Are They Here? with NASA UAP Chair, David Spergel

Are the UAP sightings aliens here on Earth? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian co-host Paul Mecurio discuss the congressional hearings on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) with astrophysicist and chair of NASA’s UAP independent study team, David Spergel.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Once you realize it is not a threat to your plane, your job is to keep going. You don't say, hey, I see something really cool and interesting. I don't know what it is. I'm gonna turn the plane around. We're gonna have a look. I'm gonna try to figure this out.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, if I were a pilot, I'd say, everybody on the right side of the plane, take a picture of this. That's what I would say. Okay?

• 0:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. You're a personal astrophysicist. And today, we've got a cosmic queries edition featuring UAPs. UAPs. And we might throw a little cosmology in on that as well. I got with me my co-host, Paul Mecurio. Paul, welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Great to see you again, Neil. So we've, we've got someone who is uniquely positioned to comment on the UAPs. Just remind everyone what UAP stands for, unidentified aerial phenomenon. We've got a longtime friend, longtime colleague, recently tasked by the US government, NASA in particular,

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to investigate UAPs in all ways that they might lend themselves to become accessible to scientific inquiry. David Spiegel. David Spiegel, theoretical astrophysicist. We have many overlapping years at Princeton University, where he is an emeritus professor. And now he's president of the Simons Foundation. But more specifically, more importantly for this podcast, is the chair of the NASA Independent Study Team on unidentified aerial phenomena. So, David, welcome to StarTalk. Great to be here. Yeah, yeah. So you've got, you're, so how did you step in this? Sorry. How did you land in this?

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want to lead the witness, okay? How did you come to be chosen as the chair of this committee by NASA?

• 2:12Speaker 00

  So I've done a lot with NASA over the years. I've been involved with a number of NASA missions. And I feel NASA has done a lot of great science and really enabled my career. So when I got a call from the head of science at NASA, then head of science at NASA, Tom Zabrunge, asking me to chair this committee. My first response was, what committee? Why am I doing this? And then he said, you know, he really wanted someone who had a broad scientific vision, who wasn't, didn't really have an agenda here.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  And also, as someone who now leads a science foundation, I'm not someone who gets funded by NASA. So they wanted someone who really had an independent perspective, independent both of NASA itself and no real kind of agenda here, right? I mean, this is an area with a lot of strong feelings.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I can vouch for your independence, your rationality, your sensibility, your politic, in the sense that when people are disagreeing, you will find ways to bring people together. And that is rare among people in general and in the sciences. We might have a few more in the sciences than you find on social media. But whatever that pyramid is, for me, you're at the top of that pyramid. So I concur with all of the efforts that people put in to get you to lead this. But let me ask, what is the difference between your committee and other committees that have

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  testified in front of Congress or other efforts that Congress has engaged to try to get to the bottom of the UAPs?

• 4:04Speaker 00

  So our mission in some ways is narrower, right? Our mission is tell NASA what they can do that could contribute to understanding. Right, so our job is not to say, "Resolve every UAP event," right? NASA has tasked-

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Resolve? When you say "resolve," you mean, "Here's a light in the sky, we don't understand it, figure it out." That's not your task.

• 4:30Paul Mecurio?

  Or we have like this, we have this massive alien being in a warehouse in Arizona, please go in like Jeff Goldblum and make it go away. That kind of thing.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Right, right. Well, our job is to say, "Okay, what is NASA's role if there is something like that?" Right? So, you know, I think of this in terms of, okay, let's say there was some thing we didn't understand, right? There's some rock you don't understand. Well, you know, NASA's done this before. We bought black rocks from the moon. What do you do? You make it available to everyone, right? Like you make it, you want to have things open to the whole scientific community. Um, you know, um, I think our job was to say, "How do we address questions like this as scientists?"

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to back you up there, scientists are trained to ask questions, trained to, to, trained to not agree with each other, actually.

• 5:34Paul Mecurio?

  And being a friend of Neil's, man, that's a big thing with him, is just not agreeing.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Well, trained not to believe, right? So I think what could turn out to be one of the big science results of the year is this claim from South Korea that they made a high-temperature superconductor, right? And if that works, that moves power at room temperature, all sorts of great stuff. Everyone's reaction is, "I don't believe it. I want to make the same thing in my lab and see if I can do it." And what's happening right now is there are literally tens, maybe hundreds of labs throughout the world trying to reproduce the results from South Korea. And all their data's public, it's all on the archive, and you go and you test it,

• 6:22Speaker 00

  and you see if you can verify it. And that's, as you know, how we do things as scientists.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's healthy skepticism, especially if a claim is extraordinary that's put on the table. Yeah, absolutely.

