The Evidence for Aliens, the Afterlife, Bigfoot, Sea Monsters, and More | Miguel Sancho

An investigative journalist on why reincarnation, ghosts, and unexplained phenomena deserve more scrutiny; plus, why our need to believe in something bigger isn't something to be embarrassed about. Miguel Sancho is an Emmy Award–winning television producer and author. He is a veteran of ABC News, where he helped run 20/20, and he is now the executive producer of The Proof Is Out There on the History Channel. His latest book is Evidence of the Extraordinary: Discoveries from the Series The Proof is Out There https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Evidence-of-the-Extraordinary/Miguel-Sancho/9781668085455. In this episode we talk about: How to walk the line between skepticism and credulity Why most UFO footage falls apart under scrutiny The scientific case for Bigfoot Why kids who remember past lives are hard to dismiss How to spot a fraudulent psychic Pascal's "God-shaped hole" What unexplained ancient rock structures reveal about our history Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD This episode is sponsored by: MasterClass: Get at least 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/HAPPIER http://masterclass.com/HAPPIER. OneSkin: Get 15% off OneSkin with the code HAPPIER at www.oneskin.co/HAPPIER https://www.oneskin.co/HAPPIER. #oneskinpod To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

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

• 0:03Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. We talk a lot on this show about the value of having an open mind, about intellectual humility. But how open-minded should you be when it comes to things like Bigfoot, or UFOs, or the afterlife? Today, we're talking to an experienced journalist, a hardened skeptic, my old friend Miguel Sancho. We used to work together at ABC News, where he helped to run the legendary news magazine show 2020. Miguel has gone on to become the executive producer of a show called The Proof Is Out There, which is on the History Channel, and he's got a new book, which is called Evidence of the Extraordinary.

• 0:44Dan Harris?

  We're going to talk about how Miguel has gone from, as I said, a hardened skeptic, to somebody who is a little bit more open-minded. Miguel Sancho, welcome back to the show.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Dan, great to see you. Honored to be on your show and grateful, of course, to your audience for lending us a little bit of their time. Let's make it worthwhile.

• 1:03Dan Harris?

  Let me just start with your story. So, I mean, I worked with you. We started working together, like, I think, the late aughts, and we did a bunch of investigative stories together. We took on self-help fuckeroos, and we took on the Church of Scientology. And my memory of you is of somebody who was pretty hard-bitten in his skepticism and atheism, et cetera, et cetera. But now, you're the executive producer of a show called The Proof Is Out There, and you've got this new book. So, like, what has happened? Give me your arc.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it would be great if there was some sort of dramatic, you know, Damascus Road epiphany, and I could kind of complete the stereotypical Hollywood arc of the cynical hardened journalism professional who has some transformative experience that leads him to embrace every single corner of the woo that's out there. I would say this, in my own defense, as a reconstructed cynic and skeptic, that back when we were doing our stuff, and I thought it actually was not just worthwhile, but some of the most important work I've ever done in my career, we weren't necessarily cracking on any particular belief, per se, but rather the degree to which certain charlatans and unscrupulous exploiters

• 2:20Speaker 01

  of people's desire to believe in something bigger, not only kind of drain people of their money, oftentimes, but also their autonomy and their identity and their grasp on reality. So, I like to kind of separate the two questions about whether or not there is something more than straight-up hardcore scientific materialism as a lens through which to understand our world, our universe, and our experiences, and the nefarious ways in which some of the gullible and credulous are taken advantage of. Because fundamentally, I do conclude in this book that the desire and the need, if you will, to believe in something bigger is not something that we should shun

• 3:03Speaker 01

  or be embarrassed about, or try to evolve beyond, but something that is, in fact, crucial to the process of evolution and progress itself.

• 3:12Dan Harris?

  I want to come back to that, how the desire, dare I say, needed to believe in something bigger is important. But let me just stick with you for a second.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Yes, we know I'm infinitely interesting, so let's talk about me.

• 3:27Dan Harris?

  You are at least... Interesting to me. This may be a local concern, because you're one of my friends, but I take your point that you and I, in our roles at ABC News as investigative journalists, we weren't taking on belief itself. We were taking on unscrupulous exploitation of the human propensity toward belief. And yet, you know, you were, you know, I think by your own description, pretty skeptical about all sorts of claims. And now, you executive produce a show that is taking a journalistic look at the paranormal. Talk about that, and has it shifted your view on things that often have been, like, reflexively rejected by the mainstream, like UFOs, et cetera, et cetera?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  So, in a nutshell, I can tell a condensed version of the show, and how I became intricately involved and interwoven with its manifestations. So, it was COVID. I'd been working, after ABC, at A&E and its various other networks, including the History Channel, on the stuff that I usually do, which is pretty much documentary-style investigative reporting. I'd done a series of specials with them, and I had other stuff in the works. Some rather, as I recall, some rather hardcore stuff about, like, American Prisons was the show I was working on when COVID hit and shut everything down. And I was, like many people, facing an extended period of underemployment

• 4:55Speaker 01

  due to the fact that field work itself had been banned for quite some time. So, wonderful people at A&E Networks and History approached me with this opportunity to do this show. That was an attempt to, as you just said quite articulately, to apply journalistic standards, scientific rigor, and a healthy dose of skepticism to this immense and growing pipeline of videos that people claim to be documentation of anomalous events that substantiate claims in the supernatural or paranormal, or what have you. And my first reaction was, "Thank you for the opportunity." My second reaction was, "Are you sure I'm the right guy for this?"

