Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: The Pentagon's UFO Report, Featuring Sarah Scoles

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

The Pentagon finally released its hotly-anticipated briefing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. As expected, it provided little new information, saying only that there were a number of unexplainable observations. Sarah Scoles, author of the book They Are Already Here, that examines the culture and motivations behind ufology, joins the show to provide critical context. Why did it come about? What are the motivations of the people who pushed for its release? And how should we approach extraordinary claims with little information? Discover more here: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/0702-2021-spe-sarah-scoles-pentagon-ufo-reportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, everyone. It is time for the July 2021 Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of PlanRad Planetary Radio, and here is the Senior Space Policy Advisor, the Chief Advocate for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Casey, great to be talking to you again. Hey Matt, happy summer for at least us in the Northern Hemisphere, and I guess happy winter for those in the Southern Hemisphere. Hey, it's a solstice wherever you are on the pale blue dot, right? We have a special conversation today, and it is extremely timely because of something that has just been released. First, give us a little tease of what is just ahead in this interview that you conducted. We are delighted to have Sarah Skulls, who's a science journalist and author of the book,

They Are Already Here, UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers, which I thought was a really interesting take on the motivations and people who really pursue ufology, which I believe is quite relevant right now as this episode is going to be kind of talking about this Pentagon Department of Defense report on UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, that a lot of people, I argue, are jumping maybe a little too eagerly to conclusions about the implications of this. She will be joining us. We'll go through her book. She has been writing about this topic and understands and knows a lot of the people who've been showing up in this discussion in the last few years. And we kind of trace through the context and history of why we got to this report, where it came from, who's pushing it to be released.

And then also, of course, talking about its implications. We actually recorded our conversation before the report was released. We had seen hints of what was going to be in there. The report has subsequently come out. It does not change at all, I don't think in any major way, the outcome of our conversation. But it's something that you're welcome to read. We link to it in the show notes here for this episode. What I really want to impart today is not necessarily going through some kind of attempt to debunk one by one everything on there. There are people online who will do that for you. But really try

to think about how to approach claims like this more broadly when people make them, how to train your brain to think critically about things you may want to be true. How to spot any red flags or people jumping to conclusions or people pushing an agenda, I think is really important for all of us, particularly in an age where information basically costs no money to disseminate. Casey, as you know, I was listening in as you talked with Sarah. And I want to say, I hope with some humility, I think that Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan would have been very pleased with this conversation. It accomplishes exactly what you were talking about just now. Before we get to it, you didn't think we were going to let you get away without a little bit of a plug, right?

Planetary.org slash join. We hope that if you are listening to this, if you are enjoying the Space Policy Edition, and if you're not already a member of the Planetary Society, please take a look there. I'm a member. Casey's a member. You're going to see a lot of stuff that we are up to, a lot of the stuff that we can only do with the support of our members. We hope that you will consider becoming one of them. Again, planetary.org slash join. scientists in a scientifically rigorous way to seek out life beyond Earth, to look for biosignatures, technosignatures, and to try to attain, if it's out there, this fundamental revolution in our understanding about ourselves, about our place in the cosmos, and about what

else is out there. You and I, honestly, we've talked about this and all of our colleagues probably want nothing more out of our careers than to in some way assist in what could be one of these most profound discoveries in human history. And I want nothing more for that to be true. And this is why we have to be so profoundly careful and rigorous when we evaluate things that we want to be true. This is why, in a sense, we have this very, for all of its flaws like any institution, the process of science as humanity has refined it over the last 400 years works really well. You and I can meet each other in person now because we have vaccines as a product

of that 400 years of scientific process. And that process involves open debate, sharing of data, rigorous analysis of that data, and free access to that data. This is where you see, I think, the validity and importance of this broad global scientific process to understand the potential for life elsewhere. And that's how we need to approach any sort of evidence very rigorously. Well said, Casey. I know I have met, you have met and talked with so many hundreds of scientists who cannot wait to answer that greatest of all questions,

or maybe both of the questions that our boss Bill Nye likes to ask. Where do we come from and are we alone? I think maybe everybody feels that way and maybe that's why these topics become so inordinately popular. But we have to remember what our co-founder said as well. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's absolutely true. And I think it's simultaneously buoying for me to see how many people are interested in this. But then I just personally sometimes get frustrated at people who I think have a predisposed outcome in mind, who I think have a predisposed outcome in mind,

pushing a narrative to jump to say that these types of, basically highly ambiguous signals are therefore evidence of basically this very big claim that there's alien, you know, life visiting us, not just out there, but, but here now shadowy in a way I've thought about this. I talked about this with Sarah a little bit about why that bothers me in some way. And you'll probably hear this throughout the

conversation. Maybe to illustrate this, I actually wrote to a journalist who I just won't name a few years ago, who was promoting an interview they had done with a very prominent, completely bought in UFO person. And I found that upsetting in a sense because they wouldn't do the same for someone who promoted the anti-science of denying climate change. And I was very surprised at their response, which was basically a very confrontational, well, what if you're the one who's wrong? And it's like, you're the one making the claim. Like, you're the one who needs to, if you're saying that this is the case, let's expect some very aggressively positive evidence for something, right?

As opposed to this classic switcheroo in terms of how people, it's like a rhetorical trick in terms of how they manipulate public opinion, which is attack an existing structure, create doubt in non-experts, and in that realm of doubt, almost like a virus, insert their own idea into that doubt as the answer. But if you notice very carefully, they have never provided at any point positive evidence for their claim in that process. They've only worked to undermine your confidence in the established viewpoint. You see this in anti-vaccine stuff. You see this in anti-evolution. You see this in anti-climate change.

It's the same playbook. And I think you see this with people's claims with UFOs being alien spacecraft. claims with UFOs being alien spacecraft. There's no yet any positive evidence for supporting that hypothesis. There is only ambiguity that then they insert their preferred outcome. And that's why I find, I think, this whole kind of media approach to this as this harmless, fun, in a way, it's troubling in the sense that it's promoting an anti-scientific approach to the world. And I'm not saying it can't necessarily be the case, but I need way, way, way more evidence for something, which we just do not have. And so I think the very likely outcome is that if you just look at what

has happened already, the most likely outcome is that there's probably a mix of, and this is what the Pentagon report said, a variety of probably very practical explanations that are probably complex because by definition, these are weird occurrences that are self-reported, could fall prey to any manner of fallibility, instrumentation issues, uncertainty, complex, unusual intersections of all of those. It doesn't mean it has to be that way. But I feel that the most likely explanation is that it is these very prosaic and not as fun outcomes. So this is why I'm caring about it. And again, why it's on the policy show, because they've asked the Pentagon to do this now. They're spending US taxpayer dollars on this. Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, has said he's going to ask people at NASA to study these problems too. These are time of civil servants. They can't be spent doing something else. This is a policy issue now. issue now. And we need to say, is this a valid or how important is this versus all the other things we could be doing? And this is why we need to approach this in a very rational, skeptical perspective. I also hate to hear it referred to as a matter of right and wrong, or what if you're wrong? This is a question of the critical approach to any kind of claim, approach to any kind of claim, whether it is extraordinary or fairly mundane, and our ability to think about these things in the way that has been so successful, proven so successful over time,

