I Debated UFOs With America’s Top Skeptic (It Got Ugly…)

Our American Alchemist this week is Michael Shermer. Check out Michael’s book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters at https://amzn.to/4fstzal Please consider supporting our show by checking out our amazing sponsors below! Visit https://ketone.com/ALCHEMY for 30% OFF your subscription order PLUS receive a free gift with your second shipment—or find Ketone-IQ at Target stores nationwide and get your first shot free! Raycon: Go to https://buyraycon.com/jessemichelsbc to get 20% off the Bone Conduction Headphones! Thanks to Raycon for sponsoring! MudWtr: Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your @MUDWTR with code JESSE at https://mudwtr.com/JESSE! #mudwtrpod One of the biggest names in scientific skepticism, Michael Shermer, has come to debate the strongest UFO cases ever recorded. More than 50 years of well documented UFO incursions at American nuclear weapon sites, the 2004 Nimitz “Tic Tac” encounter, what really crashed at Roswell, and the disappearance or deaths of a dozen scientists working on top secret technology are laid out in a tense exchange with the new member of the White House UAP Science Advisory Council. Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, the author of more than a dozen books on belief and pseudoscience, and is betting that no major scientific institution will confirm an alien presence by the end of 2030. -------------------------- Support our other projects below! Grab Your American Alchemy Merch Here ➤ https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ Join The American Alchemy Magazine Here ➤ https://americanalchemymagazine.substack.com/ Subscribe To Our Clips Channel (10 Minute Highlights!) ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@UC8ZKTXN9trt5dhixz6b6l6w -------------------------- Follow us and get in touch! Instagram ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TikTok ➤ https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjessemichels X ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican Spotify ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify Clips Channel ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@JesseMichelsClips Apply For Jobs ➤ [email protected] Sponsor Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Media Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 2:44 - Meet Michael Shermer 5:49 - Shermer's Position and Evidence Thresholds 14:04 - UFOs at Nuclear Missile Sites 21:28 - Sponsors (KetoneIQ, Raycon) 24:26 - Nuclear Accidents and Base Rates 26:28 - Explaining Away UAP Sightings 35:06 - Government Interest and Disclosure 45:06 - Nimitz Tic Tac Encounter 48:20 - Photos, Videos, and Witnesses 54:39 - Scientific Priority and SETI 57:58 - ET Discovery and New Physics 1:02:15 - Palomar Transients and Anomalies 1:06:04 - Dark Matter, Truth, and Belief 1:09:02 - Eyewitnesses and the Courtroom 1:14:05 - Missing Scientists and McCasland 1:21:10 - Strongest UFO Cases 1:23:35 - Graham Hancock and Göbekli Tepe 1:30:41 - Pyramids and JFK 1:31:52 - Sponsors (MUD\WTR) 1:32:58 - Manson, MKUltra, and Oswald 1:37:44 - Astronaut UFO Sightings 1:42:07 - NASA Transparency 1:46:07 - Gary McKinnon Hack 1:48:08 - David Grusch and Magenta 1933 1:53:49 - Roswell and Crash Retrievals 2:01:11 - Contrarians and Government Files 2:04:33 - Shermer's Abduction Experience 2:08:04 - Abduction Research and Memory 2:16:12 - Havana Syndrome 2:19:51 - Shermer's Mystical Radio Experience 2:23:45 - Perception and Base Reality 2:28:20 - Remote Viewing and Stargate 2:39:40 - MKUltra and Limits of Science 2:42:04 - Non-Consensus Thinkers and Prediction Markets 2:50:17 - Varginha Brazil Crash 2:53:31 - Secrecy and Sagan 2:57:35 - Debunking, Conspiracies, and Media 3:05:14 - What Aliens Might Look Like 3:09:41 - Perception Thought Experiments 3:12:48 - Consciousness, God, and Simulation 3:17:42 - Myth and Truth 3:20:15 - Closing Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Jesse Michels?

  Michael Shermer, it is an honor to have you here.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  I talked to Michael Sherman. Michael Shermer. Michael Shermer.

• 0:36Jesse Michels?

  Good to see with your pile of your writing. You are probably the most prominent scientific skeptic in the United States.

• 0:43Speaker 03

  I'm the publisher of Skeptic Magazine.

• 0:45Jesse Michels?

  You are synonymous with pouring cold water on people's wanting to believe.

• 0:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  I've been hearing about disclosure coming any day now for 40 years. When's it gonna happen?

• 1:01Jesse Michels?

  I think we have an abundance of evidence in the open source world. I believe that now. So like, I've already hit that threshold. What's your threshold?

• 1:08Speaker 03

  Wow, much higher.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  If we're talking about aliens, I would say they're out there somewhere, but they have not come here.

• 1:16Jesse Michels?

  What about observable anomalies we are seeing on Earth all the time?

• 1:20Speaker 03

  Space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddy, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light up the clouds.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  You're picking the winners.

• 1:29Jesse Michels?

  Who are you picking the winners?

• 1:30Speaker 04

  The vast majority of these things have a prosaic explanation. We don't give a shit about those ones.

• 1:38Jesse Michels?

  Do you believe in dark matter?

• 1:39Speaker 03

  I believe there's a mystery to be explained.

• 1:42Jesse Michels?

  So you believe in UFOs as much as you believe in dark matter?

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't like the word "believe in."

• 1:49Jesse Michels?

  What about General Neil McCaslin? In isolation, that story is completely significant.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  No, I don't think. It's just totally random.

• 1:55Jesse Michels?

  What do you mean? There was likely some sort of anti-Diluvian civilization.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  If there was an advanced civilization, where's their trash? Where's their tools?

• 2:03Jesse Michels?

  If you read the book, your base case has to be that Charles Manson was probably an MKUltra mind control patient.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Either that, or cult leaders can use sex, drugs, and rock and roll to get people to do crazy shit for them. If you were the CIA, would you really want to hire somebody, a lowlife like Lee Harvey Oswald, a nobody?

• 2:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, and that's why I said, "I'm a patsy." That's exactly who you'd hire. Somebody disposable.

• 2:27Jesse Michels?

  I will admit that I want to believe. Will you admit that you want to disbelieve?

• 2:34Jesse Michels?

  Do you want to have a mystical experience?

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Okay, alright. Yes, that could be.

• 2:39Jesse Michels?

  I think you're running from your shadow. You're a secret mystic.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Very strange thing happened to me last night.

• 2:45Jesse Michels?

  You were once abducted by aliens.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Okay, you want to hear that story?

• 2:48Jesse Michels?

  I do, I want to hear that story.

• 3:13Jesse Michels?

  Michael Shermer, it is an honor to have you here. You are probably the most prominent scientific skeptic in the United States. You're the founder of Skeptic Magazine. You are synonymous with pouring cold water on all sorts of, you know, mythological belief systems that people have. People's wanting to believe, you know, in the UFO world, we have a phrase, which is, "I want to believe." I will admit, I fall prey to that all the time. I would say that's probably my a priori bias is, "I want to believe."

• 3:45Jesse Michels?

  So you, I think, are a healthy check against that sort of thinking. And maybe I can, I can challenge you on a couple of things here, but this will be a really fun conversation and I'm honored that you're here.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. Isn't that the Mulder poster, "I want to believe"?

• 3:58Jesse Michels?

  It is, exactly.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I guess I'm the Scully.

• 4:02Jesse Michels?

  You're the Scully. That's exactly right. Yeah, perfect X-Files reference. And I actually have a photo, I think it's the background of my phone, of me and Jacques Vallée, and we're next to that poster. And so that is, that is one of my prized...

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Well, I love his work. He's, you know, when you read him, it's like, "Oh my God, this guy's a skeptic." You know, he's like, "Oh, I don't believe Babazara. I don't think this is aliens. I don't think this is what they said it was." I'm like, "Whoa, okay." And then he goes, "But it could be these interdimensional beings of the mythology." I'm like, "Okay, wait, hang on." Where are you going with this?

• 4:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, he's very interesting, because he pulled, he's, first of all, he has a real scientific background. He worked on ARPANET, first version of the internet with Doug Engelbart, and in the 60s, he was also an astronomer, you know, and so he's like real kind of, you know, scientific credentials. And he talks about the phenomena in this really interesting way where you can't take it at face value. You know, you have this phenomenological experience, but that is sort of the mask and behind the mask is something else sort of going on. And then, yeah, at other times, he sort of debunks, you know, he doesn't believe the Lazar case. I happen to disagree with him, you know, on that specifically, but he's, um, he's a very interesting sort of deep, deep thinker.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Well, the collection of stories and anecdotes that they're not enough for belief, but or to tip over into accepting it as viable, but it is a direction of which to go. Like, what are these people experiencing? What are they seeing? You know, it's like alien abduction people. I've met a lot of these people and I don't think they're making it up. I don't think these are fraudsters or anything like that. I think they're, and they're not mentally ill people also. There was, you know, Susan Clancy at Harvard for her doctoral dissertation in psychology. She wrote a book on abducted and she did a study on people who had been abducted by aliens. They're not abnormal people. These are normal people that have, well, it's probably sleep paralysis, mainly a sleep disorder. But, you know, you get enough of those, you go, okay, what, what are they experiencing?

• 6:00Speaker 03

  So it leads us in a direction for research, like Jeffrey Kripal's research also. He compiles these hundreds and hundreds of, of anomalies, right? Weird things that happen to people. And they are, they've happened to me. And then I, the people write me when I write about this, I'm like, oh my God, wow, these are wild.

• 6:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Well, I want to establish, and by the way, congratulations for being appointed to the UAP White House Advisory Board. That's a big deal. You're sort of the resident skeptic there. What do you believe overall? Why don't we set the table with that for the audience's sake? Obviously phenomenologically, as you're saying here, there are things that are happening, you know, from abductions to people seeing things in the sky. So I don't think you're arguing with the fact that they're saying they saw a thing and that they're earnestly retelling their experience.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:51Jesse Michels?

  What do you, do you believe that all of those things have some sort of prosaic explanation within kind of our current physics? Or where, where do you stand? Exactly.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, fair question. Well, I would say on the, if we're talking about aliens, I would say they're out there somewhere, but they have not come here. Now, I don't know this for sure, so I always start with metha- well, with universal realism. There is a reality, we can know something about it. And then fallibilism, we're not gods, we don't know everything. So we have to start with some element of doubt. So, you know, given the Drake equation and, you know, there's a trillion galaxies or more, and each of these galaxies has hundreds of billions, maybe up to a trillion stars in each one of them. And now we know from the Kepler Space Telescope and others that pretty much all these stars have planets.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  So you start crunching the numbers, you go, okay, there just has to be Earth-sized planets at an Earth-sized distance to have water and air and so on and so on. And you're eventually going to get the development of life and then complex life and then intelligent life and then maybe communicating intelligent life. No matter how many steps are in there, the number is so big that we just can't be the only ones, right? So, but said that, that said, it's a big, vast, empty universe. There's just mostly empty space. So the chances of them having come here, I would say is not very good. So I would say they're probably out there somewhere, they probably have not come here.

• 8:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, so you have deductive logic, you have inductive logic, what you just described is deductive logic.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:20Jesse Michels?

  It's sort of, you know, this large-scale, you know, kind of probabilistic reasoning, à la kind of the Fermi paradox or the Drake equation, like you just mentioned. You know, there has to be life out there. What about observable anomalies we are seeing on Earth all the time as far as, you know, objects in our air, often in our very sensitive military kind of nuclear airspace when it comes to the US? That doesn't look like it comes from here. It seems to be breaking physics, breaking conservation of momentum, materializing, dematerializing. You know, not involving sort of lift mechanisms that seem like prosaic propulsion. Well, how do you explain that?

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Okay, well, let's, okay, let's back up for a second. So there are scientists searching for extraterrestrial signals from space. The aliens are out there somewhere. Let's see if we can pick up their signals, right? And Carl Sagan famously used the in contact, the prime number sequence that Jodie Foster's character hears in the earbuds. So that would be something that's not naturally produced. It's not a rotating black hole or ways are whatever. For, for, have they come here? What is our evidence? So there's lots and lots of these anecdotes and stories and blurry photographs and grainy videos. And one of the purposes of our committee that Avi's heading is to say, okay, we've seen all this. We've had three government dumps now and no one has anything obvious.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  So come on, give us the good stuff, right? That's what everybody says. So what would it take? Um, well, so Avi and I have a bet, you know, a thousand dollar bet. Um, we each put in 500 bucks. It goes to the Long Now Foundation. They have the money, they invest it. And by January, uh, by December 31st, 2030, one of us is going to get the money. Uh, and who determines it is if two of three major scientific institutions, NASA, uh, the, uh, what is it? National Academy of Sciences and then the American Astronomy Society. If two of the three of them go, yep, aliens are here. That's it, right there. That we've made contact, that's the evidence and everybody can see that. Much like the Chinese spy balloon that floated over US airspace in 2023. Everybody sees it.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  It's covered in the news, the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of, everybody goes, yeah, it's real. Now, I didn't personally see it, you know, but I accept that that's real and no one cares about the credentials of the pilot that shot it down or anything like that. We have the balloon. So if we had the aliens, okay, that would do it. You know, Avi would go, yeah, that's it. Sherman, look, here it is. And NASA said it's real. Uh, you know, he gets the money, right? I mean, the money all goes to the Galileo project anyway, because I support it. But so it's just a way of focusing our attention on what, what constitutes good evidence and not good evidence? What would it take to go from here? I doubt it to here. I think it's probably true.

• 11:10Jesse Michels?

  Well, that, so I would, I would ask that for you. Like what constitutes the threshold of evidence, you know, after which you are ready to say this is a real phenomenon and that humans or prosaic explanations aren't responsible for it. Uh, because I think we have an abundance of evidence in the open source world, um, that, that would, you know, I believe that. I believe that now. So like, I've already hit that threshold. What's your threshold?

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Wow, much higher. Yeah, no, I need to see the bodies or the spaceships or, you know, not me personally. You know, Marco Rubio goes there with the camera crew from 60 Minutes or whatever. And they're in the warehouse and he goes, all right, I can't actually show you, but we found it. And okay, all right, if I'll be upset and all these scientists accept it, then yeah, it'd be nice to see it. Like, okay, let's see it. We all see it. The problem with anecdotes like that is there's different fields where other people have anecdotes of other things, paranormal, supernatural, miracles, things like this. And it's like, they can't all be true just on the anecdotes. We need more than that. So my analogy is if you're a biologist and you show up at a conference with your colleagues and you go,

• 12:22Speaker 03

  look, I found a new bipedal primate species living in the Himalayas or Washington or Canada, or whatever, Bigfoot, Yeti, Sasquatch, right? And you go, wow, okay, let's all see it. Put the slide up. Well, you see, it was three in the morning and I was asleep and I heard this noise. I went out and I snapped this kind of blurry photograph. You can sort of see in the shadows. They're like, no, dude, you gotta bring the, bring it. Show us the body, right? The roadkill, the dead, the dead Bigfoot, whatever. You know, so that's what it would take. Like, just show us.

• 12:54Jesse Michels?

  So my threshold for evidence for believing in corporeal alien bodies is the same as yours. I'd want to actually see those to believe them. But I think there's all sorts of other stuff before going there that just makes us, me, think that we're not alone and that there are things that seem to be intelligently moving around in our sensitive airspace. I'll give you an example. This is a book by a friend of mine named Robert Hastings called UFOs and Nukes.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:20Jesse Michels?

  And this accounts basically for 167 people that work at nuclear bases all over the United States. And these guys are on often what's known as the PRP program, the Personal Reliability Program. So they have to report if they're taking Tylenol or Ibuprofen. You know, like they literally have to be the picture of mental health. They can't do any of that. Yeah, yeah. No ayahuasca for them.

• 13:45Jesse Michels?

  And they consistently report seeing Tic Tacs, saucers, orbs, things flying around in our most sensitive airspace and often tampering with the nuclear weapons in a way that we'd never do to our own nukes. It just doesn't make sense. And then. The, okay, you could say, oh, it's like, that's some sociological hysteria or something. But if anything, again, these people are screened for mental health. This is a database. It's not a bunch of anecdotes. And if anything, there's preference falsification in the opposite direction because it's this culture of shame, secrecy and humility. And so I would assume if we have 167 on record, we probably have 1,000 plus off record.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  So this is more than just the Maelstrom nuclear site in Montana, right? Because that's the most famous one.

• 14:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, so that's Bob Salas in 1967.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:36Jesse Michels?

  But there are tons of others. There are two cases in September of 1964 at Vandenberg Air Force Base that seemed to dovetail with each other. We have-

• 14:46Speaker 03

  That was the one off the coast that was like rectangular, like football sized shape rectangle.

• 14:51Jesse Michels?

  That was in 2003 at Vandenberg and 64 at Vandenberg. Bob Jacobs, he was a photo instrumentation specialist and he was up the coast 100 miles at Big Sur and he was, had a telescope pointed at an Atlas V missile with a dummy nuclear warhead. And afterwards, when he was reviewing the tape, UFO seemed to wrap around it and caused the warhead to tumble out of the sky. A couple of guys in tweed suits behind him were basically swarmed to secrecy, said, you can't speak about this again. He was deleted from the government despite having his DD 214. And he managed over 100 people, so.

• 15:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, I had 134 guys working for me and I had two friends from college who were my commanding people. And I also have something called a DD 14. I have, I have records here. My officer efficiency reports are in there.

• 15:46Jesse Michels?

  And his boss, Major Florenz Mansman, nobody could get a hold of him. So there's this liminal question of, was Bob Jacobs completely full of it? He's saying he's managed over 100 people. And it turns out, we found Florenz Mansman in the 90s and he admitted that Bob Jacobs worked underneath him.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Okay, let's assume he's not making it up.

• 16:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  So 167 cases, how many photos do we have of these objects?

• 16:10Jesse Michels?

  Uh, we have, we, well, you don't have photos because it's nuclear sites.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:13Jesse Michels?

  So, so obviously all of the sensors, any of the collection is going to be classified a priori.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  So presumably the sites have some recordings or radar or, other than just the guards said he saw this.

• 16:25Jesse Michels?

  They do. Well, in, in, uh, in the case of Minot, uh, Air Force Base in 1968, we actually have radar associated with it and physicists have reviewed the radar. Kevin Knuth, um, you know, who's a prominent physicist on the topic of, you know, is, uh, he's at University of Albany and he's reviewed the, the Minot, you know, radar, for example. And he thinks that, you know, it indicates a bunch of anomalous objects showing up.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Well, it indicates something. The question is what, right? Is, is it, you know, ball lightning or, or, you know, satellites or, I don't know, drones? These are too early for drones, but, you know, something like that. I, I have in my book, that list of Leslie Keens, you know, the possible ordinary terrestrial explanations for UFOs and UAPs.

• 17:09Jesse Michels?

  But when you have multiple witnesses, like, so Malmstrom, let's use the 1967 case. You have Bob Salas, he's at Oscar, uh, Launch Control Center. He basically, you know, he gets called down, he says, you know, topside guards are seeing this like red orb making right angle turns and flying around in weird ways. And then nine of his missiles, nine of the 10 missiles go into no-go status.

• 17:32Speaker 05

  Can't launch it.

• 17:33Jesse Michels?

  Had that ever happened in your career thus far?

• 17:37Speaker 05

  I was there for three years. One of them may have gone down for some power problem, but nothing like multiple shutdowns.

• 17:47Jesse Michels?

  And then simultaneous to that, Bob Hastings himself, who wrote this book, he was actually, uh, taken under, he wanted to learn more about radar theory. And he was a janitor at Malmstrom in 1967. So he independently was taken in by this radar guy.

• 18:02Speaker 06

  And he pointed, he said, we're tracking, and he probably said unknowns. That's the formal term for unidentified objects. I saw five blips in the sort of northeast quadrant of his radar scope.

• 18:15Jesse Michels?

  So you have, in that case, top side guard eyewitnesses. You have Bob Hastings independently seeing the thing on radar himself. And then you have a guy in the launch facility saying that the, you know, the missiles are all going down. And then you have a strategic air command report saying that the missiles went down eight days earlier for this other, you know, echo flight incident. So you have this like, it's, it's kind of a tapestry of like, good evidence.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  All right, so you're picking, you're picking the unusual anomalies that happen. So what's, so this is what's called base rate neglect in Bayesian reasoning. What's the base rate of weird anomalies that happen at all nuclear sites everywhere in the world for the last 50 years? Does anybody keep track of this? Like, most nights, nothing happens. Nobody sees anything. 365 nights a year, maybe one night a year, somebody sees something weird. We write books about the weird stuff. Why is it, if that was true, what else would be true? Why are the aliens, or whoever, not harassing nuclear sites and, and military sites? Most of the time, most of the time, nothing happens at these sites. How come they're not harassing the Russians? Or maybe they are. Maybe you have some cases of, you know, Russian sites like this.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  So, in other words, 167 sounds oppressive, but compared to what? How unusual is that really? I mean, if you took any place, anywhere, where there's a lot of people and cameras and people paying attention because this is an important site, there's more observations. I'll give, I'll give you an analogy.

• 19:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, sure.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  So last year, uh, two years ago, when Trump was rerunning for president, 20, fall of 24, there was the New Jersey swarm, UFO swarm, UAP swarm. All right, so are these drones or whatever? And yes, so Trump gets in there and goes, oh, well, I'm going to find out what's going on here. So he sends his people in there and they come back and it was nothing. It's just normal drones and planes and stuff like that. And one of the effects is that's a heavily trafficked area. So the base rate, like the Bermuda Triangle, how come there's more ships and planes crashing there? Because that's where most ships and planes go, is in that little area, right? New Jersey. Jersey is a very crowded area for a lot of airports, the Guardian, JFK and so on, all this. And so there's a lot of stuff going on there. Then there's commercial drones, which are now popular.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  And then the other effect is that people are going outdoors and looking up in the sky because they've heard the news reports like, oh my God, there's something going on. This guy's over in New Jersey. They look up. Most people don't ever look up at the skies at night. They're busy. They're watching TV or whatever. And if you do that, there's a lot of stuff up there. I mean, Venus and Jupiter are both very bright, very surprising to people. And now Elon has launched over 10,000 satellites for Starlink. And I know because I live in Santa Barbara, in the mountains above Santa Barbara, so it's very dark. And Vandenberg is just, it's about 90 miles up the coast. So every week there's a launch and the rocket goes up and about six minutes later, the sound gets to my house.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  It's a pretty cool effect. And then you see the string of satellites. The next, like 90 minutes later, they come over the house. And then the next time around, they're really stretched out. And if you didn't know what was going on, this would be freaky, like, whoa, what is this? Well, the base rate, right? Elon is right there. They're launching missiles, launching satellites. And now, because I have a, I have a nice 12 inch Meade telescope. And I get it out and I look at Jupiter and Saturn, for example, which are pretty cool because you can see the rings and all that stuff. Pretty much every time I look now, I'm looking through the eyepiece and a satellite just streaks right across. And so on X, this happened like a year ago. On X, I see people going, oh my God, there's a weird thing going around Jupiter or Saturn. It's like,

• 21:49Speaker 03

  no, it's going around the earth. You just, they just noticed it because whoa, what is that thing that's going by Jupiter?

• 21:55Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  It's a satellite in our atmosphere.

• 21:58Jesse Michels?

  What, what, what would your base rate be for things going wrong with nuclear weapons? Because mine would be pretty low.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Well, things go, okay.

• 22:10Jesse Michels?

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• 23:36Jesse Michels?

  Today's episode is sponsored by my favorite headphones, Raycon. Raycon's been supporting the show for a while now and they have some really cool new technology that I'm very impressed by. These are not your run-of-the-mill headphones. In fact, they're called bone conduction headphones and they're absolutely wild. Bone conduction means the headphones don't go in your ears at all. This is actually the same technology that Beethoven, who was deaf, used to hear back in the day and Raycon has perfected it. With these headphones, sound travels through your cheekbones directly and you feel the difference immediately. No alien implants necessary. I've been using these pretty much every day, calls, podcasts, out filming. They're also IP68 waterproof and dust

• 24:19Jesse Michels?

  They have 13 hours of battery life, so I'm not thinking about charging them all the time. And what I love most about this company is that Raycon gives you premium performance without the premium price tag. The bone conduction headphones are a game changer. Click the link in our description or go to buyraycon.com/jesse michels with no a m i c h e l s b c to get 20% off. Thanks to Raycon for sponsoring today's episode. What would your base rate be for things going wrong with nuclear weapons? Because mine would be pretty low.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Well, things go, okay, no, mine would not be low. Look at all just, just the literature on accidents, nuclear accidents since, you know, the end of the Second World War. You know, there's dozens of them, you know, these are the list of close calls, you know, like, like the Russian guy Petrov, who, you know,

• 25:13Jesse Michels?

  Oh, of course, of course, close calls, but I'm not talking about manual.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  The B-52 crashes and there's two nuclear weapons at the bottom of the ocean. There's another one in Greenland.

• 25:22Jesse Michels?

  But these things are,

• 25:23Speaker 03

  I mean, weird shit happens, just, just entropy.

• 25:26Jesse Michels?

  You have, you have the best cryptography of the NSA, you have Faraday chambers, you know, surrounding these things and they are, you know, guarded in extremely sort of intensive ways. And so to me, when I hear, you know, the, the two times I know of where nukes getting, you know, going down, being decommissioned and getting tampered with, one is 1967 Malmstrm, the other is 2010 F E Warren. And both, if you actually back channel, do a little digging, the people on site are saying they're associated with things that are flying around in the local airspace that seem to break physics. And in the 2010 case at F E Warren, it was this Tic Tac flying around.

• 26:07Jesse Michels?

  Then I'm like, okay, maybe there's a correlation here. Maybe there's something going on that.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 26:12Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  You know,

• 26:13Jesse Michels?

  Might be future science, you know, I'm not saying it's, I'm not saying it's some like woo woo thing.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  Let's hang on, let's, let's, let's, let's not go there yet because time travel has other problems with the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. You can't, they can't, our future humans can't come back here.

• 26:29Jesse Michels?

  But if, but our current physical model of reality always gets overturned. So saying a thing.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Not always. No, no, no, not always.

• 26:36Jesse Michels?

  Of course it does.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  So Einstein did not overturn Newton. Newton's works.

• 26:40Jesse Michels?

  It's couched within Einstein.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Newton's, Newton, Newtonian mechanics works very well for most things. If you want to fine tune it, you know, want to land right there instead of right there. Okay. You gotta, you gotta use Einstein.

• 26:53Jesse Michels?

  You have time dilation. You have, you know, observer dependency for, you know, a lot of things.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Okay, hang on, hang on.

• 26:58Jesse Michels?

  You have the perception of Mercury.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Okay, I know where you're going with this. So let me back up for a second. So we have a lot of anomalous, unexplained phenomena. UAPs or UFOs, whatever. And we have 99, 5% of them have been explained even by the ufologists. So we're down to just not a handful. There's still hundreds and hundreds of unexplained things. All right. What are they? Okay. So, okay. So I have three categories. Ordinary terrestrial, extraordinary terrestrial, and then extraordinary extraterrestrial. Okay. So the first one is, can you hand me my book? And I'm gonna, I'm gonna read to you just since we have plenty of time.

