 Hello everyone and welcome to another twist podcast broadcast on a Wednesday evening or a Thursday morning or somewhere in between depending on where in the globe you might be. I don't pay attention to those things. What am I doing here? I don't even know. I don't even know what I'm doing right now. I'm not supposed to be here. I don't have headphones. I don't have a good microphone. I may just be starting the show and leaving it to Justin and Brian. We don't know what's going to happen yet. This is just happening. This show is Justin's, but I'm going to start the show. Everybody knows there will be things that will be edited. There will be things that will be awesome. Whatever this is live, the podcast will be edited for brevity as it always is. No, it's not, but for coherence maybe and lack of trouble. But we're going to start the show now so make sure you hit the likes and the subscribes and the shares and make all that stuff happen because it is time to start the show in three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science episode number 944 recorded on Wednesday, September 20th, 2023. You should be skeptical of this show. Hi everyone. I am Dr. Kiki and Justin will be hosting this show and fill in your head with UFOs, UAPs, and skepticism, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following program contains conversations they don't want you to hear. Unsecret knowledge, unhidden truths, plainly viewable facts, all of which can give alternative explanations to improbable inclusions. Meantime, by being exposed to the ideas in the following disclaimer, you can be disqualified from holding an above super top secret clearance. Believing anything you hear here may prevent you from registering as a member of MUFON. And in extreme cases, being well informed can lead to uncontrollable sneering and snickering whenever an acquaintance tells you their eyewitness account of the UFO sighting. While no one should be ridiculed for their beliefs, the beliefs themselves will hold no such protection in conversations on This Week in Science, coming up next. You're saying that. I'm going to be having the best conversation tonight. I know. I know this. Well, yeah, as soon as as soon as our, our chaperone leaves the room, we're going to delve into the topic of UAPs and UFOs, something I've been kind of forbidden to talk about on the regular This Week in Science broadcast. Which is why I have to leave right now, so that I'm leaving. I'm leaving. But you know, I'm still lurking. There will be a troll in your comments. Perfectly. You can jump in anytime, reign in the show, save it from the from being censored, whatever. I am so excited that Brian Dunning has joined us this evening, though, or joined you for this discussion because I'm leaving. Have a wonderful time. You're not here. I'm not here. You're really not here. God, I thought you'd never leave. My goodness. I know. So we have, we have a jam-packed show set up with things that we carefully crafted for, for this discussion. Basically, I want to start off this show with something that's not even in the itinerary to run down for the show. First, I'm going to jump into science news. This is from this week, the James Webb Space Telescope discovered methane, carbon dioxide, and missing from this headline, dimethyl sulfide on a distant exoplanet, 120 light years from Earth named K218. Actually, that's, I guess, the name of the dwarf star that this planet is circling in the constellation Leo. K218B. It's the second planet. It's the planet and then K218 is the dwarf star. So this is uncontestable proof that there might be life on another planet. These are, these are those biosignatures that one would look for that indicates potentially live organisms producing these chemicals and creating this into the atmosphere. That's a nice backdrop, I think, that finding for what we're going to be talking about because we're going to be talking a little bit about the possibility of life on other planets in our, in our galaxy and more to the point whether or not that life has been visiting the Earth. Indeed. Yeah. So you, you have made, you made a movie and I'm, I'm staring a little bit because my, I've always wanted to make a movie. And so whenever I'm talking to somebody who's actually gone through the whole process of making a movie, I'm initially struck with intense jealousy and then sort of undeserved animosity towards the person. I understand all of that. I do. Yeah. And then I, but I actually got a chance to, to preview the UFO movie. They don't want you to see and it's brilliant. It's really well done. So I have to put aside all of my jealousy and my animosity to actually admire the work that you created. Thank you. Yeah. And so what, how does, how does this come about? How does, how do you decide there's enough in my head that I need to discuss on this and the only way to do it is through the narrative of a movie? Well, okay. So I work for Skeptoid Media. It's an educational nonprofit. Our main thing has been the Skeptoid podcast, but we're always trying to reach out to new audiences. We're always trying to launch new programming. And one thing that we've been doing the last five, six, eight years is we've always got a movie in production. And sometimes that's a, an educational film. Two of them have been 40 minutes long. Sometimes that's a feature documentary that we released through conventional film distribution. It's all a matter of, you know, how can we get our message out there to as many people as possible. And documentary films are one way to do that. And so this was the most recent one. And about just over a year ago, I literally posted on Twitter, what should I make my next movie about? And UFOs is what, what everyone came back was the most, most popular answer. You know, it's, we're always trying to promote science, literacy, critical thinking. That's the basic thing. What the movie is about is actually kind of secondary. You know, it's like, okay, what's the vehicle that we're going to choose to promote our message this time? And UFOs is such a great one because it is, it's just insanely disproportionately popular in, in, in society and in pop culture right now. It's just fricking everywhere. So it was the natural choice is to make a movie about UFOs. How do we take a scientific look at the UFO phenomenon? Yeah, and that's, it's something that I was sort of teasing earlier that I'm not allowed to talk about it much on the normal this week in science. We had to craft this opportunity for every, all the co-hosts to be out of the room. Because I don't think they live in the same media bubble that the rest of the planet is on. Because that's sort of what every time I've sort of brought up like what this, you know, UAP news that's out there, like, why are we talking about this? Why are you talking about that? Like, who, who's talking about that? Who cares? And so it somehow didn't penetrate the scientific bubble that the co-hosts live in. I, on the other hand, love this stuff. Everyone, it's super popular. A lot of people love this stuff. The whole reason I'm even doing this show right now is because I was a big fan of radio. And my favorite show on the radio was the Art Bell, Coast to Coast. Sure. And Art Bell used to do a great job of having guests with good narratives and good stories. Sometimes it was ghost stories or it would be aliens or, I think my favorite was Richard Hoagland who would come on and, and he would, he would have this like, he would be like connecting dots between, he'd sort of lay out all this information like, oh, this son of an Egyptologist was working for NASA at the time where they were planning where to land on the moon. And because of the angles and the pyramids, this is the reason they show, lays out all these dots. And it's sort of like watching a, this is the oldie time, watching a photograph develop where the image just sort of comes across the paper all of a sudden. And it was always really, really fun and fascinating. And especially because I didn't believe any of it. You know, I wasn't, it wasn't like, I never felt like this show was meant to convince. Even Art would like, sometimes have a skeptical question. And then he would go along with it and go, oh, wow. You know, it was sort of an interplay there. So, so I've always tracked these sorts of things. But I've seen them in that window of kind of fun to think about, sort of like a cheap version of a sci-fi movie where you didn't have to have any of the special effects. You just have a narrator. What's concerning though, is I'm now realizing that, yeah, there's a very large percentage of the population that's bought into the stories that are being told. And there's people who are telling these stories. Now, that's fine. But it got to the point where there was a congressional hearing. There's been about a, about a half dozen of them, it seems. And there's another one tomorrow. So there was hard evidence, I think, at the first UAP hearing, congressional hearing, that we did need to talk about. Because I have never seen more convincing evidence that there is a lack of critical thinking in our government. The, what was your impression of that? I'm assuming you must have forced yourself at least to watch this. Yeah. I mean, you know, unfortunately, it's what I do for a living. I'm forced to do it for work. It's like in school when they give you a book to read. It's like, in my job, I'm forced to sit through these congressional UFO hearings. But no, you're absolutely right. I mean, there's, there is some people in government displaying an astonishing, not only naivete of some pretty basic science issues, but complete failure to do any due diligence. For example, this, this last most popular hearing with, it had the three witnesses, right, which are always introduced as an intelligence official and two F 18 pilots. No, these guys are career ufologists. These guys have been speaking at UFO conferences. They've been telling stories for years and years and years, and they happen to be veterans. So that means all of a sudden a plus B equals C, the government believes in UFOs, the military has specialists assigned to UFOs. But you know, if you, if you want to find three military guys who believe in UFOs, you don't go to the military and say, who believes in UFOs? You go to the UFO conference and say, Hey, who's ever been in the military and 500 hands go up. You've got plenty to choose from. That's where these three guys came from. They came from the UFO world. They didn't come from the military world. And if the senators or the Congress people in the subcommittee had done any due diligence into them at all, I mean, simply Google their names, Google their name with the word UFO conference or something like that. And you'll find that these guys are not credible intelligence officials, quote unquote. They're simply UFO guys who've been telling these same old stories for years and years. And the one guy in particular, who they're calling a whistleblower, you know, he, he's calling himself a whistleblower. He's calling him a whistleblower. You know, he comes from the whole community of people who have been driving this whole UFO mythology since, since 2017. And when he actually named, he only, remember in his conf David Grouches, who I'm speaking of, in his testimony, he refused to give almost any specifics at all. He said, Oh, I can only tell you that in behind closed doors. Oh, I can, I can ask that question. Yeah, the skill and it's in a soundproof phone booth. Yes, the code of silence from get smart. When he finally gave two specifics, one of them was Roswell, which has been so hilariously debunked for decades, that my jaw just about hit the floor. And then the other one he gave was this, this Italy 1933 story, which was invented by a long hoaxer and immediately dismissed by the rest of ufology as a hoax 25 years ago, and never enjoyed a minute of credibility in any of that time. So you can learn any of this in a five minutes of, of, of Googling, and the, the Congress people didn't even do that much. So when you say that we're, that's, they're displaying as an astonishing lack of critical thinking, they're displaying an astonishing lack of a lot. It definitely raises concern for who's, who's running the country. My jaw drop came from the revelation, though, that Grush had good information from somebody else about, I think a third party that had, they said that they had evidence of non-human biologicals recovered near the site, a crash site. And it was the first time I think that I had, I'd heard that term and it, and it occurred to me that if that's true, it means that humans wouldn't be the only form of life on this planet. We didn't say it was extraterrestrial, it said it was non-human, that can be a dog. Yeah, or a, or a bacteria, or a bumblebee, or a bird strike on a domestic drone, you know, commercially available drone. But it, it was like, didn't we know that? Didn't we, don't we know that humans aren't the only form of life on earth? Like, and, and the jaw dropping part wasn't the statement, it was the lack of anybody on the panel going, wait a second, that just means it's not human. It's, and I wonder like, I wonder if there is like some element of being under oath where, uh, he's like, oh, uh, that pigeon drone strike story sounds good if you tell it sideways, but I've got to be, make sure that I don't overstep here. I don't know. I don't even know if they were under oath. The other thing I took away from that one was uh, the pilot who claims not to be a UFOologist, Farver, Fravor and Graves, Fravor, who claims not to be into UFOs, but then like you say, just Google it, he's been talking about UFOs for a very long time, goes to all these conferences, does all this stuff. But actually, he was the most believable of, uh, the sort of group because of the way he was doing most of his answers. Some of the times he goofed up and overstepped his, his sort of way he's been presenting himself is just like, I'm just a pilot who saw a thing that I can't explain, not saying what it is. He accidentally did answer a few questions when they were like, well, do you think they could be here probing our defenses? And he's like, oh yeah, absolutely. Like, oh, what do you mean they? What do you mean probing defenses? What are you talking? So he's overstepped even a couple times in that, but I thought it was interesting. The most believable thing that he said was that he thought it looked, he said, he described it as, uh, I'm going to mess up how they, uh, how long it was, uh, but he described the size of it and that he recognized that because that's the same size as the planes that he's trained to look for. Right. Well, if you're up there and you do a great job of this and beautiful movies that they don't want you to see of explaining how difficult it is for a pilot to identify a size of an object that they're unfamiliar, that they're even familiar with, perhaps, but unfamiliar with, but the fact that he has signed it the exact dimensions is something that he's used to seeing then apparently dictates everything about that interaction. How far away it is when he moves around it, how quickly it seems to be moving. If he's got a set size that he thinks it is, and it's something much smaller, it would seem to be moving very radically. Yeah. And remember that the duration of the event was approximately five seconds and he's drawn an awful lot of conclusions from those five seconds. And also everything that he talks about with the size of the object being, you know, a football field or whatever it was, it can't be reconciled with the numbers that are shown on his screen. His actual assessment was, I think it's something in the range of however long a jet plane is, like 40 feet or something like that. I don't even know. But that was the thing. It was like, if it is a balloon or something of that size, like a weather