and that is the way of science. Casey, I think you've prepared us for this great conversation. I'll get off my soapbox now and let Sarah start talking. But I just wanted to set the context of why we're spending an episode on this. All right, brains on and ears open as we begin to listen to the conversation that Casey Dreyer had just a few days ago with Sarah Scholes. And we will see you on the other side. All right, I'm here with Sarah Scholes, the author of They Are Already Here, UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers. Sarah, thanks for joining the Space Policy Edition today. Thanks so much for having me. I normally don't talk about UFOs on the Space Policy Edition, but it's become, in a sense, a policy issue with an upcoming report that we're waiting for still as we record this from the Department of Defense, analyzing

their past research on unidentified aerial phenomenon, I guess, is the current parlance. You've done a lot of reporting and thinking about this topic. How have we gotten to this situation? Why are we waiting for this report? And where did that come from? Yeah, the full story of how we got here kind of goes back more than a decade to the 2007-2008 timeframe when Senator Harry Reid, along with a couple of other senators, helped lead an initiative to get this research program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program funded. And there's a lot of debate about what this program actually was or wasn't. But the latest word from the Pentagon is that it was a program to research advanced aerospace vehicles

to potentially determine if there were any foreign technologies that represented like a leap ahead version of our own technology, and to create a center of expertise for examining advanced aerospace capabilities out to the next 40 years. And as part of that, according to the latest Pentagon statement, the contractor, which was Robert Bigelow and Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Studies, who some of your listeners probably know, has funded or built inflatable space habitats, researched different technical areas related to advanced aerospace vehicles, produced a bunch of reports. And then it kind of went quiet for a number of years until 2017, when the New York Times published a big article that I believe was called Glowing Auras and Black Money,

which was all about this program, what we call AATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, that kind of portrayed it as strictly a UFO research program, aiming to find out what UFOs were, which is not how the Pentagon portrays it. And this kind of led to a slow bubbling up of interest, first among the public and the press, and then now among people in Congress, about how often military service members and military installations see these unidentified aerial phenomena, whether or not they represent a threat, and what we should do about them. And this report that's coming out is kind of the culmination of that very long answer to your question. The report itself, too,

is a function of this kind of snake eating its own tail aspect of this, right? Because from the New York Times stories, and from this kind of growing media coverage, more senators like Marco Rubio, from Florida, Republican from Florida, put it into the defense authorization bill last year that the Department of Defense should release this report, right? So this is a mandated report from Congress, right? Yes, that is correct. And they want to draw together sources of information about these UAP from the Navy, from the FBI, from other Earth observation platforms, and then kind of both bring together and standardize the reports themselves and then a way to gather future

reports. But it seems like, you know, people like Marco Rubio heard about this because of the public interest in it and then became interested in it themselves and then brought it into things like the Defense Authorization Act. There's so much to unpack here. So thanks for summarizing this quickly, because your book covers a big portion of this, this history of Harry Reid and Robert Bigelow, also from Nevada, right, his home state. It was difficult.

There's so many names and so many interested parties kind of feeding into this. But something that struck me was most of the people pushing this narrative of this various aspects of very, everyone kind of has a slightly different narrative. There's as many orthodoxies, I guess, as you can imagine, within this umbrella of UFOlogy, or however, it's really categorized. They're already kind of decided on what these are, right? Harry Reid is like convinced that there's aliens.

Robert Bigelow is convinced there's aliens behind these things. Even one of the authors of that New York Times article, what was her name? Leslie Keen was also convinced previously that there's aliens. So these aren't just kind of open inquiry from open-minded people. These are people really pushing an agenda that they kind of got then into, it seems to me, a broader public discussion that lacked that context, that they had this agenda, that they'd already decided what these were, then pushing these stories out in this kind of like, well, we're just asking questions kind of a situation. Is that an accurate way to characterize a lot of these individuals? I think so. I mean, with the caveat that I am not a

mind reader, it does seem like it could be. Well, that's a different aspect of UFOology. Right. Oh, yeah, absolutely. We can get into consciousness studies anytime. No, I think that the longstanding connections to and interest in what UFO people call the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs was an undisclosed part of a lot of people who have been pushing this agenda and that actually they do try in polite public spheres to distance themselves from that. Like that's part of the reason that we are talking about this with the office of the director of national intelligence. And as a national security threat, you can remove yourself

from the alien idea when you talk about things in that way. It becomes a policy problem. It becomes a contract problem and a reporting problem. But yes, behind the scenes and on UFO podcasts, they will a little bit, I mean, people like Robert Bigelow will just come out and say, like, I think aliens are here on Earth, which I do believe that he has said in several public forums. But other people will say, like you said, we're just asking questions. We're just presenting this agnostically. But then there are things like Leslie Kane kind of sits on the board of a UFO data gathering and advocacy organization. And behind the scenes, there does seem to be a lot of belief in the alien hypothesis or the extraterrestrial hypothesis. So she's, I'd say, one of the primary characters.

And she, again, was the author of the New York Times article that really, I think, elevated this into broader public discourse. There's another individual that I just want to mention for listeners who kind of want to be aware and skeptically follow a lot of these claims, who worked at the Department of Defense, who retired in 2017, and was the key source really for that 2017 article. Can you talk a little bit about him, where he's coming from and what he claims to have participated in at the Pentagon? Yeah, I believe you're talking about a man named Luis Elizondo, who has worked in counterintelligence and counterterrorism for a number of years for the Department of Defense, and first came forward a little bit before the New York Times article, but the New York Times article was when most people started to pay attention, saying that he was the director of this AATIP, this UFO or Not Research Program.

the people within the Pentagon were not taking this threat and UAP themselves seriously enough. And so he wanted to bring it to the public and make it a big matter so that people would pay attention. And actually, most recently, he has been, I don't know if threatening is the word, but threatening to run for a seat in Congress to further more attention to the UAP agenda. The problem with this claim is that it is not undisputed. The Pentagon has maintained for a long time that he either had no responsibilities with AATIP or had no assigned responsibilities. And it's hard to reconcile how someone can be the director of a program and also have no assigned responsibilities. So that's kind of an un someone can be the director of a program and also

have no assigned responsibilities. So that's kind of an unresolved, like, what was he doing there? Who is being disingenuous and how is, I think, an unresolved question. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, I mean, in addition to your book, you had some good Twitter threads kind of about identifying, again, these common individuals, common between reporting articles and coverage on 60 Minutes or on TV, that they're continually being presented credulously, right, without any of this kind of important context, that their claims are being allowed to kind of stand without any pushback. And for our listeners, why is this an important context for interpreting claims by these individuals about the role and importance

of these UAP studies? So I think when you have a small group of people pushing for the same thing, in this case, UAP investigation, or what some in the UFO sphere might call disclosure from the government about what it really knows, but it's just a few people and their backgrounds are either disputed or kind of undeniably associated with aliens driving spaceships. That kind of obscures how large a thing we're talking about, like how common are UAP sightings among military members or otherwise? How big a problem do they represent? And also how much interest is there actually within Congress or other parts of the political sphere? Because when it's just a few people, they can appear very loud and get a lot done and it can still be just like, you know, three guys in a back room.

