Michael Shermer with Sarah Scoles — They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers

before i introduce today's guest i want to tell you about our sponsor of our podcast the great courses plus this is the teaching companies the great courses which i've been listening to for decades they have thousands of professionally produced college courses or courses taught by college professors the best in the country and they they've introduced a app for your phone it's thegreatcoursesplus.com and so you just touch the app and you open up the course you want to listen to the one i just started this week is on understanding the old testament by professor robert d miller ii so um just to give you an idea of how it works you just touch on the lecture you want to listen to like number one is the old testament is literature number two is the genesis creation story i'm right now on uh chapter three lecture three what god intended for adam and eve oh boy this should be interesting any case this is great because you can skip around if i find one of the lectures boring i just skip to the next one uh you can do it on audio or video and all from your phone it's it's a terrific way to consume content particularly during social isolation during the pandemic it's a great way to become an autodidact so if you want to know more you can if you sign up through my podcast then you get um a free trial so go to thegreatcoursesplus.com salon that's thegreatcoursesplus.com slash salon and you get a free trial with free access to the entire library of all these hundreds and hundreds of courses and thousands of lectures so with that i'll introduce my next guest my guest today is sarah scholes her new book is they're already here ufo culture and why we see saucers now she doesn't think they're already here that is extraterrestrials but she's taking kind of a sociology or anthropology look at the ufo community her she wrote a previous book on jill tarter and the seti program and herself her background is in astronomy and physics so she is a science journalist a contributing writer at wired and a contributing editor at popular science her work has appeared in wired the atlantic slate smithsonian vice and the washington post scientific american popular science discover and the verge a former editor of astronomy magazine schools formerly worked at the national radio astronomy observatory the location of the first ever seti project and she's the author of making contact is her book about jill tarter anyway we had a super interesting wide ranging conversations of course about ufos and the ufo community and how they differ from the scientific or the seti community and what constitutes reliable evidence or reliable knowledge what it means to believe something i want to believe i don't want to have to believe i want to know these kinds of epistemological questions um then we get into kind of some deeper subjects toward the end on the difference between leading a happy life and a meaningful life this is in the context of her kind of reflections at the end of the book about what it meant when she lost her religion she was raised mormon and which is kind of a type of ufo religion in a way and uh you know how she uh has kind of made a sense of the world without belief in in in the supernatural god the afterlife and so on uh and then we get into some civil rights issues toward the end and and you know you'll see how we i'm not i'm not even sure how we ended up there which is kind of little side tracks that i take guests on sometimes anyway super interesting and uh so i hope you enjoy it thanks for listening thanks for coming on the show the new book is they are already here ufo culture and why we see saucers so tell me who are they they uh that's a good question um [Music] that i should have a better answer for um they theoretically are the the aliens who in our overall cultural mindset uh drive these flying saucers that's just kind of how people tend to associate the the pilots of of flying flying craft that we can't identify as aliens so that's uh if you go on twitter you will hear a lot of they're already here yes yeah i figure that's what the the title is internet in a way the another way to say it is that um they they really do exist in the sense that they exist in the minds of people who truly believe it um like if somebody says they believe in god i believe that they believe in god and so those gods are real in their heads and as much as people act on their beliefs so to that extent i see what you're doing there it seems like i really enjoyed the book uh i read it twice on on audio and it's really a gripping story something of a follow-up i i think to your previous book making contact uh jill tarter in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence so in a way you're kind of touching in both worlds the one you were trained in the physical sciences in astronomy uh and then that kind of took you to this other community of people so let's let's start off just talking about a little bit of the sociology of science and and you know the kind of two different communities of people that study a related topic but they do it from a rather different perspective yes absolutely yeah i so i studied radio astronomy when i was in school which brought me into contact with these seti astronomers who are looking for the the radio broadcasts or sometimes now the laser broadcast from alien civilizations and they kind of try to do it in a systematic scientific method centric way where they gather data eliminate hypotheses set limits on what we might be able to see and kind of just go through the sky and see if we can find anything with technology that we might be able to imagine and then i would say that they these study scientists try to set themselves apart a bit from this other group of people the um the ufo slash they're already here crowd who believe not that the the aliens might be sending you know uh fancy fancy fm radio from their planet but might have already built spaceships that can traverse vast swaths of space-time and have come here and that um you know that to some people that seems like a semantic difference either you think aliens are far out here or you think they are yeah i've currently traveled to earth but for these two different groups of people i think that's a big distinction yeah when you were um getting to know the seti scientists how do you think they would answer the question do you believe aliens are out there yeah surprisingly so when i was working on making contact the book the person i talked to the most was was jill tarter who's kind of been at the head of um the search for extraterrestrial intelligence for a number of decades and she answers the question in a totally agnostic way um she does not have an opinion so she says about um whether there are intelligent extraterrestrials out there um but others recently i just heard seth chostak say that he absolutely does believe they're out there else he wouldn't have spent his life searching so i think there's actually kind of a diversity of opinions but i think um what maybe sets some study scientists apart from some ufo believers is that um they are maybe more willing to uh accept some to to follow the evidence than to follow their belief system regardless of what they believe yeah i guess it depends what you mean by the word belief i mean when seth says yeah i believe they're out there i think he means in a different way than ufologists say i believe they've come here i think he's making you know the drake equation type argument you know a bayesian reasoning kind of argument that uh you know i wouldn't be searching if if there weren't pretty good odds that you know given the 100 billion stars in every galaxy and there's 100 billion galaxies or trillion galaxies or whatever and every one of them has planets and you crunch the numbers you know okay they really got to be out there so what's the harm of searching so when i say i believe i i think what he means is the odds are pretty good so it's worth the search as opposed to i am know for sure i've been in contact with them and they came to my house in the middle of the night so forth for sure for sure yeah no no i agree with that and i've definitely um i've met a lot of people who are interested in ufos who you could not you could not show them any piece of evidence that would convince them um otherwise and that's their kind of belief system but i've also met a lot of people who are interested in ufos who i would say also taken agnostic attitude toward it kind of more like jill tarter's attitude where they just say you know this is a topic i'm interested in it would be cool if you know i did discover a spaceship in the desert in new mexico somewhere and um but i'm not going to count on that and i don't necessarily think that is true and i don't necessarily think that as aliens and i think you know that group of people was a surprise to me i think coming from the outside and from the physical would be somebody who would say instead of calling him ufos he'd call him uaps unidentified aerial phenomena could be a russian or chinese drone or something like that sure sure yeah and that that uap term um which i i mean it seems to have started as a military term i think is an attempt to take the the stigma and that automatic alien association away from ufos which are kind of inseparable from aliens and culture at this point yeah yeah i met jill at several conferences that we both belong to this group called adventures of the mind uh for these advanced high school kids and anyway i got to know her a little bit i described her as this sort of steely eyed you know missile man you know zeroed in on what she wants to do and so i had a few short debates with her um i'll just recount these from the believing brain my book my chapter on that uh one of them i actually did a on the drake equation there's the um the element of l the length of time that a civilization exists and you know is it a hundred years a thousand years ten thousand years and you know study scientists tend to argue it's something like ten thousand years we've been a civilization in a hundred years since we've had like radio technology so you can use parameters like that in the l for l in the equation uh but i took uh i think with 60 civilizations and showed that the average lifespan was like 400 years or something like