• 6:36Paul Mecurio?

  I have a question as a layperson for both of you. In dealing with NASA, is there institutionalized thinking sometimes that you have to overcome? Right? In other words, are they coming with a preconceived notion or agenda? That you, even though it may not be spoken, is sort of beneath the surface and you have to sort of navigate?

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's the whole point of David being independent. I mean, he's not coming from within a NASA establishment to do this.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  You know, and also NASA isn't one really model ethic agency, right? There's a piece of it that's concerned with sending humans on the space station, right? And that's very sick. It's a, but anything that deals with putting humans in space tends to be very conservative and careful. Because they don't want things to blow up, right? So there's that kind of, a piece of NASA's culture is that careful engineering mentality. And the piece that I was mostly working with is the Science Mission Directorate, right? And culturally, that's people who come, they're science PhDs who lead that.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  And that's, it's, that part of the agency very much has a, a science culture. I would say more than the engineering management culture.

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The point is you've got multiple cultures coming from different places. And people come in and out of NASA. So while they're career people at NASA, there's, there's fresh blood moving through there with quite, with quite a bit of frequency. And many people who do work, quote, for NASA, they're separate from NASA because they have independent appointments at universities, right? So, so it's to, to, to have the idea that everyone at NASA is in some kind of mono think. That's, this is, the last of all agencies for which that could possibly be true is NASA.

• 8:33Paul Mecurio?

  Well, you know, look, as, as just a layperson, as a citizen, you don't know how this works. And life is political and, and the world is political and you don't know, like, well, okay, well, you're getting a call sometimes from the administration saying, look, we, uh, there's a UAP. It's not going to be good to talk about this right now. Wait six months. You, you don't, I'm imagining it doesn't work that way, but you know, for the person looking on the outside, looking in, unlike the two of you, it's, it's, it's refreshing and good to know that. There are checks and balances in having healthy, independent skeptics out there working with the agency as opposed to, you know, being kowtowing to them or sort of carrying their pails of water, so to speak.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you, uh, who's on your committee? What types of people are on your committee?

• 9:18Speaker 00

  We've got a great group of people, um, from, uh, a number of scientists from a number of fields, oceanography, atmospheric physics, um, some people who study exoplanets, planetary scientists. Uh, we have a lot of people from the remote sensing community, including people who've worked with the Defense Department in remote sensing. Uh, we have two members of the FAA on the committee, a number of NASA officials, Najee Drake, who's a science writer. So, uh, we have a lot of different perspectives and it's, uh, been a really engaged committee that I've learned a lot from my fellow committee members.

• 9:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. Let's go to our Q and A here. Uh, so Paul, did you collect, you, you, I haven't seen them. I don't think David has seen them, but you have, and these are all Patreon supporters.

• 10:09Paul Mecurio?

  They are.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exclusive access. They are. That's a new rule that we put into play. So, uh, go right ahead.

• 10:16Paul Mecurio?

  All right.

• 10:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Start us off, Paul.

• 10:17Paul Mecurio?

  And David, just a suggestion, it's your world, not mine. I think the committee needs a social media influencer. That's all I'm saying. I mean, they're big out there and you may want to put one on because they have a lot of power now. Anyway, uh, here we go. Uh, Troy from Virginia, regarding the UAP that was a cube in a bubble, what if in between the clear sphere and cube, there's a vacuum that allows the ship to maneuver through our atmosphere in the unseen ways mentioned in Congress?

• 10:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause I'm reminded that, uh, cause many of us saw the testimonies of, uh, I guess whistleblowers. What, what is that committee? That congressional committee that, uh?

• 10:57Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, the Complete Waste of Time Committee?

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, stop.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  You know, one of the things, and I think this is going to affect how we answer a lot of these questions. We looked at the reports we saw, and the thing that struck us most was the lack of data quality. So what do I mean by that? Like, if I have an image of something that looked strange, like, I'd like to know, be convinced I understand the instrument that took the image, convinced that I'm not seeing artifacts. Ideally, you'd like to see the same thing.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, I have to clarify what artifact is. So if you have a brand-new instrument, in fact, it's more likely to happen in a brand-new instrument than a well-tested instrument. If you have yet to characterize how that instrument is going to obtain and hand you data, then you don't always know what you're looking at, whether you're looking at it as real or something the instrument put in there. And until it's properly characterized, you don't know how to subtract it out. And so we call those artifacts in this business.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  Yep, so let me give you a good way to make one. You can do this experiment at home. Go take a picture of a friend. Now, everyone's told you, "Take a picture of someone with the sun behind the photographer and the light on the person's face." Right, it gives the best picture. Don't listen to what people told you. Have them stand with the sun behind them, coming in at some odd angle to the camera. You'll find that what that will do most often with your camera is produce a terrible picture, often with a funny-shaped light coming across your camera. And that's the light of the sun bouncing around inside your cellphone camera.