And I think that that is important to understand. And I don't know, as a journalist, I always think it's important to question people's motives. Like, why are people bringing information forward and why now? I wish I had the answers to those questions. But I think from a policy and budget perspective, like if you make something like UFOs or UAP into a national security threat, like what do we do when there's a national security threat? We give people money to make it less threatening. And so I think we should be questioning whether that is part of what is going on. Yeah, a dollar spent cannot be spent twice, right? And so for every dollar spent on studying UAPs, that's not going to something else. I just found this so fascinating in a sense. And there's also again, you talk about motive. And I think motive is just so important as a contextualizing piece of information. These individuals maybe honestly really believe what they're saying,

but also it's kind of a lucrative thing to be known for this too. And what was this organization, the To The Stars organization that I think both Keane and Elizondo, Elizondo now belong to? Can you talk a little bit about the role of the To The Stars group? Sure. Leslie Kane wasn't part of it, I don't believe, but Elizondo was. No, that's fine. Yeah, this is a tangled web. But To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, or TTSA, is an organization founded by the rock star Tom DeLonge, formerly of Blink-182, to kind of both produce entertainment, you know, books, movies, music kind of related to UFOs, and then also create what he called a community of interest for like investigating UFO reports in a more systematic way and helping bring forward more documents and videos from

government studies. This organization was formed in 2017, kind of close to the time that Luis Elizondo came forward and talked about this UFO research program, AATIP. Luis Elizondo was, I believe, the director of global security for them at the time. I'm not sure what that means. And it also involved a number of other high-level people, like a former Lockheed Martin Skunk Works executive and Christopher Mellon, who used to work high up in the intelligence sphere. And so there was this very shiny sheen of credibility to the organization. And it was the organization that published on the same day that the initial New York Times story came out,

the now famous videos, Go Fast and Gimble are what they are called, the ones that get played over every news story. And that organization has kind of the two floating blobs yeah correct the blobs that are floating against the back sky yeah exactly yeah i see you're familiar with them um yeah um but yeah it's uh it's kind of fallen apart a little bit recently elizondo recently departed um saying that they were focusing a little too much on entertainment. And he actually recently formed his own company called or is part of a new company called Skyfort, which is some kind of UFO think tank. So there's just a whole lot going on here. I don't know if that was an

intelligible summary. Yeah. Well, let's let's let's just jump back out. And let's just rephrase where we are, because I think it's so easy to go down. And this is what's so fascinating to me is, again, this kind of fractalizing nature of various organizations and individuals that are part of this. But fundamentally, we have, it seems to me that a handful of influential individuals who have basically stated or seem to very strongly believe in a preordained outcome of what these UFOs are, that they are extraterrestrial, they're alien intelligence or somehow, and they've used their positions of authority and influence to push their perspective into kind of a more credible domain of public discourse via the New York Times, New Yorker, 60 Minutes, talking about these issues and kind of creating it in the context of a national security issue, which then everything becomes easier to argue for. And then using that in a sense to kind of push this broader narrative of aliens, basically. This is kind of what I meant by the snake eating its tail.

It's like Harry Reid mandated, you know, he gave the money to the Pentagon to start doing this study in the first place, and then basically promotes the fact that when the New York Times talked about that the Pentagon did it, say, see how important this is that even the Pentagon is studying this, which then begets more studies and then more people taking it seriously, even though it wasn't like the Pentagon was just saying, oh, we're really freaked out about these. We need to do this. We're asking for this money. No, they were mandated to do so. Right. And so I keep thinking of when you said this, it gives the impression that it may be a broader movement than it actually is.

I just think about like social media, where a small number of very noisy people can seem like they're speaking for a ton of people, just because our brains shortcut the idea that easy accessibility is kind of this means that there's a lot of credibility behind it, right? Or if we can easily recall something, it must be really true or have heft, right? And so people who can kind of hack their way into our consciousness or our brains merely by speaking about it incessantly or loudly misrepresent the breadth and scope of this movement. I think that's very accurate. And I think something that just further reinforces that is that journalists, breadth and scope of their this movement or i think that's i think that's very accurate and i think something that just further reinforces that is that journalists are particularly prone

to live inside of that kind of echo chamber especially online where there's where there are there's just a small number of voices saying this thing but they're on twitter all day and they are seeing this and seeing it replicated and then then, you know, one person, maybe they work at the New Yorker, as there was just recently a very large story in the New Yorker about UFOs. And, you know, they're seeing this sound and fury coming from a few people. They write a story. Other journalists see that, see how popular it was, decide to do their own thing. And then that also kind of feeds on itself and, and creates a whole other wave, which then creates the perception that even more people are interested in this is even bigger threat. And so it's just exponential, I guess. And I feel like it's almost become weirdly fashionable among certain circles to be very

open minded now to what these UFOs are. And I'm thinking about people like Ezra Klein or Tyler Cohen or other kind of influential thought leaders kind of in these somewhat, you know, I hate to use the word, elitist spheres of cultural discourse, but they're influential, right? And suddenly it's become like, well, look how open-minded i am maybe maybe they are aliens how fun would that be and i think that's what starts to bug me start to drive me a little nuts and maybe we should just kind of state our incoming biases right now so i'll go first and say that i don't think there's good evidence that these are anything uh that important. At best, they're either highly misinterpreted standard phenomena or classified or secret aerial vehicles from other advanced nations

or even our own. In prep for this, of course, I read Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World, which I thought put this whole thing to bed 25 years ago about what UFOs are. But I think this is a good point of clarification. He says, I'm often asked, do you believe in UFOs? And he says, I'm always struck by how the question is phrased. The suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I'm almost never asked, and this is the key question, how good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?

