Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast Am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norrey with
Speaker 2: you or with astrophysicist Adam Frank. His book is called
Speaker 2: The Little Book of Aliens. We'll tell you in a
Speaker 2: moment where you can get it. It is a marvelous Adam.
Speaker 2: What do you think of the witnesses who testified several
Speaker 2: months ago before Congress? They seem very credible. They were pilots,
Speaker 2: and what do you think, Well, you know, I've.
Speaker 3: Had really great conversations with Ryan Graves, one of the pilots. Yes,
Speaker 3: what I really like about Ryan is that, you know,
Speaker 3: he's very agnostic about what it is. Like I like
Speaker 3: his attitude or he's like, this is what I saw.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm telling you it didn't look like anything
Speaker 3: I've ever flown around with before. But I need you
Speaker 3: to figure it out, right, Somebody go figure out He's
Speaker 3: not he's not going to a conclusion. He's just reporting
Speaker 3: what he saw. And you know, I think it's great
Speaker 3: that the pilots are able to talk about this without
Speaker 3: you know, there any kind of stigma. So that's really good.
Speaker 3: But again there's nothing you know that links There's there's
Speaker 3: no hard data that links what they saw because you know,
Speaker 3: personal testimony. There's only science can't really work with personal testimony.
Speaker 3: So there's still nothing that links to the to the
Speaker 3: idea that they're you know, they're non human. And you know,
Speaker 3: again that's why I support the massive panel and doing
Speaker 3: that study. I do think, you know, there's a real possiblity.
Speaker 3: For me, it's probably I'm more inclined to believe that
Speaker 3: this is going to be about about national defense. And
Speaker 3: I you know, I book, I talk about the modern
Speaker 3: history of UAPs and you know where that's led so
Speaker 3: that people can understand sort of you know where science,
Speaker 3: how science would look at this. Now when it comes
Speaker 3: to the idea that of the alien craft and the garages,
Speaker 3: I got to say, as a scientist, you know, show
Speaker 3: me the spaceship until somebody shows me the spaceship and
Speaker 3: you know we can go bang around on it. Their
Speaker 3: their stories and you know in the book I talk
Speaker 3: about in the nineteen fifties, one of the first government
Speaker 3: rep whor it's ever done, Project sign There was the
Speaker 3: head of it, Captain Edward Rupert, wrote a book after
Speaker 3: he retired in the fifties where he said, oh, there
Speaker 3: was this report called the Estimate of the Situation that
Speaker 3: claims there was evidence that UFOs were interplanetary, right, because
Speaker 3: I didn't really think interstell of them. But of course
Speaker 3: that report was never found. People have dug around looking
Speaker 3: for that report. It was never found. So the idea
Speaker 3: that there, you know, the military has spaceships has been
Speaker 3: around forever. We've never really gotten anything from it, so,
Speaker 3: you know, and for every military guy who says we
Speaker 3: have spaceships, there's another military guy who says it doesn't.
Speaker 3: And the problem is it's the government, right, and the
Speaker 3: government is a giant bureaucracy that good luck getting anything
Speaker 3: from them. So I think it's far more likely that
Speaker 3: we are going to have evidence of life, some kind
Speaker 3: of life, whether it's dumb life meaning you know, microbes
Speaker 3: or forests on alien planets via what I called biosignatures
Speaker 3: or what are called biosignatures or smart life techno signatures
Speaker 3: on alien worlds before we find we really get anything
Speaker 3: from you know, from finding anything about UAPs. Hopefully eventually
Speaker 3: we'll figure out what UAPs are, but we're so close
Speaker 3: to getting real data about alien life on alien planets.
Speaker 2: Adam, you're scientist, so you don't guess, you don't speculate,
Speaker 2: But I'm going to ask you. The pilots are seeing
Speaker 2: something that is something they ever have seen before. They've
Speaker 2: told you that, what does your gut tell you that
Speaker 2: might be going on?
Speaker 3: Well, my gut tells me because especially as I went back,
Speaker 3: you know, I did this. I did an op ed
Speaker 3: for the New York Times when in the two thousand
Speaker 3: and one about this, and I went back and I
Speaker 3: was doing lots of reading, and one of the things
Speaker 3: I stumbled on was the fig INT community, like the
Speaker 3: community of people from the signals intelligence and electronic intelligence community.
