Speaker 1: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
Speaker 1: CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
Speaker 1: in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2: And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
Speaker 2: and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
Speaker 2: our adversaries.
Speaker 1: Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories large and small.
Speaker 2: Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1: This is mission implausible. Today we have the bad astronomer,
Speaker 1: Phil Plate. He's an award winning astronomer, educator, and science writer.
Speaker 1: He's worked with NASA on the Hubble Space Telescope team,
Speaker 1: and he's written several well received books. So welcome, feel
Speaker 1: glad to have you with us.
Speaker 3: Thank you so nice to be here.
Speaker 1: So, Phil, you do a lot of work on debunking
Speaker 1: common misunderstandings of science and astronomy and educating people on
Speaker 1: why astronomy is so important. Can you give us just
Speaker 1: some sense and background on your work and the kind
Speaker 1: of examples that you talk about.
Speaker 3: Well, these days, mostly I'm doing straight science, just talking
Speaker 3: about all the wonderful things that are happening in the universe.
Speaker 3: Basically in astronomy. I do still occasionally have to dip
Speaker 3: my toe into the debunking pool, and this is something
Speaker 3: I used to do all the time. As a matter
Speaker 3: of fact, I guess I could say I was a
Speaker 3: professional skeptic, a critical thinker. And it all started in
Speaker 3: the nineties when I started seeing just silly ideas about
Speaker 3: astronomy online. And this was when online was not what
Speaker 3: it is today. But I started just debunking these ideas, saying, hey,
Speaker 3: you know that's not how this really works. Why does
Speaker 3: the moon look big on the horizon as opposed overhead?
Speaker 3: And read up on how that works. And in two thousand,
Speaker 3: Fox TV aired a moon landing denial show called Conspiracy Theory?
Speaker 3: Did we land on the Moon? And you know, if
Speaker 3: they'd been honest and just said yes, it would have
Speaker 3: been a very short show.
Speaker 4: It has been estimated that as many as twenty percent
Speaker 4: of Americans believe we never went to the Moon. Is
Speaker 4: it really possible that NASA to see the world. According
Speaker 4: to a former astronaut, it's entirely possible.
Speaker 5: Regarding the Apollo mission, I can't say one ercent for
Speaker 5: sure whether these men walked on the Moon.
Speaker 3: I wrote it up on my website and it became
Speaker 3: really popular. That was my first big sort of viral moment,
Speaker 3: and ever since a UFO's moon landing. When it comes
Speaker 3: to science based conspiracy theories or urban legends and that
Speaker 3: sort of thing, that's when I would come storming in.
Speaker 2: I'm going to start up a discript basy talking about
Speaker 2: espionage astrology, not astronomy and effectiveness. So let's jump back
Speaker 2: on our time machine. And Hitler was a great believer
Speaker 2: in astronomy in the cult and especially Googles, And when
Speaker 2: World War II was just starting, the Nazis, surprisingly enough
Speaker 2: took astrology is a war effort and they banned private
Speaker 2: use of astrology. All had to be done by the
Speaker 2: state as part of the propaganda effort. I was actually
Speaker 2: surprised to find that there's been a long history of
Speaker 2: using astrology and other bogus science for propaganda efforts that
Speaker 2: sometimes have been quite effective, is as real conspiracies and
Speaker 2: real conspiracy theories to actually further a political agita. And
Speaker 2: I was wondering if your sense of like how astrology
Speaker 2: is used to basically they drafting off of real astronomy
Speaker 2: to make political purposes or to to you know, to
Speaker 2: make money things.
Speaker 3: If I knew that, I'd be a million well, I know. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So astrology, I mean, just to be clear, is nonsense.
Speaker 3: There's no aspect of astrology that works. This has been
Speaker 3: tested over and over again, including using tests that astrologers
Speaker 3: themselves have come up with, and then double blind studies
Speaker 3: where they say, here will agree to these rules, and
Speaker 3: then they cast their horoscopes or whatever, and what they
Speaker 3: do is no better than random chance, which is exactly
Speaker 3: what astronomer has been saying. But Nancy Reagan used a
Speaker 3: personal astrologer to schedule, yeah, quickly, that's right, to make
Speaker 3: appointments for Ronald Reagan to meet with people or to
Speaker 3: do things or not do things. And this is all
Speaker 3: silly until it's not silly anymore, which is typical of
Speaker 3: conspiracy theories and scientific nonsense, pseudoscience or anti science, whatever
Speaker 3: you want to call it. With astrology, you've got a
Speaker 3: pretty good head start because, first of all, astrology has
Speaker 3: been around for thousands and thousands of years. The constellations,
Speaker 3: the zodiac, the zodiacal constellations, we base these on the
Speaker 3: Greek constellations. We're already talking about twenty five hundred years
Speaker 3: or so, and most ancient civilizations had their own versions
Speaker 3: of this, the Egyptians and the Babylonians, the Chinese. I
Speaker 3: could just go on and on. So a lot of
Speaker 3: people believe this stuff, and it all kind of boils
Speaker 3: down to people want to remember the hits and forget
Speaker 3: the misses. So you know when they say, my astrologer
Speaker 3: said I was going to to come into money, and
Speaker 3: then I found a twenty dollars bill, and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: how about all the other times they said you'd come
Speaker 3: into money and nothing happened. You forget about those. Plus
Speaker 3: there's a desire to believe, a desire to sort of
Speaker 3: give up your responsibility about certain things and let whatever
Speaker 3: is going on over your head take care of it.
