WTUFO
What the UFO? We're processing the emerging scientific revolution around this fascinating subject.
We talk about what the UFO/UAP phenomenon might be, explore historical sightings, track new developments, and generally feel our way through this wild, exciting territory.
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WTUFO
S1E5: Why Are UFOs Kind of Careful?
Why do we see UFOs frequently but not all the time? It seems like they must be hiding to some extent, but they've still made many appearances over the years. We go through all the explanations we can think of to explain this semi-cautious behavior.
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Hi, welcome to Holding Space. I'm Caleb Mayo and this is my brother, john Mayo.
Speaker 2:What's up? Ufos are real and we're going to talk about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so today we're going to explore why UFOs are kind of careful, and I'm going to throw to John to set up this idea.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, we're fascinated by why it is that UFOs appear, uh, appear, seem to like curtail their behaviors to some extent. It seems like, I guess. I guess the crux is kind of that. It seems like if they wanted to, they could be not seen at all by us, and instead we see them quite a lot, uh. So I guess maybe the way to start is for us to just like define what do we mean by being careful or kind of careful? You got any that come to mind for you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just wanted to say on the other half of that sandwich. It seems like if they wanted to, they could very easily display themselves super publicly.
Speaker 2:Right, yes, yeah, ok so that's all right. So that's part of it. We don't see, for instance, a lot of mass sightings. There are, you know, tons and tons of sightings, probably every day somewhere, but it's been since I don't know, arguably like Tinley Park, Chicago area, 2006. And before that like Phoenix lights in 1997. Those are kind of, I think, the last times I know there's both America, but those are the last times that, like thousands of people saw um, saw some UFOs.
Speaker 1:Was Tinley park, the Chicago O'Hare airport appearance.
Speaker 2:No, oh, and it's 2004. Um, it's in August and through October of 2004. It's not the O'Hare Airport, though. I think that was 2004, maybe also.
Speaker 1:I think maybe 06, but that's just my memory.
Speaker 2:No, you're right, that's 06. Okay, so 04 Halloween night, in particular in 2004 in Tinley Park, which is a suburb south of Chicago, thousands of people saw these red lights in the sky and there are videotapes about it. If you look it up on YouTube, you'll find documentaries people have made about it. There are newspaper articles about it Many, many people. I always think it's worth contextualizing that the iPhone came out in, I think, 2006 also, so in the smartphone era, we really have not had one of these mass sightings the Phoenix.
Speaker 2:Lighting in 1997, also, thousands of people saw these ships over this one evening in March flying like enormous triangles, flying low and totally silent over you know. So that's one thing. We don't see a ton of mass sightings, we don't see, uh, we don't see like a dc 1952 style sighting over a major city.
Speaker 1:Also yeah, yeah and, and yet on the other side we don't never see them. Like thousands of people see some kind of UFO every year, pilots are seeing these things all the time. Graves, in his testimony to Congress and his 60 Minutes interview, says pilots see this every day, or at least for several years while he was working in the Air Force, they saw these things every day. So it's like a fairly common experience, but it's not so common as to happen over Times Square or have yet featured the famous White House lawn moment.
Speaker 2:Right and that seems deliberate. Yes, all right, so those are the. Those are kind of the two sides that we're coming at, the two like assumptions that we're walking into into this conversation with is uh is one that they, they seem to be, uh, they seem to not want to fully show themselves to us, and two they seem to be capable of doing so if they, if they did want to, right yeah, okay, and so that leads to leads to this like fascinating question, which is why?
Speaker 1:why would you not be totally sneaky or totally demonstrative? Why would you leave this line in the middle? So we've got a bunch of potential interesting answers for that and we think that maybe these are going to collapse into some big buckets as we go through them, but we're going to take them one by one and see what kind of categories they inspire, and then maybe at the end, them one by one and see what kind of categories they inspire, and then maybe at the end we'll look back and see what kind of big chunks they may have formed. Does that sound good to you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that sounds good.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay, cool, let's start with. I'm going to start with one that I don't think is super plausible, which is that they may just not care. Maybe they're truly disinterested in whether or not we see them, and that could be because they're so much more powerful than us. That could be because we are yeah, I mean, because we're ants to them. It could be because, you know, we're maybe not that interesting and like they're all over the cosmos and Earth is just not that cool. What do you think of that idea?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with you that it seems lower probability, because that would imply that it's random, that they're not appearing above dense population centers frequently and that that doesn't seem right to me.