balloon or something, but he thinks it's the size immediately of the thing he's used to identifying, then it's going to act weird when flying around it. The GoFast video, when I first saw that, it had no audio and it was a news clip that was sort of teasing it out to talk about it later. And I was like, wow, that really like, oh my gosh, I've been wrong all these years. They've seen a UFO. They've got it on it. They've tracked it. That thing looks crazy, whatever that is, maybe. When you hear the audio though, I didn't even need to wait for all of the trigonometry to sort of tell that it was, you know, a balloon at 12,000 feet, moving at 40 miles an hour. And it's the parallax effect of filming from an airplane, you know, 12,000 feet above it or whatever it was. But the audio where the pilots are like, oh, hey, got it. What did you use? Well, do you manually track it? No, I used the auto tracking and actually picked it up. Wow. Okay. That's interesting. And then, whoo-hoo! Look at that thing go. Like, if I'm the pilot, I'm like, I mean, there's an object moving at hyper speed off the coast to California, I'm calling NORAD. I'm like getting online. Like, we got an incoming. Like, this is an emergency situation. Not, whoo-hoo. Oh, hey, what did you do? You know, the conversation was so casual that you could tell the pilots weren't overly alarmed by this in any way. So even in there, even in the evidence that's being produced out there, I think there's quite a bit of sort of self-debunking. Well, the interesting thing to me about those three Navy videos is once you understand what's happening in each of them, you realize these are these are such commonplace events that this has got to happen every time anyone goes up. Any time any pilot goes up and there is any other aircraft at all visible to his FLIR camera, you're going to have essentially this same event is going to be repeated. And so I was wondering, you know, why did they, why did anyone save these three videos? The one we have an answer for is the Gimbal video because the video file was, as it came from the Navy was actually named Gimbal. Gimbal.WMV, right? So my personal guess is that somebody saved and made that video as a demonstration of what happens when the camera reaches the end of its range and it has to Gimbal so that it can continue pivoting around. That's my guess. But as far as the other three, I don't even know why those videos would be saved because there is just, they're not even unremarkable. They're too unremarkable to even be called unremarkable. So one of them I think was like recorded off of an iPhone 4 or something like this. Like it was like the pilot had recorded their screen. It wasn't that it wasn't actually the Navy's recording on one, at least the first version of it that came out. And I think that's when the Navy maybe released it. Honestly, I hadn't heard that, but I also don't, now that you mentioned it, I don't know anything about the history of how each one of those videos was saved off of the screen. Yeah, one was, I think, you know, the Navy released it after the footage that was taken from within the cockpit had been released first. I think that's the scenario that went down. Okay. But yeah, so the videos come out, they get thoroughly debunked, which means that the video evidence is not evidence of anything unusual. So we're left then with the eyewitness accounts. As the still the only, I guess, the most credible sounding, because once you have video evidence and you can tell it's not something supernatural, that it's something moving at 40 miles an hour, along with the jet stream at 12,000 feet, that's no longer convincing anybody that we're being visited from, but and also the leak to it being other plants. Has anybody looked at the fact that all these pilots describing things that seem like they might be, you know, spherical objects? Now that we know that there's Chinese spy balloons occasionally flying over the United States, like maybe we should have been reporting this, actually. And maybe if you did see a balloon, like the GoFast video, that could have been a Chinese spy balloon. Instead, they made a UFO conspiracy out of it instead of actually reporting it and then trying to get that thing shot down. If we're considering the possibility that these are alien spaceships from other star systems, why are we not considering the possibility that your neighbor, who is a psychic, use their powers to imprint this onto the video? Where did we make the leap from, here's a video I don't understand, to aliens from another star system? That's an astonishing leap of logic to me. Yeah. And some of it must just be that actually, isn't it, doesn't Fox Mulder from X-Files have a poster that says I want to believe? Very good. You're the pop culture god. Yeah. That's probably a big part of it. You know, when you are, when you have this belief that this thing is happening and this thing exists, any scrap that seems to provide you with evidence of that reaffirms that idea and is probably very tempting to suspend all doubt and just believe, I suppose. So that, it's going to bring me real quick to, to NASA's reluctant role. Okay. All right. And first I want to, I want to stop letting NASA administrators speak in public. I don't know, you know, from the James Webb Space Telescope roll out to every conference they've, or committee meeting they had held publicly with the UAP things recently. NASA administrators are terrible communicators. They, they just, they're stuck somewhere between trying to do this knockoff impression of Carl Sagan. And like, it's like, you're not that person. Like Carl Sagan was a very special individual who had a pose at his fingertips for describing the universe using similar sounding words in a monotone. Unintensive points is not the same. They need to, they need to stop. But then also like poor NASA, you know, poor NASA, here's, here's, here's a new mandate. We need you to, we need you to look into this, you know? Yeah. I just imagine them just groaning when they got that. It's like, are you frigging kidding me? It's not like you don't have anything better to do. Okay. Fund us separately for it. More than happy, I guess. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the guys, the, the, the, the people who are on this particular NASA panel, they seem to be from very diverse backgrounds. I don't know most, most, most of them I didn't know a number of names I knew one or two of them were actually people I'd met and they're very cool, but they don't work for NASA, the ones that I knew. So yeah, some, somehow somebody threw together a budget and said, I guess and pay some people to do this and handle this for us. So hopefully it wasn't taking time away from regular NASA employees who did have better things to do. I see someone mentioned in the comments about the NASA administrators being retired astronauts. Charles Bolden was very good at public communication. I know he was not very popular as a NASA administrator. Bridenstein was, I don't think Bridenstein had been an astronaut, but he's someone that I think he was, I believe he was a naval aviator. I could be wrong about that. But he was someone who surprised everyone with being a very good NASA administrator. And I kind of wish he'd stuck around. He was a big surprise. The current guy though, Bill Nelson, is a disaster every which way you take it. Not only is he bad at communicating, but he's probably the worst NASA administrator in my opinion that we've ever had just in terms of waste and pork and putting this ludicrous, useless SLS program above all else. Anyway, I digress. Well, no, you don't have to because he opened up his, felt like a two hour speech. I think it was seven minutes. And in talking about what NASA's role was going to be in UAPs, start off by talking about the current Mars mission, how we're collecting tubes of rock samples from the mouth of a river on Mars, which I get what he, when he got calling it the mouth of a river, but still like you're entering into the fray of conspiracy theory world in broaching this subject. And you're going to start off talking about rivers on Mars. And then, and then NASA has the brilliant idea, you know what, we're going to make everything transparent and scientific and make transparency and open information the goal of this. And we're going to have a secret administrator of this program who we're not going to tell you who it is. And it's going to be a secret. And they're doing it because nobody wants the job. Nobody wants to get the blowback from the crazies. And so they're not identifying who's heading up the new UAP research department, which is going to do nothing but feed the beast. And it's going to come out because they're going to figure out who it is anyway. So it's pointless. And it's just shows a completely tone depth to the situation. What I think they should have done is gone up and had had it not administrators and not this assembled group of people who really might believe that some of this could be possible in some level. And, you know, we're going to look into it with open eyes, you know, and see where it takes us. They should have just had some hardcore research. This is where the scientists come at me explain the 10 different reasons why it's not UFO. And here's what we've debunked and we've never found any evidence. And none of what the reports are credible. And here's why they aren't credible. And here's how science actually works. Something I want a sort of cold to the facts analytical front to NASA so that I believe that the missions are worth the money. Because like say if if we if we are having this SLS slush funds stuff going on, like if I can see why if these administrators are acting behind the scenes like they're talking in front of the camera, then I'm lost confidence in what NASA should be doing. Maybe I'm too harsh on NASA administrators. But they really need they really need somebody else. The NASA administrator is a difficult job. There's no doubt about it. I mean, it's that that's a damned if you do damned if you don't job. But I think that if there was one thing the NASA administrator should do, it's to put the science at the top. And that's where we are not right now. You know, they they have this thing called the oh gosh, I hope I'm the Decadal Planetary Science Survey. I'm getting that wrong. But I hope someone who knows what I'm talking about knows it right. I'm not googling right now. But that's basically what all of the scientists want to be prioritized. They do it every 10 years. That's why it's called the Decadal Survey. And guess what is not ever been on that Decadal Survey. It's anything pertaining to the SLS or a moon base or the Artemis moon mission, which all of that is purely a justification for the SLS rocket. And the SLS rocket exists only as a pork project to keep budget flowing to legacy shuttle contractors, literally wasted money. It's a program that has no no potential to do anything useful. If you want to have the Artemis system fine, you can do it with SpaceX hardware. You don't need the SLS. But scientists say we don't even need the Artemis system. It's a you know, rah, rah, rah, wave the flag America to the moon. Not that that's a bad thing, but I wouldn't prioritize it ahead of projects like let's get out to Titan, and let's get out to Europa, and let's drill down through the ice, and let's find if there's life in these oceans here in the solar system. That's what that's what the scientists want. Anyway, I digress again. I get off on tangents. No, it's fine. You know, it's also the shift, I think that took place in NASA over the years from NASA astronauts being jet pilots, test pilots or military folks to more scientists. The right state. Yeah, we've moved into the we've moved into the field where playing golf on the moon isn't really going to do much for us. Anyway, it's cool though. I mean, you're right, though. I mean, the whole thing with the hot shot pilot, we've done that. And we can do it again if we need to, but we just don't need to anymore. It's been done. And by the way, our scientists have figured out they can do their job from home. They can send a robot that can do all of the stuff there. They don't have to go up and, you know, multi-billion dollar firecracker to try to get there. So here's the question though. So we've talked about the NASA's got this group and there was these panels in front of Congress. And there's these collections of people who are starting to look at this in different angles. Where is your invite? Where is your invite to the panels to the to the these research committees? Where's the skeptics who have been looking at this stuff for years and years and years that can shortcut, like you mentioned, they all they needed to do is a Google search. And it seems like they if you were sitting down there is the fourth person, I don't know which side you want to be on one side or the other that panel that could have said, oh, well, that was already figured out and, you know, many years ago and this, you know, you're saying in my tune. Yeah. No, I mean, this is something that this is something that I talked about in my UFO movie was what is what is the problem with these panels and how could these panels be done better? And now when I made the movie, this was this this was finished, it finished shooting. I don't know, December or so. And then it was in post production. So the most recent UFO hearings hadn't happened yet when I made the movie. But that doesn't matter because there is no nothing new to the science in there. But we get we get a we get a vision into who are they putting on these panels. And it is not people who should be on the panels. The examples that I talked about in the movie were when Scott pray Scott Bray, who was the head of the all domain anomaly resolution office, I believe, he was talking about, they've got a metallurgist, and they've got a meteorologist, and they've got a physicist. And, okay, let's see, what are those people good at? What does it mean? What does a metallurgist do? He like analyzes metal. Okay, so here's a here's a piece of metal. Actually, this is a from a Robotech little guy that I've got on my desk here. But okay, so here's a piece of metal that we can analyze to sell if it came from another planet. Okay, we don't have that. We do not have any metal that needs to be analyzed. We've got blurry videos. We're jumping way too far ahead by putting a metallurgist on the panel. We need people who can tell us about blurry videos. And honest to God, I'm not advocating this, but you could get a bigfoot hunter would be better to have on one of these panels than a metallurgist. The thing that I advocated for two two main things that I really advocated for. First of all, UFO skeptics, people who have been writing books about UFOs for 50 years, and who have been debunking UFO cases, and pointing out why this was actually Venus and why that was actually Venus. Now granted, that's something that that suggestion is something that a lot of UFO fans would react to with hostility. Because they say, Oh, the debunkers, we don't want their opinion. They they made up their minds before they ever got here. Okay, but if you want your panel to actually be objective and to consider all perspectives, then at a minimum, include the people who have been doing this exact job for their entire career. We don't have a single UFO skeptic on any of these panels, who would have been able to get rid of these UFO videos in two seconds. And that never even would have been a thing after 2017. And there's still a huge thing, because there are still no UFO skeptics on the panel. And the other thing that I advocated for was was a someone from the NTSB, basically a crash an air crash investigator, because they understand the things that fool pilots. Yeah. And that also would have made all three of these UFO videos from the Navy non