that so that the you know l means the the total number of uh technological civilizations is probably going to be pretty low because nation states go out of business you know they they collapse and uh and therefore they're not going to continue some kind of searching program anyway she objected to this uh and uh hang on let me go back to where i was on that point um yeah here it is so she says i think l is undetermined except for perhaps a lower limit of about 100 years what matters here is not the longevity of the technological civilization but the length of time the relevant technology continues to be employed by the technologists or even their post post-biological creations so if radio or optical lasers are the correct modes of interstellar communication if there is any such then l is 100 years and counting if another technology is the relevant one and we haven't invented it yet then l is zero for now but perhaps not forever when you enumerated the longevity of the 60 odd defunct civilizations what you failed to mention was that the technologies they invented were often adopted by and continued forward in time by the civilizations that replaced them so that's true um except that they you still need a political unit or a private uh company or somebody that wants to continue the search or else you know it's gonna stop but the most interesting uh uh debate i also did in a separate paper i i i did a kind of a an analysis of the seti pioneers and who they were and and what they were like and just their background so it turns out they are they were all raised religious and they were all atheists so i i kind of had fun just thinking you know aliens are sort of deities for atheists right so she says the indefagatable eti searcher jill tarter who brooks no sloppiness her sentimentality in a rigorous research program in response to my initial suggestion in a science review essay that etis or secular gods expressed her contempt at such a characterization and correctly noted that quote physics not faith dictates that any successful study detection will be with a long lived technology and perhaps the technologists who invented it and that quote we work on the search because we want to know the answer to a very old question popularly phrased as are we alone and so then i asked her well what why do you search for sides guys for a sign she says i search because i'm curious not to find some deity secular or otherwise exclamation point i do not know the answer to this old question but i'm as excited about using whatever tools are available defined the answer is i'm excited about the possibility of using other tools to understand the nature of dark matter and so on and so forth so i thought that was rather amusing yeah i can absolutely hear that in her her actual voice inside of my head um but no i mean there and i think different people like joe would object to it in different ways but i think there's there are a lot of parallels in the you know the search for god and meaning in the search for aliens and some some anthropological writers who i read while doing research but this ufo book talked about how um the aliens kind of represent an accessible god because they're like a version of us they're not they're not actually some kind of you know paranormal or spiritual thing they're they're probably if they exist or a physical thing that evolved on a planet just like we did and they got they got better and they got better technology than we did um and so there's some there's some kind of uh superior status that we could obtain so it kind of fulfills two objectives um and actually related to what you were saying uh earlier about the about l and the disagreements about how long l is there's actually an interesting paper a couple of years ago that came from the future of humanity institute that kind of took all these different disagreements and the full uncertainty levels of all the different parameters of the drake equation to calculate um a new a new answer including all of those uncertainties and they actually came to the conclusion that it is not unlikely that we are alone in the entire universe which i thought was interesting and and contrary to what we normally hear yeah i know i i i think the idea that the that we're not alone that there's somebody out there uh isn't emboldening in a sense uh it doesn't have to be religious or spiritual use whatever you word word you want but in the scientific sense it's possible i mean it's they really could be uh and i don't know that when you crunch the numbers particularly since the kepler space telescope has found so many extrasolar planets pretty much every star has you know a dozen or so planets so um chances are pretty good so then you don't have to use faith you don't have to say well i just believe because i want to although you you have an interesting discussion in your book about you know the whole fox mulder thing i want to believe in the episode that that came in and then actually let me read the your own words which i really liked um and so this is you speaking if i had a poster on my wall though it would say i don't want to have to believe i would love to think ufos are out there and that aliens pilot them but i'm incapable of thinking that unless i know it still perhaps knowing it is not the point of ufos so what do you mean by that um well as far as the uh as the part about not not wanting to believe i just feel like to to take on a um an idea like that i would need a whole lot of evidence and um would need to know like i said and then the um the idea that knowing is not the point is actually not something i came into the book thinking but was from talking to people who've spent a long time researching ufos and they're very self-aware about this and and what people who are very serious and often agnostic about the search say is that it is the search itself that is that like cleans their pulse and makes them excited and it's the fact that it is a um you know kind of you might agree or disagree with this but a persistent mystery whatever you think they are people people see them there are documents that you can scour and you can kind of spend your whole life trying to figure out what is going on and not succeed and so it gives kind of it gives people a project and a sense of a sense of wonder and if they figured it out then you know they'd have to find a new hobby well it'd be hard to top that one because that you know that would be the greatest discovery in the history of science and to think that i'm pursuing this much like conspiracy theorists you know are convinced that there's some basketball going on if they could just get to the bottom of it who's running the government or causing wars or whatever it is kind of a grand exciting project it is it is yeah and the fact that you especially if you think that you know the if in conspiracy theories and often in ufo world which overlaps quite a bit with general conspiracy world um you know you as just a regular private citizen might have the tools to unravel this mystery and the idea that you could spend all night on the internet or staring at the sky and and solve these big mysteries about these people in power and these powerful aliens i don't know i understand why that's an appealing aspect well you kind of hinted at the end of the book of your own pathway uh from religion to science you were an ultra devout mormon you describe yourself so your parents are mormon uh they actually left the church a few years ago but that they were mormon for most of my life yeah wow and their parents your grandparents were mormon too uh no actually my parents were converts they converted when i was about two i know unusual despite all those missions that uh missionaries that go out i think they're not that successful um so but but if if you think about it mormonism is kind of a ufo religion in a sense right when you die you get your own planet and and you know the gods come from the planets and so forth yeah yeah absolutely and um you know mormon politicians have historically supported things like study research and um harry reid most recently helped you know form a an alleged ufo research program and you know as as a mormon kid you grow up um i'm probably going to get the quote wrong and any mormons listening are going to know but um um you know there's there's a quote somewhere about just there being uh you know more more civilizations than there are grains of of sand and you know you grow up as a mormon kid thinking that this is not the only planet with life on it yeah yeah yeah uh andrea makes this point in the one of the latest cosmos episodes that uh you know there's a new solar system formed like every second in the entire universe if you just crunch the numbers so it's like new solar system new solar system new solar you know just for all day all night all day tomorrow and so on and it so the chances of us being alone it just seems but that's a different question from have they come here right right which i think is a very a very hard question and requires a little at least a little bit of arrogance because if the universe is so big and there are so many solar systems where life could potentially form why would a civilization that had grown you know that had evolved enough to develop spaceships that could traverse you know a bunch of the universe why would they come to earth if there are so many other places like what makes us so great and humans historically are very great at thinking we're great and special and so it's just um um it's hard it's hard to believe that they would spend their precious time uh coming here unless they're machines and have no concept of time so well that i guess that's the idea right that they they would create self-replicating uh robot machines that would then populate every possible place in the universe over some finite period of time i think it was like 10 million years you could explore the entire milky way galaxy with robotic machines that are self-replicating so what is your answer to the fermi paradox of where is everybody if they're out there yeah i mean i don't i don't know for sure unfortunately like anything that's the beauty of the question yeah right right i mean if i had to choose an answer i think it would be a combination of of your your statement earlier that actually civilizations don't tend to last that long and don't tend to continue