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, David, it's an aura from the person, just, just, just.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Could be, could be the aura.

• 12:59Paul Mecurio?

  Neil's aura is like, takes over the whole picture.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Knowing some of the people involved, I don't think they have much of an aura.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  But, you know, and an example of something that's been understood is there's a famous image in the UFO community of these rotating triangles that was taken, I think, by an F-16. And you can reproduce this by taking the F-16 camera.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Putting the sun at an angle relative to the camera, and that will produce a triangle-shaped optical effect. And that's just the sun's light bouncing around inside.

• 13:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that would be an artifact, right? Not a real object, right?

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Right. Now, the F-16 camera sits on a mount, and it's not designed to do astronomical studies. It's designed to, like, follow enemy targets. So when it's tracking that target, and the cable wraps around, fully around it, it automatically swings it around it rapidly and undoes the cable wrap, keeping track on the target. And that produces rapid rotation in the object and can reproduce it.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  Now, one of the things that provides a bit of an obstacle, a serious obstacle, to looking at a lot of the UFO reports or UAP reports from the military is that they're classified. Now, why are they classified? Not because of what's in the image, but how the image is taken. If you take data with a camera on an F-16, that image is automatically classified. Any image taken with military cameras, and particularly anything taken from space with our spy satellites, those images are classified because if you see the image, you can study it and learn about our military capabilities.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  So that's been an obstacle, I think, to transparency in this area, is that many of the best-known events are taken by military planes, and then the military classifies it. So that's why we have not gone through the classified data. We don't have, we want to operate entirely in the open. I have no classified clearances, and we made sure that we structured our committee. So while some people had clearances, most of us didn't. So we can do a completely open report. But that means that we're relying on the AARO. That's a committee, an organization set up within the Defense Department, coordinating both the O D and the intelligence community,

• 15:48Speaker 00

  led by Ashanka Patrick. And they have the charge of reporting to Congress.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  On the individual events, and they have full access to the classified data.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So David, why didn't anybody say this earlier? That any military image basically is going to be classified so that we don't reveal our capacity to obtain data? Because everyone is thinking it's classified because the government knows something that we don't know about the thing that's in the picture. So why wasn't, why isn't that made much clearer to everybody?

• 16:21Speaker 00

  It should have been made, that should be made clearer. I mean, that's, I think that's known by the people involved, and there are some people who know that about classification. There was a famous incident during the Trump administration where there was, people in the intelligence community got very upset at President Trump because he made public an image of an Iranian missile site. And in doing so, he revealed to the Iranians our satellite capabilities. So normally, we would only talk about, or they would only talk about what's seen. They wouldn't make public the image, but he wanted to show everyone the images. We know he likes to show stuff.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  So that, that, you know, that was concerning because we sort of leaked intelligence by revealing an image like that.

• 17:11Paul Mecurio?

  Little known fact, he still has that photo in his closet in Mar-a-Lago, just, just so you know.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  I thought it's all by the toilet.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, best, well, best thinking happens.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Bringing the universe down to earth, this is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 17:48Paul Mecurio?

  This is Malcolm Marfan. Uh, there are a number of reasons why people might be afraid to report UAP sightings.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just as well, do they say where they're from?

• 17:57Paul Mecurio?

  Uh, this, uh, Malcolm from, uh, Trinbago or Trinbago? I don't know if I'm mispronouncing that.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why didn't you say that? I want to hear where these people are from.

• 18:04Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, alright.

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, definitely.

• 18:06Paul Mecurio?

  Um, there are a number of reasons why people might be able, uh, afraid to report UAP sightings. People are afraid of being ridiculed or ostracized. Others are afraid that they'll be labeled as mentally ill. Um, still, others are afraid that they will be investigated by the government. The stigma has chilling effect on the reporting of UAP sightings. It makes it difficult for researchers to gather data on UAP and therefore has also made it difficult to understand what these phenomenon are. How can we reduce the stigma around reporting UAP sightings?

