are yes okay great um so i believe that you know we can say without a shadow of a doubt that there is an intelligence beyond uh humans um that are tampering with our nukes that are showing up around facilities and um i think the skeptics always rest on there's no definitive evidence of extraterrestrials which is a cop-out because that's a conclusion, which is a hypothesis as to what we're seeing. But there's so much evidence that we are seeing stuff. Michael Shermer just wrote, actually, a piece in the Washington Post basically saying that all UFOs are chalked up to, number one, space trash, number two, U-2s or SR-71, kind of modern equivalents, recon planes, deep black American programs, or number three, religiosity.

27:52Michael Shermer:And what I would say is explain the thousands of documents that are declassified from American intelligence from 1945 to 1955, before the U-2 was ever even commissioned, and before 1957 when Sputnik, the first satellite, was in space, where you have UFOs discussed widely in intelligence circles, explain the 100 ,000-plus global intelligence documents around UFOs. You have Gaipan, like the equivalent of blue book, the Air Force project from the 50s and 60s in France, basically acknowledging the reality of this stuff. Even if you look at Arab, which is the American version of this, the modern version of this, a third of their cases, 34 % to be exact, are completely unknown and unresolved.

28:45Michael Shermer:So this should be fertile grounds for science and where to look. And so, yeah, jumping to you know, specific explanation like extraterrestrial might be kind of, you know, a little, you know, fast to do that or presumptuous rather. But to answer your question about the different hypotheses, I think none of those are mutually exclusive. So to take to get from Earth to Proxima Centauri b, the closest, you know, habitable planet, that would take 80 ,000 years via chemical combustion. So you would need some sort of space time metric engineering and basically time travel in order to get there. Space and time travel are not mutually exclusive.

29:24Michael Shermer:In fact, they're both needed in order to travel interstellar. And that is a definitive sort of debunk against the Elon argument that we're going to be able to go interstellar with the chemical combustion. It just literally doesn't work with physics. You need new physics. And anytime you have an empirical anomaly that's observed thousands of times and reported at the highest levels from presidents to fighter pilots to civilians, whenever you have an anomaly that's observable repeatedly, and then you have a theoretical model of physics, the anomaly always wins, whether it's black body radiation before the quantum revolution, the orbit of Mercury, which wasn't explained via Newton and is better explained via Einstein, or UFOs.

30:07Michael Shermer:We're going to have a theoretical model that explains UFOs, but saying the anomaly isn't real because of science is just bad mushy brain thinking. When you want your spring break to feel like...

30:19Jesse Michels:And your kid's pool day to feel like... And your hotel bed to feel like... Ooh, and room service to feel like... Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like...

30:34Michael Shermer:Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels?

30:37Jesse Michels:It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton. For this day.

30:48Piers Morgan:Okay. Michael Shermer, I want to show you what Jeremy Corbell put out a couple of weeks ago. These are two videos purportedly captured by US military drones in the Middle East, showing three objects flying in a triangular pattern. We're looking at it again now. I mean, what is your explanation for what we might be seeing there?

31:09Jeremy Corbell:Those are probably drones or just aircraft, you know, flying in formation. I do show in my book, the Kinesi illusion. This is where you put three triangles together like that, and then the brain fills in what the rest of it looks like, as if it's a solid object. It's a very common phenomenon. Many of the UAP sightings are in that triangular formation. I should note, you know, back to the, you know, the previous comments, all of that is possible. I mean, time travel, you know warp speed these kinds of things that we see in science fiction that's entirely possible that you know if if there are aliens they're not going to be just five years ahead of us you know like you hear you know they crashed in roswell in new mexico in 1940s and that's where we got uh silicon chips instead of vacuum tubes something like that they're not going to be just barely ahead of us they will be you know light years ahead of millions of years ahead of us so Yes, they could have that physics and technology, but do they in fact?

32:07Jeremy Corbell:Has that in fact happened? That we do not know. So again, just show me. I hear the stories about Bigfoot. Okay, show me the body. And it's always kind of the videos, like the videos you just showed. It's like you can't quite make out what's going on there. It's grainy. It's blurry. The mind then fills in those gaps, and that's always a problem. So then as for Jesse's comment about the many, many anomalies, Yes, anomalies are important. You know, the perturbation of Mercury's orbit led to Einstein. Okay, if that's in fact the case, then I'm in favor of it. But will that in fact happen? Because what we don't hear are all the missed opportunities that, you know, failed experiments and scientific theories that never panned out.