starters in 2017, because the things that fool pilots are myriad. And people sitting at their desks don't understand what those are, but NTSB investigators do. So those are two critical inclusions that these UFO panels should have on them. Yeah. And then we maybe that would also give us insight into why so many UFOs crash. Because somebody put together like, actually, if you add up all the reports of crashed UFOs, they crash at a higher rate than commercial aircraft, like much higher. That's true. Several hundreds fold higher. I haven't considered that, but that's a good point. They do. Yes. They're just terrible, terrible. But maybe they could use some of that NTSB info that's like, oh, so we're misidentifying these planes as much smaller than we thought they were. Okay. Oh, your plan is only how big? No wonder we keep running into it. The difference is we can go to an aircraft site and we can find bits of metal, but so far, nothing from any of these UFO crash sites. But I think I thought that was a great point from the film, but also like the skeptic community is actually the only community that's actually been researching UFOs because there's those who are pushing forward narratives that UFOs exist and they stop at, here's an eyewitness report. Now I've told it to you, all done. But the skeptics actually are the ones who go through, figure out what time of year it was, which direction was this, what else is going on in that area. There's a great example that you have in the movie, which is, I think here's the first sort of debunked UFO story that I remember hearing, but I thought you did a much better job of it. And it's actually of a verified UFO sighting. What does that mean? It means it was an actual event and they were able to, it wasn't something somebody made up. It's verified in that they discovered the UFO. And that was the, oh, I can't remember the name of it now. It was the British military base or is it US military base? Rindlesham. And so what I mean by a verified UFO is that it was an unidentified object and then it was verified what it was. They discovered what the UFO was eventually, which was a lighthouse that had a red light through the fog and it seemed to be hovering like a red light in the forest sort of glowing and it got reported by a bunch of military members. The thing that I'd never heard before, I don't know if I knew that there was audio recording of it or not, but there was an audio recording of the witnesses being interviewed by military police or something. And that was also like, here's real evidence that they actually, military actually reported it, and in this audio, you can hear them seeing it again because they look, there it is, kind of a thing. The way you handled that in the film was something I hadn't seen before and I thought that was really well done. Thank you. And I don't know if you want to tell that story, if we should just leave that as a teaser for everybody go and see the UFO movie, they don't want you to see. That's, I was going to tell it until you suggested that. So now I'm not going to, we're going to leave it as a teaser. I would leave that as a teaser because it's my favorite, it's one of my favorite parts in there because it was a story that I thought that I knew, but it had a twist to it that you illustrate brilliantly there that I hadn't been aware of that really, really kind of brings it home. So in that too, in the title, they, who is the they that you have in mind? So I'll say a couple of things about the title. First of all, it sounds like a silly stupid title that makes the movie lose credibility right off the bat. But I mean, how do you title a movie about the UFO phenomenon, right? And now I had a whole bunch of people, some of whom I see are in the comments right now, who were focus grouping and workshopping titles for me. We had a whole long list of titles. We went through all these rounds of surveys and voting and what's a good title and somebody through the UFO movie they don't want you to see onto the list as a joke, right? As a joke. And instantly it led the voting and it led the voting ever since. And I'm starting to think, look guys, obviously I'm not going to call the movie that we need something real here. It occurred to me that we're all talking about that title. We've been workshopping titles for two weeks and this is the one we're all talking about. It's something people remember. And that's a quality you can't buy in a movie title. So I finally decided, you know what? Hell with it. Let's go with that. If it makes the movie appeal to some people who are, you know, fairly far on the UFO conspiracy theory spectrum and they watch the movie because of the title, that's great. All the better. Anyway, who is they? It's not purely tongue-in-cheek because if you look at what's popular on television right now on the pseudoscience and pseudo-history networks, it's all of this UFO programming. It's ancient aliens. It's skinwalker ranch. It's unidentified this or that. These are shows that are popular because viewers don't have great science literacy. If viewers had better science literacy, ancient aliens' viewership would go into the toilet. So there actually is an element out there, particularly in Hollywood, who does not want you to have better science literacy about these topics. So when we say, this is the UFO movie they don't want you to see, this is a movie that teaches astronomy using the public interest in UFOs as a springboard. And when it educates people from that perspective, it makes them less of a good target audience. It makes them worse red meat, if you will, for any of these UFO shows like ancient aliens, etc., etc. So the title actually does make sense. And so I've made peace with it and I'm happy with it. Yeah, that was actually my take on it too. When you first see it today, it's like, oh, the deep state, the government, the Illuminati don't want you to know about this. And at the end, you realize, oh no, it's talking about the grifters, the people who are propagating this sort of non-scientific nonsense. Although I have come to some level of peace with ancient aliens. I haven't really watched much of it because it's utter nonsense. But I get that in my desire to make a movie and my jealousy and animosity towards anyone who actually has. If you've got picked up for, like say they did this as a goof in a short, and they got three or four episodes picked up, okay, we did our thing. Now the network's like, yeah, we need you to produce 12 of these a year, 20 of these a year. Now, I might have actually thought I had a good, you know, story about like, oh, there's this weird thing about how they built the pyramids, like it's unexplained. But now I got to come up with one every week. So of course, you're going to have to stretch crudility to the just utterly breaking point every week, because you have a contract now to come up with nonsense on a weekly basis. And I think that's what people forget. It's not like, hey, we discovered this thing and we have to publish. We have all these experts together and we have to publish on this because this is important information. It's we've been contracted to do 20 episodes. So we have a writing team that's back there furiously working out how to make something mysterious out of mundane archaeology. Okay, let me ask you a question. How many years has this week in science been going? Oh, how many, how many years? How many years? Depending on the way, how you do the math, depending on the initial is over 20. And how many times have you had to stretch crudility to fill one of those episodes? Oh, maybe once. Zero. Okay. I've been doing the Skeptoid podcast for 17 years. The 17th anniversary is coming up in two episodes. That'll be 900 and something shows. I have had to make something up or exaggerate things zero times. Yeah, it is very, very, very, very, very possible to cover these subjects from a good science perspective and from a good storytelling perspective, especially if you've got a giant staff of people and frigging history channels budget behind you. So I have no sympathy for them. I have zero sympathy for them from that perspective. I do not agree that you have to stretch crudility. I say that it's easy and cheap. It's the dark side that's, you know, more seductive, whatever it is, that I cannot give them a pass for that. Do you have that same level of stretching crudility when watching science fiction? Like, oh, well, wait a second, you know, if they're on different planets, their communication can't be real time. They've got to have at least an eight minute to two hour delay, depending on how far the planets are. Or like, you know, like, if you go in knowing that this is science fiction, that they're doing storytelling, you know, we don't look at people aren't going, oh gosh, did you see the last Fast and Furious? Yeah, they kept the physics all wrong. Like, ours don't do that. Gravity doesn't operate that. Like, are they being held to too high of a standard because they're addressing actual science and not just messing up the science and telling their story? I have no problem with suspending disbelief. And I can enjoy science fiction whatever it is. If it's a good story, I don't care if it gets fake gravity, magical gravity, magical space communication. Those don't bother me in the slightest. I'm very happy to enjoy good fiction. But also, I mean, what I do for a living and... Oh, your audio just got out there. You did it. Maybe a cable came loose? Oh, I accidentally clicked the mute button. I guess I was just clicking around aggressively on the screen. What did I say? I was saying, what I do for a living and what you guys do as well is finding ways to make reality into good entertainment without cutting any corners at all. And to the degree that we're able to, making it entertaining and weaving it into a good story. To the degree that we're able to. We're both very small teams. We don't have a huge budget behind us. We don't have a staff of writers throwing ideas and filling in all of the space. And yet, we're still able to do it. Yeah. I'm glad you said that thing about suspending disbelief for science fiction. Does that even brings me to the second part of the show? Because I think we're in the second half. I think we're supposed to take a break. Do you need a break? I don't, but if there's supposed to be a break, I'm not supposed to break. We say something. Oh, you got to like the channel. You got to follow and subscribe. I usually tune out. So I don't really know what Kiki does in the middle. I go get a cup of coffee or refresh. So you're a skeptic and a critical thinker. I'm different. I'm wired differently. I'm not as much of a skeptic. I tend to believe everything I hear, but I still maintain a bit of a critical eye. So I think you're a more normal person. That's okay. That's a merit. Yeah. Well, I do some science journalism writing. So the way I've realized that I'm approaching things is I'm suspending all disbelief. I'm not questioning anything about, I'm assuming this is a well vetted research study that this is curated information that's been through a scientific process. There's an institution behind it. There's reputational, you know, online for the researchers doing it. They're presenting it. Either it's been peer reviewed or it's going to be. And so I'm just sort of retelling their story without as much jargon. Although sometimes I find something maintaining that critical eye, the data is wrong. The data doesn't match their conclusion. They come to a conclusion in this, but their data is saying actually something that they also presented is saying something very different. So if we apply that sort of approach where we have a skeptic who's a critical thinker and somebody who's willing to speculate as a critical thinker, but maybe less skeptically, if we suspend all disbelief and take eyewitness accounts as the evidence, where would that lead? That would lead to an enormous can of worms. If the criterion is that verbal reports are to be equated with inerrant literal accounts, I mean, what's not true then. This is what people are listening to. This is what they're using as their evidence because I'm convinced that everybody is a critical thinker and on some level could be a scientist. Oh yeah, it's a spectrum and everyone is somewhere on the spectrum, sure. But I believe that there are really intelligent people out there who, for whatever reason, are driving a truck and instead of delving into the molecular interactions of COVID virus versus our immune system, but are still able to make connections between things. Yes. Here's, I'll start to talk. The first thing, if I'm believing all of these reports, there's almost you have to give the whole backstory of life. The first thing that jumps out is that in almost all of the classic descriptions, Roswell, Barney and Betty Hill, Travis Walton, all of these accounts, one thing that's consistent is the description of the beings, the aliens. You don't need an autopsy. Lay out any of these on a table. Invite an anthropologist. They'll walk in and say, hominin. There's one planet where hominins are known to exist and that is the earth. Even if you took the 15 to 20 billion planets, which I think almost all of them will have life because it's just chemistry and physics. You have to get up beyond bacterial life to a complex life to intelligent complex life to a scientifically intelligent complex life to then where we would still need to go to get to interstellar travel. And then on top of all of those thresholds of probability, you're going to throw in, oh, and they have to be hominins. Sure. That to me is the one that says it's not aliens. I think that is an excellent point. I had heard it put quite that way before, but yeah, no, I agree with you completely. When you consider all of the possible forms that life could take, why would they happen to be tetrapods? And that's in believing the eyewitness account. Even if you say I'm going to suspend all doubt and believe what they're saying, what they're saying is hominins, which is earth. Now, there is something else that is near and dear to me in the reports. There are a lot of reports of, how do you say, a prostate exam and collection of biological materials. The people seem to be either put to sleep or sort of in a daze sedated during these events. They usually are picked up someplace secluded away from the rest of humans. This behavior from the alien perspective sounds very familiar, actually. It sounds like what scientists do when they're collecting specimens from animals. You get one that's sort of away from the rest, you put it to sleep, and then you sample biologically, so you can take that back to the lab because you don't need the being back at the whole animal. You can look at the microbiome. So what are hominins doing, looking at the microbiome of other hominins? They're scientists. That's who it has to be. That would make sense. I mean, if, you know, we have one data point for what aliens, intelligent alien astronauts would do, and that one data point is ourselves. It's what have we done when we've gone to other planets? If you look at what we're doing on Mars, we haven't been there ourselves, but we've sent proxies as the much less energy expensive option. But what are they doing? They're doing all kinds of little science experiments. They're drilling into rocks and looking for things. They're doing little gas chromatographic experiments, and they're trying to learn everything that they can. So there are, there's lots of different reasons that one race would choose to visit an alien planet if they could. But one of those reasons is why we would do it, which would be to run all those science experiments. So, you know, if, if we put ourselves into the position of aliens visiting Earth, I'm not saying we'd do anal probes. Well, microbiome, microbiome, from the biological science world, you