Speaker 3: And what was interesting, they had lively discussions about all
Speaker 3: of it, but none of it was about extraterrestrials. It
Speaker 3: was all And this is where I learned the term
Speaker 3: peer state adversaries. You know, other governments using drones using
Speaker 3: it doesn't have to really be advanced technology. You can
Speaker 3: actually use simple technologies to spoof something looking like it's
Speaker 3: moving very fast. And the United States did this itself
Speaker 3: in the late nineteen fifties. Russia had built this giant radar.
Speaker 3: We wanted to know what that radar was capable of
Speaker 3: of of so we spoofed the signal into it to
Speaker 3: get the Russians to crank you know, the power upon it.
Speaker 3: And that's how we detected. That's how we understood what
Speaker 3: they were capable of. So if I had to take
Speaker 3: a guess, and again, like you said, I'm just speculating
Speaker 3: until we actually do the science. You know, we don't know,
Speaker 3: but that's my speculation. But here's the nexting point, George.
Speaker 3: Imagine that we did do the science, and imagine that
Speaker 3: we found that these things were behaving in a way
Speaker 3: that no human craft could do, like he was making
Speaker 3: a right hand turn, you know, at mock five hundred
Speaker 3: in the book, I discuss well, what would be the
Speaker 3: next step? Right, you would still have to do more
Speaker 3: science because if they don't land and announce themselves. Now
Speaker 3: we found, wow, here's something that is moving in ways
Speaker 3: that we don't understand. But how you know that? What
Speaker 3: do you do next? So you just have to do
Speaker 3: the next bit of science. So the interesting thing is
Speaker 3: having an agnostic approach to this means you're just following
Speaker 3: where the data leads, and every good question that's answered
Speaker 3: will lead to the next good question.
Speaker 2: Years ago, I was at a conference. I go to
Speaker 2: a lot of them, Adam, and there's an individual there
Speaker 2: who since passed on, but he would attend every event
Speaker 2: and he would bring with him night vision goggles. His
Speaker 2: name was Ed Grimsley, and he'd always sit next to
Speaker 2: me or producer Tom with a little paper bag in
Speaker 2: his lap. And I'm going, man, this doesn't feel right.
Speaker 2: This is just weird. You know, I've seen this guy
Speaker 2: five times at five different events. He sits close to us,
Speaker 2: He's got a bag on his lap. This just doesn't
Speaker 2: seem right. Tom. We got to figure out something here.
Speaker 2: Finally he came up to us and reaches into the
Speaker 2: bag and you know, I'm ready to jump the guy
Speaker 2: and he pulls out night vision goggles and says, George Hi,
Speaker 2: Ed Grimsly, would you come on the roof with me?
Speaker 2: And I went no, And he said, well no, let
Speaker 2: me explain. I've got a group of people up there
Speaker 2: and we're looking at UFOs with these night vision goggles.
Speaker 2: Would you come up there? And I said how many
Speaker 2: people are up there? He said about half a dozen.
Speaker 2: I said, okay, let's go. So we go up on
Speaker 2: the roof and he gives me these night vision goggles
Speaker 2: at him, and I swear to God, I'm looking at
Speaker 2: objects in the sky that are not insects, they're not satellites.
Speaker 2: They're doing ninety degree angle turns, as you just mentioned,
Speaker 2: stopping and starting, and they're way way up there, grimsly asked,
Speaker 2: made it one hundred two hundred miles up perhaps? And
Speaker 2: there were little tiny little shiny dots just going zoop stop, zoop,
Speaker 2: right hand turn. I don't know what I saw, but
Speaker 2: something was up there. It was weird.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, because this is the interesting thing about this, right,
Speaker 3: So you know I could I would never say to
Speaker 3: somebody you didn't see what you saw, right, I wasn't there,
Speaker 3: I wasn't watching it. So I don't know, right, I
Speaker 3: can't answer that. But if we want, what we want
Speaker 3: with science from science is public knowledge, right, something that
Speaker 3: we can all the data is available, we can all
Speaker 3: agree on it. And so how would you get that
Speaker 3: kind of data about UAPs? And that's you know, one
Speaker 3: of the things I cover in the book, like what
Speaker 3: would a scientific search look like? And it turns out
Speaker 3: it looks a lot like the search that we're doing
Speaker 3: for alien planets. When we're looking for biosignatures and technosignatures.