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So David, I, let me just slip something in there. I, my, my thought is, it's not that there's stigma around a UAP sighting. It's that there's stigma around anyone's assumption that the UAP is visiting intelligent aliens from outer space. If I say, "I saw something in the sky. I don't know what it is. Let's investigate it." Who's gonna, who's gonna fault me for that? But if I'm gonna say, "I saw aliens today," that's a whole other leap that people have made that would get a giggle factor. So isn't there a line in the sand here that we can draw?

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Well, it depends who you are. So you're a professional scientist, a professional astronomer. You say you something, you see something in the weird, in the sky. It's like, yeah, that's your job to see weird.

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I look up all the time. Right, right. There's stuff up there, yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  There is a lot of stigma, particularly for commercial pilots and for military pilots, to report anomalies.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  So, you know, um, this is something we've heard from a lot of pilots. It's something that was talked about in the congressional hearings. And it's very clear that there are, if you see something odd as a pilot, um, there's a sense that, oh yeah, you're, you're sort of, you know, let's not imagine that that oddity is. An alien spacecraft. Oddities are just not reported. There was a culture that keep that wasn't collecting that. The military has made an effort to change that culture. That's why the number of UAP reports in the last two years is so much higher than the past.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  Because people are encouraged, if you see something strange, report it.

• 20:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Now, but let's talk about just two classes of events that are certainly there that you want to make sure get reported. We all heard about this Chinese balloon that flew over the United States.

• 20:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, it was in full high resolution, you know, so it wasn't some fuzzy object. You know, it was like fully identifiable.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  Well, it's right, but I want that was very clearly a Chinese balloon. But initially, those balloons have probably been, for at least what I've read in the press and in stress, I, you know, I have no clearances. Um, this is what I read in the Washington Post, right? The Chinese were probably flying balloons and spying on US Navy operations for years.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  And probably some of these balloons were seen by commercial and military pilots as UAPs. They saw something strange, but because of the stigma, those aren't getting reported. So one of the things we want to do is reduce that stigma just to get those reports.

• 21:38Paul Mecurio?

  But can't you push back on the stigma by the people that are applying a stigma to it? They're the ones that should have a stigma. It's narrow thinking. It's based in insecurity that we are, it's also sort of a little self aggrandizing that we could be the only things in in the entire universe, only living beings. So, so why, why hasn't there been able to be a shift? For years, it's been like this, right? Oh, you said you saw an alien? You're crazy.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  No, no, I think to say you've seen an alien, to know that it's an alien is taking a big step.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the point I was making.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, to say, hey, I see something I don't understand.

• 22:13Paul Mecurio?

  But even when people say that, that gets the stigma. Sorry, UFO?

• 22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't give them stigma. I said, tell me about it. What does it look like? You got video? You got images?

• 22:24Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  So that's, so that's what I, one of the things we are aiming to do in this report is you see something weird, report it, and give us good data, right? Now, most of the time, that weird thing is gonna be an airplane, a balloon, a drone. It's weird to you, but give it more data, we'll figure it out. Sometimes it's gonna be something interesting. Interesting could just, you know, knowing about, for the US military, to know about a Chinese spy drone or balloon, that's pretty interesting. They'd like that data. And then there's phenomenon, and my favorite on this list is lightning sprites.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Have you, you know, these lightning sprites are amazing. They're upward going lightning. I encourage any of your listeners to just go on the web and look at pictures of lightning sprites if you haven't seen them. And these were reported by pilots for years. They saw these weird lightning flashes going up. They were these amazing patterns. And no one believed them. And some of them look really bizarre.

• 23:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, they're not normal lightning bolts, right? It's like a, it's like a sheet of electricity, sort of. I don't know how to describe it.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  They're really, and it was only with the development of high-speed cameras and dedicated instruments to go after it, that people believed that they're there and started to understand them.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And David, this is only in the last few years, right? Where we had authentic, high-speed imagery of them, right?

• 24:00Speaker 00

  And they really represented something where I think the kind of the whole UFO stigma thing affected the discovery of lightning sprites.

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Those people, I saw this really weird flashing lights. It's, oh, you're seeing aliens. So, you know, they're really interesting, but, you know, they're a different phenomenon, right? So. Set aside those other, you know, the most exciting interpretations. Just removing the stigma, collecting data in a systematic way. You see something that's surprising to you. Collect data. I mean, I think that like, that's a message we want for everybody.