• 27:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's plug it. Treat, go, go back, treat.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Treat the book. I just want to talk, talk about the aliens here. I'm going to give you Leslie Keens list of ordinary terrestrial explanations. This is from her book UFOs, Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. So she says, quote, roughly 90 to 95% of UFO sightings can be explained as weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddy, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light up the clouds, lights on the ground, lights reflected on the cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole punch clouds,

• 28:22Speaker 03

  and the list goes on. In other words, so medical students get this reference. If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Now, Nick Pope famously on my show said, unless you near, live near a zoo and there's a lot of zebras. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. So 90 to 95% are something in that list. And now I would add drones because commercial drones are so popular. How does something that's big and going really fast suddenly turn and go like, well, drones do that all the time. Extraordinary terrestrial would be like.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  The Russians have this super advanced technology, the Chinese have it, or the CIA, DARPA has this advanced technology or so on. Okay, first, if that were true, what else would be true? Why wouldn't the Russians use it in Ukraine? Why wouldn't we be using this in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran?

• 29:11Jesse Michels?

  I'm not saying we can use it. I'm not saying it's us. I'm saying it's not us.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Or maybe it's not, but a lot of people do think that could be it. So I debunked that, say that can't be because if the Russians had this, we would know because we steal their stuff, they steal our stuff.

• 29:24Jesse Michels?

  I think you're arguing for this being non-human.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Well, it could be. Okay, so, but if it's not a human, what would it be? Okay, so then, so my third category is extraordinary extraterrestrials. So these are aliens, these are, okay, now I know, um, non-human intelligence does not mean aliens. So the people on the UAP panel are going, Shimmer, don't say aliens, because it could be something else. Like, okay, what else could it be? You know, interdimensional beings or far future human time travelers. All right, now I think we're really getting into speculation there.

• 29:55Jesse Michels?

  But you mentioned up top that it's important to have epistemic humility, which I agree with. And so we have a limited scope of reality as, as humans. How many of the millions of species on earth think that they're apex predators when they're not? Because the apex predator above them, it just exists at a higher scope. And you know that the history of science and cosmological models building is all the history of umwelts and the ability to, you know, scope out new territory, whether it's James Webb on the macro scale, or, you know, room at the bottom, you know, as Feynman said, you know, we have, you know, increasingly granular electron microscopes, and we do, we have the Large Hadron Collider and stuff like

• 30:35Jesse Michels?

  that to detect subquark stuff. So, you know, to say that we won't bump into, uh, you know, some sort of species above us, and then you have all sorts of observable anomalies that we're seeing. So like, why not?

• 30:48Speaker 03

  I'm not saying that. I agree with you. We could. Okay, if it's, so this is the last chapter of my book, My God Gambit. If we encountered extraterrestrial intelligences, they're not going to be just like five years ahead of us. Where, you know, we back engineered and upgraded our computers from, you know, vacuum tubes to to chip, computer chips, like, really? That's five, the aliens are just five years ahead of us? They would be hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us, millions of years ahead of us. They would be like gods to us, right? Like the iPhone to the Neanderthal, like, it feels godlike. I think that's

• 31:24Jesse Michels?

  That's how people who are in the quote unquote UFO legacy program talk about UFO materials.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  I know, I know, because I talk to them. That's fine. If we encountered aliens, they would be far advanced. That does not mean that that's the explanation for the anomalies.

• 31:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  It's just one of multiple possible explanations.

• 31:42Jesse Michels?

  For sure. But let's, let's, I want to take your, you know, drones, space trash, temperature inversions. You have thousands of documents between 1945, so the advent of the nuclear age in 1953, 54, which is when the first recon U2 spy plane was created. This is well before any drones were in the sky. You have thousands of documents from the FBI, the CIA, all sorts of, you know, Army CIC. And they're all talking about UFOs showing up in our most sensitive airspace specifically around nuclear. There was in fact a project called Project Twinkle.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  You're picking the winners. What about, what's the base rate?

• 32:19Jesse Michels?

  We're picking the winners.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Okay, let me back up one second.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  On the history of science, you're picking the winners there, okay? Everything you said is true.

• 32:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  This theory overturned this one and so on and so forth. That has happened. But that doesn't mean the new theory is going to be overturned because it is also wrong, the current paradigm. I mean, they, they may be wrong. The Big Bang Theory might be wrong. The theory of evolution might be wrong. Maybe quantum mechanics isn't right.

• 32:44Jesse Michels?

  It would be a bet.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  But that would be very surprising, given how well supported these are.

• 32:48Jesse Michels?

  But Michael, we're never at the end of history. It would be an ahistorical thing to say flash freeze frame now. We're done with knowledge. At the end of the 19th century, electromagnetism had the last laugh.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  I know, I know.

• 33:00Jesse Michels?

  And, and it obviously didn't.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  Okay, so all this is possible, but that doesn't mean that is the explanation. For these anomalies.

• 33:07Jesse Michels?

  I don't, I don't think that we have a good explanation, but I do think they're genuine anomalies that aren't explained away through prosaic means. That's all I'm trying to say. I don't think we should snap to grid, say, these are aliens from Zeta Reticuli, because we don't have a lot of evidence that they are. But I do think we have a ton of evidence that intelligently propulsed things that don't seem to be human are moving around in our sensitive nuclear airspace. And then you could, you could take it a step further and you could come up with some sort of like, okay, it's, you know, the, the, the, the people working at these nuclear bases are MKUltra patients and they've been tested on with mind control experiments.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  No, I don't think that's it.

• 33:50Jesse Michels?

  You don't think that's it. And then, you know, you, you can't really come up with the drone thing, but you, you could come up with some sort of, maybe some spoofing technology in the sky that's sensitive, that's co-located. It's really hard. But then you get into the fact that in Japan, next to their civilian nuclear energy grid in Fukushima, they have a mountain called Mount Sengun Mori, which is dedicated to UFOs. Bariloche, Argentina, next to their civilian, you know, energy grid, you have UFOs showing up and you have a famous case in 95 with a commercial plane. You have similar accounts at Chernobyl.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Here's another example of commercial airline pilots in the 1960s and 70s being startled at UFOs that are streaking above them at like three, four times their speed, two or three times the height that they're at at 35,000 feet. Okay. They were seeing the U2 spy plane or the SR71 Blackbird, but they didn't know about that because that was secret. Okay. So how do you know that some of these are not, some of them are not like the next generation of DARPA, CIA type spy planes or whatever that we haven't heard about?

• 34:54Jesse Michels?

  Again, between 1945 and 1953, before the U2 spy plane, I just don't know. I understand all of the like, oh yeah, we used to mistake the U2, the SR71, things like that. But we're talking about before that, we have thousands of documents that comport exactly with the stuff in this book that occurs later on. So I just, you know, as early, the first case in this book is 1945, Hanford plutonium.

• 35:18Speaker 07

  When they got down there, they told us that this bogey was out there right over the Hanford ordnance works and directed Lieutenant Commander Brown to take off and challenge him. He said, all I can see is a bright red or reddish orange fireball right up in front of me.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Okay, go ahead and give me your best speculation about what you think whatever it is is doing at our nuclear sites.

• 35:42Jesse Michels?

  I don't know, but I don't think our current science explains it. And I think it's worthy of further inquiry. And I feel like the skeptical mode is shutting down the conversation.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  The government would care. They would care deeply if somebody was messing around.

• 35:55Jesse Michels?

  And they do. And they're, and so I think Blue Book was a front facing, basically decoy that was meant to, to, to, to throw the public off. And then underneath that, and this is now publicly admitted because Jacques Vallée was J. Allen Hynek, the chief astronomer of Blue Book's assistant. And he found this thing called the Pentagon memo, where it looked like Patel Memorial Institute, which works hand in hand with our nuclear sites all over the country, even back then, on basically a more granular mapping of UFO instances across the country, even in the 50s.

• 36:27Speaker 05

  Project Blue Book was the best they could do at the time because they felt they had a real project going on that was secret.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 36:36Speaker 05

  And UFOs too.

• 36:38Jesse Michels?

  Oh, I didn't know that. And so I think they care intensely. And I think the reason to not disclose this is you don't want things that you don't, that flying with impunity, you don't want things that you can't attribute flying around, around our nukes and tampering with them.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  I agree. So this, one of the goals of the UAP Science Advisory Committee is to get more information so that we can figure out what it is. If somebody in the inside knows, then tell us now. What we're worried about, okay, so this is a point of discussion in our first Zoom meeting was what if they misdirect us and go, hey, Avi, here's some stuff. Now go spend a few weeks analyzing that. Meanwhile, we're going to invade Cuba or whatever. Okay, so we're, we're aware that this could be, Avi's a pretty savvy guy. I don't think that's going to happen. But, but yes, they would care. So why are they not doing something about it? Why do these things keep happening? And so every president that gets in there, you know, Clinton and Obama, Trump, you know, we're going to find out what's going on, right?

• 37:37Speaker 03

  And then you see, you know, like Obama on these shows or Clinton on these shows going, I got in there, I sent my people in, we didn't find anything. Anything having to do with UFO or related?

• 37:46Speaker 07

  Material and we're going to be releasing a lot of things. There's footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Did you go through the UFO documents?

• 38:00Jesse Michels?

  I'm not telling you. But that's the thing. I think that's why disclosure is a misnomer. I don't think they have an ontological model of truth. And let's just simulate this. You're Obama and you're like, I really want to understand what's going on. You send your best people at it and they say, there are things flying around our nukes and we have no idea what they're doing, why they're here. And sometimes they turn the nukes off and they're, we do have multisensory data against this. We know it's a real thing. We know it's not kind of illusory. Of course, you're not going to disclose that to the American public. What is, that's crazy.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Now you're accusing Obama of lying.

• 38:35Jesse Michels?

  No, not at all.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Or he's siloed.

• 38:36Jesse Michels?

  No, I'm accusing of him of doing the rational thing, which is not touching off mass hysteria. If that's all you know.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  I see, I see. So you're saying he's siloed from the, some other people in the government who know what's actually going on and they just don't tell them?

• 38:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I don't think this is your day to day concern as president, you know? But I think if you, if you want to do a deep inquiry and then you find out that these intelligently propelled things are flying around our nuclear assets. You know, totally like, you know, we have no, no attribution on them. We have no idea where they came from. They're flying, you know, in ways that break our modern physics and our understanding of physics. You're not going to willy nilly disclose that. That then creates a green field for adversaries to try to, you know, do recon against our sensitive sites. Because it becomes this real, you know, then it's, we, we, we're admitting that we don't know about these, these certain things. And they can sort of muddy the waters by, by throwing, you know, more mud at us.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  But who's the they?

• 39:37Jesse Michels?

  No, I'm saying adversaries can then like, they can then throw, throw a bunch of like their most, you know, exotic drones in the mix. And then it's like, oh, we don't know whether it's the NHI or the, so you would never disclose it.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  We know the Russians do, they muck with stuff all the time. They're doing this social media.

• 39:52Jesse Michels?

  For sure.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And we do that with them. Our spies do bad stuff too.

• 39:56Jesse Michels?

  But you get what I'm saying. The public would freak out. You would never want to.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  I don't think the public would. Okay. And I don't, you don't mean like if we discovered aliens, the stock market would crash and religious.

• 40:04Jesse Michels?

  No, what, no, no.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  You mean?

• 40:06Jesse Michels?

  I don't mean that. I mean, if you're Obama and all, you find out that all we actually know about this stuff is, yeah, maybe some material was dropped. Maybe we have some remnants of actual physical evidence. But like, ultimately, one of the core truths about it is that these things are flying, you know, with complete impunity around our most sensitive defense assets.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Maybe. So what's the, what's the criteria cutoff to tip over on that particular issue of, because power goes out at stations all the time. This happens. So maybe the power just went out for some other reason at the Malmstrom site. And it wasn't these orbs or whatever. So how many does it have to happen? And we go, okay, this is not just some random electricity occasionally goes out and shuts off the nukes. It was something else.

• 40:52Jesse Michels?

  The reason I think that it was actually UFO related is there's a Boeing Strategic Air Command report where they actually looked and they tried to recreate the effect. And this is on the Echo Flight Incident. So this was eight days before the Salus Incident, just to be clear. But it was at Malmstrom. And they couldn't recreate the effect. And they couldn't under, they had no idea what it was. And so they concluded that it was anomalous. Then cut back to a year or two ago, the Wall Street Journal reports this clearly disinfo hit piece on UFOs. And it's around this event. And they say that an EMP in 1967, like a hu, like a

• 41:33Jesse Michels?

  60 foot EMP was wheeled up to Malmstrom. And we shut down our own nukes in some sort of experimental testing, which has all sorts of issues. The nukes wouldn't go back online if they were, they'd be fried, you know, from the EMP. You would never do that with people present. We didn't even have operational non-nuclear EMPs in 1967. So that's checkmate in one, you know? So, so whenever there's.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Maybe the CIA DARPA has some advanced.

• 42:01Jesse Michels?

  I don't think that. I don't think that.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  This reminds me a little bit of the Havana.

• 42:04Jesse Michels?

  Blue gill triple prime was four years before where we incidentally created an EMP in the starfish prime series. I don't think we had and I don't know.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  Okay, maybe. So the question would be, how can we get to the bottom of this? Okay. So part of my problem is that, you know, I've been hearing about disclosure coming any day now for 40 years. When's it gonna happen? Right? And so every time Clinton or Obama or Trump go, okay, we're gonna get to the bottom of this. I looked into it. I didn't find anything. And then the UFO people go, oh, okay, he's siloed or he's lying or they're lying to him or whatever.

• 42:35Jesse Michels?

  No, they have different criteria. They probably personally believe in this. That's why Obama thought about producing Betty and Barney Hill's, you know, documentary. That's why he's on set at Spielberg's disclosure day. It's because he's into this stuff. But he can't talk about it publicly because it's sensitive.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  Obama was on that podcast. This is what triggered the UFO files dump was, you know, he said, the host asked him, do you think aliens are real? And he goes, yeah, I think aliens are real.

• 42:59Jesse Michels?

  Are aliens real?

• 43:02Speaker 03

  They're real, but I haven't seen them and they're not being kept in, what is it?

• 43:07Jesse Michels?

  Area 51.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hit it from the President of the United States. Then he clarified, I meant they're out there somewhere, like what I said, right? Not that they're here.

• 43:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but the revealed private preference is that if he's funding documentaries about the first abduction case in the United States.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Well, it's an interesting topic. I mean, Spielberg's a filmmaker. Why would he not?

• 43:33Jesse Michels?

  The director of his CIA Brennan and director of national intelligence that oversees all intelligence agencies under him, James Clapper, is on record, you know, in the age of disclosure, saying that, you know, we were at area 51 and we had, we were systematically detecting UFOs in that sensitive airspace. So obviously Obama knew.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  Detecting what? Detecting something, an anomaly. That's not aliens.

• 43:56Jesse Michels?

  But again, I, again, I think if you go back to the pre U2 spy plane and then it comports with all of this data, you have eyewitness accounts, you have radar, and you know, you have all sorts of evidence that this is happening. Like clearly, you have an abundance of evidence.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  Evidence of something, but what?

• 44:14Jesse Michels?

  I don't know. I don't know. No, no, but I think, I think what I'm saying is that that's obviously worthy of further inquiry. That's obviously warrants, because the skeptic thing shuts down the conversation, you know?

• 44:26Speaker 03

  No, I don't want to.

• 44:27Jesse Michels?

  So you admit that, you admit that this is phenomenologically real and hard to explain by

• 44:33Speaker 03

  I'm not sure that the nuclear thing is beyond statistical chance. See, like in the social sciences, you're familiar with the null hypothesis.

• 44:40Jesse Michels?

  Of course.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  The hypothesis is not true until proven otherwise. You gotta have, you run the experiment, the randomized controlled trial and so on and so forth. You get to the point of five or point of one level, statistical significance. You go, okay, I think we have a real effect and not. Sometimes that holds up and it's, and it's replicated. Sometimes it's not. Maybe manipulated the stats or whatever. In other words, there's a method.

• 44:59Jesse Michels?

  Of course.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  To get there. What would be the method for that? To say, okay, something weird is happening in our nuclear sites and it's predictable and here it's repeatable and you can see it versus some weird stuff is happening. Let's look further. Okay, but then what?

• 45:16Jesse Michels?

  I think this is happening far more frequently than if you were to like stand in random locations, you know, all over the globe.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  Well, but not random because you gotta be where there's, there's a lot of people looking up. They're interested. There's observers.

• 45:26Jesse Michels?

  Of course. Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean.

• 45:28Jesse Michels?

  While being hyper vigilant about what's going on, controlling for all of the other variables.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. So here's an example. Like, like the Navy pilot David Fravor talks about the UAP going from 80,000 feet to sea level like that, right? Like one second. Okay, how could this possibly be?

• 45:48Speaker 07

  It rapidly accelerated in front of us and disappeared. Our wingman roughly 8,000 feet above us lost contact also. We immediately turned back to see where the whitewater was at and it was gone also.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  You know, Avi does a calculation saying, this is not possible for any physical object to move through the air at that speed because it would, it would burn up, it would release a, you know, an explosion, you know, break the sound barrier. The people on the aircraft carrying Nimitz, they would have heard it, they would have reported it. None of this happened. So whatever he thinks he saw, or people think they saw the radar, whatever, that's not what happened. It cannot have happened. That is physically impossible. This is Avi Loeb saying this. He did the calculation. Can't happen. We know what happens when bolides and meteors come through the atmosphere at that speed. They burn up, they explode. It's a big thing. This never happened with that UAP. So whatever the story is, 80,000 feet to sea level, oh my God. Okay, you're wrong.

• 46:43Jesse Michels?

  So yeah, that's the point, that it's flying in ways that defy our current physics. And so that means we should study it and figure out if some future physics might be able to explain it.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  Or that's not what happened.

• 46:55Jesse Michels?

  It one or the other.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  A sizable object did not drop from 80,000 feet.

• 47:00Jesse Michels?

  But when you have somebody like.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  It was a camera effect, or it was a lens effect, or the zoom effect.

• 47:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but when.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  Or, okay, so these are our choices. It was a normal camera lens, something weird.

• 47:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  Effect, or all of our physics is off and we need a new physics. Okay, let's go with this one first.

• 47:17Jesse Michels?

  Well, you, fair enough, but I would say, I don't know if you know who Miguel Alcubierre is. He's at the University of Mexico and he figured out a way, you know, for faster than light travel within the scope of general relativity. It requires negative energy, but you have things like the Casimir effect, which allow for, essentially show negative energy. And then you have somebody like Sonny White at NASA who's figuring out how to harness the Casimir effect to light up a small chip. So you can make the Casimir effect useful.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Okay, but you're doing these calculations to explain something that may not need explaining. It's not, it's not what you think it is.

• 47:50Jesse Michels?

  But it needs explaining because you have, you have Commander David Fravor, who is an extremely esteemed person. He was in charge of.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  I know, I know.

• 47:57Jesse Michels?

  You know, is flying an F-16 is extremely, extremely experienced. You have this whole squadron. And you have, you have, you have Chad Underwood catching the thing with forward looking infrared. You have Kevin Day, who's catching the thing with radar on the USS Princeton. You have a whole chain of custody and you have all these different kind of, you know, multisensory corroborating things. You have the radar, which was confiscated. And then again, there's a nuclear connection. Tactical nukes were likely on board.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  The Nimitz was still adjusting a new radar system for that particular one. Was it the Tic Tac one or something like that?

• 48:33Jesse Michels?

  It was a spy radar system.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, so maybe it was inaccurate. Maybe it was still being adjusted.

• 48:39Jesse Michels?

  They thought that and then they repositioned it. And it was total, it was reading the same thing and it's been fine ever since. And it's this, it's been the state of the art ever since.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Okay. And how many of these do we have? And by the way, how come we don't have?

• 48:53Jesse Michels?

  We have tons. We have tons in this book.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  How come we don't have good photos? What's your answer to the, where's all the clear and unmistakable photos and videos?

• 49:00Jesse Michels?

  We do have some good photos.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  Maybe the Navy needs better cameras.

• 49:03Jesse Michels?

  Do you know, do you know about the, do you know about the Lake Coat photos?

• 49:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 49:07Jesse Michels?

  And, and, and Costa Rica, they were doing aerial mapping around this, this, uh, uh, renal, um, area, Lake Coat. They were trying to do this hydroelectric project. And, um, this guy Sergio Leozzi, I always mispronounce his name. He was the, this guy, you know, flying this plane, doing the aerial mapping. You know, it was with a professional grade cameras for the, their, um, uh, geographical institute, which is in their, you know, ministry of public works. They're developing the photo and they see this UFO over, you know, over the region. That looks like this perfect UFO that they didn't even spot while they were taking the picture. And Jacques Vallée and Gerald Haynes looked at the negatives and the negatives looked perfectly fine. The Costa Rican government has never denied it. So this is an official photograph that's been taken.

• 49:51Jesse Michels?

  There are other cases like McMinnville where you, it's really hard to debunk these.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  The McMinnville one, I mean, really, this looks like a hubcap tossed into the air.

• 50:00Jesse Michels?

  But there's no way to ultimately debunk it. It's unfalsifiable in either direction. And Paul and Evelyn Trent were these hapless farmers.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  I know, I know. I'm just telling you.

• 50:09Jesse Michels?

  And they took two different angles of the thing.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  I have, I have faked UFO photos. It's super easy to do.

• 50:13Jesse Michels?

  But there, my point is there are a bunch of these things that sit in liminal space where you can't say that I'm definitively wrong. And I can't say that you're definitively wrong. It's not even wrong, right? You, you end up in this impossible argument. And then you have eyewitness accounts and then you have FLIR and then you have radar and then you have materials. And it's like, we have a tapestry of really good evidence beyond the threshold. For me at least, as far as, okay, this is really worthy of further investigation.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Okay. You know, the Tic Tac video where you see the little white thing in the middle? All of a sudden it zooms off, right?

• 50:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Okay. This would be in that direction for you.

• 50:47Jesse Michels?

  That could be the lost losing target. We don't know what that is.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Well, but, but Mick West pointed out that if you look on the vertical axis, you'll see zoom 1.0. And the moment it goes like that, it goes from 1.0 to 2.0 zoom. In other words, the lens is zooming in, not the object moving. All right. So he was the first to point that out. Also, the triangular. All the shows show these triangular, green shaped UAPs near LAX. They're not. They're blinking in the exact same pattern as a commercial airliner. These are commercial airliners coming into LAX. It's the, um, the bokey effect on the triangular lens that's causing it to look triangular.

• 51:22Jesse Michels?

  But, but, but context matters. And so the Nimitz case is really important because not only do you have Commander David Fravor, you have Alex Dietrich, you have, you know, uh, Underwood, who's doing the FLIR.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  I'm glad you brought her up.

• 51:36Jesse Michels?

  Who caught it on FLIR. You have, you have radar catching it for days before and after. You have the fact that the UFO showed up at the rendezvous point, at the cap point, 60 miles away, uh, on radar that, that, um, you know, Fravor was headed to. Uh, so I just think this is hard to argue with, like the overall tapestry of evidence, at least that it's worthy of further investigation.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 52:00Jesse Michels?

  Could, could, could this have been some secret American technology red teaming our systems? Possibly. I'm, I'm open to that. I am. But, but I think, I think the, the, the, the nuclear stuff, again, going back to the forties, is just really, really hard to debunk. I think you're on very, you know, not solid.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  I don't know, maybe, you know, it's just, okay. So you brought Dietrich. So I'll give the last, this is the end of my chapter on aliens. I'll give the last word to Dietrich, who witnessed the 2004 UAP incident from the USS Nimitz. Fighter jet, as I think it well sums up, 75 years of ufologist's search for aliens. Quote, "I think they enjoy the anticipation more than actually finding answers." And that's been my frustration because I've been hearing about this for decades. It's like, you know, it's like Stephen Greer, "Boy, we're gonna get to the bottom." Okay. All right. And it never happens. Okay. So what I'm hoping for the UAP committee, advisory committee, is that Avi knows people who know people on the inside. Like he's friends with, um, uh, Anna Paulina Luna. Okay. So she seems to be an insider.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  She just yesterday had a big, uh, congressional hearing on MKUltra. All right. Let's get to the bottom of this. I happen to know a lot about this. That Gottlieb destroyed all, most of those records. I don't know if there's a bottom to get to, but fine. Okay. So I'm hoping that. Ana Paulina Luna, or somebody that Avi knows on the inside could go, all right, damn it, we're gonna, I'm gonna go in there and I'm gonna get the stuff from the nukes or the whatever, and we're gonna bring it out and show it. Will this happen? I don't know. I'm prepared to be frustrated and, you know, but.

• 53:31Jesse Michels?

  So I will, I agree with you, and I think this is important for the audience to be more discerning in cases. I think you serve a very valuable role there. And there is a dynamic with this whole field of kind of Lucy with the football. So I think it's, you know, it's constantly like, you know, disclosures around the bend sort of thing. But I also think if you are familiar with, obviously, you know, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I think consensus thought and science moves as much due to politics as it does due to truth. You know, famously Aristarchus was the first person who thought that, you know, we lived in a heliocentric universe, but it took, you know, Galileo and Copernicus measuring it, you know, or Copernicus theorizing it

• 54:13Jesse Michels?

  many, many years, centuries later, in order for the consensus to shift on this sort of topic. And then if you look at the money that's been historically spent on UFOs, it's basically nothing. And then you, you look at, you know, the Robertson Panel documentation, which is, was meant to be classified at the time, saying, Blue Book's literal explicit motive is to throw the public off and systematically downplay, suppress, and rationalize UFO sightings. Of course, you're not going to have made good scientific progress on these things that seem to be breaking our physics. Like, you're not going to, because you haven't spent the proper resources or money. You go, just now, certain academic institutions are starting to take it seriously. You have, you know, Avi Loeb and Gary Nolan, Stanford

• 54:58Jesse Michels?

  and Harvard, you know, respectively. But like, this is, we're talking about the last four or five years. So I think, yeah, on the one hand, yes, it's Lucy with the football. And then on the other hand, it's like, give us a chance.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  All right, I'll give you some more stories. So when Darwin published on the origin of species in 1859, you know, he was right. That theory has stood the test of time. Okay, but he was not the first. There were many other people speculating about the origins of species, and they were wrong. One reason Darwin waited so long because he returned from the Galapagos in 1835, and he opened his first notebook in the fall of that year. And it was not until 1859. Okay, what took him so long? Well, because a guy named Robert Chambers wrote a book called Vestiges, in which he had his own theory of evolution that was widely criticized and completely wrong. So Darwin thought, oh, I don't want to be like that guy. And, you know, everybody laughs at me. I want a career in science. I got to really take my time and build up tons of evidence.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  So he does it. Right? So, so that's what it takes, right? The famous French astronomer who discovered Neptune, he discovered Neptune by seeing perturbations in Uranus's orbit. And he said, there's got to be something right around there pulling it that direction. He pointed telescopes there eventually. Oh, it's a planet. Right? That guy also saw perturbations in Mercury's orbit. He's like, okay, here we go again. There's another planet in there. It's planet Vulcan. And he twice found it. He never found it. Right? He was mistaken. And it was Einstein that figured out, oh, Mercury is very close to the sun. It's not the perturbation of another planet. It's the distortion of the spacetime around the sun causing Mercury to, you know, the relativity

• 56:36Speaker 03

  theory. Okay, so you're picking the winners. Those are all true, but don't forget, most of the ideas in the history of science are wrong. Right? I mean, Copernicus was right, but Brahe had an alternative theory to Ptolemy, where the, the sun and the, and the moon go around, but then that whole thing goes around the sun. Right? So it was kind of a modify between Ptolemy and Copernicus. Brahe was wrong. Most ideas in science are wrong. So the people that discovered this or that about bacteria and virus, you know, like cancer.