Speaker 3: So you've got a big head start. There's leverage with people. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you've got a pretty good place to put your crowbar
Speaker 3: and pry things open. And we're seeing that now. People
Speaker 3: are believing almost anything they're being told and it's all nonsense.
Speaker 3: But if it's coming from the people you believe and
Speaker 3: the people you have put your trust in, you believe it.
Speaker 2: So the British intelligence services knew that the Germans were
Speaker 2: using astrology to their benefit. And so they hired a
Speaker 2: guy called Lewis DeWitt and they actually established inside British intelligence,
Speaker 2: they established a small division form, but they sent him
Speaker 2: to the US where he made all sorts of predictions
Speaker 2: about the Nazis about to fall. And he met in
Speaker 2: Cleveland with a group of American astrologers and it's sort
Speaker 2: of unclear what really happened, but he either bribed them
Speaker 2: or persuaded them to begin casting rogue British astrological projections
Speaker 2: to help get the US into the war, you know,
Speaker 2: to push you the US to join World War two.
Speaker 3: That is absolutely terrifying and it makes me super uncomfortable
Speaker 3: to know. And we are talking World War two and
Speaker 3: Nazis and all of that. So yeah, sure that had
Speaker 3: to be defeated. But that stuff tends to linger.
Speaker 1: So why do you think there is so much science
Speaker 1: skepticism these days?
Speaker 3: It Waxes and Waynes. In the seventies there was all
Speaker 3: sorts of nonsense, you know, astral projection ESP and all
Speaker 3: that kind of stuff, and that kind of went away,
Speaker 3: and then the moon hoax thing was huge for I
Speaker 3: don't know about a year in two thousand and now
Speaker 3: that's basically gone away. It's still out there, but it's
Speaker 3: not a big deal. But what we're seeing now in
Speaker 3: the past few years is different. And if you want
Speaker 3: a conspiracy theory, I might posit that there has been
Speaker 3: a concerted effort to destroy I can't say anything about
Speaker 3: other countries, but in America, to destroy people's trust in science.
Speaker 3: And this has all come not all, but the vast
Speaker 3: majority is coming from the Republican Party, which is downplaying
Speaker 3: climate change, building up anti vaxxers. You know, anti vaxx
Speaker 3: for a while was kind of a crunchy granola thing.
Speaker 3: There's a whole history of that, and so it was
Speaker 3: a left wing thing, but then it got co opted
Speaker 3: by the right, especially when Gardasil came out, which was
Speaker 3: a vaccine against a type of virus that can give
Speaker 3: you cancer. But there are sexual overtones to that, and
Speaker 3: the right wing took that up in their social case.
Speaker 3: And so now this has spread to everything. And there's
Speaker 3: not any aspect of science, evolution and versus creationism, because
Speaker 3: a lot of these are religious based, and the right
Speaker 3: wing Party of the United States has co opted religion,
Speaker 3: and now the GOP denies everything when it comes to science.
Speaker 1: It's horrifying. So it's anti science, but it's also anti expert,
Speaker 1: anti elite.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's what makes me think is a concerted
Speaker 3: effort because it's coming at all levels. Right, they're attacking universities,
Speaker 3: they're talking about scientists and the elite. That's the perfect
Speaker 3: word of this anti elitism. It's like, oh, you just
Speaker 3: think that because you're part of the elite, and it's like, no,
Speaker 3: I just got an education, and you know, I see
Speaker 3: what's going on, and so I see this all the time.
Speaker 3: People argue with me. I go on. I used to
Speaker 3: go on TikTok and leave comments. People would say I
Speaker 3: saw this light in the sky and I think it's
Speaker 3: UFO and I'd be like, it's Venus. You're looking right
Speaker 3: at Venus and you're looking at the right direction, and
Speaker 3: there it is in this guy. And they're like, no,
Speaker 3: it was doing this and this, and what do you know?
Speaker 3: And it's like, been an astronomer for forty years, I
Speaker 3: think I know when I see Venus, but they don't
Speaker 3: believe me. So it's mind boggling that people would rather
Speaker 3: believe they're in group than think for themselves.
Speaker 2: Is this something innately human? Or is this something that
Speaker 2: you see sort of different now being pushed by political
Speaker 2: forces or certainly the Russians are doing it.
Speaker 3: What's your sort of sense of this As a scientist,
Speaker 3: I'd say it's both. Sometimes there is an innate need
Speaker 3: to find some sort of outside force that is affecting us,
Speaker 3: and certainly human our brains have evolved to seek out patterns,
Speaker 3: and it happens in astronomy all the time. I mean,
Speaker 3: you look at it at four stars in the sky
Speaker 3: and say, yes, that's the Great Hunter or a microscope
Speaker 3: or something like that. And so we have the constellations,
Speaker 3: and we see it when you see faces in clouds.
Speaker 3: And this is another thing I've dealt with a lot
Speaker 3: in astronomy, because we see rock formations on Mars gas
Speaker 3: clouds in space and they look like things we're familiar with.