Speaker 1:I saw actually like an Axios report I'll find this link that said that the Arrow sighting collation recently suggests that in the west of the United States these sightings are happening disproportionately in areas of dark sky, which is like places with low light pollution. So it seems like we have not just anecdotal but maybe the beginning of some like sensor and like tabulation data that suggests that more of this activity happens far away from big human centers. So I think it's it's unlikely that they are, that we're seeing the result of them just not caring, because if they really didn't care they would be zipping around like every now and then we would see one over new york or you know pipe or like what, like big places with lots of people, and that would just like be a much more common experience, especially in the cell phone era which, as you point out, has been largely devoid of these mass sightings. So I think they they are not interested in us is not a good explanation, but it does come up on the list. So I appreciate you starting with it.
Speaker 2:Cool, ok, great, let's, let's move on. You do the next one.
Speaker 1:OK, this is one I like. I think they may be slightly concerned about us. This is one I like. I think they may be slightly concerned about us. And the analogy that I've been using is like if you're on safari or if you were to like drive by a like a group of humans who are still living in the wild and have like sort of early technology like spears and sticks, um, you might not be super afraid of them, but you might not be not at all afraid of them, like you're in your subaru. Your subaru is much more advanced technology. You could drive away at any time, but if somebody threw a spear through your subaru window, you could still die.
Speaker 1:No, you might still be eaten off by lions every now and then on safari yeah, right, and maybe there's an analogy there to occasional ufo shoot downs, which we hear mumblings about but we don't know for sure is a thing that happens. So I, I I kind of buy this idea that they might be slightly concerned and just being careful. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2:I think there's some supporting evidence for it also, like, for instance uh, I mean for instance their, their fascination with our nuclear weapons, our apparent interest, interest in our nuclear weapons and nuclear facilities, um, and then also arguably maybe, like the way they interact with, um with our like fighter jets and fighter pilots. Uh, for instance, like the iran, the tehran encounter in 1976, where the guy engages his weapon system and then it like shuts down. Um, or the even the favor nimitz tic-tac encounter where, uh, you know, he goes down to start to engage with it, the thing starts coming up and then just like blasts away, doesn't want to stick around for too long. Um, what do you think? I feel like there's other like corollary evidence here for for them being slightly concerned of us uh, that they tend to jet.
Speaker 1:when we follow them, like if there are jets scrambled, they tend to boogie after not too long. There's that. I was thinking about that. The big crazy diamond in Scotland was like apparently circled by some military jets and then eventually it just bounced.
Speaker 2:Okay Cool, circled by some military jets and then eventually it just bounced um, okay, cool, uh. This is. This is making me think of another one, which is the idea that maybe they're um, behaving sort of playfully with us, maybe they're toying with us in a way, and the, yeah, the, the not being careful or being kind of careful is um, is a game oh, I really like this idea.
Speaker 1:Can I do my uh call of the wild thing here? Yeah, absolutely, okay, cool. So there's this section in call the wild toward the end where buck's kind of like exploring the wilderness more and he meets a wolf and this uh gray wolf is like nothing he's ever seen before because he's grown up with dogs and been working with dogs and he's like a hardened warrior now because he's been through fights and races but he's never encountered a wolf. And so the wolf like appears to him in a clearing and buck uh follows it and the wolf basically plays this game with him where it runs away until Buck can corner it and then it runs away again and then Buck corners it again and it runs away one more time and Buck really locks it in to this place that it can't escape from. And at that point the wolf's demeanor changes and he sort of accepts Buck as a peer and leads him on a journey through the forest to like where the wolf lives and their dynamic kind of shifts.