• 57:06Jesse Michels?

  But, but I'm not presenting an idea. I'm presenting a tapestry of evidence that wants further investigation and a theory to explain it.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Okay, Jesse, I agree with you.

• 57:14Jesse Michels?

  Okay, so there's no daylight between us.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  I've always supported the SETI program. Supported the Galileo project. I'm on the Galileo team.

• 57:21Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Since the first week, every Monday, the first Monday, the first Friday of every

• 57:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  Month, we meet on Zoom. I never miss a meeting. Uh, you know, I'm there.

• 57:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  I want to find out.

• 57:31Jesse Michels?

  Okay, I love it.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  Now, I don't have enough pull, Avi, because of his Harvard connections. I think, okay, maybe this guy can actually make it happen. In other words, the Stephen Greers of the world are like, we're going to get to the bottom and it never ha- even Clinton, Obama, it never happens. Damn it, show us.

• 57:47Jesse Michels?

  Greer's theory is that they're all love and light and good. And it's, you know, almost like a play on the great filter theory that they have to be perfectly altruistic to have, you know, to go interstellar or something.

• 57:58Speaker 03

  And they, I don't know.

• 57:59Jesse Michels?

  So, so, so that would be an example of a thing where I'm like, that is not going to probably stand the test of time.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:05Jesse Michels?

  Like, like what you're talking about. But I think just getting off first base, because some people, and hopefully you'd admit this, in the skeptical position, have just tried to shut down the conversation.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  No, of course we don't. I love the conversation.

• 58:17Jesse Michels?

  Okay, good.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Here I am.

• 58:18Jesse Michels?

  So that's, that's, that's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. I know you do, and I appreciate that. And I have immense respect for you, and I'm glad, and I, you, we've, we've always had great conversations, so.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  I mean, personally, I, I don't think the discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence would disrupt anything. I think it would be great. I think the stock market would go up.

• 58:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 58:35Speaker 03

  Every religious person I've ever talked to, and all the surveys that have been done over the decades of religious people, would this upset your religion?

• 58:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  Nobody goes, yeah. Everybody goes, well, of course, God can make as many species around the globe as he wants. And maybe Jesus goes to different planets to save people. I don't know. But it's not a problem. And, and, you know, if, if we discovered aliens, I mean, NASA would go straight to Congress and go, hey, we got to double our budget. Look what we, look what we found. Right? And the military go, hey, what if they're dangerous? We need a bigger budget.

• 59:04Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  So contrary to the myth that, you know, the world would fall apart, that, or in the new film, Spielberg's film, you know, the geopolitical stability will be, I don't think so.

• 59:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  I think if anything, the Russians and the Chinese and the Americans go, okay, we now have a common enemy, Reagan thing. And so we got to stay close together here.

• 59:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 59:24Speaker 03

  Work together on this problem. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would

• 59:31Jesse Michels?

  Vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. I will admit that I want to believe. Will you admit that you want to disbelieve?

• 59:42Speaker 03

  I don't want to disbelieve. No, I would like, like Sagan, I would love to know there's aliens. I would be surprised if we were alone. As Carl always said, it would be a terrible waste of space if we were the only living intelligent organisms in the entire universe.

• 59:55Jesse Michels?

  Would you be surprised if we were being visited, though?

• 59:58Speaker 03

  I would be surprised because, again, the vastness of interstellar space, it's just, you would need this new kind of physics that you're talking about because...

• 1:00:08Jesse Michels?

  But we always get new physics. That's a safe bet.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  No, not randomly.

• 1:00:13Jesse Michels?

  To say we always get new physics. I'm not saying randomly, I'm just saying we always get new physics.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  I mean, here's one of the things that Avi always says in our new meetings. No new physics. Quit bringing up new physics.

• 1:00:23Jesse Michels?

  You think we're at the end of history in physics?

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  No, of course not. But we just spent a billion dollars, we just spent a billion dollars at CERN. They found no new physics, right? There's nothing new.

• 1:00:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but that's, it's often the wrong framework. You, you, you're, we're going, we're just smashing particles together to get to, you know, smaller and smaller. Maybe you find the Higgs field and then, and then what do you have left? But then, as you know, if you read, you know, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, often it's going down the tree trunk, finding another branch. And then that's where the new, new physics comes, so.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  It could happen. It could happen.

• 1:00:55Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  But, I mean, Avi's point is, you know, no new physics. What he means is, we're not, we're not Star Trek here. We're not just writing new crazy stuff to explain. Let's get the bottom of it. Show us the thing that we're looking at. Give us the film. Give us the, like, on the UFO files that Trump has dumped, three of them now. All the photos and videos have these big blacked out rectangles. Okay, what are those? Those are the numbers from the cameras. Where was the camera? Which camera was it? What was the distance? Was it triangulated? All the details we need.

• 1:01:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Otherwise, I don't know what I'm looking at.

• 1:01:25Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  You see this blurry thing going around, like, what is this?

• 1:01:28Jesse Michels?

  I'm right there with you. I think we need more. Have you, did you look at the Gemini 7 Frank Borman, by any chance, that audio?

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  Yes, and also, and Buzz also.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  Roger. Okay, so I forget on the Borman one, but Avi had a good explanation of this is cosmic rays. Okay, so cosmic rays ping your retina. They also land on film and they can cause film to record something. So he thinks, and I think he's probably right, that the lunar photos where you see the little blue lights in the distant sky on the moon and Buzz Aldrin's report that inside the cabin, he sees lights, even with his eyes closed, he sees light. Well, that's cosmic rays. It's like if you press the side of your eyeball, you'll see a little white light. And then the third one that I'm not sure about, but the Palomar telescope, the 200-inch

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  telescope there in the 1940s developed film there of things in the sky. There's nothing in the sky. This is before satellites, it's before Sputnik. So 1940s and 50s.

• 1:02:38Jesse Michels?

  This is Beatrice Villarreal's Project Alaska.

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  Avi says, I'm pretty sure those are cosmic rays and she says, I'm pretty sure they're not.

• 1:02:44Jesse Michels?

  So this is, this is an amazing astronomer from Stockholm University. She's also a physicist. And she saw all sorts of light reflecting transients, basically objects in the sky, seemingly objects, flashes.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  You're talking about the film now or are you talking about eyeballing?

• 1:03:01Jesse Michels?

  I'm talking about, no, in the plates, the astronomical plates at the Palomar Observatory. And you have all these people saying they're plate defects, but then she showed that there's actually a drop off in the sun's, in the earth's, you know, obviously you have a side of the earth where there's shadow from the sun. So, you know, where the sun doesn't exist. And there's a massive, you know, drop off.

• 1:03:23Speaker 05

  30 to 35% of the objects we are working with come from solar reflections and not any solar reflections because these short flashes and not streaks, they are associated with things that are extremely flat and extremely reflective.

• 1:03:37Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  Like mirrors. And that makes it more fun.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  Like mirrors.

• 1:03:41Jesse Michels?

  So that seems like, okay, we're looking at physical objects at that point. And I don't think solar cosmic radiation is a good explanation, actually, because there's ambient solar radiation all around the earth due to solar radiation. And you wouldn't have these sort of, you know, pointed spots.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  Cosmic rays from distant space. So they come in in parallel. They're so far away. These are quasars or distant galaxies. This is what Avi thinks.

• 1:04:05Jesse Michels?

  And, and he thinks that the, the, um, the light reflecting specific transients are based on that?

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  That's what he thinks. Yeah.

• 1:04:12Jesse Michels?

  I don't think that's right.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  It's not a great theory, but hers, she, she doesn't really offer a theory. She goes, this is just some weird stuff.

• 1:04:18Jesse Michels?

  Well, I think her theory implicitly, and she's obviously, you know, kind of reining it in because she's an academic. And this passed peer review, by the way. Um, but, you know, I think implicitly we're talking about UFOs. Especially given that you look at the-

• 1:04:31Speaker 03

  What do you mean by UFOs?

• 1:04:32Jesse Michels?

  Well, that, this is the thing. You look at CIA documentation at the time and it says, "Flat mirror-like objects that reflect light." So like, that's how they're describing these things. And then that sounds a lot like these transients being described as well.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  All right. So here's the bigger issue. You mentioned the word liminal, uh, you know, in any field, there's always a residue of anomalies that can't be explained. Every scientific field has these. So back to Kuhn. Do enough of them build up? It's like, you know what? There's something really wrong with this theory. We need a new theory. Okay. So how does this happen? Well, you, if you are an outsider, you just want to challenge the mainstream, which is good. This is what young scientists should do. Your new theory has to explain all the stuff the old theory explains pretty well and some of the new anomalies.

• 1:05:16Jesse Michels?

  Of course.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  And this has always been the problem with, um, these kind of, uh, fringe physicists or whatever. The people that say, I have a theory of physics that overturns Einstein or whatever. All right. Can you explain all this stuff over here that current physics explains? You know, the standard model that explains quarks and this and that, whatever. And usually, no, they just say, well, they have some model of space and time and whatever. It's like, you have to do that. And then also here's some, the rest of anomalies, we don't know what they are. Can you explain any of those also?

• 1:05:46Jesse Michels?

  Of course.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  So that's the test.

• 1:05:47Jesse Michels?

  Of course. And I don't think anything is adequately past that. That test to my knowledge.

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  This is so common. Michio Kaku has a webpage in which he says, if you're writing me about your alternative theory of physics, here's what your theory has to do. Here's a bunch of stuff it needs to explain.

• 1:06:00Jesse Michels?

  Absolutely. But there are ways of explaining what seem to be anomalies. Like, again, the existence of dark energy and quantum vacuum fluctuations and quantum electrodynamics. You have the Casimir force and you have somebody who's harnessing the Casimir force seemingly on small scales. You know, we're talking about Sonny White here. So then could you end up with some larger scale propulsion due to that? Like, possibly, you know, we have to keep an open mind there. And that fully comports with our physics. So

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:06:30Jesse Michels?

  I don't think we necessarily need a theory of everything to

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  Yes, I agree. Yeah. So I mean, let's take dark energy, dark matter. Okay, these are linguistic placeholders by cosmologists.

• 1:06:38Jesse Michels?

  That's right. Do you believe in dark matter?

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  Well, I believe it. I believe there's a mystery to be explained. Okay.

• 1:06:45Jesse Michels?

  So it's the same thing as UFOs.

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  So what is it?

• 1:06:48Jesse Michels?

  You're indirectly measuring it.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:06:52Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  Okay, fine.

• 1:06:52Jesse Michels?

  So you believe in UFOs as much as you believe in dark matter?

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't like the word believe in. I just, it's like, what is it we're talking about?

• 1:07:00Jesse Michels?

  So you don't want to believe?

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  So

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  I don't like the word believe. I like to say I don't want to

• 1:07:06Jesse Michels?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  I don't want to believe things that have to be believed in to be true. They're just true.

• 1:07:11Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  Okay, so when astronomers tell me galaxies should not be

• 1:07:15Jesse Michels?

  But they're true according to you. Ultimately, we're all pre-leveraged by our own epistemics.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  True. What do you mean by true? So I define it in my book as something confirmed to such an extent it would be rational to offer your provisional ascent.

• 1:07:27Jesse Michels?

  But do you think human beings are rational?

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Provisional. Yes, pretty, pretty rational.

• 1:07:30Jesse Michels?

  I would say they're pretty irrational.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  Well, my whole life is spent showing how irrational humans are. But now I've had a bit of a turn of heart here that most people, most of the time are fairly rational. This is how they maintain jobs and families and they keep gas in the tank and food in the fridge. And they lead a normal life where it happens, like with conspiracy theories. It's in areas where they can't know. Like, how am I going to fact check if the 2020 election was rigged or not? What do I, I don't have time to go to Arizona and go to the voting booth and see what I'm just going to trust the Department of Justice and Attorney General Bill Barr. He loved Trump, voted for him, looked into it and said, nah, we didn't find any fraud. So this is, but this is an epistemology question. How do we, how do we know about anything in the world?

• 1:08:15Jesse Michels?

  So dark matter is a conspiracy?

• 1:08:17Speaker 03

  Okay, so on back to the dark matter. My astronomer friends tell me that there has to be more stuff in the galaxy to hold it together. Okay, what is it? And their answer is, we don't know. Could be neutrinos, could be dark, whatever, these dark stars, brown stars or whatever. Okay, um, keep working on it. We'll just, so to me, I just set that aside and go, okay, that's a mystery to explain. Same thing with dark energy.

• 1:08:38Jesse Michels?

  So, and same with UFOs.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:08:40Jesse Michels?

  So, so you're placing it in the same category. And by the way, UFOs are even more accurately and epistemically humbly framed because they're called unidentified flying objects.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  Yes, okay.

• 1:08:50Jesse Michels?

  Whereas with dark matter, we're calling it, you know, this, this thing, like, we're acting like we know what it is.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  Okay, but if.

• 1:08:55Jesse Michels?

  Well, we can't detect it.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Let's say astronomers all decide, 99% of astronomers, okay, now we know dark energy is neutrinos. Just make that up, okay. Then I go, okay, then that one is pretty much solved. Now, if the UFO people go, okay, we figured it, put it out, it's the ball lightning, or it's the orbs, or, you know, whatever it is. And now we know the CIA had this thing, or the Russians, or it's the aliens, or whatever. Then I go, okay, then that one's solved. Okay, we're not there yet, right? Again, you got 90, 95% of them are, are explained. You got the 5 to 10% like, bleh, I don't know what that is. The nukes, the orbs, the, could be this, could be that. Eh, okay, now what?

• 1:09:31Jesse Michels?

  But say, you say you have a, like, a criminal case. You have like a dead body, right? And you need to have the detectives work on finding what happened, you know, in this criminal case. And then you have one person being like, I don't know if the body's dead. And you're like, sort of, you're sort of just like poo pooing the field overall. And I feel like the skeptics' role in ufology for the last 20 years, and maybe now it's starting to shift. And, you know, with Neil deGrasse Tyson is taking it more seriously, you're taking it more seriously. When these people of high rank started reporting, I said, all right. I have to jump in here. I can't stay silent.

• 1:10:15Jesse Michels?

  Historically, it's been like, I don't really think there's anything there. And it's like, don't trust the witnesses. And so now, I just want to acknowledge your, would you say that you're now shifting to like, ah, we kind of trust the witnesses and we think this is worthy of investigation?

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  No, I'm very leery of witnesses by themselves. Okay.

• 1:10:30Jesse Michels?

  But it's not witnesses by themselves.

• 1:10:32Speaker 03

  Well, okay, if it's, if it's more than just the witnesses that you have.

• 1:10:36Jesse Michels?

  We have cases with witnesses and radar.

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  Yes. Okay. So that.

• 1:10:39Jesse Michels?

  You have 45 minutes on it.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  So that nudges it from here to here.

• 1:10:41Jesse Michels?

  Japan Airlines.

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Then we gotta get, we gotta get up here.

• 1:10:44Jesse Michels?

  We have Japan Airlines pilot flying for 45 minutes with radar that was confiscated by the White House. And the radar is publicly available and physicists have looked at it and be like, UFOs.

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  These UAP congressional hearings, the point is we want to get to the bottom of it because we're not there yet. We want to get to there and figure out what the hell it is. And we're not there yet. Everybody knows we're not there yet.

• 1:11:02Jesse Michels?

  Of course, I agree.

• 1:11:03Speaker 03

  All right. So I'm in favor of that.

• 1:11:05Jesse Michels?

  Okay. But you're admitting, you're admitting, you know, Allah, the criminal case example, you're admitting a crime has been committed. There is a, there's a hole here that we have to find.

• 1:11:15Speaker 03

  That's right. If you, if you say, are UFOs real? Yes. I mean, there's an unexplained.

• 1:11:20Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:11:21Jesse Michels?

  So they're, they're as real as dark matter.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  It's a little bit like when the government said in 2017 that UAPs are real. And Lou Elizondo goes, the government says they're real. The government said the videos are real. We didn't fake these. These are not CGI. These were actually filmed by our jets.

• 1:11:37Jesse Michels?

  So we are indirectly measuring them like we are indirectly measuring dark matter and they, those are.

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  We're measuring something. Yes. There's something to be explained. Yes. I agree.

• 1:11:44Jesse Michels?

  So you would put dark matter, UFOs, same category?

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  I guess so. Yeah. Okay. Sure.

• 1:11:50Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  All right. On the eyewitness, on the eyewitness thing, the problem, okay, so let's go to the court case.

• 1:11:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Speaker 03

  So how, how do we determine truth in the legal system? All right. We have an adversarial lawyers method, right? So the goal of the lawyer is not to find out what actually happened. Did this guy actually kill this person or not? The goal of the lawyer is to win the case. The goal of the other lawyer is to win the case for their side, right? It's prosecution and the defense. And so. In this case, the peer review system is the judge or the jury. They're the ones that decide, okay, I've heard your evidence. I've heard your evidence and arguments and so on. I think this is the right one. Now, did they get it wrong? Yeah, they get it wrong. Right? So here's how I do it. Just picture a two by two grid, right? So we've got four cells, one, two, three, four. All right. So I did this, um, this sort of a fun example of cursed horror films, right?

• 1:12:41Speaker 03

  So I'm doing a documentary, talking head for documentary on cursed horror films like Exorcist and, and, and other horror films where bad things happen on the set. The actor dies, um, like, um, what was the famous one with, um, uh, the omen? You know, and so on. So there's, you know, there's a good half dozen really popular, uh, horror films in which bad things happen. So cursed horror films, all right? That's cell one. So my answer to them is, well, what about the other three cells? Cursed horror, cursed films where nothing horrible happened, like yet, you know, The Shining and so on. These are really scary. And then what about the non-horror films that were cursed? You know, like Apocalypse Now, you know, um, uh, what's his name? Has a heart attack on set, uh, Charlie Sheen?

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  No, the father, Martin Sheen. And then the non-cursed, non-horror films, right? So in other words, you, you have four cells, like it's the case of the missing dead scientist. Ooh, spooky, right? Well, okay. First of all, we have to quantify. What do you mean by a scientist? What do you mean by they work for NASA? They work for propulsion systems. They work for, um, the military. They worked on a nuclear site. This is all over the board. And then dead or missing. Well, okay, what's our base rate? How many people go dead or missing every year in any case?

• 1:13:54Jesse Michels?

  You're talking about the missing scientist story?

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have four cells. You've got the, the, the non-scientists.

• 1:13:59Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:14:00Speaker 03

  Who go missing or commit suicide or, or, or killed. And then you have the scientists who just live fine. How come, how come no one's murdered you? Jesse, you're a big UFO guy. You don't have personal security here, do you?

• 1:14:12Jesse Michels?

  Knock on, uh, on metal.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  And then the fourth category, that, yeah. So in other words, we have to keep all of these, the, the other possibilities in mind. So that's what I do when I hear anomalies. Okay, what's the base rate? Okay, the, the nuclear, woo, what about the other cells? The nuclear sites where nothing weird has happened? Or the non-nuclear sites where weird orbs or something happens? They have to keep track of all that.

• 1:14:35Jesse Michels?

  Of, of course. And so my nuanced take on the missing scientist story is that, is there some statistical speed up of scientific suppression? No, I can't, I can't say that for a fact at all. I don't, I don't know.

• 1:14:48Jesse Michels?

  Are each of those cases, and some of them, are they all non-stories? Absolutely not. And that is what some people are implying.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  Well, okay.

• 1:14:57Jesse Michels?

  The idea that Nuno Larrero, who is probably the tip of the spear on magnetic reconnection, which is the number one thing around making nuclear fusion work, is him getting gunned down at his doorstep is a non-story, or Carl Grilmair.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  Okay, but that guy that shot him was himself deranged, and he had already harassed him before. Right? So each particular case has an explanation.

• 1:15:20Jesse Michels?

  He was an old classmate.

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  But, yes, but the deeper question is, how many people commit suicide every year? About 45,000 in the United States alone, okay? How many people go missing? It's thousands.

• 1:15:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but that's neither here nor there.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  No, no, it is, because...

• 1:15:35Jesse Michels?

  No, because I'm admitting that. I'm saying that there might not be a statistical speedup, but what about General Neil McCaslin, who's responsible for a lot of modern UFOs?

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  Why doesn't anybody kill Lou Alizondo? He's gonna tell everybody everything.

• 1:15:47Jesse Michels?

  He dealt with Tom DeLonge at the highest level when it came to writing secret machines.

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  He's gonna expose everything. Why isn't he hiding?

• 1:15:56Jesse Michels?

  Well, General Neil McCaslin was on the Special Access Program Oversight Committee, and he ran Wright Patterson's Air Force Research Laboratory. So he's as top of the pyramid as it gets, more so than any of the people you just mentioned, including me, Tom, even Lou. So, you know, I think there are distinctions to be made. And this is a few days after Trump said, "We are going to be looking into UFOs."

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  Speaking of which, oh, they did try to kill Trump, but for other reasons, I think.

• 1:16:25Jesse Michels?

  So, there you go. So, yeah, is that not significant? Of course it's significant. In isolation, that story is completely significant.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  No, I don't. It's just totally random.

• 1:16:35Jesse Michels?

  What do you mean? A gun was missing, and his wife then...

• 1:16:40Speaker 03

  His wife said he was suffering from depression for years.

• 1:16:42Jesse Michels?

  His wife also said the only explanation might be that an alien took him on the mothership.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  She was joking.

• 1:16:48Jesse Michels?

  Why would she joke about a missing husband a week later? That's weird behavior.

• 1:16:51Speaker 03

  Because of all the weird conspiracy theories around it.

• 1:16:53Jesse Michels?

  Oh, it's a strange joke.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  And, well, I mean, come on. It's not nice for these families who have just suffered... Loss like Elizabeth Weiss, her and her husband Nick Pope died of cancer.

• 1:17:04Jesse Michels?

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's not vibing the, oh, Nick Pope was an insider and, and he was killed. There are people that think this happened and she's not vibing this at all. Like, that's not funny.

• 1:17:14Jesse Michels?

  All, all I'm saying is the fact pattern in the McCaslin case is extremely, again, do you not think it warrants further investigation? You don't think, you think it's case closed?

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  I think his own family.

• 1:17:25Jesse Michels?

  He goes missing, there's no footage of him, there're no, there're ring cameras all throughout the neighborhood, goes missing.

• 1:17:30Speaker 03

  Okay, where's Nancy Guthrie?

• 1:17:31Jesse Michels?

  And everything that would.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  Okay, why, why are you, why, why not?

• 1:17:33Jesse Michels?

  And a gun, and a gun is missing.

• 1:17:34Speaker 03

  Why not, why not Nancy Guthrie? Where's she?

• 1:17:37Jesse Michels?

  What, what if Nancy Guthrie?

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, she's not related to nuclear.

• 1:17:41Jesse Michels?

  Oh, that's, that, that's the mother of the reporter who, I mean, that, that's also like.

• 1:17:46Speaker 03

  But this happens.

• 1:17:46Jesse Michels?

  Correlated with Savannah Guthrie looking into Epstein.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  But this happens all the time. The reason this is getting attention is because the daughter's a celebrity.

• 1:17:52Jesse Michels?

  No, I think that should get attention too. I think that should get it. Our daughter is investigating Epstein.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  But again, we, thousand, how many people die every year? 2.6 million in the United States, all causes, all, all, all ages.

• 1:18:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but wasn't, wasn't, I don't, I'm not super familiar with that story, but wasn't she kidnapped? The mother?

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  Well, okay, there was, yeah, there's, it's a big mess.

• 1:18:10Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  She was probably kidnapped. We don't know who, there's a ring man, there's a ring camera footage of this guy, it looks fake. And then there was a note sent to TMZ.

• 1:18:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, that's obviously, that, that obviously warrants further investigation.

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it is.

• 1:18:27Jesse Michels?

  As does the McCaslin thing, as does the McCaslin thing.

• 1:18:30Speaker 03

  That's fine, yeah, but.

• 1:18:30Jesse Michels?

  They are not non-stories.

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  But, but, okay, there's stories for the family to figure it out, or the local police, or the FBI, if they think something's up.

• 1:18:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but it's part of the public conversation at this point because he's, you know, put himself out there as a collaborator.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  You're picking after the fact.

• 1:18:45Jesse Michels?

  Who are disseminating UFO information.

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  You're picking people that worked in some area you're interested in that also died mysteriously. Okay.

• 1:18:50Jesse Michels?

  Oh, he's missing. We don't even know if he's dead. You're now jumping to the conclusion.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, he's missing. Okay, fine. But people go missing. Okay, so you just look it up. How many people go missing every year in national parks in the United States? It's like a thousand, 1,200 a year or something. It happens all the time. And, and they can't find them. They fall off the cliff, they fall into the bushes, the animals get them. There's nothing unusual. You're picking that one because he's an interesting character.

• 1:19:13Jesse Michels?

  You can always use like heuristics, like laws of large numbers. You can always use these sorts of things. I think that is a poor excuse for thinking in a, you know, about the idiosyncratic case with all of its complexity. You can always sort of overfit.

• 1:19:29Speaker 03

  I don't think there's anything.

• 1:19:30Jesse Michels?

  Some sort of like, ah, yeah, but that's survivorship bias or it's file drawer or it's pee hacking. You can always do that.

• 1:19:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:19:37Jesse Michels?

  Or you can look into the specifics.

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, but this.

• 1:19:40Jesse Michels?

  And I think it's better to look into this.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  But why are you interested in that particular one?

• 1:19:43Jesse Michels?

  Because of his, who he was.

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  Yes, I know. That's it.

• 1:19:46Jesse Michels?

  He was privy to the most sensitive science in the country.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  But lots of people.

• 1:19:50Jesse Michels?

  And he's talking about UFOs with Tom DeLonge.

• 1:19:53Speaker 03

  That work at NASA now or work at the nuclear site.

• 1:19:56Jesse Michels?

  I think anybody working in an extremely sensitive capacity who goes missing without a trace.

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, but why?

• 1:20:01Jesse Michels?

  Should be investigating and it's not a non-story.

