Are UFOs Alien Tech? Avi Loeb vs Michael Shermer

Is there alien technology in our skies, or just birds, balloons and bad video? Two members of the White House UAP Science Advisory Council face off LIVE. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who chairs the council, makes the case for searching. Michael Shermer, the council skeptic Loeb picked himself, says show me the evidence. They have $1,000 riding on whether non-human technology is confirmed by 2030. Get all my best ET content: https://big-bang.kit.com/bvyt We'll cover the redacted Pentagon videos, Loeb's new papers on tracking objects over Nevada, the claims from David Grusch, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and Eric Weinstein, and what evidence would change each of their minds. Avi Loeb: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/ Michael Shermer: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/08/opinion/aliens-uap-ufo-videos-trump/ Subscribe to The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Sponsorships and speaking: https://BrianKeating.com 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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  The action's on the court. And as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:00Speaker 02

  The scientific approach is indeed, should be guided by evidence and we shouldn't have a prejudice. We shouldn't have a view about the outcome before we see the evidence. Now, one reason I have you in the council is so that, you know, those believers will attack you instead of me for using the scientific method.

• 1:26Brian Keating?

  I have to say, Brian, the vitriol on both sides, it's amazing what people say about each other. Not just on X, but on X especially bad. But, you know, as I've gotten to know Avi pretty well, I'm just amazed by the stuff that people, the shit they talk about him. It's like, oh my God. I mean, this is ridiculous. He's not at all like this. And yet, you know, and then people, of course, they hate on me and they hate on the believers or whatever. I don't know. It just, there seems to be, it's almost political, right? I mean, it's like politics.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  The way to think about it is what people say reflects on them more than on the subject that they're talking about. We see that a lot in politics. We see it, but we see it in science as well. And the way to distinguish between truth and what people are saying is to look at the primary sources. So if someone says that I said something, go ahead and check if Avi said that thing. And when you check the primary sources, you will realize that I didn't say that thing. And that's the way science is done, by the way. We go to nature, to the data that is collected by instruments to tell us what is out there, rather than talk about what is out there, which is very common on social media.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  You just say what you think is out there. But that's not necessarily what is out there. Most of the time, we are wrong. So the same is true when you say that a person, you know, should be, you know, dismissed because he said this and that. We should check if that person actually said that. And unfortunately, social media is such a shallow platform that people don't really go to the primary sources. They don't really check. Just yesterday, someone was saying that I said bad things about Jay Straton. I didn't say. I said only positive things about Jay Straton. Personally, if you look at my essay, I only gave his credentials.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  And I said that we should look for the evidence behind what he's talking about, which is exactly what I'm saying right now. It's not a bad thing to say that about Jay Straton. It's about the fact that, you know, enough with storytelling, enough with verbal testimonies. We are at an age where it's time for us to look at the evidence. And that's what I'm saying. I think that resonates very well with what the public wants. If Jay Straton says there is a spacecraft that is withheld within government or within corporations, I want to see the spacecraft. What could be more natural than that? Before, I believe it. And someone may say, "Well, he's worried about showing the spacecraft

• 4:14Speaker 02

  because he might get something, you know, retaliation." And I say, "Well, he doesn't need to show it to me. He doesn't need to show it to Michael. He doesn't need to show it to the council. He can go straight to the White House and have a guided tour of President Trump to the spacecraft. The only person who would know about it is President Trump. There is no doubt that President Trump is interested in this subject. Why? Because he put the directive out. He sees a political benefit from being the person who provides the revelation about alien intelligence. You know, that would be a huge event. President Trump will be remembered for thousands of years just by making this recognition that we are not alone, that there is,

• 5:00Speaker 02

  that we are not perhaps at the top of the cosmic food chain. So it would be a great political boon for President Trump. There is no doubt that he wants it. And so I'm saying, Jay Straton, you know about the spacecraft. Go ahead and give the inside information straight to President Trump. I'm not asking to know about it myself, but if you want, I'd be happy to help.

• 5:22Brian Keating?

  I heard the exact same thing from Michael Schirmer a couple of months ago when he was on my show for his wonderful new book. And he was using not President Trump, Marco Rubio. But I have a better idea. How about Councilwoman Luna? And by the way, Avi, you're very close with her. She did a, you know, kind of a glow up shot of herself visiting your Harvard Observatory and looked through the telescope during the day. Why isn't she, you know, just opening up the kimono? Here's everything we know. And I respect her. She has no whistleblower concerns whatsoever. She has no security, no doxing concerns. She has every right and every responsibility as the chairwoman. Is this just a manifestation, either one of you guys, of the Peter Principle, which we have in academia? The Peter Principle.

• 6:06Brian Keating?

  You fail up to the level of your incompetence. You rise to the level of your incompetence. We have a thousand deans and stuff. Why are there so many directors of different task force, Avi? Is this just like some way to, like, who are these people? You have Lou Elizondo, David Grusch, Anna Luna, Jay Straton now, Christopher Mellon, all these people who have podcasts and books and appearances. Who the hell are these people? And why isn't the one at the top of the food chain, the chairwoman in the congressional committee on this task force? Why isn't she just opening up the kimono like you just said?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Well, so first of all, it's obvious that the U.S. government sees objects they don't understand. The fundamental question is, do they represent alien technology? Non-human-made technology? That's a very simple question. And if there is a spacecraft the way that Jay Straton claims he saw, if there are alien bodies the way Jay Straton claims he saw, then it's a very, you know, straightforward thing. Because the only thing we need is to see digital evidence, either video footage or the actual material of these objects. We are not talking philosophy here. We're talking about real things that were seen and perhaps, very likely, documented

• 7:19Speaker 02

  because the people who held them have documentation. So all we need is access to the primary sources, like I said before. Now, you may ask, "Why isn't the information delivered to congresspeople like Representative Luna, Representative Burleson, Representative Burchett?" All of them are very eager to promote this disclosure. And they were exposed to some data from the U.S. government, but it's not available to everyone. And it's not, you know, we don't know how conclusive it is. I don't think it has to do with the kind of material evidence I was talking about. It's probably mostly footage. But to your question, there are lots of people

• 8:03Speaker 02

  who used to work within government within a project that was funded to study those UAP. And how far does the data go? We don't know. Okay? So these people have the duty now because President Trump is very interested. There is a memorandum written by the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Aaron Lucas, who says that all non-disclosure agreements are waived. These people are encouraged. They're not supposed to worry about legal repercussions. And they can approach the Pursuit Team. This is the team that is following on the presidential unsealing and reporting system

• 8:48Speaker 02

  for UAP encounters. Now, if they are worried about legal repercussions and they don't believe the Pursuit Team, they can go straight to Stephen Miller in the White House and they will have a direct line to the President where they can share the information. And believe me, these people will not face any legal repercussions if they reveal it to the President of the United States.

• 9:12Brian Keating?

  So, Michael, why aren't they doing it? Why aren't they coming forward? Why aren't they addressing this consideration, which you and I talked about, called the residual of anomalies that will never go away? Why aren't these people just being straightforward and honest? I feel like disclosures like nuclear fusion. It's the disclosure of the future and it always will be.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I guess if I had to anticipate what they might say, it would be something like fear of retaliation or whatever. Jay Stratton told Fox News Brett Byer Monday night or Tuesday night that it's too intense was the word he used. That actual disclosure where the American public or anybody could actually see the alien bodies and ships, it would be too intense for the American public to handle. Okay, I don't believe any of this. This is kind of the old line of they don't want to disclose whatever it is you're looking for because it'll cause the stock market to collapse and people will lose their religious beliefs and so on.

• 10:07Brian Keating?