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And data for most people is very good imagery. If you're a scientist, you bring out some other tools and instruments for that, of course.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  And I may be jumping ahead, but like one of the things I think will be encouraging NASA to do is actually develop apps for people's cell phones. So you see something, have a standard app that takes an image, records the metadata, records.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Metadata is location, time.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Location, time, how the image was taken, what the focus of your camera is. You could incorporate with that data because your phone records amazing things. Your phone measures magnetic field. It measures the local gravitational field. That's how it knows its orientation. Your phone's, of course, recording sound. And you could imagine combining all that data, encrypting it so people can't easily, at least,

• 25:41Speaker 00

  edit the images and Photoshop in something interesting. You would know that from the metadata. And then if you've got the time and location and you see something interesting and someone else 10 miles away sees something interesting from a different perspective, that's the same event, and you've got four or five observations. We could combine them, get distance, velocity, acceleration.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Usually it's going to turn out to be something conventional.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're not beholden to the limitations and vagaries of the five senses, our biological senses, which are highly susceptible to error.

• 26:25Paul Mecurio?

  Listen, and you're both brilliant, but I have to just jump in here. I, look at, look at how many apps I have. I can't handle another app, okay? You gotta do, I can't do your job for you.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  There's a, there's a whole bunch of apps there, you could, you got a lot of apps you're not using.

• 26:42Paul Mecurio?

  Starbucks, I'm using my Starbucks, my Drizly app.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I agree with David. Delete half your apps. Your iPhone is already removing half your apps that you haven't touched in months. So, that's the one with the little cloud next to it, right?

• 26:55Paul Mecurio?

  Yes, exactly.

• 26:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what do we do, his job for him? You are the data-taking device that's out there.

• 27:02Paul Mecurio?

  Alright, here we go. Here we go. Alright, another one?

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 27:06Paul Mecurio?

  Thomas Cochran, from Kansas City. If these UAPs are as com-

• 27:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it KC Mo or Kansas City, Kansas?

• 27:12Paul Mecurio?

  It just says Kansas City.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 27:14Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah. Uh, if these UAPs are as common as the latest hearings imply, why aren't more common folk seeing them and posting what they see? Everyone has a camera in their pocket nowadays. Why hasn't there been a more scientific method to studying these UAPs?

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, David, what do you, what do you think of that?

• 27:31Speaker 00

  Yes. I agree. I mean, um, yeah, no, you'd like to see, uh, high-quality images with multiple angles. Uh, once you've got those events, you know, the FAA has radar data that it has recorded for, and it keeps, so let's say you see something strange, we could go to radar, can try to turn it around and say, "What would you like? This is how we thought about this." You know, you have these events where you've got a fuzzy picture that's ambiguous, and we're asked to like, "What do you conclude from this?" And what you conclude from this is, "I can't tell. I need better data."

• 28:12Speaker 00

  Right? And, you know, I think of this as, and there's been a lot of astronomical phenomenon like this, where you see something, people see something they don't understand, it's strange, and the first thing you do is collect better data in a systematic way. And most of the time, it turns out to be something conventional that you understand. And every now and then, it turns out to be something surprising and interesting. But if it's surprising and interesting, you're going to want multi-wavelength data. You're going to want to have optical data from many angles, cameras at many angles, you know, radar data and so on, and piece together a full picture.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, in our field, Paul, we we're not satisfied with just one wavelength band when we're studying an object in the sky. If I find something really interesting with my telescope, and it's really, really interesting, people will pull all stops and pull out all the big guns, all the varieties of telescopes we have, because rarely is an object only talking to you in one band of light.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  So one of my favorite examples is of unidentified things in the sky that took a long time to figure out are what we call gamma ray bursts. These were bursts of gamma radiation seen first by spy satellites that were designed to look for nuclear tests. And because they were seen by them, they were actually classified for two, three years, until they convinced themselves that they weren't coming from Earth, but from space. So then they let the astronomers know about them. And it took astronomers a long time to figure out. They first thought they were in the galaxy. And in fact, Neil and my late colleague, Boden Pachinsky, someone who I think we both

• 30:06Speaker 00

  worked with and admired and died tragically young of cancer, came up with this idea with others that this could be something like an extragalactic event. People figured out eventually that these might be the merger of two neutron stars and proposed that, in fact, all of the gold in the universe comes from these mergers.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  And only in the last couple of years did we see one of these mergers happen where we saw gravitational waves from it, we saw X-rays from it, gamma rays, optical radiation, radio signal, putting all those pieces together, we got the story of this merger, of this incredibly powerful explosion, in some ways the most powerful in the universe, these explosions. And it turns out by understanding them, that's how we understand where gold and platinum and all the heavy elements come from. So you start with something you don't understand, that's a bright flash, and it literally leads you to gold. And that's how we work.