their technological projects even if they continue the technology like a a plan a plan to go visit earth or broadcast to earth might fall apart after a few hundred years when when those rulers fall off or also i think it also seems likely although this is putting a bunch of earth psychology on aliens the people eventually you know they spend a little bit of time in a space age and then kind of turn back inward to their own planet and just aren't that interested in the rest of the cosmos what about you um yeah not just l but also i i i i think the vast distances between the stars makes it very unlikely that you'd encounter anything uh i mean andrea herself said you know when she and carl did the voyager record you know the the voyager record is really for us you know sort of a way of saying if we were going to encapsulate our species in one album what would we put on there because the chances of any extraterrestrial intelligence finding the voyager spacecraft much less capturing it and then figuring out how to play a stylus on a on a gold record you know that's a 1970s technology you know it's it's pretty unlikely so uh but you know she points out you know the voyager spacecraft is traveling at i don't know something like uh 35 40 000 miles an hour i mean it's really hauling ass and if it were going to the nearest star system uh you know it would take 70 000 years to get there yeah you know it's just that's just a long time of nothingness and so i just think it's mostly empty space and if they're if they're out there exploring they just miss this most likely of course your subjects in this book they don't think that there is no fermi paradox they're here right right yeah there um and and not all of them but yeah a lot of people are very convinced that they are here they are among us and um not just in the book but in the world you know there's the range from people who think there are reptilians in congress too oh right people who think they just uh you know maybe maybe cruise here uh through the skies and and then leave so there's there's a range of people but um and people are very certain from people i interviewed in the book to people i you know i've written in in lyft cars where you suddenly find out when you say oh what do you do oh i'm working on a book about ufos then you find out what everyone thinks about us they just open up and tell you oh yeah for sure that is that is actually something that was interesting about working on the book is if you if you tell people that's what you're doing they're like oh this is a safe space for me to tell my ufo story and there's an awful lot of people and including ones you wouldn't expect to have ufo stories right this is at some of those conferences you went to sure yeah or just uh you know friends who never brought it up before but oh really yeah yeah yeah but i think um the latest polls show one in one in six people in the us say that they have had some kind of encounter so you know if you're in a group of six yeah that's right yeah so the question is what does the encounter represent right so when somebody tells me they've had an anomalous experience of some kind i tend to believe them like they're not just making stuff up um but what does it represent you know an illusion hallucination that you know a sleep paralysis dream uh you know it was venus or the moon or or you know swamp gas or whatever it could be any number of things sure yeah and some something i found interesting also um is you know working on the book made me pay more attention to the sky and to what i was seeing in the sky and i realized that i often see things that i don't immediately know what they are and um the the stories that i could tell about things i've seen are not that dissimilar from some of the ones that i heard from people not not the abduction stories but just the like strange light in the sky yeah but um you know i think it's just a you're primed differently where i was just like oh that's interesting i don't know what that is but someone does and i didn't even think of it as an unidentified object whereas for somebody else it might you know form the basis of a very deep belief and meaningful experience now would you attribute that to your scientific training or just by temperament your tend not to go in that direction um i think a little bit of i think a little bit of both um and also a little bit of having been reporting on science and technology for a while and also just you know thinking that there are lots of advanced things that that we have and um aware aware of the fallacies of my own senses too i think and did you get the sense the people you met at these ufo conferences did not have that by temperament or they didn't have it by training or i mean i don't want to ask you were they gullible but just maybe say more open-minded to the possibility of these things whereas a trained skeptic scientist like yourself would default to the null hypothesis that there is not nothing to explain extraterrestrial and unless there's extraordinary evidence to overturn that i mean i think that is true of of some people at the conferences and other places that i that i talk to that they um yeah don't don't have that skeptical mindset or the skeptical training to look at something and think about all the alternatives that it could be but i will say that there were a lot of people who study ufos who who do have that and are as interested in it from the from the classified technology side or from the human side and who kind of distrusts eyewitness testimony as much as i do and yet still interested in stuff so when you go there and you tell them i mean they re they find out you're a science writer and with the scientific background and oh boy let's try to convince her because and she's writing a book or however you introduced herself yeah i i mostly i mostly would say you know that this is where i'm coming from i am i am a skeptic um but i promise to um kind of like kind of like you said about hearing about people's extraordinary experiences like i believe that you had that experience that that you interpreted that way so i promised that um i would treat their experience respectfully and um in general they wouldn't try to convince me and i wouldn't try to convince them we would just kind of say what we both thought and so actually most people were pretty receptive to that did you feel like an anthropologist going into a a foreign tribe to understand them i did a bit um yeah but i actually when i when i started on the book um which just spun out of an article that i i had worked on um where i had to talk to people who had been doing mostly government research on like past government programs that researched ufos and i found people who had been studying the history of them for decades and i actually identified with them a lot not specifically with the with the subject matter but they you know they had a question they wanted to find an answer they were going to go try to find all the evidence they could and we could disagree about what the what the evidence setter didn't say um but i i did try to go in with the mindset of trying to to understand and identifying with at least some some portion of the the people who were in ufo world yeah yeah the more serious ones that i met like stan friedman for example uh we were on larry king's show a couple times debating this and you know he was a pretty good skeptic and uh you know he would he would agree with me that 90 to 95 of all the sightings are fully explainable with natural uh atmospheric phenomena or whatever so then it really came down to what do you do with that five percent anomalies for example now for me and it's like you don't have to do anything with it it's just like it's cool spooky weird whatever maybe we'll figure it out maybe we'll never figure it out you know sign it to some graduate student to figure it out i don't know something will come up maybe uh the government will release files 20 years from now and we'll find out it was oh it was this x-plane thing test pilot thing or whatever or maybe never you know in that in science it's you know this you make this point about uh you know studying astronomy you know that anomalies are interesting and but you have to take them one at a time to decide what what it means and sometimes you can't figure out what it means and that's okay yeah and i think what what is interesting to me and i think what interests a lot of people about ufos is that um maybe maybe unlike astronomy or many sciences it only really does take one like you don't need five percent unidentified all you need is one thing that's an actual alien spaceship and and that's it so you could kind of search forever because you're just looking for that one tiny needle in a haystack you don't even need a category of anomalies right which is yeah yeah sort of like if you know a bigfoot searcher uh instead of giving us blurry photographs and grainy videos if they actually had a body that you know anthropologists and primatologists could study and dissect and go yep that's a new species that would be that would be the end of the search essentially mm-hmm right well that's what we have at roswell for ufos so right the alien body yeah yes i understand yeah so let's go through the history of it i mean the whole thing starts in the late 40s you talk about project saucer project sign project grudge project blue book i mean i can't even keep track of all these things so maybe just kind of walk us through you know how it all began and and up to the uh the whole academy of the stars and all that that's kind of made a big splash recently sure yeah i mean i guess the the short version is this was all kind of catalyzed in in the late 1940s when a guy named kenneth arnold saw um what he deemed to be kind of like a fleet of of nine ufos flying over washington state and then after that kind of uh you know public interest and government interest mounted in um what what could be these unidentified things flying in our skies and you know that it makes sense that the government and particularly the military would always be interested in that um you know if they don't think it's aliens which would be a concern for them also then maybe it's um you know the soviets or whoever and so um they undertook these these series of projects that you named where they would take people's sightings and identify them and