Speaker 3: The same kind of standards of evidence that we have,
Speaker 3: the same kind of demand for knowing everything about your
Speaker 3: instruments is going to be required for looking at you
Speaker 3: at piece, just like when we use the James Webspace Telescope.
Speaker 3: So for example, when my colleagues and I, if we
Speaker 3: were to ever report that we found, say, evidence for
Speaker 3: city lights on a world that was forty light years away,
Speaker 3: people are going to come after us, right other scientists.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, because we're people have to understand
Speaker 3: how mean scientists are to each other for good reason,
Speaker 3: and that we're we're going to have to know everything
Speaker 3: about how the space telescope work. You know, we have
Speaker 3: to know how it receives light when it's forty degrees,
Speaker 3: how it receives light when it's eighty degrees. And that's
Speaker 3: the only way that we're going to be able to
Speaker 3: answer that question. The same thing with UAP's We're gonna
Speaker 3: have to build instruments that we know everything about those instruments,
Speaker 3: and we know everything about how we did the search,
Speaker 3: so that way we can all you know, that data
Speaker 3: is there and everybody can look in at it and
Speaker 3: come to the same conclusion.
Speaker 2: In your book, The Little Book of Aliens, you cite
Speaker 2: the Roswell Crash of nineteen forty seven as a moment
Speaker 2: in history where the public became a little too obsessed
Speaker 2: with UFOs. Tell me about that, well.
Speaker 3: I think the problem with especially for you look at
Speaker 3: the effect on the side like SETI, as we talked
Speaker 3: about before, was that with something like Roswell, you know,
Speaker 3: all the competing stories and the ways is built on itself,
Speaker 3: and particularly you know the hoax surrounding you know, those
Speaker 3: the alien autopsy because of what happened with the aspects
Speaker 3: of the you know, people who are UFO culture. Is
Speaker 3: that the scientific search for extraterrestrials or you know, after
Speaker 3: a biology got what we call the giggle factor that
Speaker 3: anybody who you know, any scientists who wanted to study
Speaker 3: life in the universe, you know, other colleagues would raise
Speaker 3: their eyes and kind of giggle. And this really affected
Speaker 3: the funding for SETI. SETI, their funding was cut off.
Speaker 3: Like basically, there there has been almost no SETI searching.
Speaker 3: And all people need to understand that because there was
Speaker 3: no funding in the nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties
Speaker 3: when NATHA tried to fund SETI, Congress people stood up
Speaker 3: and said, we're not going to use taxpayer dollars to
Speaker 3: look for a little green men in UFOs. So that
Speaker 3: what happened from Roswell really and things like that really
Speaker 3: colored the ability of scientists to investigate the possibilities of
Speaker 3: life in the universe using telescopes and using you know, probes.
Speaker 3: But what's remarkable now is that that has really gone away.
Speaker 3: We've made so many amazing discoveries about exoplanets, about planets
Speaker 3: orbiting other stars that NASA is now all in and
Speaker 3: the next big telescope. People don't understand this. The next
Speaker 3: big telescope that NASA is going to build, you know,
Speaker 3: billion dollar telescope is called the Habitable World Observatory, so
Speaker 3: it's tuned to finding life on distant worlds. That's a
Speaker 3: huge milestone. And you know, one of the things I
Speaker 3: want people to understand from the book is how we
Speaker 3: are and how we're going to do it. This idea
Speaker 3: of finding city lights or finding evidence of a biospheres.
Speaker 3: Because oxygen in an atmosphere, we can literally look into
Speaker 3: alien atmospheres and sniff out their chemical composition. And use
Speaker 3: that to detect life.
Speaker 2: Are you amazed at the progress we're making right now
Speaker 2: trying to inch towards getting the answers to these questions?
Speaker 3: George, I am more than amazed. I'm stunned, because you know,
Speaker 3: when I was coming up as a graduate student in
Speaker 3: the late eighties, we didn't even know whether there were
Speaker 3: any planets out there other than our own truth. It
Speaker 3: was entirely possible that we were there the eight planets
Speaker 3: in our solar system, and don't start with me about Pluto.
Speaker 3: We're the only ones. And now we know every star
Speaker 3: in this guy has planets.
Speaker 2: When I was fifteen, though, I told my science teacher
Speaker 2: in school that there were planets teeming throughout the universe.
Speaker 2: You be kept saying, how do you know there's, George,
Speaker 2: And I said, because the model of what happened in
Speaker 2: our solar system is the same throughout the universe. Now,
Speaker 2: I was a kid without any data, without any scientific fact,
Speaker 2: but I just my gut told me they're everywhere.
