Extended Classic: UFO Remix

Neil Tyson and Eugene Mirman turn a speculative, scientific eye towards Unidentified Flying Objects. Featuring UFO investigator James McGaha and SETI Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak. Now extended with Neil and Eugene answering Cosmic Queries about UFOs. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and this is StarTalk. This week, our topic is UFOs, unidentified flying objects, about which so much is written, and so many people think about them and care about them, and I thought we should bring some sort of physics to the subject, or at least some kind of analysis.

• 0:43Eugene Mirman?

  No more speculation.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. You know, there's thousands of sightings of UFOs every year, and of course, most of them can be explained away as the consequence of natural phenomenon, like unusual cloud formations, or bright planets, lightning, and especially meteorological or astronomical observations.

• 1:02Eugene Mirman?

  And some are just spaceships from other worlds, visiting, preparing to take us over.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, there's some would be that, I suppose.

• 1:09Eugene Mirman?

  That's one explanation, along with your gas cloud thing.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what happens is, when you see something unfamiliar in the sky, the brain tries to understand it and come to terms with it. It'll go overboard in doing so. And so what it doesn't understand, it connects the dots, it invents missing pieces, and so when you try to judge what an object is, or just judge how big it is, your brain fills in the gaps.

• 1:34Eugene Mirman?

  It's the same reason the George Lopez Show is still on the air.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that what that is?

• 1:38Eugene Mirman?

  The brain fills in the gaps and making it make sense.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but what happens is our perception, about which there's still a lot of research going on in the neuroscience community, the depth of our perception is still being understood, and how it can fool us, and how we can think it's giving us correct information, when in fact, it's not. And so what happens is, when we find that we're ready to doubt what we see, the brain just figures it out for you, whether or not...

• 2:08Eugene Mirman?

  With lies.

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With lies.

• 2:10Eugene Mirman?

  Using lies.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 2:12Eugene Mirman?

  As its building block.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So have you ever seen a UFO?

• 2:16Eugene Mirman?

  Um.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remember, "use" simply means unidentified.

• 2:18Eugene Mirman?

  No, no, I know, yes. It's funny, because if I, because part of me wants to go like, "No, not really." But what I mean is, by saying that, I'm like, "I can identify everything in the sky." So, in that sense, I can't. But I don't think I ever saw anything.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, then you have seen UFOs, if you can't identify everything you've ever seen.

• 2:32Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, but I don't think I ever saw a thing moving and was like, "Oh, that's coming for me. I should get ready." What's my welcome speech? I, I, I feel like I haven't seen anything that was so unidentifiable, I wanted to blog about it. Let's just say that.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that means you've encountered some objects in the sky that, "I don't quite know what that is, but it's not so weird that I'm gonna freak out about it."

• 2:53Eugene Mirman?

  I think it's like a bright planet or something, or a shooting star. Like, if I didn't know about shooting stars, I'd definitely be more scared.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so you have some, sort of, a foundation for your observations? Did you ever have astronomy 101 in college?

• 3:05Eugene Mirman?

  No, I went to a school where you decide your own major, and I didn't include astronomy.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's one of those kind of schools.

• 3:10Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, but I learned everything I need from TV shows about outer space. So don't worry, I know plenty of science.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what would you have to see for it to scare you, and then have you blog and tweet about it?

• 3:20Eugene Mirman?

  I would have to have a thing fly up to me, maybe make a sound, ask me some questions, fly away. That's definitely, that's at the top of the list.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would work.

• 3:28Eugene Mirman?

  And then something sort of just floating and glowing too much. Um, yeah.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, speaking of floating and glowing too much, one of the most mistaken objects for a UFO, well, it's not mistake, excuse me, if you don't know what it is, you simply don't know what it is. One of the most reported objects as a UFO is the planet Venus in the sky.

• 3:48Eugene Mirman?

  Because it's so bright.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is so bright. Venus is 100% white cloud cover, so it's highly reflective, first of all. So it's as bright, it's like as bright as it can be as a planet.

• 3:59Eugene Mirman?

  But it doesn't dart around, it just sort of sits there watching you.

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, watch, if you happen to live near an airport, and you're accustomed to seeing airplane lights coming in at twilight or at night, and this would be Venus, and if you didn't know it was a planet, it would just be an airplane hovering. See, that's the thing. The fact that it's not darting around leaves people curious as to what it is, because anything else would have come in for a landing a long time ago.

• 4:21Eugene Mirman?

  Of the, of UFO sightings, how many happen near airports? That would be slightly ludicrous.

• 4:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I don't know that statistic. But another thing about Venus is we orbit the sun farther away than Venus does. And so if you're ever gonna find Venus in the sky, it's not gonna be all that far from the sun. You'll see it just before sunrise. In fact, these days, it's up, for all any night owls out there, it's up just before sunrise, and it's as bright as can be. And it's quite visible just after sunset. Now here's what happens, since it's in the twilight sky, and it's bright, as it gets low in the sky, it could take on sunset colors, the way the sun does. And so now you have a bright hovering light that has a bright hovering object that has lights that resemble sunset colors. So you'd have orange and red and this sort of thing.

• 5:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You combine all this together, and you get no limit of reportages of Venus being

• 5:18Eugene Mirman?

  So if aliens from Venus came here, it would be particularly confusing, because we'd be explaining this phenomenon to them, and they would be explaining where they were and

• 5:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we'll keep it we'll keep a special chapter on the UFO books for when Venusians visit us.

• 5:32Eugene Mirman?