Speaker 1:Completely I really like this story because that makes me think of the way the Tic Tac behaves. It comes right up to Fravor and then it blasts off Fravor and Dietrich, excuse me. And and it doesn't just fly away, it flies to their cap point, which is like a relevant place in their mission and that sort of suggests that it's saying can you do this, can you follow me? And maybe it's inviting us to move along at its speed. And so this kind of gets to another big bucket, as you were saying, of potential ideas here, which is that they're like drawing us out, that they're like they're being slightly careful because they don't want to just like flatly interact with us and maybe we'll get to a reason for that in a minute but they're not avoiding us completely because they want to engage a little bit. How does that land for you?
Speaker 2:I mean, I like it. It's a fun one, it's a hopeful one. I think also and we have a few hopeful ones on this list and a couple of scary ones Do you want to assign a number to each of these of how likely we think it is, like a one to three or one five score one.
Speaker 1:Yeah sure I'll give they may not care a one out of five agree uh, slightly concerned about maybe like a four. What do you think?
Speaker 2:a four out of five man. I don't know. It don't know. My thinking on this is tempered by the fact that they appear to be so far advanced that I think we might be passing ourselves up to think that they're even a little scared of us, maybe scared of us destroying our planet, but I don't know that they're scared of us.
Speaker 1:Okay, so maybe that's a two or three.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's call it a three, because they are really interested in our, our weaponry.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And then playfulness. I mean, I had to say, some of these encounters, I think, really do exhibit this. It just sort of feels like that to me.
Speaker 1:Like mimicking human behavior, responding to human thought, maybe.
Speaker 2:Oh, another. I think another corollary for the playful behavior is when people there are numerous examples of this um, specific ones I'm thinking of are in belgium in 88 and in the new york hudson, hudson valley wave shortly after that um, when people flash their car headlights at the craft or a flashlight, the craft flashed her lights back, which is arguably contact. I think yeah, but feels like it's like a yoo-hoo hello. Wink, wink, yeah, so I would give a four to playful Cool.
Speaker 1:Ooh, I want that one to be true, so bad.
Speaker 2:Okay, why don't you pick another one?
Speaker 1:Okay, well, this is a little more prosaic, uh, so maybe it should have gone closer to the top, but maybe they have rules, um and uh. This, you know, is often called the like star trek principle. What's it called the like first contact idea?
Speaker 2:it's like best case scenario is that there's a star fleet and they have rules and that we're they were like we're in the early stages of some onboarding program to a sick ass club and we're going to get like silver zip up jumpsuits and yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. So yeah, you're right, that would be freaking awesome. Uh, and one way I think about this is that maybe earth is in somebody's territory For some reason. I think of this as like the France theory, like maybe we live in France and we don't know that we live in France, and like Earth is part of a region controlled by one species or a group of aliens.
Speaker 2:And maybe they the uncontacted tribes of Burgundy.
Speaker 1:Right. So what that would do is explain the variation, uh, and the uniform behavior. Like there are lots of different kinds of ufos and there are lots of different kinds of beings. People have reported seeing um. So either all of those beings have similar instincts about how to be careful when interacting with a new species, or there's some kind of rule set that they're operating under which wouldn't have to imply that there was a regional governor, but it could. It could imply that it could also imply that there's like a much larger legal agreement throughout the galaxy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, that is, that is great, and I and this is is. This is like a meaty one. I think this, this, they may have rules, ideas, and I want to just like repeat that back to you and try to maybe dig in on a little bit, because I think it's really, really interesting the idea.