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Because there are plenty of people who have spent decades producing TV shows in this genre, in this space. I was not one of them. But they said again, "No, we want somebody with your background, because that's the lens through which we're going to be approaching this content in this space." So, it turned out to be a very felicitous marriage, and it was a wonderful opportunity, because in addition to remaining employed, I was able to learn a heck of a lot. There's a lot to learn in this space. It's not just campfire stories, or superstitions, or folklore that you can kind of ethnographically sneer at down your spectacles, but it is a very diverse, very well-researched,

• 6:24Speaker 01

  very fascinating field that was entirely worthy of my attention.

• 6:28Dan Harris?

  Okay, so let's walk through some of these, because that's what happens in your book, which, again, is called Evidence of the Extraordinary. Let's start with UFOs. This episode is airing in August, but we're recording it in late June. I just watched Disclosure Day with my son, the Steven Spielberg movie about aliens and the government, or quasi-governmental organizations, attempt to cover up UFOs and aliens that are held in captivity, et cetera, et cetera. And also, there's been, like, a mainstream treatment of UFOs in the last... There were congressional hearings, et cetera, et cetera.

• 7:06Dan Harris?

  So, like, you've looked at many of the most famous cases of alleged UFO sightings. Where do you come down?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Right. So, yes, you're absolutely right, that we've seen, and one of the kind of justifications for the book, is this ongoing mainstreaming of many of these topics, none more so than UFOs. To the point that, just last week, it was announced that the White House is forming a UAP investigative committee that's basically going to do the same exact thing that my show's been doing for six years, with indeed, some of the people who've been on my show. So, there's, to the degree that I was involved in this mainstreaming, it's interesting to be kind of part of that wave, that movement. Where do I come down on this? Okay, so I have a more nuanced and possibly disappointing

• 7:58Speaker 01

  take on this than some people who are very committed to the UFO disclosure cause and get upset if one doesn't subscribe and endorse every single tenet of what I refer to in the book as the UFO canon. So, I think many things can be true. First of all, you start with the basics that everybody says, kind of to avoid the topic, but happen to be true. One is, from a statistical standpoint, it's almost impossible for us to be the only intelligent civilization that has ever existed in the history of the universe. The second, very obvious, very easy thing to agree with, is that there is significant documentation of aerial phenomena.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Which our own government has not yet identified. Okay. But it requires a certain concatenation of highly contingent circumstances to get from those two propositions to firm and unshakable belief that there is an alien civilization that exists in the same time that we exist, that has advanced to the point where they have achieved technical mastery to achieve either interstellar or interdimensional travel, and has decided to come to our planet in our space and visit us as regularly as some of the hardcore believers think that we've been visited. What we can say is that this show, my show and others, have taken very hard looks at

• 9:27Speaker 01

  several of these videos and determined that while if you have a pie chart in your mind, you know, 70 to 80% of them can indeed be dismissed as either misidentifications or hoaxes, there is that sliver that truly defy the most rigorous attempts of the skeptics to debunk them, including some very well credentialed people who have reputations to maintain, who have been on our show and has said, not every time again, but you know, once or twice, I honestly don't know what this is. Again, it's a leap to go from that to therefore it must be an alien spaceship piloted by little green men.

• 10:05Dan Harris?

  Just to put a fine point on this, because there are other, because I want to talk about Bigfoot and other things too, but, but on, on UFOs, AKA UAPs, you Miguel Sancho cannot say or pound the table and argue that for sure aliens have visited us and maybe taken random dudes from Iowa onboard their ships and given them anal probes. You're not going to argue that all of that is for sure true. However, you can point to some of these videos, some of which were recorded, I think by the US military itself, and say something's going on here and we don't know what it is.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Now, again, many things can be true. It can indeed be the case that some of these unexplained videos are indeed alien craft. Fine, but it can also be the case that some of them are high-tech assets of rival militaries that are intentionally trying to probe some of our air defenses or other technology to gain intel and reconnaissance capacity. It can also be the case that a small sliver of these things might be instances in which our own government is intentionally disseminating disinformation to keep us from knowing about and getting concerned about incursions in our airspace or technological advances of our rival militaries.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Just yesterday, there was this big disclosure about the United States pilot who claims that he was downed by something called jellyfish drones over Iran. So again, we live in an age where the drone has become a cutting edge technology that represents the future of asymmetrical warfare. We need to accommodate the possibility that some of these UAPs aren't piloted by Martians or aliens, rather, but possibly by members of the IRGC.

• 12:00Dan Harris?

  A few things before we hear from our sponsors. I don't know if you know this, but I've been writing a newsletter for the last couple of years. I would love for you to come check it out. It's free. You can sign up at danharris.com. Every Monday, I drop into your inbox a little nugget of wisdom and sanity that you can operationalize in your life immediately. This is an actionable practice that I'm dropping into your data stream that really can color the rest of your day. I put a lot of time and effort into it and I'd love for you to benefit from it. It's also, by the way, the place where you can get updates on the broader 10% happier cinematic universe, including upcoming programming on my app, 10% with Dan Harris, and upcoming IRL events.

• 12:44Dan Harris?

  Again, you can sign up at danharris.com. I'd love to have you reading the newsletter and we will be right back after this.

• 12:52Dan Harris?

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• 13:34Dan Harris?

  It's about a girl who doesn't feel seen by anyone and about how small, everyday acts of unkindness compound into something nobody meant to cause, which happens now at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable not long ago. What I really appreciate about the show is that the show takes Carrie seriously as a person rather than as some sort of symbol. And the season keeps circling around one major question. Are you watching the making of a hero, a villain, or something more complicated than either of those options? Carrie is now streaming on Prime Video.

• 14:15Dan Harris?