  Exactly. The most confusing type of alien to visit.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, you know, the word Venusian is, we kind of invented that after the fact.

• 5:40Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And

• 5:40Eugene Mirman?

  After which fact? You make it sound like

• 5:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After the fact that if you are of Venus, the correct word for being of Venus is venereal.

• 5:48Eugene Mirman?

  Really?

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and the doctors got to that word before the astronomers did.

• 5:51Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 5:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:52Eugene Mirman?

  I don't mind saying, oh, venereal, like, uh, okay.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying.

• 5:55Eugene Mirman?

  No, I understand. But what, wait, and if, oh, Martian, wait, why venereal?

• 6:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, that's the proper genitive form of the word Venusian. Yeah. You'd be venereal.

• 6:06Eugene Mirman?

  I can't wait to arrogantly say that to people as I talk to them at parties.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because

• 6:11Eugene Mirman?

  That's really venereal.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doctors had identified a disease common to lovemaking, and Venus is the goddess of love and beauty, and all that goes along with it. So, anyhow, so Venus is a number one cosmic target for misidentified

• 6:24Eugene Mirman?

  UFOs.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  UFOs, that's right. And then the moon, the moon.

• 6:27Eugene Mirman?

  By the way, cosmic target, great band name.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, is that right? Okay, you're keeping track of these.

• 6:31Eugene Mirman?

  Would be. Sorry. I'm saying you're coming up with things faster than you even know.

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll take the compliment. And the moon is, has been, of course, we all know what the moon looks like. But suppose the moon is a crescent and only a little piece of the crescent sticks out from behind a cloud. So you don't see the whole thing and you don't know the moon is supposed to be there. And there's a little cloud areas growing around it. It can freak you out.

• 6:52Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in fact, it happened to me. I was on a beach.

• 6:55Eugene Mirman?

  Are you listening to Pink Floyd? High on a beach and the moon sneaks up on you?

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't listen to record albums that don't get their physics right. The dark side of the moon, there is no dark side of the moon, just so you know.

• 7:06Eugene Mirman?

  You only listen to accurate physics albums?

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 7:08Eugene Mirman?

  Like Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick?

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Accurate rock albums. So I just, as an example, I was once on the beach and I was, I saw a glowing object on the horizon. And it didn't, I couldn't associate it with any terrestrial object. Of course, it was at night. Because then you, you see less well at night when you have, that's where most of your UFO sightings are at night. When you can least identify what it is you're looking at.

• 7:31Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I saw something and I could not identify it. And I was intrigued, pulled out my binoculars, which I, they're never more than arms reach for me. There it was. It was the moon. And so I'm just simply saying, there are objects that can be out there. Even if you're familiar with the sky, they can stump you, at least until you continue to observe. But it's not only cosmic objects. You also get sort of meteorological objects, clouds, clouds. There are some beautiful cloud formations up there. Not just the puffy ones that make rain. There's some, particularly if you live.

• 8:01Eugene Mirman?

  Thanks for being so scientific about that. I was like, but which ones make rain? Is it the puffy ones?

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The puffy ones.

• 8:06Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, good. Got it. Move on.

• 8:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got the ordinary puffy ones, right? But then you have, there are clouds, they're, they're orographic clouds. Orographic clouds.

• 8:14Eugene Mirman?

  So the two are puffy or graphic?

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 8:18Eugene Mirman?

  And then weirdo clouds?

• 8:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Weirdo clouds.

• 8:20Eugene Mirman?

  They go back and forth?

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, and so, in fact, there was a guy who put clouds shapes on a scale. And, and the big puffy cumulus clouds was cloud nine. That was, and that's where you say you're on cloud nine. You're on a big puffy.

• 8:32Eugene Mirman?

  Is that why?

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is why. We call them, if you're on cloud nine, it's a cumulus cloud. Not cumulonimbus, because then you'd be wet.

• 8:37Eugene Mirman?

  No, don't be an idiot. Who would ever assume that?

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so an orographic cloud and you have lenticular clouds, these are clouds that look like flying saucers. You find them near mountains and they're very high up and they're these solid, take on this cylindrical shape and they're isolated. And so watch what happens, the sun sets for you, but if you're high up, the sun sets later for someone on a mountain top than it would for someone at the base of the mountain.

• 9:04Eugene Mirman?

  Like Moses.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a better explanation than that one. But, so what happens is the sun sets for you, your sky begins to darken, this cloud is still lit up by sunlight. It is still lit up and so it looks like it's glowing against the background sky, takes on the colors of sunset, bada bing, you've got a, you've got a-

• 9:22Eugene Mirman?

  Does it make that sound?

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll have to record it next time. And one of my favorite kinds of clouds are nocturnal clouds, which translates from the Latin to meaning nighttime aglow.

• 9:34Eugene Mirman?

  I know.

• 9:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:36Eugene Mirman?

  I'm just kidding.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was Latin one of the subjects you electively took in college?

• 9:39Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, exactly. I know Latin and comedy.

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these are clouds that are so high up, they can still be lit by the sun an hour after sunset. And occasionally spaceships and missiles can leave a contrail that is so high up that they become these nocturnal clouds. And people then identify and they say, oh, I saw this glowing thing in the sky, when they knew nothing's supposed to glow there. But if you know about these objects, then you have a ready explanation for them.

• 10:05Eugene Mirman?

  I can't wait to see that and then be like, no, no, it's not a spaceship. It's a cloud left by a human spaceship.

• 10:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's also lightning. Lightning can do weird things. Lightning is, is electrical charges going from cloud to ground, a cloud to cloud. By the way, most lightning goes from the ground up to a cloud.