uh try to explain them um and uh in in general like some of it was some of it was a good faith effort and then some of it was like you know we the people in charge don't don't want people to be freaked out about this and don't want them to think that it's a serious thing so we're just gonna like put all our prosaic explanations out there so that people will chill out about about these ufos um and then and then in the late 1960s they had determined that a studying ufos wasn't really providing any scientific knowledge that was useful and they had also they said proved that ufos were not a threat to national security so if those two things are true there was no point in the government studying them and so that was kind of the end of the story at least as far as we know for a number of decades until in late 2017 we heard probably a lot of your listeners heard about a program called the advanced aerospace threat identification program which is essentially um allegedly a program that is the modern version of these old government programs where they take sightings from military personnel and try to explain them and you know there's there's a lot of detailed debate that we probably don't need to get into about whether that's what the program was actually doing or whether it was um kind of looking to advanced foreign weapons systems more than um ufos um but but we know about this because um uh some of the people who say they were involved with this program joined a private company called to the stars academy of arts and science which is run by a former i guess current rock star named tom delong who used to be in the band blink 182 and he gathered these uh you know intelligence and national security and government contractor people together into this organization that um at one point said it wanted to reverse engineer a ufo and so far has mostly succeeded in making music and and movies but um yeah this this ufo program allegedly shut down in 2012 and we're back where where we were um except that there has been some renewed government interest in like uh the navy has created new reporting guidelines for um for its personnel to to report if they see ufos or things like that so there's kind of been an official resurgence of of interest yeah well i mean the way it's presented in the media is that you know the the pentagon or government has um revealed that they had a secret ufo program and that they're real or the footage is real or the things we saw is real i mean there's so much muddled coverage of this and that new york times article people don't realize this that you know the lead author um uh keane uh i forget her first name uh leslie leslie keane yeah i read her book uh years ago on ufos generals and pilots speak out or something like that and um you know it it looked like it was like journalists at the new york times did this investigation investigative story and they came up with this incredible discovery in fact it was this woman who's been a pro ufologist for a long long time not sure how she got a byline in the new york times that that really kind of changed the the the tone of the whole thing but as you point out this footage um that you know the nimitz uh video um footage that it looked like they released it for the first time in conjunction with that new york times article but you point out that it was actually back in wait wait a minute let me get the right page here 2007 i think it was uh here we go yeah um right the second video in the time story supposedly i'm reading from your book now shows pilots who took off from the ship uss nimitz to intercept a ufo but it has appeared on the internet before way back in 2007. now you see that never got reported you're the first person i know that to report that ufo researcher isaac coy a studious and mythological document gatherer who in professional life and under a different name is a british barrister interesting noted on his facebook page that the nimitz video had shown up on the conspiracy theory form above top secret years before koi traced it to the servers of a german film company one that specialized in creating special effects the moment i read that i went oh okay both stars and the navy have acknowledged that this video was leaked earlier than this latest time it appeared online okay so that would kind of indicate you know maybe somebody faked it or doctored it or something like that but then you continue this is even more interesting another strange coincidence is for you're quoting greenwald now 48 hours after the date of the nimitz siding nasa flew their scramjet engine in the same vicinity and it wasn't just any flight this one broke speed records clocking mach 9.6 so nine times the speed of sound okay so when these pilots go whoa dude did you see that well that you know if it's going nine times the speed of sound that would evoke something like that so then you asked what are the chances that the world's fastest flight happened at the same time sailors were crying ufos and thinking aliens i asked matthew kamlet nasa armstrong's public affairs specialist for details about the test and then he gives these details about the b-52 dropping this this little rocket engine thing over edwards air force base and then the nimitz thing was they were off of san diego i think you know so it's not that far it's 150 miles 200 miles if you're going nine times the speed of sound you can get there and pretty quick uh it traveled 250 nautical miles while boosting itself and 600 more miles during the engine test and descent that path would have taken it near the nimitz and then you quote him of all the gin joints in all the world it just so happens to coincide in two days to me i think that's somewhat there's somewhat of a connection there and then you you point out that people this was so many years ago people could easily mix up their dates and it was at the same time same day yeah yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of curious stuff like that about about the videos those um you know existing before for for the ones that were in the new york times were leaked again as as a lot of people probably remember it was just uh last month i believe that the pentagon finally officially released these videos which means the one that ones that were there weren't before and to me the biggest thing um in addition to weird weird coincidences like the scramjet um is that we just what we have are you know 30 seconds or however long these are of totally decontextualized footage with no beginning no ending and no associated data and there's not really a way for people to draw um conclusions including the people who are drawing extraordinary conclusions and it just leads to more and more confusion but when defense officials are talking about these right now they you know they'll call the objects in these unidentified uh unidentified aerial phenomena but in their definition of that that also includes just things that aren't immediately identifiable and also things that are unauthorized so it's kind of um you know it's slippery and and whenever they bring up their concern about uap or ufos they're talking about the proliferation of drone systems they're not saying you know we're worried about aliens coming here they're like we're worried about all these drones playing around so oh i don't know i just remembered something you're in denver and didn't denver have that drone uh mass hysteria or whatever you want to call it mass sightings a few months ago just before the pandemic i think yeah it was a little east of us but but yeah there was i'm part of a facebook group that's like colorado drones investigations group where people just keep it's a continuing topic of discussion did anyone get to the bottom of what that was if it was anything i mean the last i i am not totally up on the latest but at one point officials had drawn the conclusion that it was mass hysteria and that there were just a few drones right and that they were the same and people were just noticing right what was up there yeah yeah so there we are again it's like there are weird things in the sky yeah like the 18 1890s blimp sightings all over the place ufo blimps you know when narratives were first invented so yeah um yeah yeah the whole thing to me feels like kind of modern myth-making based in some fact of what people really see um you know like like roswell you know that something happened there and you know it wasn't probably this project mogul this top secret wait is that right project yeah mogul the the high altitude balloon tests they were listening for soviet upper atmosphere nuclear tests or something like that the acoustic signature of something like that yeah so of course the government's going to lie about that they're not going to say oh we're listening we're spying on the russians yeah yeah actually myth-making i think is a good term i read a book written by some anthropologist about roswell and about how how people do construct a myth and how this myth followed the exact path of of other myths before it and that since since roswell actually that unfo unfalsifiability thing has been key to um ufo belief like if you if you think the government is lying about something then there's no way to disprove it like i can say to you yes it was project mogul and then you can say no you're lying and the government's lying and um you know the government can say look we'll open the doors of area 51 and you can go go see that there's no aliens there and then you can say well you're lying you just moved them and so there's there's no way there's no way to to prove it to prove that negative yeah you know i thought of that very example when um george w bush announced that we couldn't find any of the weapons of mass destruction in iraq and their initial response was well that now we know they had him because they moved him and i thought that's what the ufologists say that's not that's not an argument you can't make that argument right right yeah no i mean it's a thinking area that shows up all over the place yeah so yeah yeah although i i thought of something else with the wikileaks here the absence of evidence is evidence of absence in as much as one of the arguments you have all of us always make was well it's top secret classified that's why we don't have you know the documents you skeptics are demanding i mean stan friedman would famously hold up these