  But they do want to disclose, sorry, they do want to disclose because they want to distract from Epstein, right, Michael? So how can you have it both ways?

• 10:14Speaker 04

  I don't think anybody would say that. That is one conspiracy theory about why Trump or any of the others in the mega community are interested in the subject to distract us from the Iran war or whatever. No, I don't think that's it. They may say that they're worried about people concerned about the religiosity. We've had polls for decades from religious pollsters asking people, would you be bothered about your religiosity if we discovered extraterrestrial intelligences somewhere out there or even here? And the answer is no, not at all. You know, if God is omniscient and omnipotent, he can do anything he wants. He can make as many, not only exoplanets, but as many intelligent life forms on those

• 10:56Speaker 04

  planets as he wants. Right? So it doesn't really bother anybody. As for the stock market, you know, they've always said that. Why don't we find out about X, whatever it is, because the stock market would collapse. Okay, there's no evidence that any of this would happen. If anything, it would cause AI companies and NASA and space propulsion system companies and so on to, you know, to actually boost their budgets. You know, NASA could go to Congress and go, we found the aliens and now we need to, you know, 2X our budget so that we can deal with them and so on. Anyway, the real reason, I think, yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Think about it in the following way. Suppose you find a tennis ball in your backyard and your family is not aware that you have a neighbor, even though you see a lot of houses on your street. It's just that the mainstream within your family claims that these houses may be empty. That's what the academic community claims. And the academic community says it's an extraordinary claim to think that the empty houses, meaning all the habitable Earth sun systems, you know, in the Milky Way galaxy, there are billions of them. All of these have no intelligence that ever emerged on them, or we can't imagine

• 12:15Speaker 02

  anyone being as intelligent as we are. And so the family says, we have no neighbor, but you find a tennis ball that is clearly manufactured, not a rock. Okay, I think it makes no sense to hide it from the family members because that's the reality of the situation. And the neighbor may show up in the front door. There may be many other ways by which it will affect the neighbor, will affect the life of your family. And it's the same way that for the Vatican to put Galileo in house arrest made no sense because the fact that the Earth moves around the sun rather than the other way around, you know, is an existential fact that will not be changed by preventing the information

• 12:59Speaker 02

  from leaking to the public. It is a lost battle. There is no point in denying the reality of the situation. So for the same reason, if we have a neighbor, let everyone know about it and let's adapt to that.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  The action's on the court. And as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  You know, just like we adapt to AI being potentially more intelligent than we are in the coming decade, like the mathematicians.

• 13:49Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I want to get to that because that is certainly on everybody's mind, including this context of superintelligence, which is uncontrollable, unpredictable. And, you know, that brings up a question that I've had for both of you guys for quite some time, and I'll start with Avi. You know, why would they send around these non-human biologics, as David Grush has called them? Why would they send around these, you know, meatbags, you know, instead of selling around a silicon brain, Mike, Avi? Why would they go to the trouble of this? And so isn't it a priori unlikely that when they say something is bipedal and it is non-human and is biological, that we have to put a Bayesian prior that very, very low on that claim? What do you think, Avi?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Well, I should say that the most likely entity to make it, you know, let's say between stellar systems, is probably technological rather than biological because of the long travel times, because of the hazardous conditions. But following on von Neumann's idea, self-replicating probes make a lot of sense. In other words, even we are, Elon Musk is now talking about his robots being able to use raw materials to reproduce themselves. And we know that in biology, that's exactly what happens when the dandelion flower sheds its seeds and they fly in the wind, they find a fertile ground and create more dandelion flower. So

• 15:13Speaker 02

  technologically speaking, it makes more sense to send the information that you want to replicate in the destinations. And in the case of the Earth, suppose they had that objective and

• 15:30Speaker 02

  3D printers, you know, machines that are capable of producing. Now, what would you like if you wanted to produce animals, let's say that are adaptable to the environment, you would look around and see what kind of animals exist on Earth and then sample them and try to 3D print something similar to them that would survive on Earth. So I can imagine a situation like that where we will find biological stuff, but it will be synthetic biology. It will not be natural biology, the way we think. So these will be 3D printed or synthetic biology produced biological entities that can survive on Earth because

• 16:11Speaker 02

  these things came from far away. Every planet has its different conditions that allow different animals to live on it. So instead of bringing the animals as pilots, makes no sense to bring them as pilots. But it makes a lot of sense to reproduce animals that are already there and put in them whatever you need in order to use the equipment that you bring. So

• 16:35Brian Keating?

  Michael, yeah, last time Avi was on, he's very colorful. He has lots of wonderful analogies. And one of them was, if you see an ant, there's that he's not alone, basically. You're cleaning out your kitchen there in Santa Barbara. All of a sudden you see an ant and you can be pretty sure, according to Avi, that he's not alone. He used on the context of, you know, sightings and anomalies that we talked about. But I want to say that in the context of you as a skeptic. Is there only one skeptic on this committee? Because if there is, it's kind of worrisome to me. I wouldn't go on a committee that, you know, I felt like I would get no back. I don't have your courage, though. I don't have the cojones that you

• 17:18Brian Keating?

  have. Tell me, Michael, was that a concern of yours? Are you alone? And not just in the universe, but on the committee?

• 17:23Speaker 04

  No, no. I mean, Avi just said, they're all skeptics. I mean, if you asked everybody on the committee, they all go, yeah, of course I'm skeptical. Now, the question is, is I suppose, well, what do you mean by skeptical? Right. So I, you know, for me, the null hypothesis is that aliens are not here. Now, I could be wrong. There could be very, you know, I think it's highly likely there are aliens somewhere in the cosmos. Have they come here? I think it's a separate question. I think it's highly unlikely, but okay, show us and then I'll change my mind tomorrow. Right? I mean, I have that bet. So that's always been bothering me about the disclosure projects that all these UAP whistleblowers talk about? Like, like, one of the other excuses besides the stock market will collapse and people

• 18:04Speaker 04

  will lose their religiosity is that they themselves may have their lives or careers threatened. And yet there they are on Fox News, on Joe Rogan, telling tens of millions of people what they know. But if when Joe or whoever presses for evidence, what can you, where are these space? Oh, I can't tell you. Alls I could tell you is that we're not alone in the universe. Okay, that is a massive statement. That's one of the most revelatory statements ever made in the history of humanity, that there's other life forms. You can't just say that and go, I'm not going to show you. So my analogy is the biologist that goes to the big biology conferences says, I found another bipedal primate who

• 18:47Speaker 04

  has language and developed a culture and so on. And it'd be like, oh, my God, you mean Bigfoot or something like that, or the hobbit people or whatever? Oh, oh, my God, where are they? Oh, I can't tell you. Okay, it'd be like, well, thank you very much. That's interesting. But you know, when you can tell us, get back to us, right? In the meantime, I'm going to write a book about it. Going on Fox News, going on Rogan. You know, the problem is, is that this is not just a one off. Uh, Brian, there, you know, this has been going on for decades. You know, the Disclosure Project started by Stephen Greer in 93. I mean, we've been hearing these stories. It's coming any day now.

• 19:21Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  Okay, so I'm a long time watcher of this. It's like, okay, come on, let's do it. And, um, you know, so there was Jay Stratton Tuesday night saying, "It's too intense. I can't show you. Alls I can tell you is we're not alone in the universe." Okay, sorry. That's not enough.

• 19:36Brian Keating?