• 10:23Eugene Mirman?

  Is that true?

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 10:25Eugene Mirman?

  Of course. I know. I don't know why.

• 10:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, it's not true.

• 10:29Eugene Mirman?

  It was just so opposite of what I was told earlier by schoolteachers who were misinformed.

• 10:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So much of reality is the opposite of what we're all told.

• 10:35Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, so lightning, it actually creates a plasma around, it's basically a charged gas that glows. You remember those glow things you find in Spencer Gifts?

• 10:43Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, do I ever. I wanted one until I was probably thirty, thirty. It's only five, six years ago that I was like, meh.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then, then there are other things. For example, you have weird airplane designs if you happen to be near an air force base that's testing unusual craft.

• 10:58Eugene Mirman?

  Like a triangle shaped spaceship.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if there are secret experiments going on and you look up and it's something you don't recognize, you're not gonna say, "Oh, that must be an Air Force experiment with a new airfoil." No, if you're prone to imagination, as so many of us are, you'll say, "Oh, it's an alien spaceship," rather than the more terrestrial accounting for what it is that you see.

• 11:22Eugene Mirman?

  So if an alien wanted to come here, if they just wrote "U.S. government" on their ship, nobody would bother them?

• 11:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess not.

• 11:28Eugene Mirman?

  Is that, is that the point?

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be-

• 11:30Eugene Mirman?

  If they just covered themselves in a weird cloud?

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The signal goes out at the speed of light if you're giving them ideas.

• 11:35Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And flares do interesting thing. At daytime, it's just a flare. At night, it's this glowing thing in the sky. And there's a famous sighting of flare in Phoenix, Arizona, March 13th, 1997. There was the fighter squadron from the Maryland Air National Guard, they dropped illumination flares as just part of an exercise at 8:30 PM, just after sunset, okay? And hundreds of people reported seeing a V-shaped UFO, or either a formation of lights over the city and surrounding mountains. What your brain, what their brains did was connect them into a, into a single coherent object. And so, rather than just say, "I saw these lights," they said they saw a V-shaped UFO, right? And so, the urge

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to do that. They're balloons. Now, for me, the most hilarious UFO sighting was in Manhattan just recently, October 2010. People saw glowing objects in the sky above Manhattan. Now, here's for me, the funny part. I live in Manhattan. Nobody ever looks up. So when they do, they have no experience to identify anything in the sky. I've had people say, "What's that? Oh, that's just the moon." All right? They don't notice it. They don't see it. So, New Yorkers are, can be easily enchanted by balloons that are in the sky. Now, these were, these were shiny Mylar surface balloons. And so, that accounted for some extra glow that they had in the sky. But the, this is, by the way, weather balloons also.

• 13:02Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. To me, everything you've said so far, sounds like you're part of the cover-up. Just so you know. Anyone who's like, waiting for you to say that they're definitely aliens, is getting more and more mad with each excuse you give.

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk. Stay tuned for another segment.

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. Here's more of this week's episode. Eugene Mirman before the break said that the way the aliens can infiltrate us is if they paint US Air Force on their spaceships. And then we'll just say that they were...

• 13:51Eugene Mirman?

  And then they'll be like, "Obviously, it's a US Air Force spaceship." It's a new...

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I worry, since this is a broadcast show, that signal is now going out at the speed of light, and you've given away our last hope of defense against alien invasion.

• 14:05Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, it was the last piece. It was like, "Oh, that's a great idea. And we'll put on wigs and dress like humans." That's all they were missing.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, other things that can be mistaken: weather balloons. Weather balloons are not commonly launched near urban areas or near airports, because they would tangle up your airplane. So, they're only in very secluded areas, and occasionally, unexpected air gusts can carry it into populated areas. And no one has any experience looking at a weather balloon.

• 14:31Eugene Mirman?

  Why? Does it look insane?

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, it's just not something you've ever seen, unless you are like a weather balloon person, where you live where they do this sort of thing all the time.

• 14:40Eugene Mirman?

  Where you have the money to Google the word "weather balloon."

• 14:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, the Roswell incident. Roswell, you know, the entire economy down there is alien-based. I don't know if you've ever visited the town. I've been there a couple of times, actually. Went to all the museums. It's an entire alien economy. The street lamps have alien faces on them and things. And so, that was later reported as... That crash was later reported as a weather balloon. And when combined with some other experiments that had been done with sort of dummies, people now sort of remember that as sort of aliens and...

• 15:11Eugene Mirman?

  Are there photos of the actual weather balloon?

• 15:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of fragments of it, yes. Yeah. Well, of the payload that was part of the weather balloon.

• 15:17Eugene Mirman?

  The weather balloon exploded? Is that...

• 15:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That I don't know. I don't know what was the consequence of that. I can tell you this, that if an alien really did come that far and it crashed here on Earth, that's not the alien I want to meet. That's like, anyone who can navigate better.

• 15:30Eugene Mirman?

  Right. You don't want to meet the alien that came here. Do you think that there are also liberal aliens who would try to stop the meaner aliens from taking over?

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The political alignments of aliens.

• 15:42Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, you know who we have on the line? We have a, a good friend and colleague Seth Shostak. He works at the SETI Institute. The SETI is the acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Let's see what Seth has to say. Seth, how the hell are you, man?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Uh, just fine, Neil.

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for calling in to StarTalk Radio. Uh, our subject tonight is sort of the physics of UFO sightings. Notice I said physics of UFOs, not physics of aliens, because there are all kinds of accountings for things we see in the sky. But you're, you're sitting at like, at UFO Central there, because you're advertising what it is you're interested in. So what's life like in your job?