  All right, let's go to, let's go to Bigfoot. You've investigated that story. You've seen, you're both laughing here, so I suspect I know where this is going, but have you seen any evidence to suggest that there's, there are legitimate, open questions about the existence of Bigfoot?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Okay, here we go. Are you ready?

• 14:32Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  I can give you, I can give you small, medium, extra large versions of this, of this exegesis. In this day and age, with literally billions of cell phones and trail cams and LiDAR scanning every, you know, jungle canopy on earth, the fact that the best Bigfoot footage we have is the Patterson Gimlin film, which is the famous Patty footage shot in 1967, and now has recently been debunked yet again in a Bigfoot documentary, is a problem for Bigfoot believers. Let's not pretend that that's not a problem, but let's proceed. First of all, the people who study this stuff and devote a fair amount of time to it have

• 15:17Speaker 01

  answers for all of the dismissive questions. And I'm happy to recite them, but the bottom line is yes, it would be great if there were more video, but there's reasons why there isn't video. And there's all sorts of reasons why we can't just assume that a undiscovered species can't be discovered, or it doesn't exist now because we're discovering new species all the time. The second thing I would say is that, believe it or not, there's documented evidence that more and more scientists, people with PhDs, again, people with reputations to risk, are endeavoring to study Bigfoot in one way or another. My, the closest thing I came to a big epiphany in this entire project was, I want to say

• 16:02Speaker 01

  in sometime in the fall of 2022. It's correct in the book. I might get it wrong, the exact date in this podcast, but when I was at home at breakfast, eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, reading the Wall Street Journal, the actual paper subscription that I had at the time, and I flipped it over and just below the fold was this page one story about how legit scientists, meaning anthropologists, primatologists, paleontologists are going out in the woods and going on Bigfoot hunting expeditions because they think there's a chance that it might exist. Why? There's a whole thing that we can talk about that involves a kind of paradigm shift in

• 16:42Speaker 01

  paleontology and anthropology that now is more hospitable to the hypothesis of what is called Relictomenids, meaning other branches of the evolutionary tree that have turned up in places like Flores Island, where a species of early man known as Flores Man was discovered in a cave, or the Denisovans, another branch of the evolutionary tree who were discovered in a cave in Russia.

• 17:11Dan Harris?

  But not alive. They, their bones were discovered.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Their bones were discovered, indeed. So the, the working hypothesis, okay, is that at one point there was a common ancestor, you know, some relative of Gigantopithecus or Australopithecus that branched out and migrated, and that's how we get the Yeti, the Yowie in Australia, and by dint of the Bering Land Crossing.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  The creature we know as Bigfoot or Sasquatch that either currently inhabits or at one point did inhabit the Pacific Northwest and other parts of the North American continent. Are you with me?

• 17:51Dan Harris?

  I'm with you and I'm just, I'm gonna, I'm gonna see if I can sum it up. There are serious people who are open to the possibility, but if I'm hearing you correctly, they're open to the possibility that some creature like a Bigfoot or a Yeti or a Yowie existed past tense and we might find their bones. But the video from 1967 of an alleged Bigfoot is probably not, you know, like he or she is probably not out there in the woods right now.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Those two positions can be harmonized, meaning that just because it existed at one point, you don't have to be committed to the idea that it is extinct now. Why? Why? Because of this interesting phenomenon called relict species, meaning a species that we all thought was extinct and then bingo, it pops up. Example, the prime example is a fish called the Kielacanth. And people thought that died out hundreds of millions of years ago. And then I want to say in the 1930s or 40s, wow, one pops up in the fisherman's net off the coast of South Africa. And it happens a lot.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  There's birds, mammals, reptiles, fish that scientists are convinced died out hundreds of millions of years ago, but nevertheless pop up in the real world. So again, you have the theory that Bigfoot migrated from an original ancestor in Asia, came over here. Yes, it may well have gone extinct, or it still might be out there, but has yet to be discovered.

• 19:28Dan Harris?

  Okay, let me move on to the next topic.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  You're just checking them all off one by one. This is great. It's like rapid fire.

• 19:35Dan Harris?

  I mean, it's more fun for me probably because I haven't thought about this stuff at all. You, you live in this world. The next thing is something called cryptozoology. I don't even know what that means, but you cover it in the book.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's the overarching study of what are kind of considered legendary creatures, Bigfoot among them. And of course, you know, Bigfoot walks arm in arm with the other most famous legendary creature on earth, the Loch Ness monster. And quite frankly, whereas I sometimes, in fact, maybe just a few seconds ago, ventriloquize the arguments of the believers when it comes to sea monsters. Now we're talking about things that I actually believe. That's, that's a very easy one for me to, to get behind.

• 20:19Dan Harris?

  So you're saying the Loch Ness monster is real?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  I'm saying I don't know about the Loch Ness monster, but, and again, given the major exertions that have been made to find the Loch Ness monster over the past 100 years, the fact that they haven't found the thing indicates to me that you have to take that into account. That indicates to me that the thing probably isn't there. Okay. But the broader proposition that there are massive sea creatures that we would call monsters a few hundred years ago, still existing in our oceans today is a very easy hypothesis for me to embrace. Why? Well, again, because we're all discovering them. They discover a new species of shark, pretty much one or two every year in my brief lifetime.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Probably the most famous is called the Megamouth shark, which is this thing that was pulled up from the anchor of a US Navy vessel when I was still a kid. And the thing looks like a cartoon monster with this big, huge grin and it's, you know, 20 feet long and nobody had ever seen it before. There's other evidence, okay, scientifically valid that indicates that there are large, larger than we know, sea creatures swimming in the depths of our oceans today. That's an easy one. That's a gimme, that's a layup.