• 31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul, you got another question?

• 31:30Paul Mecurio?

  I do. Joseph Fergus, I do not have where he's from. I feel pretty confident, assuming we aren't being visited by beings from another planet, as far as I know. Earth has nothing special to offer that can't be found in abundance elsewhere. Well, how about the Kardashians, buddy? Anyway, come on, that and stuffed crust pizza. Come on, guy. But given the declassified, albeit fuzzy footage, and the admittance of them not really knowing what it was they were looking at, what are the current leading hypotheses in the scientific, not military, community? Also, have you guys informed the military that HD cameras now exist?

• 32:25Speaker 00

  It is, you know, you look at fuzzy pictures and say, wait, why, how come we have incredible cellphone pictures of everything else? Why don't we have high-quality pictures? And that's one of the things that I think has encouraged us to encourage NASA to develop better ways of...

• 32:43Paul Mecurio?

  It's because you have your 60-year-old uncle who can't take a picture at a wedding properly, taking the picture. Like, what button do I push? Maybe that's part of the problem.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  As a sixty-two-year-old.

• 32:54Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, jeez, all right. I got it. I'm sorry. He was seventy. I said seventy.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Thank you. You did say seventy. I thought I heard you say seventy. Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, some of this is with the military data, I think, a very interesting difference, I would say, in culture between a military pilot, a commercial pilot, and a scientist. You're a commercial pilot flying from, you know, Denver to Chicago, and you see something really odd and interesting on your right-hand side. Once you realize it is not a threat to your plane, your job is to keep going. You don't say, hey, I see something really cool and interesting. I don't know what it is. I'm gonna turn the plane around. We're gonna have a look. I'm gonna try to figure this out.

• 33:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, if I were a pilot, I'd say, everybody on the right side of the plane, take a picture of this. That's what I would say. Okay?

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Okay. But like, you know, your job as a pilot is to get everyone safely to Chicago, right? And you're a military pilot. Your job is to carry out your mission. As a scientist, my job is, I see something weird. My job, like, that's the exciting thing. My job's to figure it out. I go to investigate it, and we go get more data. We come back to it.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We live for weird stuff.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  That's right. But, you know, when a lot of these things are being seen by, say, commercial and military pilots, the cameras they have are not designed for this, right? We talked about, you know, your camera on a military plane is designed to pick, have very wide field of view. It's designed to pick up enemy threats. It's not designed to have very clean images that are reproducible, free of artifacts and defects that we talked about. Um, so you're kind of prone to these sorts of problems.

• 34:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these military jets should have science mode, right? You flick a button, and then it goes into curiosity mode.

• 34:56Paul Mecurio?

  Well, I was just thinking, why not, in all seriousness, why not equip these planes with, with better cameras to gather this data, have the cameras they currently have, or put a second camera on? I mean, I would think the technology's there.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They do have an iPhone six. That would be better.

• 35:12Paul Mecurio?

  It's really, it's really small. It's only got two gigs. It's only got two gigs of.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two gigs, but iPhone six could take better images than anything they've been showing us. All right. Thank you.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Well, this, this is something where I think, um, it's, I see this actually as an opportunity for citizen science. I think this is something where we shouldn't be asking the military, you know, hey, you know how military spending works? You add an iPhone six to an F 16, that's going to be like 20 million dollars on the contract.

• 35:43Paul Mecurio?

  Committee hearings.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  For every iPhone six, right? You know?

• 35:47Paul Mecurio?

  And then the cover for the iPhone six, that's another 20 million dollars right there.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Right. Um, but, uh.

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a special cable to recharge.

• 36:00Paul Mecurio?

  You gotta have the dongle, this dongle right here. This is 40 million dollars right here for each flip. Yeah, it's crazy.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  No, but I, I, I think this is a good citizen science opportunity. I think.

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love the idea of an app that is streamlined, user friendly, even 70 year old uncles can use. And I, that'd be great to see that become something real because we would all have it. And it would be one of the more frequently used apps. So we're just even have it right in the, in the, in the wings of your, uh, maybe not on the first screen, but definitely on the second screen of your over stuff.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  And I think it just sends out a message that you see something strange, get the data.