That's the question. That's what the claim is, right? But that's not what's being answered. So that's where I'm coming from. And so why don't you state kind of your incoming assumptions into this whole discussion? Sure, I agree that I don't think that the videos even show anything necessarily very exciting. I think there have been a number of credible explanations of them as conventional aircraft seen weirdly or camera effects or balloons or things like that. And so to me, they themselves do not seem like something to get that worked up about. Sure, something to investigate. I'm not opposed to investigating it and figuring out what they are. about sure something to investigate I'm not opposed to investigating it and figuring out what they are and I think that a lot of what gets people fired up also is the the witness testimony and that

we forget that all human beings including military pilots are fallible and subject to our own brains perception perception capabilities and then also cultural biases, which we have going in. And so, yeah, I think people do see things they can't identify, but the most likely explanations are things like you said, weird effects, conventional aircraft, advanced aircraft of our own, or something foreign, even commercial drones. I, you know, I reserve a small percentage possibility that there's something truly strange going on, just because I don't think I can rule that out 100%. But I also agree that, like, I see something I can't explain,

therefore aliens is an extremely large leap with no, I always say, like, I want, if you're going to say that I'm going to need some positive evidence in the direction of aliens just not just like uh i don't get it therefore to also comment on your point earlier about um the way that it is fashionable for for journalists to be like well i don't know maybe what if aliens um i think people who maybe aren't used to thinking about these topics at all or in a skeptical way kind of hear somebody at the Pentagon say essentially like, yes, that's a UFO. UFOs are real. And because UFOs are so associated with aliens in our popular culture, they think the Pentagon is saying, yeah, maybe aliens are real when that's not what they're saying at all. maybe aliens are real when that's not what they're saying at all.

Yeah. UFOs are real in that people see things they themselves can't identify, which is not new or exciting particularly. Right. Yeah. I mean, cause that's a huge leap and this is always, it's always what drives me crazy.

And this is, I think a common approach to all sorts of, I would group this with anti-science fundamentally like kind of arguments. And it's always this kind of two-step where the small group of people who have an agenda against kind of the established understanding of the universe in some way, whether it's vaccines work or climate change is happening or UFOs are just weather balloons, they'll attack and create uncertainty. Just by attacking, attacking, attacking the established norms, create uncertainty among non-experts. And then in that uncertainty, like a virus, they'll just insert their own answer as the explanation. But as you said, having no positive evidence for that as being the answer. So merely by creating the uncertainty, they can insert this

answer. And then suddenly we're like, well, maybe it is aliens. When creating uncertainty, they can insert this answer. And then suddenly, we're like, well, maybe it is aliens, when in reality, they've done nothing to actually give that kind of positive evidence. And so I was trying to think about why this upsets me to some degree. You talk about this in your book, too, that there is a slightly self defeating attitude about this from the scientific community and others to kind of be dismissive of UFO, you know, studying UFOs, which I want to explore with you. But the whole time was like, why does this irritate me so much that I have to talk about UFOs? I think it's because of that anti-science aspect of it, that this is another expression of a furthering or ongoing attack on the scientific process and the established scientific

systems that we've set up, right? And what you see in these organizations, they're setting up these kind of alternative scientific-ish groups who claim that they're following some of the scientific inquiry, the methods of scientific inquiry, to kind of adapt or to cloak themselves in that credibility. But in reality, they're approaching every single piece of data with a preordained outcome, right, or with this expectation of what is true and what isn't, and then looking for things to support that. That's what is troubling to me to kind of see this furthering anti-science approach. Talk about in your book, why is that self-defeating from a public communication standpoint, if I find this just

irritating? It is problematic that a lot of the way that people from inside UFO world come at this is unfalsifiable. Like if you take, there's some recent reporting from the New York Times, Like if you take, there's some recent reporting from the New York Times reporting on an early look or an early account of what might be in this forthcoming report. And in the news story, they say there's no evidence it's not aliens. And I'm like, well, yeah. And, you know, and then that goes further that when, you know, when the report comes out, if it doesn't say anything about aliens, people on the inside can say it's a cover up. They don't want you to hear about it. And, you know, there's just not a way that there's just not a way to win the argument. continued for so many decades, despite a kind of a paucity of hard evidence, is because once somebody believes something, you can't prove it wrong when it veers into that kind of conspiracy. Do you think journalists should be required to take basic physics, college-level physics,

before they can become a journalist? I feel like so many of this credulity is because people don't have a basic grasp of how nature works if you just even have a basic understanding of how big the universe is as you said like i don't want to sound like i'm completely dismissing this but i put the chances at very small given the fact that i wrote about this on the planetary society the other week asking us to believe that some of these things are actually aliens as the answer to what a UFO is, you're not actually just saying that that is the claim. But then you start saying like, well, by the way that they move, by the way that they've come here, you're asking to say, well, they're probably defying physics as we understand it,

too. So you're not just making a claim about aliens, you're making a claim about, we fundamentally, profoundly misunderstand how the world works that we don't realize yet. And that's a much, much bigger claim really when you start thinking about the implications of it, right? Right. And if journalists who write about this had realized that like, okay, they're probably making claims that the conservation of energy isn't right, then that seems like a less likely

answer to the data. And also that should be even bigger news. That's true. Yeah, like holy... Yeah, no, something that an editor of mine pointed out when I was first starting to write about UFOs in terms of kind of like the meta science thinking behind all of this is that, you know,

the difference between saying like, let's investigate this that, you know, the difference between saying like, let's let's investigate this as, you know, something that's not aliens versus something that is aliens is that, you know, we have theoretical frameworks for like, how does a drone move? What is the physics of an aircraft? framework for the hypothesis that this is aliens, which, and I think that, that if, if journalists did have more scientific training to understand the difference between like having a philosophical and principled underpinning for, for the hypothesis that you're putting forward is actually important. Like you can't just, just make things up because you don't understand them. But I think, I mean, I haven't, in answer to the physics question about journalists, I haven't actually taken a journalism course. So I don't know if I should tell journalists to take physics courses. But I think at least maybe critical thinking courses.

I think a lot of, I think because UFOs have been in history just such a silly, fun, weird topic that's mostly anecdotes. such a silly, fun, weird topic. That's mostly anecdotes. People are covering them that way now, even though it has become a story that's about intelligence, government contracting, budgets, you know, it's a very earthly story. But I feel like journalists are still covering it like, wow, I stepped in my backyard and saw something weird, like with that level of due diligence. wow, I stepped in my backyard and saw something weird, like with that level of due diligence. For most part, journalists wouldn't entertain really rabid anti-climate change opinions like bubbling up into their news stories, right? And so that's what I think I don't feel like there's enough of an appreciation for. This is like another, in general, and for a lot of people, this is just another expression of kind of anti-scientific thinking that all plays together, right?

