Transcription
Have you seen that that recent documentary that came out? It was called Age of Disclosure.
Yeah, I've seen some of it. Yeah.
So, they got like all of the highest level military generals, people in Congress, uh whistleblowers from government agencies, um different parts of the military to all come out and talk about this real thing that's going on. And people going in these skiffs, these secret compartmented uh I don't know what you call them, their rooms that like nothing can be recorded in and explaining uh what they've been exposed to and like reverse engineered craft that they can't explain. Um, and so if you have all these people that are running this country and in charge of us saying this is real, what do you make of that?
Yeah. So this has always been this way. Like going back to this. So, one of the things for my last book for the little book of aliens, you know, I did did my research on the history of UFOs. And you can find those claims going all the way back to like I think it was 1955, the first study, the first Air Force study of UFOs, the first wave of UFO sightings happens in 1947, right? Um, and then by the early 50s, so what...
Was Roswell?
No, no, no Roswell came later. Roswell actually, uh, Roswell was '47, but it was months after the first wave. First wave was I forgotten the guy's name now. He was flying over the... It was a guy, a pilot flying Corso in Washington State. No, it wasn't Corso.
Oh, yes. I know what you're talking about. This was... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And he saw like nine things. So, it's actually that's an interesting story in itself because it also tells you a lot about the psychology of things, but let's before I go there, let's sometimes it's hard to stay on topic. [laughter] Right? Now, we're over there. Um, but so the the first um or one of the first uh Air Force studies I think it was first called Project Saucer and they're like, "Maybe we shouldn't call it that," and then they changed the name to Project Sign and the guy who was the head of it...
Grudge?
Grudge. Grudge. I think even came later. Oh, wait. No, you're right. Grudge.
I thought that was a weird thing, too. [laughter] Like, why you who comes up with these names?
Project Grudge.
But the guy who uh the Air Force, you know, major who was in charge of it, he retires like and then he writes a book, first one of these books claiming, you know, this secret government report that said, and this was interesting, right? Said it was interplanetary, right? Because in those days, nobody really, we didn't really know much about. So, oh yeah, it's interplanetary. Now, now nobody would claim interplanetary because we know the the solar system is empty, right? There's no planets in the solar system that can harbor life other than Earth. But anyway, the important thing is he claimed there was I think it was called the uh Report of the Situation or something. That was the name of this secret report. Nobody's ever found it. Nobody's ever found it. Right. People have tried people, you know, the the Black Vault people never found. And that has been sort of the story for every guy like, you know, that a Age of Disclosure thing kind of pisses me off. Right. Really?
Yeah. Because...
You know, you get people standing up making claims but they never show anything. It's like, "Oh, I, you know, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who saw something." You know, it's like, "Okay, show me the saucer." I can't do that, you know. And so this has been, so you look at like Sean Kirkpatrick who was the head of the AA, right?
He, you know, from his perspective, it's been this mutual circularity because for every of of um kind of a, you know, a circular conversation going back to the 50s, there were two kinds of people in the military. The ones who thought the UFO thing was aliens and the ones who thought the UFO thing was ridiculous, right? And there has always been those two groups for every like with Age of Disclosure. That's a problem with these kinds of documentaries. They didn't show the armies of army guys and the armies of of um intelligence people were like, "No, this is crap." So, what um because there's no actual data. It's always guys who claim they saw something or most of all, they don't claim they saw it. They claim they know somebody who says they know somebody who saw it. And at what point as a scientist I'm like, "Come on, man. Show me the saucer." You know what I mean? Like without the saucer, show me a piece of metal that you can distribute to every lab in the country and we'll analyze it. It's never that. It's And we're going now into like the fourth year of these congressional hearings. And we still don't have any actual evidence. It's just people talking and like, "Can I stand up at a congressional hearing saying, 'Hey, you know, I've got a theory of quantum gravity?'" Which is like that's the most important thing in physics to have a theory of quantum gravity, but I can't show it to you, you know. Should everybody say like, "Hey, Adam Frank invited you know, the theory of gravity?"
Right. It's like, "No, I didn't," because I can't show it to you. So I am not...
Impressed. I mean, I'm all for the disclosure. Let's if it's true, more hearings, let's actually get to the bottom of it. I'm all for it. But everything I see and the it gets [sighs] hyped. Um...
It's frustrating for me.
It's very frustrating.
It's very frustrating for me because I I believe that this stuff's real, but all the public evidence is it's not it's compelling, depending on how, you know, generous you want to be to yourself. But you're right, in a in a in a objective scientific setting, you can't definitively say that that any of that any of those videos or any of that testimony proves...
Right. Right. Which frustrates me. Frustrates... So you're right. Your belief. I mean, because like I said, I know lots of people who are in, you know, really interested in UFO and UAPs like you who like, "Yeah, want evidence," like would like to know what's going on. And I think that's [clears throat] totally cool, right? But the right, you can't make the mistake from going to there be saying like, "There's already proof." You know, there's there's interesting things that are happening.
I believe there is proof. I don't believe anything we've seen publicly is is proof, right?
I think it exists. And, you know, I also think like I it's hard for me to discredit people that are like some of these ex Air Force guys that were in charge of running nuclear bases. You know, these guys are like top of the top of the top when it comes to being psychologically sound individuals, right? They get tested for this all the time because their hand their their job is to protect the the button that launches the nukes, right?
You'd like them to be kind of stable. That would be a good idea. These are the same guys that are saying they're seeing this stuff and there's just too many cases that and then also like the fighter pilots like the Tic Tac pilots, you know, say...
But, you know, the Tic Tac, but taken away like those those Tic Tac pilots, they say, "Ex," they say what they saw. And there's no photos of it. The radar came, they got confiscated by people right after it happened. So...