documents with the big blocked out you know there's like one sentence in a three-page document you can use there's nothing on there and he said blacked out see they blacked it out well but in wikileaks here you have like i don't know 10 million top secret documents or whatever not one mention of roswell area 51 you know the uf secret ufo program nothing right right that is that is an interesting interesting absence of evidence and um yeah i think i think what also makes people suspicious of that and suspicious of the government are things like something we didn't mention earlier from the 1960s the robertson panel report which was sponsored i think sponsored by the cia that kind of lays out the fears about what the public would do with ufo information like if people are afraid of ufos it could cause mass hysteria and panic in the streets and ufo groups could manipulate the minds of of the people and clog our intelligence channels and so i feel like that kind of attitude does pervade the way that um you know pentagon officials and intelligence types do talk about ufos and things where i think i think that's probably part of why we're not just getting straight information about this this latest program why they won't just say look this is what it did this is what it was for is because they're still kind of afraid and then and then that looks secretive and then when you're secretive it makes people mistrust you yeah right well you know again back to conspiracy theories enough of them are true that it pays to be somewhat conspiratorial minded i mean we know corporations cheat like volkswagen cheating the emission standards and pharmaceutical companies hacking the fda standards and so on this goes on all the time inside of trading and wall street politicians are nabbed for you know indiscretions and and manipulating systems and sconding with money this happens you know it's pretty much weekly so the idea and again the government did lie about roswell and even in 96 when they came in 96 and 97 when they came up with those two documents attempting to explain um that the double phenomena both the alien the alien bodies and the ufos you know that these were test dummies that they dropped from high altitude and they conflated their memory because these were years apart even that was kind of a bit of a reach i felt like okay you know maybe yeah yeah no i mean all of that all of that does make me totally understand why why people don't believe what uh various arms of the government tell them about lots of things and about about ufos and um i mean i'm a journalist you know i it is also partly my job to try to find true conspiracies and seek them out and so there's a part of me that has that mindset too in the way but i mean you don't want to go the full q and on or something like that you know you want to keep keep a check on it but i mean being suspicious of officials skeptical of authority i think does pay off as long as you can also i call it uh men in journalism we call it red teaming yourself like no poke holes in your own vocals in your own arguments laws with your thinking think about alternative hypotheses so by the way in the wikileaks there's also no documents about 911 as an inside job you know you would think that there'd be something in there a memo from bush to his you know vice pres whoever you know make sure you plant the bombs in the right place or something right yeah yeah so there's like a difference in how evidence is evaluated by people and with the deception on the part of agencies that that that makes it confusing you also had talked about john podesta hillary clinton's campaign manager i forget what he was mixed up it was in one of those leaked documents wasn't it yes it was um [Music] i guess it was the wikileaks i think yeah um yeah yeah his his emails were were leaked and you know his his campaign was talking to tom delong this guy who's so into ufos um um you know about about ufos and about bringing the information to the youth tom tom delong had a nice little speech about how together they could make young cool people trust the government again and bring bring this important phenomenon to them and so a lot of people in the ufo community grabbed on to the fact that tom delonge was talking to to john podesta and to the to the campaign managers um as evidence that he was correct and um you know connected you looked at all those emails i think you said that they didn't really respond to him like he was writing to them right yeah he wrote them a lot more emails than than they wrote back to him and what they did right to each other about it seemed to be more like how can we use this guy to get more votes because he's a famous guy or like right there was at least one that was like do you actually want to respond so it didn't seem like they were taking him quite as seriously as he hoped they were yeah what's he what's he like i've never met him tom delong yeah i have not met him no he never talked to me no oh yeah i just wonder what the what the appeal is of him to a lot of the ufo community other than well he's a famous rock star so you know here's somebody that can elevate our cause maybe something like that how about robert bigelow uh he actually didn't want to talk to me either he doesn't really like to give interviews um and especially doesn't like to give interviews about ufos so but from what i understand from previous profiles and things like that you know he's a he's a serious guy he's a businessman even though he has a you know he has a space technology company where he builds kind of uh modules that one day he hopes will become hotels in space he's actually kind of anti-technology and i'm not sure if this is apocryphal but you know people say he doesn't use email um things like that so he's just kind of a serious old west no-nonsense guy who also happens to have a an extreme interest in ufos and the paranormal which he's been funding studies in since the 1990s right the paranormal so that brings us to skinwalker ranch he did go to that right i did yes yes um uh it's in utah it's in the uintah basin in utah um not so far from like dinosaur national park area right um yeah it's this plot of land that um some people some mormons actually speaking of mormons bought um in the in the 90s um and then there was a newspaper story published about all these paranormal experiences that they were having on the ranch and robert bigelow who was interested in that um offered to take the ranch off their hands to buy it from them and so there he set up a paranormal research facility called the national institute for discovery science where he said he wanted to just kind of systematically investigate you know the ufos the the skinwalkers the giant wolves um all cattle mutilations you know infrared sensors video cameras other lots of other instruments and collect hard data on this for the first time um and uh you know he owned it for a long time he ran the institute for a number of years and um the you know the cameras always just seemed to shut down at the wrong time and you know they could never quite catch the sneaky paranormal stuff so we don't really have any of the data that he was hoping yeah the whole paranormal world is like that it's always just kind of right on the margins can't quite make it out you know and and their explanation for that is well it's a very rare phenomenon it only happens right on the edges you have to set up the experiment just right in like these esp experiments or the remote viewing experiments you know and or even some of the other ones with with like deviations from statistical um randomness is just barely above uh you know 50 50. it's 51.49 and you know is that statistically significant well if you if you run the numbers this way and you crunch the statistics that way you can kind of get it to come outward and then no one can replicate it and uh you know this sue blackmore uh the british psychologist she was a parapsychologist for a while and and this is what she writes is like you know we've been doing this for a century and and you know it the the digger the deeper you dig into the actual methodology of the experiment there's always some little weird anomaly thing and it just doesn't quite work and no one can replicate it so she ended up becoming a skeptic but they kind of hang on to that and that's kind of like with the ufologist there's always this just a hint you know maybe could be there's this weird anomaly you know and it's almost like the brain you you your subtitle is why we see saucers it's almost like the brain and poor's a vacuum of explanation maybe psychologically we're just not um built to say i don't know and just leave it at that yeah yeah i think we're not i think we are primed to go down rabbit holes and to give anomalies a lot of importance and to want to to want to pursue them and i think yeah i think robert bigelow did that with this and did that with you know he funded a number of other projects kind of along the same lines just just one off throughout the years i think millions millions of dollars just um i mean it kind of comes back to that thing about belief and motivation for research like when when you think something is true or might be true that's highly motivating for you to just keep keep going down this path even when evidence presents itself to the contrary or doesn't present itself at all right yeah we just we just published a very old lecture by carl sagan from 1974 at colorado springs at the air force academy there and it's a great talk it's sort of you know what the cutting edge of astronomy was in 1974 in terms of you know exploring other planets and the possibilities of eti and all that but in the q a somebody asks him about ufos and he just says well that just the evidence is so crummy and uh so he goes so it kind of comes down to this that the stories are either reliable but not very interesting or really interesting but not very reliable so example the first one is like it's the fourth of july and there's people out having picnics at dusk all over the place and and many of them report seeing this weird thing in the sky about the same time that there was a missile launch or you know something that you know it's probably explicable that way so it's reliable but not very interesting or interesting uh is you know the woman that says so i'm standing there on my porch and this big craft comes