And so the more you're talking about UFOs, you're kind of opening the door to a lot of weird things, whether or not it's fun, right? And I think that to me is what really troubles me from a lot of the credulous media reporting that I've seen about this. Right, right. And even aside from just strictly anti-scientific thinking, it's also a big gateway into general conspiracy culture because it's an easy slide from maybe the government is hiding things about aliens

to lizard people in Congress or QAnon. Congress or QAnon. And I mean, you do see very, you do see very rabid fan groups online that are growing and also growing more violent in their verbiage in a way that I find disturbing. Like we're in a war for disclosure. Somebody said like a famous UFO person said recently, like, we're not going to stop until the bodies hit the floor. And there's just kind of this tribal kind of violent mentality popping up that I think you do see with a lot of other conspiracy theories. I was going to ask this later, but it's kind of relevant now. How much of this growing recent trend do you think is related to being stuck at home online for like the last 15 months with COVID? Because I feel like, you know, because that's sometimes the

explanation for things like QAnon. And people just like, being way, everyone's now like way too online, particularly people who had the luxury to work from home in the last 15 months. So do you think being stuck and not being able to go out, people were able to get more into UFO stuff as this kind of rabbit hole, conspiratorial, gamified, self satisfying explanation like that, because they're doing this kind of personal journeys into these worlds together. It's it seems like it would be related. But I guess this predates it, though, fundamentally. Yeah, it did really start to swell more in the past in the past 18 months or so than it did even, you know, back in 2017 when the first article came out. I think it's likely that's part of it.

I think likely part of it is also the kind of coordinated push from a small group of people that happened around the same time as that. And then I think also there's kind of a recurring trend in the waves of UFO interest in that they tend, UFOs tend to be of public interest during times of turmoil on Earth, in times of fear of outsiders, fear of technology, fear of where the world is going. And you know, that makes sense to me in terms of how the human psyche works. You kind of project your fears onto something that seems to be invading that you don't understand that is maybe a little more, I mean, it's less scary than a virus, at least to me. And so I think, you know, maybe we're seeing part of that historical cycle play itself

out again. Well, it's like less scary because it has purposeful intent versus being a random, pointless, destructive virus that just happened to evolve or something like that, right? And just tear through everybody. And that seems to be, I mean, that's like the fundamental commonality between many conspiracy theories, right? That there is actually a highly ordered world out there that isn't random and pointless, that it has meaning in a way. You talk about this to some degree in your book, that relationship between ufology. Is it ufology? Is that the right way to say it? People say it both ways. I say ufology, but other people say ufology, I think. You can have artist license.

My podcast, I'll call it ufologyfology and its relationship to kind of a religion the way again that people talk about being believers right finding that kind of community in finding these fellow believers and things that are non-falsifiable um and you point out you weren't the first to make that connection but what was your experience as you started to study the culture of people who are really into this? And what is the intersection of this kind of religious aspect? To give credit where credit's due, the first time I encountered a robust interpretation of this was from a guy named Chris Rutkowski, who is Canada's UFO guy who kind of compiles all of the UFO reports from across Canada. But he wrote an essay all about the ways that modern ufology is like religion. The idea that there is something out there, speaking of the extraterrestrial version of UFOs, that is more advanced than us,

advanced than us, but cares enough to do something like come to our planet and is either, depending on who you ask, out to help us figure out climate change and not nuclear bomb each other to death or to Independence Day invade us. That's a lot like older New Testament gods. It has that kind of watch over appeal. I mean, I think it also taps into a lot of questions that are at least traditionally spiritual, if not religious, like what really is the universe? How did it get here? How did we get here? Are we alone? And those are also scientific questions, but a lot of people think of them spiritually. And so, you know, a lot of people who don't find meaning in traditional religion can find similar holes filled by ufology. And then the groups that come together in communities and now also online form a really cohesive cultural identity together as believers and with each other that I think church also fills for some people. But then also from the conspiratorial mindset perspective

that you were talking about earlier, another aspect of it, I think, is not just that the world is ordered and there are these patterns here and you are the one who's making sense of them. I think it's also, you see conspiratorial belief a lot among people who may feel disenfranchised in one way or another. Like,

yeah, the world is ordered. There's all these plans going on, but you are not a part of them. It's these other people conspiring to do this thing and you are left out. And that's why things aren't as good for you as the way that you would like them to be. And I imagine that's a feeling that a lot more people had in the past year and a half than did before that. That's a good point. Much more of Casey and his guest, Sarah Scholes, is just a minute away. Bill Nye, the planetary guy here. The threat of a deadly asteroid impact is real. The answer to preventing it?

Science. And you, as a Planetary Society supporter, you're part of our mission to save humankind from the only large-scale natural disaster that could one day be prevented. I'm talking about potentially dangerous asteroids and comets. We call them near-Earth objects or NEOs. The Planetary Society supports dedicated NEO finders and trackers through our Shoemaker Near-Earth Objects Grant Program. We're getting ready to award our next round of grants. We anticipate a stack of worthy requests from talented astronomers around the world.

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that you interviewed for your book. Is this where you're drawing these types of interpretations of their experience from? Because you went, you put yourself out there. You went to Area 51, right? Or near it, I should say. You went to Roswell, you went to meet with a lot of the people who are actively trying to investigate a lot of these UFO claims. So tell me about some of the people you met and what kind of common characteristics or qualities that they shared that drove them to investigate these. I mean, I think for a lot of people on the more believer end of things, the thing that they have

in common often is a personal experience with seeing a UFO that was meaningful to them that then kind of led them to a community. I think about there's a woman here in Colorado where I am. Her name is Katie Grabowski, and she's one of the lead UFO investigators for the Mutual UFO Network here in Colorado, which just, you know, if you see a UFO and you want to report it, you can report it to this group MUFON, and then someone like Katie will go investigate it. And so she had had experiences in her childhood that she couldn't explain. And they came back to her as an adult and she wanted to dig into them more. And so she went to MUFON's training and then also found this whole group of people who was interested in this thing that had been meaningful to her.

And you can go to these meetings and hear about other things that people have seen as kind of like a judgment-free space to share your experiences. On the slightly more skeptical but interested side, I think of people like the guy I just mentioned, Chris Rutkowski, who, you know, these are people who are interested in UFOs as much as a human phenomenon as whatever else they are, and kind of are interested in the historical cycles and historical documents. And yes, individual cases, but kind of interested in putting them in context. And I think those people, what unites them is kind of seeing it as a mystery that you could investigate forever that will just provide

endless research rabbit holes for you, which, you know, I get that. That's my whole, that's my job is research rabbit holes. And so I think, you know, I think the believer, the believer side on average, maybe thinks they have this mystery explained and they hold secret knowledge. And then the skeptical side thinks this is a fun thing that I can dig into for the rest of my life. How did you end up going down this rabbit hole? Because you mentioned this earlier, your background is you have scientific training, and you went to school for, was it physics or astronomy or both? Both. Yeah, they tend to go together. I'm guessing from what you've already said that you didn't

come into this thing like, well, I've got to check out this UFO thing. There's something here. But it seemed like you were interested in the people and motivations of people who were. And so how did you how did you find yourself in Area 51 and Roswell and talking to some of these individuals tracking down these claims? Yeah, it started for me, I think, the same time a lot of people's interest in UFOs started, which was in 2017 when the big New York Times story came out. And I was reading it and I just thought, you know, there's something that's not adding up here. This should be, you know, if what they're saying is true, that's very interesting and it's very huge. But some of the sourcing and reporting on this seems a little thin to me. There was a part in the story like Robert Bigelow had pieces of a crashed UFO that he was modifying a building to investigate, and the pieces of the UFO maybe had medical effects on people. And I was like, well, you can't just say that. You have to prove it to me. And so I started going through that article, just kind of trying to prove or disprove things that were in there about this Pentagon UFO research program and the claims