Speaker 3: They look like faces or whatever. And so that's a
Speaker 3: fun aspect of this. It's when people start believing that
Speaker 3: there's more to it. Coincidences happened. And on the flip side, yeah,
Speaker 3: there are people out there who are absolutely trying to
Speaker 3: manipulate others into believing stuff that is clearly wrong. It's
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty four, you know when you deny the evidence
Speaker 3: of your eyes, and that's what's happening now, and so
Speaker 3: it's easy for evildoers to use that unbrelative to manipulate
Speaker 3: people into denying the evidence that they think might be
Speaker 3: real like science, and believe in something that's incredibly wrong,
Speaker 3: like ivermectin, Cure's COVID or anything that comes up that
Speaker 3: we've seen in the past few years. In the height
Speaker 3: of COVID, I was living in Colorado and I had
Speaker 3: a couple of horses and some goats, and I was
Speaker 3: always worried that I was going to go to my
Speaker 3: local feed store and they weren't going to have it
Speaker 3: when I needed it, And I thought, this is it
Speaker 3: seems that seems silly. But again there's an undercurrent of
Speaker 3: serious trouble here when anti vaxxers are telling people not
Speaker 3: to get the COVID shot, to not worry about polio
Speaker 3: and whooping cough and measles and these horrific diseases, and
Speaker 3: it's people say how common is this and they're like, gommin,
Speaker 3: because we have vaccine for them. Why do you think
Speaker 3: this is? Oh?
Speaker 1: So, I think bad actors, either for money or for
Speaker 1: political purpose, often try to use fear. Fear works obviously,
Speaker 1: but I'm wondering what should we worry about. And I
Speaker 1: know you've looked at asteroids and things like that. What
Speaker 1: things in science are things that we actually should be
Speaker 1: paying more attention to.
Speaker 3: Well, in the medical field, I think that's all pretty clear.
Speaker 3: In astronomy about yeah, yeah, well, there's there's lots to
Speaker 3: worry about. When it comes to astronomy. There are a
Speaker 3: handful of things to be concerned about. I say, being
Speaker 3: concerned means maybe we should pay attention to this versus
Speaker 3: worrying like this is going to happen and an asteroid impact,
Speaker 3: for example, we don't need a gigantic dinosaur killer asteroid
Speaker 3: impact to wipe us out. There are and only be
Speaker 3: worried about that. That is, that's a once in a
Speaker 3: fifty million year event, so that's probably not going to happen.
Speaker 3: And plus those giant asteroids, we know where almost all
Speaker 3: of them are, so I'm not too worried about that.
Speaker 3: The other side, on the other side of this, twenty thirteen,
Speaker 3: over Russia, there was a nineteen meter asteroids something in
Speaker 3: the size of a big house came screaming in and
Speaker 3: exploded twenty thirty miles up in the atmosphere and caused
Speaker 3: a lot of damage on the ground. And if that
Speaker 3: thing had been moving faster, had been bigger, maybe made
Speaker 3: of metal instead of crumbly rock, it would have done
Speaker 3: a huge amount of damage. And those sorts of impacts
Speaker 3: happen every couple of decades.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: Luckily, the Earth is very large, seventy something percent of
Speaker 3: it is water. What's not water is typically uninhabited. Antarctica
Speaker 3: is a big empty space, so there's a surface area
Speaker 3: of the Earth where these things can come in and
Speaker 3: not do any damage. On the other hand, chel Yabinsk
Speaker 3: was a city of is a city of a million
Speaker 3: people or more, and this thing shattered windows and caused
Speaker 3: over a thousand injuries. So that happens, how often is
Speaker 3: not too And the small ones we can't really do
Speaker 3: anything about. But the bigger ones that are coming in
Speaker 3: at the size of a football stadium, and those can
Speaker 3: do much more damage over a region as opposed to
Speaker 3: a locality, And those are the kind of things that
Speaker 3: we're looking at more carefully and saying, what can we
Speaker 3: do about that? Smash it with a rocket. We've done this.
Speaker 3: The dart mission not too long ago, slammed a spacecraft
Speaker 3: into an asteroid and moved it. It worked, worked really
Speaker 3: well actually, so if there's something in one hundred meter
Speaker 3: side scale, we can probably prevent that from hitting the Earth.
Speaker 1: Which is when you say we give us a little more.
Speaker 1: I never I don't know about that. Who's we? Was
Speaker 1: it humans and humans?
Speaker 3: The Dart mission, the Double Asteroid Redirect t Test so
Speaker 3: many acronyms, was a NASA mission that basically approached an
Speaker 3: asteroid and hit it really hard. It was actually the
Speaker 3: moon of a small asteroid and changed its orbit, changed
Speaker 3: the orbital period by quite a bit. And the European
Speaker 3: Space Agency is doing a follow up mission called Hero
Speaker 3: which is launching soon, and we'll go there and make
Speaker 3: close up measurements and really see what happened. There are
Speaker 3: a lot of space agencies now India has one China,
Speaker 3: and it's possible that we can get together and if
Speaker 3: there's something big enough, we can all do something about it.
Speaker 3: Or one country just takes the reins and says we're
Speaker 3: going to do this. That is fraught with international issues
Speaker 3: because okay, here's an asteroid coming in. It's going to
Speaker 3: hit the US. So NASA's going to launch a rocket,
Speaker 3: we hit it, we change its trajectory, and we find out, oh,
Speaker 3: now it's going to land in China. Oh that's a problem.
Speaker 3: So given the time skills here, this is something I
Speaker 3: think about. This is something I'm concerned about, but not
Speaker 3: something I lie awake in the middle of the night
Speaker 3: sweating about. This is something that we're getting better at
Speaker 3: detecting them and better at figuring out what to do
Speaker 3: about them.
Speaker 1: All right, let's take a break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: So Phil, let's talk maybe just a little bit about
Speaker 2: satellite there. I'm assuming they have overt missions, but they
Speaker 2: may have covert missions. And I've read about something called
Speaker 2: the Kessler syndrome or the Kessler effect where killer satellite
Speaker 2: which sort of I guess put badly hit shrapnel in it,
Speaker 2: which destroys other satellites, that creates more shrampnel, that destroys
Speaker 2: our ability to operate in low Earth orbit, which means
Speaker 2: we go back to like manual tie writers and VCRs
Speaker 2: and things like that. So what's your sense now, the
Speaker 2: space race and an espionage and national rivalries with using
Speaker 2: satellite technology or modern technology to impact how we all
Speaker 2: live today.
