Nick Pope on UAPs, UFOs, Conspiracies, and Cover-ups

welcome to the michael schumer show i'm your host michael shermer today's episode is brought to you by one dream w-o-n-d-r-i-u-m.com onedrian.com and if you listen to it if you go there through my podcast that is one dream.com shermer you get a 22 day free trial give it a shot you can't go wrong it's just endless content for example i just queued up here on my one dream app uh the theory of everything okay this is interesting because i get letters all the time pretty much on a week on average of people who think they have a theory of everything you know that newton was wrong einstein was wrong stephen hawking was wrong and they've worked out the uh structure and origins and end of the universe in their garage okay everybody thinks that they have a theory of everything most people don't and even scientists haven't figured this out yet although they're working toward it so this course is all about that this is 24 30 minute lectures 20 minutes if you listen to them at 1.3 speed like i do just for example uh einstein unifies space time and light neutrinos violating parity in the weak force how let's see conservation laws and symmetry uh how einstein's gravity bends space and time well the gravity einstein and uh from weak gravity to extra dimensions extra dimensions okay that's going to be mind-blowing and then finally the last lecture toward a final theory of everything toward we're not there yet anyway that's just an idea of of the kinds of content that i like to listen to if you're into other things there's tons of stuff beyond just science there's also history philosophy economics finances business art music literature wine tasting photography you name it they've got courses on it so go to onedream.com shermer get your 22 day free trial at the end you can just skip it or you could actually subscribe which i highly recommend why wouldn't you it's just endless content and it supports this podcast i'm never going to have advertisers for painkillers and pillows and gold and silver for when the end times come or any of that stuff you get on other shows this is strictly knowledge wisdom science history philosophy uh content that i think my listeners would enjoy because i enjoy them anyway thanks for listening to the show and carry on my guest today is nick pope you've all seen nick he's on all those ancient aliens and the basement office and ufos declassified shows and pretty much any documentary you've ever seen on on ufos and and many on conspiracies you've seen nick pope nick is an author journalist and tv personality who ran the british government's ufo program for the ministry of defense for 21 years leading the media to call him the real fox mulder although mulder was pretty much a believer and as you'll see in this conversation nick is pretty much in the skeptical camp on most of these things nick pope is recognized as one of the world's leading experts on ufos the unexplained and conspiracy theories he's the media's go-to person for ufos and he's made appearances on numerous tv shows and documentaries including good morning america nightline tucker carlson tonight and ancient aliens he's also written for the new york times for the bbc news website and for nbc's technology and science site and has acted as consultant and spokesperson on numerous alien themed movies tv shows and video games he gives talks and takes part in academic conferences ban conventions and debates all around the world he's spoken at the national press club the royal albert hall science museum and the global competitiveness forum and is debated at the oxford union in the cambridge union society he lives in the united states here in california actually so this is a wide-ranging conversation obviously we deal with the recent flap over uaps an identified aerial phenomena formerly known as ufos those navy video clips that we've all seen so we deconstruct those we get into the larger issue of ufology and then the even still larger issue of seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligences are they out there and have they come here as two separate questions and how to think about those questions and so we we go through pretty much everything uh you've heard about that particular subject then we transition into conspiracy theories uh which is behind much of that and then how to think about conspiracy theories why so many conspiracy theories turn out to be true which is one of the reasons why people naturally gravitate toward believing many of them and how that turns out to be a signal detection problem which ones are real and which ones are not and and then from there we wrap it up talking about the kind of larger cultural issues and in there we also talk about the religious aspects of uh believing in ufos what i call deities for atheists and sky gods for skeptics nick is an atheist as you'll hear and how that does seem to fulfill some kind of deeper need in the human condition for uh believing there's something else out there bigger than us smarter than us more moral than us and so forth and that knows we're here and that's part of the impulse driving it although it's not his personal motive he he would actually like there to be aliens having had come here which i would do it would be super interesting but the question is is it actually true not just what we would like to believe anyway enjoy this conversation and if you appreciate the podcast do give us some support at skeptic.com donate that goes to the skeptic society which is a 501c3 so your donations are tax deductible and it supports not only the podcast but also skeptic magazine and all our other activities all right thanks for listening here's my conversation with nick pope all right nick pope nice to see you man it's uh so good to have you on the show you're a long a long time fan and uh and viewer of your many many many media appearances on this uh topic of ufos and uaps and conspiracy theories and so on so thanks for coming on thank you it's good to be on the show so nick um let's just kind of do a general background for those of a few people of my followers here who are not familiar with your work you're most famous for having worked for the ministry of defense i guess that'd be the equivalent of the department of defense in the united states when you were living in the uk and uh and you were in charge of ufos so give us a actually let's go back even further a little bit than that then give us some a little a potted biography of where you were born and raised and how you got interested in this particular topic and how did you end up at the ministry of defense well i was born in the united kingdom and uh my father was a senior government scientist he headed up the royal aeronautical establishment at farnborough and then got promoted rose to be deputy chief scientific advisor at the ministry of defense so the mod was sort of the family firm and i i got a tap on the shoulder from my own father suggesting that it would be you know interesting and important work uh to to do that and i gladly complied what father wouldn't want to follow his uh what son wouldn't want to follow his father into into the glamour of that kind of work now i was never a scientist so i i joined really as a a bureaucrat and most of my 21 years in the ministry of defense i was a civilian employee most of my postings involved briefing analysis taking large amounts of data and distilling it down to to fairly simple briefs for senior uh defense ministers service chiefs whoever it might be and i did about eight different postings over the course of my career but the one the one that i guess we're going to focus on and that i'm i'm best known for is one i had in the early 90s when i was posted to a division rather unglamorously titled secretariat air staff and my duties there included researching and investigating the ufo phenomena or uap as we generally called it and and the brief was essentially to see if there was evidence of any threat to the defense of the uk or anything of more general defense interest right so they're not looking for extraterrestrials this isn't like a branch of the seti program this is defense of the realm we have some sightings we have reports we have radar blips we have whatever and we don't know what they are so go figure it out because if it's you know russian drones or whatever we need to know what that is exactly this this was a defense and national security issue it had its roots and somebody had been doing the job that i did i mean way back um that the post went back to at least 1953 on a formal basis but we had we had reports before that on an ad hoc basis and yeah we were not conclusion-led at all um it was simply if there's something in our airspace we need to know what it is and yes absolutely the default position was and i know this is a a kind of glib sound by that i have given over the years but it's true it's it's more likely russian than martian not that we not that we entirely dismissed those other possibilities but yeah we we we just went in thinking we need to find out who's in our airspace yes i love that little line from you it's more likely russian than martian because it's in a bayesian way and we can get into this a little later it's like the line to medical students if you hear footsteps or hoof steps outside of your door you live in north america say you know think horse not zebra because zebras are pretty much non-existent in north america except for zoo so you know it's a base rate probability estimation and that makes sense it's far more likely to be russian or in this case now chinese with the uaps than say extraterrestrial so i'm glad to hear you say that and much of the time when i listen to you or read you i think this guy's a skeptic like me and then other times on some of these other shows i think i don't know the way he says it is in a way it suggests it could be extraterrestrial and and i think there's a reason people have you on all these shows is because you haven't come out and said i'm pretty certain it's not aliens um and you and you phrase your lines in such a way that it kind of leaves it open like it could be and that opens the door for ufologists who already believe that well this guy worked for the department of defense he's got uh good cred and he says it's possible so let's you know let's let's lean on him um so just what do you what do you think what do you believe or or or not believe or how do you think about that well i try not to be too definitive in my beliefs and uh yeah you you've probably seen me on shows where i come across as as quite skeptical and others where i am more open and sometimes to be fair that is just the edit um but other times it is it is because my own views sometimes evolve and and change and i'm not i'm not going to i i'm not going to sort of butter you up here by by sort of saying look i'm i'm absolutely in your camp on this i'm i'm a skeptic too i do approach things from the point of view that as i say statistically it is more likely to be russian than martian but neither do i rule out the more exotic possibilities because to take your your horse zebra um