will learn more about an organism through its, through its microbiome than you will, then with the months of observation. Sure. But I mean, would you even be ready for that fire hose of data? I mean, just give me a skin sample from, from, from the little frog that we find on the planet. I don't need its microbiome yet. I'll, I'll look at that tomorrow. Let me have that too, you know, it might have gotten a nice good, it might just be the thing that's remembered for some reason. If my tricorder can store all the data, then I'll take a shot of it with my tricorder. But yeah. So, I mean, so if we believe now all the reports, we now have hominins who are conducting science. And I think you've made this point before too that they're not here for, they wouldn't be here for interstellar domination, because they haven't destroyed anything. And they wouldn't be here to like teach us all the secrets of the universe because they haven't made that kind of contact either. Well, let me, let me, I don't, not to interrupt, but let me clarify. I don't mean that they wouldn't be doing that, because some of them might. All I mean is that we don't appear to have been visited yet by any who would do either of those two things. To do either. Because nobody has destroyed us and nobody has jumped out on the White House lawn. Not saying they wouldn't, just saying we don't appear to have been visited. Anyway, that's, I interrupt. Go ahead. So no, no, no, you're not interrupting. I'm going to keep talking too much. So that's why you need to interrupt. That's why I brought plenty of whiskey. So go for it. Perfect. So here's the thing, if it's hominins, and they're doing science, and we believe all the reports that we don't have film of, of UFOs, of advanced technology, because all the video evidence that we have debunks them being advanced technology. So we still have to go through the eyewitness accounts, because we don't even have any of the myriad of crash sites to investigate. How would a hominin from Earth, who's doing science and has advanced technology, where would that come from? Where would I don't follow the question? Where would it come? Where would what which come from? Where would. So if there's a hominin that is from the Earth, that's doing science with an advanced technology, where is it? Like what country is it in? Is this, is this from the descriptions? I can kind of go like, it kind of looks like a home on a leddy maybe. You know, maybe, maybe there's an ancient archaic hominin that moved underground, and then an imperfected air travel technology. Because this is also this, this is an interesting factoid that's out there is that the vast majority of reports of UFOs. This is why NASA, I think NASA pointed this out. And they're like, why should we study this are below commercial aircraft in terms of altitude. They're actually all very, very low flying things. They're not high orbiting. And it around the out, you know, they're not up there with the satellites looking down at us. They always seem to be lower than commercial aircraft. Which seems like home on a leddy would be if they're living underground, full time developing advanced technologies. That would, to me, that's the part that would be the tough one. To perfect air travel while living underground. No, you're right. I mean, if we were to plan a mission to another planet, I mean, let's say we found a planet that we could get to. That in itself is an enormous leap. But let's just say that let's say, okay, here's a planet, and we're going to send a craft to it. Manned or unmanned, either one, what capabilities are we going to put? Now, you know, right away, we've got all of our different science agencies are going to be bickering with one another for, okay, I want one gram of weight for this. And someone says, I need two grams of weight for this science experiment. And then someone says, I want the whole thing to be able to fly down into the atmosphere, perform aerodynamically, shoot down the whatever it's going to do, land, conduct experiments, take off again, fly around some more. That guy, it's going to be really hard for that guy to get his experiment onto the spacecraft. But there's going to be a lot of competing interests. It's just such an absurdly high energy proposition to do anything more than, I mean, even assuming orbit is a high energy proposition, because you have to slow down to get into that orbit. And that takes fuel. And if you plan to return, that's going to take a massive amount of fuel to reaccelerate and gain escape velocity. There's so much to think about when you when you're saying, oh, that UFO must be a spaceship from another planet. You're making so many massive, massive assumptions. Most people don't realize the scope of the assumptions they're making with that small suggestion. Yeah. And it doesn't seem to to create a pause, either. If you're describing the size of the galaxy and how far away something, how much time it takes to travel at the speed of light to get to different stars, like the one that we talked about where they might have seen a hint of your elevated methane carbon, the methyl sulfides, 120 light years away. That doesn't mean even that it would take us 120 years to get there, because we don't have speed of light travel. Yeah. It means that it would take us a two, I didn't do the math on this one, but the 100 generations spacecraft where because of limited space and resources, once people got to a certain age, they get pushed out the airlock to maintain a stable population. And in 2000 years, they hopefully they still remember that they were on a spaceship and that there was a mission. I've got a funny story about that. So I took my daughter to a conference called SETICON 2 put on by the SETI Institute. What year was this? Probably about 2012, give or take. It was the last time they had this conference. And I think my daughter was probably about 13 or 14 at the time. And I was taking her around. I was introducing her to people. She'd always wanted to meet Mae Jemison, the astronaut. I introduced her to Mae Jemison. And Mae Jemison was, I'm not sure if she still does this, but she was on the board of a project called the 100 year Starship Project, which was just as it sounds, and I sort of a think tank for, let's have some kind of a plan if there was to be some kind of a cataclysm that was going to destroy the earth. And we needed to build a multi-generational Starship to preserve a core of humanity. Now that is a reasonable thing for someone to be thinking of because we might find out tomorrow, hey, here's an asteroid that's going to destroy the earth in five years. So now you're going to have five years to put a 100 year Starship plan into effect. And so this, is this, is this, this would, the Starship wouldn't be, would it be going to a different star or would it just be hanging out in orbit until the planet kind of came back a little bit? Now that's a great question. And I don't, I don't know the answer, but I presume that the 100 year Starship Project people had an answer to that, or maybe they had various contingencies. I don't know. But regardless, they had a panel and sitting on the panel was, May Jemison was on the panel, Robert Picardo, who was the hologram doctor from Star Trek, and a member of the Planetary Society. He was on the panel. I think Bill Nye was on the panel. I think Seth Shostak was on the panel. And there was probably two or three other people as well. And so here's a line of people of standing at the microphone to ask questions about the 100 year Starship. And a lot of them are like, oh, what are you going to do for a food source? How are you going to give water for that many people? Whatever their questions were. And here comes my daughter. She's standing in line. I love her for this because it was the most thing, most awesome thing ever. So she gets up to the microphone and the people on the panel are saying, oh, here's the little kid. She's going to ask us some cute question. That'll be, that'll be cute. But let's hear what she has to say. And she says, is it morally right to give birth to a generation of people who are going to have no say in their future? And the panel is like stumped. And I guess it's awesome that the little kid is able to stump the panel. Well, they didn't want to tell her. It's like, well, actually that's already happened. We've been doing that for a while actually. It's called society. No matter where you are, there you are. No choice. Anyway, I love that. That's my 100 year starship anecdote. So my conclusion from all the hominin and the science and everything, is that they would have to be future humans, future humans coming back in their own timeline to collect microbiome for a future where they've used too many antibiotics. So you're writing a science fiction story now. And this is, this is the it's bigger than that. It's bigger than that. Because why would they come back in this time zone? Because traveling back in your own timeline must be very dangerous. It's like back to the future. You know, you could disappear from the photograph at any given moment, if you step on the wrong bug. Because the only place you can travel, if you and I were to go and travel back in time and safely not affect our future, we could go to one place that I know of, which is Pompeii, after the last boat has left, but before the volcano has gone. So I'm not writing a science fiction book. I'm creating a end of the world cult. See, the aliens are here because they're future humans and they're safe to be here because the world's about to end for most of humanity. And so that's why it's safe for them to be here. And it's going to be in five to 10 years because I've been told that's gives you enough urgency to recruit for an end of the world cult, but not but enough time to also fleece the flock. It's that sweet spot. So it's going to be 10 years. The world's going to end. That's why the UFOs are here. They're future humans who aren't going to be affected by our future. So let me ask you a question. And this is a serious question. Yeah. You're from Denmark, right? Oh, not from. I'm from Davis, California, but I'm living here. You're Denmarkian. Yeah. So therefore, you must know Bob. Therefore, I'm trying to remember who's I do know Bob. I know Bob very well. Was it the Iceman? Yeah, who was found in the glaciers of and the Alps. That's why I'm asking you because Denmark is nowhere near the Alps. So do they have a microbiome from him? Oh, that's a really good question. And does this, does this put your whole thesis? Does it make it moot? Because if microbiomes can be preserved in these long preserved, I'm not sure even how old he is. Well, see the problem, the problem with going back there though is it's too far away from my end of the world prediction. See that, but you go back too far in time and you mess up your future timeline. Anybody you talk to has this butterfly effect of then the future events turn out differently and you don't exist. Oh, that's no good. That's no good. You can't have that, Brian. But if you go, if you're at Pompeii right before the volcano, then you're safe. Then you can talk to everybody. They might as well, I don't know why they didn't go and get the microbiome samples there. They were probably much more diverse than they would be now. But my point though is that I'm going to start a cult predicting the end of the world. And if you send me enough money, we may be able to convince future humans to take you out of the danger zone. But also that like there's so many, there's so many other creative imaginings you could make out of even the eye witness reports. Even if you took them literally, you could go in a tremendous number of different directions with them, that it's curious that it's only aliens. And the only reason I can think that it's only aliens in their conclusions is that these are all just primed ideas. That seeing something unusual creates that leap because they've been primed to believe that that's the most reticent possibility. I think if instead of UFO lore, there was future human time traveling lore, then every time we saw something like that, we go, oh, it must be the future humans. Like even you could switch it out with ghost stories. You could be, oh, wait, did you hear that door shut? Yeah, it must have been a future human visiting. Like you could just replace almost the entire canon of UFOs or ghosts with something else. None of it actually ties to the conclusion of aliens. And that's what I find fascinating about the whole thing is that there's no reason. Like it's almost the meme for the ancient aliens, guys. It's aliens. Only because you're saying that. No, you're right. I mean, that goes back to what I was saying with a projection from your psychic neighbor. How did we get to aliens? And why is it that of all of the other billions of directions we're going to go, if we have no rules now, if special relativity isn't a thing, and there's no rules, and we can just make up anything, why isn't aliens? Why isn't it leprechauns? Why isn't it the people who live inside the hollow earth? It's just one of these silly, silly leaps of logic. Well, it's really silly because also you talk about it pretty well in the movie actually. The vastness of space, the amount of of distance and time required to travel places, and the amount of the age of the universe, meaning that even with, even if you make it through all those probability filters. Life, I think, is the lowest bar. I say life is on 100% of Earth-like planets, and according to that, the J-West and even an unearth-like planet may have life. I think life is probably on its most basic form on every one of these Earth-like planets. Again, chemistry and physics, it may have started a hundred times on this planet. We only know of one because once something is there, it fills all the bio-niches, and when life starts and do tomorrow on planet Earth somewhere, it's just food for a microbe. It's gone. It could still be happening. That part's not that to be out of bounds, but we need to get into all the other filters, and then it's a hominid too. Okay, fine. Well, I'll tell you one other thing. I went to an astrobiology conference once, and I don't know how common astrobiology conferences are, if these are things that happen every year somewhere, but number one, I've never felt so out of my depth in my life. This is a huge conference. I think it was at Arizona State University. I think it was 2017, 2018, somewhere around in there, but the rooms were huge, and I was amazed how many astrobiologists there are in all of these conference rooms, and the number of things that these people had thought of and were prepared for, and I'm talking about different spectra to look for. You remember the Horta from Star Trek? Okay, that's one form. That was like silicon-based life. There's a thousand others, not a thousand, but there's plenty of others, and people have thought about what all of those possible spectra would look like, and they have considered so many questions and so many possible forms of life. I was blown away, and when I say I'm out of my depth, it was because they were talking about really technical issues with analyzing spectra and things like this that was so far above me. But I remember in one of the breakout rooms, they did a poll, and they just asked, hey, that's exactly what you were talking about just now. How many people think that life is on almost everything that's round and is floating in space? There's some kind of a planet. How many people think it's on virtually everyone in some form? And again, we're talking about pretty broad range for what is life and what form can life take. And there was a lot of hands that went up. So you're not alone when you say that. But also, I should point out how many of them think that it's virtually zero, and it's on 0.001%, and a lot of hands went up there too, and everywhere