32:53Jeremy Corbell:You know, so we have a survivorship bias. So you're highlighting the ones that turned out to be true. If the alien thing turns out to be true, you know, okay, this would be great. You know, I would love this to be true, like Carl Sagan back in 1980. I would love it to be true, but is it in fact true? And, you know, it's just so frustrating. I mean, aren't you guys all frustrated? You've been hearing this too for years. Well, the question I would have, the question I'd have,

33:17Piers Morgan:I'll let Jesse respond to that. My quick question for you, I have no idea what the answer is, but do you believe in God? Are you a religious man?

33:25Jeremy Corbell:Oh, no, I'm an atheist. Yeah, well, I'm an agnostic. I don't know, and you don't. I don't know, and you don't either, is my quick take on agnosticism, but no, I don't believe in God, no. And the research on this, by the way, I discuss this in the book, is that people that score high on need of spirituality and awe and wonder, but are low in religiosity, are more likely to believe that aliens are visiting Earth. So that's kind of the part of the thesis of my idea here, that this is kind of a religious impulse. It's a way of telling us, just like the original 1951 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still.

34:00Jeremy Corbell:It's a Christ allegory. You know, Klaatu comes down from on high, delivers the message. He's killed by the authorities. He's put in the tomb. And then Gort the robot pulls him out of the tomb and brings it back to life. He resurrects him. He delivers the message to earthlings about the nuclear weapons. And he ascends to heaven in the spaceship. It's a Christ allegory. It's the oldest story in all of mythology. I think what we're witnessing here is mythology. okay um jesse what's your response to that i think everybody does have religious impulse and i think

34:32Michael Shermer:skepticism is an embodiment of the religious impulse as well anybody who's had a debate with richard dawkins for example would know that he's sort of this you know hyper moralistic hyper christian thinker and so there you go pierce you you've experienced it yourself this no well i had

34:47Piers Morgan:a whole debate with him funny enough i had a whole debate with richard dawkins because i said the reason I believe there must be something superior to us out there, I was raised a Catholic, I believe in God, I said, but notwithstanding that, I said, the reason I believe there's something superior as an entity out there is because nobody with a human brain can explain to me what was there before nothing. So if you subscribe to the Big Bang Theory, okay, fine, I can understand the scientific logic behind it, but what was there before the Big Bang? What is nothing? What's there before nothing? No human can explain any of that to me, right?

35:24They start talking in kind of, you know, scientific gibberish,

35:28Piers Morgan:but they can't actually give me an answer. So therefore, to me, it makes obvious sense. There must be something with a superior brain that can answer questions like that, which must be a more superior entity. That's my logical brain. Let's see if I was Mr Spock on the Starship Enterprise.

35:48Michael Shermer:Well said, Piers. I think to put it differently, I think space and time in physics have scaling problems. And so our cosmological models of the universe, I think, are going to be really dicey. We've never detected black matter or sorry, dark matter. It's just this sort of, you know, mathematical placeholder. Dark energy is not one of the four fundamental forces. It's just this sort of expansionary force in the universe. You know, the Big Bang itself keeps getting the, you know, the dates keep changing. It's very confusing. And so it is the epitome of human hubris to say that we have this perfect understanding of cosmology.

36:26Michael Shermer:And the longer you go back in time and the bigger you go in space, it's like a rocket that's one degree off course that ends up 99 degrees off course as it scales. Or error propagation in computer science where you have one error that continues to propagate. And so if you have anomalies at a small scale, they're just going to sort of metastasize at larger scale. I want to address Michael's point on not having data. I think we have an abundance of data. We have materials in a lab right now held by a Stanford professor who is a microbiologist. He's tenured. He's a Nobel nominee. His name is Gary Nolan.

37:03Michael Shermer:He spun out a nine-figure company. He's as well-respected as it gets. And he has materials in his lab that come from a 1957 crash in Ubatuba, Brazil, on the beach. and they contain silicon with a purity level that he's never seen before and just doesn't occur on Earth, and magnesium with isotope ratios implying some sort of neutron bombardment that also don't pattern match to anything on Earth or asteroids. And he's doing mass spectrometry on these. And so that is real data. You know, there's an astronomer. Go for it, yeah.