analogy every now and then some some exotic animal will break out of a private collection or or a state or or national zoo and there really will be a zebra in somebody's backyard so so it's yes i mean you can i mean i know you know far more about statistics than i but but i'm just saying i never say never and i want to i want to actually circle back to one other aspect of government mindset that i think speaks to this question and it's the concept of low probability high impact and we often thought in those terms not just on ufos but but on a range of things and and the idea that even if something it has a a vanishingly small probability as long as it's not zero probability we sometimes looked at those things because the the consequences if just one of those things turned out to be something low probability would be so immense that it's worth taking a look so i know that's a very long-winded way of saying but i guess my default position on this is i do not rule out some of the more exotic possibilities like extraterrestrials you know i'm not neither am i going to make the case that there is definitive proof for this because clearly there isn't of course right good perfectly stated yeah i think uh as scientists we always have to keep an open mind because we don't know everything there's a lot we don't know you know when i made that you and i are both on that galileo project team uh led by avi loeb at harvard and you know i gave that little presentation on bayesian reasoning about uaps and one of the responses was interesting that you know had we kind of taken that approach that i i just presented pretty far then we never would have recognized i think it was a type 2a supernovas because that that wasn't even in the you know the bin of possibilities when we're looking at stellar objects so you can't ever say never because then you're going to miss something right so you want to be open-minded enough uh to recognize something new just in case um but not so open-minded that you know you believe everything that comes along or that your brains fall out as they say so i i think that's right i think that's a good way to look at it um just just out of curiosity when you were growing up were you interested in science fiction did you have a fascination with the possibility of extraterrestrials i mean i did and you know a lot of people interested in this subject did i i guess i read quite widely as a kid and um certainly i did come across some sci-fi i mean um war of the worlds and the time machine uh yes i i read maybe i i don't know somewhere between eight and ten um but i probably read all sorts of other things too i mean from from classics uh through through the whole range but then i i suppose when i was a teenager i found the works of asimov and and uh very much enjoyed enjoyed that and then the frank herbert dune books so i i enjoyed and read sci-fi but i could probably say there were other genres that i enjoyed too like thrillers well i guess what i'm after is is there a personal interest in this i mean i i'm fascinated by the whole ufo uap issue because even though i'm skeptical that they've come here i separate two questions are they out there and have they come here i i think it would be shocking if there was no other intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos given that just the raw numbers you know 100 billion stars in every galaxy 100 billion galaxies maybe more than that maybe a trillion galaxies whatever it is the number is so huge that it would be stunning if you know even no matter how many steps you have to go through in the drake equation to get to a communicating intelligent life form it's got to be close to one if because of the raw numbers are so high and uh and so that that's one aspect of the of the question and then the other one is you know have they come here which is a different question entirely i think how do you separate those or think about those yes i do think they are two distinct questions that people often blur into one um i guess you get down to a debate and this goes back to sci-fi about whether light speed is a hard barrier or whether there are workarounds like warp drive and wormholes and such like or but i i take i've recently taken a different view on that and i've said even if lightspeed turns out to be an insurmountable hard barrier it still doesn't actually preclude interstellar travel it just puts a very different time scale on it but if i mean one of my favorite quotes i think from former nasa historian stephen dick if we are living in a largely post-biological universe populated by immortal thinking machines then pointing i suppose even if you suppose we could go no faster than we've already gone and we had pointed a voyager probe at proxima centuri and it would take about 75 000 years to get there to immortal thinking machines to ai um you know doesn't matter and and in those sorts of you know with with the kind of cosmological timescales uh even even with light as a hard barrier i i don't think we should necessarily preclude the idea of them getting here from there if they are machine intelligence um right so if if we did encounter aliens here they're probably going to be ai some sort of information system whatever we would consider to be something like a computer uh not biological yes i think that so far from from everything we know about our own sort of infant baby step space program is that space travel for biologicals is going to be very very difficult but but maybe you know for the for the the probes maybe a whole bunch of the problems physiological psychological can be taken out of the equation yeah but uh let's leave the light speed as the upper limit but i i recall there are calculations where if you accelerate like one g per whatever time unit of time very slowly so that you could sit there in the spacecraft and feel like you were just being pressed against the floor like we are right now with one g but you accelerate it one g at each unit of time you get up to like 99 of the speed of light within some relatively short period of time like a year or two or something and then therefore you could get to alpha centauri within uh up you know whatever maybe 10 years or something not 70 000 years and i think it was like an ion propulsion engine proposed that could do this something like that so it and given that you know the galaxy is well the earth is four and a half billion years old and the galaxies you know roughly double that i guess um that's plenty of time for for for machine intelligence or even biological intelligence to get around the galaxy uh they could have come here in in some distant past more likely in the distant past than now just because of the copernican principle that we're not special and our time is not special there's no reason why uh that they should come you know in the 1950s say uh rather than say 5 000 years ago or 10 000 years ago or something like that yeah um as ever i mean i think we you know you almost get into philosophy when you you start discussing these things but i was um there was a paper i think published um earlier well i late last year maybe um i can't remember the exact title of it but the kind of colloquial concept is grabby aliens and uh anyway i i it's quite an intriguing paper they attempt to maybe blend a little bit of fermi paradox with with some other things and it suggests that we might be a very early civilization and it says one and now you know you can argue yourself around in circles with this but it says one of the reasons for that is that if we weren't uh there would already be very visible technological structures out there i guess the counter argument is that we're only just getting to the point where we're maybe able to detect them with with things like james webb perhaps if it uh all goes to plan and square kilometer array when they get around to building it and and all these fabulous things right and the galileo project cameras are going to be put all over the planet we'll see what gets photographed in in in all those uh airspace um yeah so again but the probability that alien's going to be anything like us it's got to be extremely low which is why i'm skeptical of like alien abduction stories because it's always these kind of bipedal primates with a big brain and and eyes and ears and you know how many species on earth of the roughly 10 billion species there's ever been you know look anything like that well there's just you know one lineage the primates and there's only a handful of those uh and and so the chances of that entire sequence evolving on some other planet is next to nothing which is why sagan never wanted to show what the aliens look like in contact because it whatever we show in in a hollywood movie is going to be too parochial it's going to be based on on the you know the wardrobe availability in the in the costuming that they have to to dress up people in it as aliens or whatever they're not going to be anything like us i mean it could be something like an octopus or whatever um and and so again you know just using a probability type argument you know even if they got here they can't look anything like us well unless you say that there might be some sort of what is it converging evolution kind of concept on a galactic scale that yes that certain designs are maybe quite good in terms of of the sorts of life that would be capable of going on to develop a technological civilization and and if if a principle like that applies then maybe maybe the we would get something like us but i i don't know it's i suppose it's unknowable but but fascinating to think about but again actually that's the argument with the numbers though richard dawkins made that very argument against me yeah go ahead yeah with with the numbers though that um you mentioned and i mean i think i saw a paper uh a year or two ago suggesting a very low ball figure for the drake equation much lower than than other more recent estimates and i think it was something like 36 um communicable civilizations in in our galaxy but going back to the number of galaxies in the universe that's still calculated out to something like 72 trillion species out there so i don't know maybe maybe humaniform you know life will crop up here and there in amongst other weird yeah that's the argument dawkins made right uh that this convergent evolution argument that uh you know there's only so so many ways to build a body if you're in the water you have to have something like a fuse a form body whether you're a mammal or or a fish that that is you have to have this kind of streamlined body that pushes through a dense medium if you're on the on the air live in the air you got to have something like wings whether you're a batter or a bird uh or an insect and so this convergent evolution maybe if you're a living on the ground you need to have some kind of arms and legs to propel yourself and you need to have like most of the sensory apparatus up front in the head and and the waist disposal part at the back and you know and so on and but pretty soon you end up with something like a bipedal well dinosaur there's actually proposals that that you know had the