down and lands in in my front yard and it's a shiny disk and it has seamless doors and he says they have this fascination with seamless doors yeah it's like a tesla tesla right and uh and the aliens come out and they do something with her and then they go back and and then so you go to check on the story and you know she's now lives at this uh mental institution down the road and says like okay we can't even talk to her interesting but not very reliable yeah yeah and i think that's been the state of things for for a long time especially since most of it is based on eyewitness accounts and and something you know a lot of of people who study ufos have asked me well if you want so much evidence before you you know have any sort of belief in them what kind of evidence do you suggest we get and i think i'm not saying we should dedicate the resources to this but i mean there are sensors all over earth and above earth all the time data exists that could tell us um theoretically something about lots of these sightings or their prevalence and and some places are working on that um there's a company called hypergiant that specializes in artificial intelligence i don't know if you've heard of them they actually have a number of government contracts and they are going to correlate reports with satellite data and emit automated image analysis and the you know the signatures of various known military and commercial aircraft and and stuff and kind of screen out what's left and i think that's an interesting project um yeah you would think with with all of that you just described plus everybody has a phone with a high high definition video camera if they were coming here we should have plenty of footage on the other hand they could say well they're not here now you know they were here in 1947 or i don't know if you ever looked into the ancient alien stories you know they were here thousands of years ago and of course people back then didn't know what to describe they had no notion of extraterrestrials so they call them angels or demons or whatever yeah i didn't really look into ancient aliens theory but that does that does kind of bring up that and the maybe they were only here in 1947 does bring up the idea of why why would they stick around like if they came to visit and where do their ships go when they're not you know crashing here for visiting um for the past six years what are they what are they up to do they go back home and come back really fast or what are they doing they're on the back side of the moon we've actually seen that now so um yeah i was going to read another portion from your book i really like toward the end you're kind of reflecting on all this work you've been doing in your own background one night in the midst of this philosophical turmoil and probably procrastinated on my physics homework i went outside and looked up at the sky i tried like really tried to imagine all those pen lights were actually roiling spheroids made of plasma scattered across seemingly empty light years actually filled with invisible matter and energy i tried to feel like this what i knew to be true was true it wasn't easy in the way that it's not easy to re-inhabit any long-lost state of consciousness new love adolescent angst sharp grief or ones that you've just grown so used to that they don't feel like anything anymore old love constant angst dull grief i could only hang on to the actual emotion for a few moments but during the seconds when i succeeded i started to feel differently about insignificance if nothing we do matters to anyone or anything greater than us if everything lives loves losses triumphs terribleness dies with our civilization maybe that is the part that doesn't matter all of this human stuff feels significant to us here and now and maybe that feeling was truer than the truth that it's probably all for naught man sarah that's some pretty heavy reflection there yeah it sounds kind of depressing when somebody else reads it it's beautiful writing i mean it's kind of like you were just sort of looking back at it all like what did this mean and whoa yeah yeah i mean it was interesting when i when i stopped being religious i had to try to kind of make a new meaning for my life when when my viewpoint was essentially as that demonstrates kind of nihilistic about it all and i kind of um came to the conclusion that what what feels important and significant day-to-day can be significant just because it's significant to us and not because it's significant to the universe or because it has some kind of greater meaning than that and so um yeah i guess it's maybe like kind of like the placebo effect of um existential philosophy or something is that how you felt when you gave up your religion uh yeah i mean mormonism is kind of a very all-encompassing religion and it gives you you know the reason your how you got here the reason you're here what you're supposed to do and what happens after and when you leave it you don't have any of that so it's kind of like starting from scratch right yeah one of the discussions in atheists and humanist communities is you know if people are losing their religion do we need to replace it with something so there is something of a movement to create like a secular religion uh where you have i mean you can get training in in in in marrying people and in in presiding over funerals and uh you know just pretty much the full compliment of what religions offer except no afterlife part um but you know we're here for you and you know we have free parking and babysitting uh and you know there's these um sunday sermons that you could go to and and a little bit like universalist unitarians you know they don't they're kind of deists or i'm not sure what they are actually um but you know they and they sing hymns to newton and they like candles and they give testimonials about how they lost their religion to me when i you know i'd go to a few of these it felt like being back in church again yeah i feel like i understand the appeal of that for a lot of people and probably also especially people who have kids or families um but yeah maybe i'm just not not quite enough of a joiner because when i when i think of that um you know i think maybe i would do some something else with my sunday or think that um i don't know especially people who people who leave a lot of religions and people who leave mormonism in particular spend a long time in a phase of defining themselves kind of in opposition to religion like you were saying telling their stories of of leaving and then i think i don't know for me at least i kind of moved out of that and stopped identifying myself as like xx this thing and just started being what i what i was now at that point i feel like uh something to replace religion in the form of religion didn't really appeal to me anymore you don't call yourself an ex-mo what's the other word there's ex-mormon and then there's another word for it i forget what it is now there's um there's jack mormons who's that oh i don't know that one oh that's a former former mormon yeah for former former mormon yeah do you know dorothy parker's funny line about why she doesn't go to church on sundays anymore she says i'm too busy and vice versa [Laughter] that's a good one another way to spend your sunday mornings okay uh yeah but you know sagan used to talk about this that it that the whole seti program ufology whatever even just astronomy in general kind of touches a deep religious impulse we have whatever that means uh the sense that uh you know we're not alone or there's something else out there or something bigger than us grander than us you know and that's what i think he tried to capture with cosmos and that you know andrean and neil have tried to do with the up uh reboot of cosmos is you know just sort of take us out of our mundane lives of work and politics and blah blah blah you know every day there's some trauma and just kind of you know pull back and go you know what it none of this really matters in the big schema and i think that yeah i think it's yeah your passion kind of reflects that's good yeah yeah i think it's good to get that kind of perspective and i think at least for myself not having religion i do try to seek out you know one wonder and beauty and those kinds of things and in other ways and try to you know make make myself ask big questions even if i'm not asking them of some god figure so right i mean it's it's like modern buddhism with you know you meditate or you do long walks on the beach and or long hikes in the mountains you're a long long-distance hiker right or runner or something like that yeah probably somewhere in between i do i do i do ultra marathons but probably at a pace that might qualify as as hiking um so yeah yeah i'm training for a 50-mile race right now in the mountains so i get up to the mountains in colorado most weekends do they still do that wasn't it the western states 100 mile run they do i think they just canceled it for this year um because of the whole pandemic thing but it's still around yeah you know because i do a lot of long-distance cycling and you know sometimes i'm out on a long ride by myself you know you do kind of lose yourself and it becomes kind of a reflective moment i'm not sure that's the same as meditation i've tried meditation i i just haven't been able to dial into it i'm told it takes a while but sometimes i feel like i'm kind of doing it when i'm just out on my own with my thoughts and maybe that's something like that yeah i think that that's how i feel when i run long distances is it's a way to to quiet quiet the mind and let let weird big thoughts come especially around you know mild 25 or something when you don't have it your mind isn't constantly yeah constantly worrying with all the modern stuff because you're just so focused on how tired you are and how much you would like to stop um but you just don't really have any other thoughts and kind of i think free stuff different part of your brain yeah like the um the shift now in psychology positive psychology from studying happiness to studying meaningfulness and turns out they're not the same thing that you know what people do to find meaning is not the same as what they do to find happiness so happiness is more short-term you know maybe you go out to drinks and dinner with your friends big fun but then after it's over it's over you know