Speaker 3: The Kessler syndrome is a real thing, and the idea
Speaker 3: being that, sure, you could have an anti satellite, which
Speaker 3: is basically an explosive device in space, and you pull
Speaker 3: up your satellite next to your enemy's military saturate or
Speaker 3: something blow years up and the shrapnel will shred their satellite.
Speaker 3: The problem is, satellites are orbiting the Earth at eight
Speaker 3: kilometers a second five five miles per second, which is
Speaker 3: very fast, twenty thousand miles an hour, and they're moving
Speaker 3: in a certain direction, typically roughly west east, the same
Speaker 3: direction to the Earth spins, but not always. There are
Speaker 3: some in polar satellites that go north south. But now
Speaker 3: you've got this expanding cloud of debris, thousands of small
Speaker 3: parts and it doesn't matter how big they are iffle
Speaker 3: like a paint moving at twenty thousand miles an hour,
Speaker 3: Slamming into your satellite could destroy it. Huge energy is
Speaker 3: involved here. A bullet is small, but it's moving really fast.
Speaker 3: That's why it's doing so much damage. If you have
Speaker 3: a thousand pieces a cloud of this debris which is
Speaker 3: now miles across and screaming around in lower th orbit
Speaker 3: at that speed, the odds of one satellite hitting another
Speaker 3: satellite are very low that it's only happened a few times.
Speaker 3: The odds of this cloud of debrisating something are much
Speaker 3: much larger, and when they do, they create another cloud
Speaker 3: of debris, which then increases the odds and what you
Speaker 3: get as a runaway effect a cascade. That's what the
Speaker 3: Kessler syndrome is. The movie Gravity with Sandra Bullock and
Speaker 3: George Clooney, was based on this idea. The basic idea
Speaker 3: of that movie was the premise was correct. But yeah,
Speaker 3: this is a very big concern. If we had as
Speaker 3: many satellites as we did twenty years ago in space,
Speaker 3: that would be one thing, a few thousand or even
Speaker 3: ten thousand. But right now SpaceX is launching thousands of
Speaker 3: Starlink satellites. Then their plan is to launch tens of thousands.
Speaker 3: There are other what they call mega constellations of satellites
Speaker 3: that are being planned, and these things they can fail
Speaker 3: and they can hit other satellites. The more you have
Speaker 3: up there, the more likely acclision is. Now there's plans
Speaker 3: to diorbit these things. If they start to go wrong,
Speaker 3: they just bring them down, let them burn up. Tens
Speaker 3: of thousands of satellites it's just you have that many
Speaker 3: the chances of a collision go up and up, and so, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is a concern.
Speaker 1: It wasn't there reason reporting that the Russians were looking
Speaker 1: at possibly nuclear explosions in space. You could conceivably use
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons in space. It doesn't necessarily kill people right away,
Speaker 1: but it creates these kind of problems.
Speaker 3: We've done this. Starfish Prime was a hydrogen bomb that
Speaker 3: was blown up over the Pacific Ocean in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty four i think, and it was done to test, Hey,
Speaker 3: what happens when you do this? And it turns out
Speaker 3: that you get a tremendous blast of high energy particles
Speaker 3: electrons and gamma rays and things like that that interact
Speaker 3: with Earth's atmosphere and cause an electromagnetic pulse. And this
Speaker 3: is the kind of thing where you hear about this
Speaker 3: in science fiction all the time. Oh, it's an EMP
Speaker 3: and it blows out our computers. And it turns out, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's what these things do. You have a tremendous pulse
Speaker 3: of energy, it passes through your satellite and it creates
Speaker 3: electric charges inside the satellite that can fry the circuits.
Speaker 3: And this is a decent concern. A good solar storm
Speaker 3: can do this, which is something a lot of solar
Speaker 3: astronomers and engineers are concerned about. The sun blasts off
Speaker 3: these big storms. It's a sensely like detonating a hydrogen
Speaker 3: bomb in space, very similar. So yeah, you can do that.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't recommend it. First of all, it's against international law.
Speaker 3: We've signed the Outer Space Treaty so as Russia, I believe,
Speaker 3: and that makes it illegal to detonate those things in space.
Speaker 3: On the other hand, what are you going to do
Speaker 3: about it? Somebody blows up a nuke. The repercussions are awful.
Speaker 3: You could blow out a lot of satellites. Military satellites
Speaker 3: are hardened typically against such things. But what do you
Speaker 3: do if Russia decides to do that or a rogue
Speaker 3: president of the United States says I'm going to bomb Greenland?
Speaker 3: How do you stop them?
Speaker 2: Okay, Phil, we have to talk about UFOs at least
Speaker 2: a little bit. What is your take on the recent
Speaker 2: space of sightings of aerial phenomenon or perceived sightings going
Speaker 2: on around in Jersey and let's pretend they're real. What
Speaker 2: would we actually see? Scientists and how could we prove
Speaker 2: it or verify that there's stuff up there that isn't
Speaker 2: just drones through airpor.