dinosaurs not gone extinct they may have evolved into these kind of bipedal uh reptiles with big brains and so something like that is is not inconceivable no i i i like to think so and uh given the size of the universe um i i suspect we'll find a vast diversity and i mean i mentioned largely post biological but but i suspect we'll find biological post biological and and a huge range of size and shapes and colors and and just diversity i suspect it will be a diverse cosmos is a diverse cosmos yes yes yes i like the fermi paradox just as a way of thinking about um you know how these things could be discovered um on the one hand if the copernican principle is true we're in the middle of the bell curve uh therefore there's many behind us and many ahead of us so fermi's paradox you know they should have been here by now because if you give just they just take a billion years of time that's plenty of time to populate the galaxy even if there's only 36 in the entire galaxy that's you know if you give them a billion years um to develop technology and you know build self-replicating robots that can go and land on planets and build more self-replicating robots and launch them into the into the cosmos and then pretty soon you know they should be everywhere but they're not so where are they so one answer for me i'd like to get your answer to the fermi paradox is this there's just a lot of empty space and it would be hard to find finders no matter how many there are they're gonna mostly miss most of the planets but who knows yeah i think so i i mean i'm going to have to reread this recent paper on the so-called loud or grabby aliens which which suggested um you know that we might not be in the middle that we we might really be one of the first first up but um yeah i mean i suspect there is a point though where where even given the empty space a civilization certainly a space-faring civilization would leave fingerprints that would be detectable i mean people talk about the james webb having the the in infrared but having this great analogy that they always roll out that it would be able to detect a bumblebee on the moon um and then the square kilometer array radio telescope they have a similar analogy for that and it's something along the lines of it would be able to detect an average airport radar system out to 50 light years so so i think given those sorts of tools that we're just now getting into our hands it is conceivable that that a civilization you know a few hundred or thousand years ahead of us which isn't much in in cosmic time scales would would be detectable so so i don't know you know we we hear a lot now nasa getting into the search for techno signatures and avilob and galileo project too of of course some of some of the the things that that they're looking for you know a second amua muah or a third or fourth um satellites maybe in orbit around you know the idea that we things would be detectable and there would be there would be fingerprints to be found and i'm i'm rather attracted to that i i mean we we heard a year or so ago about the the tabby's star controversy and i i know there are there are much more prosaic explanations which are now favored about that but i think the principle remains the same if there are things like alien megastructures dyson spheres and things we have not far off particularly if they're in our local part of of the milky way galaxy we're probably not far off being able to detect them and i guess it it is the same the other way around that we have probably been detectable to a civilization not much more advanced than our own level for some while if they're out there i remember i remember i think in the 60s sagan proposed that maybe fiba phobos one of the moons of of mars might have been an artificial structure he got hammered pretty hard for that and you know of course it's not but but but in principle that could be dyson sphere abbey star for those not familiar with that this was a a star in which the light curve was much greater than it should have been based on the number of planets around it or what could possibly be blocking it whether it was a cluster of comets or meteorites or moons or planets or whatever it seemed like there was something more so maybe these are like gigantic solar structures blocking the light between that star and us something like that i remember when that story first broke this is this this will get to the psychology of people who believe um that i was on this radio show john uh was a uh i forget the name of one of these la radio afternoon talk shows john and jillian and uh so they had me on they had they had on um art not art bell the other guy george neuri uh who was talking about tabby star and that you know he he's pretty confident this is you know the aliens are there and uh you know it's 1500 light years away and so and then they bring me on and and immediately jillian asked well what are they like and i said what is who like the aliens it's like there's no aliens it's just a dip in the light cone just the dip in the light curve that's all we have is a dip in the light curve there's no there's no detection of aliens or anything like that and it's 1500 light years away so it would you know that light took us 1500 years to get here and if we sent a signal saying yeah who's out there it would take 3000 years for the signal to get there and back if they responded right away but see people immediately go to the you know if mystery than than magic or if you know if mystery then aliens and uh yeah so talk a little bit about that you know the human psychology seems to be that even if i if you can explain 95 of all the sightings which seems to be the number most most even believers agree that we're talking about that five percent people readily just spin that five percent into fantastic stories and whole new world views new physics you know the aliens are here and they know we're here and they're this and that based on this just this tiny little fraction of the unexplained well i think on the psychology um few people said it better than than the x-files with the i want to believe and i think people do want to believe i want to believe i i make no bones about it i often say you know the world would be a much more interesting place with aliens in it than without and and as i said earlier i'm i have no definitive proof that they are here but i certainly hope that we're being visited and and i certainly certainly hope and believe there's life out there in the cosmos and that we'll we'll find it sooner rather than later probably with science but but going back to the question yeah i think there is people love mysteries people love the idea that there might be something more something bigger than themselves something that i don't know gives meaning and i know i know where this is kind of going obviously because because you will doubtless say and others will be thinking well isn't this just a another religion in a sense another another sort of quest for for something over and above ourselves and our everyday existence and i i get that i come at this actually you know maybe we can get into this it's just like it i don't normally talk about this and it surprises some people i'm actually an atheist and and um which always creates some interesting dynamics at ufo conferences particularly the more sort of spiritual new age ones um so so i don't know i i but i i can separate out those parts of my life i think um i'm an atheist because i i just i i'm not sure i can even put it into to words really but it's it's just um you know not not something that i have ever believed whereas you know i think what you said earlier about the size of the universe and i you didn't quite put it this way but i often do but with the laws of physics and chemistry seeming to be constant in the observable universe there's there's no reason to suppose that there's anything magical about life so in one way maybe it sounds like uh you know that i why why is he an atheist if he believes in aliens actually maybe it is understandable this this idea that that i'm not arguing for any special treatment i'm not arguing for a new physics i'm arguing for maybe with the extraterrestrial thing and particularly visitation maybe there being aspects to the laws of physics that we don't currently understand but that's always been the way yeah i'm actually not surprised to hear you say you're an atheist i didn't know that but that doesn't that doesn't surprise me at all in a way it makes sense because i i think of ufos or just the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in general as a kind of uh deities for atheists sky gods for skeptics um you know and i don't mean this in a derogatory way like oh that belief is you know it's like a religion it's like a cult it's like a myth it's just a bunch of i don't mean it that way i think there's kind of a longing in the human heart or mind or condition about aw and wonder and that there must be something out there bigger than us that knows we're here or that you know created things or it's just something else out there and i think that longing is in everyone i think it is the basis of religion and if you don't have religion then what well you know the the scientific view of this would would be there are aliens out there and if there are if we detected them the chances of them being at our level is pretty nil and if we detect them they're likely to be ahead of us not behind us unless we go to some planet and so if you take something like moore's law development and apply not just to technology the doubling of technology every 12 to 18 months or whatever and you apply it to moral values and the development of of human societies and so on they are likely to be just vastly more superior to us advanced than us not just technologically but morally culturally politically economically maybe like a a post-scarcity star trek where they don't have money they just have replicators that give you everything you want and everybody has equal rights and and at some point you end up with this idea of this thing out there that is relatively omniscient to us it just knows vastly more than we know and it would seem like a godlike figure and i don't mean that in a derogatory way again to repeat myself it just seems like that's a natural way to think about those things a very human way to think about that yes i mean i think picking up on a number of points there i mean i think people have speculated about literally almost like a god gene that that causes us humans to believe in things like that but yes then i mean if essentially your last point was was really i guess um something that arthur c clarke spoke to in that marvelous quote which i'm probably going to mangle but any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and extrapolating from that any sufficiently advanced civilization would probably be indistinguishable from what we would call a god i i mean i don't know if there is an upper limit on technology for example and if if there is or isn't there's certainly a level which which must be something so above and beyond us that that it would appear omnipotent to us and and