it's like well okay um but but you know you go for a long run and you're suffering uh but afterwards you feel like a better person or you you had some big reflective thoughts or and so on and those are different things so so meaningfulness is more uh sort of focused on the long term forward and also constructing some kind of narrative about your past this is why i'm here this is the path i'm on the reason i'm on this path is because i want whatever it is change the world or make politics better whatever it is having some cause bigger than you that that it isn't fun doing it it's not like i'm having i'm so happy doing this that's not that's a different phenomenon yeah yeah and i i uh i am glad that they are doing that i used to get mad at all of the like you should here's how to be happier studies because i did i didn't think that was the be all and all but i didn't really have the the words to articulate what the what a different a different way to look at that was until i started reading the articles about about meaning and meaning making and things like that so i think it's a good shift yeah clay routledge is a cognitive psychologist in montana a friend of mine who studies this you know he's he's really on now about how culture is changing and how people are kind of scrambling to find deeper purpose and meaning you know in part there's the us baby boomers that are you know getting older now but but millennials you know that you know on the other end and um or gen xers you know that that were born after 1996 you know they're coming of age in a very different world where you know now the fastest growing religion is nuns the the no religious affiliate okay so where are these people gonna turn to and the the little dating app box you check you know spiritual but not religious what does that mean you know when you say well i'm a spiritual person i i don't know what that means yeah good question i don't i don't either but i i do feel like this particular moment in history and the you know the the collision of the the pandemic and and you know social justice and racial um reckoning with our racist past and present and things like that um all of that kind of coming together i think is going to force a lot of people to ask themselves a lot of questions about their lives and our society and and maybe um for a while probably things won't be you know happier but maybe afterwards they will be more meaningful it's a weird year really weird yeah it's a lot it's a lot going on yeah i mean maybe like me you're you're a rider and a long distance runner so most of that you do by yourself anyway so the social social isolation hasn't really changed my life that much on the other hand you know the engagement with other people at restaurants or whatever even if they're just sitting there you know it's like you kind of miss that you know and then the protest stuff you know wow i mean this has really been a game changer in terms of the sort of the history of u.s protests i don't think we've seen anything like this since maybe 1968. um and you know i wrote this book the moral arc about moral progress and it's like wow you know maybe i've overlooked something and i'm trying to check my white privilege and so on and it's there for sure i know i have that i mean my wife is pointing out you know because i drive a tesla she goes you're driving a tesla around santa barbara you're never going to get hassled by the police right you were driving while black you know my left blinker's out they're not going to pull me over right so i really have no idea what that's like i really don't and uh you know so i guess the question is i don't know the answer to this but you know to what extent is systemic racism still pretty deep or is it you know the bad apples and maybe there's more bad apples than we thought but most of them are good and i just don't really know clearly there's still a problem yeah i mean i think especially a lot of the you know the things we've seen on on video and in social media in the past few days have changed a lot of people's minds about how many bad apples there are and made made a lot of people think of of uh this is a systemic problem rather than as a one-off problem and i don't know it's um i think it's it's good that in a moment like this we do have social media and everyone has a phone so we can get at least like a you know a random sample and see see what's see what's going on yeah i don't know if you read neil degrasse tyson's facebook posting on this the other day you know he's a longtime friend and and uh you know i was wondering if he was going to say something because he's never wanted to find himself as a black astrophysicist or you know the black scientist he's just an astrophysicist period full stop and i always respected that but he finally you know kind of wrote a thoughtful piece the other day on his facebook page about you know all this just the kind of the little insults not you know i was thrown to the ground with a knee on my neck not like that but you know just dry you know driving while black walking while black or jb just being black and he had lots of examples and i thought you know i've never experienced anything like that and you know we have to kind of tune into some of that more now yeah i mean if you were a black man driving a tesla around santa barbara you might get stopped because people thought you stole it yeah exactly yeah exactly yeah this could be a major reckoning well we're way off the path from ufos but you know kind of reflecting what you know the bigger questions that you're after there i think it's important to remember too in that final passage about you know the the kind of context of if the universe is going to die and for another 14 billion or whatever it is 30 billion years or something it's all going to be gone you know what difference does any of this make this is kind of a theist argument without an outside god to validate our existence and meaning what's the point because in you know 30 billion years the universe won't even exist well the point is that we don't live 30 billion years from now we live now and and it matters what i do and you do and and what people do to each other now not in the afterlife whether there's a here after or not we live in the here and now yeah yeah and i think i mean that was a big that was a big shift for me because um in in mormonism and lots of other religions the whole focus on what you do now is what it means for you later and so it kind of prevents you from thinking about the present significance and meaning of things like that and so that was that was a big shift for me yeah so how how would you answer somebody now that says well why why should you bother to be a good person because you don't believe that there's going to be a payoff in the end um well i mean there's something to be said for being able to live with yourself while you go about the rest of your life um but no actually being be a good person was like the one rule i came out of um out of religion with i was like how am i going to form my moral framework and the the one thing that mattered to me was not you know harming other people and figuring out if i was harming other people um because that here and now is important and i wanted to be good for me and i wanted to be good for other people so i would like not to hurt them and i would also like in return for them not to hurt me and you know that's not how life goes of course and and i hurt people all the time i am sure um but i think it's a good working framework for us making all making that present better of course that's something like the golden rule so religions could claim some originality to that but they trademarked it they trademarked it yes but i think you know i try to think of it from a social science perspective you know they experiment with a lot of different things that one turns out to be true that is that sort of principle of interchangeable perspectives i'm i'm not special just because i'm me and you're not therefore if i want you to take me seriously i have to appeal to you and how you want to be treated and so on and so a lot of philosophical ethical systems have kind of developed along those lines like rawls just society of the you know what he calls the veil of ignorance that if you design a law you can't know which group you're in to decide you know how to design it so therefore it should be fair to blacks and whites and and males and females and you know rich and poor and so on because you're there's a veil of ignorance of which group you're going to be in therefore how you will be affected that's that kind of argument that you know a reciprocity kind of argument yeah yeah we'll see how it uh how it plays out um what made you give up mormonism what what was that path like um i i was early in college um and it was the time when the first um people in calif the gay people in california were getting married and mormonism says you're supposed to feel one way about that which is very bad and i felt pretty good about it um and i just came to this realization like i could either believe what someone in utah told me i should think and feel or i could believe what i myself actually thought and felt and um you know once once there's one thing in mormonism where you say you know i don't believe what the the prophet of the church says about that then the whole rest of it kind of just falls apart because uh what the prophet says is true if it's not true they're not a prophet if they're not a prophet neither was joseph smith so mormonism's not real so it was just like the span of five minutes the whole thing wow wow that's incredible what year was that uh 2003 oh wow has the church changed its position on gay marriage now particularly after the supreme court decision uh no it actually took a stronger stance against gay marriage for a couple years um and uh said you know that if if if a kid had parents who got uh who were married who were gay then that kid like couldn't be baptized in the church and um essentially put having a gay marriage on par with murdering someone sin wise then put it in policy um and then i think i can't remember exactly when they rescinded that but it um was just recently like within the past year or two i was wondering if they were gonna change it because they have made major changes i mean polygamy was outlawed in what 1896 when utah wanted