in between. So I mean, this is an early, early science. I mean, we are infants in the science of astrobiology. We've been making strides in discovering how the basic building blocks form from natural events. And that's the part that makes me think that the chemistry and physics is the same throughout the universe. I think there's life out there. But again, my definition might be a giant virus. It might be RNA life on all of these planets, and bacteria is very rare even. One of the things I chose, I never seen your Christmas tree analogy. I hadn't really seen that one. No, I claim that as my personal contribution to the field. Okay, I really liked that. That was cool. That again is another one of those thresholds where, maybe you should describe it because I'll do a terrible job, but a different life coming and going on planets. So everyone understands the distance problem. We say, oh, it's too hard to get from one star system to another because of relativity and all the issues and the energy requirements and everything. So the distance problem is one that we're all familiar with, with why it's difficult for alien civilizations to visit one another. But another problem that a lot of people fail to consider is the time problem. And this is what I call the Christmas tree problem. If you imagine a Christmas tree filled with strings of blinking lights, and so there's blinking lights all throughout the body of the Christmas tree, and lights are on, lights are off, lights are on, lights are off. And the duration of each light represents the lifespan of a technological civilization. And by technological civilization, we're talking about one that's capable of understanding and communicating with life on other worlds. So if the distance problem is one, that means it's hard to go from one blinking light to another blinking light, and maybe it's not even going to be on anymore by the time you get there. There could have been a gamma ray burst, a pandemic, a war, the sun could have gone nova. There's a million things, a planet killer asteroid. There's a million things that can terminate a technological civilization. We'll die one day somehow. We don't know how. But so you have to have two of these blinking lights turn on that are right next to each other. And they have to be on at exactly the same moment for these two civilizations to have any hope of finding out about each other and then communicating with each other. And so the time problem, the Christmas tree problem, makes the whole issue so much worse and so much less likely. And as I say in the film, that's a problem that we hate because we would love to visit with our neighbors somehow. And in that scenario too, it occurred to me, our right just came on. Like just, just came on. Not even a century ago. Yeah. So we're not even, we're not going to even be visible to anything other than maybe this methane super planet that we found in Leo. That one might see us if they, if their light is on. There's, there's, there's nothing. I don't think there's, so this is, this is something we might disagree about. I don't think there's anything special about the earth that would gain attention from an interstellar traveling, yeah. Relativity bending, time warp traveling, interstellar traveling civilization. I don't see, our technology won't have reached that far. They won't have a technological signal. They won't have the full light on. They won't have a technosignature. I mean, when you say our light came on, our technosignature light just came on. But our biosignature light, you know, going all the way back past the dinosaurs and beyond that, you know, for, for two billion years, there's been life on earth. And we've had biosignatures for a long time. You know, a significant, still a single digit percentage of the life of the universe, but, but a fair period of time. And I know that we as humans, and as human astrobiologists, we would be equally fascinated with any planet that has biosignatures, whether it has technosignatures or not. We'd be just as happy to find alien bacteria as we would be, you know, alien heavy metal bands. That's that whole story is about the possibility of bacteria shoots on an exoplanet in Leo. That's the most of what that story could be, right? So, I don't know. James Webb is a fine telescope, but it's not really good enough to do great exoplanetary spectrum analysis. We really need to wait until the next generation of space telescopes to be able to really characterize exoplanetary spectra. So, so here's the really, here's the really down and dirty part, because I, I think that the life signature on earth won't be that special. I think my, my opinion is that that's going to be on 15, 20 billion planets throughout, throughout the galaxy. I'd love for that to be true. So, but here's the thing. The more likely, right, that it is that life exists in our galaxy, the less likely that an intelligent interstellar traveling society civilization would see ours as special and worth visiting. That's the, that's the, that's the weird ratio is that the greater the chances that they're out there, the less likely we're going to be visible within the sea of other planets that have life. And if they find two or three other lights on somewhere, well, your light isn't on, buddy, your technological light isn't on. There for all we can tell nobody's home. We've already, we actually already have dinosaurs in our zoo anyway. I tell you what, I, I love the optimism of your version of the universe. I would love for you to be right, because that would be an amazing universe to live in. It would be, but we'd never get that, but they wouldn't come and visit us is the problem then. So, you know, I, I kind of like yours better where we're so obvious that of course this is where the, an advanced civilization would one day come and visit. And unfortunately, probably check us out. The one thing that I refuse to subscribe to is the very fashionable notion that humans are so horrible and evil and don't care about the environment and don't care about each other that aliens would not want to visit us for that reason. That is a, that is a pop culture fad, sort of a self-loathing anti-human fad that I've never subscribed to and, and don't now. And I don't believe that that's a decision-making basis that we would use when we decide to go visit some alien planet that we were able to discover had a techno signature. Oh, do we, do we think they're worthy social justice-wise of visiting? I think our scientists would want to know everything about them regardless of that. Yeah, although I do think though, they, if, if we've been monitoring a planet for a while, you know, a future version of us who's become peaceful because we've, I think you have to become a somewhat peaceful civilization to achieve, you know, that level of technological ability to travel there, but it's just an assumption. Yeah. All right, and they see, you know, they see over the course of observing a bunch of big nuclear explosions taking place on the surface of the planet that was actually caused by inhabitants of that planet. You know, why are they nuking themselves? And like, I don't know, I think if we were observing something like this, we might have a little hesitation. And if we did visit them, we might try to be elusive, non-confrontational, and maybe even try to keep it a secret. I don't think we'd have much choice. I mean, that's, that's the lower energy option anyway. If you're going to observe another planet, doing it in a way without landing and announcing yourself is the lower energy option and the easier option. And would, I mean, that's probably the one we're going to have no choice but to use in any event. So I think that if we saw a nuclear war happening on some other planet, I think our sociologists would be fascinated. I think our historians would be fascinated. And I know our biologists and everyone would be fascinated. I don't think for an instant that we decide, oh, we do not, we choose not to learn about that planet. I don't believe that. There's also, I don't know why it reminded me of our conversation today about this. I think it was an X minus one radio, sci-fi radio from like the 50s. There's an episode where there's aliens are communicating with Earth and that they are, they're on their way. And that, you know, they have advanced technology and they're going to be taking over things and prepare for their arrival. And all of humanity is getting more and more nervous and it's, you know, supposed to land, the UFO is supposed to land at this airport space. And it, and it does. But I think this, the scenario is that it, it had the scale of our planet completely wrong and it gets swallowed by a golden retriever. They just, they just didn't realize the scale of the humans on this planet, maybe, or the life forms on this planet from a far away didn't look as big. I love that. I feel like I've used up all of your agreed time. I did, I did tease ahead of time that I wanted to share with you the greatest time travel experiment of all time. Because if, if we get to this point where we're doing speed of light travel or faster than speed of light traveling, want to get to that star while it's still on, want to get to the other Christmas tree when it's that light, when it's done, we would need some sort of time traveling ability or faster than speed of light, which puts you back in time. We'd need something like this, but you don't have to worry about all the grandfather paradoxes or the, what was it, what was the, yeah, yeah, yeah. All that said, you can, before any of that ripple effect of the past, before you, anybody's disappearing from a photograph, the first time travel experiment is going to be a big red button. And when you press that button, it's going to send a particle from your emitter to the detector on the wall, light will go on, it'll go boop. And it's, it's set up experimentally, we're going to test this out to go back in time two seconds. That's all you need to do. A particle of light going back in time two seconds. So when you hit the button, as I'm about to do now, it's, oh, wait a second. Do I still press the button? Does it know that it, because I didn't press it yet and it still went boop, right? There's this determinant, we can test all determinism, whether the, whether the, the past exists, but the future does not yet. We can test all of these things with a time traveling device of two seconds. That's all we need. And so all the, whenever somebody's talking about time traveling, everything else, the first experiment is actually the toughest. Whether or not you still have to press that big red button to fire your emitter after you've heard it go off. I thought about it too much. I am thankful to be too stupid and too impatient for philosophy. I get stuck in it. I get stuck in it because I'm that, I'm that guy I was talking about who should be having a research project in front of them. But instead I spent the day watching too much YouTube videos. And so now I'm trying to figure out the universe from my couch. Well, I'd sure rather be that guy. Brian, I think we've had a wonderful conversation. We've, we've used up the amount of time. I was, I was promised that I could steal you away. Is there anything though that you would like to talk about, discuss or bring up here towards the end of the show? Well, if I could tell people where to go see my movie, I would love to be able to do that. Have we not mentioned the movie yet? Okay, I'm sorry. Let's, let's start this over. Okay. Uh, my next guest is Brian Dunning, who is a producer and director and star of a new movie called the UFO movie. They don't want you to see. Yay. Where, where can we find this, this fine cinema cinematic portrayal of the movies website is the UFO dot movie. And until I bought that domain, I didn't know that dot movie was a thing, but it is the UFO dot movie. And it's, uh, it's available for rental right now. And it is imminently going to be available on Amazon prime, to be Apple TV and probably a whole bunch of little minor streaming services that nobody's ever heard of. But it's not yet, right? But you can rent it and enjoy it right now on, on Vimeo. The current streaming options are always available at the UFO dot movie or search the streaming services for the UFO movie. They don't want you to see. Also now, now I'm also becoming jealous and just make a move. Justin, no, no, it's not the movie. It's now it's the voice. You got that good radio voice on top of it. It's so unfair. I can't, I can't advise you on that one. That was just locker genetics or something or getting old. It wasn't this good when I was young. I started like this. Okay. I got a question for you after the after show. It has nothing to do with anything we've talked about today. Uh, uh, what am I doing? I got to do a rundown. So there's something at the end of the show are usually tuned out. Oh, here it is. It's all listened for me in this rundown. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. Is that, is that really what we say every week? No, so, so I, I hope you enjoyed the show. Kiki gave me a run of show document and I'm following it down here with you because I'm supposed to jump in and say some stuff as well. So don't, don't, don't make me get lost. I'm going to change that. I'm going to change that. Oh, no, I don't know where to come in. Well, no, the rest of it will be the same then. Uh, I'm going to say, uh, thank you for listening. We know you enjoyed the show and that feels like more, more confident. I hope I agree. We know you enjoyed. Yeah, we know you enjoyed the show. That's why you're paying attention. Shout out to Fada for his help with social media and show notes. Gord for demanding the chat room ID for for recording the show. Rachel for your amazing assistance and for editing out all my arms. Um, and I'd like to thank our Patreon sponsors for their generous support. And I have a list of the sponsors right here. Thank you patrons, Arthur Kepler, Craig Potts, Mary Goetz. I haven't had chance to pronounce these right. So go ahead. I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing it again. Teresa Smith, Richard Badge, Bob Cowles, Ken Northcote, Rick Loveman, George Chorus, Pierre Belazar, but John Ratnoswamy, Carl Tarnfield, Chris Wozniak, Begards, yeah. Jonathan Stiles, AKA Don Stilow, Ali Coffin, Ragon, Shoebrew, Shoebrew, Sarah Forfar, Don Mundis, P-I-G, the notorious, Stefan Albaron, Darrell Mazurak pronounced Maishak. Oh, it says the pronunciation in here. Darrell Maishak, Stu Pollock, Andrew Swanson, Fred S-104, Sky Luke, Paul, Ronevich, Kevin Reardon, Noodles, Jack, Brian Carrington, David E. Youngblood, Sean, Clarence Lamb, John McKee, Greg Riley, Mark Hasenflow, Steve Leishman, AKA Zima. This is actually, Kiki makes this look really easy. She does it in a micro machine, but Ken Hayes, Howard Tan, Christopher Wrapping, Richard, Brendan Minnish, Johnny Gridley, Remi Day, Gee Burton, Lattimore, Flying Out, Christopher Dreyer, Adion, Greg Briggs, John Atwood, Rudy Garcia, Dave Wilkinson, Rodney Lewis, Paul, Rick Ramis, Phillip Shane, Kurt Larson, Craig Landon, Sue Doster, Jason Olds, there's more. David Neighbor, Eric Knapp, E-O, Adam Mission, David Parachan, Aaron Luthan, Steve DeBell, Bob Calder, Margie, Paul, Dee, Disney, David, Simile, Patrick, Pecoraro, and as always, the amazing Tony Steele. Wow, that's quite a list. Oh my goodness. Can I jump in and can I thank those people too? I mean people forget that people who do this kind of content production on a weekly basis year after year after year after year, we really do depend on you and we're only able to do it because of you. So that was an amazing list. I am humbled to be in the presence of such a list. Thank you all so much for supporting this Week in Science. Thank you for that. Thank you. This is also, by the way, the reason that when we skipped the commercial and the middle of the show, the commercial break, we didn't tick off a sponsor because we don't use them. We just have, we just have, it's our, we're like the PBS of podcasting. We're all, anyway, thank you for the support on Patreon. If you are interested in supporting us, you can find information at Patreon.com slash This Week in Science. On next week's show, we will be back Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific time, broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels. And again, for the show that I'm part of, which is on at Thursday, 5 a.m. Central European time. Look out for either of those shows. What's Central European time? Central European time. That's where Denmark is. Okay. I'll buy that. Thursday, 5 a.m. Central European time. Oh, you know what? It might actually be 8 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday. It might actually be, is there just one show? I'll have to look into it. That's when I came on 8 p.m. Pacific. Oh, you didn't, you're not 5 a.m. Central European time on this? Maybe I am, for all I know. Well, wait a second. Okay. So maybe there is only one show. I've been convinced that we've been doing two shows a week because the girls are doing it on Wednesday and I'm doing the show again on Thursday. But now I get it. Wait, does that mean the planet's round? Wait a second. That can't be right. I don't look out the window. It doesn't look round. Anyway, you're on Q72D right now. Yeah. Broadcasting live from our Facebook channels and from twist.org slash live. Want to listen to us as a podcast? Just search for This Week in Science, wherever podcasts are found. And if you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe to. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org, where you can sign up for a newsletter, maybe. We do so many shows for a newsletter. We actually, this is the problem. We got to get rid of the newsletter. We do too many episodes. There's no like downtime between shows where you could do a newsletter between the, we just bring it up on the next show. Hey man, I do a newsletter. Do you? I do. In fact, you can contact us directly if you don't want the newsletter. In fact, and when I say us, I mean them. You can contact Justin and Kiki. Kirsten at This Week in Science. Does she say Kirsten? Kirsten. She's Kirsten. I call her Kiki, so I could be wrong. Yeah, I've always gone with Kiki too. At twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBaz at twist.org. Just put twist in the subject lines so your email doesn't get spam filtered into oblivion or simply deleted. You can also try to hit us up on the social platform formerly known as Twitter, where we are at Twoscience, at Dr. Kiki, at Jackson Fly, and at Blair's Menagerie. I probably won't see it in this, for the minute, at some point I'm going to be like, oh, come on, just try it again, but I haven't been on co-op. If there's a topic though you would like us to cover or address, suggestion for an interview, a hike, who that comes in tonight, please let us know. And we'll be back here next week, or they will. And because I'm probably fired after doing a bad job this week, but we hope they'll join us slash them again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember it's all in your head. Robots with a simple device, I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand. And all it'll cost you is a couple of grasses coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say, I use the scientific method. This week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science, I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be me. How long do we have to stand, or does this just go forever? It goes forever, it's on a loop. Are we still on or does someone click stop? We are still, we are still live, okay. We are still live, so don't say anything as you don't want to record it for all of the humanity today here forever. Hey, thank you, Brian. That was a wonderful conversation. I feel like I talked way too much and didn't get enough out of you. Oh, you totally did. But that's fine. I was born to expect that. This is what happened. So the show used to be in the evening for me. Like I was in the West Coast, the APM Pacific time. And I always thought it was APM Central European time. I would hit, I would hit the show, you know, after some maybe a day of work even, very relaxed. Having a, maybe having a beverage along with the show. Now the show starts at 5 AM for me. And so I've got like three cups of coffee in me just to wake up from the day before, before hitting the show. And so I can't stop talking. It's the worst. The people are still tuning in. Well, for me, my show is only like 12 to 15 minutes. So that makes it really, really easy. Oh, really? Now how often are you doing that 12 to 15 minutes? Well, it's, it's, it's a weekly show, but it takes a full week of research and writing. Because it's, it's, it's fairly content dense and it's all original material. So it's, it is a hell of a lot of work. The show is short, but it's only because that's about as much as you can do for original content and, you know, in a weeks of research. Yeah, it is stuff. So I only started doing writing, writing up science new stuff recently, where I've got an editor, they send me a paper basically. And then I've got to convert that into, into a story in a very timely amount. Very timely way. That's, it's actually like, it's one thing to come onto the show and have launching points from research that you've read. It's another thing to actually have to recraft everything into a paper. And it takes longer than it takes me to do the show to do a single article. Which is always, I don't know. Absolutely. Absolutely. For sure. Yeah. And just to do original content that's based on things that are out through the world, of course, it takes a bunch of time. We have the luxury on the show of having content producers at all of the major universities and research institutions creating all of our content. Oh, you do. I don't like it on that train. That we then just get to talk about and discuss on the show. But we have, we have actually pretty much all of the world's scientists working for us 24-7 producing content for the show that we can just sort of walk in at the last moment and take it from here. We'll just take it from here. If you can share that secret with me, I'd be most grateful. It's actually pretty easy. You just go to the, you just get on these lists where they, actually the only place I don't take honestly stories from is the media list. They have all these media lists where they want you to talk to a researcher has done something. I've never taken anything off of any of those to talk to. Because they usually are, they usually are part of a book promotion or a product promotion as opposed to just a really interesting research thing. But I don't have, oh, do I, I don't have a way to log us off. So anytime you want to escape, I think you've got the escape button. I don't, I can, I can leave, I can leave here, but I thought you said you had some stuff you wanted to talk about offline after we're done with being live here. Because we're still live. We're still live, but there's a way to go unlive. This is unlive and still we can talk for a minute. That's where we just, we just both hit stop cam. And that way only our voices are live and it continues going out on. Is this show, I don't think the show can end. I don't have a stop button. I don't know how to end this. Well, if one of us has to call Kiki in her hotel, then that's not going to be me because she'd be angry. Oh, she's, she's well asleep right now. Okay. Well, I can do the countdown again. And that won't help anything. Now people are mocking us in the, Oh, I wish, I wish I had known that this was there. We could have done the, we could have done the background in the, anyway, there's a Christmas tree. I'm, I'm fiddling around with that. Okay. Well, here's what, here's the other thing we could do. We could, we could both just leave studio. Oh, because Kiki did start. We could do that. That's why we can't stop. Or if, if whatever you want to talk about, if it might be of general public interest, we could continue it here. And that would be like a secret Easter egg on the internet for people to find. No, I wanted to ask, oh gosh, where did I go? I'm coming back. No, no, I wanted to ask you if you, if you, because you mentioned Bob, because that was for Davis. I wanted to know if you just know Bob or if you just all the, No, I was, I was referencing the old joke. Oh, you're from Canada. You must know Steve. Oh, that's hilarious. And Bob was the most Denmarkian name I could think of. Oh, I think, because I thought it was in reference to Davis. No, there's no, no Davis reference. Because there's a, no, what's, what's wild is, there's a reporter there who's a, I know quite well named Bob Dunning. So throughout Bob, I was like, wait a second, maybe, like, I'm like, it's the same last name, sure. But like, I didn't know you guys knew him though, or related maybe or something. Like anyway, that's what you have a question named Brian Dunning, same as me, who is, I don't believe is there any more, but he used to be in Davis, I think. That was, that was just a lucky guess for, for, for that. It was amazing that you actually didn't know Bob. Yes. No, I know Bob Dunning. I know Bob Dunning very, very well. And so that's why it was, okay. All right. Now it all makes sense. That was just, that was just chance. I think, have we reached the point where we just both hit leave studio? I think so. Hey, thank you so much again for doing this on really short notice. I know the whole team appreciates it. And I know the audience, I saw in the comments that there was somebody who's, who listens to both podcasts. It was really enjoying seeing the crossover show. Oh, fun. That's very cool. So what happened since, since Kiki started the stream? And both you and I came in as like, you know, guests. Yes. I guess, I suppose. If we both hang up, will the live stream switch to just like video of her asleep in her hotel room? Ooh, that's worth trying. Well, now I'm afraid to turn it off. Because what if that is what happened? How about the chat room? Does the chat room have anything they want to talk about? We could take questions. I can keep going about the process of making this movie. So you're, you, you produce this yourself. How do you, how does that even work? Where you, you, from what I've heard in front of you, you were saying, you have put this all together yourself. This is an in-house project. It wasn't like you had an outside film crew come in and do this. This was. Well, we've done it, we've done it both ways. We've hired production companies to do past movie projects. And this one was one that I thought would be fun to do in a minimalist kind of way. And I'm never going to do that again. That's a, that's a, that's a poor idea. Don't do that. At a minimum, at a minimum, work with a director and a producer who has done a feature film before. And a line producer is an absolutely essential person. They are worth their weight in gold. And I will never again work without a line producer. So someone who, you know, literally does everything, they get the, they figure out who you need to deal with for locations. They make sure you have the right insurance policies for each location. They get the permits. They send everyone who's involved a call sheet every morning at five. So they've got it in their email. You need to be here and do this and this and this. And here's all your instructions for everything. All of that is, there's so much more than you can ever imagine that needs to go into that. So yeah, an experienced producer is key. You must have an experienced, at a minimum, an experienced sound guy and an experienced camera person at every location. And I tried to do with less than I should have with that. And I regretted it every time. And by the end, I was hiring people wherever I needed to. So is the doctor, because you're doing a documentary style film, you're interviewing people, you're interviewing somebody in an airplane at some point, I believe. So that the audio there, yeah, you have to get it right the first time. He's like, it's like in a in a story. So you have to have people, you can have, you can mess up the audio and then post somebody's like, saying the words that they, the lines that they said before over and like, you can try to match it up, I guess. But now I've shot in an airplane before and I knew some of the problems that you face. You know, and when you're in an airplane, this was a small plane, you know, a little propeller plane. This is a skyhawk. And you've got the, everyone's wearing headsets and you got a boom mic, right? And it's got to be like the mics right up on your lips. So what you do to record audio is you patch into that system. So that system is always, always, always glitchy in my experience. When you record directly off of the intercom system, there is no external auxiliary output. So what you have to do is you have to like put a Y patch and you have to plug into someone's quarter inch jack with a Y and you plug their headphone into that and you record your, plug your audio recorder into that. And it might work and it might not. Now I've done this enough times before to know that there's always problems. So here's what we did. When you're taking off in a small plane, the first thing you do is you, you go to the run up, the run up area, which is the place where you park the plane with the engine running. You run the engine up, you know, to full speed. You make sure the oil pressure is okay and you're not going to die if you take off. And you do that several times. So we went there, ran up the engine to get it loud and we just talked. So, okay, hey, I'm testing. I'm talking. Let's record. I'm testing. And then we would turn the plane off so that I could play the audio back and make sure that it recorded correctly. And it didn't. So I fidget, fidget. I had, you know, I had backups. I had other plugs, other cables and things. And so we tried it again, run it up, you know, get the engine to full throttle, record, hey, I'm talking, I'm talking, turn the plane off, play the audio back, nothing. We did this half a dozen times. And then the guy said, Chris, the pilot, he said, okay, we're out of battery now. We've been turning the plane off and playing so many times. We can do this one more time, but we cannot do it two more times. And here's the thing I've never tried before. He said, here's a new GoPro, which we're not going to use. And it's got this weird USB plug, which I've never tried before, but we'll try this USB plug and plug that into the audio recorder and see if it works. And so we started that going. He cranked the engine and we said, we've got to go. We have no choice. We can't turn the plane off and crank it again. And so we took off and flew and we did the interview and we're up in the air for 45 minutes doing everything. And I have no idea if it's recorded audio or not. And when we landed, of course, the first thing we did was, okay, turn the plane off, let's play it back. And we had all the audio. That worked. And that was just a shot in the dark. And every time you do a shoot at every location, there is some problem like that. There's just always a glitch. There's always some new problem. And so, yeah, never, never, never, never, never do a film shoot without an experienced sound person and an experienced camera person. Yeah, I mean, it always fascinates me the old way of making movies when they actually used film is that they would go out and do all this shooting. But if there was a problem with the camera or the lighting or something like that, they wouldn't know until like a day or two later when all the cameras fell off. Yeah, so that might have to even go back to a whole location. So then how do you go from there