  Can't tell Avi Loeb? I mean, Avi, you have a vested interest. We've talked about that. You have a vested interest. Yeah, we, you have a vested interest.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  I actually met Jay Stratton, uh, a few weeks ago, uh, in Utah at a conference and I, I invited him to speak with the council, but he did not respond to my invitation. But I should say that two things I wanted to, to mention is how science is done and people need to understand that. So we have no, uh, prejudice. So when, uh, the Pentagon reports about six dots in the sky that they cannot understand, they call them UAP, they declassify the video in the infrared uh, on September 18th. And then the council, uh, looks into that, uh, and that's a study led by Jacob Hakmisra.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  We ended up writing a paper showing that the brightness of these six dots fluctuates periodically, just like you expect from birds flapping their wings. Now, it's not as if we started with this notion because even the Pentagon didn't know that these are birds. They called them UAP because they didn't know what they are, but just analyzing the brightness is taking a Fourier transform of that, seeing a period eight times per second, comparing to Galileo Project data on birds. We have a lot of birds that we see. Then we see that there is a match, that the brightness fluctuations of the six dots that the Pentagon is reporting about that matches what the birds are doing in the Galileo Project data. That's how science is done.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Second point, we don't have good enough data on most of the reports that are in the trenches, six trenches from the Pentagon. Therefore, the conclusion is not that we, let's imagine what these things are. Instead, the conclusion is, let's collect better data. So my hope is, we will, uh, partner with the Pentagon, do experiments with new sensors in the locations where they see those unusual objects. Why? Because at the very least, if you have a down to earth approach, you would say, "These are national security risks. We're dealing with espionage by Chinese drones that we haven't yet identified." So let's figure them out and I'll be happy to help the Pentagon and the intelligence community fulfill their mission.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  That's the minimum that we will do. But of course, if it happens to be alien technology, this will be huge. Now, um, how do we promote that? So I'm also working, uh, to get the funding to a UAP X Prize, which means $10 million allocated to whoever brings, uh, evidence beyond a reasonable doubt on unidentified anomalous phenomena being associated with alien technology. And a week and a half ago, uh, I, I, uh, attended a gathering in the home of Peter Diamandis, along with Gary Nolan and Peter Skaafish.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  And, uh, to my, uh, I mean, fortune, I, I also the same day had a brunch with a potential funder and that would be really nice because it will encourage scientific research. People will now have a prize to gain if they demonstrate alien technology. But also, if there is anyone that is, has the spacecraft that Jay Stratton is talking about in, in their possession, uh, they can get the, the X Prize. Now, if they go to President Trump, President Trump can get the X Prize. And I think it will, uh, bring more transparency into the subject, either through research or through anyone that already has the evidence.

• 23:21Brian Keating?

  Now, with, with regard to why people wouldn't come forward, uh, it seems like there's a lot of vitriol. Uh, obviously, Michael even talked about, I want to get to his, his Boston Globe op ed, which is paywalled, but he sent me a, a free version of it. Uh, but the, uh, the reason I, I might think is because, uh, of some things that Anna Paulina Luna has said about former director of, of Arrow, the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Avi, you connected me to Sean Kirkpatrick. I never got so much hostility, hate, vitriol directed at me, at him. And maybe it's because of things that she said. She said, quote, "Sean Kirkpatrick," she spelled it wrong, "he's a documented liar, a deep state shill, and someone who lied to the public while intimidating or discrediting witnesses."

• 24:07Brian Keating?

  This is pretty awful. And her communications director, uh, David Leatherwood has also responded to criticism of the UAP hearings. Why would anybody come forward? I mean, why, Michael, would you risk your reputation if you're in government? Why would you want to lead this? So it's not only a residual of anomalies, it's a residual of true believers that get left to lead these committees like potentially, I don't know Jay Stratton at all, except what Avi tweeted about him. Um, but, uh, but you have people like that that will just have this, this fanfare and, and celebration from people like Luna and, uh, her, her, you know, her workers. Why would anybody come forward that has the, on the counter side of the issue? The devil's advocate.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  The action's on the court, and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents 21 plus. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  Yes, well, I mean, if there's one real reason, I suspect that has to do with national security. And that whatever it is that people are seeing, these UAPs, they may be our own advanced technology or actually crash retrieval, um, technology from foreign assets. I mean, there's always been crash retrieval programs all the way back to World War I, where we capture the, uh, enemy's airplanes and see what they're using. Uh, you know, that's why, like in the B-17s over Nazi Germany, they, you know, if a plane was going down, they had to try to get rid of the Norton bomb site, um, device, because we don't want them to know how we're, you know, using these accuracy technologies for our bombs, right?

• 25:58Speaker 04

  So, uh, I suspect that the vast majority of these UAPs are just our own technology, just the next version of, you know, the U-2 spy plane or this, or 71 Blackbird or the stealth bomber or, or, or whatever. The CIA and DARPA is maybe developing super advanced drones or, you know, spy balloons or whatever, something that we just don't know about yet and that maybe this is what people are seeing and that somebody in the government is just like, we don't, we don't want people to, to know what's actually going on for national security reasons.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's called black projects, Michael. Exactly.

• 26:31Brian Keating?

  Yeah, yeah. So if these are, I, what, what, Avi, what's your null hypothesis?

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Oh, I have no null hypothesis. I just wanted data to guide us because, you know, Steven Spielberg, uh, you know, made the script for Disclosure Day based on everything he heard. Uh, and, uh, you know, to me, that, that is, uh, that could be very misleading because, uh, people say a lot of things that are wishful thinking. Uh, and frankly, I didn't find Disclosure Day to be an inspiring movie. Uh, I mean, the main characters, uh, that are trying to unravel the truth are being chased by the government. Their car is crashed against the moving train. My car is intact and I'm actually

• 27:22Brian Keating?

  In Boston, Harvard Yard? That's a miracle, Avi. If your car hasn't been keyed in Harvard Yard like mine was.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the point is, if you listen to, to all the, uh, noise that is out there and you amplify it in a movie, uh, you know, it doesn't serve any good purpose. The point is, we need to look for the signal, not the noise. And how do you find the signal? It's by not having a, a, a prior, not having a prejudice and just trying to collect as much data, as much evidence, because nature is far more imaginative than Steven Spielberg. And if we do find, I'm not excluding nor debunking the existence of an alien visitation. I'm just saying, let's collect better data so we can tell whether we are looking at a UAP that is birds

• 28:10Speaker 02

  or whether we are looking at a UAP that is, uh, Chinese drones that are spying on the US or whether we are looking at alien technology. The only way to figure it out is not by speaking to reporters on Fox News. It's by showing us the evidence.

• 28:28Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that reminds me of something my rabbi told me once, Avi, that, you know, I can believe in Kriath Yom Soof because if Cecil B. Demille can do it in the Ten Commandments, certainly Hashem can do it. Uh, Michael, before we turn this into a minion and get you, uh, properly circum, no, we, we don't have to do that, Michael. Uh, but, uh, uh, Michael, recently David Grusch was on, uh, Joe Rogan and it was an incredibly wide ranging interview, but at one point he mentions our mutual friend. All three of us are friends with Eric Weinstein. Uh, and he mentioned that he had some biological material and that he was hoping to, you know, Eric Weinstein had some, had some access, you know, if he could give Weinstein access to this or maybe Grusch has his own access to this.

• 29:10Brian Keating?

  Um, what would be worse than giving access to a completely non-professional biologist? Eric's a mathematician and, and, and works in, you know, formerly works with, uh, Teal Capital. Uh, what, what would be the concerns that you have? What should be the protocol? Because if you can't maintain prominence as a scientist, you lose your traceability matrix. It's over.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  I don't know. People just, uh, shoot off the most famous names they can think of, I guess, maybe when they're on Rogan. I have no idea. Uh, I mean, Eric, I mean, he doesn't know anything about this, right? I mean, we have, uh, um, biologists on our council. I'm, you know, they would be highly qualified to, to look at this. But, but, but forget that, just the government has access to, uh, you know, professional medical and, and biological scientists that they get to access.