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Well, in, in connection with UFOs, what's life like? I mean, you know, we, we don't have enough time to really go into that, Neil. But, but let me just tell you something with relevance to the subject at hand, and that is that I get at least five phone calls and emails a day from people who are having difficulties with aliens in their personal lives. Uh, they send me photos, they send me videos of UFOs. They often think that we're doing the wrong experiment, trying to eavesdrop on alien broadcasts, because after all, they, like one-third of the population of this, of this country, believe that the aliens are here.

• 16:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so, but what do you tell them? Do you say there's no evidence? So how do you handle this, these encounters?

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Well, I, I, you know, I listen to what they have to say, or I read what they have to say, because let's face it, it doesn't violate physics to go from one star system to another. Uh, it seems a little improbable that they would come all this way just for salacious experiments your mom wouldn't approve of. That, that, you know, but on the other hand, you could say that's alien sociology, and we don't have a whole lot of data when it comes to alien sociology, so nobody knows what they'd really be interested in. But, the, the, the fundamental fact is that it's just truly an extraordinary claim to say that aliens have come, you know, hundreds of light years to visit Earth with nothing better on their mind than these unfortunate experiments.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Uh, and if you're gonna make that claim, then what I wanna see is the good evidence. So I, I, I look at what they have to say, uh, and I look at the pictures, and I try and decide whether, does this, uh, does this suggest that we actually have visitors here?

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what have you concluded? I guess I can guess, but I'm just wondering.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you know the answer. I'm not convinced. Look, you know, there are a whole bunch of arguments that could be made to suggest that this is, you know, this is a bit unlikely. One thing you could ask is, why are they here now? Why now? And I ask people who think that the aliens are visiting Earth, you know, how is it that we're so fortunate that they've come to Earth just while we are alive to improve our social lives or whatever?

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you realize that there are references to aliens, or at least unexplained sky phenomena, that goes far back as the Bible. Ezekiel had a vision of wheels in the sky that had no other real account, and real alien fans would suggest that maybe he was bearing witness to that, and that's, you know, 5,000 years ago.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, but 5,000 years ago is, you know, one millionth of the age of the Earth. So that's still now.

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that cosmic perspective on the timeline.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Okay, so that doesn't convince me, because what it requires is either one of two things. Either the aliens are always visiting the Earth, so it really doesn't matter when you're born, you'll have the opportunity to have an unpleasant encounter with an alien.

• 19:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the Men in Black scenario. They've just been around us all the time.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's that possibility, in which case I would think that the evidence wouldn't be so equivocal, that, you know, that I would occasionally go down to the airport and, you know, and the captain would come on and say, "Well, folks, we're gonna stay at the gate here for the next 20 minutes, because there's some unidentified craft in the area, and they haven't filed a flight plan with the FAA, so we're just gonna stay here." I mean, that doesn't happen to me.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm, okay.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  And I think if the aliens were really here, it would be like asking the North American natives, you know, 50 years after Columbus arrived, you know, "Do you think you're being visited by Spaniards?" It wasn't something just for late-night radio. It was, they knew, they absolutely knew. So, I can't believe that they've always been here. So the only other possibility is that they're here now because they have some interest in one of our contemporary problems. They don't like, in fact, we have nuclear weapons, or they don't like what we're doing to the environment.

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's the plot of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. But of course, it doesn't make any sense, because they don't know any of that stuff, right? The only way they could know that Homo sapiens is creeping and crawling across this mortal coil... It's because of the high-frequency, high-power broadcasts we've been sending into space since the Second World War.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're sending into space at this moment.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Exactly, but those things are only, you know, seventy light-years out at most, which means you can only expect to visit with aliens that are no more than thirty-five light-years out, because they need time to get "I love Lucy," decide they don't like the jokes, and then get into their spacecraft, which are limited to the speed of light, and get back here just to haul you out of your bedroom.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  (laughing) Okay, so none of his squares with you?

• 21:00Speaker 02

  That doesn't square, because the number of stars within thirty-five light-years is a few thousand, that's a small number in astronomy. I don't think any aliens know we're here, so I really stumble across this problem of why are they here now?

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so if anyone actually finds an alien, we'll take him to your office, and then you'll have another argument.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Job security for me, Neil.

• 21:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, well, Seth, thanks for calling into StarTalk Radio. Can we call you at another time if we have an urgent need?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Oh, of course.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, if we actually get visited, we'll have some champagne with you on that one.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Okay, box him up and send him even FOB.

• 21:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, thank you. That was Seth Schostak, a friend and colleague at the SETI Institute in, where else could that be but California? So Eugene?

• 21:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you seen any movies that have UFOs in it that you liked?

• 21:52Eugene Mirman?

  That's, I wish you could ask a broader question.

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, lots of movies, from Men in Black to the Star Trek serieses. The Last Starfighter, I still want to fight someone else's war somewhere far, far away and protect the Earth from an eventual, but not that great, costume-wise.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know who I have clips of? You know who I have clips of? I interviewed, there's a UFO skeptic hunter.

• 22:22Eugene Mirman?

  No.