37:41Piers Morgan:Jesse, let me ask you the same question I asked Jeremy earlier, which is, why would the government today, with all that is being, you know, everyone's more transparent these days, one of the big problems with distrusting government from the people is because they just got fed up with lack of transparency. So more and more things are being laid out to us, right? Why would a government be so determined, why would any government be so determined, particularly the United States, to suppress information about UFOs if they had it. Why would Obama look so shifty? Slightly answering the question, then backtracking when there's a furore.

38:22Piers Morgan:Trump's now saying he's going to release it all, declassified all. I don't understand why there has to be this massive veil of secrecy. We're all big grown-up people. Why can't we just deal with the fact that there may be some aliens and show us. I mean, to Dr. Sherman's point, which is a good one, just show me, show me.

38:44Michael Shermer:Yeah, no, look, I couldn't agree with you more. I feel the exact same way and I'm extremely frustrated. Obama, to the point that you made earlier with Jeremy, that he is being sort of cheeky, he's literally producing a documentary right now on Betty and Barney Hill, the first alien abductees in 1961 in the US. So clearly he's interested in the topic. And his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and his CIA director, Brennan, are literally in the Age of Disclosure documentary where they tacitly endorse a multi-generational, multi-decade-long UFO crash retrieval and reverse engineering program being hidden behind basically closed doors in U.S.

39:31Michael Shermer:intelligence. And so he definitely knows a lot more than he's letting on there. The reason I think they are being cheeky and they aren't just coming out with this sort of thing is because these crafts seem to fly over our most sensitive defense sites. I'm talking Vandenberg, Malmstrom Nuclear Missile Base, F.E. Warren, all these sites, Savannah's River site all across the U.S. with impunity. So you are essentially admitting that aerial dominance exists, and it's on behalf of something that you don't even fully know. You have these hypotheses as to what they are, but they have complete aerial dominance over you.

40:12Michael Shermer:And God forbid you get one of these things wrong, and one of these incursions are actually China or Russia. That's even more scary. And so the fact that you don't know that this is happening and it's happening over our most sensitive sites, I think explains it all. I also think there might be some very disruptive technology hidden with some of these things that might be very bad for kind of establishment institutions. But I think the first thing really is all you need to know.

40:40Piers Morgan:You know, Dr. Shurmur, at a Davos panel earlier this year, Elon Musk was asked if he thought aliens were amongst us and said, I am one. and people took that to be a joke but having met Elon a couple of times and to see the sheer scale of what he does with his supposedly human brain I kind of think he probably is an alien planet

41:03Jeremy Corbell:he feels like it's from a different planet I think he is I think it's highly likely he's an alien he has said that you know when he was head of doge that you know he had an all-pass uh you know look at everything that's secret and he never saw aliens and he told Joe Rogan I'll tell you if there's aliens, but I haven't seen anything. Obama says, I haven't seen anything. Clinton said, I hadn't seen anything. All the way back, you know, it's again, just show us. Now, you know, Sean Kirkpatrick, who was head of the government UAP program for two years, when he quit, he said, you know, I looked everywhere I could and found nothing.

41:38Jeremy Corbell:So here's what I predict will happen. I think Trump will come out and say, all right, put Pete Hegseth and Marco on charge of this. We all looked into it. We didn't find anything. So what you'll have is the other hypotheses that you put forth. Oh, it's an interdimensional being. They're invisible. They're non-detectable. We don't know that they're there, or it's a deep, deep, deep state secret that even the president, secretary of war, secretary of state doesn't know about. All right. All these things are possible, but very, very unlikely. I just think it's a phenomenon that's not going to go away like a religion.

42:12Jeremy Corbell:and if you would allow me, Pierce, to address the why there's something rather than nothing question, because I have a chapter in the book. I think it's one of these known unknowables. I think it's like Stephen Hawking said, asking what's north of the North Pole? You can't get there. We hit epistemological foundation, bedrock. There's no more where to go. And your answer, well, God did it, is not a very good explanation, because it doesn't tell us how God did it. What's your answer?

42:37Piers Morgan:What was there before nothing? What was there before nothing?