to join the united states and the government said you can't have that polygamy thing and they got a new revelation well you know i was talking to god and he said no on the thing oh okay apparently god can change his mind yeah and this i mean the same thing with black people and the priesthood couldn't for a long time you know hold have the have the power of god or be the full uh be a full member and then after the civil rights movement they waited a little while but then the church was like okay fine we uh we we heard from god and we don't think that anymore um and uh yeah you would think that maybe god would have something to say sometime soon about gay marriage but not i think that's kind of well i've been predicting since 2015 that religions would come around first of all they quit talking about it and then at some point in a few decades they'll look back and go you know what that was our idea that you know that we should treat all people the same you know and those episcopalians who supported gay marriage those are our guys they're christians yeah yeah that'll be a fun rewriting of history well i mean in a way they did that with slavery you know because now um you know theists and christians take credit for it and because william wilberforce was this you know major abolitionist and you know but who were his as i point out who were his uh primary enemies were his fellow christians that said no no no slavery is totally okay it's right here in the old testament this is what god wants and he put the separate races on different continents for a reason and you know as i also point out again uh on the gay marriage thing uh remember when interracial marriage was a thing and most people go no it's like right that used to be illegal in the united states until 1967 it was illegal not even that long ago not that long ago i mean it's incredible so i i i i it seems to me that the gay marriage thing has kind of dropped off the radar maybe because it's been pushed off by all these other um incidences that have been happening but i do think people are just going to quit talking about it as they get used to it yeah yeah and i mean once once we see that society doesn't just dissolve as soon as we let two people get married then um maybe there's less reason to keep talking about it i mean some of the lamest arguments from before is like well if you allow people to gaze to get married then people will marry animals like what it's the slippery slope and before you know it you know the western civilization will be destroyed uh-huh okay right any day yeah yeah so well sarah we've covered all the major topics i think i i really loved your book and uh so i'm dying to know what what's next on your on your project list um that's a good question i actually um just finished up some book proposal research actually about about mormonism and the ways that the internet is is changing it and these different little subgroups and splinter groups that are forming both in the more conservative and the in the more progressive direction i'm just kind of interested in how the religion is evolving and not evolving and so yeah we'll see if we'll see if any publishers actually want that that's a great idea it's particularly this moment in in time with the rise of the nuns and all that and religions are you know the catholic church is going through upheaval and you know i think all religions are scrambling to try to figure out the modern world that would be so interesting did you ever read um john krakauer's book under the banner of heaven oh sure yeah oh my god it was such a it's such a great read you know again an outsider kind of diving in to see what this is all about and when he comes up with you'd be former insider which would be particularly interesting yeah yeah well hopefully you're not the only one who thinks so we'll find out yeah well there'd be like a sociology of religion and how they change and then how they rationalize their changes and all that in a way you know that in other words studying like civil rights and women's rights and gay rights and so on i i sort of track it that religions are just behind the crest of the wave they sort of get pulled along as the whole wave goes and once it crashes then they're like okay we're fine with this you know but they're always lagged behind by a few years like if you track the the pollsters for you know when you uh agreed that same-sex marriage was when it hit 50 or more i think it was 2011. that's when both hillary and obama said they now support gay marriage before that in 08 they both had opposed it although you never know what people actually think when they're campaigning because they have to say whatever they have to say but but somewhere along there publicly it shifted from 20 to around 2011 it was more than 50 percent support gay marriage and then 2015 is the supreme court decision that's incredibly fast yeah yeah that's interesting i'll have to the crest of a wave is a good analogy that i'll have to you know steal with credit from you yeah and then the other thing about the the sort of changing mormon there's still those polygamous groups living up there in um sort of the border of utah and and arizona i think it or what am i thinking there's um kayenta there's a few of those little towns yeah um where it's it's kind of creepy to go into them where you know everyone there is one of the plea including the sheriff and the judge and so on it's incredible that they can still get away with that i guess legally they do so because although the government says polygamy is illegal they don't marry they only marry one person then the others are sister-wise or whatever let me let me give you an idea you can give me some feedback on this i i'm just thinking out loud because i'm not sure what the answer is but i used to think because i was kind of a libertarian in my philosophy whatever consulting adults want to do i don't care you know polygamy fine prostitution fight i don't care none of my business that you know consenting adults okay but then when you look into it like in the case of polygamy in the mormon church you know these are young girls that are raised like this so the idea that when they're 20 they're making some kind of rational decision is not at all what you know you and i would make living in a completely different environment uh would think is that you know i'm calculating my life path and this is the journey i've chosen mind your own business i want to be married whatever uh you know to the extent that people have autonomy if that's the only world you know from age two or whatever and at age 15 you're told well you're going to marry that old guy over there okay that's got to be hard to break out of that yeah yeah and i've heard i've heard both of those arguments from both sides from i've actually done some reporting in in that in those towns down there and i've heard from people on the on the inside you know this is this is a life i chose it's a life i believe in and it's a life i want and then i've heard from people who were part of it and left who said there's not a way that you can choose and want it when you don't know anything else and also you believe it's what god wants for you um and um then from outsiders i've also heard kind of yeah kind of the libertarian argument of what you know let people do let people do what they want and then also you know we should save people from this bad life so i don't i don't think there's an easy answer and i mean my my family was never fundamentalist we were very mainstream so i just have one one mom um but um uh you know it is if you were part of a powerful religion it is hard to think of alternatives to it or to imagine your life uh differently especially when you're raised in it sort of touches on human agency and free will to what extent are you really free given the constraints of your background this would apply to all of us but it seems like some people have fewer degrees of freedom than others if they were raised in like a cult or some extreme environment and my other example prostitution again i you know sex workers whatever it's none of my business they should do what they want but on the other hand if you there's a lot of cases where these young girls maybe their teenagers are in their early 20s and they have you know they're drug addicted and their pimps beat them and you know they're are they really agents you know making rational you know volitional choices the same way you and i do in some other aspect of our life i don't think so yeah it's um yeah it's hard questions and i mean i think at the core of it is what what is exploitative and what is not and who decides what's exploitative and what is not right yeah like that warren jeff character oh yeah oh my god he was a piece of work and it gets worse the more you learn about him yeah absolutely absolutely yeah he was for sure exploitative and those girls were not old enough for anything no no volition there i think that's remember when the supreme court just uh decided that that capital punishment does not apply to people that are like under 23 or something like that it was based on brain development maybe it's 18 but that the you know the prefrontal cortex is not fully online and developed until your early 20s so somebody that you know has an impulsive act and murder somebody that you know they're 17 or something they're not really the same level of autonomy and responsibility as an adult yeah i think that's i think that's a good decision i know when i was 21 or 22 i thought that i was fully developed and i would definitely argue argue with that now and immortal and immortal and immortal that's right i don't think any of those things now yeah well sarah thank you so much for the great conversation super interesting love the book again they're already here and uh thanks for your work yes thank you for having me

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 15,170

Keywords: skepticism, Michael Shermer, UFOs, UFO culture, flying saucers, Pentagon program, AATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, conspiracy theories, Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, Fermi paradox, UFOs vs. ETIs, Project Sign, Project Bluebook, Project Grudge, Project Saucer, USS Nimitz, UFO videos, Roswell, Area 51

Id: DiFVrGOe3ik

Length: 86min 35sec (5195 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020