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  James McGah, director of the Grasslands Observatory in Arizona. And I asked him about UFO investigations and how he got involved in it. Let's see what he's got to tell us.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  I got involved originally because as an amateur astronomer growing up, you mentioned to someone you were interested in astronomy and he always asked you two questions, what's your sign and do you believe in UFOs? And it got me interested in astrology and UFOs and studying it and realizing that there was simply no evidence for it and it was really a belief system that a lot of people had and as a result I started investigating and critiquing and analyzing UFO reports over the years.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what have you found? Because there's tons of them, right? I mean, there's no shortage of them.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Well, there's tons of reports, of course, but I've found that there's no evidence. Almost everyone thinks of the term UFO as being a spacecraft from another world and that's what I mean. If you're referring to something that somebody sees as unidentified, then that's a different issue. What you have to do is, most people see something in the sky and they interpret it as an alien spacecraft and there's no evidence that there are alien spacecraft flying around in the earth's atmosphere.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's where the belief system comes in, where the brain takes over the interpretation?

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Right, and you know, it's a very strong desire for humans to believe in things in the sky. This is nothing new, this has been around for thousands of years and it's related to the whole concept of humans wanting to find meaning and purpose and this revolves around superstition, magic, hope, salvation and doom and UFOs fit this bill perfectly.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk Radio. Stay tuned, more up next.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back. Here's more of StarTalk.

• 24:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, just before the break, we talked about some famous sort of alien movies.

• 24:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the, I think one of the classic ones now is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Because most of that movie was actually about UFOs. People saw lights in the sky and they didn't understand what was going on.

• 24:58Eugene Mirman?

  And they were also making a lot of mounds.

• 25:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 25:01Eugene Mirman?

  Is that the sound of a piper? Of like, someone with a flute flying in from venereal, yeah?

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The venireals coming in from Venus. So, you know what my big gripe about Close Encounters was?

• 25:14Eugene Mirman?

  That it was factually inaccurate?

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. That, if you remember the movie, they were decoding on a teletype, back when teletypes were the coolest thing, this string of numbers that would constantly get repeated from space. And one person says, "I know what those are. It's longitude and latitude. That must be where the aliens are gonna land." And I thought to myself, "长距离和 latitude, is that the best you can come up with?" It's a completely human construction, the coordinate system of our Earth. It's not even in base 10, alright? It's in base 60. Like, so what is this? And if the aliens knew enough about our culture to give us longitude and latitude, they would know enough to like, learn our languages, just say, "Hey, we're coming down. We're gonna land to the left of..."

• 25:54Eugene Mirman?

  Of what you call Spain. Yes.

• 25:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I was just, plus, the ship comes down, it flew across the galaxy, it's a flying saucer, and what do they have? They have runway lights. What's that about? If you are a flying saucer, you don't need runway lights.

• 26:12Eugene Mirman?

  Hearing this, I both think that you're 100% right and also it would be unpleasant to see a sci-fi movie with you. Where you'd be like, "That's not how beaming would work." Time travel's sort of not real.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know, all the data from across the nation over the decades has been collected and investigated by the US government. Did you know about this?

• 26:35Eugene Mirman?

  I would hope so.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This was-

• 26:36Eugene Mirman?

  I hope they're protecting us against-

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This was called Project Blue Book, very famous project. It ran for 28 years, right from the depth of the Cold War, 1952, up through 1970, and they collected 12, I got the exact number here, 12,618 reports of UFOs. And the people who are giving them this information, they're thinking, "Oh, the government wants to know if we're being visited by aliens." That's not what drove Project Blue Book. No.

• 27:03Eugene Mirman?

  Commies?

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Commies. It was like, "What are the commies coming up to?" And now you have 100 million observers in our country looking up, reporting on what it is they see. And this became this huge data gathering project. And so, other governments across the world are doing this as well. And, but there are other things. Back then, there was the U-2 spy plane, just very different proportions from a normal plane, very big wingspan, to fly in the rarefied atmosphere at 60,000 feet, where this thing would soar high up, it would be very hard to shoot it down. And another famous place is Area 51. You've heard about Area 51?

• 27:37Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah. Isn't it a restaurant?

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not authorized to tell you what Area 51 is.

• 27:43Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We were interviewing earlier James McGah, who was director of the Grasslands Observatory in Arizona. And, as you heard, he's a former military pilot, so he knows all about what the Air Force might have been doing. And so, let's see what he has to say about Area 51.

• 27:58Eugene Mirman?

  Let's go.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Area 51 has never been called Area 51 by the Air Force. There is an area near Groom Lake in Nevada that people call Area 51. This comes out of the old Atomic Energy Commission areas when they divided up Nevada for nuclear testing. There is a facility there by the US Air Force, it's highly classified, it does a number of flight operations and other operations. I have flown in and around the area as an Air Force pilot. To the best of my knowledge, there are no aliens or no spacecraft there. It's all US technology that goes on there. But that's about all I can say about it.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's your response to people who are certain there's a cover up? Because surely occasionally, if not often, the government would find a reason to cover something up if they judge it to be in the interest of security or public safety. So how do you reply to that?

• 28:55Speaker 03

  The government generally doesn't cover things up because if it ever comes out, they're embarrassed by the cover up. Now occasionally, some individuals will say things or do things that they shouldn't do. The proper thing for the military to do when dealing with classified, and after all, there are reasons to keep secrets because a lot of classified information is stuff that is very dangerous and we don't want to get in the hands of our enemies. The term, "I will neither confirm or deny that." It's not covering anything up, it's simply not talking about it.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there are people, though, who will then rely on the fact that they're not told what's going on there. That's where, in their own mind, they could place everything for which they don't have evidence.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Right, and this goes right to the heart of conspiracy theories. UFOs are wrapped in conspiracy theories. And conspiracy theories are very attractive because they can explain complex social structures and problems, and they can simplify it and put a face on something otherwise that's very impersonal.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, another interesting fact about conspiracy theories is that to assert that there's a conspiracy, that's the battle cry for having insufficient data.