to, was there interest in a movie that involved you? The problem with independent film production right now is that the industry is very dynamic. It changes rapidly. It changes over the course of every year. Whether there are any distribution opportunities for an independent filmmaker. And the thing is that the, you know, it used to be, you know, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Movie Studios. Well, for a long time, Netflix has been a much larger movie studios than any of those. So the majors are now Netflix and Amazon Prime and things like this. And they have been pushing back hard against the independent film filmmakers, making it harder and harder and harder for indie filmmakers to be able to have a business at all. If you spend a million dollars producing an independent film, making 10,000 of that back is a huge success. Almost everything is going to be a loss these days for independent filmmakers. And now I'm in an unusually fortunate position in that as an educational non-profit, we have donors, we have grantors and things like this. And if I say here's our next project, we'd like you to fund this, we can generally get it funded. And we, as a non-profit, we're able to be mission supported and not profit driven. So we don't have to make money back on the movie. As long as we had the money up front to make the movie, that's what our grantors and supporters wanted to make happen. And they did. And so that's great. This movie is not going to make anyone any money. Don't think I'm making a million dollars off of this movie. If five figures in income ever comes back, that'll be a huge success. That's just not the reality anymore. As far as what other independent filmmakers are doing, and I'm part of a lot of these groups on Facebook and Reddit and things like this, I don't know how about most of them are getting by. I really don't. It is very, very, very difficult right now as an independent filmmaker. And you just heard me say, you have to have a sound guy. You have to have a camera person. You have to have a producer. I have people know what they're doing. You can't just go out there with your iPhone and think, hey, it's so easy now. I can edit myself on my computer, and I can have a ring light, and here's my iPhone. That's not the reality. All right, I'll give up on the dream then. That was my point. Yeah, it is very tough right now, very, very tough. But it's also just, I would think that there would be a little bit more room for the independence now than there was before because there's so many opportunities and places to put content. Well, but there are, but that can make money. But they can make money now. Yeah, I think it's apparently can make money. Even your favorite YouTube channels, they basically operate like small film crews. There are people who have cameras. There are people who are holding lights and microphones, and they are being paid. And if you've got that money in your pocket, great. Or if you're lucky to have a million subscribers and a million views in your videos, and you're maybe covering your costs, then you're lucky too. But I don't mean to paint an unnecessarily grim picture, but it is very hard right now. It really is. It is something that has always amazed me when you look at some of the other podcasts that are for science communication or commentary shows that I feel like they're kind of doing the same general format as Swiss. But then at the end, they have a list of credits of people, writers, producers, camera, tech, all these things. I'm like, oh wait, that's why their show looks so much shinier than our show. Yeah. That's why they've got the cool graphics. I get it. Yeah. There's a whole bunch of people involved. Yeah. And I mean, there are there are also people. I know a number of who are friends of mine who are just very extraordinarily talented and who can make a film completely on their own and have it look as good as a studio film just with a hell of a lot of work and talent that you and I don't have and that 99.9% of the people don't have. They can get away with it, but that's a very, very, very rare set of skills to be able to do everything that well. It takes a lot of experience. Yeah. I worked in one of my first jobs was in the film industry. Sorry. It was working out. But no, that was that was one of those things that too that was a real eye-opening how many people are really involved in it. I remember the sound guy got fired after like a week because the audio was just terrible and they had to replace him with a new sound guy. Wow, that's rough. That's big. That is rough. That is rough, but it also meant that like a week of the whole group of people doing stuff, they're like, we can do voiceovers for like a lot of this and stuff, but we're going to have to we're going to have to bring actors back and what they decided to try to do at first was they were just going to recreate the scenes and do the audio, but it didn't work. Anyway, it went through like a bunch of a couple of iterations, but they had to dub stuff. That's what I was saying. You can go if you mess up audio on a fiction piece, you can go in to a sound studio, watch the video, and say the words along with it because you have the lines written down. I can't even imagine trying to control audio outside. Just just forget the airplane that you got into and did all that just even outside like the winds blowing. Oh, we're not going to get audio today. Thank you. Now, if you watch the UFO movie and you saw it, so the main set that I was on was outdoors. We were at the Owens Valley radio observatory, which is outdoors and I'm sitting there in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night. And I'm not kidding. I have never worked on any project. I'm a podcaster. I do sound editing for a living. That's what I do. I have never had sound that sounded as good as that did. It was astonishingly good sound. And the reason was because the guy was using like a $5,000 microphone. It was this big boom mic that was this huge and it was just a super, super good equipment that I would never have been able to afford on my own. Yeah, that kind of equipment is not is sort of out of the range of most podcasters for sure. What do you do your audio editing on? Well, I finally got out of the business, but I did everything in Logic Pro. But once the Skeptoid podcast moved to PRX, we had to start mastering everything to public radio, to NPR broadcast standards. And so we at that point, we had to hire an audio engineer. And so we have a full-time engineer on staff. So I'm no longer able to edit the podcast, but even he works in Logic Pro. Okay, I think I got some version of Logic Pro a long time ago and was trying to work with it and I couldn't figure it out. I like the Adobe Suite stuff. I can't remember what the... Audition? Is it Audition? Is that the one that's in there? But they grabbed, it used to be CoolEdit Pro. That was this ancient software that became a freeware shareware audio editing or was originally an audio shareware. I used for free for decades. And then it got bought by Adobe. And I'm sure they've added a new feature or two. But now you have to pay like $100 a month or something to get access to it. And I've still got on one of my old PCs, I've still got this old CoolEdit Pro software that was free shareware that does everything that Adobe does. Yeah, well, this is another advantage to being a nonprofit is that we get a very inexpensive license to the full Adobe Creative Suite for the whole company and also for the Apple Pro apps. There's a lot of advantages to being a nonprofit. There's some disadvantages too, like we all make no money and we'll be poor for the rest of our lives. But it's fulfilling. We do what we love and because we believe it's important and it's a way of life that we enjoy. So there's things that we didn't talk about. We didn't talk about the Mexican mummies or statues. What did we waste all of our time on? If we didn't talk about the basics. You gotta interrupt me. This is what the girls do on the show. They cut me off and Kiki does this. Really? Yeah, she does that. No way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll keep going. That's, wow. That's like total mansplaining at you. She does. She'll have to sometimes interrupt me. Otherwise nobody else would stop. I remind you that we're still live and that she's watching this right now. Yeah, yeah, she's not watching this. She's not going to go back and watch the after show. No, no, no, no. She's not going to see any of this part. She's still on blogs in her hotel room. What did you think about the first thing I thought was that this was like, this is an old story. Talk about like, you were talking about the how Grush was bringing back the Italian UFOs. This is the Atacama Desert, you know, fetal mummy story being brought back. It's not that one, but yeah. This same guy has been displaying these same, it's not ridiculous because it's actually very horrific. He was, the first time I know that he did this was in 2015. He had an illegal grave robber literally stealing mummified corpses of Peruvian children. And there's nothing funny about that. I mean, you cannot make jokes about that. And they were mutilating the corpses. They were clipping off the fingers. They were cutting off the skulls and replacing the skulls with llama skulls and then coating the whole thing in some kind of white goo. And then these latest mummies, I don't believe they're the same ones as those. I haven't heard if they're still actual Peruvian children, but I mean, just at a glance, you can tell they're obviously the same gaffe made by the same person. Well, the version of the story I've heard thus far is that the Peruvian government is asking for them because he had told the story that he had received them, that they were from Peru, that he received them from his won't be revealed source. And Peruvian government was like, well, if that came from us, it needs to come back. But not that they're confirming what mummies they would be or anything, or that they're even mummies. But I think they're just following like, here's like, based on his history, I guess. Here's this guy doing it again. They did provide apparently some scientific evidence that was found to contain carbon-14s, earth-like carbons. And I think it was, Seyfried is having come from two different mummies, but I don't know. In, I think it was 2017, where the same guy, I'm not sure about the year now, the same guy went into some museum, I don't recall off the top of my head sitting here right now, what museum it was, but he took like iPhone pictures of an actual mummy, just on display in the museum. And then he presented to the press as, hey, I went to area 51 or at Roswell, and these are the alien bodies that the government's hiding in Roswell. Before, of course, the internet matched, did Google photo match or whatever, and recognized, no, these are from a museum. And this is the kind of thing that we were talking about earlier during the show when we should have been talking about this, where the congressional members did no due diligence, because if they had simply Googled this fucker's name, can I say that? Because he deserves it. They're in the aftershelher, yeah, it's fine. If they had Googled this guy's name, this fine person's name, they would have found how just nakedly corrupt and dishonest this guy is to the point that he's not even remotely good at lying and making up of fake bodies. He's terrible at it. He's so easy to catch. And yet this Mexican UFO Congress or whatever it is, and one of the three pilots, Ryan Graves, one of the three pilots from the American UFO hearing in July went down and presented at this same conference alongside this guy. But yeah, you can't be guilt by association in the conference. No, you can't because on his Twitter timeline, he tweeted that he looked the guy up and was aware of this guy and still decided to participate in this guy's event. So I do not give him a pass in any remote way, shape or form. So this is also something that we should have talked about in the show. I wish you'd interrupted more. We were still in that. What do you think is the emphasis? Because it's usually when you're talking about what politicians decide to do, you do that. Is it evil or stupid sort of weighing? Is it as simple as because now so many people believe in UFOs that looking to, like you're looking into it, is ingratiating you with a certain political move? Is it that simple? There's probably some of that too, but I always fall back on Hanlon's razor, which is never a tribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or by incompetence. And I am so stunned at what people in our Congress do sometimes that you have to consider incompetence is a major factor. Well, incompetence was very much on display during that hearing, but then it makes me think, what if it is intelligence? Because then maybe the next thing is like, how many people believe in ghosts? Oh, it's even more than 50% of people believe in ghosts? As your next Congressperson, I'm going to look into the ghost problem. Get to the bottom of all these ghosts. Now a lot of you have been writing to me and telling me about the ghost problem you've been having. And so I'm going to put up a special tax force, if elected, it'll stop ignoring the ghost issue. And in fact, I'm going to get, who do we get? We don't get NASA for ghosts. Who do we get? Get a different, we've got the Department of Energy is actually going to be heading up the investigation into ghost operations, as well as a subcommittee in HUD, because it's usually in people's houses. We just extrapolate what they're doing with the UFO thing. What else could we grab? I think Trump was doing this when he was talking about people having problems with their showers and toilets. And people are like, what is he talking about? I'm like, no, it's brilliant. Everybody's got a shower that they wish had a little bit more pressure. So now he's being like, I am going to fish things, the shower pressure that you're all complaining about. And people went, oh yeah, I don't care about all of the economy and the COVID and everything. What I care about is a big shower. Justin, I just want to raise a very important point. Of all of the countless podcast interviews and stuff that I've done, I don't recall a single case where the after show conversation wasn't better than the actual podcast. It's always that way on this show. It's almost always. The after show is usually when we're allowed to leave the script. Okay, so when I promote this on all my channels tomorrow, I'm going to tell everyone, be sure don't bother starting it until two hours in, until after the outro. That's when the good content starts. And make sure they watch the YouTube version, not the podcast version, the audio podcast or whatever. Because someone edits that, correct? Someone edits that, it gets replayed on radio stations or across the country. I mean, there's two radio stations, I think, but they're on different sides of the country. So that's all across the country? That's true. Across the country, all the way across the country. And it gets edited to take out all of the rambling parts. So if you've only listened to the audio version of This Week in Science, this is the first time we're meeting. Well, that person has my sympathy. Rachel, I'm sorry. Rachel has my sympathy. Oh wait, her name's not Rachel. Now I'm really sorry. Uh-oh. I messed up her, no. So I don't even know how we got onto the subject of, oh yeah, whether or not, whether the politicians are doing it out of some kind of rift. The other thing that strikes me too is, I feel like there's, and I don't quite understand it, a congressional distrust from one party of federal government and of military secrecy. Because one of the things that they keep seeming to want is to declassify and military exercise operation and military