Speaker 3: And I'm right right that you were right. And the
Speaker 3: thing is, in nineteen eighty eight, or you'll say nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty five, when I started graduate school, we didn't know
Speaker 3: whether there were any other planets, and now we know
Speaker 3: that there are you know, billions upon billions upon billions
Speaker 3: of planets, and even more exciting, we know how to
Speaker 3: look at those planets, how to look into their atmospheres
Speaker 3: to find evidence of life. You know, what's an interesting
Speaker 3: thing that we've learned. Though, also I talk about all
Speaker 3: the different kinds of planets that we found, the most
Speaker 3: common kind of planet in the universe is one that's
Speaker 3: not in our solar system. Right, our Solar system is
Speaker 3: not average. It's kind of weird.
Speaker 2: If you were an alien on another planet in a
Speaker 2: different solar system looking at Planet Earth with the technology
Speaker 2: you might possess, what would you conclude?
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is an interesting idea that the Earth has
Speaker 3: shown biosignatures. The Earth has had these signatures of a biosphere,
Speaker 3: you know, either microbial or about half a billion years ago,
Speaker 3: that's when multicellular creatures started to evolve on Earth. The
Speaker 3: Earth has been showing biosignatures for about three billion years now.
Speaker 3: Our techno signatures are new. It's only been probably in
Speaker 3: the last one hundred years that we are showing technosignature.
Speaker 3: So you'd have to be within one hundred light years
Speaker 3: of us to be able to detect our radio signatures
Speaker 3: or the atmospheric pollution that we put in. But you know,
Speaker 3: certainly Earth has been visible as an inhabited world by
Speaker 3: just you know, a non intelligent life for at least
Speaker 3: three billion years.
Speaker 2: Tell us about NASA's techno signature's research program you're part of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is a wonderful story. So, as I said,
Speaker 3: you know, NASA had really gotten out of the life business,
Speaker 3: or at least the intelligent life business, for quite a
Speaker 3: long time. And in nineteen or sorry, in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 3: they were in congre someone in Congress put in a
Speaker 3: bill that said NASA should fund the search for techno signatures, right,
Speaker 3: and Son's was like, uh okay. So they convened a
Speaker 3: meeting that brought us, you know, the people who were
Speaker 3: interested in it together and we had this amazing three
Speaker 3: day meeting and that's was like, look, if we get
Speaker 3: this money, what should we do with it? And it
Speaker 3: was the most amazing three days of just you know,
Speaker 3: exploring all kinds of ideas, trying to figure out which
Speaker 3: ideas were the best, which were the most likely to
Speaker 3: produce some kind of return. So we talked about things
Speaker 3: like city lights. Would you be able to see artificial
Speaker 3: illumination on the dark side of a planet from forty
Speaker 3: light years away? Would you be able to see atmosphere
Speaker 3: chemicals industrial chemicals from forty light years away? And from
Speaker 3: that meeting a group of collaborators and I put in
Speaker 3: a grant to study atmospheric techno signature. It was the
Speaker 3: first ever grant like that, and we got it. And
Speaker 3: now since twenty nineteen we have been writing papers and
Speaker 3: studying the possibilities for how we might find alien civilizations
Speaker 3: on alien planets.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's great. Can you conclude that there's water on
Speaker 2: these planets?
Speaker 3: Not yet, but that's coming very very very soon. There
Speaker 3: was recently a just about a month ago that James
Speaker 3: Webb space telescope looked at and this is really exciting
Speaker 3: George an entirely new class of habitable world, what they
Speaker 3: call a high Sean world, hydrogen ocean world. And this
Speaker 3: is a world that is much bigger than the Earth,
Speaker 3: like probably eight times the mass of the Earth, but
Speaker 3: it has a hydrogen just pure hydrogen atmosphere and a
Speaker 3: liquid water ocean liquid ocean underneath the hydron atmosphere. And
Speaker 3: James web fake telescope was able to detect both methane
Speaker 3: and carbon dioxide wow in the atmosphere in a way
Speaker 3: that told us that, yeah, this is there, probably is,
Speaker 3: or at least it's likely there's a liquid ocean down there.
Speaker 3: And where there's liquid water, George, there's you know, good
Speaker 3: chance that maybe life happens.
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