that were made in the article. And as part of that, you know, I talked to historians who study UFOs and anthropologists who study belief in UFOs. And then also a few people who are more on the inside of ufology who've been studying it for a long time. And I just realized there was this whole world of people who were interested in UFOs from a lot of different perspectives and not necessarily from the perspective of being convinced that there are aliens on earth. And I was like, I want to know what motivates, especially the people who don't believe aliens are here to nevertheless investigate this thing that might not actually be that interesting at all, like what compels people to dedicate their lives to something that might just be

essentially fake. So I took a bunch of road trips after that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was kind of fascinating reading about that, that kind of personal journey and literally that you had in that book. And I want to just plug the book. I think you gave a really sympathetic treatment of a lot of these individuals. And I found that really interesting just to see these really honest

profiles, in a sense, of these individuals. You're not just dismissing them out of hand. You really did a nice job, I think, fleshing them out and their motivations and what they're trying to do. And rarely do you see ones that are just purely, it seems like, you know, motivated by opportunity or greed. A lot of these, particularly at these nonprofit groups or seeking out claims, they're just personally really committed or intrigued by this. And what struck me is that, again, they are applying what they consider to be a scientific process. A lot of the time, I keep going back again to whether we need more rigorous scientific training for every high school student or something like that they're using in a sense that this established authority of science, but not quite implementing

it correctly the way that you really need to do it. Would you say that a lot of them feel like they are being scientific in how they approach these claims? Yeah, I would. I think in the book, I mostly tried to talk to people who were working in this field in good faith and weren't the hoaxers, the people just out for money, just regular people. But, you know, they don't have scientific training and we don't expect me to be able to be a plumber or something like it's a it's it is something that requires knowledge of how to do it.

And I think a lot of people at groups like MUFON are putting forth like a good faith effort toward being scientific, but that they don't always know exactly what that means and that it means things, including like you can't go in knowing what you want to find out. You're supposed to go in not having a predetermined outcome in your mind. But, you know, ufology has a complicated relationship with science in that people who research UFOs kind of both revere science and want to replicate it, but then also think, you know, it's, it's wrong, it's limited, people are biased, and they they don't know the limits of their own knowledge, and kind of eschew traditional, the traditional scientific fields, because it doesn't accept ufology. But then also,

if somebody has a PhD in physics, and they want to come speak at MUFON, they're like, look at the PhD. That's awesome. And so it's, I don't know, it's a push and pull there. Yeah. They'll selectively embrace the authority when it's convenient. Right. A lot of the times. Yeah. And I mean, the same thing actually happens with people in the military and intelligence communities. When it doesn't agree with what they say, the military and intelligence communities, when it doesn't agree with what they say,

the military and intelligence communities are hiding information and are bad. And then when they come out and say something that they want, like we're going to produce a UFO report, or, you know, I used to work for the Pentagon, then that's great. And please come into our circle. You mentioned something that you also discuss in your book that I actually found a really interesting critique from the ufologists of this epistemological limit or limitation that they are critiquing the modern scientific community. If you can't engage with these broader ideas, can you even really say that you can test for them? Or if you're limiting yourself to what is what you consider real, are you closing off potential areas of useful inquiry? I actually found that the most convincing argument about how to approach things like this in the

natural world, I don't know if I'm necessarily going to have like a formal branch of ufology at, at the double S or something. I'd say there's a kind of a point to that. Like if you pre, if you really limit yourself as to what you will test for, you will just by definition, not be looking for things in certain areas,

but that's a philosophically very difficult problem to solve. How do you make that choice about where to put in your scientific efforts and research dollars? Yeah, it is a good question. And I mean, I do agree to some extent with the critique that just as UFO people shouldn't go in with a predetermined outcome that it's aliens, perhaps scientists shouldn't go in and say, like, I know for sure that these are the things it's not, and I'm not even going to look at them. I think I do agree with that. Yeah, I mean, it's been hard enough historically for something like SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, to prove that that's a worthwhile thing to be doing. And I would argue it's much more likely to produce

results than studying UFOs. But because it is still nevertheless so unlikely and how do you convince a scientist that what they want to do is study craft in the air that might be like a radar error? Yeah. I don't know. Because again, it's balance of once that time is spent or the dollar is spent, it's gone, right?

You can't get those back. And so you have to make these ultimately zero-sum decisions based on what seems to be a valid line of inquiry. That's never a perfect answer to that. And again, touching on this idea of going into these questions, I forget who coined this phrase, you want to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out. I almost feel like by having such a dismissive tone, and I kind of felt this as a subtext in your book, the scientific establishment by completely denying or ignoring this topic enables the subculture to exist without using good scientific methods, right? And so, and you even mentioned this in your book about studies showing if you want to disprove conspiracies, it's actually really difficult to do so by just

saying it's wrong, by debunking is actually not a very effective way to do it. Do you have an opinion? What should be kind of the professional scientific society's approach to things like these? Should we embrace a little bit of it to encourage better scientific methods and to add some credibility to when they say or to when they likely would say that there's not much to this? Or does that only empower people who have this predetermined answer to what this data is? That is hard. I think I'll start with agreeing with what you said about how pushing it out or dismissing it does just result in leaving only people who aren't professional

scientists at the table. And it's something that anthropologists call boundary work, like scientists determining what is acceptable science and what is not. And when something goes beyond the bounds of traditional acceptable science, who you're left with are the people who are not that. And then they feel an antagonistic feeling to the people who are at the science table and then also are left without necessarily the tools to do something more scientific. I mean, I think, I don't know is the real answer, but I think not to draw another parallel to SETI, because I'm wary of always drawing alien parallels. But you know, something that people like Jill Tarter have been proposing is taking data that already exists from telescopes doing mainstream traditional astronomy

and looking for anomalies that could be signals of an extraterrestrial intelligent civilization, you could do something similar for UFOs. And I think that is part of what will come out of this forthcoming report is taking, you know, signals, intelligence, and data from remote sensing platforms, and pilots and combing through it and looking for things that are unidentified, trying to identify them, but maybe not explicitly dedicating separate resources to looking for UFOs, but using what's already out there

and keeping an eye out for UFOs, I think is maybe a good middle ground. Yeah, I mean, I guess you can say, given the fact that it's probably very unlikely that these are actually aliens, that should then kind of drive how much resource, you know, given that it's extremely unlikely, probably shouldn't put a ton of money into it, right? Because it's unlikely to, you know, given what we know about the natural world, which could change, but given everything we know, that seemed like a good way to maybe inform some of these priorities. Definitely, yeah. And