Speaker 2:Either there there are rules, because there's so many different, there's so much variety in the sightings of both creatures and uh and craft that either they're working under some rule book on some some superstructure governing organization or this is the more interesting one they innately uh something in evolution. How, you know, intelligent species evolve, that they all have reached the same conclusion about how they should interact with us. That it's natural. I find that idea really fascinating and, again, hopeful. I think Like it's sort of like the opposite of a great filter, you know, like of a doomsday kind of scenario about evolution. It actually implies that like the more evolved and intelligent you get, the kinder and more sensitive and nurturing civilizations become. That to me, is super, super hopeful. I love that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that pivots into an adjacent idea really nicely, which is that they're being careful because they don't want to freak us out, that they're empathetic and looking out for our feels and they're not appearing above new york because they don't want to cause mass panic. Maybe, as you say, they're so far advanced that they're not even that worried that we might attack them. They're just more worried that it would like disturb our civilization, uh, in in a dangerous way yeah, well, so, okay.
Speaker 2:So I don't want to get too in the weeds here, but how does that, how do you think that interacts with the like?
Speaker 1:you know the glut of pretty disturbing abduction stories that people share of the non-interference principle, which is that we have a scientific relationship, that they're observing us and being careful in the way that we're careful when we observe wild populations. Like we'll go out and watch a bunch of monkeys do something and we'll keep our distance, but we can't necessarily hide completely if we want to engage with these monkeys. And the Whitley Streber pointed out recently on the Rabbit Hole podcast, which is great, that humans sometimes abduct animals and like artificially inseminate them. And there are like lady rhinoceri out there who are like missing time and got taken and got, you know, injected with rhinoceros semen and they don't understand why. And from our point of view that's like a positive contribution to rhinoceros society, but from her point of view it's, you know, traumatic and terrifying.
Speaker 2:So it could be that some of these abductions or all of them, all of our, most of them, are essentially scientific in nature or preservational in nature, and this is white rhinos don't know that they're nearly extinct and that doesn't that implies some not great potential future outcomes for humans, but like it's pretty easy to argue that humans are, uh, on the brink of extinction right and, for one thing, we only live on this planet, um, and we should maybe note that there are some offshoots of this that are sort of like darker or bigger, which involve the aliens, like controlling or whatever the phenomenon, the beings, some beings controlling human evolution in some way, or like guiding our growth and change throughout maybe millennia or million, any, but it could.
Speaker 1:It could be as simple as just like observational science, or it could be as serious as like direct management, and that that's just pinging to sort of branches of that possibility okay, let's, let's assign a rating to this rules idea and then move on.
Speaker 2:Um, I don't. I don't think it makes sense to separate them, because we're I mean, we're already in speculation territory pretty heavily here. But like, I don't know, it's yeah, speculating about a governing structure seems out of scope. I would say this is a five. I think they clearly are adhering to some guidelines here, whether written or organic. It really feels to me like they have some rules. But what do you think?
Speaker 1:Either written or organic. So you would give those the same probability that they have like naturally arrived at this behavior, versus that they have like collectively agreed that.
Speaker 2:I guess what I'm saying is like I don't know how to, I don't know how to separate the two or like, like I'd kind of rather just assign a number to the whole general idea.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Okay, yeah, and I think, given how much territory it's covering, it makes sense to give it a five. It's pretty darn likely that they're doing this on purpose, because it's it's just too persistent and widespread a behavior for it to be an accident.
Speaker 2:Would you assign different likeliness quotients to innate versus governed?
Speaker 1:I guess I sort of would tend to think that the innate is a little more likely, just partially based on the diversity of UFO and possibly beings. That sort of suggests to me that it might be difficult to get that many different kinds of creatures to agree. I also actually wanted to flag something in this space, which is that it's possible that most of these beings have agreed to something but some haven't, uh, and so that could be a potential explanation for some of the outlying examples, like o'hare airport or, um, the phoenix lights or something like. Maybe every now and then somebody shows up who's not playing by the rules, who hasn't bought into the Federation's guidelines and or who has just like different instincts about how to interact with lower species.
Speaker 2:OK, so what number do you want to get for this one?
Speaker 1:Which one rules are natural.
Speaker 2:Just well, if you want to split them up, give me different numbers, I like it I would say five natural four rules okay, all right, cool, great, I'm cool with both of those. Um, I feel like we we sort of moved into talking about the? Um, the control experiment idea, that they're carefully controlling us and they don't want to mess with their experiment. Um, what can you expand on that a little? Okay?
