Speaker 1: For the first time in more than fifty years, Congress
Speaker 1: is pointing its attention toward uf foes. That's right, floating
Speaker 1: green triangles, and a sphere like object flying past a
Speaker 1: fighter jet. These are just a few of the photos
Speaker 1: and videos shown today on Capitol Hill at an unusual
Speaker 1: congressional hearing.
Speaker 2: They're calling them.
Speaker 3: The touchy subject of unexplained aerial phenomena, also known as UAPs,
Speaker 3: has been all over the news lately, in part because
Speaker 3: of reports by military pilots and others who say they've
Speaker 3: encountered objects that they cannot explain. Of course, we used
Speaker 3: to call these unidentified objects UFOs, but that term has
Speaker 3: apparently fallen out of fashion of those connotations with little
Speaker 3: green men. A US Congressional committee put UAPs front and
Speaker 3: center at a hearing in July. It featured Navy pilots
Speaker 3: talking about seeing what they described as aircraft of an
Speaker 3: unknown origin, and members of Congress asking whether the Pentagon
Speaker 3: should ease public concern by disclosing more about these reports.
Speaker 2: How do you know that these were not our aircraft?
Speaker 4: Some of the behaviors that we saw in a working area,
Speaker 4: we would see these objects being at zero point zero mack,
Speaker 4: that's zero air speed over certain pieces of the ground.
Speaker 4: So what that means, Just like a river, if you
Speaker 4: throw a bobber in, it's going to float downstream. These
Speaker 4: objects were staying completely stationary and category four hurricane wins.
Speaker 4: These same objects would then accelerate to supersonic speeds one
Speaker 4: point one to one point two mock. They would do
Speaker 4: so in very erratic and quick behaviors that we don't
Speaker 4: I don't have an explanation for.
Speaker 3: Many of those unexplained phenomena turn out to have simple explanations,
Speaker 3: like weather, balloons or satellites. But the hearing got a
Speaker 3: little weird when it veered into age old claims of
Speaker 3: a government cover up. A former Air Force intelligence officer
Speaker 3: alleged with out evidence that the US has recovered non
Speaker 3: human remains from crashed alien spacecraft and has kept it
Speaker 3: secret for decades.
Speaker 5: Were they I guess human or non human biologics?
Speaker 6: Non human?
Speaker 7: And that was the assessment of people which re acknowledge
Speaker 7: on the program I talk to that are currently still
Speaker 7: on the program.
Speaker 5: And was this documentary Reverence's video photos eyewitness like, how
Speaker 5: would that be determined?
Speaker 7: The specific documentation I would have to talk to you
Speaker 7: a skiff about.
Speaker 3: So why is this all bubbling up now? Is it
Speaker 3: a substantive inquiry or just a summertime Washington diversion. Bloomberg's
Speaker 3: Congress editor Megan Scully and Pentagon reporter Roxanna Tyrone are
Speaker 3: bravely here to help answer that question.
Speaker 8: You have your true believers, those in Congress who have
Speaker 8: said they've seen UFOs or UAPs and who are really
Speaker 8: pushing this, and then you have others who just are curious.
Speaker 9: I think they're acting more from a protect the military
Speaker 9: perspective than from there might be extraterrestrial life out there.
Speaker 3: And later astronomer Seth Shostak tells us how seriously the
Speaker 3: government and the rest of US should take claims of
Speaker 3: possible visitors from other worlds.
Speaker 2: This is just Okham's razor.
Speaker 10: If you have an unknown phenomenon, you can jump to
Speaker 10: the conclusion that it must be alien, or you can
Speaker 10: consider the possibility maybe it's not alien, it's just something
Speaker 10: you've not seen before.
Speaker 3: I'm west Kosova today on the Big Take, Congress puts
Speaker 3: its eyes on the skies, Rexana, what is the difference
Speaker 3: between a UFO and a UAP.
Speaker 9: Everybody knows about UFOs, it's unidentified flying objects. The Pentagon
Speaker 9: is trying to change the understanding of that because military
Speaker 9: aircraft pilots have seen not just flying objects, but things
Speaker 9: that they cannot explain. So the term is changing to
Speaker 9: unidentified aerial phenomena because it could be anything from flying
Speaker 9: objects to flares from satellites.