maybe that might help temper some of this more anti-scientific lines of inquiry. As an example, if they're not seen as kind of this subjugated group that is being denied the truth or something like that. It almost kind of breeds that contempt for scientific establishment that then allows it to, you know, metastasize on its own outside of that completely. But it is a difficult problem. And already, research dollars are so limited, right, for civilian, particularly for civilian science, that it becomes very difficult to say you know we have these much more promising lines of inquiry that are likely to show some kind of results or benefit that deserve funding instead you and i don't need to figure out the actual policy solution to this on the fly right now but i think it's a really interesting question

yeah yeah and i mean i think i mean if you strip it also of the alien context and there are incursions happening where they shouldn't of you know very terrestrial craft that we don't know what they are i think that's worth knowing also and is probably likely to get many more research dollars than figuring out of their aliens so that's you know a whole other well that's where this interesting intersection of national security comes in. And that reflexive secrecy from the national security state almost enables, and you kind of point out, sometimes encourages the more UFO alien interpretation but it's kind of a useful distraction from maybe a highly capable Chinese hypersonic aircraft or something coming into U.S. airspace. Yeah. And that has happened in the past also with U.S. classified projects. Like when the U.S. was working on the U-2 spy plane back in the mid 20th century, you know, people would see those and report them as, as UFOs. And that at least wasn't discouraged because then if,

if somebody says I saw a UFO, you're not going to go looking for a classified imaging aircraft, you know, you're going to leave it alone and either think, wow, that person saw aliens or be like, that person's crazy. I'm going to leave that alone. And so it provide useful cover, whether that's official or not. Yeah. And again, breeds conspiracy theories because of that national security aspect of secrecy. So this upcoming report from the Department of Defense will have a classified section on it. Regardless of what the public one will say,

the fact that there's a classified section will then enable people to continue their pre existing beliefs, no matter what, because they'll just claim whatever is in that classified section, even, you know, and so it almost requires this, this intersection of legitimate, you know, terrestrial aerospace secrecy, enables this conspiracy line of thinking. And there's no way out of that, really, unless we just come really, really open with a lot of our national defense stuff. And, you know, there is an argument, I'd say, and this is what we've gone through in previous disclosures of trying to declassify stuff from the 40s and 50s that clearly aren't relevant anymore, but are treated as such just because that's the attitude in the national security state. Yeah, definitely. And I mean,

you can see that going on in the, we don't need to fully get into the Roswell case, but you know, in the Roswell happened in the 40s, an alleged crash of something. And it was only in the 90s that after some political pressure, the federal government agreed to release everything it had on Roswell, make all the files public, write a report, do interviews, specifically, you know, to engender trust and say, like, look, we've got nothing to hide here. Here's everything that went on. Here's the real declassified program that it was. And it didn't work. Roswell is still here with us as a flying saucer myth. And so I think you're right that like... And to be clear, yeah, it wasn't

aliens, right? No, no, no, sorry. It was a high altitude balloon that was designed to look for nuclear tests called Project Mogul and it crashed. And you had a good little story, again, in your book about how the story evolved over time, too. And the story that was first reported changed, and even the people who claimed to be there, their memories were reinforced. Their beliefs changed about what happened over time, too. And what we know as the Roswell story didn't even really firm up

until decades later. Right, right. Yeah, it was the, yeah, it wasn't until the 80s that it even really like reentered public consciousness at all, and then kind of spiraled from there. So yeah. Reminds me of another intersection that I just want to just mention real quick that struck me from the aspect of your personal exploration of some of these places, which is there's a strong, like local kind of capitalism or like local economy motivation to encourage these types of thinking as a tourist function for these relatively generally small, economically depressed towns. Talking about other inadvertent reinforcements of these types of anti-science messages, it's like, well, it can be pretty lucrative for a small town in New Mexico to

really talk this up and encourage this type of thinking to get people to come and check it out. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Roswell doesn't have a whole lot else going on, but now they have a festival and tourist stores and visitors. And yeah, I mean, the state of Nevada put up an extraterrestrial highway sign on the road next to, you know, the border of Area 51. And, you know, it's a lot of people don't go there. But I mean, we all we all live in a capitalist society and people are going to capitalize on whatever notoriety their, their place has. And I think that goes back to the idea that like UFOs are just fun. What's, what's the harm here. We can all have fun on the extraterrestrial highway. I'm not saying I agree with that. I'm saying I think that's the thinking.

Yeah. That's no, that's the claim. Yeah. Well, that's again, that's what I find so interesting about thinking about incentives and incentives don't have to be conscious or mandated by an individual

or top down. Incentives can just be from the frameworks in which we inhabit. Incentives for self-promotion and boosting local economies. Incentives for self-promotion, for stroking your own ego or getting attention that maybe has been denied to you over the years. Incentives for finding community and loneliness, you know, and finding meaning and structure to the world. All of these things seem to just intersect in interesting ways in this whole topic. And I think that is always to me the context that is missing when we too credulously talk about these topics, about why we do. This is why, again, I liked your book because it really added that context for a lot of

the, you know, motivations and incentives for a lot of these people doing things. Maybe as we start to wrap up here, how would you recommend or maybe just talk about how you approach these claims? One thing I didn't want to do is specifically try to debunk these videos because there are people like Mick West on the internet who just do this really, really well. But there's always going to be new claims coming out. Something I'd really wanted to share with our listeners and talk about is, what's the best way or how do you approach claims like these from a general sense? Like what's your kind of toolkit used to evaluate and be skeptical, but not completely closed minded in a way that would

turn people off? I think I usually try to go back as much as possible to whatever the primary source is. So like, if I'm reading a story about a new UFO video or a new claim, I will see where it looks like they got their information. So, you know, if the New York Times says, we heard from an official who had seen this briefing, I'm like, well, that's extremely secondhand, because this person saw a document, you haven't seen it, and is then relaying it to you. And so then I would be skeptical of that claim because was their memory perfect? Are they being honest? What are their motivations? And so I, yeah, I try to see where whoever is telling me something got their evidence and then go back to that source. I'm not saying don't read news stories because I write them and I do think people should read them. I think we should all be

skeptical of them. And I think also, people should always be skeptical of first person claims about UFOs, because that is most of the evidence that we have for what goes on. And this is not an insult to anybody. It's just how human brains work. Like we are not perfect rememberers or perceivers or interpreters. People used to denounce witches and burn them on first person accounts. And I think we can fairly claim that they were wrong about their accounts, right? It was not a good time in history. Yeah. And yeah. And so I do think, and the approach I took in my book was to be respectful of people's first person experiences that I think are meaningful to them,

but to not take them as gospel, even if they are important people who make claims. I kind of don't believe anything anyone just says is my personal policy, UFOs or not. Yeah, and that adds, I think, to what I've encouraged our listeners and members of the Planetary Society, and it's to also then respect the science that we