surveillance capability and military technology capabilities, which, I mean, yeah granted, I'm living in Denmark now, but hey, I still want the United States of America to be, you know, militarily have the secrets it needs to keep secret. Well, this promise of there being some treasure trove of alien evidence, that's why the UFologist crowd, the crowd that's always clamoring for disclosure and everything, that's their last bastion of hope, is that there is no evidence of alien visitation. So we're just going to hold out faith that there's secretly a classified treasure trove of actual evidence somewhere. There isn't. Ooh, it's a sort of like a God of the Gap, but with the aliens. It's not here, here, here, here. Where can't we look? Yeah, yeah. Let's say it's there. Okay. That's why when you look at these three Navy UFO videos, there's only image data, right? There's no radar. There's no corroborating radar data. So they have convinced themselves, and what they'll always say is, well, there is corroborating radar data that proves that it was a UFO, that it was an alien spaceship. It's just that we don't have that. It's in the secret classified treasure trove. So that's, you know, that's, yeah, just like it's a God of the Gaps. It's explaining one unknown with another unknown. Yeah, yeah. And there's, I mean, I get that mystery itself can be the main character of a narrative of a storytelling. There was a whole television show. I might have even been on the history channel or discovered one of those, where there were guys digging holes on an island with the idea that there was treasure or something buried under this island. And they were in the show every week, it'd be like, oh, we've found pieces of wood. Oak Island, yeah, yeah. And the show went on like for seasons where they were like, oh, what are we going to do? We're going to, we're going to dig another hole. That's what we do on this show. We didn't think we'd get picked up for three seasons of digging a hole on an island, but here we go. It's another season of digging a hole on an island. I've got an interesting story about that as well. Oh, please. There's nothing interesting about this show that I could tell. I mean, Oak Island was never a mystery. Any geologist in the area would tell you that was just a natural sinkhole. They're everywhere in this part of Canada. So the producers of the show presumably, you pray, you hope that they knew that. So that they have to be able to know that in order to plan what we're going to do. What are we going to do next week? Because we're not actually going to find that in gold, we have to invent some kind of drama. So I periodically get calls from producers making some TV show. And this was one where there's a cave in Mexico that a few crackpot authors in the 1900s believed aliens had stored some sort of laser crystal computer full of secret alien knowledge in this cave. And the problem is this cave is also a protected sanctuary for a type of bird. And scientists had been in this cave for decades. They've been in every inch of this cave. There is no secret hidden alien computer made of crystals and lasers in this cave. And this TV show had partnered up with the daughter of one of these authors, these crackpot authors. And they were preparing to go shoot a season of a show where they were going to explore the cave with the daughter and find the alien computer. And they were calling me, they were talking to, I guess, probably a number of people about being the skeptic. They always want to have a skeptic and a believer, right? And the daughter was the believer, and they were trying to get me to be the skeptic on the show. And I was trying to explain to the producer, I was telling him the history. And he said, you know, yeah, we know that. We know that there's nothing in the cave. And I said, so what are you going to point the cameras at? How are you going to make a TV show when you know that there is nothing in the cave? And all you can do is show the people, okay, this week we're going to walk 50 feet further into the cave. And I said, I'm not even going to do, I'm not remotely interested in doing this, you know, without knowing how are you going to do this? And how are you going to make a show that's a, some kind of a positive educational show, right? I don't need whatever their stupid minimum wage is to go be on some embarrassing ancient aliens TV show. I had no interest in that at all. And they, and the guy was at least honest with me. He said, we just, we just leave it a hanging mystery. We just say next week it probably is around the next corner. And next week we have to dive through this water filled tunnel and we probably will find something. And we're just going to do that. We just, that's how you, that's how you make a show. That's how you make it interesting. You just hang, leave the hanging promise of next week you'll find something. And then, and then after, after season one you find a map that shows you've been exploring the wrong cave all along. And the real cave is on the other mountain over there. And now next season we'll explore the right cave and then we'll get, we'll get, put the season behind you. We're going to get to the right cave next time. And then we'll walk 50 feet in at a time. That was the interesting thing about, about Oak Island is because back in the old days, back in the, God was it, I think it might have even gone back to the 1700s. Oak Island is in the, in the early days of people digging in this hole and finding nothing. They used a technique that was developed by gold miners in the 49ers who were seeking further investment in developing their mine. They hadn't found anything yet. So they would take some valuable gold ore. And when no one was looking, they'd dump it in and say, hey, look what we found. Let's go take this to the assay office and prove that there's very valuable ore in this mine. And so for Oak Island, they took a few lengths of gold chain. Someone, someone made a little tablet with some coded writing on it. And they found these items in the hole in order to entice investment. And the TV show is going off those as if those are legitimate discoveries that were found in the hole 200, 300 years ago. It's, it's just, it's, it's the same old tricks. So then a similar one is taking place, the skin walker ranch, which has a history that I don't quite understand. I know that it has been both, was a common thing talked about on the art bell show for weird things happening on this ranch out in the middle of nowhere, but that it was also got federal funding to be a UFO study site. But not that they were studying that site. But you know a little bit more about this skin walker ranch scenario, right? Yeah. Yeah. What you're talking about is not the current owners of the ranch, which is this guy, Brandon Fugel, who is the, who's making the current TV show, which I think is called the secret of skin walker ranch. He bought it from Robert Bigelow. I don't know, roughly 10 years ago, give or take. And Robert Bigelow is the guy you're talking about. If you remember the whole Pentagon, $22 million UFO investigation thing that was published in the New York Times in 2017. This $22 million went all to Robert Bigelow. It was a very incestuous relationship. Wait, wait, wait, wait a second. So this is, the Pentagon's going to investigate UFOs and they give this one individual $22 million to figure it out. Yeah. Can you still get that kind of gig? Apparently you can. Yeah, I mean, Robert Bigelow was friends with Harry Reid, who's now deceased, who was the Senator who made the whole thing go through. Democratic Senator from Nevada, who was a big believer in UFOs. A big believer in UFOs, along with Daniel Inouye from Hawaii, who's also now passed away. But so he was able to secure $22 million. Guess who the only bidder was? It was Robert Bigelow, who persuaded him to create the fund in the first place. So this $22 million went right to Robert Bigelow at his Skinwalker Ranch. The only deliverable that's known was one of Bigelow's employees who wrote a series of reports on like kind of science fiction. Here's how I think we could make a spaceship go faster than light. And the rest of it was just blown. It just went to Bigelow's friends and associates who set up a little office on Skinwalker Ranch. They called themselves the NIDS, the... Oh, fuck. I forget what it's called. Excuse me. Poop. I forget what it was called. Aftershow is fine. Aftershow. Something to Discovery Science. Something Institute for Discovery Science. And yeah, they just sit and looked at infrared cameras and looked for interdimensional bigfoots and shape-shifting characters. They were a bunch of ghost hunters, basically. It went to ghost hunting on Bigelow's Utah Ranch. That's where the $22 million in Pentagon UFO fund went. Yeah, because right, so it was... First, they were getting reports, collecting reports from the Pentagon or from... Yeah, so what happened was because of Bigelow's... The Pentagon didn't want to deal with it. Because of Bigelow's Pentagon connections with Harry Reid and presumably others, for some long period of time, the better part of a decade, any UFO reports, if you picked up the telephone and called the police and said, hey, I see a UFO. And the police were suddenly given a number to forward that to. And that was Bigelow's Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. They actually made themselves the national official... Repository of... Repository for UFO report. Phone call. So then, wow. So then they actually then have all the information required to build believable scenarios or scenarios that people might... Like, if they can find the thread across 10 or 20 years of people reporting UFOs, you can say, like, oh, a lot of them say it's triangle shape. That's a big hit. Oh, and a lot of them say it's had a red blinking light versus the green blinking light folks. And some of them say it's the size of a football field versus the size of a grape that somebody reported. And so they can kind of create then... Get a good idea of the diversity of what's being seen. But that money then... Because I didn't know that about the backstory of Skinwalker Ranch. I only knew it as the ghost stories that were being told on the art bell show of strange things being seen on the ranch, which wasn't why the money was spent there. Wasn't what the... So the idea that this was a Pentagon-funded research center had nothing to do with researching alien craft or back engineering any of this or have anything spooky going on. It was a bunch of people taking phone calls that the Pentagon didn't want to deal with. So look, I did a two-part podcast series breaking down the whole history of this group. Okay, we need a link to that because I think... I need to see that in some time. Well, I can tell you right now. Just go to Skeptoid.com and search for Rogues Gallery. And if you do that, then you'll see the link and you can post the link in your show notes or whatever it is that you do. But Skeptoid.com and search for Rogues Gallery. And you'll get the whole history of Bigelows and through the whole 2017 New York Times article and Lou Elizondo and all the way through the current day. It's very depressing. And who's the guy who was involved in the Arrow thing and he's doing all the interviews? He's like another one of the guys who's close with Grush. I think he's the guy... Lou Elizondo, I think you're talking about... Is that Elizondo? Is that him? He was in the Arrow program or whatever it was that was collecting the UFO data supposedly for the... Yeah, so after the $22 million ran out, Bigelow continued the program himself and he had one employee, which was this guy Lou Elizondo, who has been presented as the Pentagon's UFO guy. He ran the Pentagon's UFO program. No, he actually ran Bigelow's non-government affiliated UFO program. It is Lou Elizondo. Okay, this is the person I'm thinking of. I've never seen anybody who, within just a few phrases, has set off my bullshit detector harder. Oh my God. Not even saying anything that is credulous, but just his presentation before the camera, it comes across as... Here's a bullshitter ready to tell you this bullshit story about why it is you need a new radiator on your car. It's like, oh, you need to... No, yeah, it's a problem. It's really, it's a problem with your carburetors. This is a carburetor free car. The first time I saw a picture of Elizondo, I thought that's a guy I knew in high school who had no friends and so he just made shit up. Yeah. I feel like, honestly, oh my gosh, I'm so terrible with names. The pilot trainer who thinks he saw the UFO, Frazer? Fraver? Fraver? Fraver? Fraver or Graves, probably. No, it's Fraver. I get the sense from him that he also lacked friend. And the reason is whenever he's talking about anybody else, he's like, oh, we are great friends. We're wonderful friends. That's a great friend. I like hanging out with those guys. Like he's always like talking about how good a buddy is. Didn't want to do the UFO thing, but then of course he has new friends. I don't think he could resist it. I don't think he could turn it down. But Louis Elizondo just comes across. See, now I didn't even know that. I didn't know he was... Everybody should watch this. Apparently, Rogues Gallery. Is that what you call it? Yeah, it's a two-part podcast series. The UFO Rogues Gallery or something like that. It's basically the whole history of these people, literally from the 1960s through the present day, who have been the primary drivers behind today's UFO mythology. And that has fooled members of the United States Congress to the point of having all these UFO hearings. It's a travesty of embarrassment. I didn't even realize what you were telling me there, that this was part of the Bigelow's organization, and not specifically... I mean, even if it was a portion of the Pentagon, it wouldn't make him seem anymore like somebody who I would trust. Reporters and Congress people alike do not do any meaningful amount of due diligence. And maybe there's a reason. They don't need to. They get paid anyway. Yeah, I don't want to... Hey, if I go off against this guy, do I piss off 40% of people who believe in UFOs? Like, are they going to not vote for me for that? I'm telling you, we're going to fix the ghost problem. When this ticket gets through, we're going to fix the ghost problem. We're going to tell you the truth about the UFOs. The real truth. Not the truth that you're thinking of, but the other real truth, and a secret truth. And oh yeah, we're going to turn all of our military secrets over to our adversaries, so that there's transparency and government at last. We're going to do that too while we're at it. I think we need to wrap this up. We do. I was going to make one last comment. Go for it. As a skeptic, if you had to choose between a country that believes in conspiracy theories, like UFOs, or a nation of highly religious devotees, which would you choose? What's the difference? And on that note, that is perfect. This is the, this week in science after show. Very special guest host, Brian Dunning. We hope everybody out there stays lucky, because that's the most important thing in life. And then all the other stuff that goes with that. Shout out to Paul Disney in the comments there. All right. Getting near bedtime. Oh, he means we need to stretch it out. He means keep going. No, he doesn't mean we're not at bedtime. I have no idea what time it is. I feel so sorry for it. I just realized because it's now just morning here. I know. You're ready for your eggs and bacon. I'm ready for bed. Good night, everybody. I'm just going to hit leave studio. I have two and I have no idea if that's going to save or delete. The stream may just keep going forever without it. All right. Good night. Thank you all so much for having me. And he's gone. Finally, I can start talking about the real problem. Ants.