Speaker 3: Megan, why is Congress looking at this so closely right now?
Speaker 8: Well, it's been really interesting to watch, and in Congress
Speaker 8: that is very divided and where lawmakers can agree on
Speaker 8: very little, this UAP issue seems to be one issue
Speaker 8: that has some bipartisan support. So you have Chuck Schumer
Speaker 8: in the Senate and he's really pushing for requiring the
Speaker 8: federal government to collect and also make public this information.
Speaker 4: UAPs generate a lot of curiosity for many Americans, and
Speaker 4: with that curiosity sometimes comes misinformation.
Speaker 8: You're seeing a similar effort underway in the House. Basically,
Speaker 8: what Congress wants is they want the Defense Department to
Speaker 8: be more forthcoming about the information that they're collecting. Everything
Speaker 8: is heavily classified, and their safety concerns. There's national security concerns.
Speaker 8: I think the Chinese weather balloon, you know, earlier this
Speaker 8: year certainly was kind of a precursor to this broader conversation.
Speaker 11: Congress, of course, has the power of.
Speaker 8: The purse, so there's this push to know what do
Speaker 8: d spending his money on, how it's allocating this, what
Speaker 8: defense contractors might be involved. And they're saying, essentially, you know,
Speaker 8: the public has a right to know.
Speaker 3: And what is it that they think the Pentagon is
Speaker 3: doing that they want to know.
Speaker 8: Well, it depends on who you ask, right, you have
Speaker 8: your true believers, those in Congress who have said they've
Speaker 8: seen UFOs or UAPs and who are really pushing this,
Speaker 8: and then you have others who just are curious that
Speaker 8: there's all these unexplained instances, and it's not just military
Speaker 8: pilots who've seen them, it's alsocial pilots. And there's also
Speaker 8: concern that, well, if there's stuff in the air that
Speaker 8: we don't know what it is, it's incumbent upon us
Speaker 8: to know what it is. So our commercial planes aren't
Speaker 8: in a position of danger certainly that our military planes aren't.
Speaker 8: So it's sort of this complex, multifaceted approach.
Speaker 9: The latest report has about a total of five hundred
Speaker 9: and ten of these unexplained events, but they also found
Speaker 9: that more than half of them are exhibiting unremarkable characteristics.
Speaker 2: What does that mean?
Speaker 9: It means they're not something that they're worried about, basically,
Speaker 9: and then.
Speaker 3: They un explain them, but they don't seem so strange
Speaker 3: that they're alarming exactly.
Speaker 9: And then the other ones are you know, twenty six
Speaker 9: of them were drones, one hundred and sixty three of
Speaker 9: them were balloons or balloon like entities, and then another
Speaker 9: six were clutter.
Speaker 3: So we have these unremarkable events. Have there been remarkable ones?
Speaker 9: One that is in particular that's always being brought up.
Speaker 9: It's called the gimbal. It was observed by a fighter
Speaker 9: jet that flew off the USOS Roosevelt in Florida, and
Speaker 9: it's so far the most unexplained. It just flew by
Speaker 9: the plane and it sort of looks like a tic tac,
Speaker 9: and it's being brought up as an example of these UAPs.
Speaker 12: There's a whole fleet of a book on the afa,
Speaker 12: My God, Oh, going again for the wind, they win
Speaker 12: the hunting and playing out to the west, Oh bade.
Speaker 3: Megan. Earlier this summer, there were some pretty splashy congressional
Speaker 3: hearings where these questions were front and center, and people
Speaker 3: came to testify what happened at those hearings.
Speaker 8: So the first one was before the House Oversight Committee.
Speaker 8: This committee has been torn apart over the last several
Speaker 8: months by investigations into Hunter Biden, the President's son, by
Speaker 8: investigations into the cause of the COVID pandemic, and it
Speaker 8: has been really polarized politically. But you had this UAP
Speaker 8: hearing and the members on both sides of the aisle
Speaker 8: came together. You know, you had Jamie Raskin and James Comer,
Speaker 8: who were on very different sides of the political spectrum,
Speaker 8: singing from the same hymn book.