42:40Jeremy Corbell:What do you mean by nothing? Because no thing means there's not a thing, but there's not even that. So Hawking's explanation, some of the other cosmologists I talked to, tell me that it all began, time began with the Big Bang. There was nothing before it. So what was there before the Big Bang? What was there before the Big Bang? Maybe another universe, and you have a multiverse. You have multiple explosives.

43:05Piers Morgan:So just to be clear, hang on. Hang on. So time did not begin with the Big Bang. You just disproved their theory immediately.

43:13Jeremy Corbell:Our time. But there could have been previous times. Yes, this is a cyclical. So there are rival times. We don't know this is true. The point is,

43:23Piers Morgan:your brain and my brain and Jesse's brain cannot actually answer those questions. Nobody, no human brain can. Elon Musk can't answer it. And he has the biggest brain I've ever seen in my life. But God is not a good explanation.

43:40Jeremy Corbell:How did God do it?

43:41Piers Morgan:Well, you know what? It's as good as any other. It's as good as any other I've heard.

43:45Jeremy Corbell:So it could just be, I don't know, and you don't either, and full stop. And then you make the leap of faith, and I don't. There's really no difference. It's a different kind of truth. I'm claiming it's not a scientific truth. Yeah.

43:58Piers Morgan:That's true. I think that's right. Well, polymarket, the money in the polymarket market is currently saying there's a 14 % chance that aliens exist and that the US will confirm it before 2027. Would you take those odds, Jesse? Well, oh, Jesse, sorry.

44:20Michael Shermer:I don't know if I would take those odds. I think this is going to be a jagged process from here. So I think it's like, you know, like the Epstein stuff. There's going to be some smoke. The smoke is going to build. I think more is going to come out in this sort of staggered process. I think you're going to have this sort of push. I do think the Trump thing is kind of the line in the sand where a president has never gone that far as to sort of implicitly acknowledge this stuff and say that Obama is revealing classified information, basically implying that, you know, aliens existing underground at Area 51 is possibly classified.

44:55Michael Shermer:So I do think that's going to galvanize sort of, you know, people searching for truth here so much that I do think things start to come out as to kind of the timeline. I think it's tough. It does feel like things are accelerating with the advent of LLMs and AI. People can make connections here, I think, much faster. And so I'm very excited. I would go long, you know, that polymark. In 2023, I made a bet with Mick West for$10 ,000 that the consensus, I think, in 10 years would shift to 80 % plus academia and, you know, elite military and government basically accepting that we are not alone in the universe.

45:33Michael Shermer:And I stand by that. And I think, you know, I wish Polymarket were more liquid then because I think that would have gotten really good odds. And I think they've shifted a ton since then.

45:45Piers Morgan:Yeah, I mean, Dr. Shermer, just finally, I mean, you did say that you look forward to the administration being really transparent and sending their people out, revealing all they've got. Of course, we have had that recently, a similar journey with the Epstein files, where they were going to be really transparent. Then they suddenly shut them down and then they got forced into being sort of transparent. It turned out there was a ton of stuff in there. So if we use the Epstein files as the parallel, maybe in a year's time we'll have gone through a similar process and there'll be six million documents of your evidence for you.

46:18Jeremy Corbell:I would welcome it, you know, and I'm with you. Like, why would anyone want to keep this a secret? NASA itself would go straight to Congress and go, oh, my God, we discovered aliens. We need to double our budget. Right. I mean, every scientific institution would go, hey, we need more funding for this. You know, far from keeping it a secret. And there's a lot of polls on religious people. Would you be bothered if we discovered extraterrestrial intelligence out there somewhere or that they came here? And the answer overwhelmingly is no, not at all. God could do whatever he wants. You know, it's a big universe.

46:47Jeremy Corbell:Nothing wrong with it that there's elsewhere out there.

46:52Piers Morgan:You know what? It's a fascinating debate. A bit like when I debated with Richard Hawkins. In the end, we may never get answers, but it would be great fun if Richard Hawkins suddenly got visited by God. and it would be great fun if you, Dr. Shermer, suddenly got a knock on the door from an ET-like alien. And I'd love to be there for when it happens. Well, I'm looking forward to it. I'm waiting for it. And if those two things could happen live and uncensored, I'd be a happy boy. Guys, thank you very much. All right, we'll come on your show. Thanks so much. Thanks, Piers.

47:24Jeremy Corbell:You're welcome. Thank you, Michael. Piers, all the best. Thank you. Bye, Jesse.

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