Speaker 3: My overwhelming take on this is frustration to see the
Speaker 3: stuff that's been going on for decade and it's just
Speaker 3: the same stuff over and over again, and you cannot
Speaker 3: debunk it is whack a mole. All this new stuff
Speaker 3: is not new. The only thing new about it is
Speaker 3: that these are we're seeing lights in the sky and
Speaker 3: it's probably drones. And I remember thinking when drones started
Speaker 3: to become popular a few years ago, I thought I
Speaker 3: would hate to be a UFO researcher now because this
Speaker 3: is going to destroy anything you can do. It is
Speaker 3: like trying to build an astronomical observatory in the middle
Speaker 3: of a football stadium with all the lights around you.
Speaker 3: There's just going to be so many things up in
Speaker 3: the sky now. And watching these videos, you know, everybody's
Speaker 3: taking their videos and posting them online. And I'm looking
Speaker 3: at that and going, that's Venus, that's Jupiter, that's the moon,
Speaker 3: that's an airplane, that's a drone. Those are spotlights. I
Speaker 3: see a lot of circling circles of light, five or
Speaker 3: six of them in a circle. Spinning around on a
Speaker 3: cloud bank, on a low cloud bank. I'm thinking those
Speaker 3: are spotlights. There's probably a movie theater or somebody trying
Speaker 3: to get somebody's attention, and people are losing their minds
Speaker 3: over the stuff. So this is all nonsense.
Speaker 2: But what do we as a scientist, what do we
Speaker 2: have that like can actually see the Have we got
Speaker 2: radars that are going up, We've got weather saurights, We've
Speaker 2: got people on the you know, landing airplanes.
Speaker 3: I don't know if there's a concerted effort to observe
Speaker 3: these things and to see what they are. If somebody's
Speaker 3: got a radar installation that they're using to shoot radar
Speaker 3: up into the atmosphere and see if and when there's
Speaker 3: a UFO sighting, that would be really hard to do anyway,
Speaker 3: because UFO sighting seemed to be sporadic. How would you
Speaker 3: know where to put your radar assembly.
Speaker 2: They're around an airport, right, I mean, yeah, sure, you.
Speaker 3: Know, and it's like, yeah, an airport where there are
Speaker 3: tons of airplanes flying around, and you see a light
Speaker 3: moving in the sky and its first guess is probably
Speaker 3: an airplane. And you have, for example, the Navy released
Speaker 3: a bunch of footage declassified this stuff, and these have
Speaker 3: been these are known what they are. One of them
Speaker 3: is an airplane in the distance. One of them looks
Speaker 3: like an object that is moving against the wind at
Speaker 3: a rapid speed with the sea in the background. The
Speaker 3: plane was looking down on the saying and it turns
Speaker 3: out that's likely a balloon, And it's just perspective making
Speaker 3: it look like it's moving really rapidly, just like when
Speaker 3: you're driving down the street and it looks like the
Speaker 3: trees are whizzing past you and it's no, they're really not.
Speaker 3: They're stationary. You're the one moving. So there are lots
Speaker 3: of ways of looking at these things and everything comes
Speaker 3: up negative. There are things you can't explain because we
Speaker 3: just don't happen to know what they are. That maybe
Speaker 3: it's a balloon, Maybe it's a flock of birds. Maybe
Speaker 3: it's an alien spaceship coming down to slice up our
Speaker 3: cows and probe people. But I would always put that
Speaker 3: at the bottom of the list. You think mundane first,
Speaker 3: eliminate the more obvious things. And again with these videos,
Speaker 3: I'm seeing people saying they're flying saucers or whatever, and
Speaker 3: I'm thinking there's a hundred other things that you guys
Speaker 3: don't know. First, like they don't know how their cameras work.
Speaker 3: They zoom way in and they see this sparkling ball
Speaker 3: and it's yeah, it's a star and it's out of focus.
Speaker 3: That's what you're doing. So this kind of stuff is
Speaker 3: what makes it so frustrating. And if aliens did come,
Speaker 3: I guess that was the second part of your question. Yeah,
Speaker 3: how would you know? And that's a good question if
Speaker 3: they didn't want to be seen. If you have the
Speaker 3: technology to go from star to star, which is way
Speaker 3: beyond what we think is even possible right now according
Speaker 3: to physics, chances are you're going to have good science
Speaker 3: to absorb radar. I mean we have that technology now.
Speaker 3: The stealth bombers and fighters absorb radar. So if you
Speaker 3: ping them with radar and nothing returns back to the
Speaker 3: dish and you just don't see them, it might not
Speaker 3: be that hard to avoid us, and you wouldn't need
Speaker 3: to land necessarily, even you could do remote sensing. We
Speaker 3: do that now. Then people always ask me if you
Speaker 3: don't believe all of this footage, and I'm like, you
Speaker 3: have terrible footage. But that's why I don't believe it.
Speaker 3: But if you don't believe all this footage, what is
Speaker 3: going to convince you landing on the White House line?
Speaker 3: And I'm like, yes, that is the standard of proof
Speaker 3: that I am looking for. If you're going to make
Speaker 3: a claim that is so extraordinary, it goes against everything
Speaker 3: that everybody's been claiming for fifty years. And you want
Speaker 3: me to believe that they're aliens. I want them to
Speaker 3: land on the White House lawn. I want them to
Speaker 3: have biology that is very different than ours, and when
Speaker 3: our scientists study it and they say, wow, they have
Speaker 3: six DNA pairs or something like that, six base pairs,
Speaker 3: very different than any life on Earth, a metal alloy,
Speaker 3: or they can tell us something like what's the next
Speaker 3: star that's going to blow up? It's like that light
Speaker 3: is on its way to Earth. There's no way we
Speaker 3: can know what star is going to blow up next,
Speaker 3: and they can. They have faster than light travel. They
Speaker 3: can say, oh, it's going to be this star, and
Speaker 3: then two years later we see it something like that.