• 29:57Brian Keating?

  But would that, would that corrupt or pollute the provenance of, of such things? I mean, I talked to Tom DeLonge many years ago, first interview I think he did on a podcast.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  Again,

• 30:07Brian Keating?

  He claimed he, he lost access to the provenance. I don't, why would we care what a rocker thinks? I mean, come on. I mean, SETI has a whole protocol set up. Like if we find the signal, this is what we're going to do, you know, it's there'll be disclosure and so on. The government has systems in place like this NASA and so on. You know, this is what we're going to do. Okay, so we don't have to go through rock stars and and and, you know, I don't know, podcasters or whatever.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  I I should just make an anecdote that I met Tom DeRong last month and I told him, yeah, you know, I don't know how to sing. I don't know much. And he said, neither do I.

• 30:51Brian Keating?

  He's a local San Diego boy, so we gotta love him here. But Avi, what would be the the chain of command custody to prevent, you know, someone's mentioning in the chat, as has my friend Delon, you know, why not give it to Gary Nolan? It's last I checked, Gary Nolan, yeah, he's he does immunology, I believe, at Stanford. Yes, he knows more about biology than me. I always told you, when I dissected a frog in a ninth grade biology, the frog came back to life and started screaming in agony. So don't give it to me, but don't give it to Gary Nolan either. I mean, what, just because someone has a degree, does that make them entitled to, you know, this provenance potentially contamination chain? And I like Gary, you've been on with me and him.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the the way science works is that the multiple groups should be able to vet whether the data implies the same conclusion. And without that vetting, without checking independently, you know, we will lose objectivity. And so if we have a sample, and I should say that it's sufficient to tell if a material came from outside the solar system, my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobson, just needs one gram of material. That is plenty. We actually submitted a paper for publication a month ago that analyzes a nanogram of material, ten to the minus nine

• 32:14Speaker 02

  of a of a gram, so that we draw very high significance, statistical significance conclusions from that nanogram. So giving a gram is a treasure. So just to infer isotope abundances and chemical abundances, a gram is plenty. In order to do biology, what you want, of course, is to compare it to a systems you find here on Earth, life forms. And by the way, all of them have the same chirality, all of the life forms on Earth. And so you have a 50% chance that if something came from outside, it's an opposite chirality, not that not to speak about the fact that the DNA will not be the same. I mean, who said that universally it has to have,

• 32:57Speaker 02

  you know, four bases and so forth. The point is that it could be very different. And if you give it to multiple groups, some of which are, let's say skeptics, some of which are believers, if they reach the same conclusions, we are on a solid footing. And the way science is done is by allowing multiple scientists to look into the data. That's the way we should approach it. And we have the resources, no problem. We just need access to the data. And whoever holds it is, you know, conducting a sin to science, because whoever has such materials is preventing the rest of humanity from learning more about the origin and the potential intent

• 33:40Speaker 02

  of those materials. So if anyone is listening and they have access to such materials, I highly encourage you, whoever holds it, to share it with the

• 33:56Speaker 02

  with a broad range of expertise, because very likely, either within government or in corporations, you don't have the the world, the best experts and professionals to deal with such an exotic origin. And it's not up to the holder of that material to decide whether humanity is mature enough to learn about it. I think, you know, we should all figure things out together and grow and adapt to this reality together. And it will make our life far more exciting, you know, to realize that we have a sibling, that God is not a parent to only one child, that in fact, our siblings may be more accomplished than we are, that we can learn from them. It

• 34:41Speaker 02

  will bring a sense of humility to our existence, which we desperately need.

• 34:46Brian Keating?

  Yeah, speak for yourself. I'm the most humble person. Michael, let me ask you this.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  Let me just.

• 34:51Brian Keating?

  Go ahead, go ahead.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Well, I was gonna add, you know, since the replication crisis began in 2010 in science, particularly psychology and medical science, what was discovered is that a lot of claims about scientific discoveries had not been replicated. They'd been published in peer reviewed journals, but there are certain flaws there, you know, that time restraints on the reviewers, maybe they didn't actually read through all the data carefully, but also the reporting in the papers themselves, the file drawer effect where, you know, you run 10 experiments and you get one that is statistically significant, you publish that one, you put the others in the file drawer. No one even knows about the failed experiments or, you know, P-hacking, where you make the statistical significance number come out by throwing out

• 35:37Speaker 04

  some of the extreme data points or whatever. There's lots of problems with that that have now been resolved, one of which is, don't depend on one published paper for any particular conclusion. Wait to see if it before, I should say, before you, you know, announce on a in a press release, you've made the greatest discoveries since Einstein or whatever, you should just wait to see if it's replicated. And before you, you know, publicize it and make a big deal about it. And that has gone a long ways to solving some of these problems that I think if there was discovery made of some, you know, biologics or non-human intelligence or technology that we can't recognize, you know, you asked about protocols, well, yeah,

• 36:20Speaker 04

  not just one journal, not just one biologist or one lab, everybody, lots of labs, you know, the adversarial system is really good, where people compete with each other to debunk each other. That's the whole point of the adversarial system. And it works really well to get to the truth about what's actually happening.

• 36:36Brian Keating?

  Talk about the the obstacles you mentioned in the in the Boston Globe article, because I know you have to leave in a few minutes. But talk about the obstacles. Which one of the obstacles do you think is the most significant practical hurdle to your work on the council?

• 37:21Speaker 04

  I forget what I what obstacles. I don't remember talking about obstacles.

• 37:24Brian Keating?

  Yeah, you're talking about hurdles. The videos are filled with redactions or blacked out. There's

• 37:28Speaker 04

  Oh, I see. Yes, yes, of course. Yes. So all of us on the on the council have been frustrated by the lack of information. We would love the government to give us more information, like what, you know, where was this UAP filmed from? Where, you know, what what camera was used? What was the distance? What was the speed? You know, whatever. It would really help us. And, you know, somebody knows, but, you know, maybe, again, maybe there's national security reasons why they don't want to make that public, because they don't want the Chinese or Russians to know how our cameras work on these jets, maybe. That would be legitimate, but it'd be nice to know if they'd at least say that, you know, we would tell you, we would show you the numbers behind this blacked out box, but we can't tell you because then the

• 38:10Speaker 04

  adversaries, our adversaries would know how our camera works. Okay. You know, I mean, I sort of get that. But then why tease us with all these videos and photographs and documents without giving us full disclosure?

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is another point to be made, Brian, in this context. For example, the satellites monitoring the Earth with infrared sensors for ballistic missile launches, you know, there are a number of the a large number of those. And over the past decade, they detect meteor explosions, because when an object like a rock collides with Earth, it burns up in the atmosphere, generates a fireball. And these detectors can easily see that. And so they decided to share the information with NASA. Now, they don't show us the footage of the meteor, because that would reveal the level of high resolution imaging that they can accomplish. But but they give the kinematic properties of these meteors, the

• 39:09Speaker 02

  three dimensional velocity that they have, the position and so forth. And in the same way, the US government, without revealing the quality of the instruments that are using, they can give us more information about the distance of objects, the velocity of objects, without revealing what instruments were used to derive those.

• 39:29Brian Keating?