• 1:20:03Speaker 03

  If this is true and there's something spooky happening.

• 1:20:06Jesse Michels?

  I'm not saying definitely there's no Occam's razor explanation. I'm just saying.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  Why aren't all the heads of all the nuclear sites or the generals, why aren't they all going missing?

• 1:20:15Jesse Michels?

  Cause I don't know. I don't know what happened. I'm not impugning a motive or, or coming up with some fake story. I'm just saying it warrants further investigation. That's obvious.

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  Only because we're interested in whenever there's a dead body or a missing body.

• 1:20:26Jesse Michels?

  No, because of this specific, because of this specific case, because of his specific access and credential, obviously.

• 1:20:32Speaker 03

  I don't think so. I think you're, I think you're fine.

• 1:20:35Jesse Michels?

  I think that's you not wanting to believe, you wanting to disbelieve.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  No, I think you're finding, you're just as a patternicities, like I love this story about power and propulsion and nuclear. And here's something weird that happened to somebody in that field. Okay. What I'm saying is if that was true, what about all the other people that, that are in that field that are high up, that are classified and so on?

• 1:20:55Jesse Michels?

  I think, I think.

• 1:20:56Speaker 03

  They're not being buffed up.

• 1:20:56Jesse Michels?

  I think everybody involved in sensitive national security work that goes missing in a way that Neil McCaslin went missing. Should be investigated, obviously.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  But after the fact, you're picking it. Now let's go forward. Who do you think is next?

• 1:21:09Jesse Michels?

  I'd have no way of predicting it because you don't have a story underneath it. You don't know what happened. You don't know if somebody took him or what. You need more information. My point is, we should try to get more information.

• 1:21:21Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:21:21Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:21:22Speaker 03

  I think, yeah, the local police, the family, sure, they should do that.

• 1:21:26Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  Because they want to do that anyway.

• 1:21:27Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:21:28Speaker 03

  I mean, Elizabeth Weiss knows why Nick Pope died. He had cancer. Okay, nobody planted cancer in Nick Pope's body 20 years ago as part of a plot against him because he believes in UFOs.

• 1:21:39Jesse Michels?

  Of course, of course not.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  This is random.

• 1:21:41Jesse Michels?

  I, in that case, I agree.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:21:44Jesse Michels?

  But, um, okay, shifting gears a little bit. What do you think is the strongest UFO case based on the evidence?

• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  Uh, well, so like in the UFO files, um, I think a lot of the sort of Orbish looking ones, it's not clear what they are. I would like to get more to that, like there's something there. Some of the stuff you brought up, I think, um, again, I just call them anomalies, but it would be good to get explanations of the Foo Fighters during World War II, the pilots that saw these things. Oh, it's ball lightning. Okay, maybe. I don't know. Some of the stuff they described doesn't sound like ball lightning.

• 1:22:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  So, all right. And we know the Nazis, they could not possibly have been that far advanced, uh, to have these things what that are observed to move in strange ways. So that one would be a big one. Um, I think historically, um, I enjoy all the, you know, the kind of almost mythological, the stuff that, um, Jacques Vallée talks about and, um, Jeffrey Kreipel talks about of historically people seeing weird things. Now, most of this, uh, I think is just sociological or whatever psychological effects, but not everything. So back to your liminal case, you know, this is what I do. I'm kind of on the margins of science. I can't quite explain it. What if it's probably this, but it may not be, you know, let's keep looking. So I do think all of that.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  Now, you know, can we get to the bottom of some of these historical events? You know, probably not. You know, you look at these medieval paintings with the thing in the sky that looks sort of like a UFO. Whatever. Now, art historians go, no, no, this is what it is. This is what the painter was doing and so on. These are religious symbols. Okay, so, but the rebuttal is, yeah, but the religions didn't have the language to describe what's actually going on. You know, this is like the ancient alien stuff or the Van Donnegan, you know, the ancient alien gods that are actually, you know, spaceships, right? So, okay, maybe, I love all that stuff. I've read all those books, I've watched all the shows, you know, it's like, that would be super interesting. But, you know.

• 1:23:44Jesse Michels?

  They're inserting placeholders. They're looking at anomalies and then they're inserting explanations.

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  They're not, no.

• 1:23:50Jesse Michels?

  Just like scientists are inserting dirt.

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, they don't do that. Okay, so one of my criticisms of the ancient aliens, for example, is they almost never have on like an archaeologist that goes, oh, the Easter Island statues. Here's what we know. And then, and then they give the other guy that goes, no, I don't think it's that. I think it's the space aliens or whatever.

• 1:24:05Jesse Michels?

  Do you think?

• 1:24:05Speaker 03

  They don't do that.

• 1:24:06Jesse Michels?

  Do you think like people like Graham Hancock or Randall Carlson, do you think any, they've contributed anything to the field?

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  I do, I do, yes, I like, I like people on the margins and fringes because they push us, the mainstream people, to better define what it is you're talking about.

• 1:24:22Jesse Michels?

  Do you agree with them on anything?

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  No, not really. Like, in the case of Graham, I know a lot about his theory.

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  I've been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization in prehistory for more than 30 years.

• 1:24:39Speaker 03

  He's, what he's missing is, is positive evidence in favor of his theory versus negative evidence against the mainstream theory, right? So mainstream archaeologists say, this is how the pyramids were built, or this is what happened with the Easter Island statues. This is the Nazca lines explanation, because you can see him from the local mountains, it's a water god or whatever. Okay, that that's the accepted document and Graham comes along and go, okay, I'm gonna challenge that. Okay, good. You know, and his little line he uses on on X, you know, stuff keeps getting older. He has a T-shirt, stuff keeps getting, and he's right, stuff does keep getting older.

• 1:25:11Jesse Michels?

  He is right about that. You would admit that.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  Yes, but but.

• 1:25:14Jesse Michels?

  You'd admit, Go Beckley Tepe rewrites the map as far as how old human civilization.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  But but know what's happening. Archaeologists are responding to Go Beckley Tepe by going, huh, I guess these hunter-gatherers were more sophisticated than we thought they were. I guess they were more advanced. They could build monumental architecture without thousands of people.

• 1:25:32Jesse Michels?

  But that seems like as unfalsifiable a conclusion as you actually just have to go a little farther back for civilization.

• 1:25:39Speaker 03

  So the alternative to that is, no, actually, this was a.

• 1:25:42Jesse Michels?

  Agriculture and specialization a little earlier than we thought.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  This was a deeper, advanced, I mean, Graham thinks this is, these were built by ancient peoples, the Atlanteans or whoever, but.

• 1:25:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, he thinks it's a holdover from before the Ice Age or something.

• 1:25:55Speaker 03

  From like tens of thousands of years before.

• 1:25:56Jesse Michels?

  Transfer of technology, yeah.

• 1:25:57Speaker 03

  All right. Okay, if that was true, what else would be true? Well, first of all, we should find out where do they live? Where's their trash? Where's their tools?

• 1:26:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  Now, if they're advanced, do they have any technology, any metal? Do they even have pottery? And the answer is no, there's nothing.

• 1:26:16Jesse Michels?

  But you you'd have to admit that that's a tall task to put totally on Graham in a single lifetime of investigation.

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, he says.

• 1:26:25Jesse Michels?

  He's pushed us farther, like, we wouldn't be talking about Go Beckley Tepe if it wasn't for him and the fingerprints of the gods. Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:32Speaker 03

  Schmidt, you know, the German archaeologists, in archaeology circles, there's no mystery about Go Beckley Tepe. They all know about it. It's only to the public, you mean?

• 1:26:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but that was, you know, it was a discovery. It was really popularized in the 90s and it was, and Graham Hancock has really helped popularize.

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  National Geographic did a whole cover story on Go Beckley Tepe. I remember when this came out. They described it as like the world's first religious ceremony place.

• 1:26:57Jesse Michels?

  Well, okay, we don't have to argue about like who's responsible for making it more famous, but I do think Graham is very responsible for it.

• 1:27:04Speaker 03

  Yes, okay, okay. I know Graham pretty well. Okay, so he's a very likable guy. He's a great runner.

• 1:27:07Jesse Michels?

  He's one of Rogan's first guests.

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  Oh, I know, I know, I know. I've seen all that. Spent four hours with him in the studio, you know, yeah.

• 1:27:14Jesse Michels?

  Yes, debated.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  Okay, but part of the problem he has, this is what I tried to explain to him, is that you have the mainstream archaeologists and they're just working away going, this is what we think happened and this is what we're working on. Then Graham comes from the outside and goes, I think you're all wrong. They're like. Okay, where's your evidence? And are you gonna publish a paper about this? In the, you know, here's our peer reviewed journals, here's our conferences and so on. This is how we do it. And he's going, I'm not going there. I'm not publishing there. I'm gonna do an end run around you. Okay, so what irritates professional scientists is, but this is how the game is played. You don't get to cut to the front of the line and become famous for your alternative theories. You gotta, you gotta do what the rest of us do. You gotta work at it.

• 1:27:53Jesse Michels?

  But I, so I will admit that podcasting independent media engages in way more type one errors than type two errors. We are falsely accepting bad hypotheses probably all, all the time. Right? And so that's the problem. Mainstream media blocked out too much. There's an overcorrection. And you know, I'm still pro independent media because everybody can just say what they feel like. And I, I like that. That's, I'm more biased in that direction. But that is, that is a, a real, uh, uh, externality or issue, you know, uh, uh, with that.

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  But let me just finish the point. Okay, if there was a civilization, uh, that lived 30, 40, 50,000 years ago. Now, we do have lots of finds of hominids that lived then. Neanderthals, we got lots of stuff from them. The earliest Homo sapiens, we have lots of stuff from them. All living in small groups. Okay. So first of all, if there was an advanced civilization, what do you mean by civilization? And what do you mean by advanced? And where did they live? Where's their trash?

• 1:28:51Jesse Michels?

  I will, I will be the first to say that inserting, and he will say that too. He'll say inserting Atlantis as a placeholder is speculative. And so that's fun to speculate about. And I think all he would say is that there was likely some sort of anti-Diluvian, you know, civilization with common architecture from all over the world. And that that, there's mounting evidence for that sort of thing. I think that is more speculative than just rewriting, you know, how old civilization is around Gobekli Tepe. And then, but then you also, we have to be epistemically humble, right? You know, archaeology as a field was invented 200 years ago with the discovery of the Babylonian cities.

• 1:29:32Jesse Michels?

  And so it's almost like you could probably create a law around like the farther we go in archaeology, the older thing. Things get. In fact, lo- lower in the sediment layer, the, the, the deeper you dig, the older things get. So almost definitionally, that has to be true.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Also, Graham pushes this, this mean that, you know, scientists are closed minded or whatever. I mean, nobody believes in the Clovis first hypothesis. Everybody knows that humans came to the North American continent and South American continent long before 13, 11 to 13,000 years ago. Okay, nobody's arguing that. They've all shifted. Everybody admits Gobekli Tepe is 11,000 years old. Nobody's going, that never happened.

• 1:30:06Jesse Michels?

  That shift was slow. Like, we were, we thought that they, I learned that they crossed the Bering Strait. I learned that. And so.

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  Oh, I know. It was probably multiple migrations.

• 1:30:15Jesse Michels?

  So, so people like Graham are serving a vital role. And, and then to, just to defend him further as far as his career decision, you can travel the world, write books, have fun, make money and contribute massively to the field, or you can be constrained by this publisher parish. You know, Kissinger had a famous quote about academia, the lower the stakes, the harder they fight.

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  Whoever actually said that, yeah.

• 1:30:36Jesse Michels?

  Whoever actually said that, but like you could, you could be stuck in this like petty, sharp elbowed thing. Or you could be famous and have fun and make money and, and contribute.

• 1:30:46Speaker 03

  Many are called, few are chosen. Graham is one of the few alternative people that have made, there's lots of them, lots of them. I mean, you talk to like, uh, what's his name? Havas.

• 1:30:56Jesse Michels?

  Zahi Hawass.

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  Zahi Hawass, right. So, I mean, you know, how come Graham, how come he doesn't talk to Graham? He's not nice to Graham and other friends. I don't know, whatever. But there's hundreds of guys like Graham who show up at the pyramids and go, I have my alternative. The pyramids was a nuclear power plant.

• 1:31:09Jesse Michels?

  But I think the pyramids are, the pyramids are another example, as with the JFK assassination, a lot of these things where it's like, I don't know the ultimate answer. I'm not, I'm not claiming to be the source of ground truth, but the prima facie story is so obviously a lie. And so like, so, so people are tired of being gaslit. But like, if you watch that Zahi Hawass interview with Joe Rogan. But is, are there photographs online? Yes, in my book, I don't, I. I I do. I don't go online. Why I have to go online? I go to my book. It's like, come on, this guy, this guy is gatekeeping all of our information. It's in my book. I wrote about it.

• 1:31:48Speaker 03

  It was a little painful to watch.

• 1:31:49Jesse Michels?

  Very painful.

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:31:50Jesse Michels?

  Very painful. So same with the JFK assassination where it's like, people are tired of being lied to. There's obviously something more than the Oxford's Raider Loans gunman.

• 1:31:59Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 1:32:00Jesse Michels?

  Really? And JFK?

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  Do you know about the JFK conspirators who died and went to heaven? And God says, you know, sir, you were such a pious man. I will grant you any wish you want. I'll answer any question you want. He goes, all right, who really killed JFK? And God says, Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, using his Carcano Manlicker rifle. He goes, oh, my God, this goes higher than I thought.

• 1:32:22Jesse Michels?

  That is, that is a funny joke.

• 1:32:26Jesse Michels?

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• 1:33:08Jesse Michels?

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• 1:33:26Speaker 03

  But this is what happened.

• 1:33:27Jesse Michels?

  But you don't.

• 1:33:28Speaker 03

  How did we get to the?

• 1:33:29Jesse Michels?

  I saw, I saw you made a tweet about my friend, Tom O'Neill, today.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:33:33Jesse Michels?

  And he's, because there's MK Ultra hearings.

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:33:36Jesse Michels?

  And he has this theory that maybe Charles Manson was an MK Ultra patient.

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  I read his book. At the end of the book, he goes, damn it, I didn't get a smoking gun. This, here's a bunch of little.

• 1:33:46Jesse Michels?

  Yes, but if you're. If you read the book as a reasonable third party.

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  Could be.

• 1:33:51Jesse Michels?

  Then you then you have to think your base case has to be that Charles Manson was probably an MKUltra.

• 1:33:55Speaker 03

  Either that or cult leaders can use sex, drugs and rock and roll to get people to do crazy shit for them. And this does happen.

• 1:34:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but he's going into the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic where Jolly West, who's definitely the head of MKUltra.

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  There's enough of these weird connections. I will admit Manson's an interesting case. And and O'Neill did, I think, properly debunk the Helter Skelter.

• 1:34:17Jesse Michels?

  He did, for sure. Vincent Bulyosie.

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  Bulyosie. I liked Vincent Bulyosie. I knew him. I think he sold us a bill of goods. I, because I bought that. I read the Helter Skelter. Oh, my God, this is a great story.

• 1:34:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  And I think Tom O'Neill showed that was a bunch of bullshit.

• 1:34:31Jesse Michels?

  Well, you know what else he revealed, ala the JFK assassination in that book, is that Jolly West saw, so for the people that don't know, Lee Harvey Oswald's supposing lone gunman, probably not lone gunman in my opinion, of, you know, JFK on November 22nd, 1963. He then gets killed right outside the courthouse by Jack Ruby, who's this like nightclub guy, you know, and and he ends up in jail, Jack Ruby, but doesn't actually remember having shot Lee Harvey Oswald. It's this very strange sort of circumstances.

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  That was a later story. He, no, he shot.

• 1:35:06Jesse Michels?

  Well, he's, that's what he said. And he was confused at the scene of the crime. He's in jail for six months. And you know who sees him in jail? And this is according to Tom O'Neill.

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  I know, Jolly West, yeah.

• 1:35:14Jesse Michels?

  Jolly West, who's the head of MKUltra. And then he has a. And then Jolly West comes out and he does a press conference and he says, Jack Ruby has had a psychotic break.

• 1:35:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, he might have. I mean, he admitted, I was really upset because I loved Kennedy and I felt bad for his wife and that's why I shot him.

• 1:35:31Jesse Michels?

  But lying in the sand, you have a psychotic break after you see the guy who's the architect of MKUltra? Come on.

• 1:35:36Speaker 03

  I know, it's weird. I know, it's weird.

• 1:35:38Jesse Michels?

  No cameras?

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  I recommend, I recommend reading Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed. He goes through all this stuff and shows why Oswald.

• 1:35:46Jesse Michels?

  I don't think he went through the Jack Ruby.

• 1:35:49Speaker 03

  Well, that, yeah, okay. So, but the Ruby case, he was a, he was a short fused, angry guy, got bites all the time. He, you know, acted. Just spontaneously.

• 1:35:58Jesse Michels?

  The perfect MKUltra candidate.

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  Maybe. I mean, I mean, if you were the CIA, would you really want to hire somebody, a lowlife like Lee Harvey Oswald and nobody? Pull off the greatest.

• 1:36:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And that's why I said, I'm a patsy. That's exactly who you'd hire. Somebody disposable.

• 1:36:14Speaker 03

  I mean, but somebody who's incompetent. I mean, he got lucky. You know, he got the job at this cool depository building. Before they announced where the motorcade was going. That was just pure luck.

• 1:36:25Jesse Michels?

  Do you know who, do you know who the mayor, do you know who the mayor of Dallas was?

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  Do you know he tried to assassinate Edmund Walker?

• 1:36:31Jesse Michels?

  I do. Six months before.

• 1:36:32Speaker 03

  In April, yeah, six months before. He was a nut job. He wanted to be famous. He wanted to kill somebody. He was, he was gonna kill Nixon at some point and his wife locked him in the bathroom and took his gun away from him.

• 1:36:41Jesse Michels?

  Do you know who the mayor of Dallas was?

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  I forget, I forget.

• 1:36:44Jesse Michels?

  Earl Cabell.

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  I, I forget who that is.

• 1:36:46Jesse Michels?

  He was the brother of Allen Dulles's number two at the CIA, the deputy director of the CIA.

• 1:36:52Speaker 03

  That's just random. That's just paternity. I don't think, I don't think. Well, we'll check with Gerald Posner on that. I don't think that's the case.

• 1:37:00Jesse Michels?

  Seems somewhat significant. No, it is the fact. Those are facts. Those are facts. Those are facts.

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  I know. You know, Oliver Stone's movie JFK has all these things and they're half of which are just made up. I mean, there's a whole webpage dedicated to JFK the film going, here's what.

• 1:37:14Jesse Michels?

  What did Oliver Stone make up?

• 1:37:16Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, well, there's a bunch of stuff like Lee Harvey Oswald could not shoot very accurately. And he shot Maggie's drawers when he was in the Marines taking riflery. Not true. He got the second highest rating. And Posner shows in his book, his report from the riflery training, he had scored the second highest you could get. He was a sharpshooter.

• 1:37:36Jesse Michels?

  Okay. So Oliver Stone got one thing wrong, but then he also.

• 1:37:38Speaker 03

  Not just one. There's, there's pages of this. And if you go to.

• 1:37:42Jesse Michels?

  You said he was incompetent before and you said he couldn't kill Walker.

• 1:37:43Speaker 03

  If you go to Dealey Plaza and you look out the window, there's two X's in the road. Uh, and you can, you can stand on the X's and look at the, at the sixth floor of the room, or you can look down. It's close. It's really close. There's no way you could miss, right? And he was a sharpshooter. So, and they've tried, uh, sharpshooters have used the same rifle. And they can hit it no problem. They can, they can get the three shots. So you have one shot. Already cocked and loaded, boom, and then you only have to do two more. And then, end of story, eight seconds, no problem.

• 1:38:13Jesse Michels?

  We get, we get deep into the issues with the autopsy that the coroner himself had. And the idea of the magic bullet, but and the missing frames that were published in the video. And the Zapruder film, but, uh, but I want to get back to UFOs. So the Gemini seven case, I, I found the, um, you know, Pentagon kind of UFO drop to be lamer than I would have liked. I would have liked to see much more higher signal stuff. So I sort of agree with you there. I think, uh, some of the astronaut sightings were interesting. Maybe some are explainable by cosmic rays, you know, I'm, I'm very open to that, but I think.

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  Or like, uh, John Glenn, you know, with the, uh, the little, uh, ice crystals.

• 1:38:54Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:38:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:55Jesse Michels?

  To which come, come off.

• 1:38:56Speaker 03

  And he sounds like, whoa, what is this?

• 1:38:58Jesse Michels?

  Of course.

• 1:38:59Speaker 03

  So the Houston goes pound on the wall. So he pounds on the wall and they come off. It's like, oh, okay.

• 1:39:03Jesse Michels?

  So one of my favorites, eh, because it so clearly separates any sort of false positives with, you know, other misidentifications. Gemini seven, Frank Borman, um, they were actually specifically trying to travel the second stage alongside the booster.

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:39:20Jesse Michels?

  Right? And so for the rest of his life, he was like, I, you know, this was not a UFO, like I'm, he downplayed it. And he was like, we were trying to travel, you know, right next to the booster. It was just the booster that I saw.

• 1:39:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:39:31Jesse Michels?

  In the audio, he clearly delineates the booster. And, and he says that that's at, you know, two o'clock. And then he says, there's, there's a real object. And he calls it a bogey, which is basically code for unknown, unknown object. And he says, that's a 10 o'clock high.

• 1:39:48Speaker 03

  Right. It was too far away and it was off the right.

• 1:39:50Jesse Michels?

  And it could, it could not have been the booster.

• 1:39:52Speaker 03

  I'm going to read you another, um.

• 1:39:53Jesse Michels?

  And so then you're like, he was probably lying for the rest of his life. That doesn't make sense.

• 1:39:59Speaker 03

  Hmm. All right. I'm going to read you, um, uh, another.

• 1:40:03Jesse Michels?

  And it couldn't have been part of, if, if it had been part of the booster, you would have seen that part of the booster, which was originally traveling next to the booster as you would in a zero G environment. You would see it slowly move to 10 o'clock high and you would know that it was the booster. And he goes, this is an actual sighting.

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. I understand. Okay.

• 1:40:26Jesse Michels?

  So what, so what is that?

• 1:40:27Speaker 03

  What is it? I don't know. Uh, I'm gonna read to you. This is a part of the problem. This eyewitness.

• 1:40:32Jesse Michels?

  I don't think he did either. That was a UFO.

• 1:40:33Speaker 03

  All right. So here is Scott Kelly, um, NASA astronaut and pilot, right? His brother Mark is senator. They're twins. They've both been in the space shuttle. So during the hearing like two years ago at NASA about the UAP videos, okay? And he gives a little speech, just takes thirty seconds. "In my experience of flying over fifteen thousand hours in thirty something years in airplanes and in space, the environment that we fly in is very conducive to optical illusions. So I get why these pilots would look at that Go Fast video and think it was going really fast."

• 1:41:17Speaker 03

  "I remember one time I was flying off Virginia Beach Military Operating Area and my RIO, R-I-O Radar Intercept Officer, who sits in the back of the tomcat, was convinced we flew by a UFO. I didn't see it, so we turned around and to go look at it. It turns out it was a Bart Simpson balloon." "My brother Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and also now a US Senator, shared a story with me about an experience he had years ago that when he was commander of the STS-124, they were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the space shuttle and they see something in the payload bay and they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt. They couldn't figure it out. And they were potentially have to go do a spacewalk to retrieve it, but before they did that, my brother grabbed the camera

• 1:42:00Speaker 03

  and they took a picture of it. And when they blew up the picture, they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay. It was actually the International Space Station eighty miles away." "These are cases where pilots have, there are cases where pilots have rendezvous on a buoy because they thought it was their wingman. It's just a very, very challenging environment to work, especially at night."

• 1:42:22Jesse Michels?

  Of course, of course.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  This is a problem with these.

• 1:42:25Jesse Michels?

  Of course.

• 1:42:25Speaker 03

  Oh, he was a pilot. He was a.

• 1:42:26Jesse Michels?

  I'm sure there are all sorts of false positives.

• 1:42:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Jesse Michels?

  These people are under duress, you know, they're.

• 1:42:31Speaker 03

  But the idea of being, I'm a trained observer. Yeah, but you still get stuff wrong.

• 1:42:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but even Jared Isaacman, the current NASA admin is admitting that some of these cases are unresolved.

• 1:42:42Speaker 03

  Yes, okay, I like him. I like him. I think if, if, if, if we're going to expose anything, he would be on board with releasing it.

• 1:42:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, no, I like, I like him too. But NASA from 1958 till now has been, it's basically an intelligence agency. If anything involves national security matters, it's not going to let the thing out.

• 1:43:01Speaker 03

  I mean, he's one of Elon's men. Okay. But he says, we're going to be transparent. All right? Good.

• 1:43:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  But what if, but here's the problem, Jesse.

• 1:43:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09Speaker 03

  Let's say he goes, all right, I went in there and you know what? We didn't find anything. Now, you know, UAP people will go, okay, he's covering up or he's not telling us everything.

• 1:43:18Jesse Michels?

  Well, I mean.

• 1:43:19Speaker 03

  Or he's siloed.

• 1:43:20Jesse Michels?

  Well, at this point, I have enough evidence in the open source world and everybody listening does to say, for example, with the Frank Borman case, we need an explanation for that because again, he's, he, there are sparks coming out and, and he delineates that from the booster. And he delineates both of those things from what he calls an actual sighting at 10 o'clock high. And he calls that a bogey, which is the nomenclature for unknown detected object. And so, and he says it's an actual site. And like you see, we actually hear the guy in mission control. He wants to say UFO and he goes, is it an actual sighting? And he goes, yes, it's an actual sighting. It's so clear that it's something that he, you know, is confused by and doesn't understand.

• 1:44:02Jesse Michels?

  So, so all I'm saying is we should have all of the data in that specific instance. If Jared Isaacman is going to say, yeah, this is definitely prosaically explained. Give us all the data in that instance and then I'll be satisfied.

• 1:44:13Speaker 03

  But here's the problem. There's probably, we're probably never going to get explanations for a lot of these. This is a one-off event. There may be nothing to find. In other words, maybe NASA doesn't have the explanation. They can explain some of the stuff.

• 1:44:25Jesse Michels?

  Do you know, do you know?

• 1:44:26Speaker 03

  You know, like with the case of Buzz Aldrin. I was on Larry King Live once with Buzz Aldrin and a couple of UFO people. James Fox was on there too.

• 1:44:32Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:44:32Speaker 03

  And Buzz launches into this long story about, you know, when they launch the Apollo 11, he's going out there and he reports to Houston, oh, I see this thing out there. But he went into a long thing about the panel of the second stage of the Apollo and it was just also just going alongside them. That's what it turned out to be. But it took him like 10 minutes to get this story out. Larry King is like, come on, get the story out. We gotta go to a commercial break. It was really a funny moment, but, um, but that's all it was. Okay. So that one is explained. The Barmen one, maybe NASA doesn't have an explanation for that. Maybe, maybe they have one and they're not telling us.

• 1:45:04Jesse Michels?

  Buzz Aldrin got pretty uncomfortable on air. Buzz Aldrin had a sister that said that he was very into UFOs in his private life. And James Fox actually chased Buzz Aldrin all around the world, finally cornering him in Monte Carlo. And he was about to interview him on UFOs because apparently he had, he had had a sighting as a fighter pilot in World War II. And, uh, basically Buzz Aldrin said to him, well, you know, I can't do this, you know, mess with my reputation. And, you know, I think it was actually around Paul Allen getting, getting, he was the, one of the co-founders of Microsoft. He was getting a lot of flak at the time for being involved in SETI, which shows you how far the conversation has moved on this topic. And where the Overton was.

• 1:45:43Speaker 03

  He funded the, the Allen Array of telescopes.

• 1:45:45Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:45:45Speaker 03

  For SETI, yeah.

• 1:45:46Jesse Michels?

  Right. So, so, so this is Buzz Aldrin being really fearful about what's going to happen to him. And he says, I can't jeopardize my initiative. I'm working with Congress right now. I'm trying to get money to develop a rocket. It's going to help put civilians into space. And how's my story going to change anything anyway? Which to me is implying that there's something real here and that, you know, you're worried about your own reputation as a result of going out on the record and on a limb in this case. Edgar Mitchell did just that. He was an Apollo 14 astronaut and he ended up being.

• 1:46:14Speaker 03

  All right. So there's a good example.

• 1:46:15Jesse Michels?

  Margaritas.

• 1:46:16Speaker 03

  How come he, is he marginalized? I mean, he's a famous Apollo astronaut.

• 1:46:20Jesse Michels?

  A lot of people said he went crazy and lost his mind after that, you know, and so, and anybody didn't.

• 1:46:25Speaker 03

  I don't know. You saw what Buzz did to, uh, Cibrel. They said, guys who never went to the moon. Give him a knuckle sandwich. Okay. I have a hard time believing Buzz would be afraid of anything. He seems pretty fearless.

• 1:46:37Jesse Michels?

  One more interesting NASA data point is, do you know who Gary McKinnon is by any chance? So this was a guy who was working in bank security. He had basic IT skills. He was in the UK. This was 2003, I believe.

• 1:46:52Speaker 05

  I read the Disclosure Project book, Stephen Greer and his team. And they told you installations, locations. And so I thought I could use my basic networking skills just to do a scan, you know, a light scan on American military networks, which is mad now. But back then, it was just kind of like a playful idea.

• 1:47:13Jesse Michels?

  He was interested in building eight because a whistleblower named Donna Hare had come out saying that she had met somebody there who was responsible for airbrushing out. She was a NASA employee. This is on record. She had met somebody, you know, in that building who was responsible for airbrushing out UFOs from real photos, and she had even seen one of these photos. I said, is this a UFO? And he's smiling at me and he says, I can't tell you that. And he said, well, we always have to airbrush them out before we sell them to the public. And McKinnon hacks in and he starts to see a UFO pop up and populate on a screen. It's a Tic Tac UFO and it's orbiting Earth.

• 1:47:53Jesse Michels?

  And the US goes after him hard and he is still on the Interpol watch list. And for 20 years, there's this crazy sort of witch hunt. They're trying to extradite him. Eventually Theresa May ends up sort of protecting him. Why would you go after somebody that hard? When there are actually other hacking cases where people broke into even more sensitive areas in the US.

• 1:48:15Speaker 03

  What's their source for this story?

• 1:48:16Jesse Michels?

  If this UFO thing wasn't true and again, comports with the Donna O'Hare.

• 1:48:20Speaker 03

  But what's the source?

• 1:48:21Jesse Michels?

  The source is McKinnon. Yeah.

• 1:48:24Speaker 03

  Well, okay.

• 1:48:25Jesse Michels?

  And why would he play up the thing if they were witch hunting?

• 1:48:29Speaker 03

  Maybe he's mistaken. I don't know.

• 1:48:30Jesse Michels?

  He almost committed suicide because they were trying to extradite him. So he's not lying. Why would he try to play up the thing that they're getting after him for?

• 1:48:38Speaker 03

  Maybe they're genuinely mistaken. Maybe he thought something was happening and it wasn't. I don't know. I don't know this case at all. I'm thinking of the David Grusch case because people have been bringing him up a lot lately.

• 1:48:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, you said David Grusch is.

• 1:48:49Speaker 03

  Oh, I know.

• 1:48:50Jesse Michels?

  Is that Codswallop?

• 1:48:52Speaker 03

  No, did I use that?

• 1:48:53Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:54Speaker 03

  I deleted it. I used it in a couple of tweets. I deleted it. I mean, you know, he's just X.

• 1:48:58Jesse Michels?

  You said he's a top 10 all-time bullshitter.

• 1:49:00Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, that's right.

• 1:49:01Jesse Michels?

  Buncombe, Blader, Codswallop.

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  Yes, Codswallop.

• 1:49:04Jesse Michels?

  I find David Grusch to be incredibly smart and.

• 1:49:06Speaker 03

  Oh, I do, too, yes. But his, but his stories.

• 1:49:09Jesse Michels?

  So you take those back?

• 1:49:09Speaker 03

  Come on, enough of the stories.

• 1:49:10Jesse Michels?

  But they're not stories. I'll give you, I'll give you an example with Grusch.

• 1:49:13Speaker 03

  But he, okay, but one thing.

• 1:49:14Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  He says he's never seen anything himself.

• 1:49:17Jesse Michels?

  He actually doesn't say that. He said in his original testimony, because he, you have to clear certain things that you say, everything that you say for somebody in his position through Dobbs, which is the pre-publication review for the Defense Department.

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  And. You mean in the congressional hearing?

• 1:49:32Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yes. And he didn't clear one of these things, and I think he did later, that he actually does have firsthand experience with this stuff.

• 1:49:40Speaker 03

  I'm not aware of that.

• 1:49:40Jesse Michels?

  He also gave hundreds of pages to the Intelligence Community Inspector General, who called his claims urgent and credible. So why are you calling him an all-time bullshitter when the Intelligence Community Inspector General?

• 1:49:50Speaker 03

  Because they're just stories.

• 1:49:51Jesse Michels?

  Says he's legit. But they don't think that. The Intelligence Community Inspector General doesn't think that.

• 1:49:56Speaker 03

  Then show us.

• 1:49:57Jesse Michels?

  I would like to see that, too, but clearly it's too classified to let out. There's a reason that it's sensitive.

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  Jesse, aren't you frustrated hearing these people going, we, I talked to somebody who saw the bodies interactive. I talked to somebody who went inside the spaceship.

• 1:50:09Jesse Michels?

  Can I give you an example of a thing?

• 1:50:11Speaker 03

  Can you show it to us? No, we can't. Come on, show us.

• 1:50:13Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but, but, but think about, he's, he's this guy who's obviously operated in sensitive areas. He's handled the presidential brief, but he, he knows that he's not, doesn't have an understanding of all of the equities when it comes to the, you know, kind of American situation. He doesn't want to go full Ed Snowden. Ed Snowden did a lot of amazing things as far as showing, you know, overreach on the part of the NSA when it came to Prism and Bull Run and all, you know, harvesting consumer data. But he also, you know, compromised a lot of Americans' lives abroad. So Grusch is making this explicit decision to not do that and to go as far as he can and to try to push the president to make, you know, do all sorts of executive actions around this stuff and to make speeches around it and to make it clear, you know, from the

• 1:50:58Jesse Michels?

  top down. So that was his explicit strategy. What's wrong with that strategy?

• 1:51:03Speaker 03

  Nothing. Show us. Come on.

• 1:51:05Jesse Michels?

  Okay, but-

• 1:51:05Speaker 03

  But again, Jesse, I watch all this stuff. It's like interview after interview after interview. I can't show you, I can't tell you, I can't classify, I gotta tell you in this.

• 1:51:14Jesse Michels?

  Can I, can I give you an example of something-

• 1:51:15Speaker 03

  So frustrated, aren't you frustrated? You're like, damn it, show us.

• 1:51:18Jesse Michels?

  Well, I'll give you an example of something that he explicitly did say in coming out. He talked about a 1933 Magenta Italy crash.

• 1:51:25Speaker 03

  1933 was the first recovery in Europe, in Magenta Italy. They recovered a partially intact vehicle. News Nation itself went to the Vatican and checked in the Vatican files and said, "We couldn't find anything."

• 1:51:39Jesse Michels?

  Well, guess what? 1933 Magenta Italy, I spoke to a man at the end of his life. His name was Harold Malmgren, who said that he was briefed by the number two in the CIA, Richard Bissell, who founded Area 51. And Richard Bissell told him about the Magenta crash in 1933. Yeah, what else did Richard Bissell tell you?

• 1:51:57Speaker 05

  He said this didn't start last week. This has been going on. He mentioned 1933 in Magenta.

• 1:52:07Jesse Michels?

  He did?

• 1:52:08Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:52:08Jesse Michels?

  Richard Bissell mentioned the 1933 Magenta crash?

• 1:52:11Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 1:52:12Jesse Michels?

  That's amazing. So all of a sudden, you're spanning generations. Now let's go continents. So you mentioned the Vatican thing. I tracked down Marconi's grandson, Marconi being the inventor of the radio. And I met his grandson because Marconi was supposedly part of this RS-33 cabinet, the special research group under Mussolini, that was dedicated to studying UFOs. And I wanted to see if this was actually a real historical artifact, this group was real, or if this was all BS.

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:52:43Jesse Michels?

  Marconi's grandson said that he knew through the family, not through any sort of circular reporting BS, you know, he did zero collusion with David Grusch, that he was part of RS-33, the special research group under Mussolini, studying UFOs.

• 1:52:59Speaker 02

  In 1933, the Italian government set up this group, a secret research 33 cabinet, where Marconi was the president and Enrico Ferriemi was the vice president. And they made some searches and studies on this phenomenon.

• 1:53:17Jesse Michels?

  So then you have to come up with this crazy thing of like Harold Malmgren is colluding with David Grusch and they're colluding with Marconi's grandson in Italy? Like, like, and David Grusch went out on a limb and, you know, a few years ago and said this, and it's proving to be true in the open source context.

• 1:53:32Speaker 03

  How come no one else has brought up this Vatican UFO 1933 story except for Grusch?

• 1:53:37Jesse Michels?

  That's not true. You have Roberto Pinotti wrote a book about it. He's an Italian UFO researcher. He wrote a whole book about it and he shows telegrams at the time that clearly indicate there was some sort of press blackout and they were, you know, they were trying to cover it up.

• 1:53:49Speaker 05

  And the most important one is the third one, this one. And he says, you see, on the personal order of Il Duce, absolutely no mention is to be made of the alleged landing of an unknown aircraft on national soil. The same applies to today's news due to for publication by the Stefani Agency and individual journalists.

• 1:54:11Jesse Michels?

  This is much evidence for like any other, you know, thing that was, there was an attempt to hide it. That's that old. It's 90 plus years old.

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  Let's talk about the crash retrieval programs.

• 1:54:20Jesse Michels?

  Let's do it.

• 1:54:20Speaker 03

  Okay, those are not abnormal. All governments have them because we want to know what the other side is doing. So famously like during World War II, when a B-17 got shot down, they had to try to destroy the, you know, Norton bomb site finder.

• 1:54:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:35Speaker 03

  So that the Nazis don't see how they were doing, how we were doing this, right?

• 1:54:39Jesse Michels?

  Of course.

• 1:54:39Speaker 03

  And we, you know, captured some zeros in the Aleutians just before midway, uh, so that we could find out, how come these zeros are such great planes and ours are way slower? You know? So in other words, governments do this to find out what technology the other side has. There's nothing to do with aliens or orbs or whatever.

• 1:54:56Jesse Michels?

  Naturally, but then it gets weird when the same people in charge of those prosaic crash retrieval programs, people at places like Wright Airfield, which was responsible for recreating the German pulse jet engine in 1943. Are talking about material they've never seen before with weird hieroglyphics that's malleable and.

• 1:55:15Speaker 03

  You talk about the Roswell, you talk about the Project Mogul balloon, high altitude balloon.

• 1:55:18Jesse Michels?

  That's clearly not project. That's the other, that's the funny thing about the, the cover story for Roswell. So we're talking about Roswell now, 1947, July, you know, a flying disc came down, the, the, uh, Roswell Army Airfield.

• 1:55:32Speaker 03

  A balloon crash.

• 1:55:33Jesse Michels?

  Well, they, they published flying disc and then they retracted it, which is strange if it were a balloon. Well, you know, um, so.

• 1:55:40Speaker 03

  But it was secret. So they go like, well, we gotta make up some.

• 1:55:42Jesse Michels?

  They've changed their story three times now.

• 1:55:44Speaker 03

  And they went, they.

• 1:55:45Jesse Michels?

  The government admitted that. First they said it was a weather balloon. Then they said it was, you know, a, a, a Project Mogul, this, now they're saying that it's, you know, pro geriatric crash dummy to children.

• 1:55:57Speaker 03

  There's two different reports. So there was the 94 report and then the 96 report. The 94 report was about Project Mogul. The 96 report was about years later, they were throwing these anthropogenic dummies out the balloon thing at high altitude to test how pilots would do. And so their explanation was that when people said they saw these humanoid bodies, they were probably seeing these crash dummies.

• 1:56:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but that, but you can't have it both ways. It's, it's either Project Mogul or it's a crash.

• 1:56:25Speaker 03

  Well, no, it's both. The crash dummies, so their explanation was.

• 1:56:29Jesse Michels?

  All of a sudden, the Occam's razor explanation sounds a lot more ridiculous than the, than the, it's, it's just.

• 1:56:33Speaker 03

  I have my doubts about Occam's razor anyway. But, but their, their explanation was that there was a conflation of memory, because this is decades later. I mean, don't forget, Roswell as an incident didn't become a thing until 1980, when Berlitz wrote his book about it. And then Stanton Friedman and others got involved and started writing books and then films and so on, became the, you know, in the 19, uh, from 47 to 1980, Roswell was nothing.

• 1:56:55Jesse Michels?

  Exactly. Cause you, you were living in this Cold War era of secrecy where everything was shut down. But you have, you know, somebody like Lieutenant Walter Haught coming to out, you know, with an affidavit, you know, to be released upon his death, saying that he actually witnessed a, a, a craft. He saw bodies under a tarp. And, you know, this was this kind of memory metal thing, which totally comports with what Army Intelligence Officer Jesse Marcel said. Jesse Marcel's son said that he took the material home. If you go there, I was just speaking to a physicist friend who works at a venture capital firm and is like totally like, you know, hard headed, you know, really smart guy, materialist reductionist. And he was like, yeah, I went, I went to, you know, the Roswell site.

• 1:57:38Jesse Michels?

  And I saw that a boulder had clearly been pushed into it. What was probably a sapling at the time. So the tree was growing abnormally around this boulder. So he was like, it seems like, you know, maybe the craft crashed into the thing and it was split down the middle. And he was like, what could have, you know, caused this boulder to split down the middle? There is so much evidence when you actually look into Roswell.

• 1:58:01Speaker 03

  I don't know. I think it's Project Mogul. What do you think it is?

• 1:58:04Jesse Michels?

  I think it's worthy of further investigation and that this memory metal, I believe Jesse Marcel, I believe Walter Haat. I have no reason to disbelieve them. I, I disbelieve these BS cover stories that keep changing over decades. And so I think it's, it's something crashed that was anomalous and it's worthy of investigation. And that's all I want to say. I don't want to say it's definitely alien, but it's weird.

• 1:58:25Speaker 03

  But what if the government, let's say the UAP committee and Avi comes out and goes, okay, we got to the bottom of Roswell. It was just Project Mogul. Would you then go, Avi's just not.

• 1:58:36Jesse Michels?

  He would need to, no, no. If he explained to me how he got there in a first principles way, I'd be like, Avi, you got me. Okay. So the boulder split apart like this. Cool. Uh, so the memory metal, it was actually this material they were using for Project Mobile Mogul at the time, which is especially reflective and, and helpful for detecting radar. Boom. I'd be like, easy, case closed.

• 1:58:55Speaker 03

  The story of the moving boulders in the Mojave Desert.

• 1:58:57Jesse Michels?

  No.

• 1:58:58Speaker 03

  It was one of these mysteries or these huge, they're like the size of this table. And then, you know, like the next day, it's like way over there. I mean, there's like a two ton boulders. And anyways, it was finally figured out that, that it rains or whatever, the moisture from the night freezes. And then the thing slides on the ice and then it unfreezes and the people come out and go, oh my God, look, there's this. So there's these, it's called the, um, the boulder racetrack or something in the Mojave Desert.

• 1:59:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:22Speaker 03

  So it looks kind of spooky for a while. I was like, ooh, there's something mysterious. Like, oh, nevermind. I don't know. It's a little bit like the crop circles, you know, we've seen. People fake them.

• 1:59:30Jesse Michels?

  Why do you, why, why do you think, uh, people who are at the top of the pyramid when it comes to American intelligence, people like James Clapper, you know, people like Brennan? Why do you think they would come out in a movie talking about Roswell being real? And there being, you know, a surviving being from Roswell? Like, why would, why would they talk about and implicitly sort of endorse those cases? If they were going to be looked at like sycophants years later? And they didn't have some asymmetric intelligence that Roswell actually happened?

• 2:00:00Speaker 03

  Okay, my explanation for all these is that they're not making it up. They're genuinely reporting as best they can what people told them. So just take the case of Grusch saying, I talked to somebody who interacted with this spaceship. He told me it was a spaceship. Maybe Grusch is, is being truthful. This is what he was told. And the guy that told him that saw something that he indeed couldn't explain. Maybe it was a CIA DARPA test drone or something. He's like, oh my God, I've never seen this before. It looks alien or something to me. So he reports that to Grusch, who then reports it to Congress, saying, I know somebody that went.

• 2:00:34Jesse Michels?

  But the Roswell Army Airfield published flying disc and then retracted it in a panic.

• 2:00:40Speaker 03

  It's the Cold War, they're making shit up because governments do that. So does government, do governments lie?

• 2:00:45Jesse Michels?

  But, but that's right. They were making the cover story up.

• 2:00:49Speaker 03

  Probably, yes.

• 2:00:50Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:00:50Speaker 03

  In the 90s, in the two 1990 reports, they said, yes, we made this up. Cause it was the cold. We didn't want the Russians to know. We were launching these high altitude spy balloons.

• 2:00:59Jesse Michels?

  Uh, it's just, it doesn't work. And it doesn't work when the story keeps shifting. Like then, then you get into the crash dummy thing, which is the most recent story. And I'm sorry.

• 2:01:08Speaker 03

  So the crash dummy thing.

• 2:01:10Jesse Michels?

  The skeptics have to get their story straight.

• 2:01:12Speaker 03

  They're saying it's two different things and that people are conflating memories together and that they're separate. That's all they're saying. Human memory is not reliable. And people are saying, at the time of the Roswell crash, I saw these bodies. And the government is going, no, you, you're conflating a, a, a later memory of the crash dummies with the Roswell balloon.

• 2:01:31Jesse Michels?

  The human memory not being reliable is also, you know, just as true for the skeptics case.

• 2:01:36Speaker 03

  Yes, of course. Yes, of course. Yeah.

• 2:01:38Jesse Michels?

  Okay. And then you have like all. Whole host of like, I would now say on the UFO issue, you're a contrarian. I would say, seriously.

• 2:01:46Speaker 03

  In terms of the scientific community, no, most, most scientists don't, don't think so. In the UFO community, yes.

• 2:01:52Jesse Michels?

  This, science is lagging, I would admit that, but otherwise you have, you know, presidents, you have, you know, Navy fighter pilots, you have astronauts, you have civilians.

• 2:02:01Speaker 03

  So Trump says, we're going to get to the bottom. Part of that is because Obama's gave that.

• 2:02:05Jesse Michels?

  He also told his son that something very interesting that happened at Roswell.

• 2:02:09Speaker 05

  Would you ever open up Roswell and let us know what's really going on there? So many people ask me that question. I know, it sounds almost ridiculous, but it's actually the real question I want to know.

• 2:02:16Speaker 05

  It sounds like a cute question, but it's actually, there are millions and millions of people that want to go there, that want to see it. I won't talk to you about what I know about it, but it's very interesting. But Roswell's a very interesting place.

• 2:02:31Speaker 03

  I know. All right, let's see it. Yeah. I mean, I do trust that Trump means it when he says he wants transparency. He did that sort of begrudgingly with Epstein files, but he did that with the JFK files. There was no smoking gun and now he's doing it three times. We're promised a fourth dump here, maybe this week.

• 2:02:48Jesse Michels?

  There's no smoking gun with the JFK files because we're already oversaturated in data.

• 2:02:53Speaker 03

  We have everything on, we know.

• 2:02:54Jesse Michels?

  So you have, you have people like.

• 2:02:57Speaker 03

  But wouldn't there be a paper trail, like somewhere in the CIA goes, we got to pay Lee Harvey Oswald, send him, send him some money or send this guy with cash.

• 2:03:04Jesse Michels?

  Especially, no, especially not if, you know, JFK said, I want to see, scatter the CIA to the winds.

• 2:03:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, he said that.

• 2:03:10Jesse Michels?

  Dulles had a lot of power, but he was outside of the CIA.

• 2:03:13Speaker 03

  People say shit all the time. The CIA lied to him and they said, if you invade Cuba, it's going to go great.

• 2:03:18Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  And it didn't. So he's like, that's when he said, I want to, he's just pissed off at the CIA.

• 2:03:22Jesse Michels?

  But he fired Dulles. He actually fired Dulles, the director.

• 2:03:25Speaker 03

  Trump has fired, you know, most of his cabinet members in his two terms.

• 2:03:30Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but he, but he.

• 2:03:30Speaker 03

  That's not unusual.

• 2:03:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but, but, but usually president versus, you know, intel world, intel world wins historically, whether it's Nixon, JFK.

• 2:03:40Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 2:03:40Jesse Michels?

  You know, yeah, I don't want to get into, you know, what might be happening.

• 2:03:43Speaker 03

  I mean, maybe, you know, my concession to conspiracy theories is like, when you get elected president, they take you in the back room and they go, okay. Here's what's actually going on. You know, you can't close Gitmo because of this. You can't stop the war in Iraq because of that. And they're like, oh, no. But I said I would. And then they don't. I mean, this is the explanation. How come Obama gets the Nobel Peace Fries for his work on nuclear weapons? He didn't do anything. And my answer is, is like, well, they must have taken him in the back room and go, look, all our allies are saying you can't end, you know, launch on warning. This is where they're depending on this. No first use. We can't get rid of that. We have to threaten the Russians. And they're like, oh, yeah, okay, never mind.

• 2:04:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, there is, there is this thing where you run on this Mr. Smith goes to Washington campaign.

• 2:04:24Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 2:04:24Jesse Michels?

  And it's like, you know, no, you know, you need FISA warrants, no wiretapping.

• 2:04:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:04:29Jesse Michels?

  And, you know, we're going to close Gitmo, no more drone attacks, you know, this, kumbaya. And then all of a sudden you go in, you're like, you turn into a neocon overnight. Something happens. I, so I, yeah, I hear you.

• 2:04:40Speaker 03

  I know. I know. But if anything, it's a, it's a, a tat, a tip of the hat to you and the conspiratorial

• 2:04:48Speaker 03

  movement, because I think there is a lot of stuff like that that happens.

• 2:04:51Jesse Michels?

  You're a, you're a tough nut to crack.

• 2:04:55Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm gonna read you something else.

• 2:04:56Jesse Michels?

  I feel, I feel like I can't, uh,

• 2:04:58Speaker 03

  Well, I mean,

• 2:04:58Jesse Michels?

  I can't get in there.

• 2:04:59Speaker 03

  We're just talking. But what is it you want to?

• 2:05:02Jesse Michels?

  I want, I want, I want to,

• 2:05:06Jesse Michels?

  I almost think an interesting inroad is like your relationship to the topic because you were once abducted by aliens.

• 2:05:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, I mean, have I had experiences? Yes, I've had a lot of anomalous experiences. I have seen UFOs, you know, most of them, I think I can explain, like, um, one of them looked like a V-shaped, shiny object out in the desert. Turned out it was a flock of geese. I, we drove further, it was during Race Across America, we flew, drove further down, went, oh, it's geese. Okay. Yeah. But it was like, whoa. Uh, and the other examples I use, like, um, seeing the stealth bomber fly over my house when I lived in Altadena. Every January 1st at 8:05 a.m. Because the stealth bomber flew from Edwards Air Force Base over the Rose Parade. Right? So, but if I didn't know what it was, it'd be like, whoa, because it was really spooky looking. It's this, you know, delta shaped thing. It's super black. It looks like a hole in the sky.

• 2:05:57Speaker 03

  When it comes at you, it makes no sound. Now, now I already know what it is. So I was like, okay. But I can imagine being in the desert like in 1950s going, whoa, what is this? Okay. Uh, I did have an alien abduction experience in 1983. I was traveling along a lonely rural highway near Hagler, Nebraska, and um, a big vehicle with bright lights pulled me over. And the aliens got out and they abducted me into the ship where I lost 90 minutes of time, missing time. Okay. Anyway, so this is during Race Across America. The big spaceship is my support crew, big motorhome with lights. And the aliens are my support crew, my girlfriend, my best friend, my mechanic and so on.

• 2:06:38Speaker 03

  And I had transported in my mind, and I'd ridden 1,280 miles from Santa Monica Pier all the way into Nebraska, nonstop on a bicycle, right? Except for a few bathroom breaks, but just no sleep, right? So I'm sleep deprived, going like five miles an hour, just sort of wobbling down the road. And uh, and they go, we gotta pull Shermer over. He's, he's going too slow. So they get out and, you know, to put me in the vehicle on it. And in the 1960s, when I was a child, there was a CBS show starring Roy Thinis called The Invaders. And it was the aliens were, had invaded this small town and snatched the bodies. It was a body snatcher story. Uh, and the humans that lived in the town looked just like, Roy Thinis is the hero of the story,

• 2:07:19Speaker 03

  just like his neighbors and his friends. But you could tell that they were actually aliens because they had bent little fingers, right? Somehow they could clone humans, but they couldn't bend their fingers anyway. Uh, so I thought that. And then the next day after my sleep break, I'm like, whoa, that was wild. So you can go on YouTube, you can look under Shermer, abducted by aliens, and you'll see an interview with me with Eric Hayden. Uh, Eric Hayden is the Olympic speed skater. He was also a bike racer. And he worked for ABC Wild World Sports, who was filming our race. And so he pulls up to me when I'm crossing the Mississippi River the next night and he's like, how's it going? I go, not so good. I got abducted by aliens last night. He's like, what?

• 2:07:58Speaker 05

  That's a very, very strange thing to happen to me last night. Uh, taking my crew. Was aliens from another planet trying to capture me?

• 2:08:10Speaker 03

  So I told them all about it. You know, so I've always used this example of people that have experiences, really have them, schizophrenics really hear voices that are out there, not in here. You know, the people that have have abduction experiences, it's sleep paralysis almost surely.

• 2:08:26Jesse Michels?

  But do you think you think it's always explainable by?

• 2:08:30Speaker 03

  Well, I try to explain. Yeah, because most of the cases.

• 2:08:33Jesse Michels?

  What about John John Mack, head of the Harvard psychiatry?

• 2:08:36Speaker 03

  Yes, I think he I think he was a little too open minded. I don't want to use the word gullible, but I think he took people's stories at their word instead of this person that's telling me the story had sleep paralysis and they're reporting it as if this happened to them because they don't know I was asleep.

• 2:08:55Jesse Michels?

  So Edgar Edgar Mitchell, sixth man to walk on the moon, who we mentioned, you know, Apollo 14 astronaut. He has a database of 5,000 plus, you know, abductees. You were saying that all of those abductees.

• 2:09:06Speaker 03

  Either sleep deprivation or another popular theme with like Bud Hopkins was using hypnotic regression. Okay, we know from cognitive psychology hypnotic regression is not reliable. People use their imagination and just make stuff up, right? So I'm fond of saying, do you think, you know, J R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is true? It's like, no, what are you talking about? He just made it up. I know people have fantastic imaginations to just make stuff up.

• 2:09:30Jesse Michels?

  Do you not think that it's a viable and real method for recovering memories?

• 2:09:36Speaker 03

  No, we know it's we know it's.

• 2:09:37Jesse Michels?

  That are shattered due to traumatic.

• 2:09:40Speaker 03

  No, we know it's not. And we know this from the recovered memory movement in the 1990s. Do you know about the recovered memory movement?

• 2:09:45Jesse Michels?

  Tell me about it.

• 2:09:46Speaker 03

  Okay, these, this is a dark chapter in psychology history, but it's sort of a Freudian idea that if something bad happens to you, you bury it, you repress it.

• 2:09:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:56Speaker 03

  And that in therapy, you can recover this repressed memory of this horrible thing that happened to you. Okay, this was long debunked, but it came back online in the late 80s and early 90s. These are adult people going to therapy for various issues, depression, anxiety, sleep problems, and so on. The therapist is saying, okay, it could be this, could be that. But, you know, a lot of people who were molested as children. Repress that memory and they have these symptoms similar to yours and persons like, I don't think I was ever molested. Well, you think about it, dream about it, we could talk about it. Six months later, they're accusing their father, grandfather, uncle, whatever, of molesting them as children. These are like mostly women in their 30s now. There were hundreds of cases.

• 2:10:38Jesse Michels?

  So I do, I think memory is.

• 2:10:41Speaker 03

  Not reliable.

• 2:10:42Jesse Michels?

  Fallible.

• 2:10:43Speaker 03

  Those guys were all the people that were convicted based on these recovered memories alone were let out of jail. Some of the women sued their therapist for planting false memories.

• 2:10:51Jesse Michels?

  Do you, would you admit that due to your own experience, you're looking at John Max's whole data set and you're, you're biased because of your own experience?

• 2:11:01Speaker 03

  Could I be biased? Of course, anybody can be biased, but what's more likely, right? We know tons of examples where people falsely remember things. They conflate memories.

• 2:11:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but, but when, when those memories involve real missing time, sometimes physical marks on the person.

• 2:11:17Speaker 03

  You think it's missing time. People have marks on their bodies from various things.

• 2:11:21Jesse Michels?

  No, I mean, I literally, there's in this book, there's a, you know, a friend of mine at Ellsworth Air Force Base, 1977, he woke up nine miles away.

• 2:11:28Speaker 05

  Well, it was the backside of the New Lake Reservoir Dam. And that is about on the map, about eight miles, eight and a half miles away from November 5.

• 2:11:39Jesse Michels?

  He says he did. No, he and a partner both did. And both of them weren't into aliens at all.

• 2:11:45Speaker 03

  The Travis Walton case, I think he just made it up. I think he was just late getting the job done. And he didn't pass a lie detector test. By the way, I was on a show with him in which it was called, I forget what the name of the show was, but you had to.

• 2:11:58Jesse Michels?

  Do you think those are not, do you think those are fully perfect, the lie detector tests?

• 2:12:02Speaker 03

  No, you can beat them.

• 2:12:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:04Speaker 03

  But he said, I want to have, take a lie detector test and he failed it. Doesn't mean anything, probably not. I mean, you can't use them.

• 2:12:10Jesse Michels?

  They measure stress specifically.

• 2:12:11Speaker 03

  You can't, you can't.

• 2:12:12Jesse Michels?

  And, and, and thinking about.

• 2:12:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, we did.

• 2:12:14Jesse Michels?

  Being on live television.

• 2:12:15Speaker 03

  We did whole issues of Skeptica and like, it's not reliable. This is why they're not allowed in court.

• 2:12:19Jesse Michels?

  Okay. Okay. So you were using it as a rhetorical argument that you're now retracting.

• 2:12:22Speaker 03

  Not retracting. He said, I'm telling the truth. I'll take a lie detector test. He didn't pass the lie detector. That's not why I think he's lying. I think he's made it up because he was late finishing the job.

• 2:12:32Jesse Michels?

  So you think like the the grays, for example, that seem to be just a common, consistent archetype of what people see.

• 2:12:39Speaker 03

  Well, not just the grays. Don't forget the Norwegians and the lizard people.

• 2:12:42Jesse Michels?

  No, that's right. So there are others as well, but they're they're often fairly consistent. You know, it's those two.

• 2:12:47Speaker 03

  Well, but some of that is due to cultural cultural influence, right? The moment that Bud Hopkins publishes his book with the alien with the bulbous head and the almond shaped eyes and tiny nose.

• 2:13:00Jesse Michels?

  Comedian?

• 2:13:00Speaker 03

  Uh, Streber. Yes, sorry. Streber. Yeah. I met him in the green room at Bill Maher's show, Politically Incorrect. So, um, I'm just chatting. Like, what do you do when you're not writing about being abducted by aliens? He goes, I write science fiction and fantasy. I went, oh, okay. He's got a vivid imagination. He thinks this happened to him. Okay. I'm not saying he made it up.

• 2:13:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but that you can't.

• 2:13:21Speaker 03

  People have experiences.

• 2:13:22Jesse Michels?

  You can't rule it out entirely just because of that.

• 2:13:25Speaker 03

  I would say the vast majority, we have explanations and it's okay to say, maybe there's some that this doesn't fully explain.

• 2:13:31Jesse Michels?

  And you're.

• 2:13:31Speaker 03

  Maybe they weren't using hypnotic reduction repression. Maybe they weren't asleep when it happened. Okay. So then what?

• 2:13:39Jesse Michels?

  And your belief that is biased from your own experience, which was clearly an alien overlay on a real thing.

• 2:13:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe.

• 2:13:45Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:46Jesse Michels?

  Okay. Okay. Well, at least you can admit that.

• 2:13:48Speaker 03

  But, but, but, I mean, okay, none of this is reliable. This is why eyewitnesses are so bad. And that when I was writing my book on the Holocaust deniers, you know, they would use survivor's stories to show how wrong the survivors are. And they were right about that. I mean, the survivors of Auschwitz have all seen Schindler's List and all the movies and so on. And they have this, oh, I saw Mengele on the platform when I got off the train. I fact checked one of these stories I heard. It's like, but he wasn't there when you were there. This woman's remembering seeing the movie about Mengele, right? And, you know, I saw the flames coming out of the chimney at Auschwitz. No, that's not possible. The crematoria is over here with the ovens and the chimneys are over here that has to

• 2:14:31Speaker 03

  go through. You could not have seen the, okay, this kind of stuff. So people, they're not reliable. And this is why in the.

• 2:14:36Jesse Michels?

  But that's a good example because the Holocaust. You're saying the Holocaust happened, right?

• 2:14:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 2:14:40Jesse Michels?

  But then, but the memory, the specific memory is not reliable. So you could say that an alien abduction happened, but the specific incidental, you know, details are often wrong.

• 2:14:50Speaker 03

  That could be, but if that's the only thing you have, but we have way more than that for the Holocaust. The Holocaust is only tiny, supported by eyewitness testimony.

• 2:14:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah. I'd love to move away from this analogy.

• 2:15:02Speaker 03

  I know, I know.

• 2:15:04Speaker 03

  But just one more point. I mean, if the other side says, yeah, we did that, and that's true, no one in the German, you know, community today denies it, they all go, yeah, we did that.

• 2:15:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:15:15Speaker 03

  So, okay, anyway, so, I mean, okay, this is my point about it.

• 2:15:19Jesse Michels?

  No arguments there.

• 2:15:20Speaker 03

  This is my point about pistol, how do I know the 2020 election wasn't rape? I didn't check myself. I trust Attorney General Bill Barr, who was a lifetime Republican, twice voter for Trump, said, I'm gonna look into this. If anybody would find it, he would find it, he didn't. Okay, so this is, reminds me of Christopher Hitchens line about, which he got from somebody else, that when you hear Mother Teresa saying that she believes in God today, you think, well, yeah, that she's doing her job to, or the Pope. The Pope says, I believe in God, you think, well, the Pope's doing his job today. If you hear the Pope saying, you know, I'm having some doubts about God's existence, you think, oh, Pope might be onto something. Because if anything, he would believe one thing if he says the other, right? So if somebody like, again, a Marco Rubio, you know, goes in there and goes, okay, we

• 2:16:05Speaker 03

  have something, that would get my attention, you know, not another one of these third level, I know somebody who knows somebody, you know, just, somebody more direct, Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, President Trump, you know, the head of the CIA, somebody that would have reason to know, then says, yes, I found it. Okay, now, and maybe if Marco says, I can't show you because it's actually. What we have is CIA, DARPA, top secret. I don't want the Russians to know, but we do have something.

• 2:16:39Jesse Michels?

  Can I give you an example?

• 2:16:40Speaker 03

  That would get my attention.

• 2:16:41Jesse Michels?

  Can I give you an example of why I think that's not always the best scientific methodology? You're familiar, obviously, with Thomas Bayes.

• 2:16:49Speaker 03

  Reverend Thomas.

• 2:16:50Jesse Michels?

  Reverend Thomas Bayes, you know, who was, you know, famous statistician as well, came up with Bayesian logic.

• 2:16:57Speaker 03

  I have a whole chapter on it right here.

• 2:16:58Jesse Michels?

  There you go. And I think it's a very important way to think. If you start to build up, you know, mounting evidence for something possibly being real, I think that should warrant further investigation. So a good example is if you have some circumstantial evidence, say around Epstein circa 10 years ago, or around directed energy weapons and, you know, Havana syndrome. Skeptics magazine in 2022 said, you know, this is all psychosomatic and this is not serious. And we shouldn't, you know, these diplomats are experiencing kind of mass hysteria.

• 2:17:33Speaker 03

  Or vertigo or whatever.

• 2:17:35Jesse Michels?

  Or vertigo. And in fact, we realized that it's, you know, Der Spiegel, 60 Minutes do this piece.

• 2:17:41Speaker 05

  In 2016 and 17, 25 Americans, including CIA agents, suffered serious brain injuries. We have been collecting evidence of what appears to be a hostile foreign government's plan to target Americans.

• 2:17:56Jesse Michels?

  And we realized that it's this real directed energy weapon.

• 2:17:58Speaker 03

  We still don't have a directed energy weapon. Where is this weapon that could do this? Do we have this?

• 2:18:03Jesse Michels?

  I mean, Mike, I think it's pretty clear that microwave, you know, weaponry can do this. And this is being admitted at the highest levels of intelligence, again, on both sides. But it's similar to the UFO thing because you don't have a smoking gun, but it's, you know, if I were a betting man, I would bet that it's that and that it's not psychosomatic. Would you now bet that it's psychosomatic?

• 2:18:23Speaker 03

  Again, I'm withholding judgment until I see, like, I don't know, somebody in the FBI or whatever goes, we found the sonic weapon, the acoustic weapon or whatever that the Russians were using.

• 2:18:33Jesse Michels?

  They're not going to release that publicly. Because that's a literal tactical, you know, trade secret. That literally confers an advantage.

• 2:18:40Speaker 03

  This is the problem with the UFOs. What if UAPs are actually just weapons that our government has?

• 2:18:45Jesse Michels?

  I think in certain cases, there are conflations, but I think a lot of the stuff that we've outlined today cannot be explained by, you know, advanced human technology.

• 2:18:54Speaker 03

  You know, Russian tech spying on our nuke sites.

• 2:18:57Jesse Michels?

  In 1945?

• 2:18:59Speaker 03

  Well, they had nuclear weapons by forty six. They already knew that we were working.

• 2:19:02Jesse Michels?

  Not by forty six. It was, it was.

• 2:19:04Speaker 03

  In nineteen forty-three, Klaus Fuchs was a Russian spy.

• 2:19:08Jesse Michels?

  From forty-two to fifty, yeah.

• 2:19:10Speaker 03

  Working at Los Alamos.

• 2:19:12Jesse Michels?

  That's right. But they ended up building the weapon later than forty-six, I believe.

• 2:19:16Speaker 03

  The Russians, yeah, forty-seven.

• 2:19:18Jesse Michels?

  Forty-seven, okay, yeah.

• 2:19:19Speaker 03

  So, but, but I mean, the point is, yes, they do spy on us and we spy on them. So maybe some of the weird shit people talk about with anomalies, maybe that's just Russian assets or... But again, the Russians are not gonna have.

• 2:19:31Jesse Michels?

  Stuff that's breaking our physics in the late forty's.

• 2:19:33Speaker 03

  They would, they would not have that. They would never have that. That can't be. This is why I reject that in my chapter on that, is that no country gets far ahead of any other country.

• 2:19:42Jesse Michels?

  So would you admit you got the Havana syndrome thing wrong?

• 2:19:45Speaker 03

  No. I still think.

• 2:19:47Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 2:19:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I still think it's mass hysteria.

• 2:19:50Jesse Michels?

  Oh.

• 2:19:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:19:51Jesse Michels?

  Oh, you're, okay, so you're in the real minority there.

• 2:19:54Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I think the sixty minutes, I, I really think they got it wrong. Yep. I usually trust, I usually trust them. I just think, anyway, I don't know.

• 2:20:03Jesse Michels?

  I think.

• 2:20:03Speaker 03

  I could be wrong. Show me the.

• 2:20:04Jesse Michels?

  I think they got it very right.

• 2:20:05Speaker 03

  Show us the, again, they're anecdotes. People saying, I had these weird things happen to me and I'm a diplomat in, in Cuba. Okay, that gets our attention. Okay, fine.

• 2:20:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:15Speaker 03

  Now we investigate.

• 2:20:16Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:17Speaker 03

  All right, where's the weapon? Where's the people that did it? We don't have any of that.

• 2:20:21Jesse Michels?

  I want to speak about a mystical experience that you cannot explain. And this was with your wife.

• 2:20:28Speaker 03

  Oh, my, the radio story?

• 2:20:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:30Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:20:31Jesse Michels?

  Can you tell that?

• 2:20:31Speaker 03

  That's fine. Yeah, sure. Yeah, no, no, no, no problem. I mean, this, this is a popular... Because I, I wrote about this in Scientific American, because I do want to keep an open mind and I want people to also keep an open mind, just in case, right? So, um, yeah, so I got remarried in twenty-fourteen. So when my wife Jennifer moved to the United States from Cologne to be with me, which, you know, I still think it was a big mistake, but, you know, don't tell her that.

• 2:20:58Speaker 03

  So she, you know, so she'd come here and I went there and back and forth, back and forth. And I, and I tried to navigate the immigration system and it's a mess online. So I just hired an attorney and we went. To see the immigration attorney, they're like, if you keep this back and forth stuff, they're not going to let her back in. So like, oh, okay. And, you know, what should we do? Well, you should get married. You know, if you're gonna do that anyway, we're not telling you to do that. But if you're gonna do that anyway, sooner is better. So we said, all right, let's just go down to the courthouse, Beverly Hills courthouse, and just fill out the form, get married right there. So we did that. And it's like, but this is not very romantic. So then go back to my house where we she'd moved in, and we're gonna have a little ceremony. So this is all my friends and family, and she doesn't have anybody there from Germany. So she's feeling kind of blue. Now, you know,

• 2:21:42Speaker 03

  months before, she had shipped out all her stuff, including a little 1977 Philips transistor radio from her grandfather. Now, she didn't have a dad, you know, so a single mom raised her. So her grandfather was sort of her surrogate dad, and they used to listen to the radio together. So she always kept that and sent that to me. And I tried to get it working. I couldn't get it working. We do batteries in and did the, you know, the slap it on the table test and all that stuff. Nothing happened. Anyway, so before she even got there, I just threw it in the back of the drawer in the bedroom in the big, you know, desk. And nothing ever happened for months and months and months. Then the day we get married, we're just kind of standing around, we hearing music. And so we go back to the back bedroom, and it's like, there's music. And is it the house music system? I don't really have one. Is it my laptop with the iTunes? No, it's not.

• 2:22:25Speaker 03

  Is it the neighbors? No. And it's like, I get closer to the desk. It's like, it's coming from the desk. So I open the drawer, and there's the radio on perfectly tuned to a station playing beautiful romantic music. And it's like, whoa, this is fucking weird.

• 2:22:41Jesse Michels?

  What song?

• 2:22:42Speaker 03

  I don't remember the song. I think it was a classical song. We Jennifer and I like classical music. And anyway, so it was something like that. It was perfectly tuned. And it was just kind of a moment of like, oh, so it's sort of a connection with the grandfather. You know, did we think grandfather's in the bedroom with us? No, that would be kind of creepy, right? But it was just like an emotional anomalous event. Anyways, I wrote about this in Scientific American. And to my utter surprise, I got just like hundreds of letters from people saying, you know what, I had something similar to happen to me. And they would tell me these stories. I mean, one went on and on about, you know, well, I had this necklace, and I was gonna marry this guy, and I didn't. So I get rid of the necklace, and then like Five years later, I'm in Jakarta or somewhere and there's the necklace. It's the actual necklace.

• 2:23:23Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 2:23:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, there's like hundreds of stories like that.

• 2:23:26Jesse Michels?

  Do you think it's possible that her grandfather was in the room with you?

• 2:23:28Speaker 03

  And a connection, maybe, maybe, you know, I, I just keep a little door open just in case.

• 2:23:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Would that be a nice reality if, if, if?

• 2:23:37Speaker 03

  I think so, as long as it's not creepy, like grandfather's in the bedroom when we're, you know, fooling around. That would not be cool.

• 2:23:43Jesse Michels?

  No, that wouldn't be cool.

• 2:23:45Speaker 03

  But you know, there's some rules about that yet. I don't know about the afterlife, Jesse. I, you know, I wrote a book about this, Heaven's on Earth. I concluded that nobody knows what happens after you die. We don't know. I'd be happy to wake up and I'm going like, oh, so this is what it is. Okay. Cause we don't know what consciousness is. We don't have the, the solution to the hard problem of consciousness. I write about that in here. It's like, nobody knows. And you look on Wikipedia, there's like two dozen theories for the hard problem of consciousness. Like, well, okay, we don't know what's going on here.

• 2:24:15Jesse Michels?

  So I guess in that sense, we're seeing everything through a headset, through this like very limited scope. And so then you get into this area of kind of radical Cartesian doubt. And, you know, there's a whole host of possibilities as far as non-human intelligence, but also are we even seeing?

• 2:24:32Speaker 03

  Didn't you have Hoffman on your show?

• 2:24:33Jesse Michels?

  I did have Donald Hoffman.

• 2:24:35Speaker 03

  I know him. Yes.

• 2:24:35Jesse Michels?

  And he says the likelihood that we see base reality is zero.

• 2:24:39Speaker 03

  I, I think he's, I think he goes too far. His stuff about, you know, species dependent perception, that's correct. Particularly colors and smells. Yeah. Like the, the, the, what's the beetle in Australia that sees the brown beer bottle?

• 2:24:53Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, the beer cap and then thinks it's the, the mate.

• 2:24:56Speaker 03

  The model beer bottle looks like a female. So.

• 2:24:59Jesse Michels?

  That's right.

• 2:24:59Speaker 03

  Okay. That's, that's true. Um, you know, but so my, my response to that is let's say a bat sees this. Whatever it's seeing with its sonar echolocation, it's not what you and I see. It's a different. Icon on its brain. But there really is a mic there and that if the bat flies, it's really gonna do this. It's gonna go around it.

• 2:25:20Jesse Michels?

  But the characterization of the mic is fully dependent on your conception of a mic, which is based on your observation of the mic.

• 2:25:27Speaker 03

  Philosophers.

• 2:25:27Jesse Michels?

  And that's not the bat's mic.

• 2:25:29Speaker 03

  Yes, but there's something there. So philosophers make a distinction between like colors and sounds.

• 2:25:35Jesse Michels?

  But it could be something there that's entirely different.

• 2:25:37Speaker 03

  Physical objects, like touching a physical object. You know, this isn't species dependent. The bat, the dog, whatever is gonna feel it. That's really there, even though it's a different, it looks different, like a shark icon. Whatever it's like to be a dolphin, I don't really know. But whatever shark looks like, it surely doesn't look like what it looks like to me.

• 2:25:56Jesse Michels?

  Do you think that?

• 2:25:57Speaker 03

  But there really is a shark in the water and it really should avoid it.

• 2:26:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, that's right. Well, and for in a species context, you know, there's, there's obviously resource allocation when it comes to evolution to detect certain predator and prey. And they're definitely species, you know, higher up and lower down that aren't adaptive for you to perceive. And so they're likely species that exist outside of our scope. Okay. Like, would you admit that?

• 2:26:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, absolutely. But I do, I do have a thing on, um, on Donald Hoffman in the book. And I have a picture here of MC Usher's The Waterfall That Flows Uphill, right?

• 2:26:33Jesse Michels?

  Ah, yeah.

• 2:26:34Speaker 03

  Okay, so illusions only work because there actually is a reality and water never runs uphill by itself. There's something off here and we all recognize that. Okay. So predators, or I should say like prey animals that look like predators. You know, they have the eye spots or they have the, the fake rattles or the fake wings or whatever. They evolved those because there really are predators that look like that. And there are prey that are afraid of those predators. And so if you can be an organism that looks like the predator, that can be adaptive. But that only works if there really is a reality that there really is a predator. There is.

• 2:27:13Jesse Michels?

  It's a, it's a reality, but it's a reality that it's hard to say a lot about. Science is only true insofar as it's useful. And so, you know, it can be predictive and that you can create technology. From it. But there are things in physics, for example, like, you know, the Planck's constant or, you know, gravity that seems so finely tuned. You know, this is the anthropic principle, where if they were slightly different, you know, we wouldn't have a habitable earth. And you could say that's a bunch of rolls of the dice and we got lucky. Or you could say that this is all an interface and that physics actually comports with what is, you know, adaptive for our survival. And so physics is actually downstream of our biological needs to survive.

• 2:27:54Speaker 03

  I don't, I disagree with them there.

• 2:27:56Jesse Michels?

  Why? It's really hard to, it's really hard to argue.

• 2:27:58Speaker 03

  Let me use another argument. Okay. So when you see Penn and Teller or David Copperfield, I don't Penn Teller, Teller walks through a wall. Or Teller makes the Statue of Liberty disappear. Okay. This is fine. It's, it's like people like, whoa, where'd it go? Does anybody actually think Teller can walk through a brick wall? No. Does anybody think Copperfield is actually moving the atoms of the Statue of Liberty?

• 2:28:19Jesse Michels?

  In an extremely like unlikely instance of, you know, electron coherence, where you don't get electron repulsion.

• 2:28:25Speaker 03

  These are magicians. They're not doing it.

• 2:28:27Jesse Michels?

  No, but this is my point. Cause you, what would you say quantum mechanics is fake? No, it's real, right? But it's, but it implies that all subatomic particles are probabilistic in nature.

• 2:28:37Speaker 03

  Yes, but, but like this table is solid, even though the atoms that it's made out of are mostly empty space.

• 2:28:43Jesse Michels?

  But what are, what is an atom?

• 2:28:44Speaker 03

  The jiggle in of the atoms makes it, it's solid.

• 2:28:46Jesse Michels?

  But they, these are all just placeholder names.

• 2:28:48Speaker 03

  But Jesse, you know, the, the, the movie and book, The Men Who Stare at Coats, right?

• 2:28:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:53Speaker 03

  So General.

• 2:28:53Jesse Michels?

  I interviewed the, the guy who was the basis of that character.

• 2:28:56Speaker 03

  Oh, you did? Oh, you did? A stubble bind that, that guy or the other one?

• 2:28:58Jesse Michels?

  No. So, so not General Stubblebine, who's head of Army NSCOM, but, um, uh, Carrie Cassidy is based on a guy named Lynn Buchanan, who's a famous kind of Army psychic spy, remote viewer. And I, I just interviewed him.

• 2:29:10Speaker 03

  Well, in the movie, they show him, I'm going to run through this wall now because it's mostly empty space. And he runs into the wall, splats back, because of course, there really is a reality. Well, you cannot walk through walls. It doesn't matter what the quantum physics says, you can't do it.

• 2:29:23Jesse Michels?

  I'm not going to die on that hill, but I'm just trying, I'm trying to, you know, imbue this conversation with a little epistemic humility on what we can say about, you know, reality itself. Ultimately, I do. I do want to, just going back to your story, the Phillips transistor radio.

• 2:29:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 2:29:36Jesse Michels?

  I want to quote you to you because you were, this is so eloquent and beautiful. You wrote in the Scientific American, "If we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive, we should not shut the doors of perception," quoting Aldous Huxley, or William Blake, actually, originally, "when they may be open to us to marvel in the mysterious." That is so beautiful.

• 2:30:00Speaker 03

  I wrote that?

• 2:30:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, you did. I think you're, I think you're running from your shadow. You're a secret mystic. Do you, do you want to have a mystical experience?

• 2:30:08Speaker 03

  Okay, all right. Yes, that could be. I, I meant that. I do, I do, I do believe that. I do, I do try to keep an open mind. I'm not as dogmatic. I'm not like one of the angry atheists, the new atheists. I'm not like these hardcore materialists that say, never, ever, ever, ever, just in case, right?

• 2:30:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:26Speaker 03

  I think a lot of things can be explained, but not everything.

• 2:30:29Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:30:29Speaker 03

  All right. So there's always these anomalies. I'll read you, I'll read you two examples.

• 2:30:32Jesse Michels?

  Okay, let's do it. And that's why I enjoy talking to you about it.

• 2:30:35Speaker 03

  These are coincidences, right?

• 2:30:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:37Speaker 03

  So here I'm discussing statisticians Percy Dianikonis and Frederick Muller about coincidences. So here's an example from the skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner. "One day, Martin was perusing a used bookstore when he came across a familiar title. His father had given him a copy of that book when he was a child, but he had lost it during a move many years later, uh, many years prior. As he considered purchasing this replacement copy, Gardner flipped through the pages and found his own handwritten notes in the margins. It was the very book Gardner had lost." Okay, this is even spookier. Coincidence that happened to the actor Anthony Hopkins, who in 1972 was signed to star in the film adaptation of George Pfeiffer's novel, The Girl from Petrovka.

• 2:31:22Speaker 03

  Hopkins went to several London booksellers to purchase a copy, but none had it in stock. Heading for home, he chanced upon a book on a bench at the Leicester Square Tube Station. Unbelievably, it was The Girl from Petrovka. Two years later, when Hopkins met Pfeiffer and mentioned the coincidence to him, the author noted that he had lent his last copy to a friend with handwritten edits in it for the American edition, changing labor, L A B O U R to labor, the American spelling. For example, when Hopkins flipped open his copy, he saw Pfeiffer's annotations. It was the very same book.

• 2:31:54Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 2:31:54Speaker 03

  Okay, that's pretty spooky. All right. So then I discuss, well, it could be this, could be that. I mean, how come he didn't find a copy of Silence of the Lambs, you know, or something like that? We remember the hits, we forget the misses and so on. But there's enough weird stuff like that. And again, I've received hundreds of stories. And I mentioned Jeffrey Kripal and Chuck Belair collections as well. There's thousands of these. So just in case, you know, there's a lot we don't know. You know, the consciousness problem is one, the God issue, you know, that you mentioned, fine tuning. We have explanations for that, but they're not great. The multiverse is not.

• 2:32:32Jesse Michels?

  It's not great. It's unfalsifiable.

• 2:32:34Speaker 03

  It's kind of science fictiony, sort of metaphysics, you know, string theory. Even Avi goes, ah, string theory is a bunch of nonsense. Well, okay, now it's not my fields is like, whoa, okay, no one seems to vibe this anymore. So what happened? This was the big explanation. Okay. You know, Martin Rees wrote that book, Six, Just Six Numbers about fine tuning, but he doesn't believe in God. So, but he doesn't, he doesn't have a final answer either. Why is the universe this way? So I think these are, these are what I call known, maybe unknowables. Okay, we're coming at it the wrong way. We're asking the wrong questions. Like the consciousness problem, you know, what's it like to be something is what the hard problem people talk about. What's it like to be, I think that's the wrong question.

• 2:33:15Speaker 03

  I can't know what it's like to be a bat or a dolphin or my dog or you, right? I could just, and the implication in this question is that the little homunculus in my mind can jump out and go over to your head and look inside and see if the red looks like to you, what it looks like to me and go, oh, Jesse's red looks like my red. This is not possible. You know, I have to make assumptions. So all the stuff you're talking about, like, you know, consciousness or these things happen. Okay, it could be, there's a lot we don't know.

• 2:33:42Jesse Michels?

  But there's, and there's so much we don't know about. Consciousness. I mean, the government for decades has spent money on remote viewing and taken it very seriously.

• 2:33:50Speaker 03

  Viewing, yes, I know. Again, this is one of those areas.

• 2:33:53Jesse Michels?

  A real modality. You know, they gave another past interviewee of mine is Joseph McMonigal.

• 2:33:59Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:33:59Jesse Michels?

  Who was given the Legion of Merit for helping, you know, aid and intelligence collection and all sorts of, you know, you have Jimmy Carter on record in 1976 saying, the craziest thing I ever experienced in my presidency is a woman named Rosemary Clooney, who was a psychic spy, a remote viewer. They were looking for a downed TU-22 Russian cargo plane and Africa was the entire target that they gave these psychic spies.

• 2:34:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:24Jesse Michels?

  And Rosemary Clooney circled a three square mile radius in Zaire and they found this plane under the treetops there.

• 2:34:33Speaker 03

  Okay. So here's the, here's the counterfactual to that. Okay. So during the CIA program, Stargate, where they were using the remote viewers. So yes, they got some hits. But what else would be true if they could really do this? Like, you know, where were the Russian missile sites? You know, where was, I don't know, Osama bin Laden? That's probably too late for that program.

• 2:34:55Jesse Michels?

  But A, how do we know that remote viewing wasn't used in certain instances?

• 2:35:00Speaker 03

  You know, we don't know about the hits.

• 2:35:02Jesse Michels?

  We might not know.

• 2:35:03Speaker 03

  That's possible.

• 2:35:04Jesse Michels?

  And then B, there was actually a meta-study done by Jessica Utz, who was president of the American Statistical Association and a fellow skeptic, Ray Hyman.

• 2:35:12Speaker 03

  Yes. And Ray Hyman did not agree with her on that, though, if I recall.

• 2:35:15Jesse Michels?

  Well, he agreed that it was statistically significant that, and then, and then, and then he was like, but I think we'll have to, this will get explained down the line, which Carl Popper, a great philosopher of scientists, he would call that materialist promissory notes. He would say that that is, that is, you know, taking out debt on materialism and assuming it'll, it'll stand up.

• 2:35:35Speaker 03

  Ray's pretty good at these things, though.

• 2:35:37Jesse Michels?

  But he admitted it was statistically significant.

• 2:35:39Speaker 03

  Jessica Utz and him, and also Richard Wiseman, the psychologist from England, he, he's also disputed her and, what's his name? The people that stare at the back of your neck, Rupert Sheldrake.

• 2:35:51Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:35:51Speaker 03

  Um, so like Rupert Sheldrake has this whole theory about, you know, perception is your eyes sending stuff out and it tickles the back of your neck if I'm staring at you and you pick that up.

• 2:36:01Jesse Michels?

  Scope esthia.

• 2:36:02Speaker 03

  Or the dog, your, your dog knows when you're coming home and you're miles away at work or whatever. Okay. So he has all these stories and books about it and experiments he's run. So Richard Wiseman tried to conduct the exact same experiments with the dog and he's published these and he gets no results. Okay. And then Jessica comes in and it's like, well, this or that problem with the methodology, it gets complicated. And so, you know, Rupert has gone, it's a skeptic effect, you know, the skeptical, uh, energy interferes with the very weak power of the, of the psychic, whatever. Okay. So here's my problem with all this is that so many of these things are not replicated. So we know that in psychology, probably half of all studies ever published should never have been published. This is the replication crisis.

• 2:36:43Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:36:44Speaker 03

  This is very disturbing and worse than psychology and, and, and medical research. These studies are so complicated and so expensive to run that they pet, a lot of things passed peer review that probably should have never passed, or they were pee hacking or whatever. So ever since, um, the replication crisis started in 2010 with Daryl Bem's research on the backward causality. That's how it began. And, uh, so if for your viewers don't know this story, cause I would always be asked, what would it take for you to believe in psychic ESP, psychic power, whatever it's like, well, how about a real scientist at a real university that conducts a real experiment and publishes in a real peer reviewed.

• 2:37:20Jesse Michels?

  But that's happened.

• 2:37:21Speaker 03

  Journal. And that happened.

• 2:37:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:22Speaker 03

  Okay. Ben did this. Okay. Not very many, this hasn't happened very often.

• 2:37:25Jesse Michels?

  But this, in the psychic context, that's happened.

• 2:37:28Speaker 03

  Well, they're, but they're psychic journals, but this is a mainstream journal. He published, this is in social and personality psychology, which is like the top journal in, in psychology. He's at, uh, Cornell University. He's the great Daryl Bem that has a stellar record. So he sets up subjects in front of a screen and on the screen, you have to take, take a pick and you press one key or the other key. Will the, will the image come up on the left screen or the right screen? So one image is a emotionally neutral image. The other one is, is an emotionally arousing image, like a, like a pornographic type image. And so the subjects guess which one it's going to be. Okay. It should be 50 50 is your prediction. All right. So it comes out statistically not statistically significant that they did

• 2:38:10Speaker 03

  it above chance. Okay. That was his finding before the computer decided with this random number generator, which side of the screen the image would appear on. Okay, that's the key. So this was what he called backward causality. They knew before the computer even decided which side left or right that the image was going to come on. All right. So that was a big story. It got a lot of media attention. Daryl Bem went on Colbert Report and told this story and they famously, he famously joked it's, you know, extrasensory porinception, right? And I remember thinking, okay, backward causality, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, there's an arrow of time. What are the chances that a

• 2:38:50Speaker 03

  social psychologist has overturned 400 years of physics by showing pornography to college students in a lab? Come on. And so Ray Hyman famously went through the whole paper and then the journal also published a critique by somebody else, not Hyman, somebody else. This is the methodological problems with the study. No one was able to replicate it. Richard Wiseman and Stuart Ritchie replicated the exact experiment and got null results, sent those results, their paper to the same journal who rejected it that said, we're not interested in null results. Another problem with psychology, null results are important, right?

• 2:39:26Jesse Michels?

  They are, of course. And I think we're in the stone age on whatever is going on with extrasensory perception. So I think there are very weak effects beyond the standard deviation as shown by this, you know, statistical analysis of the Stargate program and, you know, these, the Gansfield method that Ray Hyman and Jessica Utz actually looked at. But you look at the Princeton, you know, engineering and anomalous research lab, which was started by Bob John, who was the dean of the engineering school. You look at what Stanford Research Institute was looking at and you, just the very fact that the US government is willing to pay for this year over year, even despite the optical scrutiny of remote viewing seen as sort of this super quacky thing. I think-

• 2:40:10Speaker 03

  Well, the government's done a lot of programs like that. MKUltra came out of the fear that we're losing the race to the Russians on mind control, Russians, Chinese and-

• 2:40:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And it was, and it was a vital program that's now being investigated by Congress.

• 2:40:22Speaker 03

  It turns out you can't control people's minds. You can't create a killer like that. It doesn't, there's no drug-

• 2:40:26Jesse Michels?

  How do you know that?

• 2:40:27Speaker 03

  Oh, there's tons of research cognitive psychology now that can you actually control people like this? And the answer is no, you can't. There's no magic drug. There's no hypnotic formula you can use to make people like kill the president or whatever.

• 2:40:39Jesse Michels?

  How do you know that?

• 2:40:40Speaker 03

  Well, the research shows you can't do it.

• 2:40:42Jesse Michels?

  I don't know if that's right.

• 2:40:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now, you could do it by, say, more globally, like, like religion. Take nine eleven. How can we get, okay, how can we, you know, send, design these missiles to take down the World Trade Center building? You know, it's really expensive. It's hard to do and so on. I know. Let's just get some guys to fly some, take over some planes and fly them in there. How do we do that? We promised them an afterlife. So religion can do this, right? That's a kind of programming that probably doesn't work for most people, but it works for some.

• 2:41:11Jesse Michels?

  Right. But I'm just, I'm trying to make a larger point, which is that science needs to be perfectly repeatable and it needs to be able to be turned into math. And that's really our criteria for calling something science. Something could be phenomenologically very real, show weak effects, and we can't perfectly manipulate it in a lab setting over, you know, over and over again.

• 2:41:33Speaker 03

  That could be a problem, yes.

• 2:41:34Jesse Michels?

  And so, and so, science has this very limited criteria, and I would, I would put ESP in that bucket.

• 2:41:39Speaker 03

  It could be.

• 2:41:39Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:41:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it could be. I mean, there are limitations to science for sure. Um, I mean, there's a lot of progress, a lot of good stuff we've done, a lot of things we don't know. Again, these known unknowables, I think.

• 2:41:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:49Speaker 03

  Free will and determinism.

• 2:41:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:51Speaker 03

  Consciousness, God's existence, why there's something rather than nothing, the fine tuning of the universe. These are all really hard problems I talk about in the book that, you know, that we may not solve them the way we're going. This is why I wouldn't mind being chronically frozen and brought back 500 years from now going, "Oh, so that's what dark matter is. I see. Okay. That was obvious." You know, something like that. Much like if you and I could imagine traveling back to the Middle Ages before Newton and Galileo and all that and go, "Wow, these people think completely differently than us."

• 2:42:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:21Speaker 03

  Totally different worldview.

• 2:42:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:23Speaker 03

  I can't help but thinking, what if I live 500 years from now? It's like, oh, Einstein was interesting, but he completely missed whatever. Well, it would be quantum physics, I guess, but whatever comes after that.

• 2:42:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:34Speaker 03

  Right, that we, we're not thinking of.

• 2:42:35Jesse Michels?

  Totally. No, I, well, I, I think that's important to, to say, and Another place I would, I would, I don't want to say challenge you, but I'm curious what you would say here. Historically, present day heretics get vindicated as, you know, future pioneers.

• 2:42:53Speaker 03

  Most don't. Okay, most, the fringe challenged heretic people, they're wrong.

• 2:42:58Jesse Michels?

  Most, that's correct. We have survivorship bias.

• 2:43:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:01Jesse Michels?

  But many people who have contributed to scientists, to science, were considered heretics in their time.

• 2:43:07Speaker 03

  It depends.

• 2:43:08Jesse Michels?

  Anti-establishment thinkers.

• 2:43:09Speaker 03

  Like Einstein, yeah, he worked at a patent office, general relativity, all this stuff. But he went and got a PhD at a normal university, published in peer review journals, he knew all the top physicists. He was an insider.

• 2:43:21Jesse Michels?

  But, but.

• 2:43:22Speaker 03

  He wasn't just some fluke.

• 2:43:23Jesse Michels?

  Relativity was seen as a total novel curiosity. It was completely marginalized until the 50s in the golden age of relativity.

• 2:43:30Speaker 03

  No, I'll tell you when it happened. It happened in 20, uh, sorry, in 1919 with Sir Arthur Stanley, Stanley Eddington led the expedition for the solar eclipse test of the bending of the starlight around the sun from this distant stars, which you can't see during the day, but during eclipse, you can see the stars, take a photograph of them, compare it to the photographs taken at night, and you can see they bent just the exact amount that Einstein said they would be bent because it's not gravity pulling the light, it's the bending of this.

• 2:43:59Jesse Michels?

  That's experimental proof of the theory. I don't, I think it was still.

• 2:44:02Speaker 03

  Well, there's a, there's a New York Times headline, "The, uh, the, the universe's light is all askew. Einstein discovers," whatever. It's, so he became famous after 1919.

• 2:44:13Jesse Michels?

  But it was not canonical physics like quantum mechanics was, which he was also contributing to.

• 2:44:18Speaker 03

  Well, but he didn't, so he became a bit of a, a, a, a grumpy old man and, and had a hard time accepting spooky action in a distance.

• 2:44:27Jesse Michels?

  Can I, can I give you another example? Marconi flunked out of all of his classes and he tried to send a radio signal across the Atlantic and, uh, he thought that, that maybe, uh, radio signals bent and curved with the earth and he was totally wrong, but he tried anyways. And, and in fact, uh, the radio signal bounced off the ionosphere and it worked. So he was, he was. Right because he was wrong. And like, I can't tell you how much of, you know, like Eric Weinstein, my former colleague, you know, he would call it like cowboy science. Where like, you're, you're going out on a limb and you're trying a thing and maybe even for the wrong reasons and then you get it right. And so.

• 2:45:07Speaker 03

  Okay, but at some point, you know, he's right because it works.

• 2:45:11Jesse Michels?

  But is.

• 2:45:11Speaker 03

  We have experimental proof.

• 2:45:12Jesse Michels?

  Is it.

• 2:45:13Speaker 03

  Market proof.

• 2:45:14Jesse Michels?

  Is there one non-consensus thinker now that you would get behind?

• 2:45:18Speaker 03

  I don't know, because if I knew, I would get behind him.

• 2:45:21Jesse Michels?

  But it's important to do that work, right? To take bets on.

• 2:45:25Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 2:45:26Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:45:26Speaker 03

  Okay, so I'm in favor of, you know, the Graham Hancock's of the world going on Rogan and telling their story. I think this is great.

• 2:45:33Jesse Michels?

  Okay, good.

• 2:45:34Speaker 03

  Totally fine. I mean, Joe talks to all these people.

• 2:45:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:36Speaker 03

  I've been on there seven times and, um, you know, going, here's my opinion and he doesn't agree with me, whatever, fine, that's fine. Let everybody have their say. I mean, I watched, uh, Robert Malone on his show. It's like, all right, I'm not really vibing this, but you know, okay, I'll listen to it. I'll go look it up myself. I don't like these people to go, he, Rogan shouldn't platform these people. Why?

• 2:45:54Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:55Speaker 03

  I mean, it's kind of condescending, like you're too dumb to go look it up yourself? Really? I mean, come on, right? Nothing wrong with that. So, and, and, and Graham has gotten the attention of archaeologists who have now responded. Okay, good. Right? That's good that they're doing that. This is how we make progress. So I, I, I'm in favor of that.

• 2:46:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, so you're pro Socratic method.

• 2:46:12Speaker 03

  Now, part of the problem in science is that, is, is just a practical one. Most scientists don't have time to deal with, you know, the challenges, like the archaeologists are busy working and reviewing papers and teaching classes and getting grants and like, well, here's this Graham Hancock guy, he's like, I don't have time. I get that, right? It's like, but that's what we're for. It's, we deal with that. Skeptic Magazine deals with that, right? Uh, or you mentioned Eric Weinstein. Okay, I, I love Eric. Um, you know, but, but a number of physicists have said, all right, show us, publish it in a journal, come to our conference and so on. And he doesn't do it. So to me, that says, okay, there's something off here. You can't, you don't get to do an end run and go to the front of the line and skip all the steps that everybody else has to go through.

• 2:46:57Speaker 03

  You've got to present it. Here's the, here's my theory. Here's my evidence. Now, what do you think?

• 2:47:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but like the politics of academia, like if I tried to write, I was some garden variety professor, and I tried to write a paper about a UFO crash, I'd be laughed out of the room. That's starting to change, but there's still real stigma attached to it.

• 2:47:17Speaker 03

  Okay, okay, I will admit it's a, so Avi's talked about this, like he wrote a paper about 3A Atlas. And, you know, it's probably a comment, it's a comment, comment, comment, comment, comment, but, but it has these weird anomalies. So last paragraph, let's not rule out the possibility it could be an extraterrestrial light sail or spaceship, whatever he called it. And so he said, he was telling this on a Zoom meeting, the journal editor goes, okay, this is a great paper, but you have to take out the final paragraph. He goes, well, that's, that's not science. I mean, the whole point is like, here's what we know. Here's the methods and so on. Here's our final speculation. That's okay. Cause what if that's the right one? Right? So I don't like that. I admit that that does happen. The other problem with peer review, again, time, you know, a lot

• 2:48:01Speaker 03

  of papers get pushed through because they're not really read. And I know this, I get sent papers for review for, most of them I don't do because I don't have the time. The fewer I review, it's like, damn, this is taking me hours to read this. And here's all these statistics and like, geez, if I really run through this, I mean, it's been like two days on this. I don't have time for this. And, and so you're tempted to just go, oh, it looks good to me. And then so stuff gets through and I'm sure this happens. I'm absolutely sure. And, and here's another complaint. So these peer reviewed articles are, are blinded. You don't know who the author is. You just flip to the references and you can see exactly who the author is. There's like 27 citations on one name. It's like, that's the guy.

• 2:48:44Speaker 03

  It's like, this is not right either, right? You'd have to leave off the references. There's, you know, and the P hacking and all that stuff and the file drawer problem. You know, some of that's, so now you're supposed to post what you're going to do ahead of time on these sites. Avi does this, uh, which is good. You know, the, these are all the things I'm going to do and I'm going to report all of them and you can see what happens.

• 2:49:05Jesse Michels?

  I think, uh, prediction markets would be a really interesting use for, uh, you know, some of these like nature of reality truths. Like, oh, you believe in it? Okay, bet on it. And this is based on actually the work of, there's this guy Philip Tetlock, he wrote a book called Superforecasting. And it was all about how, you know, if you predict a thing and you put skin in the game, you're, this is Nassim Taleb 101 as well. You're more likely to make money, you know, to be right rather than one of these sort of armchair pundits that's like wrong all the time, you know?

• 2:49:34Speaker 03

  I have a discussion of this in, in my book because the prediction market people, the super forecasters, uh, Phil calls them, they're more Bayesian. They're like, instead of a pundit on Fox News going, I think Putin's going to invade, or I don't think he's going to invade, or whatever. And no one, like a week later goes, well, he invaded and you said he wouldn't. No one fact checks them and go, you lost, you lost your money, right? But if you go, okay, now you have to place a bet. All right, now, how often does Putin actually do these things? Or what is the base rate of terrorists? Like, when's the next terrorist attack going to happen in Gaza or whatever, Israel? You know, well, there's prediction markets. So the, the guys that make money are Bayesian. They're like, okay, how often does Hamas actually attack? What's the base rate? And then are there any tensions now? And then they put probabilities on it and then they place their bets.

• 2:50:19Speaker 03

  That's the value of prediction markets.

• 2:50:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:21Speaker 03

  What I don't like about them is now is the insider stuff is a little like, okay, you know, you knew this was going to happen because you're part of it.

• 2:50:27Jesse Michels?

  Totally. You get, you know, government actors betting on, you know,

• 2:50:32Speaker 03

  Wars.

• 2:50:32Jesse Michels?

  Wars and that sort of thing. And that's totally, you know, it's what Nancy Pelosi seems like she's been doing for the last couple of decades, but uh,

• 2:50:39Speaker 03

  I want her investment program.

• 2:50:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:50:41Speaker 03

  Inside joke.

• 2:50:42Jesse Michels?

  Track her portfolio. You looked into the Virginia UFO crash of 1996?

• 2:50:48Speaker 03

  A little bit. I mean, I only mostly know through James Fox's, uh, work, again, eyewitnesses and so on. On maybe.

• 2:50:54Jesse Michels?

  Fifteen to twenty witnesses who were alive.

• 2:50:56Speaker 03

  I know. Yeah, I know. Same thing with um, um, the um, what you call it? Uh, the miracle of Fatima. You know, there was fifty thousand people, seventy thousand, or whatever it was.

• 2:51:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, but in this case.

• 2:51:06Speaker 03

  Saw this. Okay, so what is it they're seeing? That's the question. They're not hallucinating. Okay, fine.

• 2:51:10Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:51:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:51:11Jesse Michels?

  But they saw in fifteen to twenty people, they've triangulated the flight path of this Tic Tac UFO, which had seemingly like steam coming out of the back, because it maybe it had been punctured in some way. It crashes on the Mileylini farm. This ultralight pilot and geography teacher Carlos de Souza finds it. He picks up part of the material. This whole military crew comes from the ESA base, which is right nearby. They confiscate the material from him. And uh, and then you have a being coming out of this craft. It's seen all over the the city. These three little girls at the time, now they're women, all testified to having seen this being. It's it's kind of curled up in a ball and it's it seems scared.

• 2:51:52Jesse Michels?

  And it has red big eyes. And then you go to this specific hospital, the Regional Hospital, and you you can literally walk in there today. And he goes, this the hospital that where they treated the ET? They go, yeah, this is the hospital. And their chief neurosurgeon, a guy named Italo Ventorelli, says that he was face to face with the being for four minutes. And he oversaw the work of this other guy, Marcos Benitez, who like helped the being with a puncture wound. And then you have all sorts of evidence that the being was carted off and taken to the US. And I just interviewed a former defense minister and a current presidential candidate, a guy named Aldo Rebelo. And he was like, yeah, this happened. You said that fundamentally, you do think something happened in Virginia in nineteen ninety six.

• 2:52:35Speaker 05

  Believing that a phenomenon like this exists, of course, because these were phenomena that had the testimony of totally credible witnesses.

• 2:52:49Jesse Michels?

  So I'm like, what else do you do you need? Again, if this were a criminal case, which takes eyewitness, you know, testimony into account.

• 2:52:56Speaker 03

  What is the it? Okay, so something happened clearly.

• 2:52:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:59Speaker 03

  Question is, what is it?

• 2:53:00Jesse Michels?

  But the.

• 2:53:00Speaker 03

  Now, does and if it was true, what else would be true? What does the government say? That they think it was.

• 2:53:05Jesse Michels?

  He thinks that he thinks it's akin to what happened at Roswell and this is Aldo Rabello. And Carlos de Souza, in feeling the material, said that it was very light. And when he would move it around with his hands, it would and perturb it. It would go back into its original shape, very similar to the testimony of Army Intelligence Officer Jesse Marcel at Roswell.

• 2:53:26Speaker 03

  Mean like cellophane does.

• 2:53:28Jesse Michels?

  Like cellophane?

• 2:53:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, you crush it up and it unravels back to solid. Maybe it's not cellophane.

• 2:53:34Jesse Michels?

  Nitinol. Maybe that's. Nitinol or nitinol.

• 2:53:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, whatever that that stuff. Anyway, well, I don't know, Jesse. I mean, again, these are, these are good things that would be good to know what actually happened. How can we get more information? Again, we don't have the body. We don't have the spaceship. We don't have photos, videos. And then the question is, why would the CIA want to hide that body? Why not just show everybody go aliens are here? We need to double our budget because we're going to protect you all.

• 2:54:00Jesse Michels?

  For, for, for the reasons outlined in the Robertson memo, you know, they would, they would touch off mass hysteria. Hal Putoff.

• 2:54:07Speaker 03

  I don't think it would touch on. Why, why do people think that?

• 2:54:09Jesse Michels?

  I agree with you. I'm just saying, if you have this old school mentality, do you know who Hal Putoff is by any chance?

• 2:54:14Speaker 03

  Of course, yes.

• 2:54:15Jesse Michels?

  Famous scientist and UFO space, but also in sensitive kind of military world. And he says that he, along with Stephen Hadley, who is a national security advisor of George W. Bush. They did this whole kind of, you know, review panel of like, what does disclosure look like? And they were all, they all came in pro disclosure and they waited, you know, everything from economic destabilization to sociological or religious destabilization. And they came out of it being like, disclosure is not worth it. Again, I wouldn't make that call. I think it should all be out.

• 2:54:48Speaker 03

  Let it all out. Yeah.

• 2:54:49Jesse Michels?

  But do you, do you think that maybe that's been the case?

• 2:54:51Speaker 03

  I mean, I do think governments overcorrect on the security and secrecy and classification. We, they do do that. There's a lot of stuff they don't need to block out. You know, especially old stuff. I mean, come on, the Soviet Union's been dead since 1991. You know, it's time. What happened in 1947? I mean, who cares? They just show us, right? That's, yeah. Well, I'm hoping again, part of the UAP Science Advisory Committee, that someone like an Avi Loeb with connections to people in the government, which he does, they really admire him. And like, okay, we're going to show Avi what happened, I'm hoping.

• 2:55:27Jesse Michels?

  I hope so too, and I hope you get access to the goods. Well, how do you think you'd react if you were taken into a hangar?

• 2:55:33Speaker 03

  Oh, I would be, I would be totally, I would love it. It'd be amazing.

• 2:55:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:36Speaker 03

  I would love that.

• 2:55:37Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:55:38Speaker 03

  But, but again, I mean, you know, my, I'm of an age when, when Sagan was, you know, ahead of me by 15, 20 years or so on this whole thing. And it's like, I love this. The aliens are out there. I'm terrible waste of space if we were the only ones. I mean, let's go looking and so on. Absolutely. I mean, I think they're out there. If they came here, even, even more amazing.

• 2:55:58Jesse Michels?

  Sagan's interesting because he wrote The Demon Haunted World and obviously was-

• 2:56:01Speaker 03

  Good skeptic book, yep.

• 2:56:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, as a fan of weeding out bad ideas. I remember Richard Dawkins blurb that book. But in other ways, he seems kind of privately interested in UFOs and aliens.

• 2:56:13Speaker 03

  Oh, he is, yes. Although he hasn't covered anything. That was a myth. There was a story about him saying, I think aliens are real and that, that this was redacted or something. So I checked with his, his widow, Annie, who's a friend. She goes, that never happened. That's one of those bullshit, like death, deathbed confessions. I, I believe in God now. Yeah, it never happened.

• 2:56:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:32Speaker 03

  Hitch, Hitch always said, if, if anybody tells you I said at the last moment, I believe in God, don't believe him. I'm never gonna say that.

• 2:56:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he held high clearances, you know, he, you know, he was involved in this 1958 project called A119, where we were gonna nuke the moon as a show of force against the Soviets.

• 2:56:49Speaker 03

  I don't remember that.

• 2:56:50Jesse Michels?

  It's fascinating.

• 2:56:51Speaker 03

  Is that in the bios? I don't remember that.

• 2:56:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:53Speaker 03

  Okay, all right. I must've forgot that. Okay, yeah. Yes, I know. Well, I mean, he was a major insider. He, you know, got the Voyager, um, you know, the record thing he worked on, turned the Voyager around, take a picture of Earth. I mean, he made all that happen.

• 2:57:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:05Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a fascinating story. The audio version of their 1977 book about the Voyager record, uh, 79, I guess it was published about him and Annie and, um, a few of the others that worked on it. It's really quite a slice of history because like this is what they thought in 1979. This is what we were thinking about the universe and aliens and music and like, which music do you pick to put on the record? My favorite story of that was somebody said, well, we gotta put Bach on the record. And somebody said, that would just be bragging. Too good.

• 2:57:37Jesse Michels?

  That's fine.

• 2:57:38Speaker 03

  I thought that was funny, but uh, but yeah, I mean, the chances of the Voyager encounter anything? Pretty much nil, but you never know. So it's but uh, but just in case, but also it's a slice of what we cared about, what we think is important about us.

• 2:57:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:52Speaker 03

  For other people to know, even if no one ever finds out, it's a, it's kind of a, a, a look into what we think is important. Art, music, language, what people look like, that kind of thing.

• 2:58:03Jesse Michels?

  Well, I'm excited you're on this panel. I think you're going to serve a very important purpose. And if anything, I want you to debunk harder. And what I mean by that is I feel like often our conversations are like, Michael, here's this data set. And you're like, yeah, but the data set is probably happenstance for all these, you know, kind of high level heuristic reasons. I want you to debunk the isolated specific cases and be like, actually, here's a conventional prosaic explanation because otherwise we just have so much evidence sitting there in this liminal space. And I'm with you. I don't want to kind of preemptively pre-crystallize or snap to grid some conclusion. I don't know. Space aliens, I'm not sure, but like, is reality much weirder than we think? I'm pretty high conviction in that.

• 2:58:49Speaker 03

  I think I would agree with that. I think there's a lot we don't know about the physical world. Even these quantum effects, all the spooky action of distance stuff. You know, they, they pro- the hard problem of consciousness, you know, Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose theory about the collapsing wave function inside the microtubules of the neurons. Okay. I don't really buy this, but it's an interesting story because if it turned out to be true, then that would not be paranormal ESP psychic. That would just be like quantum neuroscience or something to be part of science.

• 2:59:21Jesse Michels?

  And there are physicalist models around remote viewing where maybe, you know, in certain quantum interpretations, you have obviously have temporal non-locality with double slit experiments.

• 2:59:30Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 2:59:30Jesse Michels?

  You can reverse qubit positions in quantum computations. So in a working quantum computer, you'd be able to send information back in time on the application layer. So if there was some sort of, you know, room temperature quantum system in the brain, ala Penrose and Hameroff, then you could maybe access your future knowledge. State. So if you were given confirmatory feedback on a remote viewing session, that would be a physicalist, materialist, reductionist explanation of remote viewing. You know, that would fully comport with possible interpretations of physics.

• 3:00:00Speaker 03

  If that happened, then it would be. So this is my point. If it became part of science. So the words paranormal and supernatural, they're just linguistic placeholders. There's no such thing. There's just reality. And if it turns out people can read each other's minds at the backs of playing cards or remote view due to these quantum effects, okay, then that's just part of the world.

• 3:00:20Jesse Michels?

  It's super normal, not paranormal.

• 3:00:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, super normal or yeah, like really cool or something like that.

• 3:00:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Well, I love it and I hope we can, I hope we can make a lot of progress on this and I'm really excited to see what you do on the White House Advisory Panel.

• 3:00:33Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. I'll do my best.

• 3:00:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I think I'm excited. You know, just the fact that this exists, I think is a really cool stamp of approval for the, for the space. And yeah, hopefully we can do this again because I always enjoy my conversations.

• 3:00:47Speaker 03

  If nothing else, it could expose how much governments keep secrets, which is also interesting for conspiracy studies. Like, like, do they really lie? Yeah, they really do. Right? I used to make a joke about this, like, you know, crazy conspiracy theories, like we never landed on the moon, the earth is flat, 9/11 is an inside job and this rich guy has this island where he's bringing rich and powerful people to have sex with. Oh, wait. That one's real.

• 3:01:13Jesse Michels?

  Exactly.

• 3:01:13Speaker 03

  Because, you know, Rogan was talking about that way before any of this stuff came out.

• 3:01:16Jesse Michels?

  For sure.

• 3:01:17Speaker 03

  And it's like, oh, that one's real.

• 3:01:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And a good example there is you have pizza gate, which on the face of it looked totally ridiculous, but it was one step adjacent to the Epstein stuff.

• 3:01:29Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. Some of the rich guys taking the blood of adrenal.

• 3:01:34Jesse Michels?

  I think that was like Q and N and yeah. So, so all of these things, while maybe prima facie shouldn't be taken at face value and they were wrong, they were almost meant to pre-stigmatize against a real truth, a really dark truth. So.

• 3:01:49Speaker 03

  That's the problem with conspiracism is that conspiracy theorizing is that some conspiracies are true. They do happen.

• 3:01:55Jesse Michels?

  And I think being a, there's a, there's a healthy, efficient frontier of looking skeptically into conspiracies, which should everybody, be everybody's kind of a priori, you know, orientation. Cause I think if you, if you write it off and you say, oh, nothing to see here, cause it's called a conspiracy. There's a CIA memo from the seventies saying, we're going to popularize the term conspiracy to have people look away.

• 3:02:18Speaker 03

  I don't doubt that they do this. Let's feed the UFO people this and this will distract the American public for a while.

• 3:02:24Jesse Michels?

  And then there's the flood, then there's the opposite of the flood, the zone. Like you have these people, you know, coming out who are disinfo agents saying, oh yes, there, we have six different alien races and they're from these planets or whatever. And that's every podcaster's dream to have those people on, you know? So it's important, I think, to, to, to go into the conspiracies, but with your wits about you.

• 3:02:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. Our latest issue of Skeptic, we look into the, the whole social media model and podcasting and, and the kind of attention economy in which you get people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens saying just crazy stuff. And I can't tell that they believe this? Or are they just saying this because it draws attention? And here I am, watching it and writing about it. So I'm getting more attention. It's like, did I just fall for something?

• 3:03:09Jesse Michels?

  I think, look, I think, I'm sure they get a lot wrong. And then I think there's a general sense of being burned by the establishment institutions.

• 3:03:17Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 3:03:18Jesse Michels?

  And have we overcorrected? And, you know, is there, you know, blanket anger against like, you know, every institution, everybody with a third degree connection to like anybody who's done bad? Yeah, for sure. Podcasting is sloppy right now. And then, and then at the same time, I understand they're tapping into something very real, like an emotion on the part of the American people that they feel ripped off and burned. And clearly just, you know, ignore all the details. There was an extreme amount of undue leverage on the United States government by, you know, basically a pedophile who was running a ring.

• 3:03:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:03:55Jesse Michels?

  And so, you know, that, that's all you need to know, right? Like to be like angry and want investigation. And then, and then clearly, you know, people have been distracting systematically from that. And so like, if you agree with those two things, like, you know, I get it as far as, you know, that sort of sphere of podcasting world where they're, it's like, what else? What else are they lying to us about? I don't, you know, I don't know.

• 3:04:16Speaker 03

  I know, I know. Yes, well, so that's why I like independent journalism. You know, when something gets reported that I know a lot about, and I know they're getting it wrong. It's like, what else am I watching that I don't know anything about? This happened in Iran is like, well, maybe that didn't happen in Iran. Cause I know they got this one wrong, right? That happens like in the New York Times, the CBS, whatever, like, huh? So I do like having, you know, the independent journalists going, let's get lots of voices out there. And it gets time consuming sometimes, you know, it's like, okay, I have like 20 windows open. Like, I'd really like to read all these articles. I really should read all these. And it's like, okay, you can't do everything, right? So that's all, but I think it'll winnow, winnow down. I think it'll become obvious, these are the good places to go.

• 3:04:59Speaker 03

  You know, and try, you know, left wing, right wing, libertarian, green, whatever. Add them all up, divide by four, whatever.

• 3:05:07Jesse Michels?

  I love it. Exactly. Well, Michael, thank you for coming to my UFO.

• 3:05:13Speaker 03

  Oh, I love being here, by the way. This is, I feel like the Star Trek bridge here.

• 3:05:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's so fun. And, uh, no, this is a blast. I really appreciate it. And, uh, you know, I now know that you were, you're, you're on record, right? That aliens are real.

• 3:05:27Speaker 03

  Yes, that's it. Yeah, they're here. Yeah, yeah. I've been zapped by the, uh, the alien beam. Yeah, I know. I would love it. I mean, again, if I woke up and there's an afterlife, great. Okay, I'm not against that. I'm fair with that. You know, if there's aliens, I don't want to be alone in the universe.

• 3:05:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:42Speaker 03

  Okay, so let's do it.

• 3:05:43Jesse Michels?

  I think that the only guarantee about the future is that we're going to be surprised. And so I would say.

• 3:05:48Speaker 03

  That's a good way to put it.

• 3:05:49Jesse Michels?

  I would say, I would say all the memes we have in our head, all the expectations of quote unquote, alien life. It's probably going to be so much weirder than we than we ever expect. Whatever is coming around the bend.

• 3:06:01Speaker 03

  Well, this was to Sagan's credit, he didn't show the aliens in contact for a reason. Cause we actually don't know what they're going to look like. Right? I mean, I mean, how many bipedal primates are there on earth? You know, there's a four, four great ape, five great apes. That's it out of millions of species. So if we go to another planet, what are the chances they look anything like us? Probably not, they're going to be very different.

• 3:06:21Jesse Michels?

  Well, I think the gray alien thing is a real archetype. I think it's consistently seen.

• 3:06:25Speaker 03

  You do?

• 3:06:26Jesse Michels?

  And yeah.

• 3:06:26Speaker 03

  Bipedal.

• 3:06:27Jesse Michels?

  Well, that's the thing that I think points more towards something that's derivative of humans. If you're in North Sentinel Island, which is, you know, off the coast of India, it's completely uncontacted. You know, for centuries.

• 3:06:38Speaker 03

  All those guys.

• 3:06:39Jesse Michels?

  If, if, say they've had, you know, a couple of missionaries have shown up with bibles and stuff. And I think a couple of them shot down.

• 3:06:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:06:46Jesse Michels?

  But, you know, maybe these North Sentinel E's go back to the, you know, the inland tribes and they say, you know, we've seen aliens, they've, they've, they've attempted contact. Don't worry, we've, we've nullified the, you know, the threat or whatever. And so if you're seeing something that looks like you, you know, it's bipedal. There's this sort of morphological consistency and there's evolutionary convergence. You know, the likelihood is that it's, it's, it's actually sort of like, you know, derivative of you. And it's in your neighborhood and it's proximate to you. And so then you have to get into time travel. Obviously you have paradoxes there, but you have to get into other weirder explanations.

• 3:07:23Speaker 03

  Or another one, do you know Simon Conway Morris, the paleontologist who countered Steve Gould's contingency argument for the Burgess Shale on a larger scale convergent evolution? That there's only so many ways for organisms to be designed in a world. If you have air, you have to have something like wings. If you're in the water, you need something like fins and a fusiform body. And then like, so you should have like most of your sensory equipment and your brain on one end, your waste disposal system on the other end, you got to have some limbs to move around on the land. You might end up with like a bipedal dinosaur or whatever, right? It wouldn't look completely like. So I read his book and I had him on the show and I was like, yeah, that guy actually makes sense.

• 3:08:05Speaker 03

  So this is, this is good because instead of joking about aliens are not going to look like us. He's like, you don't know that.

• 3:08:11Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating.

• 3:08:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:08:12Jesse Michels?

  What's his name?

• 3:08:13Speaker 03

  Simon Conway Morris.

• 3:08:14Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 3:08:15Speaker 03

  So he's a paleontologist. I think he's at Oxford. And so when Steve Gould wrote his famous book, Wonderful Life, and he made his case for how contingent history is, which was a good correction, but he went too far. And Simon Conway Morris is like, you know, it's not all chance. You know, wings are going to look like wings because this is the environment they're in, right? And so most things converge to look certain ways for good reason. Like, oh yeah, that's a good point.

• 3:08:39Jesse Michels?

  Interesting. Well, I would love to talk to him. He sounds fascinating.

• 3:08:42Speaker 03

  Oh, he's great. Yeah, he's good.

• 3:08:43Jesse Michels?

  I do just think that radically different environments, right? Like, we have like a nitrogen-rich atmosphere. If you know, you end up with, you know, some other element that sort of dominates the atmosphere. You know, gravity is a little bit different. I would imagine morphologically, you end up with different, you know, patterns of life. I'm sure he has good counterarguments to that.

• 3:09:01Speaker 03

  So I'll put you in touch with him. Also, Charles Cockell at Oxford. He, he works on extraterrestrial liberty. So that's kind of his big thing. Like, if we set up a civilization on Mars, what should be the political system or the economic system? What if somebody takes control of the oxygen production? And then they monopolize it, you know? So then he starts thinking, what kind of laws do we need on Mars? And then you take that out to, you know, extraterrestrial civilization. Well, you know, what, what kind of system are they going to have? And, and then, and then different planets are going to have different kinds of bodies, right? Depending on the gravity. If you have gravity 10 times that of Earth, you can't have a giraffe. It's just, or the bones would be, you know, this thick, right? So anyway, I'll put you in touch with him, too. He's, these are super interesting questions.

• 3:09:43Jesse Michels?

  That would be awesome. But on the Conway example, you're kind of saying that, you know, maybe they are extraterrestrial. Maybe the grays are in fact.

• 3:09:51Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, that's, that's kind of the argument. That at least it's not completely crazy to think they could be something like bipedal. They're going to be primates, but something like, you got to have arms and legs to move around and manipulate tools. And you have two eyes and, you know, the, the brain is up here and, you know, so on, you end up kind of like this.

• 3:10:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. It's also interesting to think of like. Lower species, as far as, you know, they're less conscious than us, what they think of us. And whether they think certain things humans do are actually scientific laws. Versus, you know, agency versus humans. So I know you have agenticity, this idea that we impugn too much sort of agency when it comes to things. But are you familiar with the farmer and shooter analogy from the three body problem? Do you know about this?

• 3:10:39Speaker 03

  Which one is that?

• 3:10:40Jesse Michels?

  It's fascinating. So you have these like 2D people who are living on this like flat surface. And you have shooters in 3D world shooting at it. And every 10 centimeters, you get a little hole. And they think each hole is like a crater. It's this, but it's this sort of just consistent phenomena. It's like the weather or it's a natural geological formation that just shows up every 10 centimeters. And in fact, it's discretionary and it's because of these shots being taken.

• 3:11:08Speaker 03

  Really? That's a great example.

• 3:11:10Jesse Michels?

  It's a great example. Another great example thought experiment is you have turkeys that, you know, every day they're fed at 11 a.m. Every day they're fed at 11 a.m. This is sort of this David Hume style thing. So, you know, they're fed, they're fed, they're fed. And then one day their heads get chopped off. And this is an analogy for the Tricalarian aliens in the three body problem, which are, you know, coming to invade or whatever. But the point is, you know, you think of these things as patterns sometimes that are, you know, out of your control. But it's the opposite of agenticity. There is actually agency and discretion behind some of these things that you're observing.

• 3:11:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, that's Edwin Abbott's book, Flatland from the 1890s.

• 3:11:49Jesse Michels?

  Great book.

• 3:11:49Speaker 03

  So good. Yeah. You never know. I mean, I think that was also Sagan's point, you know, we're carbon chauvinists, he liked to say. You know, don't think carbon is the only way to structure a living organism.

• 3:11:58Jesse Michels?

  And he would talk all the time about tesseract and you know, platonic.

• 3:12:03Speaker 03

  You showed it. You showed it on your show.

• 3:12:04Jesse Michels?

  I've showed all the time. Yeah. He shows it to you. He goes, you can't see a tesseract. But you can just see the shadow. And so maybe some of these UFOs, because they actually seem to show holographic principle like features where, you know, about the holographic principle, of course, you just see the 2D boundary of a black hole, but it's obviously this larger 3D structure. So in this case, if you walk into the UFO and many of these reported instances, it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

• 3:12:31Speaker 03

  Yes, I've heard this.

• 3:12:32Jesse Michels?

  And so it could be this holographic principle like.

• 3:12:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it could be. Well, Fred Hoyle wrote that novel about a gaseous cloud in space thinking. You know, I mean, it's just particles that are interacting, right? Like these drones. Now, the jellyfish UAP looks to be a group of drones. The drones are interconnected, you know, Bluetooth or whatever, and they're coordinated. Well, why not coordinate molecules of gas or whatever, right? That was his idea. And then Ray Kurzweil, there's a scene in that film about Ray Kurzweil, where he's staring at the ocean, and he's like, what are you doing? What are you thinking? He goes, I'm thinking computation. All these little molecules, they could all be coordinated and computing and thinking. Don't think it's just neurons firing is the only way you can get consciousness, right?

• 3:13:18Jesse Michels?

  I think that's right. I think we assume it gets cut off, and we just, we don't know how consciousness works. There are all these things that, in nature, that could actually, you know, be not random. And I would just say also, like, yes, there are all sorts of mythologies that have led humans astray historically. But it's the epitome of human hubris to say that the Enlightenment is not another example of a mythology, right?

• 3:13:44Speaker 03

  Well, it's a story, but hopefully a story based in reality.

• 3:13:47Jesse Michels?

  It's a story. It's a story that involves an origin story, how things come into creation. It involves rituals and labs. You know, it's like all these things, and it's all, it's not immune to any of the, you know, consensus dynamics and herd-like thinking of any of the other mythologies.

• 3:14:02Speaker 03

  You know, Dan Dennis analogy with termites and thinking? So, in his book, Bacteria to Brains, he has pictures of these gigantic termite mounds in Australia. I mean, they're like 20, 30 feet tall, lots of complicated things. Do any of the termites that spit the little dirt out and build this thing, do they have any idea that they're building this tower? This looks like a skyscraper. No, they're just doing their little thing, right? But together, the whole collective builds this magnificent structure. He goes, that's what we're doing.

• 3:14:29Jesse Michels?

  You know, Joe Rogan talks about this all the time. He says, like, our need to consume things drives our need to make better and better things, incrementally better things. And it's like the Tower of Babel or something, where we're just trying to, we're creating this like cyber Sort of thing around us where our own consciousness is going to look fundamentally different in a hundred years. And this is not, you know, this is not normative statement for me because I think it's actually, you know, bad in many ways. Like I'm sort of more of like a primalist in this context, but there are people like Noah Yuval Harari, who like, you know, he's just, he's probably, and I don't love him on a lot of other things, but he's just right about this Homo Deus thing where we're, you know, we're probably going to

• 3:15:13Jesse Michels?

  end up merging with technology. We are, the history of computation is the history of a lower latency, higher bandwidth relationship with this stuff. And then all of a sudden, that's a new aperture through which we see everything. And then, and then what, what do you detect on the other side? Is there an intelligence, you know, non-human intelligence that you, that's maybe higher than us on the consciousness chain that you can then speak to? And have they been, you know, Allah cellular automata, have they been poking at us and messing with us in ways to get us to just meet them and be able to communicate with them? Who knows?

• 3:15:50Speaker 03

  There was this line asked, I think it was to Ray Kurzweil, you know, do you think there's a God? And he said, we're working on it.

• 3:15:57Jesse Michels?

  Ah, that's fascinating. Wow. Well,

• 3:16:01Speaker 03

  I mean, that's the singularity, right? I mean, everything changes and they become essentially omniscient.

• 3:16:06Jesse Michels?

  Right. But then that also feels really heretical. Like it should be, there should, there should be a God that created.

• 3:16:12Speaker 03

  He's been right by so many things. You have to take him seriously.

• 3:16:15Jesse Michels?

  He's also been wrong on a bunch of things too. And then he might be right on this again. But like, I don't know, I find that like, you know, the whole AI craze, it's like, I think this is a simulation from some higher sentience. And so why would you port yourself into a lower bit compressed, you know, simulation Allah artificial intelligence, if you can maybe ascend out of this one? And maybe, you know, commune with a real God, you know, why would you, why would you go into the tech thing? You know what I mean?

• 3:16:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There was a good Star Trek Next Generation episode about this where they, you know, the holodeck, they go in there and have these pretend worlds, right? So one of the common themes in that series is Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty and the whole thing. And they go in there and they play act and do the whole thing with him. So one of the in in this particular episode, Sherlock Holmes and his sweetheart, they're in there and they're all interacting with the Star Trek crew people. Captain Picard and so on. All of a sudden, the holodeck doors open and and he walks out, the holodeck guy, the, um, what's the, uh, yeah, Moriarty walks out and he's like,

• 3:17:24Speaker 03

  how's he walking out of the holodeck? He's, he doesn't exist. So the rest of the episode, they're trying to figure out, how did he do this? I mean, how does he go from this digital figure that doesn't exist to actually living in 3D space? Right? And then you get all the way to the end where they realize we're still in the holodeck. This entire enterprise is in the, in a little box in the holodeck.

• 3:17:44Jesse Michels?

  I love it. I love it. And it will, cause I also.

• 3:17:47Speaker 03

  But and then it ends where Barclay, the kind of character officer, uh, he, he's wondering like, huh? I wonder if this whole, now they're in the real enterprise and it's wrapping up and he's like, I wonder, and he goes, he kind of looks to the sky and goes, you know, computer and program. And it doesn't end. He's like, like we're, we're not living in a matrix because really we could all be in a little box on some, you know, computer programmer's desk.

• 3:18:12Jesse Michels?

  We could, and in almost every religious myth, we are. And so you have to ask, is there any semblance of truth in some of those myths? Do we throw that out entirely or can myth motivate real truth?

• 3:18:27Speaker 03

  I think it's, I love myth. Myth is important.

• 3:18:29Jesse Michels?

  I think so too.

• 3:18:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love, I, you know, Joseph Campbell stuff and I love some of Jordan's stuff about this, what they really mean. I discussed this in a book of my chapter on religion that what maybe we're misreading some of these religious stories as being real. Maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point is what's the story about?

• 3:18:45Jesse Michels?

  But, but if myth, you know, if it sets this up as like a construct and we're a lower construct, maybe they're right about that. There, there are cases where myth gets vindicated in reality. Heinrich von Schliemann went looking for Troy when it, when it was relegated just to Homer's the Iliad.

• 3:19:00Speaker 03

  I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.

• 3:19:02Jesse Michels?

  That's right. And he, and he found it.

• 3:19:05Speaker 03

  This one's real.

• 3:19:05Jesse Michels?

  And he found it. Yeah. So I wonder, I wonder if they're right about that. And the, you know, the, the Hindu, you know, Maya, the, the great illusion is like a real, is a real thing.

• 3:19:16Speaker 03

  I'll tell you a funny story. So in my, in that book, in my book, chapter on religion, I talk about Jonah and the, and the great fish. You know, so the story is he's living on this one land and God gives him this instructions. You gotta go over and tell these people, the Nineveh people, whatever they're about, you know, whatever the religious messages. He goes, I don't want to do it. I'm not going to do it. So he gets on a ship and he sails away the opposite direction. But the ship flounders and he, and he's about to drown and he gets swallowed by a great fish. And he lives for three days and three nights, very symbolic, in the belly of the fish and takes him all the way over the land, spits him out on the dry land. And he gets out there and goes, all right, God, I'll do it. And he delivers the message to these people. All right. So like hardcore atheists are like, that never happened. How could you live in the belly of a fish?

• 3:20:01Speaker 03

  It's like, of course it didn't happen. It's the story that, you know, he's delivering this message of redemption, starting over, building a new society, forgiveness, this kind of thing. Right. And then most Christians, when I tell, what I just told you, they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course that makes sense. And I go, maybe the resurrection didn't literally happen to Jesus. Maybe it's a story about redemption and forgiveness and starting over, creating a heavens on earth. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that one has to be true. Cause for Christians, like, maybe it's not literally true. It's okay to, mythology has deeper truths that are valuable.

• 3:20:34Jesse Michels?

  Yes, but it could also be.

• 3:20:36Speaker 03

  But it could be. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So the face of Agnam and Non Troy actually existed.

• 3:20:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:42Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 3:20:43Jesse Michels?

  It's, it's, you know, I don't know. It's so fascinating and we could go on forever. But I, I think you're, the way you think is a very healthy check against probably, uh, the way a lot of my audience thinks, probably the way I think. And, uh, the great Bertrand Russell once stared up at the stars and he. Thought he was awestruck by how random the whole thing was. And you can be awestruck by the randomness. And that can give you the proper kind of, you know, positioning and, you know, humility in life and sense of wonder. And then you can also be awestruck by, you know, an entity, a great creator God. And so I think there are failure modes on both sides. And it's really, it's really good to always check your thinking.

• 3:21:27Jesse Michels?

  So I really appreciate you, you being here.

• 3:21:30Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. Thank you for having me and you're welcome.

• 3:21:32Jesse Michels?

  This was a blast.

• 3:21:33Speaker 03

  Big fun.

• 3:21:34Jesse Michels?

  Let me know when you, when you find the aliens.

• 3:21:36Speaker 03

  It's okay. You'll be the first person I call.

• 3:21:39Jesse Michels?

  Please. Yeah, I'll be the, I'll be the, the water boy.

• 3:21:41Speaker 03

  Jesse, Javi says we got it.

• 3:21:44Jesse Michels?

  I'll be on the next plane.

• 3:21:45Speaker 03

  All right.

• 3:21:47Jesse Michels?

  Thank you.

• 3:21:47Speaker 03

  All right.