• 21:40Dan Harris?

  Okay, I can get down with that. Where I start to lose my footing though, is I was listening to you on a, some paranormal podcast and the host referenced in passing as if it was like a totally established thing that there might be alien civilizations living at the bottom of our oceans outside of our visibility, visibility.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:06Dan Harris?

  Any evidence for that?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  All right. So how do we get there? The point, by the way, for your listeners, the point of this book, okay, is not to convert you to any of this, it's just to give you the vocabulary so you can have these conversations at your next cocktail party. It's the quickie kind of, you know, matrix-like upload of every little bit of layman's knowledge you need to have to swim in this ocean, so to speak, intellectually, without having to spend six years producing a TV show about it.

• 22:36Dan Harris?

  This stuff is just interesting. And the fact of the matter is, some of this stuff may sound ridiculous and some of it actually is ridiculous. And I know it's harder for you to say that than it is for me because I don't produce the show. But it is also true that there are anomalous things that we cannot explain. So it's, it's, it's two parts. It's just interesting on its face and there are some areas where we really just can't answer the question.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I take it a step further, Dan. First of all, don't you know, you're supposed to say the name of the book seven times at least in order to sink in with the viewers. It's called Evidence of the Extraity. We should just say it seven times in a row and we can then have a normal conversation. But yes, this book Evidence of the Extraordinary is supposed to be, kind of tickle your, your intellectual curiosity. And by the way, it's a fun book. It's not heavy lifting. It's not like Dan's books, they're not very serious. They're very, it's, it's light reading, beach, fine, bathroom, fine. But I want to say, I am going to say, I'm going to insist that yes, while some of these

• 23:39Speaker 01

  ideas and hypotheses are prima facie ridiculous, guess what? Every radical theory that has turned out to be true and shift paradigms in the history of science was once considered ridiculous and absurd, if not dangerous and worthy of suppression. So that's why the overall posture of the book is to take a step back a little bit from the hardcore skeptical cynical asshole that I was when I was working at ABC and try to again, be more humble in the face of the unknown, more hospitable to off the wall theories.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Because whereas sure, 90% of them will be either silly or misguided or puerile or even dangerous, there's that little sliver that we need in order to actually make progress as a civilization and to improve the world. And I cite, you know, plenty of examples of cases where, you know, crazy ideas turns out to be actually central to the progress of human civilization. How about this one? Doctors washing their hands before they deliver babies, right? Ignaz Simmelweis and the whole germ theory of disease was considered so radical and dangerous that he ended up getting fired, getting locked in a mental institution and

• 25:00Speaker 01

  ultimately beaten to death by the guards of the mental institution. So it would be nice if that hadn't happened.

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• 26:08Dan Harris?

  How do you and how do we, how can one walk the line between openness and credulity?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  You do want to maintain some standards, right? So when we talk about, you know, discovery of a new species, scientists and biologists, you know, they go through a very rigorous process before they just declare a new species exists. It has to be proven, it has to go through peer reviewed, research analysis, all that stuff. So we should still be doing that. The point is though, when the first kind of shreds of evidence, the evidence that would either kind of tickle your fancy enough that you decide that a given hypothesis is worthy of more attention and research and resources, or so silly that we should just move on and kind of leave it outside with the galoshes and umbrellas as we proceed with, you know,

• 27:03Speaker 01

  serious scientific investigation, we should be more hospitable to these things. We should not eliminate the possibility of something truly anomalous being the case just because of our own empirical prejudices.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  So maintain your standards, okay? But don't be poo pooing some of the stuff that you normally would think of as kooky. And frankly, you know, there's now all sorts of people who think that things such as quantum physics, quantum computing, almost necessitate a non-materialistic understanding of the universe and reality and require us to think of things as time, not just necessarily moving in one direction, not just present to future, multiple chronologies potentially existing at the same time. All sorts of things that kind of lean towards the potential of a grand unified

• 27:58Speaker 01

  theory of everything that could explain everything from UFOs to ghosts to psychic powers. And believe me, there's plenty of people who want to do just that. Did you want to get back to the crypto terrestrial thing, the underwater aliens? Or did you, was that just a little sprinkling and we're going to move on?

• 28:15Dan Harris?

  No, I, I, I do want to come back to underwater aliens. But let me just stay with this, this line we're talking about between epistemic humility and gullibility. The conversation I've had many times in my own life with my longtime friend and meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, when subjects come up about the deep end of the pool, the sort of more mystical ends of Buddhism, where there are these beliefs, not only in reincarnation and enlightenment, but also in the existence of superpowers. If you become a meditative adept, the idea is that you can manipulate the laws of physics. And I, my knee jerk reaction to that is to scoff.

• 28:58Dan Harris?

  And Joseph often gently argues for what I believe the poet Samuel Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief. That does not mean you believe with no evidence, but that you suspend your disbelief so that you can play with ideas, even if ultimately you're going to put them down. How does that land with you? Is that, is that, does that rhyme with what you were just talking about?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it kind of sounds like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. Right? You, you're trying to say that I don't necessarily believe I can levitate if I meditate long enough, but if some people can, or if they say they can, far be it for me to completely dismiss their claims. And, okay, I mean, that's kind of where I am. I would just say that it is a problem. This is a, is a classic slippery slope problem that you see everywhere from religion to ufology, the study of UFOs, right? I mean, you, we can agree, I think, that there are things flying around the skies that we haven't identified.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  But many people who are actually much more serious about the topic, and I am much more credentialed and frankly, much more honorable people because they've served our country in the military, take it many steps further to the point that they're saying, not only do we have these unidentified things we can't explain, need to investigate, but they're aliens, but the United States has been in an alliance with them. And we've reverse engineered their technology. And this entire vast, long enduring conspiracy theory that strikes me as just statistically unlikely because conspiracies are very hard to pull off and maintain. So yes, it's okay to meditate as much as you want with the hope that someday you'll

• 30:53Speaker 01

  be able to levitate. And by the way, there was actually a really interesting book about levitation from a Yale professor that came out a few years ago, that studied cases of medieval and Renaissance levitations, in which he kind of came out saying, something happened. He wasn't just poo pooing it or dismissing it as superstition. But always let's just keep our critical facilities at the ready.