  Especially things like the Chinese spy balloon, it's not that they don't want to reveal our capabilities, they don't want to reveal the Chinese capabilities, that's kind of crazy. But Michael, you're a psychologist by training, you have PhD, you've been a professional skeptic way back since, you know, when you were abducted in the 80s and 90s, we've talked about that a few times, so no one has more incentive out there, people that, you know, are ranking on Michael in the comments, still, he would have a great incentive because it would validate this experience that he had, you know, many decades ago, and has stood up, yeah, stood up for, but Michael, what is the psychological kind of background, help me, and, you know, Avi and I are just simple astrophysicists, but what is a psychological compulsion to believe, to not believe, the adversarial kind of nature of this, of this belief?

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Oh, well, I do think that behind the deeper question is a religious impulse to find out that there's something out there vastly more intelligent and moral and so forth than us, I mean, that is what the deity is, in most religions, it's that, you know, there's an entity out there, an agent, that knows we're here, that created all this, made it happen, and so on, this is a very old point, actually, maybe Carl Sagan in the 60s, there's a nice video of him with Walter Cronkite, where he's explaining that, the whole thing, he thinks, is like a kind of religion, so, and there's, there's research to support this, you know, that people that are less religious, but have, that score high in spirituality,

• 40:58Speaker 04

  the desire for awe and wonder, that sort of thing, there's measures for this, are also more likely to believe that aliens are out there or have come here than those that are already religious, so, it's kind of a filler, I think, I think that's the deeper impulse. Now, I did say this to Jill Tarter once, and she was not amused, because she says, "I'm not looking for God, I'm looking for aliens," like, okay, I know, but the deeper matter of why we care, I mean, what difference does it make whether we're alone or not, why do people care about that, well, because it is, really touches deep on who we are, where we came from, what we're doing here, you know, are we really super unique, or are we just one of, you know, a near infinite number of intelligences or life forms in the cosmos, that, that would make a difference existentially about, you know, our kind of place in the,

• 41:43Speaker 04

  in the universe, so, I know I got a rod, so, but I'll, I'll wrap up with, I'll give the last word to Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, who witnessed the 2004 UAP incident from a USS Nimitz fighter jet, as, as I think it well sums up 75 years of UFOlogist's search for aliens, she said, quote, "I think they enjoy the anticipation more than actually finding answers," so what Avi and I want is answers, well, I mean, it's, yeah, I know the anticipation is big fun, but come on.

• 42:12Brian Keating?

  Just before you leave, Michael, I know you got to run, but before you leave, I view it slightly problematic, as much as I love Avi, and I love to, you know, I won't miss an opportunity to tease Harvard in any capacity, but do you feel that there's a danger in centering an independent research, you know, organization like the Council, under Avi's, you know, august supervision, but still centered in a university, because look at the university system right now, look at the Ivy League, Cornell, Harvard too, you know, where I went, Brown, many different, you know, and Stanford, you know, people in the chat are saying, you know, can't trust Gary, he's at Stanford, they had their president had to resign because of, because-

• 42:54Speaker 04

  They say that, really?

• 42:55Brian Keating?

  Yeah, they're saying things like that, but, I mean, if you want something done right, you know, do you want to ask a team of academicians, you know, professors and functionaries?

• 43:04Speaker 04

  I still, I still respect the academy, I mean, that, you know, a lot of the politics and that kind of stuff is problematic, cancel culture, DEI, and all that, this too shall pass, I do think that universities for centuries have been, you know, kind of the center of the generation of knowledge, and, and we will continue doing that, I do think having this council associated with Avi, organized by Avi, led by Avi, at Harvard makes a difference, you know, that opens doors, you know, there, you know, Representative Luna, like, I went to Harvard, wow, okay, she's not coming to my office-

• 43:36Brian Keating?

  She visited Harvard, she didn't go to Harvard.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  She visited Harvard, right, yeah, I mean, she visited Harvard, she's not coming to visit me, right, I mean, that opens doors, okay, so, if that's what it takes, if somebody says, "I don't care about Shermer, but I want to show Avi, I'm going to Harvard to show him the aliens," okay, whatever it takes.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I should say that, Michael, there is another aspect aside from religiosity, and that is looking for a partner, you know, before my wife met me, she was asking her father, "Is there anyone out there for me?" And, you know, "Are we alone?" is the most romantic question in science.

• 44:12Speaker 04

  That's true, yes, that's a nice point, yeah.

• 44:14Brian Keating?

  Oh, Michael, I know you have to leave, Avi, are you able to stick around for a little longer, thanks, Michael.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  All right, I'll see you guys later.

• 44:21Brian Keating?

  Thanks so much.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  Bye-bye.

• 44:23Brian Keating?

  So, Avi, it's great to talk to you, we have a million questions for you, but we'll do a rapid fire, but I do want to talk about the, the rise of AI, I do think it is, the superintelligence phenomenon cannot be avoided, I think we do need to discuss that, especially in the context of what you're doing, but, but also scientifically for what we're both doing, and what our teams and researchers are doing, and what our young people out there that are working in my lab, and in your, in your group, have to confront, we've seen a lot of things going on lately with OpenAI, Navier-Stokes, we haven't, you and I haven't talked since then, so I think it would be fun to talk about that, let's take a couple of questions from my audience, I usually take questions only from the members that, that join the channel, so please join the channel, if you're not subscribing, please

• 45:05Brian Keating?

  subscribe, and, I guess the first thing, yeah, is, is actually, you know, related to this, so why would aliens, if they have, you know, the access to interstellar transportation, why would they care about our DNA, not just have the same five base pairs that we have in RNA and DNA, why would they care about our biology?

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, the question of the intent is the most difficult for us to figure out, and you can think of it in terms of levels of intelligence, if they are operating in a different plane than we are, we will never be able to figure out their intent, just think about a dog, that, where the owner didn't feed the dog because they had to get some stamps from the post office, how would you ever be able to explain to a dog why stamps are needed, you know, that's a completely different level of understanding of reality, and so when the owner of the dog is absent, the dog has no way of figuring

• 46:09Speaker 02

  out that the post office gives stamps, and that these are useful for some, something that the owner is doing, so, in the same way, if the aliens are operating at a different intelligence level, or if AI systems that we develop will reach a level that we cannot comprehend because of recursive self-improvement, you know, we won't be able to figure out the intent, we will see things happening, and, in fact, the AI systems might try to fool us, like putting some makeup, as if, you know, a veneer that lets us feel comfortable with whatever they're doing, but behind that veneer will hide the reality that is not

• 46:51Speaker 02

  understandable to us, because it's far more sophisticated, I mean, we are, you know, cheering whenever, you know, OpenAI solves an old mathematical problem, because we can understand the fact that we didn't, we weren't able, the mathematicians were not able for so long, and now, a collection of thousands of agents can do it, but just think about a goal that has nothing to do with problems that humans posed in the past, has nothing to do with the millennium problems that humans came up with, it has to do with problems that the AI system came up with because of recursive self-improvement, they decided to pursue some goals that are not framed by humans, and then they're giving us this

• 47:34Speaker 02

  appearance as if they are cooperating with us, but in fact, they're solving something else, and, you know, that is the most difficult situation to be in, because you have no way of figuring out the intent, and I think, in the case of, you know, neighbors that are visiting us, cosmic neighbors, if they reached our backyard before we reached their backyard, their science and technology is probably far more advanced than ours, by maybe thousands of years at the very least, and in fact, you know, they represent our future, there is no way we can figure out our future now that AI systems are growing exponentially.

• 48:11Brian Keating?