Speaker 3: That's my standard of proof.
Speaker 1: I think if something really is really happening to the
Speaker 1: United States or to the world are coming from people
Speaker 1: will look at it and experts will look at it.
Speaker 1: It'll come out. It doesn't need me to try to say, hey,
Speaker 1: I think there's something going on there.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty familiar with the sky and so if I
Speaker 3: saw something like that, I'd be like, now, that's very interesting.
Speaker 3: That's not a satellite, it's not a meteor. Could it
Speaker 3: be a drone? And think about how higher drones and
Speaker 3: how fast is this moving. I can work that math out,
Speaker 3: and if I can't, I can go online and ask
Speaker 3: people about it. And that's kind of the difference between
Speaker 3: scientist and a conspiracy theorist. If I don't understand something,
Speaker 3: I seek more information. When a conspiracy theorist doesn't understand something,
Speaker 3: they wedge it into their already preconceived framework and say,
Speaker 3: the government's lying to you, and this is clearly this
Speaker 3: this when it's it's not clearly that at all.
Speaker 1: Just hold on for a short break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: So, Philip, I was wondering, how do you feel about
Speaker 2: astrology and how do you for someone who believes in astrology.
Speaker 2: What's your easiest way to say, Look, here's the difference
Speaker 2: between astronomy and astrology. I think a lot of people
Speaker 2: mix them up.
Speaker 3: Five thousand years ago, they were the same thing. It
Speaker 3: was the study of the stars and how they affected us.
Speaker 3: And eventually astronomy became a science when we started understanding
Speaker 3: the motions of the planets and gravity and how all
Speaker 3: that stuff work. People want to believe in the sort
Speaker 3: of thing, and I get that. I get that desire
Speaker 3: to believe in something greater than ourselves. But in the
Speaker 3: case of astrology, it just falls short. And it's very
Speaker 3: easy to read your horoscope and think, oh, this pertains
Speaker 3: to me. But again, we have tested this over and
Speaker 3: over again, including again using tests that astrologers have come
Speaker 3: up with, and when these tests are done correctly, they fail.
Speaker 3: And when I was part of the skeptic community, part
Speaker 3: of the critical thinking movement back in the two thousands,
Speaker 3: we did a lot of testing on this. And it's
Speaker 3: funny how the skeptical movement had this bizarre almost group
Speaker 3: of people including scientists and magicians and mind readers mentalists.
Speaker 3: But the thing about magicians and mentalists is they know
Speaker 3: how to fool people. They know what tricks make it
Speaker 3: look like magic, make it look like something else is
Speaker 3: going on, and what's really happening, And it's exactly the
Speaker 3: sort of thing that han men do. I'm not saying
Speaker 3: astrology is necessarily a con saying it's wrong. And so
Speaker 3: we tested this and I see mentalists do things that
Speaker 3: I cannot figure out. How did that person know the
Speaker 3: date on a coin in my pocket? And they're telling
Speaker 3: you the whole time, this isn't real. And so even
Speaker 3: when it seems like a horoscope accurately predicts you, there
Speaker 3: are a thousand people out there whose horoscopes completely missed
Speaker 3: the mark, and you're the one that it worked with,
Speaker 3: and so you're the one who's now a believer. That's
Speaker 3: how these things work.
Speaker 2: So certain zodiac signs are naturally inclined to excel in
Speaker 2: espionage due to their unique traits and skills. Gorpio, Capricorn, Virgo, Gemini,
Speaker 2: and Pisces are the zodiac signs possessing qualities ideal for
Speaker 2: covert operations and intelligence gathering.
Speaker 3: It's just funny that we rely on these super outdated
Speaker 3: constellation ideas. I just wrote about this for Scientific American,
Speaker 3: that these zodiac signs no longer correspond to where the
Speaker 3: sun is in the sky. That's what the zodiac signs are.
Speaker 3: When you say you're a Libra. Then when you were born,
Speaker 3: the son was literally in that constellation. But over the
Speaker 3: past twenty five hundred years, these constellations have shifted, and
Speaker 3: so when you say you're a Libra, the son was
Speaker 3: actually in Virgo more likely when you were born.
Speaker 2: Maybe this is for people of a different generation. But
Speaker 2: there was someone called Gene Dixon, and there was something
Speaker 2: known as the Gene Dixon effect, and she carently claims
Speaker 2: to have and has some evidence that she predicted Kennedy's assassination,
Speaker 2: although it was a vague prediction before JFK was assassinated
Speaker 2: and Dallas. But I have looked into this, and there
Speaker 2: is something in scientific literature called the Gene Dixon effect.
Speaker 2: It basically what she did is she just threw so
Speaker 2: much shit out there that so she also predicted that
Speaker 2: we would have World War three in nineteen fifty eight
Speaker 2: with China. She threw out so many predictions that some
Speaker 2: of them came true, and she would then advertise those
Speaker 2: and the ones that didn't come true. She just sort
Speaker 2: of like God thought, right, And I think that for
Speaker 2: pseudo science today. QAnon for example, right, I mean threw
Speaker 2: all sorts of predictions, almost none of them came true.
Speaker 2: Maybe a couple did. I mean, you know, it's you know,
Speaker 2: monkeys and typewriters.
Speaker 3: And this is what I was talking about earlier, that
Speaker 3: people tend to remember the hits and forget the misses.
Speaker 3: So if you make a ton of predictions, and the
Speaker 3: beauty of this too is you can be super vague,
Speaker 3: and a lot of astrology is vague.