Speaker 3: Megan, Whenever we're talking about this, it seems like there's
Speaker 3: two different things that we're really looking at. One is
Speaker 3: the possibility of some sort of object that you know,
Speaker 3: maybe a debris or a weather balloon or maybe even
Speaker 3: something that another country has flying in our airspace. And
Speaker 3: then there's this whole question of alien life visiting the US,
Speaker 3: and they tend to get all lumped in together. How
Speaker 3: do you distinguish between those two things when the government
Speaker 3: is really looking at this, how much of this is Oh,
Speaker 3: the government is looking for extraterrest in your life or no.
Speaker 3: The government is just trying to make sure that there
Speaker 3: aren't things in our airspace that we can identify.
Speaker 8: At least two of the witnesses were fighter pilots and
Speaker 8: another was an intelligence officer who worked for the Pentagon
Speaker 8: TA for so you know, they came in with some
Speaker 8: legitimate credentials, and what these fighter pilots were saying was
Speaker 8: that what they witnessed was something that they had never
Speaker 8: seen before.
Speaker 4: My name is Ryan Fobbs Graves, and I'm a form
Speaker 4: fateen pilot with a decade of service in the US Navy,
Speaker 4: including two deployments in Operation and Enduring Freedom in Operation
Speaker 4: Inherent Resolve. I have experience advanced UAP firsthand, and I'm
Speaker 4: here to voice the concerns of more than thirty commercial
Speaker 4: aircrew and military veterans who have confided their similar encounters
Speaker 4: with me as we convene here. UAP are in our airspace,
Speaker 4: but they are grossly underreported. These sightings are not rare
Speaker 4: or isolated. They are routine. Military aircrew and commercial pilots.
Speaker 4: Trained observers whose lives depend on accurate identification are frequently
Speaker 4: witnessing these phenomena.
Speaker 8: There were also asked questions about, you know, did you
Speaker 8: see any seams on these objects? And they said no,
Speaker 8: sort of the basics of you know, could this be
Speaker 8: an aircraft that was built by China or Russia or
Speaker 8: some actor somewhere, And by and large they said, you know,
Speaker 8: this was unlike anything that we have ever seen. They
Speaker 8: had three witnesses to former F eighteen pilots and a
Speaker 8: former intelligence officer who had worked for this Pentagon task force,
Speaker 8: and he was sort of the primary whistleblower here, the
Speaker 8: one who went public with what he had heard. He
Speaker 8: himself did not witness any of this phenomena, but he
Speaker 8: came forward earlier this summer with information that he had
Speaker 8: and filed a whistle blow or complaint, most of which
Speaker 8: is classified and we don't know the details of which
Speaker 8: he made clear repeatedly throughout the hearing.
Speaker 11: The basis of his complaint is fairly mundane.
Speaker 8: It's not about seeing little green men or even these
Speaker 8: unexplained phenomena. His complaint is essentially based on government spending,
Speaker 8: and Congress does not like it when the Defense Department
Speaker 8: or any other federal agency spends money without them knowing
Speaker 8: about it. What this intelligence officer, David Gresh said, and
Speaker 8: what I think perked many members ears up, was misappropriation
Speaker 8: of funds.
Speaker 13: I mean, I don't want to cut you off, but
Speaker 13: how does a program like that get funded?
Speaker 7: I will give you generalities, I can get very specific
Speaker 7: in a closed session, but a misappropriation of funds.
Speaker 13: And does that mean fund Does that mean that there
Speaker 13: is money in the budget that is set to go
Speaker 13: to a program but it doesn't and it goes to
Speaker 13: something else?
Speaker 6: Yes, I have specific knowledge of that. Yep.
Speaker 13: Do you think US corporations are overcharging for certain tech
Speaker 13: they're selling to the US government and that additional money
Speaker 13: is going to programs?
Speaker 6: Correct? Through something called I read.
Speaker 3: What did this program supposedly do?
Speaker 9: He was hinting at the fact that they're trying to
Speaker 9: basically reconstruct the technologies that they're in possession of, and
Speaker 9: also that they're in possession of non human remains.