• 30:13Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To actually, so wherever you're missing data, you say, "Oh, that's been covered up."

• 30:18Eugene Mirman?

  I actually find conspiracy theories slightly infuriating because they answer things people don't really understand.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By making, by saying that...

• 30:25Eugene Mirman?

  By claiming a bunch of random connections.

• 30:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and the connectivity comes about because they're saying the actual information that would connect it is hidden or held under wraps.

• 30:33Eugene Mirman?

  Though there is something funny about playing a pilot being like, "There's no secrets there." I mean, I'm sure he's telling the truth, but also, it's the same thing he would say if he was lying. That's what it means to cover something up, is to come on the radio and be like, "No way, I flew all around that area, no aliens."

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I would know otherwise, yeah.

• 30:51Eugene Mirman?

  Because I totally was let into all the secret rooms, even the alien ones.

• 30:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And another interesting thing about how much credence we give into one, to the account given by one observer or another, we tend to believe someone who's in uniform more than someone who is not. Or they say, "Oh, he's a pilot," or "He's an astronaut."

• 31:07Eugene Mirman?

  I often dress up as a doctor just so that people do exactly what I say.

• 31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that right?

• 31:12Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, James McGah has, actually has some comments on what it is to be a trained observer. Let's go back to my interview with him.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  I've got over forty thousand hours looking at the night sky and thousands of hours of flying airplanes, because I was in the Air Force for a career Air Force pilot. And after doing all of that, I've never seen anything that I couldn't explain, but the point is, I have a background in looking at atmospheric phenomena, looking at astronomical objects, and being able to analyze what they are and interpret them correctly. And I've seen all kinds of phenomena, all the way from St. Emile's fire to ball lightning.

• 31:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  St. Emile's fire, that's that glow just before lightning strike, is that right?

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Well, it's a static electrical charge that can build up on something moving, in my case, an airplane, and it can be quite beautiful, but also somewhat dangerous.

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Something that's often talked about is this idea of a trained observer. Somehow, the public believes that pilots and police officers are trained observers, but of course, they're not trained to look at the night sky. They're trained to do other things, and pilots and police officers make mistakes all the time in the way they look at objects in the sky.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, how about astronauts? There's some, one or two notable astronauts.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  It's the same sort of thing with astronauts. They're trained to fly a spacecraft, or maybe trained, if they're mission specialists, to do some task. They're not trained to look at the sky. They're not trained to look at the reflection of dust particles and be able to realize that that's what they're seeing that's coming off the spacecraft. They're not trained to see...

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you mean, you mean to imply that all you have to do is train people to know what they're looking at, and then the UFO sightings will go away?

• 33:06Speaker 03

  In large measure, I think they would. The sightings would, barring the hoaxes, of course. If you think about in recent years, the most prominent have been what I call lights in the sky, the Phoenix Lights and the Stevensville Lights. And it's incredible that people would see these individual points of light in the sky, which were very bright, and then connect them together to make a larger object, connecting the dots in the sky.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, then, this happened at night, when you have the least able to see things.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Right, and they believe it's a UFO, they sincerely believe this, but they're simply incorrect in their interpretation of what they're seeing.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, I can tell you this, as, when I was a kid, Eugene, I was an amateur astronomer, and we're looking up all the time, and I care when there are clouds in my way, so I'd studied meteorology just to help me find out when I can make my best observing. And I can tell you this, that among, in the community of amateur astronomers who are always looking up, and among meteorologists who are always looking up, the sightings of things in the sky that they cannot explain is lower than that in the general public, and it's got nothing to do with who's wearing a uniform.

• 34:14Eugene Mirman?

  Right, it's just based on who has the most amount of information.

• 34:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Most amount of information, and probably the most famous case of a person in uniform or with some kind of cultural authority, who is a big fan of UFOs or that we've actually, that they're actually aliens, is Edgar Mitchell, who's an Apollo astronaut. And he was a lunar module pilot for Apollo 14, the sixth person to walk on the moon, he spent nine hours on the lunar surface. He believes that UFOs are visitors from other planets, and, or at least some of them, and some French.

• 34:43Eugene Mirman?

  Even one is enough, if he believes it's one.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:46Eugene Mirman?

  It's not like the question is, are there 50 UFOs?

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and one would, would work, would work. And he's pretty sure that the Roswell incident involved a real alien spacecraft. Now, he has not claimed that NASA is involved with UFOs, but NASA felt compelled to issue a statement that they do not track UFOs and don't share his opinions on this.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk. Stay tuned for another segment.

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. Here's more of this week's episode.

• 35:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got questions called from the internet from all of our social media presence.

• 35:35Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they were solicited and people participate and it's great service to the fanbase of the show. So, bring it on.

• 35:41Eugene Mirman?

  Okay. So, Joseph Deveraux asks.

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Deveraux, just like, get into the name.

• 35:49Eugene Mirman?

  I know, Deveraux.

• 35:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 35:50Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, sorry, I didn't want to sound too flirty. Assume a UFO was approaching Earth and posing a threat towards the future of mankind. What sort of information will we be able to obtain about this UFO from Earth? And how would we collect this information? Information can be size, shape, density, chemical makeup, general physical properties. I think if a UFO comes here and wants to destroy us, we can hide, but it doesn't bode well.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an interesting sort of sociological question.