Speaker 6: And a lot of.
Speaker 3: These these psychics and the speakers to the dead, James
Speaker 3: van Prague and a few others, John Edwards, that were
Speaker 3: popular fifteen twenty years ago. Now, these guys would do
Speaker 3: that same thing. They would just throw things out on
Speaker 3: you and the audience there, did you lose somebody recently? Yes,
Speaker 3: this is why they're there.
Speaker 6: In the audience.
Speaker 3: I'm sensing a ja or an m. Is there is that?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Because John and Mary and James and Margaret these very
Speaker 3: popular names, and they would just throw stuff out like
Speaker 3: that and zero in on something until they started getting hits.
Speaker 3: And even then the hits were like not great.
Speaker 7: And is somebody now pregnant?
Speaker 1: Who died?
Speaker 7: Was so the person who passed was pregnant? Yes, okay,
Speaker 7: there's a reference to two people. There's two people, So
Speaker 7: I don't know if we're talking about two people involved
Speaker 7: in this case, but two people perpetrated it, or two
Speaker 7: people are passed to be passed. You're telling me this
Speaker 7: is a husband and wife that was pregnant that was killed. Yes,
Speaker 7: did this make headlines?
Speaker 8: Yes?
Speaker 7: Okay, they're telling me to talk to you about Scott
Speaker 7: or skip or something.
Speaker 1: S K.
Speaker 7: I don't know who that is.
Speaker 8: I don't know who that is.
Speaker 7: So she's just a friend of yours, like a contemporary. Yes, yes,
Speaker 7: and it's her dad passed, but her mom's life.
Speaker 9: No, both of the parents are alive.
Speaker 7: No, she's with an older male that's passed, like a father.
Speaker 3: But people, first of all, they wanted to believe in
Speaker 3: this stuff. And second, yeah, it's like you called it,
Speaker 3: the gene diiction effect, and we've seen it over and
Speaker 3: over again. A mentalist friend of mine who is amazing.
Speaker 3: If you see one of his shows, you just cannot
Speaker 3: believe this guy is not psychic, and he's not. He's
Speaker 3: just really good at figuring out this sort of thing
Speaker 3: and working people that way. He said, anybody in the
Speaker 3: audience here, anybody been hit by lightning? And nobody said anything,
Speaker 3: and he laughed, and this was a skeptic audience, and
Speaker 3: he said, I always ask that. He said, nobody ever has,
Speaker 3: but someday somebody will have been. And boy, oh boy,
Speaker 3: am I going to be a miracle worker that night?
Speaker 3: And I thought, yeah, can you imagine somebody pulling that
Speaker 3: out and when you finally get that hit, that's going
Speaker 3: to really seem like that person is psychic. And yeah,
Speaker 3: and we see this over and over again. Look at
Speaker 3: how many times Donald Trump has lied when he was
Speaker 3: president and people just forget and he's, oh, yeah, he
Speaker 3: was wrong about this. It was always two weeks and
Speaker 3: in two weeks, we'll have an infrastructure plane. In two weeks,
Speaker 3: we'll do this knowing that in two weeks the news
Speaker 3: that's five news cycles away, and people forget. So it's
Speaker 3: very easy once you've honed your audience, once you prime
Speaker 3: them this way, that you can make them believe than
Speaker 3: almost anything, no matter how nonsensical.
Speaker 6: What you're saying is, guys, this is your producer, John Stern.
Speaker 6: There's a conspiracy theory that I heard a couple of
Speaker 6: years ago that Elon Musk's whole thing about going to
Speaker 6: Mars is a red herring. He's building up all of
Speaker 6: his space force not to go to Mars, but to
Speaker 6: go to an asteroid and drag that asteroid into the
Speaker 6: orbit of Earth, and that asteroid is mostly gold and
Speaker 6: in doing so control the Earth's economy. So is that
Speaker 6: feasible on any level?
Speaker 3: There are a lot of asteroids out there. There are
Speaker 3: a lot of them made of metal. NASA has already
Speaker 3: launched a mission called Psyche, which is on its way
Speaker 3: to an asteroid called Psyche that we think is mostly metal,
Speaker 3: and it's quite large, and there are smaller ones that
Speaker 3: will have a lot of interesting metals in them, platinum
Speaker 3: and rare earth metals. Finding one that has enough gold
Speaker 3: in it to control the Earth's economy strikes me as
Speaker 3: being unlikely. There's probably more gold in minds that you
Speaker 3: could get for much less effort and expense. So yeah,
Speaker 3: if you want to go to asteroids to mind the metal,
Speaker 3: and this is something that has been tried already, there
Speaker 3: have been a few startups that have tried to identify
Speaker 3: asteroids and build ships that can go to them to
Speaker 3: mind them. It turns out mining an asteroid is really tough.
Speaker 3: It's not as simple as they make it seem in
Speaker 3: science fiction shows. But it's possible, and this is something
Speaker 3: we may be doing in one hundred years finding that
Speaker 3: much gold. I don't think so. Using to control the economy.
Speaker 3: The guy's got two hundred and fifty billion dollars. He
Speaker 3: already controls the economy. Conspiracy theories are like a pyramid
Speaker 3: built upside down, is how I always say it. You've
Speaker 3: got this one sort of idea that everything rests on,
Speaker 3: but that idea doesn't make sense. There's no balance there,
Speaker 3: and you build all this stuff on top of it,
Speaker 3: It's gonna fall over. It's much better to flip that
Speaker 3: pyramid over, get all your basic facts and build from there,
Speaker 3: as opposed to making up wild ideas and trying to
Speaker 3: get everything to fit.