that would uh yeah that would certainly be interesting to encounter yeah like the the analogies if you if you gave a iphone to uh neanderthal you know he would think you're a god or that the iphone's the god and uh yeah i i took arthur c clarke's third law which you stated perfectly and applied it one of my scientific american columns i called it shermer's last law because you can't name laws after yourself which is any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence or i added later far future human would be indistinguishable from god just because of the you know kind of moore's law geometric growth or uh exponential growth of technologies and societies and so on that idea is not original to me but i i think it's worth pursuing in that sense um and let me just read to you this so i've done some research on this this was one of my uh columns in scientific american that i then expanded into this article for skeptic um in a 2017 article in the journal motivation and emotion titled we are not alone the psychologist clay routledge and his colleagues found an inverse relationship between religiosity and eti beliefs that is those who report low levels of religious belief but a high desire for meaning show greater belief in extraterrestrial intelligences in study one subjects who read an essay arguing that human life is ultimately meaningless and cosmically insignificant were statistically significantly more likely to believe in etis than those who read an essay on the limitations of computers that was a neutral one in study two subjects who self-identified as either atheist or agnostic were statistically significantly more likely to report believing in etis than those who reported being religious primarily christian in studies three and four subjects completed a religiosity scale a meaning in life scale a well-being scale and an eti belief scale in a religious supernatural belief scale but lower presence of meaning and higher search for meaning were associated with greater belief in etis the researchers reported but eti beliefs showed no correlation with supernatural beliefs or well-being beliefs from these studies the authors conclude quote eti beliefs serve an existential function the promotion of perceived meaning in life in this way we view belief in eti as serving a function similar to religion without relying on traditional religious doctrines that some people have deliberately rejected and by this they mean the supernatural continuing the quote that is accepting eti beliefs does not require one to believe in supernatural forces or agents that are incompatible with the scientific understanding of the world that i conclude if you don't believe in god but seek deeper meaning outside of our world the thought that we're not alone in the universe could make humans feel like they are part of a larger and more meaningful cosmic drama i think that gets to your point yes and i i think it reinforces the point i was making earlier that that unlike a god extraterrestrial intelligence in some way really doesn't violate any any sort of fundamental laws and and the idea that i i mean people sometimes joke about the ufos the ufo books being in the paranormal section in a a library and and people say well what's paranormal about another civilization doing what we're doing uh just on a slightly more advanced okay but not you know going back to our discussion about light speed not not necessarily offending against any of the laws of physics as we currently understand them and i once had a great conversation about this with a british ufo researcher called john spencer and i remember he had a very great line on this i said well if if the ufo books weren't in the paranormal section where would you put them and he said transport that's really funny right vehicles yeah you're right no it's not it's not supernatural nothing supernatural about it at all although then what do you do with the idea of good well i was going to say neither neither do i necessarily take the view that somehow atheists are you know searching for a a meaning that that religious people don't have i think i i mean in my experience atheists find joy and pleasure in every aspect of life and and don't you know just don't sort of think about it in terms of an afterlife but but whether it's whether it's a a great record on the radio or a desert hike or or whatever it is it's enjoy the moment i as an atheist i don't feel and i just wanted to clarify this i don't want people to think because i don't have god in my life i'm looking for aliens because although i can make the analogy that some people might look for something i don't define atheism as a sort of empty space that i'm looking to fill with something else because i enjoy my life and i live every day and and enjoy every day and and don't feel you know this this search for meaning because i don't have god hmm although uh i gather you since you referenced going for hikes or whatever you else you do to for spiritual fulfillment or on wonder about the world that is kind of filling in a gap i don't mean a god gap i mean just humans have a need for transcendence for something bigger than ourselves we can you know love the sunset or beautiful music or whatever there's something about human psychology that engages us in these kinds of activities and i don't think it's a replacement for religion or god i think it's just part of the human condition of which religion and god is just one you know expression of that well i guess that a lot of animals and i don't i don't have the percentages but spend so much of their time locating and consuming and digesting food and looking for shelter and looking for a mate and avoiding predators or seeking prey that they don't have time much time for for anything else but i suppose we we have gotten to a state because of of our society isn't our our civilization where we do have you know we we can accomplish those things and then fill our days with other things and i think the question is then what do you fill your your days with and i i guess for the most people the answer should be things we enjoy doing so i'm not sure there's anything i forget who said that line uh that that line grub first then philosophy you have to have to have your needs back before you can bother with things like literary criticism or or music appreciation yeah you know in one of those so let's talk about the uaps the these videos you know in a lot of the discussion there's like okay if it's not aliens then our real concern is that you know could be russian or chinese assets and they've got some new physics or technology now i'll then bifurcate that into two things you know how could they do this without us knowing about it let's set that aside for a moment in it but one of those galileo project meetings you know avi made the point well we just spent 400 billion dollars on this on this cern particle accelerator and no new physics was discovered so let's not go the no new physics route let's think about it some other way and i agree with that but you know had he said that a century ago you know we wouldn't have known about well make it more than a century ago einstein's new physics over newtonian mechanics or you know just take any of those quotes from the 1890s you know that physics is pretty much done you know everything is just being rounded out to the sixth place after the decimal point and so on and and of course that was you know complete nonsense so i can't help but thinking yeah you're probably right there's no new physics to be discovered and i'll you know the people that i friends at caltech that tell me man we pretty much had the standard model is pretty much it you know we know about all the quarks and this and that and there's nothing more down there to drill into to find um yeah okay you know i'm not a physicist what do i know but on the other hand historically you know every time humans say that then it's like oh well but you know a century later we discovered x and oh my god we were so wrong when we said there's no new physics to be discovered uh how do you think about that issue yeah i mean i'm as i said earlier not a scientist but i do occasionally dip into and i think it's it's i can't remember what the website is but i occasionally google uh major unsolved problems in and and it comes up like major unsolved problems in physics major unsolved problems in mathematics and and it does seem to me there's still a lot out there and i mean whether it's dark matter dark energy string theory multiverse um you know i i just get the sense there is still a lot that that we don't really get and and even some of the basic math problems which are quite fun some of them uh make you think well if we haven't figured out you know some of those mathematical proofs yet what what other things are there that that i don't know we haven't even thought of yet so so i suspect it's going to be like the more the deeper you the closer you look the more granularity you see and and that there is always going to be something so i think yeah i i occasionally hear people say it it's a repeat of this there's nothing new left to be discovered and if history teaches us anything it's that the very next week there'll be an oops we've just found this do you think it's possible that the chinese or russians could have developed technologies say decades or centuries ahead of our own science and technology development programs given the history of science and technology shows it's pretty cumulative and we all steal from one another and copy one another and and there's really new nothing uh new that one country has that another one doesn't quickly have after that yeah i i mean um i can't recall what the the technical term for it is but but as you said i mean the essence of it is what you just said that that most technologies are just a logical progression of something that's come before and that you can't build c without first having built b and before that you need to have the principles of a um that said and i'm just off the top of my head i'm i'm struggling for it but i mean i suppose something like the jet engine as opposed to the standard propeller driven aircraft could be seen as a sort of quantum leap breakthrough in aviation technology aeronautical engineering and and it is i think conceivable that every now and then some maverick genius or or just because it's the way it turns out produces something and and it looks like it comes from left field and it probably doesn't it probably still still builds on existing principles but it does look very different and very new so so like uh you know a coal-fired steamer as opposed to a sailing vessel with with the rigging and and all of that and and like i say the the jet engine as opposed to the propeller and and then particularly say the the v2 rocket as opposed to conventional freeform fault bombs so yes i think to answer your question it is absolutely possible that russia china anyone could have made some breakthrough that that produces what looks like new technologies new physics isn't of course because they're you know not saying that this would violate any laws of physics but it it would