• 36:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 36:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But yet, I think the answer is obvious. If they can travel the huge gaps of interstellar space.

• 36:25Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because clearly, we can't. Because lately, what have we been doing? Just driving around the block.

• 36:29Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all the space shuttle did. And now, we don't even do that.

• 36:32Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Their aliens are probably watching us from far away laughing.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Laughing, laughing.

• 36:37Eugene Mirman?

  At our space program. Putting it in quotes, in air quotes, around our space program and giggling. Wondering when we'll finally rise to the challenge.

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just picture that, an alien doing like, air quotes.

• 36:48Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, space program.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the humans, "space program."

• 36:52Eugene Mirman?

  Dancing around.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you know that dude who jumped out of the balloon with the...

• 36:56Eugene Mirman?

  No, but it sounds like a bad idea.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, the guy with the Red Bull thing.

• 37:01Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 37:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remember that guy?

• 37:03Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, who jumped from space in a...

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 37:04Eugene Mirman?

  He had a helmet.

• 37:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The marketing said he jumped from space. But I did the math on that. And you get like, a schoolroom globe and ask how high was he above a schoolroom globe? It's a sixteenth of an inch. So, the human definition of space is really lame.

• 37:17Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're right, the aliens would totally poke fun at this. So, once they saw we're just driving around the block, and they decided they wanted to destroy humankind.

• 37:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry, there's no, if they, if they manage to get it-

• 37:28Eugene Mirman?

  There's a chance that if they can't, well, no, I guess they, they, if we have infrared, they do too.

• 37:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, thank you. If they gapped the depths of space to get here and they're hostile-

• 37:39Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry. Uh, uh, that's the end.

• 37:42Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 37:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The end.

• 37:43Eugene Mirman?

  That's probably why we haven't captured aliens, right? You know how there's all the theories of how there's Area 51 and stuff? It's very unlikely because if they could get here, there's no way they can't land.

• 37:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, if they crashed, I'm not interested in those aliens anyway. They're the ones who know how to fly.

• 37:58Eugene Mirman?

  But the aliens that could get here from far away and then what they can't do is just land?

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just can't land. It's like, excuse me?

• 38:04Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 38:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, what's up with that?

• 38:06Eugene Mirman?

  That's very unlikely.

• 38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if they're there, I, it seems to me the best information we'd be able to glean from it is, if we can see it, its shape, uh, what its aerodynamic form is, if it, if there's any aerodynamics going on in it at all. Presumably there is because it's within our atmosphere and moving around, so aerodynamics matters. But they would surely know this if they came here to destroy us. And what we could do-

• 38:29Eugene Mirman?

  They might want to enslave us, but not eat us.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we do is get all of our telescopes out and monitor it in the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum. So, we think of spectrum as just rainbows and, and light. That's just visible light.

• 38:42Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah. Not the butterflies, they have nineteen senses of light or something.

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, so, yeah, so, so other insects do this, so we're just some narrow portion of a huge range.

• 38:50Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so there's ultraviolet and X-rays and gamma rays and radio waves.

• 38:53Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, we exploit each one of these in there alone for different reasons. We have microwave ovens, infrared lamps, radio communication, this sort of thing.

• 39:03Eugene Mirman?

  All of these things are used to make us sexier.

• 39:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of these are one continuum of light.

• 39:10Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some visible, some not. And if it's communicating, we may presume that it's using some form of electromagnetic, of the electromagnetic spectrum. So we'd whip out all of our detectors to see which, which of these is it lit up in? Cause that, then it'd be trying to communicate. And, is it radio waves? Is it, whatever?

• 39:27Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, it's probably not using gamma rays, cause they don't move through the atmosphere efficiently. They get blocked. Radio waves, we know- Moves through air uninhibited. That's why, you know, you can receive radio transmissions, even microwave transmissions indoors.

• 39:43Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 39:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, that's how, it's why, it's why your cellphone can work in places even though you're enclosed without a sightline to the tower. So, what I would do, if I were confronting this, and we knew we were all gonna die, so we might as well do some fun science experiments on it.

• 39:57Eugene Mirman?

  That's what you would do?

• 39:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally. So you'd, so you'd come out and just measure whether it's emanating in any of these bands of light. Beyond that, there's not much else we can measure at a distance.

• 40:12Eugene Mirman?

  You're listening to StarTalk Radio. Stay tuned, more up next.

• 40:30Eugene Mirman?

  Welcome back, here's more of StarTalk.

• 40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene, this is your first time being part of the last segment of Cosmic Queries, where it's the lightning round. Cause I always spend too much luxurious time answering all the other questions. We have a backlog behind, and we gotta get, we'll just blow through it.

• 40:48Eugene Mirman?

  Let's do it, let's just answer these.

• 40:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna go in soundbite mode.

• 40:51Eugene Mirman?

  Nice.

• 40:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soundbit mode, are you ready?

• 40:54Eugene Mirman?

  I'm prepared for soundbit mode, and I will ask only the briefest follow-up questions.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let us test the bell, we are ready.

• 41:00Eugene Mirman?

  It works.

• 41:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene, shoot.

• 41:01Eugene Mirman?

  John Randall asks, is it possible that UFOs are actually time-traveling tourists from the future, from a future Earth? This could explain why so many have witnessed UFO phenomena, yet contact is rarely, if ever, made.

• 41:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, next.

• 41:16Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, it's possible that they could travel back in time, that someone from the past, future is coming here to the past.

• 41:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, however, if you're traveling through time, generally, if you really were really good at it, you wouldn't need a spaceship, cause you're traveling through time rather than space.