Speaker 2: So there was this strange relationship between Harry Houdin me
Speaker 2: and yes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, right, the friends, and
Speaker 2: then they became bitter enemies. Oh yeah, and who Deny
Speaker 2: whose job it was was to convince people that he
Speaker 2: could break the laws of physics, that there was a
Speaker 2: supernatural because it was like Penn and Teller, because he
Speaker 2: knew there was no magic. He was he was against
Speaker 2: this kind of thing. And in fact, I've got a
Speaker 2: quote here when he's talking about astrologists, he says, these
Speaker 2: call them human leeches, sucking every bit of reason and
Speaker 2: common sense and money from their from their victims. And yet, Sir,
Speaker 2: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a character who was the
Speaker 2: absolute hitome of rationality. Right, everything is a rational explanation,
Speaker 2: whatever it is. But Who Deny could not make Sir
Speaker 2: Arthur Conan Doyle believe that he could not break.
Speaker 6: The laws of physix.
Speaker 2: Good, right, he died thinking Who Deni was secretly supernatural
Speaker 2: and that there was a supernatural So.
Speaker 3: I almost mentioned Who Denie earlier when we were talking
Speaker 3: about the skeptic movement, because Houdini was in many ways
Speaker 3: one of the pioneers of magicians coming out and saying no,
Speaker 3: this is all nonsense. And Penn and Teller are a
Speaker 3: good example of people doing it now. James Randy, Back
Speaker 3: when I was a kid, the Amazing Randy would go
Speaker 3: on the Carson Show and would debunk a lot of
Speaker 3: these things.
Speaker 8: Would you welcome, please, the Amazing Randy. What do you
Speaker 8: think of the phenomenon that's going on now that is
Speaker 8: getting a lot of the channeling or if somebody speaks
Speaker 8: through or they'd become the entity or the body or
Speaker 8: the voice of somebody who's been dead twenty five they're
Speaker 8: called channelers.
Speaker 5: Let's face it, this is spiritualism warmed over. Spiritualist used
Speaker 5: to be sitting in the dark with your hands overlapping,
Speaker 5: play the Rock of Ages, and they could do anything
Speaker 5: in the dark. Edgar Bergen used to do the same thing.
Speaker 5: He changed his voice and he sounded like Charlie McCarthy.
Speaker 5: No one ever said Charlie McCarthy was alive. And yet
Speaker 5: these people are paying three hundred dollars a session to
Speaker 5: go into these meetings. And these channelers themselves had got made.
Speaker 5: One of them said on a TV interview not long ago, Look,
Speaker 5: we can't prove that it's real, but you can't prove
Speaker 5: that it isn't. It's a perfectly non falsifiable situation.
Speaker 3: Especially towards the end of his life, Randy was taking
Speaker 3: on speakers to the dead, These people who would say,
Speaker 3: I'm sensing a presence at your father, blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: And we call them psychic vultures, these people who would
Speaker 3: prey on the emotions of the bereaved. It's just awful
Speaker 3: to watch that happen. And I've certainly met and dealt
Speaker 3: with enough people who have come into conspiracy theories as
Speaker 3: con artists. The Moon landing, remember Planet X, this giant
Speaker 3: planet in two thousand and three that was going to
Speaker 3: come by the Earth and destroy humanity. Utter one hundred
Speaker 3: percent nonsense, not a spec of truth to any of
Speaker 3: the stuff. But there was this one guy who came in,
Speaker 3: became part of this sort of cult following around this
Speaker 3: one person, and then schismed off and started his own thing.
Speaker 3: It seemed to me that it's possible that this guy
Speaker 3: was a con man and not part of the believers,
Speaker 3: but eventually grew to believe it. And there's a Moonhax
Speaker 3: denier the same. It came in clearly using con artist
Speaker 3: tricks to worm his way into this, but then later
Speaker 3: on really seem to believe it. And of course it's
Speaker 3: much easier to sell people on stuff if you believe
Speaker 3: in what you're selling.
Speaker 2: So magic in espionage, especially in how we do things,
Speaker 2: if you're unders fail. It's something that we have looked at.
Speaker 1: There are stories, but it's true because I was involved
Speaker 1: in it in places like Russia where we're under full
Speaker 1: time surveillance at all times, we have to continue to
Speaker 1: meet people or achieve our goals or accomplish things even
Speaker 1: while under surveillance. And so we actually brought in magicians
Speaker 1: to talk to us about are there ways of which
Speaker 1: when someone is watching you can do things while they're
Speaker 1: watching you to get away with things? Can you distract
Speaker 1: them or like you create the slight of hand, all
Speaker 1: these kind of things. You're looking for ways to get
Speaker 1: people who are perceiving you to misperceive what they're saying.
Speaker 2: Well, in espionage, you never know when you need to
Speaker 2: make a white tiger disappear.
Speaker 1: So, Phil, thank you so much for spending time that
Speaker 1: it's a really interesting and keep up what you're doing,
Speaker 1: keep up educating the public. I think it's an important time.
Speaker 1: I think we as a people need to get back
Speaker 1: to focusing on rationality and sciences.
Speaker 2: Thanks for being up frontman for us for keeping people
Speaker 2: from realizing that we do have space ariens trip at
Speaker 2: Area fifty one where we are first engineering their technology.
Speaker 3: I'm not at liberty to talk about that.
Speaker 9: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Seipher,
Speaker 9: and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner mission implausible.
Speaker 9: It is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures.
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