give the united states a shock indeed yes well one reason i'm skeptical that whatever it is we're looking at with these uap videos that they're russian or chinese and then the kind of breathless uh descriptions of them by believers that you know they're going faster than the speed of sound on a sharp left turn that would kill the pilot so they must have some gravity dampening system or something and on and on they go well how would the russians or chinese do this without us finding out about it i mean it'd be like you mentioned jet engines well measure smit had jet engines in 1945 and what we had chuck yeager breaking the sound barrier and night in a jet in 1947 i mean within two years you know the manhattan project the most secret scientific project ever uh you know we detonated atomic bombs in 1945 the russians had it and detonated their own bomb in 1949 they they stole it uh you know it would be like saying you know we have biplanes or right wright brother biplanes or something and and the russians have you know the equivalent of a b-2 bomber or a stealth bomber or that we're using the fax machine and the russians have the internet you know how would they do this without us knowing about it i mean we we would rip them off we would copy them we would figure it out within you know days months weeks months maybe years at most so that that that that's one reason why i'm skeptical that they've they've made some kind of anti-gravity system or you know what's been described by these videos yeah i mean actually of course i think i would turn that back and say maybe the answer is before we even get into um russia and china we really don't know what the the speeds and the maneuvers and the accelerations of these objects are we've we've heard as as you put it breathless descriptions from the believers and we've heard some less than breathless descriptions from from some skeptics two i don't know what an and the us government if they know clearly are not releasing those data um for whatever reason so so before we get into it well russia or china wouldn't have this technology we don't really know what this technology is um and certainly looking at the three best known us navy uap videos i mean despite people saying oh the sudden acceleration and i've heard estimates of speeds of of tens of thousands of miles an hour or whatever it is but i think i think the the mick west's of this world would say well those those are not the speeds that we're seeing and if you just go to the soundtrack at sound soundtrack of of the pilots talking to each other on one of those videos it's not sort of wow it just disappeared it's whoa look at that thing i mean yeah it's it's impressive but it's not magic impressive so so the first qualifier is we don't really know what speeds um these these things are capable of so we don't know whether it's a truly quantum leap development or whether it's just a next step but my other answer to your your point about russia and china is that yes sometimes history shows us that something is developed and then very soon gets copied but only usually in circumstances where it's fairly obvious what that technology is so for example one can hypothesize the manhattan project a great example i think when the first atomic bomb was dropped in anger at that point stalin said to berea you know get okay we need that this is the number one strategic priority for the soviet union you know you have unlimited resources but we must get the bomb but had they not dropped the bomb i don't know what whispers stalin had heard that that the us was developing a an atomic weapon but maybe they wouldn't have gotten the bomb because maybe it's only when you show your hand in a definitive way another example is the breaking of the german codes during the second world war and people think that that secret came out in 1945 and of course it didn't because i think it was late 60s early 70s before it was revealed that that the enigma machines had had been compromised because some some embassies in south american countries i think were still using them and and of course we were reading that mail so so secrets can be kept so i'm not you know if these things are russian or chinese until unless one crashes or is shut shot down or or something maybe they can operate this new technology and get away with it that's a good point yeah i read um who's the guy that developed the the um the youtube spy plane ben rich i think his name was at boeing in burbank burbank california right here in l.a right and this went on for decades and no one knew that they were doing this right there with hundreds of people sworn to secrecy so it does kind of counter that my conspiracy skepticism that you know people can't really keep secrets sometimes they can uh i mean apparently you working for the ministry of defense you have uh you had certain amount of security clearance and you saw things that you probably can't tell us on the show today or ever so maybe it is possible for people to keep secrets like that sure i mean it's one of those things i was in the ministry of defense for 21 years and and know a lot of things that are secret that haven't come out on a whole range of subjects whether it's iraq or counter-terrorism or whatever it is and and of course people have this thing like oh see you you can't keep a secret and then of course they cite because they can only cite secrets which have been revealed either because they have been declared or leaked or whatever but they can't and don't cite secrets that have been kept and secrets are being kept every day in in most government agencies and and a lot of this is obviously fairly low level stuff but there are i i guarantee there are some pretty big secrets out there that have been kept for decades right well sure there's going to be more probably about jfk assassination and and who knows what else and we won't know until we know um yeah but so you since you mentioned mick west uh you know he's kind of done the heavy lifting on the video analysis and you know you follow just criticize him what does he know you know he's just a video game developer and and but that makes me think well if a video game developer can deconstruct these videos in such a a way to make them relatively explainable surely someone in the pentagon must have somebody at that level that already knows all this stuff like the simplest one my favorite example of his debunking is this um uh this particular one here of of the the little uap that shoots off it was in the middle of the of the two dashed lines and all of a sudden it shoots off to the left and by the way it doubles in size and it was mitch mcquest that pointed out this little thing right here says zoom and it goes from 1.0 to 2.0 so in this case the the uap is not doing anything it's just the camera's zooming in on it and that makes it you know look like it's moving it's not moving at all okay if the video game developer can look at that and go no there's nothing that needs explaining it's the zoom surely someone in the pentagon must go these guys out there making these entire television shows about these you know incredible new physics that must have been developed we know it's just a zoom effect on the camp they have to know this right and they're just why are they not telling us this disclosure project last june you know it really didn't have that much new to say i was so i suspect there's a lot more in there that they're just not telling us i'm sure that's right now i i know what i don't know so i i i really when i was at the ministry of defense there were scientific and technical intelligence people who did did all the sort of video and photographic analysis and and i was just a lay person trying to kind of make sense of of their technical stuff so mick mick may be right on that aspect of it and and he may well have picked up something that that the ufo community missed i don't think that necessarily means he's right across the board um certainly what he says should be listened to and evaluated but i've i've seen some other people like you know retired military pilots for example criticize some of mick's analysis and say no that doesn't stand up because so i i don't know i think i it it all needs to be evaluated but yeah one thing going to your your point is absolutely 100 there will be people in the dod and in in the us intelligence community who do have a a much better handle on this um excuse me um and excuse me a moment yeah please yeah while you're doing that just just to put a fine point on that you know like with the roswell story you know that you know the ufologists say well you know the government lied they said it was a you know weather balloon and then they said it was this that and then you know 1996 they released that port that report about the what really happened at roswell this was a high altitude balloon train that was uh carrying acoustic equipment to try to detect uh upper atmosphere nuclear explosions by the soviet union so of course it was a cold war we couldn't tell you what we were doing so a apparently the government does lie to its citizens no kidding and b it's not aliens it's you know it's just cold war technology something like that but i noticed that ufologist didn't say oh okay now we don't have to worry about roswell roswell's explained no they just said they're still lying you know so it's the question is what would satisfy a ufologist you know they're hiding bodies at area 51 or the spacecraft at area 51 okay let's say they opened the gates and said all right you guys get to come in we're having an open house this weekend you can see everything we have here so of course we go there and there's nothing there but conventional technology well then the ufologist is just going to say well they hit it you know they've moved it that's how we know they have it and so this gets to the question of negative evidence and and testability or falsifiability what would it take and by the way i noticed when when george bush george w bush you know invaded iraq on the pretense of that uh sodom hussein had weapons of mass destruction and then the u.n inspectors went in there and couldn't find any and bush's initial response was well they moved them that's how we know they have them because we can't find them it's like no no you know that's what the ufologists say that's not an argument it's not a sound argument and then he later admitted that that was a big mistake yeah i mean that's a a tricky one and i i mean the whole wmd debate um actually i mean i think in one sense it is relevant because there was a very interesting line on that in in the uk's um or one of the uk's inquiries about the the gulf war and it said you know obviously we knew as a matter of fact that at one point saddam had had chemical weapons because he had used them so so there was that reasonable start point with the whole wmd thing that that they had been there and and then the question is did did they still have them and and one of the senior mi6 officers who was interviewed in the inquiry said something which was quite i thought one of these truisms but but what do you do with it in in terms of does saddam or not have this capability and he said he said a bio weapons capability for example may exist in in the cranium of a handful of iraqi scientists and and so in other words you can you can maybe destroy a stockpile but if you possess the knowledge to very quickly then remake that do you have a capability even if you don't act actually currently have the stockpile and and which is more dangerous and you know so i mean these are difficult philosophical issues but they are important because we went to war on them and and some people say you know went to an illegal war on them so it's it's not just philosophy it's important and and lives were and are in involved so and but yeah it it gets to the heart of this question of evidence and proof and and and yeah i mean you have arms inspections un under the treaties and and you know there are stories of of obviously if if you can call a snap inspection and go to the other side and say right we're you know we want to go into this base um but yeah how do you know that they haven't moved it to the next base or or just hidden it very well in the base that you you're inspecting so yeah the whole concept of proving negatives and and where does evidence become proof i mean this it's difficult but it's important and it's it's central to to the ufo debate but it's central to the iraq wmd debate and so many other things by the way i want to i want to come back on one other point i i was a little bit more enthused about the preliminary assessment of uap last june than than many people in the ufo community were i i actually thought there was some good stuff in that nine pages i i thought i thought it was interesting that they had mentioned that uap would detect it across multiple platforms and and they specifically mentioned you know visual radar flare electro optical weapon seeker and so on i think it was interesting that they mentioned the collection bias problem and clustering because that's something we need to get to the bottom of are there really more sightings around some of these nuclear facilities for example or is it just that those areas are more heavily surveilled i mean those those are all important questions and whether we're dealing with china or russia or something else they are questions that that obviously congress and the dod and the intelligence community now now accept that we do need answers to yeah one of those quotes in the 60 minutes peace on the uap's correspondent bill whitaker was talking to navy pilot ryan graves uh who said he had seen uaps quote every day for at least a couple of years and i remember being struck by that like oh so this isn't just a one-off thing and here's our video grainy video you've seen these every day but then on the other hand if that's true given how many uh you know high definition smartphones there are 100 million in the united states alone or more uh and you know these are clustered along the coast so surely there's people out walking their dogs or at the beach or or at their homes sitting on the back porch and there goes another one and another one and another one where are all the cell phone videos and photographs clear sharp not grainy videos and blurry photographs that make it so difficult to see what's going on this is what always bothers me about about this whole subject and related subjects too the evidence is always kind of murky can't quite make out what's going on and we know from cognitive psychology that's where the mind fills in the gaps patternicity and and you know thinking something's there and like like bigfoot not you know another one of my areas is you know here's a video of a bigfoot or a you know photograph of a bigfoot and and if you squint and kind of use your imagination you can see right there in the shadows that kind of a head and an arm it's like can't we have like a definitive photograph not a guy in an ape suit but i mean a definitive photograph and that's what bothers me about that about these claims about the uaps if they're that common we should have tons of video and photographs don't you think yeah maybe they're not that common or maybe they're not that common in areas where the public might capture them on on cell phones and things and that's one of the reasons why i thought one of the most important like revelations in the last couple of years was when former director of national intelligence john ratcliffe threw into that fox news interview uh he the the statement about satellite imagery of uap and he said something like he was being dismissive uh about you know betting too much on just a handful of videos and he said well it's not just a site a pilot sighting here or a satellite image over there and i thought that's interesting because nobody asked him about satellite imagery and he popped it into the conversation and then if you if you look at that interview he repeated it he followed up with a second reference to satellite imagery so i think satellite imagery might be key to a lot of this and i hope it's something that the senate intelligence committee the the senate armed services committee is it and house too is looking into because i think i think satellite imagery could very well be key to a lot of this right if you can pinpoint the date when that video video x was shot at this location 50 miles off the coast of san diego on this date at two in the afternoon and presumably you could call up the data from satellites or google earth or whatever and go there's what you were looking at right there we can see what it is now high resolution it's a jet or it's a drone or whatever that would be one way to get at the bottom of this yes and it's interesting i don't think from memory that when kirsten gillibrand wrote her amendment for the new defense bill i i think there were there was a lot about the need for a science plan on uap there was a lot on the need for a multi-agency approach i'm not sure even after john ratcliffe had dropped that bombshell whether there was reference to satellite imagery but i do hope it's something that that irrespective of the wording in the new uh national defense authorization act for fiscal year 2022. i i hope that it's something that that congress will push on because it's it it yeah absolutely it it should be one of the easiest ways to get if you'll excuse the pun resolution on the the su nice yes um so let's talk about these shows that you've done a lot of these shows and and since we're talking about mick west and and so forth um they don't they seem to be a little thin on the skeptical perspective i'd say you're the closest thing they have to a skeptic that appears regularly on these shows like ancient aliens or ufos declassified you know they they have they're mostly true believers and you you can see from the outset what the premise of the show is why don't they have mick west or myself or robert schaefer over at center for inquiry or you know there's there's a dozen you know qualified people that study ufos for a living that are skeptical and it you know it seems obvious well because they don't want a skeptical perspective but why not why wouldn't why do they think that the american public just has no interest in what the skeptical perspective is why not give a balanced show or say well these are what some people say this is what other people say kind of a conversation like you and i haven't are having do you think they just feel like that's not going to be entertaining enough and we got to sell a show or fill the air airways with enough rich content that too much skeptical analysis is going to make it sound boring or you know what's your sense of how these shows are produced i think it varies and i've got a maybe a different perspective on this because i of course i've lived in the us for 10 years actually literally 10 years to this day by the way um so oh my god well congratulations yes thank you but um when i was in the uk and i still do some uk tv but but it was much more the case with with certainly the bbc where you did generally speaking have to have balance so on those shows there often is skeptical input and i think it works i'm i'm all for it because to me i mean and i've been involved in developing some tv shows i think if everyone just agrees with everyone else and all the viewers are just nodding and going yes yes absolutely i'm i'm not sure that's as good as i say bring on the skeptics even if then the the believers are shaking their fists at the tv and saying you evil debunker you're still working for the government or or whatever so i'm i would be for it i think it works on multiple levels i think it's it's the right thing to do to bring balance but i also think it's it's actually entertaining because because you will alternately upset the skeptics and the believers who are more likely to watch i mean a range of people are more likely to watch a show with balance than than without and and so you'll be on and people will be shaking their fist at you and and then a true believer will be on and the skeptics in the audience will be rolling their eyes and saying oh for goodness sake and i think that works so i i think it it should happen i i don't know really why it doesn't um but one one thing i would say is that one of the other shows i'm involved with is is uh the basement office with stephen greenstreet from from the new york post and if if anyone has followed his twitter feed recently they will have seen that he has taken a very sharp turn towards more skeptical explanations much more favoring china and russia for example with with the the us navy videos so so season three of the basement office is coming up and i think people people can expect a few surprises there oh good yeah one of my favorite video clips that i show to my students in my lecture on the bibuna triangle is a bbc production of the bermuda triangle and they open with the disappearance of flight 19 uh of these uh avenger planes off of florida and and they present presented in a way that's like oh my god this is an incredible mystery how can they possibly explain this and then they explain it it's like oh it's like you know magic tricks revealed oh that's how it's done to me i want to know to me that's super interesting rather than here's the mystery and we're just going to leave it at that yes i i want to know too of course very often we're not able to do that with this subject because there isn't a definitive answer maybe there are definitive or widely accepted as definitive solutions to some cases but i think the phenomenon itself the mystery itself is still unresolved and i mean i guess on one level if it wasn't you and i wouldn't be having this conversation right now if if it was genuinely case closed either way in the debate so i think there is still sufficient gray area and things still to be discovered on this but i think i go back to congress and i think it's it's one of these you know examples of the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he never existed i think the point is for too long we you know trust yeah the atheist brings out that quote of course um but but i think for too long the authorities it's not that they haven't looked at uap but they haven't looked at it seriously enough and with the modern technologies that we now have in our hands that we can bring to bear on this mystery and i mentioned satellites but i could equally have mentioned the whole discipline of um uh measurement um and and signature intelligence so the whole messant discipline of of looking for example at infrared signals through through the the various cameras and and then being able to discern things about what you're looking at you know whether it's a an engine or a missile or whatever through through the use of that discipline and and now congress and the dod and the intelligence community is looking through that particular lens i think we might be closer than ever to to resolution of some of this or a large chunk of it yeah i suspect the government knows a lot more than they're telling us but we won't know until we know uh one of the reasons i do what i do for a living is because i uh no i i think absolutely a hundred percent agree on that i i mean just on the three best known navy videos again i mean self-evidently the the us government has other parts of the that footage i mean every story has a beginning a middle and an end when we look at those three videos we're just looking at a snapshot well how did we get to that point and what happened next we don't have that we don't have we being the public don't have the the data that people whether they're they're you know believers or skeptics the data that people would like to have on on the speeds on on all of that we we have a few things that the us government has decided in an unclassified video can be left up on on the display but but some pieces of the puzzle are clearly missing yeah in my more cynical moods i often think there's some government officials somewhere watching all these shows like on ancient aliens dissecting these video footage when they know exactly what's going on they're going oh look what they're saying now they think it's russian maybe but we won't know i guess you know anyway i was going to say one of the things the reasons i do what i do for a living is i'm i've always been interested in all these topics see all the back to college when i was in college i read uh van doneken's chariots of the gods and i thought wow this is really incredible uh what if any of this is true and then there was a book like maybe two or three years later called crash go the chariots and an anthropologist i think it was an anthropologist you know kind of deconstructed every one of the claims like here's his claim here's why it's not true here's the claim here's what we know boom boom boom because it's mostly archaeological stuff like you know the pyramids or or um uh you know the nazca lines or the uh easter island statues and so on and i thought that this is way more interesting to have you know here's the claim here's the rebuttal and line them all up like you said that's super entertaining you know i think that's what people want to know and this is what bothers me about if i can just rant for a moment about some of these shows particularly ancient alien shows i want to love that show but they have no skeptics on there at all and they'll say something like well here's the easter island statues and scientists just have no idea how they carved these things and moved them to the coast it's like yeah scientists do why don't you have on john van tilburg from ucla who spent 40 years studying easter island statues she goes there every year she knows every statue by heart why don't you have her on the show to explain here's what we think happened here and just at least present that but it's the same people recycled over and over it makes me wonder about this show somebody was telling me it's it's it's they just buy the air time and they just produce whatever they want there's no back checkers there's no editors going hey we need to have balance it's not like a bbc production so maybe give us some insight in in that regard well not not really i mean i'm i'm a serious regular on ancient aliens i i always regard it as a sort of fun what-if show but as as you probably know um when i do take part i i tend to be in the episodes that that look at the more modern aspects of of this so i've i've never gone to the pyramids or to stonehenge or or to easter island and uh any of that one time they sent me up a hill in wales in in winter when it was cold and wet and and things but that was to talk about a ufo case so i can't i can't really speak to that i mean i i don't i don't i honestly i don't even tend to watch my own tv shows so i don't know but people i i think people enjoy it people people like to think what if um and and speculate and and things but i'm not obviously i'm not an ancient astronaut theorist myself uh as i say and that's not to say that they occasionally don't have me on as as almost like uh an on-screen narrator with some of those episodes where i i sort of say well some people believe this and some believe that and i tell tell the story but um yeah i if if i was making my own show i think i i would put in i would put in the balance because i i do think the dissent is important absolutely well so if you have any influence you know tell them to have some more skeptics on it's like we did we did a whole issue of skeptic on on ancient aliens you know because they have like much is made about these two figures that appear in crucifixion art in the in the middle ages and early modern period and they look like spaceships inhabited by inhabited by little creatures well but any art historian will tell you well that's just a common motif that's put in um these crucifixion scenes between you know paintings done between 1100 and 1400 that's just and their angels that's the sun these are literally the sun and the moon that are uh you know bracketing the crucifixion scene and of course the sun and the moon for the ancients were inhabited things they were you know like like kind of sub gods that kind of thing and so why not have an art historian that says well that's interesting but here's what's actually we think is going on in these in these art forms you know that little ufo in the background those are clouds that the angels sat on or that that that ufo in the back that looks like a hat it is a hat that's what th this hat image appears over and over and so on and so forth it's like what why not make it more interesting where having somebody that actually knows what they're talking about when you're looking at a medieval painting anyway i'm kind of ranting about this but it bothers me no i i i get it and uh like i say if i if i was making a show i i would tell both sides and and let the viewers make up their minds yeah all right let's let's shift to um conspiracy theories another one of your areas you've spent a lot of time on as have i i think it's super interesting and and one reason i think people believe in conspiracy theories is because there are enough true conspiracies that is conspiracies do happen governments do lie to their people governments do cover things up corporations do cheat the system to make profits they do lie and so forth so you know one of my theories is that it's kind of a constructive conspiracism it pays to be a little paranoid because we have enough personal experience and historical experience of of governments line and so forth so how do you think about conspiracy theories along those lines why people believe them yeah and and isn't there even a an evolutionary argument that i've heard a couple of people put forward that that it's evolutionary advantageous to believe in conspiracy theories because if if you if you're walking through the the bush and you think um you think uh that you see uh a you know a leopard and and and then you think that looks a little bit like a leopard maybe i'll back off um then you you will survive and and uh your genes will be passed on so so that kind of looks a bit like it could be a leopard in there as opposed to no it's not a leopard and then you get lepton so i don't know i don't know whether that actually is is true that's actually right that's actually my my my own idea of what i call patternicity and we make you can make two types of errors type one errors and type two errors so you hear the russell in the grass is it a dangerous predator or just the wind well if you assume it's a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind that's a type one era false positive but no harm it you know it's it but a type two error where you think it's just the win and it's a dangerous predator you know your lunch so it's so a type 2 error is a higher cost error to make so it's better you're better off just thinking most things are true most most patterns are real and we should assume an element of danger there and then to expand that to conspiracies that you know the evolutionary argument from from our social aspects is that we're a social primate species and we have bands and tribes and that that coalesce and work together in a cooperative way against other bands and tribes that are potentially dangerous so the idea that there's coalitions of people doing things against me personally or against our family our group is perfectly rational that's a totally rational response because there are dangerous people there are bad groups there are even if it even if the other group doesn't want to be a threat they kind of have to um develop a a reputation of being potentially dangerous so that you don't attack them so you get this kind of security dilemma you know i don't i don't want to you know like russia you know you know we're putting troops here we don't want to use our troops but we don't want you to do anything over here in ukraine uh so it's kind of a threat and and so this is the idea of kind of the evolutionary origins of conspiracism is that social coalitions of people against other people happens enough that it's rational to assume the worst about other people that they are really doing something behind the scenes that we should be careful about yes and i mean i think any student of history i mean one of one of my favorite sort of periods of of history i guess is is um i don't know medieval english history i i don't know from from sort of the norman conquest onwards and if you if you read a book on on like you know the plantagenets for example it's just one constant you know mix of of plotting and conspiracies and alliances and and betrayals and and you know i i think in one in one sense that's that's who we are and and factions uh are plotting secretly to to replace other factions and as you say i mean you mentioned tribes i mean it goes back i'm sure to the dawn of of time that within within a tribe you know people would be vying for power and thinking well you know if i i'm not strong enough to displace the current chief but if i form an alliance with with this other you know band of warriors maybe we could you know particularly if we stab him in the back one one day and and you know on almost every level that goes on so i mean yeah conspiracies collusion um it's who we are i think as a species and then but what then happens is in in the context of this conversation i get