• 31:18Dan Harris?

  Well, I think we're saying, and I think Joseph's saying a similar thing, which is, yeah, keep your critical facilities and maintain what the Zen folks called, don't know mind. You know, like I ultimately, I don't know. Maybe they haven't found the Loch Ness monster. I don't personally think the animals in there. I don't personally think one can levitate, but at the end of the day, I really don't know. So I, it is having your cake and eating it too, but not in the pejorative.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, maybe that's the true lesson of Buddhism, that you can have your cake and eat, and at least nibble on it too. But I, I think it's, I think it's a wonderful part of being human that you're able to, in fact obligated to maintain a sense of empiricism, just to kind of cross the street. And yet we all have this yearning for there to be something bigger. In the book I reference and somewhat lionized Blaise Pascal and his concept of the God-shaped hole in his heart that we all need to fill. And whether we're filling it with actual religion and God is traditionally practiced,

• 32:31Speaker 01

  or ufology, or the deep end of the pool of Buddhism, or what have you, it is a, it is, I would submit to everyone, a positive Darwinian adaptation. It's a good thing we have. It's not something that we should want to outgrow or amputate.

• 32:51Dan Harris?

  Say more about that. Why not? Because there are folks like my friend, Sam Harris, who would argue that religion has been a purely, if not purely largely negative and noxious force in human affairs.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'd be happy to talk about that with Sam Harris. If we want to talk about God, sure. To the degree that religion can be criticized for its deleterious implementations, absolutely. No question about that. But you have to weigh the good with the bad, right? Like when Cromwell said, paint me warts and all, he meant paint the warts, but also paint the and all. So yes, a video camera can be used to make kiddie porn. It can also be used to make an award winning documentary about Navajo basket weavers, or whatever, you know, righteous social justice cause you think needs to be documented. A, you know, a gun can be used to kill Adolf Hitler.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  It can also be used to shoot up Columbine. So the question isn't what is the thing in and of itself? It's a question of how it's applied and what is the, you know, aggregate utility to the species over the course of millennia? What good has religion done? Well, I would submit to you that in this country at least, there's been a very helpful counterbalance to the ravages of unchecked capitalism. You know, it just again, the microcosm of the history of the United States, we have this economic system that incentivizes and rewards relatively amoral self interested behavior in the marketplace. And it is counterveiled by this Puritan tradition that includes some degree of altruism

• 34:29Speaker 01

  and self sacrifice and humanity and concern for your fellow man. I would also argue that you wouldn't really have, I'm happy to be contradicted, I'm often wrong, but in the way I kind of understand human history at least, you wouldn't really have much of a, a civil rights movement or a human rights movement if you didn't have a religious tradition from which it sprang and sprouted to the point that you might argue that we now no longer need religion because we have a, an understanding, an architecture of basic respect for human beings that makes the divine a, you know, like training wheels that we no longer need to, to ride the bicycle.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  But I would only tell you that I was meditating quite frequently and I still do it, not as frequently as I used to, maybe two or three times a week. But I go to church every Sunday and it's really fulfilling for me. And there's a reason for that, I think. It's because it speaks to and underscores many of the things that I want to improve about myself. It helps me just kind of think, okay, I know I could be a better person. Let's just kind of focus on that, at least for, you know, this one time a week and try to assimilate these, these principles into our daily lives. There was a, I forget where I saw it, but you know, Stephen Fry, you probably actually do know Stephen Fry personally, but he, there was some sort of debate he was in, I'm getting

• 35:55Speaker 01

  foggy on the details, but he had this great parable or examples, like, imagine yourself walking down the street of a city that you don't know, by yourself, it's dark, and there's five men walking on the same side of the street, straight at you. Would you be more or less put at ease if you knew that they were coming from a church meeting? So again, yes, the practice of religion has led to jihad, it's led to crusades, it's led to the bombing of abortion clinics, it's led to all sorts of things that I would abjure categorically. Those are the spectacular things that we would, that attracted disproportionate amount of attention.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  It's also responsible for a million different, small, quiet, silent and unannounced acts of kindness and compassion and patience and forgiveness on a daily basis, without which I would submit the human race would be even more barbaric than it currently is.

• 36:53Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, I agree with, you know, 75% of what you just said. The area where I, and I think it's a, just a healthy disagreement. I'm sure many people listening to the show will disagree with me on this, that I think the capacities that religion teases out of the human mind, altruism, compassion, kindness, et cetera, et cetera.

• 37:20Dan Harris?

