Neil deGrasse Tyson's Skepticism Over UFO's

And in another case, I saw it was a magpie, one of these birds known for how smart it is. There is a full, you know, half liter, you know, plastic thing of water. It was just water, okay? You know, a water bottle. And it was full. So the magpie goes over and sips out the water. Now you can, the beak is only what, an inch and a half long or an inch at moat? So it goes in until it can't reach the water anymore. So what does it do? It goes off to the side, gets a rock, just the right size, drops it into the water bottle. It raises the level of the water. Thereby displacing water. Here it is. That is heavy. You've got the, there it is. And so it comes and it goes back and gets another stone, drops it in. And every time it drops it in, the water level rises and it can drink more water. And it just, it keeps doing this. That's pretty amazing. Okay. And so, so every time we study animals, they're smarter than we ever thought they were. So maybe for our own ego, we kept building ourselves up, saying how separate and distinct we are as humans in the animal kingdom. When maybe we're not as separate and distinct as we think we are. So now what's my broader point there that I was making? I just distracted myself. Something about UFOs. Yeah, I know. I was trying to get back to UFOs on that. The fact that we have high resolution cameras in our pocket and we take videos of things that are very unusual. Oh, so exactly. So here's video of a magpie doing Bernoulli experiments in a water bottle. Who would have known that even happened, right? Right. Okay. You can't bring the bird into a lab and maybe you could, but I don't know that anyone did. All right. Here's my point. In the 1960s and 70s, there were many, many reports of alien abductions. People said the aliens came to me and they brought me in and then they released me. Do you have any footage? No, they took my camera or no, they zapped my film and now there's no image on the film, but there were countless stories. Well now you can stream live from your camera anything that's going on in front of you. So if the aliens come and they want to duck, you can stream it. That would be instantly viral. Oh my gosh. You know, the stuff that goes viral is much less than that. A cat, a kitten that jumps to the table and falls, that goes viral. You don't think video footage of an alien is not going to go viral instantly, but there's none. So I'm just saying, I'm thinking if we were being visited, somebody would have some good footage. If we were being visited, I'm thinking maybe Google satellite images would catch spaceships that are not airplanes moving on our surface. If we were being visited, I'm thinking we'd have something better than fuzzy monochromatic video of objects that apparently reveal themselves only to Navy pilots. Right? So one of the reasons is most of these sightings actually occur far offshore in the ocean. And the speculation is this is one of the ways, no, obviously I'm going to put my tin foil hat on nice and tight. Do your thing. This is one of the ways that they monitor us. The best way to do it is to do it where they hold their base where no one is around, which is the ocean. No, that's not true. In the ocean, they pop up and they fly out. It's not true. What do you mean it's not true? It's not true. Yeah, nobody lives on the ocean. Yes, that's correct. In the ocean. Well, so, it lives down undersea. This is what the speculation is. Oh, okay. It lives down undersea. That's why these transmedium devices have been, these transmedium crafts have been observed. If you want, if you are sure we are being visited by aliens and you don't actually have really good evidence, then you have to say that. Sure. Well, you know that. You have to say that. You have to say, this is really happening and they're observing us and they're concealing themselves in this particular way. You have to say that. Right. So, that's your way to maintain your alien belief system by saying that. I don't have a problem with it. Go get them. Go get them. But all of what has been put forth as evidence for aliens, to me, is insufficient evidence to excite my interest, my research interest, in devoting time to finding it out. But it definitely has excited other people. I have not stopped them. I am not saying defund the military program on UAPs, which of course is just updated UFO. I know. They like to say that now because there's like a stigma to UFO. Yeah, I know. That's just, that's a really transparent. That's a sneaky way to do it. No, no, it's not even sneaky. It's actually, I think it's embarrassing. It's like, maybe if we call them UAPs. People take them seriously. People take them seriously. No, it just- I'm of the belief that they're probably akin to what we did on Mars. I don't think there's aliens in them. I have a feeling that these things are probes. And I feel like if you just think about biological entities flying through the universe, why do that? When you have sophisticated technology that's good enough right now from our relatively primitive consideration of what we think is possible a million years from now, right? But we could send that Mars rover around. We have a helicopter on Mars. I mean, there's multiple satellites flying through the universe right now taking images. We can do all that. Yeah, but our probes are not targeting the Martian military fighter pilots. Because there's no Martian military. But if there were, we certainly would. They're just sitting out in the open. Right. But if we had something like, are you familiar with, one of the most famous cases was a case with Commander David Fraver of the Navy, who encountered with one or two other jets off of the Nimitz. They encountered this thing that was shaped like a tic-tac. You know the story. Everybody knows this. Yeah. This story. They tracked it going from 80,000 feet above sea level to 50 in less than a second. They have no idea how it moved. There's no visible propulsion system. It was blocking their radar. It was actively blocking tracking. This is what their sensors told them. Exactly. Just be clear about that. And then- You're stating information as though it is fact. I'm stating information as Commander Fraver related. I don't care. That doesn't matter. He's human. Right. And we're all human here. But as a scientist, when you're presenting information, you don't say, this thing was at 80,000 feet and it dropped to zero to sea level in one second or whatever it was, the measure. Yes. That's the wrong way to report it. Okay. We have sensors that told us this is what happened. I understand what you're saying. Okay. Yes. That's a very important distinction. Yes. And so now, all right, your first question then, tell me about the sensors. Yeah. Okay. Are they double checked? Are they, you know. But if you're just going to say, there's this craft at 80,000 feet, then everyone is thinking about a craft and no one is thinking about the sensor. They actually saw it with their eyes too. This is something that they actually got. You can't see something at 80,000 feet. No. The actual visual on the craft. Okay. They didn't see it at 80,000 feet, but this craft, it's not just something that was tracked with equipment. Got it. But they didn't see it at 80,000 feet. Right. That's my point. So by the way, this level of attention I'm giving to the detail and the reporting of information, we do that with fellow scientists for much less than if we're being visited by intelligent aliens from another planet. Go visit a, go to a scientific conference and watch the level of scrutiny we put on other people's work. If they have a sensor that has a new result, we'll say, did you calibrate the sensor? Did you, how long has the sensor been in use? What, I'll give you an example. Here's an example. Okay. Do you remember Planet X? Yes. The search for Planet X. Nibiru. That was one, there was, sorry, there were several incarnations of Planet X. Right. That was among them. That was the most black. Okay. I'm talking about 100 years ago, Planet X. Yes. Oh, 100 years ago? Well, there were several Planet X's, right? So Uranus was moving weirdly, nobody understood. Maybe there's a planet beyond it whose gravity we have yet to reckon in our equations. Oh, boom. We discovered Neptune. Wait a minute. Neptune is moving a little unfamiliarly. Why my phone is, sorry, back there. You're going to drop that thing and break it with no case on? So yeah, this, I got the 12 and yeah, I can still do this. I'm just sorry. Yeah, I get it. Last time you were here, you had a broken case. You're a broken back. Remember? So why are you distracting me? I was like on a roll and... Neptune. Neptune. So Neptune, we're looking at Neptune's orbit and it's not following Newton's laws. And this is odd. Well, we've been down that road before. Uranus didn't follow Newton's laws. We proposed another planet and we found it. So Neptune's not following all the laws of gravity that from all the other planets in the sun, there must be another planet out there, a Planet X. Let's look for it. Is that Bode's law? Bode's law is a fitting function that gets you... It got a little more attention than it deserved. It's just that planets, every next planet is about twice as far away from the sun as the previous one. So you just make a quick equation out of that. Oh, that's it? But it doesn't work for Mercury and it didn't work for Pluto. I thought it was based on the mass of the planet. No, not at all. The mass has nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with it? And it predicted the asteroid belt, but the asteroid belt, there's no planet there. Okay. And if you glued together all the pieces of the asteroid belt, you get something like 5% the mass of the moon. So yeah, it gave us the location of the asteroid belt, but that's not a planet. So Bode's law, it's fun to play with, but there are limits to how far you want to declare its relevance to the actual universe. So we're out here in Neptune. And so I said, maybe there's a Planet X. Everybody started looking. Everybody started looking, including Percival Lowell. All right. Back in the 1920s. And he said, I want to find Planet X because something's perturbing Neptune. So he sets out looking for it and he doesn't find it. Then he hires Clyde Tombaugh and he dies so he doesn't see the results of this. Clyde Tombaugh said, I can't find it either. I will just systematically search everywhere. Because if you think something's affecting you gravitationally, you ought to have some idea where it is to be tugging on you in that way. All right. That's not some kind of weird. It's like you're moving differently. Where must the thing be to tug on you so that you're moving in that way? No one could find such a Planet X. So Clyde Tombaugh said, it's got to be out there somewhere. I will systematically image the entire sky. All right. And you got to do it on multiple nights because if something's moving, you'd see it change from one picture to an X. He does this, discovers Pluto. Was Pluto where Planet X was supposed to have been? No. Pluto, the mass that Planet X should have been, everyone assumed it was. But over the decades, the mass of Pluto got lower and lower and lower as our estimates got more and more accurate. Then we found out that Pluto is one fifth the mass of our moon made of half ice. And this is why Pluto got into trouble later in the 20th century. It's not because we had some vendetta against Pluto. Pluto just never belonged in that list to begin with. That's really how you need to think about it. Now there's still the matter of Neptune's orbit. Pluto did not have enough mass to make those changes. So the search for Planet X continued. So what happens? All right. 1993, a colleague of mine named Miles Standish. Okay. He's probably related to the Miles Standish on the Mayflower. He is an astrophysicist, looked at all of the data people were using to say Neptune's orbit was crooked. Looked at all the data. Then he found out that at one particular observatory, was it the gearbox or the timing mechanism had just been cleaned or swapped out? Or there was some, because in the observing vlog, you write down everything because you just don't know. Okay. Was there a glitch in the current? Was there a bird flyover? You make notes of everything. One of the observatories whose data was being grafted together with the other observatories had this sort of gearbox. I don't remember if it was a gearbox. There was some mechanical adjustment that was made. He said, I wonder if that had an effect on the positioning of this telescope. He removed those data from his analysis and fitted data to all the other telescopes that he had for the positions of Uranus, of Neptune. When he did that, Planet X evaporated in that instant. In that instant, there was no Planet X. All the other data, when he connects across, removing the data from the one where the observing vlog said they did something different, Neptune fell right onto Newton's laws. Since 1993, there is no Planet X. Not for that, we probably would have been a long time before we discovered Pluto because no one would have looked for it. They found another Pluto light. The lesson there is you have information that you think is correct from your sensors. This was an observatory, a fine observatory. You're going to say, this observatory says Neptune is misbehaving. But then you learn there was something wrong with the data. You throw it out. I'm trying to say this happens all the time in science. You have to be careful what you're analyzing before you declare that what the thing measured is true and then realign all your resources to address what you think is true. But it might have just simply been a glitch or multiple glitches or anything. We do this all the time in science. 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