• 41:30Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 41:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you travel back through time, you have to watch out, because if you want to travel to yesterday.

• 41:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 41:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And here, in that seat.

• 41:37Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Earth was in a different place in its orbit.

• 41:39Eugene Mirman?

  So you don't want it, a lot of people probably fall in the Pacific, cause it's so big, is what you're saying.

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll be floating in space. Yeah, yes, you do have to care about where you'd land in space.

• 41:47Eugene Mirman?

  You'd materialize in a hallway, or in the middle of a wall.

• 41:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or in the middle of a wall, cement pier, go.

• 41:53Eugene Mirman?

  What if other civilizations exist in dimensions that we can't perceive with existing technology? Could we be visited by UFOs and not even know it?

• 42:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 42:02Eugene Mirman?

  Great.

• 42:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the good thing about parallel other dimensions.

• 42:06Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like a flat surface.

• 42:08Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's two dimensions. If you put an ant on that surface.

• 42:11Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 42:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you say, okay, you're a prisoner of this sheet of paper.

• 42:14Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 42:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could hover over it and look at it and poke it and it would have no concept.

• 42:19Eugene Mirman?

  You could give it whiskey and it would be like, I don't even get what's happening.

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know where it came in because you're coming at it from a higher third dimension. You come at us at a higher fourth spatial dimension or a fifth dimension.

• 42:29Eugene Mirman?

  So there might be eight dimensional beings watching us right now laughing at this Q and A.

• 42:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Laughing at we being prisoners of our three dimensional cubes.

• 42:35Eugene Mirman?

  And a little bit of time.

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go.

• 42:38Eugene Mirman?

  Um, what if others, oh, that is the one. Okay. I have had a thought for many years now. Is it possible, possible? That what we call UFOs are actually natural creatures who live in the atmosphere. Critters with a different evolution in DNA, but Earth creatures nonetheless. Possible? I'm gonna say.

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Highly unlikely.

• 42:56Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, I'm even gonna go, no. I mean, it's possible.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, we, look at how much of the airspace is sliced each day by aviation. There are thousands of planes going back and forth. You'd think we would have run into them every now and then. Where pilots would have a really good view of them, where people would have photographed them out the side window. Uh, we have evident, we have good enough abs, evidence of absence.

• 43:19Eugene Mirman?

  What if this person doesn't know about birds? How impressed would they be? If they find out about birds and they're like, no, Neil, there's birds.

• 43:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's awesome. Next.

• 43:28Eugene Mirman?

  What technology would you expect to find on an alien ship?

• 43:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I.

• 43:34Eugene Mirman?

  What'd you expect? Like a thermos?

• 43:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would love to explore new materials.

• 43:38Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 43:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe they went higher up on the periodic table of elements than we have. There are elements yet to be discovered. Every element we've discovered has awesome different properties from every other element.

• 43:47Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 43:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Amereum, for example, named after America, very high up there. That's.

• 43:52Eugene Mirman?

  What's it do?

• 43:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's one of the.

• 43:53Eugene Mirman?

  What would happen if you put it in your soup?

• 43:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would, it's radioactive.

• 43:57Eugene Mirman?

  Die if you ate it.

• 43:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But a tiny amount goes in smoke detectors and it's what enables modern smoke detectors.

• 44:02Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, really?

• 44:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we would have had no concept of that without the existence of the element. So I'd be feeling all the stuff on the ship and see if it had some new kind of uh, material properties that we have, that our material science engineering has yet to discover.

• 44:17Eugene Mirman?

  Right. I just realized based on what you said, don't eat smoke detectors, they're a little radioactive.

• 44:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, exactly. Oh, one other thing. If, uh, maybe they're using matter, antimatter drives. I want to know how they contain their antimatter. I want to know what piece of luggage they use.

• 44:32Eugene Mirman?

  Do we have access to antimatter right now?

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We make it all the time. You just can't carry it around.

• 44:36Eugene Mirman?

  Do we put that in soup?

• 44:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because what, your vessel would annihilate with it.

• 44:41Eugene Mirman?

  Right, unless you traveled in an antimatter ship.

• 44:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but then the antimatter meets your atmosphere and then it annihilates. It's really tough.

• 44:49Eugene Mirman?

  But we make it all the time. What do we do with all the antimatter we make?

• 44:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It annihilates pretty quickly with matter in its vessel, in the particle accelerator.

• 44:55Eugene Mirman?

  In the place we make it. Okay, great. Is it legal to shoot one down? I'm assuming a UFO.

• 45:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so there are no laws against shooting an alien from another planet.

• 45:05Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of our laws are human-to-human laws. Uh, there's a space law frontier.

• 45:11Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is trying to think about the laws of that next frontier. And so, there are things, like if the alien is more intelligent than you, it's a crime. If it's not, if they're not, then they're just food, you know, for you, right?

• 45:25Eugene Mirman?

  But what if they're just dopey?

• 45:29Eugene Mirman?

  But the, the truth is, most likely if you shot, uh, at an alien or a UFO, you'd probably be just shooting at a plane or a cloud or something else.

• 45:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probably, that's right, like shooting the deer and there's someone on their front doorstep. So, I would say...

• 45:41Eugene Mirman?

  Don't shoot guns in the sky. Let's just say that to our listeners. That's responsible.

• 45:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would say that the UFO, if you, I would say it would be, uh...

• 45:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you have the opportunity to interact with a UFO, don't shoot at it.

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for listening to StarTalk Radio. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Many thanks to our comedian, our guest, our experts. And I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.