do have. No one claims that we have a perfect understanding of the world, right? Science is kind of like making a working model of the natural world, and we continuously improve that working model. But that doesn't mean that it's fundamentally flawed. I think we have a lot of good practical evidence that our understanding of various aspects of the cosmos worked pretty well. Even things like Newton's laws of gravity weren't, they're not fully correct, but they're not completely wrong. They were refined with Einstein's, you know, with general relativity. But that doesn't mean they were completely missing the mark about how things moved and what they did, right? The process of advancing science, generally,

it's a levels of improvement and refinement, not throwing everything out about what we know, in order to say that that was completely wrong, that has no value. And I think that's where having that basis in physical understanding or basic physics just says, again, when you're making claims about things in the physical world, if you start requiring those things to fundamentally break our understanding of the physical world, you're actually making bigger and bigger and bigger. You're chaining up your unlikely and unlikely and unlikely claims together. It's not saying that it can't be true, but it's saying it seems very unlikely, given what we know, and just how big the cosmos is, how little we've seen of actual,

you know, technosignatures or biosignatures using the telescopes that we've had. All of that adds up to say that the answer, the hypothesis of, to go back to Carl Sagan's original point, like, what's the evidence for that these are actual alien spacecraft? Very little. The best we can say is that we just don't know what some of these are, which is the answer to a lot of things, right? You're talking about first person experience. You have a point about, can you share your, as we close here, your first person experience with a UFO outside of Area 51? And I want you to say what that while it was happening, what that felt like. Yeah, so as I was driving to go camp outside of Area 51, just in the closest town on my way in, I saw above me, I kept three, three or four orange spheres just appear in the shape that looked like they were lighting a saucer. And they appeared, they floated there, and then they disappeared.

And then as I drove on, I kept seeing more of these. And I was like, wow, no wonder people say they see UFOs out here. These things look just like a classical flying saucer. They appear, they disappear, they have shapes. You know, I have my own biases, so I didn't think that they were flying saucers. But I also they have shapes you know I have my own biases so I didn't think that they were flying saucers but I also had no idea what they were and I thought it was you know it was really exciting it was very cool I was seeing something maybe a few dozen people spread throughout that valley were seeing at all and it felt like like a special show and

like I had special knowledge and like maybe it was for me. And so I get the appeal of seeing something. And then, yeah, the next day I met up with a guy who lives in Rachel, Nevada, close to Area 51, who's been investigating it for 20 years. And he told me, oh yeah, the first time I came here, I was on top of a mountain. I saw the exact same thing. I thought the aliens are real. Here's this flying saucer. And then he discovered that it is flares. It's military flares where jets are flying, doing practice exercises. And one of them shoots a fake missile at the other. And that other lets out a flare to distract the missile. So they're just doing exercises. But it looks very incredible. And, you know, three lights in the sky in the shape of a saucer, your brain makes it into a saucer, because that's what everybody's said in movies and books and TV is supposed to happen. So

it was cool. And I'm glad I got it explained, I guess. But what I was fascinated about in the book, you talk about the, But what I was fascinated about in the book, you talk about the, I suppose by the, by the, your personal experience and like the elation, then to almost like a disappointment when you learned the reality. And I think that's a very telling component to this, that the reality seemed to be deflating almost to what that very, that the special experience that you had. Right.

Yeah, absolutely. Because it wasn't even a cool classified aircraft that I was seeing, you know, it was just a flare, which is old and boring. Yeah. And I think you talk about this, you alluded to this a bit in your book, too. Like a lot of these things are happening out in these vast, empty deserts at night. are happening out in these vast empty deserts at night. You even had another kind of experience of this where you hiked into this solar observatory that had been closed down for banal or somewhat banal reasons not related to aliens. And your experience hiking through it at night, you were

somewhat worried or slightly anxious about being there at night, and it wasn't comfortable. Then you woke up and it was daytime, and you saw it's the same place. But suddenly, in that information, it was a very different personal experience you had with it. It just reminded me about, again, the very human aspect of this going back to these first person accounts. It's people who tend to be in these big open spaces, pressed up against this brilliant night sky, and the ego kind of dissolves almost a little bit against this information then when you see something strange that emotional experience of that seems to become a valuable thing or like a precious thing that in the real then if you get it explained seems to be this unsatisfying context to what was a very personal positive experience.

Yeah, I think that that is correct. And I think it's a step that a lot of people don't take when they do see something or aren't able to take because there's not enough data for them to figure out what they did. Yeah, but like given the choice, like which one would you want, right? Like, you probably want the special one. Yeah, I do. No, I want the explanation. I want to be disappointed. Yeah. Let me, let me rephrase. Given like your, if your lizard brain was making the choice, you would want the special thing, right? Oh sure. Absolutely. Right. Like this, this difference between this experiential knowledge and this more abstract intellectual knowledge, our brains are kind of structured to really like or prefer.

You get more endorphins or, you know, whatever kind of happy brain chemicals off of that personal experience. And I think that's like a really interesting aspect of this, that so much of it is this relationship ultimately of your small self to this seemingly big and mysterious unknown. And there's an attraction to that almost at this deep level. Yeah. And I mean, I think that's also something that, you know, a scientist can identify with, like the bare feeling of that. Like, I think that's the feeling a lot of

astronomers get thinking about, you know, the universe itself or a night sky without a UFO in it. Just there's this big, awesome, awful, wonderful, scary, weird thing that is the whole universe. And I think that that is a feeling that people get when they see a UFO. But maybe we could just stick to also just the nice guy instead. There's enough wonder out there that we've confirmed is very likely real that we can all embrace. Sarah, I want to thank you for joining us today on the Space Policy Edition. Sarah's book, and I recommend it, is They Are Already Here, UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers, available wherever books are sold.

So, Sarah, thank you again. Thank you. Author Sarah Scholes talking with Casey Dreyer, the Senior Space Policy Advisor for the Planetary Society, who is, of course, with me right now to help close out this Space Policy Edition. Casey, another terrific conversation. Thank you, Matt. And of course, I appreciate Sarah taking the time.

She's quite in demand right now. She's been studying this topic before it was cool and I think has a lot of really good insight, again, into these broader cultural perspective of why people engage with this. So I really did enjoy her book and I hope you enjoyed listening to her perspective on things. Much more great stuff coming up

in future Space Policy Edition conversations. I know that Casey is working on a great one for next month, the August SPE. And in the meantime, of course, Planetary Radio will be there for you every week with a new episode every Wednesday. We hope you will visit us. Take a listen at planetary.org slash radio or wherever you are hearing this podcast, wherever great podcasts are heard.

Thank you so much. And once again, if you are not a member of the Planetary Society, please take a look at planetary.org slash join. See what awaits you as someone who backs this program and everything else that we do at the Planetary Society. Thank you so much for listening. And Casey, thank you again. Have a great month. Thanks, Matt. I'll see you in July. That is once again, the Senior Space Policy Advisor and the Chief Advocate for the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan. We will see you soon at Astro. you