  Don't have to be connected to metaphysically infused allegories from the Bronze Age. Like, I, I, I think we, we have these capacities in us. It's how we came the apex predator on the planet, our ability to cooperate, collaborate and communicate. And I don't know that belief in something we can't prove is a sine qua non for that.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  It's a shame we can't make this more of a bitter disagreement because that's what people like. But if I'm resigning myself to the fact this is going to be an amicable conversation. I, I would agree with you to the extent that I would even say that me personally, and I've said this, you know, in other, in other forums. You know, when it comes to Christianity, Catholicism specifically, the religion I practice, whether or not Jesus actually walked on water or turned water into wine or rose from the third day, I get that it's very important to a lot of people to practice the faith. For me, it's really not. If you did all that stuff, good for Jesus. But what helps me is the actual gospel, the teachings, the ministry, the, the ethical teachings

• 38:29Speaker 01

  that kind of can stand on their own with or without the quote unquote magic. So I guess I'm kind of aligned with Thomas Jefferson on that. You know, the famous Jefferson Bible kind of edited out all the miracles and divine elements and just basically brought it down to the teachings, which he apparently believed to be self-evident.

• 38:53Dan Harris?

  Except for, did not apply them to African Americans.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  But Thomas Jefferson was a work in progress, a complicated man. No, no doubt about that. So, yes.

• 39:04Dan Harris?

  Are there aliens living under the seabed in the Mariana Trench?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  So where does this whole thing come from? So the, the UFO people have a problem, okay, that they need to solve, which is, let's take, let's, let's work it backwards. Let's agree that the Nimitz Tic Tac or the Omaha USO or any one of these kind of iconic UAPs as they're, as they're called these days are indeed the technology possibly piloted by aliens themselves or dispatched by aliens themselves. How did they get here? Where did they come from? And you have a number of cosmological challenges and challenges of physics that you have to surmount. One is known as the Fermi paradox.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  And that is basically the supposition, or I should say the observation, the remark that's attributed to the great physicist Enrico Fermi, which basically comes down to saying, yes, we know that statistically the odds are that the universe is indeed populated by other folks like us, or maybe not like us, but other intelligent civilizations with you there. But if it is indeed impossible that we're alone and that there are others out there, where the fuck are they? Why are we not seeing them when we have our radio telescopes looking out there?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  When we have a million people looking up at the sky and they're not landing on the, the lawn of the White House and announcing themselves? That's a, that's a bit of a problem. The other question is posed by what's sometimes referred to as the Copernican concept or the Copernican principle, which is we're not at the center of the universe, right? We're not like some huge beacon attracting people. So that means if life is evenly distributed and there's huge distances, even if there were intelligent life, why would they be coming here? And how would they get here? How would they traverse these gigantic distances? And why would they choose to come here?

• 41:13Speaker 01

  And if they were to do so, how would they overcome some of Einstein's challenges like traveling faster than the speed of light? Okay, so there's a number of ways that people kind of solve these problems. One is interdimensionality, right? They're not traveling through space and time as we normally understand it. They're punching in and out of different dimensions. They're kind of toggling into out of a different position in our dimension that obviously need to move faster than the speed of light. Okay. Another one is that they've been here the entire time, that the distances are not exactly that problematic because it's not interstellar travel to begin with.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  That there was a meteorite or some other origin encounter whereby alien life seeded this planet billions of years ago and evolved to the point where there is indeed life forms at the bottom of the ocean that do not live by things like photosynthesis, but rather through things like chemosynthesis. And they have evolved to the point where, like in the movie, The Abyss, they are now able to engage in what's often referred to as transmedium travel, meaning from the water into the air. And that's what explains a number of these UAP videos,

• 42:33Speaker 01

  which are alleged to have documented objects not only flying in the sky, but traveling from the ocean into the air and vice versa. Got you there. Struck dumb, struck dumb by the, by the, by the knowledge, by the theory, by the preaching.

• 42:53Dan Harris?

  What I was going to ask is, where do you come down on this?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Well, again, it's interesting that you ask me because I'm the guy who was just saying 20 minutes ago that I think that deep sea life is definitely much more diverse and is much more down there to discover than some people think. So I believe there are large creatures swimming in the depths of the ocean that we have not observed yet entirely. I think we've observed parts of them, but we haven't observed entirely. So you would think that I'd be ready to embrace the crypto terrestrial theory as well. Look, there are, again, very intelligent, very well-trained, very honorable people who believe this stuff. One of the heroes of my book is this gentleman, Lou Elizondo. And I know people crack on Lou Elizondo left and right, but he's a good guy

• 43:42Speaker 01

  and he's really been helpful and a good friend to me. And I will not abide the bad mouthing of Lou Elizondo.

• 43:49Dan Harris?

  I don't even know that is.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Well, so good. You're not in a position to badmouth him. He's, he's the godfather, the founding father, if you will, of the current UFO Renaissance. He's the, the gentleman who used to work for the Pentagon program called ATIP that, and he ended up leaking the original Pentagon videos, the most famous of which is this Nimitz Tic Tac, and was behind the publication of the seminal article in the New York Times in 2017 that broke the whole story wide open that despite its decades worth of poo pooing UFOs or UAPs and studying them largely for the purpose of debunking them, indeed, the Pentagon had been taking them seriously to the tunes of millions of dollars

• 44:35Speaker 01

  in budgetary outlays for quite some time. And that was the initial, if you will, snowflake that has subsequently snowballed into the state, the current affair that we are in now, where both the Pentagon and the White House are completely open about the fact that they're studying UAPs and want to know more about them and want us to know more about them, which I consider a big sign of progress. But yet I am not fully convinced that there are aliens living at the bottom of the, bottom of the ocean, although I admit that it would solve many of the puzzles that the UAP issue presents us.

• 45:17Dan Harris?

  Okay, let's move on to the afterlife. You have done some work both on your show and in the book on claims that there may be some evidence for a hereafter. What have you found? What do you believe?