We just we just have these guys saying this, right?
Right. And that's like, so I've I've interviewed with um...
I think that stuff could have been like secret military stuff that we've been testing. I don't know.
Or or peer. So, but let me just step back a little bit on this because I want people to understand like, look, you know, my job, one of my jobs as a scientist, you know, because of that grant is to think about, you know, alien intelligence, other intelligences. So, man, yeah. And do I want them to exist? Yes. Do I hope that we find them when I'm around? Yes. Is it possible that UFOs are? It's possible. I'm going to be hyper skeptical about it because any...
In general, any, you know, this is the the car famous Carl Sagan quote, um, uh, uh, what is it? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I think that's really true, right? So, let me tell you an interesting story that's sort of related to that thing. Um, uh, I once talked to Adam Ree, who is the guy, he's a cosmologist, an astronomer, and he was the guy who discovered that the universe found the data that the universe was accelerating. Right? After the Big Bang, we know that the universe is expanding. Every galaxy is expanding away from every other galaxy. So like, you know, early on in the universe, the universe was set in motion expanding and we have, you know, absolute data from this. It's, you know...
But what he found, what we always thought was like, "Okay, you get the Big Bang, everything starts expanding," but the expansion should actually slow down because you got all these galaxies, all this matter pulling on all the other matter. Things should be, if you looked, if you could look long enough, you could look far enough back and get a good timeline, everything should be slow, slowly slowing down. Adam Reese is a graduate student, you know, he's 27 years old, and he's doing, they they finally have the data to look really far back in time and um, and do these measurements and what he finds is it's accelerating. It's not decelerating, you know, it's not slowing down, it's accelerating.
It's accelerating. Right? This is like 1997. And so, you know, he's just like a 27-year-old dude sitting, he's up at the mountain, you know, sitting on this data, right? That is absolutely a Nobel Prize. Like without doubt, a Nobel Prize. And I said to him, I said, "How did you feel when you, you know, realized what you had?" He said, and this is like really important. He said, "I was terrified." Because he knew that he was going to have to take these results. You know, this is all his work. He had planned the observations. He had taken the observations. He had done all the mathematical details to analyze the observations, you know, like it's hard to like turn the what you get from the telescope into like, "Oh, the universe is accelerating." And he knew that he was going to have to sit in front of the smartest guys in the world and women and and get grilled like they were going to like these people who know like they know their work down to the, you know, that final, you know, it's like it's like going into a ring, you know, you're a young boxer and you're going into a ring with five world heavyweight champions, you know. And so he was terrified. He like, "Did I make a mistake? Did I?" And so, he had an extraordinary claim...
And he needed to have extraordinary evidence and he was going to have to the gauntlet of fire he was going to have to run through. So, I'm bringing that up to say like if you have an extraordinary claim, UFOs are aliens, right? You need first of all, you need evidence of the highest quality, right? Just like if I and my colleague said, "Oh my god, we found, you know, we're looking at telescope images of, you know, Kepler 34b, some planet." We're like, "Oh my god, there's city lights there." Right.
I know I'm going to I'm going to expect to have my, you know, I'm going to get a new one ripped. All my colleagues, even my friends are going to come after me with knives as they should because if this thing is true, then it is, you know, it'll change the world, right? So, the problem with like a lot of UFO data as you said is that...
It's just not up to the standards. You can't make a claim like, "We are being visited by, you know, alien advanced technology," with a bunch of fuzzy blob pictures or personal testimony because as you said, personal testimony is the worst form of it's the worst form of evidence. There's just nothing you can do with it. Right. I mean, so I've talked with some of the pilots and they're great guys and a lot of times they're just saying like, "Hey, could, you know, can you tell me some of the guys that saw the Tic Tac stuff like Fraver or Graves?"
Yeah, Graves. I I was on Graves' podcast. Great guy, you know, and he just is like, "This is what I saw, you know, or this is what I remember I saw," because you were talking about memory, you know. So like, and there's been all kinds of studies that show, especially when you get excited, something's happening that your memory, you know, you just will not. So, there's that famous study of like they did they had a bunch of people throwing balls around in a room, right? And they had a bunch of observers, including trained observers, cops, and everything to watch what's going on and report what's happening, right? And while these people are throwing, so it's kind of a complicated thing. People are throwing a white ball. There's some people in in brown shirts, some people in white shirts.
Nobody reported the guy in the monkey suit who walked through.
They did this again and again. People just missed the guy in the monkey suit who walked slowly through the room. So, it just points to the fact that personal testimony, you know, I'm sure people these these pilots are absolutely being honest. It is great that they can report, remove the stigma, you know, remove the stigma because that's what's going to help us figure, you know, people should be able to say what they saw. Um, but it's just it's not evidence of the kind that you can, you know, it's just not evidence like from a scientific point of view, personal testimony is not rigorous evidence. So...
That like you said, what you're saying is like, "Yeah, you believe it to be true," which is cool. Like I can have my beliefs, you can have your beliefs, but the whole point of science is to not fool ourselves, not let our beliefs get in the way of what we can actually show to be true. Again, public knowledge, right?
If you enjoy watching our show on Spotify or YouTube, and you want to be more involved, I encourage you to please come check out our Patreon community. Not only does our Patreon community get every episode you see on YouTube early, fully uncensored, and ad-free, but we're also doing Patreon exclusive episodes as well as live Q&A's. And you can get your personal questions answered by our guests every single week. For me, being able to collaborate and communicate back and forth with our Patreon community every week has been huge. And this is my way of saying thank you for the cost of a cup of coffee a month. Now back to the show.