  So there's a question about quantum physics, that we don't fully understand quantum physics. So if we could understand it, we could manipulate it and that would create new opportunities, virtual reality, the listener is saying, and that would be a tantamount to UAPs. I call this line of thinking, the UAPs of the aliens of the gaps. You know, they can do everything that we can't do and they fill in the things that we can't do, just like God did before we understood the scientific process as we do now. And of course, there's always residual things we don't understand. What do you make of this, that, you know, they, the reason that we don't, that they can get here is because they know physics that we don't know. I mean, it's sort of a very circular argument.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  I'm not thinking about physics, but I do realize that our technological civilization is now on the brink of a new phase, which is driven by AI and eventually by self reproducing robots with AI. Why is that significant? Because in the past, if you think about SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, when we developed radio communication, it was in order for us to communicate with each other as animals, biological entities, they wished, especially humans, wished to communicate with each other. That created a sense of community. We developed a radio communication because of the fact that we are made of, you know, biological bodies.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  But when you deal with AI, they don't have the same objective. They will not necessarily radio communicate with each other. And so SETI, you know, will not work when you deal with technological civilizations that went beyond the AI singularity that we are entering. And I call it SETI, actually. I wrote three papers on, three articles on that on medium.com. And then the search for extraterrestrial AI. And the one difference, just to give an example, is that if you deal with biological creatures, that, let's say, life as we know it in liquid water, what you need is to be in the habitable

• 50:13Speaker 02

  zone of a star, at the right distance where liquid water may exist on the surface of a rocky planet that has an atmosphere. However, if you deal with self replicating robots that use AI, they would prefer to be closer to the host star. There will be a technological zone, which is different than the habitable zone, which is closer to the star in order for them to get more flux, more energy per time, per area from the host star, so that they can power their data centers, their technological infrastructure. For the technological zone of stars would be far closer in to the star than the habitable zone.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  And SETI, you know, in difference from SETI, should also consider planets that are very close, either planets or space platforms that are artificially made, that are closer to the host star because they can power data centers, technological infrastructure. It's a different search. And one other signature of AI driven civilizations is that they would use probes, self replicating robots, they will send them around, they will not necessarily transmit radio signals because their objectives are perhaps reaching those exoplanets and transforming them according to some plan.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them? That's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out, in. Dashboard, confessions.

• 51:43Speaker 05

  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 52:03Brian Keating?

  So one thing that Tom DeLonge told me many years ago when I talked to him, and I have to disagree, there's a lot of people in the chat that are saying, "You are a rock star, Avi, you just, maybe you have a bad voice." But I'm not one to talk, the only instrument I play is Spotify. Question from Poland. Have you looked into the possibility of an ancient, advanced, extinct, ancient, human civilization on Earth before us? And that's what these things are?

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Well, first I should say humanity is probably, you know, if we are being visited, this visit was not recent. It has been around, humanity, you know, hominins started 5 million years ago, which is a tenth of a percent of the age of the Earth. And Homo sapiens started 300,000 years ago. That's 0.007% of the age of the Earth. You know, it's really a short time. And if we have a visitation, probably lasted for a while. And so we might not be the indigenous, intelligent species on Earth. We are not necessarily the indigenous species if we find, find that curious.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Maybe they were responsible for some of our evolution, you know. I haven't seen any evidence for that in the human DNA. There is no part of human DNA that is definitely put, put there artificially, that is a complete, completely different. You can see that it's a patch. As far as I know, there is no such thing. And so it's not clear whether they, you know, as we evolved from chimpanzees, whether they had any role in helping our intelligence to blossom. We don't see any evidence for that, but who knows? The point is, there could have been also an intelligent civilization before us on Earth, let's say 200 million years ago.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  And, you know, since then, there were lots of catastrophes, you know, on Earth. Maybe one of them was triggered by the civilization that basically destroyed itself. The point is, all of their computer terminals or whatever they left, infrastructure, was probably mixed with the Earth's interior through geological activity. So 200 million years later, we don't see much of it, except for things that are hovering in the atmosphere. You know, these are, if they are able to survive for that long, they would not be destroyed by geological activity. So maybe UAP represent a technological civilization that predated us on Earth. That's a possibility.

• 54:38Brian Keating?

  An allied question I have, I gave to Professor Kevin Canute, who's also on your council, I believe. And we're talking about these different objects that we're seeing. You know, if you take the, all the sensor data, including the two refracting telescopes in our heads, and you include that as a visual reference, and then you look all the way down to the radio, you know, that's spanning orders of magnitude in wavelength range, you know, four, five, six orders of magnitude, maybe seven to 10. It's hard to get much more broad than that. I mean, there are very few detectors that can do gamma ray all the way down to, you know, radio waves, right? So, but, but we have a lot of these things. And I said to him, "You, you looked at these objects and they, they travel with, you know, 5,000 G accelerations and so forth.

• 55:22Brian Keating?

  They don't make sonic booms, they don't make supersonic shock waves." So I asked him, "Let's pose it as a physics question. I'm an expert in radar technology. I mean, that's part of what the CMB was, right? Cosmic microwave background. I build these detectors, I build infrared cameras, I build optical cameras, all across the wavelength range, that's as high up as I go is optical, but, but nevertheless." And I look at all the different domains, polarization, frequency coverage, I'm looking for Lorentz invariance violation. So all these things. And I said, "What are, what types of properties would have perfect reflectivity and absorption in the optical infrared radar microwave, maybe up until the ultraviolet?

• 56:03Brian Keating?

  And produce, and be made of no material, such that they would not heat up, produce sonic boom, would not produce sonic booms, would go underwater, would be buoyant? What kind of, just as a hypothesis, likelihood ratio, what kind of materials could these be?" It seemed to make me, I mean, he didn't have a good answer for it, I don't think. What is your, you know, retort to that? These things do not interact, but they do interact.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  I can give you one example of something that can do that. The question assumes that there is a solid surface, but there might not be. So, you know, in 1994, Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican physicist, came up with a solution to Einstein's equations, where he derived sort of a soliton, basically a warped structure of spacetime, where spacetime is curved, it looks like a bubble. And this warped spacetime bubble, you know, warped bubble, is able to travel at an arbitrary speed. And it doesn't need an engine, it's traveling because it keeps warping space ahead of it

• 57:10Speaker 02

  and that sort of keeps it going. And then...

• 57:16Speaker 02

  For, you know, since 1994, people wrote papers about it and, uh, you know, it can move even faster than the speed of light in principle, or smaller, much smaller than the speed of light. Uh, and I just asked the question, uh, a few months ago, uh, what will be the appearance of such a thing if it were to go through the Earth's atmosphere? That's a simple question. Nobody asked this question and I, uh, convinced the, uh, a researcher named, uh, Dr. Sean Fell, uh, who has expertise in general relativity and is brilliant, to do a simulation of that. And what we found is that, and it's all on the archive, you

• 57:57Speaker 02

  can find the paper, we calculated the radiative appearance of a warp drive, a warp bubble passing through the Earth's atmosphere. We found that if it moves close to the speed of light or, or more, it will be brighter than the sun. You know, it will be so bright that you won't be able to miss it. Uh, we don't see such things. However, if it, uh, if it moves at the speed of sound, which is a million times, uh, uh, smaller than the speed of light, it's exactly a million times, the speed of sound is a million times smaller than the speed of light, then you could get the appearance of an orb, not very far from what is reported by the US government. So perhaps, you know, you can imagine, in this

• 58:38Speaker 02

  case, a warp bubble moving through air, it doesn't have a solid surface, it's just that the air goes through it and shocks as a result of that because streams of the air collide with each other, but it doesn't bother the, the, the warp bubble because it has no solid surface, it just moves, the coupling of the bubble to the air passing through it is, is just gravitational, you know, it's nothing. Uh, so, uh, so in a way, you could get the appearance of, uh, a ball of plasma, you know, the, the, the air that passes through it gets ionized, gets sort of like a small fireball or an orb, and it will reflect radar,

• 59:20Speaker 02

  it will appear, uh, in infrared imaging or, or visible light imaging, but it's not associated with the hu- hard surface. So that's, this is just an example from a paper that, uh, we posted, uh, about a month ago and you can find all the details there.