gas this get gets it distills down to a few a few sort of flagship cases that that are almost binary so so now when you think of conspiracy theories you you think like oh jfk the moon landings uh the death of princess diana those those sorts of things and those are the sorts of things where i i tend to be you know fairly skeptical i think we went to the moon i tend to focus on the lone gunman theory for jfk though i don't dispute that a whole lot a lot of people probably did want him dead um but then i i then i look at the real the the indisputable ones i i mean pedophile priests for for example that that this organization the the catholic church that says endured for nearly 2 000 years there was cyst it wasn't probably still a systemic abuse which was known about often and just reading literally again about it today at the highest level within the organization and what happened this was swept under the carpet people were moved um you know people were probably paid off and and lent on and it's a real conspiracy and no one i think who's looked at that one would dispute that that isn't exactly what happened so conspiracy theories absolutely can and do happen i i mean some of them are are true but some are not right so it's a signal detection problem how do you know which ones are true and which ones are not so then you have to do kind of a bayesian analysis of you know what your priors are and then how those change when new evidence comes in like the jeffrey epstein uh you know suicide slash murder one you know i thought come on he just killed himself because you know the he reached the end and there was no hope uh but then you know then then that the story came out about the video cameras in the prison that didn't work well that's chance you know and then then the next story was two of the video cameras were broken i thought okay come on what are the chances of that you know that's leaning more and more towards some kind of conspiracy and then you know the probability of that you know of a motive you know he probably has a little black book of all the powerful rich politicians and corporate leaders who were on that jet that went to that island okay and then you then you start spinning out probable stories and so i posted something on twitter like yeah there might be something to the jeffrey epstein conspiracy theory that he was murdered and then someone uh emailed me that worked at that prison that said oh those cameras never work that per that prison is a dump they never maintain it it's a terrible place and of course the cameras went out because they never worked i'm like oh okay so you know in each case you have to kind of look at them one by one and uh yeah like i think jfk you know loan assassin good sure the epstein one's interesting because then you you say well you know a lot of people wanted him dead um could that have been done and then you you think well no that wouldn't happen and then you think but wait we've just read about another death in prison where it was absolutely um i i think pretty much case closed that that and that was the whitey bulger um situation that he of course had had been an informer for many years and and then he went on the run maybe with some degree of complicity from the authorities which is a conspiracy in itself which may well be true and then obviously he was deeply involved in and a part of organized crime a lot of people then realized wait a minute this guy had been informing and obviously you know what what then happened was that he was savagely beaten to death so i i mean that i don't think anyone would dispute was a conspiracy some senior figures in all organized crime obviously as as a combination of revenge and maybe deterrence in in terms of not not wanting to to encourage future betrayals somebody put out the order and and said uh take this guy out brutally and and you know painfully and it absolutely happened so that so so it's interesting sometimes to take something like that and if somebody's skeptical about the epstein thing say well wait a minute what about the bulger thing right or even something like the rigged election conspiracy theory there are rigged elections in in the history of democracies and you have to look no further than say 1960s and 70s united states cia influence of elections in south american uh elections where you know the communist guy is running against the fascist guy and we want the fascist guy to win because he's the they're friendlier toward american business interest than the communists are who might nationalize our company so you know we got to help the the rebels on the one side and you know that iran contra business you know i'm sure that's not the only one and uh you know christopher hitchens wrote a book about kissinger as a war criminal you know that he was you know up to the cia was up to all kinds of things that you know we only found out about later and now we have wikileaks and it's like wait we were doing what we were monitoring angela merkel's cell phone what the mr transparency president obama what i thought he was going to clear it up and close gitmo and stop all this you know uh why what was it warrantless uh surveillance i thought you know and we were still doing it and i'm sure still doing it now those are all kinds of conspiracies yeah better conspiracy theories that are true yeah so i i mean i've i've written a primer on conspiracy theories on my website which which kind of articulates my views on on some some of them and i mean i think it it just puts a little bit of flesh on the bones of of some of the things we've discussed i mean i think i think some of them are true some of them are not true i think there is a good side to some conspiracy theories that that i think it encourages critical thinking it encourages us to challenge the official narrative uh but there is a dark side to some conspiracy theories too um the anti-semitism that runs through some of them is is clearly one aspect of that um and and there are other kind of more dark side aspects too so i think i think as with a lot of things it's conspiracy theories are a mixed bag yeah the uh uh you know all the different elements that go into it it's fairly complex so again you have to kind of take it one at a time and and to see what the evidence is and in many cases we just can't know we just somebody knows but we don't know or we won't know yet one of the best arguments that i make for being chronically frozen and being brought back 500 years from now it's like oh that's what that's the explanation for that oh i always wondered about that or that's what dark matter turned out to be here where consciousness was finally explained in you know 20 something like that um yeah so but of course we we can't know that uh so well nick we've been going for over an hour and a half uh give us your final thoughts on on uh what you think the uap videos might turn out to be and also what you're working on next well i don't know those three videos could be anything um but i think that given they are operating where they are operating around these multi-billion dollar assets the the carriers and and of course given that we've got similar situation supposedly happening on on well not supposedly actually happening over the continental united states and and elsewhere of course just in the last few days we've heard about sweden and is it drones is it is it russia is it something else so what i what i do think is important i i have often said to the ufo community i think it's it's very foolish to bet the farm on a on just those three videos for example because if congress turns around you know later this year and says you know what we've looked into this and it turns out that this was a chinese drone that that some people deep in one of the agencies kind of suspected and and here it is so then the whole house of cards comes down so i i don't think the uap mystery stands or falls on on those those three videos i mean i i go back to the point i'm sure there's life out there in the universe i don't know whether or not we're being visited but i hope we are because i think that would be the most interesting and impactful solution to to the uap mystery i think we're getting close i know that the whole history of this subject is a sort of tomorrow never comes statement that we're we're building up to something and we're closer than we've ever been but i think that we have now the combination of the will to do it from congress and elsewhere and the technology to bring to bear on the problem so i'm i'm optimistic i still hope it's i hope it's aliens i really do um you know i don't want i don't want people watching this to think that we're too we're too like seamless on this i really hope it's aliens um but no i i don't know whether it will turn out to be or not we will we will see but um uap interesting and important whatever's going on conspiracies some true some not uh what am i doing now more episodes you'll be pleased to hear of ancient aliens uh season three of the basement office with stephen green street i think there'll be something in there to upset everyone but um and a few other new series too and i just attended uh actually i should say this i just attended um a week ago uh hereticon which was organized by um peter thiel and and the um um you know his his organization and that was uh that was a a sort of group of of people talking about everything from from the vaccines through to uap through to the apocalypse immortality human machine interface um so so a lot of people are i think now looking at this issue that weren't looking at this issue or at least weren't looking at it seriously a few few years ago and i mentioned i mentioned that so there was hereticon there's avilo but galileo project which we're we're both involved with so i i think one of the i'll finish on this i mean i think this subject of uap has for far too long been just regarded as a sort of niche fringe conspiracy sci-fi thing i think that's changing now and it's transitioning and we're seeing people regard it as a defense and national security issue but we're also seeing the scientific and academic community beginning to take a look and we're seeing the kind of business community the tech billionaires the the venture capitalists uh taking a look too and i think it's going to be that multi-disciplinary holistic approach that cracks this if anything does so exciting times indeed well that's a perfect place to end nick pope thanks for coming on you're one of the more interesting people working in this space i love talking to you and i love watching you we'll look forward to seeing your shows and and uh thanks a lot thank you

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 252,983

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, Bayesian reasoning, belief, conspiracies, conspiracy theories, disclosure project, evidence, extraterrestrial intelligence, Fermi Paradox, government cover-ups, Roswell, science, Science Salon, SETI, The Michael Shermer Show, UFOs, unidentified aerial phenomena, Nick Pope

Id: qDuNY3sMCuA

Length: 106min 7sec (6367 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 01 2022