• 45:33Speaker 01

  So what I found and where, where my kind of foundational beliefs came from, which I write about a little bit in the book, back in the nineties, even before I was working at ABC, I was working in the investigative unit of a syndicated television show. We would call it a tabloid television show called Inside Edition, where I learned many, many great things about how to produce television and how to, how to practice journalism. And also learned a great many things about the hideous overpopulation of charlatans and frauds out there who are willing to take advantage of people who are gullible or credulous or simply can't really cope with some of the harsher realities of life,

• 46:15Speaker 01

  such as the premature death of a loved one. So I'd gone to Arizona with a hidden camera to conduct a sting on one of these psychics who, for a hefty fee, would claim that he could either communicate with or more importantly, direct you to the body of a abducted and deceased family member who had never been found. And of course, that's particularly pernicious, not just because it kind of plays on people's desire to communicate with a loved one. But if you're a family with a missing daughter and the police haven't found anything, how can you possibly justify not giving money to a psychic? You'll try anything and you very easily fall prey to these,

• 46:57Speaker 01

  I would have to say scumbags is the easiest word that comes to my mind, who will take their money, play on your hopes and deliver absolutely nothing. That's where I was coming from. Well, especially when, and when we approach these kinds of topics on the proof is out there, okay? That's when I'm at my most critical and skeptical. So what are we seeing that have, that has indicated anything to the contrary? Well, There have been these videos where children in particular, I'm thinking of one particular case, where there's video of a little girl whose uncle recently died under tragic circumstances, and she's looking straight into the space in front of her high chair and having this

• 47:40Speaker 01

  long conversation with him, and her mother is saying, who are you talking to? And she says, Tim, Tim, that was the gentleman's name. And this happens frequently enough that the mother started documenting this and came to believe that indeed, the child was interacting with the spirit of her deceased uncle. Now, of course, there's a skeptical position to occupy there. You can say the child just hasn't really developed enough of a mature sense of object permanence and impermanence. But there are people, including a respected physicist, Michio Kaku, who said that indeed, it might be the case that children can perceive

• 48:21Speaker 01

  and communicate things and layers of reality that go beyond the strictly empirical perceptions that we have as adults.

• 48:29Dan Harris?

  There's also been a lot of work done by researchers at the University of Virginia, some of which has been documented on a Netflix show, which was called After Death, or something like that. I remember watching it with the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein. I'll drop a link in the show notes to this documentary series. And one of the episodes follows this researcher from UVA, whose name I'm forgetting. And he goes out and meets some children who claim to remember their past lives, little kids. And he conducts these quizzes where he sets out like a bunch of pictures in front of them and says, okay, which is a picture of your old neighborhood? And the kid can reliably pick it out. And so there seems to

• 49:09Dan Harris?

  be some suggestive, but not dispositive evidence of children remembering past lives.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I have not seen this Netflix documentary, but you were talking about the studies out of the University of Virginia. Yes, I referenced those in the book a couple different times. The initial kind of groundbreaking scientist, and that was a gentleman named, I want to say Ian Stevenson, who documented hundreds of these cases, many of which seem to have, at least on an anecdotal basis, very compelling evidence. And he focused on children, of course, because children below the age of seven or eight usually haven't learned or developed enough the way where they can read and retain information about somebody else's life who's deceased enough to pull off an elaborate hoax, right? So

• 49:58Speaker 01

  when you're dealing with kids, where else would they be getting the information? All right, they're a good group to use. And he'd come up with, I want to say something like 1600, I could be getting it wrong, but I don't think so, cases that he considered somewhat valid. Now, he died, and he was also criticized as not, you know, being as rigorous a scientist as perhaps he could have been. But to this day, there are people who continue to study this topic. And there are cases that are quite compelling. We interviewed a woman who was considered one of the kind of iconic cases. And her name was Babro Carlin. She was from Scandinavia, I want to say Stockholm, but she believed very sincerely that she was the reincarnation of Anne Frank. And she had stories and documentation about being

• 50:43Speaker 01

  able to, you know, know how to get to Anne Frank's house, the first time she visited Amsterdam as a child, and knowing where some of the furniture and wall hangings had been placed, even though they'd been taken down decades ago, and the house had been somewhat rearranged for the tourist purposes. And it's compelling stuff. But I've almost had a tough time with reincarnation, just on the numbers, right? How do you account for the fact that, you know, there's, you know, eight billion people now, there were only two billion people before, I guess, we didn't have to mean that a few billion of us were crickets or dogs or something before, and not humans. But it is really fascinating stuff. And again, worthy of serious consideration and study in my book.

• 51:25Dan Harris?

  Ancient archaeology, what does it mean?

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Everybody's familiar with some of the mysteries that surround, you know, famous locations like Stonehenge, or the Nazca Lines, or the pyramids. And it's a touchy subject, right? Because on the one hand, it's very legitimate to wonder, how could primitive cultures have pulled off such amazing feats of monumentalism? The danger, of course, and this is a criticism that's frequently and full-throatedly vocalized by many members of the academic community, is that can very easily slide into a form of paternalistic, I'm trying to find a word more gentle than racism, but I guess that's the word to use.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  The hypothesis being that, you know, how could these naked brown people have been smart enough and ingenious enough to make these impressive things? They could never have done it. It must have been aliens. So that's something to be, you know, that's something to be very careful with as you tiptoe into these discussions. One thing we know, however, that mainstream archaeologists openly acknowledge, is that there are a lot of cases where primitive ancient societies moved massive rocks around, that we have no idea exactly how they did.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  We can speculate that maybe they used some sort of pulley system, or, you know, logs tied together. But it is really interesting that a number of ancient civilizations, some of which we don't even know the names of, we don't know their language, we don't know their culture, we always know is that there's places with these gigantic rocks, and we can't explain exactly how they got there, or why they were moved to begin with. But why would people who struggled so much just to find a place to eat and not freeze to death, devoted so much energy and bandwidth to moving and assembling rocks that weigh, you know, thousands of pounds, way beyond the capacities of the vast majority of their

• 53:36Speaker 01

  technology at the time? That is a profound, deep, abiding, nettlesome question of both mainstream archaeology. And there's examples of it all over the world, some of which we've touched on in the course of the show.