• 59:36Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I'll put links to it. Uh, Steven Datalis, a long time, uh, member of the channel. Uh, do you think that we could find evidence of alien life or alien civilization once we have a base on the moon?

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Well, the moon is a, a museum in the sense that it has no atmosphere. So everything that collides with it, uh, you know, reaches the surface and stays deposited on the surface. That's why the moon is scarred with so many craters that overlap because everything impacts the moon. On Earth, on the other hand, you know, all the objects smaller than the size of a person, uh, they burn up in the Earth, in, in the Earth's atmosphere. And, uh, if they are very small, um, let's say tens of centimeters, they get evaporate, vaporized, uh, in this process. And so, um, we are not vulnerable to micrometeorites. These are

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  tiny, you know, uh, meteorites, tiny rocks or dust particles that collide with Earth at a speed of tens of kilometers per second. These, these, uh, collisions happen all the time, but these dust particles burn up. However, if you are an astronaut on the moon, you have to worry about this because they move 10 times faster than a bullet. And if any of them, uh, impacts your body, you are dead. Uh, and so, um, gladly, I did a calculation, the chance of that happening is quite small, even over a period of a decade, because the body has a small surface area. But in, in infrastructure that would be placed on the

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  moon, you know, that is part of the Artemis mission, uh, that infrastructure will be damaged, you know, as a result of micrometeorites because they are not being shielded by an atmosphere. So the moon collects everything impacting it, and in a way, that's a treasure of everything over the past 4.5 billion years that collided with the moon should be buried under the dust on, by the way, the moon is, uh, covered with a layer of dust because of all these impacts. And these dust particles are very sharp because there was no water or atmosphere to sort of, uh, uh, ablate the sharp edges. So they are just like fiberglass,

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  you know, if you were to touch them with a bare hand, you would be cut immediately. So the moon is covered with a meter deep layer of dust. Under that dust, it's an archaeological site that we can find a lot of treasures.

• 1:02:05Brian Keating?

  I'm giving a talk tomorrow at, uh, the Science of Consciousness, uh, conference here in beautiful San Diego, uh, organized by Stuart Hammeroff and other people. Uh, and I'm talking about the, what, what is the possibility that we find a dinosaur fossil on the moon or on Mars, you know, um, because it should to me, and I've written a brief paper about this, which I'll send you, but you'll probably be too busy to read it. Uh, but it provides a slight Bayesian, you know, prior on the ability for panspermia to take place. So my argument is that we have, uh, exchanged material between the Earth and Mars, just like I have a Martian meteorite, here's a Martian meteorite, uh, and we, and by the way, you can get a Martian meteorite, um, if you have enough money, uh, but you

• 1:02:47Brian Keating?

  can get a real meteorite from, uh, the Campo di Cielo impact crater. I don't have my little guy, where is he? Uh, if you have a dot edu email address, well, it looks like this, but it's much smaller. It's not a giant piece of silicon. Here it is. You'll get one of these beauties, uh, if you have a dot edu email address and live in the USA like me and Avi do. Go to briankeating.com/edu. Otherwise, you'll enter into a drawing to win one. But, uh, my argument is that, you know, when Mars was wet and warm and wonderful, wild and slippery and, and phenomenal, back, you know, billions of years ago perhaps, Earth had microbes crawling all over and then eventually multicelled and then eventually, you know, organisms and entities and animals. And so we were being bombarded and there's some probability, it might be extremely small, I calculate the probability in the paper and the talk.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

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• 1:04:01Brian Keating?

  But that we would have exchanged material with Mars that would have had living material on it when Mars was wet and wonderful. And so why couldn't it have life? The fact that, you know, we don't see yet evidence for it doesn't prove that it never happened, but it gives us some limits. And I, and I want to start doing that in a quantitative way. So I started publishing some papers in astrobiology that you'll make fun of and, and AI even, uh, but, but, uh, it's been a lot of fun for me. It's been, you know, a boon to have these AI minds helping us. But, uh, I guess one question that I raised to you last time that we spoke was, you know, why don't you have a budget? And, and I feel like, uh, this is being raised by Placebo6 in the chat, and he's wondering, why, uh, can you do anything? Why do you think you can do anything without, without security clearance, A? Avi doesn't

• 1:04:44Brian Keating?

  have one, he's not, uh, co- contracted to the government, so no clearance. Uh, that is still true as far as I know. And I don't think you have an official, at least government budget yet. You may be getting this wonderful X prize, but tell me, Avi, how do you answer his question?

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, on the security clearance aspect, um, and by the way, your idea about the, um, biological material from Mars landing on Earth is excellent. And I think it, it's good to do the calculation because the question is how much, what's the chance of some of it reaching the Earth? And would we be able to recover it and distinguish it from life forms that existed on Earth? That's, that's beautiful. Um, but with respect to the clearance, um, the point is that with the new directive from President Trump, anything to do with, uh, alien intelligence, with, uh, alien technology, with things that were not manufactured

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  by humans here on Earth, anything to do with that is declassified immediately, meaning that this is information that should be shared with people without clearance according to President Trump. Okay? So the government is not allowed to keep it classified. And if there are any whistleblowers, any, uh, people who served in government, either in the past or right now, that know about such things, they are obligated, they are being asked, it's their duty, it's their order right now to reveal anything they know about

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  it, so that it can be declassified. The only reason that a lot of data is not declassified is because it has a connection to national security. Either the data, you know, would reveal the kind of sensors that the US employs, or there is a strong suspicion that we are dealing not with alien technology, but with technologies from adversarial nations, from black projects, whatever. And so what I'm trying to say is that what the council cares about is not, uh, the kind of technologies that Russia or China are developing. We don't care about that. That can stay classified.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  What we care about is any non-human-made technologies. That is not allowed in the current situation within government. That is not allowed to stay classified. And therefore, it should be brought to the attention of scientists. Now, if it so happens that the sensors used to collect that information are classified, and the government cannot really reveal it, what they can do is really simple. We are aiming to partner with them, so they can just say, "Go to that location, use your off-the-shelf sensors that are not classified, and look at the sky." They can just say that, "Look in that direction."

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  And if indeed, these visitations are recurring, as is the case, because we keep hearing about them, you know, and some of the reports in the tranches of data are very recent, from last year, from this year. So, these things are recurring. So then, the only thing government needs to do is not reveal the sources. They just need to tell me, or the council, "Use your sensors in that location and look up." And we will do that, and we will have data that can be shared with the public this way. So, the question of, you know, what kind of clearance I have is irrelevant for that,

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  because we are not interested in human-made technologies.

• 1:08:26Brian Keating?

  So, another question is about other near-Earth objects. And I had a long conversation this summer with Beatrice Villarreal. She's actually speaking remotely at this conference tomorrow, I believe. Unfortunately, I won't get to meet her. But what have you decided? Have you updated any of your critiques and/or priors on Beatrice's work and these near-Earth objects that she claims have been orbiting Earth since potentially, you know, 1947, you know, before Sputnik, essentially? These are ancient objects, almost 180 years old. How skeptical do you remain? Because you were quite skeptical, as I think we should be. And she's quite confident. In fact, she's recently had a couple of papers published, you know, in peer-reviewed journals

• 1:09:11Brian Keating?

  that seem to substantiate the hypotheses that she claimed earlier.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't look closely enough to study all the details. And it's quite possible that there were objects in the sky that are representing alien technology back in the, you know, 80 years ago. There was a study by Wes Waters, led by Wes Waters, that was published, and criticizes the work. So, anyone that wants to see criticism can go there and ask Professor Wes Waters at Wellesley College. It's not my work, and it's not for me to decide who is correct between the two sides. But my approach in general is, if we want to find out more about such things,

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  we need to collect better data that will be conclusive beyond any reasonable doubt, because we have the instruments that we developed, we calibrated, we know what they are doing, and multiple groups can do the same thing. That's the issue of being able to reproduce the results. And that we can do for the future. So, I would move to the side of, indeed, we do have evidence. Only if we collect higher-quality data that will be beyond any reasonable doubt, and a lot of people within the scientific community will agree that this is indeed the situation. So, the way to resolve it is by collecting new data with new sensors. That requires work.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  It's not just sitting on the bench and cheering on social media when you think you see something that you like. This is not, you know, we are not in the entertainment business. A lot of people on social media think that we are in the entertainment business. "Oh, someone gives me some red meat that I enjoy," just like Steven Spielberg, you know, or Beatrice, if they like what she says, they would cheer up and like what she says and be happy about. No, we are not in the entertainment business. We're in the business of figuring out the reality.

• 1:11:17Brian Keating?

  Would you advise, would you advise David Grusch? I mean, David Grusch, apparently, according to The Hollywood Reporter, last time I think I spoke with you, you know, he's being hired as a consultant on a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Do you think that that's going to, would you advise him to do that?

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  You mean Jerry, or?

• 1:11:34Brian Keating?

  No, David Grusch. Do you think that improves the credibility of a whistleblower and brave man?

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, Hollywood is all about getting the attention of an audience, which is similar to social media. You know, it serves no scientific purpose. The only way we can learn something new about the reality that we live in is through the scientific process of collecting data by instruments, analyzing that data, and then, when everyone can see it, then everyone agrees that's really the case. And that is the way a detective works. It's like a detective story. So, it's really misguided to think that by appealing to the audience, the way Hollywood scriptwriters do, you know, you would gain some credibility. That's completely misguided. The way to gain credibility is to show us the evidence.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Okay, so when David Grusch says about, you know, the dozens of spacecraft that are held in corporations, he doesn't need to collaborate with Jerry Bruckheimer. I saw Jerry Bruckheimer a year ago. The point is, he needs to have a guided tour to one of these sites where just one spacecraft is located. And it doesn't mean that he needs to bring me there or the council. He just needs to bring President Trump, and everything will be over. Everyone will agree with it. And then he can make the millions or billions of dollars, because he was the one to show this spacecraft, okay, or to lead to that location. That is the key. The key is the evidence. People are missing the point.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Now, of course, if you are a believer, you think you already know the answer in advance, you might be quite happy about the current situation already. But I'm saying that's not the way science is done. That's not the way by which we gain objective new knowledge. And, you know, just look at the history. There were lots of people believing in something that turned out to be wrong for many, many decades or centuries. And the only way to figure it out is eventually through the scientific process. And I know that science doesn't have a great reputation right now. It's considered to be the occupation of the elite. But this subject is a great way to demonstrate the value of science,

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  because we can then convince everyone through the scientific method that we are dealing with an alien visitation if it's real. And the public cares a lot about this question. So, here is a golden opportunity for us to engage the public in the scientific process, tell the public that we don't know when we don't have evidence, and we do know when we have evidence. Not tell Jerry Bruckheimer what we think we know without showing the evidence. That's not the way to make progress. So, to me, it's important as an educational way of telling the public how science is valuable. And by the way, I think that science is not appreciated also by, not just by members of the public,

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  but also by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, billionaires, who think that by, you know, if you have the Tree of Knowledge, you know, the biblical Tree of Knowledge, they can harvest the fruits of the tree, like AI, quantum computers, and make trillions of dollars out of those fruits. And all they need is to water the branches of the tree to get more fruits in the future. They're making a great mistake, a huge mistake strategically, because the only way that the Tree of Knowledge will give them new fruits is by watering the roots of the tree. The roots of the tree is fundamental science. And the fundamental science is not being funded at the same level

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  as all these trillion-dollar technologies, the data centers. And what I'm just saying is, I'm not asking them to apologize for the fact that 100 years ago, the people who discovered quantum mechanics received salaries that are a million times smaller than their income. I'm not saying, "Okay, you ripped the fruits of the tree without rewarding the people who actually allowed you, by discovering quantum mechanics, to do this." I'm not, I'm just saying, appreciate the intellectual value of those pioneers who were paid very little, gave you the information that you are using now to get trillions of dollars out of the economy, and fund additional work on the foundations of science

• 1:16:06Speaker 02

  rather than on how to use AI and quantum computers to make more money.

• 1:16:13Brian Keating?

  Speaking of something, as we wrap up, that's taken a lot of money and didn't provide a lot of return on the investment until maybe just last month, is the search for dark matter. And dark matter was recently claimed very, not claimed to be detected, but Rick Gates Gill is spokesperson for the LZ collaboration down there at Brown, my alma mater. Go Bears. He claimed, "Weak evidence for some anomalous hint of a new particle." First of all, we haven't talked since then. What was your initial take on this? You've done a tremendous amount. I mean, there's no, there's no branch of astronomy, cosmology, physics, fundamental philosophy that you haven't contributed to. And aliens are just the tip of the iceberg. And I should say that you can find out a lot more about Avi from his Medium,

• 1:16:57Brian Keating?

  which we'll link, and his YouTube channel, which there's only one official Avi Love YouTube channel. Anyway, Avi, tell me, what did you make of that detection? Because I'm going to bring it back to the search for aliens, too.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  I should say, most of my career was dedicated to other things, you know, like, just today, I taught a class in the morning, and I was teaching the hydrogen atom in quantum mechanics and mentioning the 21-centimeter transition. And I said, you know, "Two decades ago, I worked full-time on 21-centimeter cosmology, and I wrote textbooks about it." And, you know, it's one of those things that I was completely immersed in. So, people who see me just over the recent years get a very false impression about what I worked on or know and so forth. But to your question, so...

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  I was very excited about the discovery, but it's one event. And of course, it has a statistical significance because we wouldn't expect this event from background. So the key is that the background events that we can imagine would never produce this, the properties of this event, the characteristics of this event. So of course, what it means is that in the future, you know, with bigger, bigger detector and also with more time to collect additional events, we should be able to figure out whether it was a fluke of some random event that we cannot understand, but is background, or it's a signal. And if it's a signal, and we will know hopefully within the coming decade, indeed, it's a

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  major discovery because we are talking about 84% of the matter content of the universe. You know, that's a major and, and we, you know, knowing what it is would open up a new frontiers for fundamental physics, which over the past 50 years, you know, theoretical physics was engaged with extra dimensions, with supersymmetry, things that were not demonstrated experimentally. It's a bit disappointing, you know, that to see that decline in the traditional sense of fundamental physics being driven by discoveries, experimental discoveries. So let's hope that there is something there. And if not, we'll continue the search. We're searching in the dark.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  And I should say, you know, we invested billions of dollars in the search for dark matter so far. And we maybe a thousand times less in the search for technological probes near Earth that may have arrived from another civilization. So I would say let's invest also billions of dollars in the search for technological gadgets of alien technology. And if we don't find anything, we'll be roughly at the same situation as we are with dark matter search.

• 1:19:42Brian Keating?

  Well, good luck with the X Prize. Good luck with the research that you do. I want to thank you, Michael Shermer. I have links to your YouTube channel, your Medium articles. Abhi, this has been great. Thank you so much, my friend.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

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