Speaker 5: You've said that the government is in possession of potentially
Speaker 5: non human spacecraft. Based on your experience and extensive conversations
Speaker 5: with experts, do you believe our government has made contact
Speaker 5: with intelligent extraterrestrials?
Speaker 6: Something I can't discuss in public.
Speaker 5: Setting if you believe we have crashed craft stated earlier,
Speaker 5: do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted
Speaker 5: this craft?
Speaker 7: As I've stated publicly already in my News Nation interview,
Speaker 7: biologics came with some of these recoveries.
Speaker 5: Yeah, were they, I guess human or non human? Biologics?
Speaker 6: Non human?
Speaker 7: And that was the assessment of people which re acknowledge
Speaker 7: on the program I talked to that are currently still
Speaker 7: on the program.
Speaker 3: Did he present any evidence of this?
Speaker 9: He couldn't because it's all classified, and he was very
Speaker 9: clear about it.
Speaker 3: Megan, how do the members of the committee receive this testimony,
Speaker 3: especially some of the allegations about the US and extraterrestrial life.
Speaker 8: They listened very intently. Given that the three officials test
Speaker 8: fine before them were former military that certainly lent some
Speaker 8: credence to what they were saying. But nobody really brushed
Speaker 8: aside these allegations. They were taken remarkably seriously. And the panel,
Speaker 8: which is a very partisan panel, this was probably, I
Speaker 8: would say, of all the hearings that I have watched
Speaker 8: this year by this committee, probably the one with the
Speaker 8: most bipartisanship.
Speaker 3: Why do you think that they were able to come
Speaker 3: together on this.
Speaker 11: I think because they're genuinely curious.
Speaker 8: There's enough of these incidences, whether they believe that it
Speaker 8: is an alien form or whether they believe it is
Speaker 8: a potential you know, enemy aircraft, there's enough interest in
Speaker 8: it and enough mystery there that I think that members
Speaker 8: came with an open mind and actually some good questions.
Speaker 3: Roxanna, What is the Pentagon said about all of this?
Speaker 3: Obviously these would be some pretty serious charges if the
Speaker 3: Pentagon was spending money without telling anybody.
Speaker 9: The Pentagon basically sort of brushed aside the allegations and said,
Speaker 9: you know, we are not aware of any of these
Speaker 9: you know, non human technology or remains. And the Pentagon
Speaker 9: really does operate on this mantra it is a national
Speaker 9: security issue because it could be various things that could
Speaker 9: harm the US military and its operations or impede their operations,
Speaker 9: and so I think they're acting more from a protect
Speaker 9: the military perspective than from like, you know, there might
Speaker 9: be extraterrestrial life out there.
Speaker 8: And then members of the committee have also said they've
Speaker 8: been denied information from the Pentagon, that they had requested information,
Speaker 8: and that the Pentagon rejected their requests. So while some
Speaker 8: members of Congress might have more details, maybe members of
Speaker 8: the Intelligence Committee. Members of this particular committee were saying
Speaker 8: that they weren't getting the information that they demanded.
Speaker 3: After the break. Where does the government's inquiry go from here? Roxanne?
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty two, the Department of Defense created this
Speaker 3: thing called the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, very pentagon
Speaker 3: sounding office. It's supposed to investigate and keep records of sightings.
Speaker 2: What exactly is.
Speaker 9: This so, actually this office was renamed by the Pentagon,
Speaker 9: but it was created by Congress in Defense legislation because
Speaker 9: they wanted to know more and they wanted to have
Speaker 9: a centralized agency at the Pentagon dealing with these issues.
Speaker 9: This office is basically tasked to work with other federal agencies,
Speaker 9: including NASA, to review these UAPs and to then file
Speaker 9: reports and talk to Congress about what they found. But
Speaker 9: they're sort of the central office for these.
Speaker 3: Events, Megan, what are the next steps from Congress and
Speaker 3: asking for clarity for answers from the Pentagon on this question.
Speaker 8: There's this amendment from Senator Schumer that's attached to the
Speaker 8: National Defense Authorization Bill, this must pass piece of legislation
Speaker 8: that's been enacted for more than six decades now, and
Speaker 8: it's in the Senate version of the bill, and it
Speaker 8: would essentially ramp up oversight of this area. It would
Speaker 8: require the Defense Department to make information public. It would
Speaker 8: also give Congress more ability to see what it exactly
Speaker 8: it is that the Pentagon is doing. That is in
Speaker 8: the Senate version of the bill, it's not in the
Speaker 8: House version. So the two chambers need to negotiate differences
Speaker 8: in the measure before they come to a final The House.
Speaker 9: Measure has a sort of similar provision also an oversight
Speaker 9: provision by the Tennessee Republican by Timbership as well. It's
Speaker 9: not the same as Senator Schumer's, but in sort of
Speaker 9: a similar vein. But they would have to sort of
Speaker 9: melt the two versions together.
Speaker 3: And if that passed, and say Joe Biden signed it,
Speaker 3: what would be different from now.
Speaker 8: The Pentagon would be required to declassify some of this
Speaker 8: information to make it public. So what you've seen essentially
Speaker 8: is many of these incidences get witnessed and then it
Speaker 8: isn't until years later that the public becomes aware, whether
Speaker 8: it be through a whistleblower or from a story in
Speaker 8: the media. So this would essentially force the Pentagon's hand,
Speaker 8: but we would be seeing more and more information about
Speaker 8: these unidentified aerial phenomena.
Speaker 3: Did anyone express any kind of skepticism on the committee
Speaker 3: about these kinds of questions.
Speaker 11: No, and I was somewhat surprised by that.
Speaker 8: I think that those who maybe skeptics took a route
Speaker 8: of asking about this missile appropriation of funds. And we're
Speaker 8: more procedural in nature as opposed to talking about what
Speaker 8: these objects might be, because remember, these are members of Congress,
Speaker 8: and they don't want to isolate voters in their district
Speaker 8: who may be true believers in UAPs.
Speaker 9: It's going to be a long process because they've just
Speaker 9: not talked about this for years. Like so the first
Speaker 9: hearing on NEUFOS was in the sixties, and then the
Speaker 9: next hearing was last year. I mean, it took forty
Speaker 9: years to talk about this in Congress an open session.
Speaker 9: So I think it's just like a very slow moving
Speaker 9: train here.
Speaker 3: Megan Roxanna, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 11: Thanks, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 9: Thanks for having us.
Speaker 3: It's novel for Congress to take out the question of
Speaker 3: extraterrestrial life, but other organizations have been on the lookout
Speaker 3: for years, like the SETI Institute. SETI stands for the
Speaker 3: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It's a nonprofit research organization that's
Speaker 3: been around since the nineteen eighties. I asked, said he's
Speaker 3: senior astronomer Seth Shostak, what he needed of the hearings.
Speaker 10: Of course, the most I should say remarkable thing about
Speaker 10: the hearings from me was when this former intelligence officer,
Speaker 10: David Grush, claimed that the government had teams of experts
Speaker 10: who routinely went out into the field to recover crashed
Speaker 10: alien spacecraft and occasionally crashed aliens.
Speaker 2: That struck me.
Speaker 3: What did you think of that testimony as somebody who
Speaker 3: studies this all the time, did you find that intriguing
Speaker 3: or did you meet it with a certain amount of skepticism?
Speaker 2: A lot of skepticism.
Speaker 10: Actually, it's sort of like my next door neighbor claiming
Speaker 10: that he's had ghosts living in his attic for the
Speaker 10: last twenty years. I mean, you know, it would be
Speaker 10: important if true.
Speaker 3: What was it about his testimony that struck you as implausible?
Speaker 10: He didn't say anything that was impossible. Nothing he said
Speaker 10: would violate physics, But he didn't offer any any evidence
Speaker 10: to back that up. You just saying it. So regarding
Speaker 10: him as an authority, people who like to think the
Speaker 10: aliens are here would say, see, that's proof.
Speaker 3: And that was just one part of the hearing. It
Speaker 3: certainly was the splashiest, But there was an entirely different
Speaker 3: line of questioning, and that was around pilots who have
Speaker 3: seen things while they were flying that they just can't explain.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't doubt them.
Speaker 10: I don't think that the pilots are deliberately fabricating anything.
Speaker 10: I think that they're you know, telling it like it is.
Speaker 10: So they see something in the sky and they don't
Speaker 10: understand it. Well, there are things in the sky that
Speaker 10: maybe they wouldn't understand, right, And there's a whole laundry
Speaker 10: list of things that you know are up in our
Speaker 10: airspace that have nothing to do with aliens, but you know,
Speaker 10: they might not be instantly recognizable, even aircraft at a
Speaker 10: distance might not be instantly recognizable.
Speaker 3: Well, there had been any number of these things that
Speaker 3: the Pentagon was eventually able to identify what they were,
Speaker 3: but quite a few of them where they still haven't.
Speaker 3: And I think people's minds immediately go to alien spacecraft
Speaker 3: or something from outer space. Is that where your mind
Speaker 3: immediately goes No.
Speaker 10: That's about the last thing I would consider, because this
Speaker 10: is just Okham's razor. If you have an unknown phenomenon,
Speaker 10: you can jump to the conclusion that it must be alien,
Speaker 10: or you can consider the possibility maybe it's not alien,
Speaker 10: it's just something you've not seen before.
Speaker 3: What are some of the things that you would think
Speaker 3: would explain things that experts who are looking on this,
Speaker 3: they just can't figure out what they are, especially craft
Speaker 3: that seem to move in ways that defy anything that
Speaker 3: we currently know exists.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that argument is always a little bit suspect in
Speaker 10: my eyes, because they say, oh, this thing was moving
Speaker 10: and accelerating in ways that you know no earthly craft
Speaker 10: could out. Surely if it goes from a parent standstill
Speaker 10: to mock eight in a second or two, you would say, well,
Speaker 10: that's really remarkable. But how do you know that it's
Speaker 10: mock eight? In order to do that, you need to
Speaker 10: know the speed, And in order to know the speed,
Speaker 10: you need to know the distance to these objects, right,
Speaker 10: because otherwise, I mean, look, you know, a fly buzzes
Speaker 10: across my face here and it's moving so fast, you know,
Speaker 10: I say, man, that the fly is going it up
Speaker 10: mocked six right, No, it's just very close to me.
Speaker 10: So you do need to know the distance. And they
Speaker 10: don't have any distance estimates that I've ever seen. And
Speaker 10: actually it's quite hard to understand how they would have
Speaker 10: any distance estimates. They just have cameras that are giving
Speaker 10: you imagery of what's in front of you, but they
Speaker 10: don't know how far in front of you.
Speaker 2: It's a crucial bit of information.
Speaker 3: When we come back. What would it take to persuade
Speaker 3: Seth Shostak that extraterrestrials have visited Earth. Another one of
Speaker 3: the questions that came up in this hearing was the
Speaker 3: idea that the Pentagon has a duty to disclose more
Speaker 3: about what they know. This feeling like there's information the
Speaker 3: public doesn't get to see, and even the Senate Majority
Speaker 3: Leader Chuck Schumer has been pressing that the Pentagon should
Speaker 3: tell people more. What do you think of that?
Speaker 10: No, I'm all for that. I mean, more information is
Speaker 10: not going to be dangerous. I mean, if the aliens
Speaker 10: were really some sort of threat, if there were something
Speaker 10: that the Department of Defense would have to worry about
Speaker 10: I think that there would be real investigation into it.
Speaker 10: But I don't notice that United Airlines is canceling any
Speaker 10: flights because it doesn't know what's up in our airspace
Speaker 10: and they would too much liability fly around if there
Speaker 10: are alien craft that haven't filed a flight plan. So
Speaker 10: I think that all speaks to the fact that there
Speaker 10: really isn't terribly much good evidence, if any good evidence
Speaker 10: here for visitation. It's a very appealing idea, and poles
Speaker 10: show that the majority of the American public believe it's happening.
Speaker 2: But you know, as I say, when I look.
Speaker 10: At the activity at Laguardian, I don't see any provision
Speaker 10: being made for the fact that, you know, the skies
Speaker 10: might not be empty, keep them behind that there are
Speaker 10: something like eight thousand satellites in orbit around the Earth
Speaker 10: that are making images all the time of what's below them.
Speaker 10: And they don't need to see these things either. Now
Speaker 10: you can say, oh, yeah, they do, but the government
Speaker 10: just scrubs all that imagery away. But it's not just
Speaker 10: the US government that has these satellites. Many governments have them.
Speaker 10: And it's hard for me to believe in a worldwide
Speaker 10: conspiracy to keep the most important science news of probably
Speaker 10: this century from the public.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of our listeners might be surprised
Speaker 3: to hear the way you're talking about this. You spend
Speaker 3: all your time looking for the possibility of life beyond Earth,
Speaker 3: and yet you seem to be very skeptical of the
Speaker 3: idea that we've already seen it.
Speaker 10: Yeah, well, I think the evidence just doesn't support that
Speaker 10: conclude very straightforward. I mean, if I thought, and I'm
Speaker 10: sure you can ask just about anybody involved in any
Speaker 10: field related to this, if they thought that there was
Speaker 10: even the one percent chance that what's reported to be
Speaker 10: in the sky or you know, photograph with these cameras
Speaker 10: and so had an alien origin, it's spent one hundred
Speaker 10: percent of their time working on it. But they don't
Speaker 10: do that, And I think that that's a real indictment
Speaker 10: of the quality of that evidence.
Speaker 2: You know, it may.
Speaker 10: Puzzle a casual observer, but there's no reason to think
Speaker 10: that it's extraterrestrial.
Speaker 3: What would you consider to be valid evidence that would
Speaker 3: make you think, okay, this is something to look into.
Speaker 10: Well, I mean, it could be evidence, just pictorial evidence
Speaker 10: such as it's been presented. But the evidence that's been
Speaker 10: presented is ambiguous.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 10: If you had, for example, a very simple thing, some
Speaker 10: observatory on the ground, whatever it is is, somebody in
Speaker 10: the backyard with a camera, or you know, something a
Speaker 10: little more classy observed something flying in the sky. Oh,
Speaker 10: lights above Arizona, right, I think, but not just one camera,
Speaker 10: but several cameras observing simultaneously to begin with.
Speaker 2: That would tell you it's not local.
Speaker 10: And knowing the distance between those two observing sites, you know,
Speaker 10: you'll probably figure out how far away these things were
Speaker 10: and consequently how big they were, So that would give
Speaker 10: you some real hard numbers, and that would, I think
Speaker 10: change the nature of our assessment of how important those
Speaker 10: things are.
Speaker 3: In the years that you've spent looking for evidence of
Speaker 3: extraterrestrial life, have you ever seen it?
Speaker 10: If we had, you'd know about it, right, And besides,
Speaker 10: we're not looking to see it, right because the assumption
Speaker 10: is Okay.
Speaker 2: You know, they're on the order of one hundred.
Speaker 10: Billion star systems in the Milky Way galaxy. Most of those,
Speaker 10: almost all of those will have planets. So the idea
Speaker 10: that there's some other societies out there is neither far
Speaker 10: fetched nor implausible. I mean, I think you know, Earth
Speaker 10: developed intelligent life. Other planets could do that too. There's
Speaker 10: no reason to think that Earth would be the only
Speaker 10: place where intelligence would arise. So yeah, the existence of
Speaker 10: aliens is really not what's at stake. The question is
Speaker 10: is there any good evidence that we've found such a society,
Speaker 10: if you will, or the location of such a society,
Speaker 10: or in artifact. I mean, you know, you could imagine
Speaker 10: seeing some giant construction around a nearby star and you'd say, well,
Speaker 10: that doesn't look like something nature made. You could do that,
Speaker 10: So you know, I'm not against to the idea in theory,
Speaker 10: but when it's simply arguing on the basis of videos
Speaker 10: or photographs that can be explained in far more prosaic terms,
Speaker 10: then you've got to say that isn't very good evidence.
Speaker 3: Seth Shustak, thanks so much for talking with me, My pleasure.
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