• 36:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  And then we'll fit, you know, and then we work together to figure it out. That's what we do. So, so just in terms of strange things, something that people should keep in mind, because a lot of the reports that you get when you look at them are of flashing lights. Why do we put flashing lights on things? So they're seen. You put flashing lights on bridges, you put flashing lights on planes, you put flashing lights on drugs.

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And lighthouses, yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  Lighthouses. If you don't want to be seen, you don't put a flashing light on. When the Ukrainians attacked Moscow with the drone, it doesn't come with flashing lights. When the Russians attack Odessa, no flashing lights. And when we fly our military planes in effectively kind of war mode, when they're, you know, they may put lights on if they're doing something in commercial airspace. You don't do that. So let's imagine, and I, you know, that, that we are being, we, someone comes to visit Earth from outside. Uh, there's two possibilities. They want to be seen or they don't want to be seen.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  They want to be seen. You know, they're gonna land in front of the White House. They don't want to be seen. They're not putting flashing lights on. So, you know, flashing lights are almost always airplanes or drones.

• 38:08Paul Mecurio?

  It's not gonna be.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Not all events are flashing lights events, but flash, you know, a lot of the most uh, common, conventional and kind of easily explained events.

• 38:18Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  So we've time for just a couple more questions.

• 38:20Paul Mecurio?

  All right, here we go.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Maybe two more, maybe two more.

• 38:22Paul Mecurio?

  All right. Greetings from Sheboygan Falls Middle School in Wisconsin. This is Matt Berg.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 38:29Paul Mecurio?

  There you go. My question is about what it mean. It's uh, Matt Berg, uh, Sheboygan Falls Middle School in Wisconsin. My question is what it means to be uh, is what it means to be anomalous in the first place. My students and I discuss the importance of basing uh, final conclusions of any experiment on accumulated data. When looking at a data set, at what point does a piece of data move from what is considered to be an anomaly to something that is just considered part of the data set overall and an expected result?

• 39:03Speaker 00

  Hmm. So I think in a sense, once you can explain it, it's not anomalous, right? Those, that Chinese balloon is not a UAP anymore. It was when it was first seen. We didn't know what it was. It's an IAP. It's identified. IAP, identified. It's identified aerial phenomena.

• 39:22Paul Mecurio?

  Which ironically was made in the US. I'm just throwing, putting that out there.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  No, and ironically, it was copied off of the, those balloons that Google was, was, was designed in the US, made in China, like many things. Um, yeah, um.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  I think of this problem of looking for anomalies like looking for a needle in the haystack.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  And there's two ways I know of finding needles in haystacks. Either you have a really good idea of what a needle looks like. And this gets to how artificial intelligence or machine would do this. You then design a match filter that looks for a needle. And you just look, I'm only looking for needles.

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it would do a better job than your eye-brain combination would. Because it's, the filter is precise, okay?

• 40:14Speaker 00

  As you say, I know what hay looks like. And I have a very good model of how hay looks like. And I am looking for everything different from hay. And this gets to what an anomaly is. You're going through a haystack.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Um, you know, that's, uh, and you're looking for things that don't look like hay. That's looking for anomalies. So it's not, it may not be a needle, but it may be something else.

• 40:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but wait, wait, but it's only anomalous if you didn't know it was gonna be there. So if you, so you have a hay model and you have a poop model. So that now you can separate both of those from what still might be the needle. But you have to know in advance you might be finding poop.

• 41:00Paul Mecurio?

  But isn't David saying, is that?

• 41:02Speaker 00

  Start with the hay model.

• 41:02Paul Mecurio?

  David's saying it's anomalous because it's also because it's not useful to anything, no? Or just that it's?

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Well, no, no, it's anomalous because, no, no, no, because it's a hay model and it's not hay.

• 41:10Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  And you say, hey, oh, I've discovered something. Bales of hay in a barn have poop in them.

• 41:16Paul Mecurio?

  Okay.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  All right, good, I understand that. I now have a hay model and a poop model. And I'm now interested in things that aren't hay or poop. Found a horseshoe, right? You know, you sort of, you identify what's there. And you find anomalies and you understand them. And that's how we proceed.

• 41:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then they're not anomalies, right?