• 53:49Dan Harris?

  I just like what considering that does to my mind. It puts you in a position of awe, like of genuine not knowing. And even if the least interesting explanation is true, which is that they figured it out, that's just incredible. And we still don't know how or why. And so that's just a very pleasing mind state to inhabit, which is why people love thinking about this stuff.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  And the past is a trip. It doesn't even have to be the remote past. I mean, I'm still boggled by the idea that people once practiced journalism without cell phones. And I, by the way, and I'm old enough to have lived, you know, a good chunk of my life before the smartphone. It just feels like a foreign planet. And it's amazing how much stuff was actually accomplished. And that's why I kind of end the book, saying that even if there are aliens, and we're not alone, and all the most brokely, kooky hypotheses are true, we should still feel good enough about ourselves as a species

• 54:56Speaker 01

  to take a little bit of a bow. I mean, we've done some amazing things that we should be proud of. And, you know, we haven't yet found another species out there that's, you know, figured out the history of the universe, the history of evolution, the human body, invented the computer, developed AI, penicillin is a biggie, come on. And at the very least, I think we should again, be very happy with ourselves as humans, and acknowledge that the reason a lot of that progress was made was explicitly because somebody had a crazy idea that they stuck with.

• 55:36Dan Harris?

  You've heard the theory, I know, I'm sure, that the reason why we haven't had confirmed alien visitors is that all the advanced extraterrestrial civilizations developed AI which killed them.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  It is, again, a big assumption, not only that an alien civilization would evolve long enough to, you know, be able to master interstellar travel or interdimensional travel, but to not annihilate itself. I mean, you know, we have only, you know, been in possession of nuclear weapons for less than a century. And that's been a major concern from the get go. So, and one thing we also know from the study of our own planet, is that civilizations have a wonderful propensity for collapsing and wiping themselves out. Now, you know, you get the Kurzweil types who believe in the singularity and think the AI is gonna,

• 56:33Speaker 01

  you know, kind of lead to a form of transhumanism, and space itself is going to change consciousness. So maybe it's a question less of, you know, collapsing and going extinct as to evolving into some higher state of existence where our bodies themselves just become husks which we outgrow. That might be nice, you know, but I'm not convinced it's going to happen next week.

• 56:56Dan Harris?

  Two questions I ask at the end of every interview. First, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we haven't?

• 57:03Speaker 01

  We haven't talked about Scientology, Dan. It's been years.

• 57:06Dan Harris?

  I don't feel like getting sued.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Well, I'm here to tell you, you know, the Scientologists have kind of won. Look, there was a time when the fundamental principles of Scientology, which have to do with UFOs and extraterrestrials, and, and all that, their kind of core beliefs were considered so disruptive that they needed to be kept secret, and nobody could know about them. Well, not pretty much everybody knows about it. But they must be laughing double time, because now the Pentagon and the White House and mainstream America is talking about aliens and things like the panspermia thesis. And it doesn't all align with the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, which is probably disqualifying. But in terms of the larger discourse regarding

• 57:47Speaker 01

  aliens, you know, if anything, mainstream society has taken a step towards Scientology, not away from it. My problem, you know, if I were advising the Scientologists, which I've tried to do several times, to no avail, is their, their big mistake was making their bete noire, their number one enemy, psychiatry. I would advise them, I always say this, I would advise them to make their number one enemy golf.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Because there's lots of affluent people who've tried golf and hate golf and want nothing more than to turn their back on golf and find something else fulfilling. And if I were to start a religion today, that's what I would do is base it on an abiding, bitter antagonism towards the sport of golf.

• 58:35Dan Harris?

  Tom Cruise, if you're listening, reach out.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, take a number, get in line.

• 58:40Dan Harris?

  Final question. This is almost redundant at this point, but can you remind everybody of the name of your book and maybe also your past book, which you also came on the show to discuss? And, and the show that you executive produced, can you just plug everything you got, please?

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Yes. So my book, published by Simon and Schuster in May of 2026, is called Evidence of the Extraordinary: Discoveries From the Series The Proof Is Out There. And it is about, you know, my, and my team's diligent efforts to try to apply rigorous journalistic and scientific standards to the investigation of paranormal phenomena. And my earlier book, which was called More Than You Can Handle: A Rare Disease, A Family in Crisis, and the Breakthrough Medicine That Cured the Incurable, is about my own families and my son's personal journeys as we tried to diagnose and treat and ultimately cure this crushingly rare and lethal primary immune deficiency that he was born with.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  That set us on a whole journey that brought us through the miracles of modern medicine, right to the edge of science and belief and empirical data, and its border between faith and hope and potentially the divine. So that's how that book is framed, and there are certain parallels between that and my approach to the current endeavors to study the paranormal.

• 1:00:04Dan Harris?

  Miguel, great job with this. Great to talk to you. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go, remember to sign up for my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers,

• 1:00:43Dan Harris?

  ad-free access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads, exclusive livestream events, which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week, robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers, and with one another. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace.