Skeptic Michael Shermer on UFO Events

But I mean, again, how do these systems really work? So this is my kind of conspiracy detection kit. The grander the conspiracy theory, the less likely it is to be true. Like say Volkswagen cheating the emission standards in Europe. That's a very specific conspiracy theory. Turned out to be true. They really did do that. And for obvious reasons, profit motive, right? So if you scale up from that, oh, they're trying to control the entire European economy or something like, well, no, that's too big. They're just trying to make money. They're just trying to make money, right? So the more people that have to be involved, the more elements that have to come. People are incompetent. People can't keep their mouth shut. For the most part. For the most part, yes. Now, to be fair to the other side, if you read about the development of the U2 spy plane in the AR-71 Blackbird, this was done in Burbank, near where you used to live. And that's right in the heart of LA. How did they do this for all those years? And nobody knew about it, right? Well, they were acting on the interests of the government. They were trying to be patriots. They kept their mouth shut because they were trying to win a war against the evil others. Right. So again, like with the recent UAP sightings, what I want my initial response is the SR-71 Blackbird was, before it was declassified, there were commercial pilots going, oh my God, there's something going 3,000 miles an hour, 50,000 feet above me at 30,000 feet. This is impossible. We don't have anything like that. Well, actually we did have something like that. So I suspect that some of these UAPs, I think in a decade or two, we're going to find out, oh, we had these incredible drones. They can fly at these speeds. I tend to lean towards that as well sometimes. I go back and forth with it. I had Ryan Graves on recently. I saw that. It was a fascinating conversation because the way he was describing things with no visible means of propulsion, no technology that we currently know is available could act in the way those things were acting. I wonder if that is what it is, if they have some sort of very advanced drones. The fact that they seem to be trans-medium, they seem to be able to enter into the ocean and then leave the ocean, I wonder. I wonder if that's something that we have because these things, one of the ones that he described is like a translucent circle with a black sphere inside of it. When they updated their radar systems in 2014, they started seeing them all over the place on their systems. These people spotted them visually and that they were behaving in a way like at 130 mile an hour winds or completely stationary. I wonder if those are super advanced drones. Another problem with these videos is that they're very grainy, blurry, you can't quite make out what's going on like the one that looks like it goes in the ocean comes back out. It's not clear that it goes in the ocean because the horizon in the ocean is so blurry. I'm a member of this Galileo project at Harvard run by Avi Loeb, the head of the astronomy department there. I had Avi on. Yeah. He's raising money to put cameras, high resolution cameras all over the world, particularly in the places where people like Graves say these. When Graves told you, we saw these things every day, it's like every day, there surely must be high resolution photos of those things. Those jets are not designed to take high resolution video. They're designed to fight against enemy jets. That's what they're designed for. They're designed to recognize these enemy combatants and engage with them in the most effective way possible. That's not with high resolution digital video. Right. Well, that would be the solution. We just need better data. Well, I wonder if they want better data. Now let's assume- Well, we do. ... the government. Listen, the federal government imagined they are running top secret programs using advanced drones and the technology that we're not currently aware of. The United States government has these. They wouldn't want people taking videos of these things. Why would they? Right, but everyone has one of these in their pocket. Yeah, but you can't get digital video of something that's seven miles away moving that, the speed of sound. You're not going to get digital video. That's what we want to do with the Galileo Project. According to Christopher Mellon, a guy who did work for the Defense Department, he said there are top secret videos and photographs that he's seen or that he's aware of that are pretty spectacular, that they don't understand. Right. I've heard him say that. It's like, okay, then let's see them. Well, we can't. Yeah, but why would they release that? This is the question is, if they, just like the Blackbird, just like the Stealth Bomber, many of the other projects that they have that were top secret before they became public, why would they release all that information? Probably wouldn't. Right. Yeah. Right. I wonder what that stuff is. The fact that it happens so often in that very specific area, who knows? Another thing I was thinking about with the UIPs is in the history of technology, no nation gets very far ahead of any other nation. They either back engineer it or copy it or steal the secrets and so on. It's not likely we would have anything that the Russians and Chinese wouldn't be pretty close to having also. Think of just the development of jets. Or the development of the nuclear bomb. The nuclear bomb. I mean, the Russians had ... 1945 was Hiroshima and 1949, the Russians ... Right. They stole our secrets, right? This idea that these are super advanced drones that we have and the Russians and Chinese don't have, it's not likely they would not know the technology that we know, the physics, the aerodynamics, and the engineering and all that. Because they read the same journals. They do the same research we do. What do you think it is? Well, I think it's probably multiple things. I think some of them might be drones that just really high-tech drones. Some of them are just blurry videos that are ... I think the one of the sphere inside the cube or cube inside the sphere is probably a balloon. A balloon? Yes. A balloon that stands stationary at 130 mile an hour winds? Appears to stand stationary. Appears with the most sophisticated tracking devices that these military jets have. I know. These are anomalies. Yeah. So we just need better data. But why would you think it's a balloon? Well, what else would it be? Okay. It might be a drone. Certainly probably not an alien spacecraft and so on. Certainly probably not. Why do you say that? Well, this kind of gets into the argument of the SETI program. There's so much empty space out there. The chances of them finding us are pretty slim. So I separate two questions. Really? But we find planets all the time. Yeah, but telescopes, not physical. Right. Telescopes and satellites and all sorts of things that we send into space. But we find planets all the time that are in the Goldilocks zone. And we have a relatively unsophisticated in terms of what we'd expect from something that's capable of intergalactic travel. Relatively simple technology in comparison to what we would think. If you took what we have today and you increased our capabilities a thousand years from now, you could imagine that it would be quite easy for someone to at least send a drone from another planet to visit Earth and observe. This is the Fermi Paradox. That you know of. And where are they? Well, of course, most scientists like him don't think they're here. So I separate two questions. Most scientists? Most scientists. Michio Kaku thinks they're here. He's been a little fuzzy about that. He's not totally committed to that. He's totally committed. He was here. He was here and he talked about it on the podcast. He said for the longest time he was a skeptic. Oh, yeah, that's right. Okay. He has kind of come down on that side a little bit. But why would you be firm on that? When you think about the fact that there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe. Yes, let's separate two questions. Are they out there? Have they come here? Are they out there? Almost certainly. Right. I would say 99.9% they're out there. I would agree with you. 100 billion stars in our galaxy, 100 billion in a trillion galaxies. Just do the numbers. No matter how improbable it is you get from bacteria to big brains and civilization, it's going to happen. Right. But have they come here? Okay. How good is the evidence for that? Not very. It's pretty thin. Right? How good? It's anecdotal. It's human eyewitnesses. It's blurry videos, grainy photos. If they were here, damn it. Pick up the widget on the dashboard and bring it back here. But just looking at what we know that these fighter pilots have witnessed, the data that they've acquired, when they're looking at something like Commander David Fraver, who when they were off the coast with the Nimitz, when they tracked that thing that went from above 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level in less than a second. What's that? I don't know. Yeah. What is that thing that they have visual contact by multiple sources and they tracked it and they have video of this thing moving off at insane rates of speed? What's that? Yeah. I don't know. This is the problem with anomalies. No theory explains everything. But if there was any evidence that pointed to something that operated in a way that we can't comprehend any of the known technologies being able to reproduce, that's one of them. But no technologies come out of a vacuum like that. They always build on previous technologies. Right. But if you're talking about something from another planet or something from another civilization that we're not aware of that's on Earth, maybe that lives in the water, we don't know. We don't know. And when you're seeing these things, when you're talking about people that are the best fighter pilots that we have available that are operating with the most sophisticated fighter jets with tracking systems that are constantly being updated. And then when they update them, they start picking up these things like Ryan Graves discussed on the podcast. Why would you think that those are not possibly something from somewhere else? It depends on how you want to pose the problem. So here's how I think about it. So I take Leslie Keene's book on UFOs and pilots in general who go on the record and so on. In that book, she says 90 to 95% of all sightings have perfectly normal explanations. I would probably agree that's true. So the question is, what do we do with that other 5% of anomalies? No theory explains everything. There's always going to be anomalies in every scientific theory. What do you do with it? Nothing. You assign it to a graduate student, figure it out. That's future research. Rather than going to a grand theory of visitation by aliens or the Russians or Chinese have these super advanced technologies that we don't have or we have them and they don't have. I mean, again, if we had this technology, surely the Russians have something pretty close to that. There's nothing from the videos in Ukraine of any Russian drones that act anything like these UAPs. Surely they would use this technology if they had it. But we're assuming that those UAPs are military in nature and not something that they use to observe things. It could be. I mean, why would we assume that these things, if they're capable of behaving in this way and they're just some sort of a device that can travel at insane rates of speed, why would we assume that those things can launch missiles or act in a military capacity? Right. And you know there are UAP sightings over Ukraine. Yeah. Okay, so Avi did a nice paper on that showing that these were artillery shells and not what the other people said they thought it was, that it was like a drone or a plane or something weird like that. He showed that if it was what they thought it was, it would have had a much bigger impact going through the atmosphere at that speed and burning up. But it didn't, so these are artillery shells. Anyway, he did a nice paper on that. Interesting. Yeah. And he said these things that supposedly move far faster than the speed of sound without the sonic boom. Yeah. How is that possible? How is that possible? That's right. It's not. That's where it gets weird. That's where it gets weird, right. But that's where the question is. Is it really moving? Is it hours? Is it really moving at that speed or is it a misperception of the video, a miscalculation? Scientists make miscalculations of these sorts of things all the time. Yeah. That was one of the things that was posed to David Fraver and he said they have multiple sources of data. It's not just like one system that's monitoring these things. It's multiple systems. Yeah. And I follow these guys. I agree. They are incredibly credible, right. And they have good arguments. What do you do with the anomaly? I think you're an anti-conspiracy theorist. That's what I think. No, I'm a skeptic. I know you are. I'm just a... You literally are the editor. What's your position in Skeptic magazine? I'm the editor and chief publisher of Skeptic magazine. You're literally a skeptic. Yeah, that is my day job. But it isn't that I don't believe things. I mean, I believe the theory of evolution. I think the Big Bang theory happened when people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and my quantum physics friends tell me quantum physics is true. This is how we know it. To me, it's weird, spooky. I don't really understand it. But okay, you know, we have tons of evidence.