• 41:34Speaker 00

  And then they're anomalies. So, you know, um, you go through this list of here's weird things and then they're anomalies. And I think if we look at the events that have been reported. There are a bunch that you look at and you say, hey, those are anomalies. We don't understand them. And you want to understand them better, get better data. And then we're going to need is we, you know, we want to have data on lots of wavelengths. We want to have lots of observations. Um, you know, and you, I look at the reports that we've heard about and you say those, those are interesting enough that they merit investigation. Maybe we should be looking anomalies more closely, but not interesting enough, not

• 42:19Speaker 00

  complete enough that we know what's there.

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Paul, one last question, if we can go through it fast, go.

• 42:25Paul Mecurio?

  Absolutely. Sean Ravenfine, uh, don't have location. On the subject of UAP UFOs, it seems kind of unlikely to me that extraterrestrials would traverse space in something we would recognize as a ship. Imagine that any civilization that regularly crosses interstellar distances would probably use some kind of wormhole technology or something we never even thought of yet. But this raises the question, if UAPs aren't alien ships, but it turns out that they're also not something mundane like weather balloons and such, then do we have a third option, guesses as to what they may be?

• 43:03Speaker 00

  So, uh, let me agree in the sense that if I, if I think about life on other planets, um, we know that the stars around us are typically a hundred million years or a billion years older than us or younger than us. So any civilization, any life form is a hundred million years, a billion years behind us in evolution, in a sense, or ahead of us. And behind us, they're bacteria, they're not traveling. Ahead of us, I think of the, the timescale for us, for technological evolution is such that if you take someone from 1923 and bring them forward, they'll kind of understand the world today. Cars are better, planes, so on.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Take someone from 1023 to today, it's magic. Thousand years is huge steps in technological evolution. A hundred million years, a hundred thousand steps like that. Any uh alien civilization capable of space travel is going to be so advanced compared to us that their technology will not be recognizable. They will be. And it will look like magic. It will look like magic. It will look like magic. So if you're looking at some technology that turns out to be like, hey, they're better than I thought drones are. Well, that probably is because the military or someone is doing tech development and is pushing the edge of drones.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  So, you know, my guess is um a bunch of the anomalies um are drones and they're drones that the military is developing. And that's a class of events. And another class of events, and this is a national security concern, is if there are Chinese or Russian or other uh North Koreans um are developing some uh drone technology that are being developed to spy on our planes or our naval ships, um that's a that's something of national security concern. And we want to understand that technology.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  And I know that we're developing pretty cool technologies to spy on other countries and monitor their military. And that's sort of the the job of the intelligence community in the military here. David, give us one summative thought. I think the best summary I saw of what we were doing um came from someone on Twitter. And I'll take out the expletives. Those scientists, they don't believe, they just want better data. And, you know, I think that's what we're coming at this. We don't you come at something where you see something uh you don't understand rather than jumping to believing the most exciting hypothesis.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  You say, "All right, how do I collect better data to understand what's going on? This is something I don't understand."

• 45:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, in any scientific conference, when two scientists are in heated argument, at the end of the day, you're gonna go have a beer because you're gonna say to each other, "We need better data to resolve this."

• 46:11Paul Mecurio?

  Or you're gonna say, "No, that wasn't dog poop in the hay." No, that isn't, that isn't, I've never learned so much about dog poop in one conversation. Thank you to both of you, by the way.

• 46:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, of course.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Well, you know, look, you gotta get training somewhere.

• 46:24Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly, I gotta get ready for the new career.

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, David, thanks for that bit of sort of sage, level-headed assessment of what's going on out there. We're all excited to see what comes of this. I can't wait for my app, and we all have to agree that Paul has way too many apps on his iPhone, so he won't, he will not be a participant in these discoveries. He'll be fumbling, he'll be fumbling for where the app is while the alien is trying to shake his hand.

• 46:52Paul Mecurio?

  I miss it.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he'll miss the data.

• 46:54Paul Mecurio?

  And my 75-year-old uncle, not 60-year-old uncle, will have a problem with his finger in front of the camera lens, so. That's my only skepticism of this conversation is relying on us to give you quality data.

• 47:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, whatever it is, it's some data rather than no data.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  With, actually, we're relying more on the wisdom of crowds. You may take crappy data, but if we've got 10 people taking data, the combined data is actually almost always quite good.

• 47:21Paul Mecurio?

  That's true.

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Paul, great to have you back, and your podcast is Inside Out with Paul McQuirio? Yes. All right, guys, so this has been StarTalk, Cosmic Queries Edition, focusing on UAPs, which we all know is just a rebranding of UFOs by the US government. Until next time, Neil deGrasse Tyson here bidding you to keep looking up.