Speaker 1:So I was going to mention this at the end. But I heard a tidbit recently from, uh, a Martin Willis interview with of all people, garrett Graff, who's like the wrong guy to bring up something. That's crazy too. But basically Martin Willis says he was talking to a friend who served in Vietnam and this guy said his job in Vietnam was basically UFO chasing, that like UFOs used to pop up during like napalm raids and stuff, and so this guy was like part of the military service that responded to these UFO appearances in Vietnam. And Martin Willis said so what are they doing? What's the deal? Why are they here? And the guy said we're a Petri dish and that's all he would say about the subject.
Speaker 1:But Martin Willis's takeaway from that was that we are some kind of experiment or the Earth ecosystem is a managed garden in some way of far-fetched data points. You could maybe generously say that sort of point in this direction. But I will say that it feels crazy. This feels intuitively unlikely. I personally have a little bit of a hard time peeling apart how much it feels unlikely and how much I just don't want it to be true. I think this is a place where, like human ego sort of clouds our judgment. It's a little difficult for me to see clearly how likely I think it is, because I really don't want it to be the case.
Speaker 2:What it also makes me wonder right away is are we seeing a ramp up in activity over the past 100 years or so, or 85 years, or are we just getting better at spotting these things?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If it's been consistent over millennia. That to me feels like more of an argument for us being a Petri dish, but I guess also maybe we're just the counter argument would be that things are like coming to a head right now and the Petri dish is getting really, really interesting, because the Petri dish has nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence now.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so they would monitoring us yeah More closely. Yeah, taking more of a hands-on approach. I don't know, do you have a gut instinct about the one to five on this?
Speaker 2:That they're controlling us and don't want to mess with their experiment. Man, I don't. I agree it's so hard to assign a likeliness quotient to this because I so don't want it to be true, and it's also so ontologically doesn't fit with my worldview and everything that I have been raised up believing about the world.
Speaker 1:I don't know three, yeah three over two maybe, like we want to give it a two, but realistically we think maybe there's something to it, so it might be a three.
Speaker 2:Yeah, probably because I'm not human and I don't want it to be true. Yeah, god man, I think a lot about that thing thing from communion willie strever's book, when he is in the chair and is being examined by the lady alien and he says you have no right. He manages to like cough that out and she says we do have a right. Like what the fuck, dude?
Speaker 1:yeah, no, you're right. That's a perfect data point for this column yeah, um, okay, all right, let's then.
Speaker 2:Let's maybe pivot to the nhi version of slow disclosure, which is the idea that they may be encouraging us gently with a soft revelation of their existence and presence. Yeah, I guess this would be like an orchestrated. This would mean that they're kind of careful because they're like showing us a little ankle, they're just like taking it, you know one trip.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is pretty similar, I think, to the playful idea that they're teasing us out, um, which we assigned a four, but the idea that there might be some more more like orchestrated long term campaign, I would I give a lower number, two because of the drop off in the last 20 years. I would actually maybe say like a two because of the lack of mass sightings in the cell phone era, which I think is probably not a coincidence. I think their tech is good enough that they probably are aware of our tech and if they wanted, well, well, yeah, we talked about if they wanted to, they could, they could show up. But like the fact that there hasn't been a big show since before we all had cameras in our pockets, kind of suggests to me that they're not increasing gradually. Yeah, their demonstration of abilities I think that makes sense.
Speaker 2:You could, I think, if this were true, reasonably expect that it would be a linear revelation, and that's not really what we're seeing. Um, okay, cool. So let's just, let's just move on. Let's call that a. Let's call that a two, great, but the aliens are orchestrating slow disclosure of their own accord. Let's call that a two, okay. So we touched on there briefly, this idea that maybe they're trying to tease out how capable we are of tracking and play with our, or, you know, uh, uh, provoke our, our military. Um, is a test, is is doing data gathering.
Speaker 1:Like an example of that is Graves describes uh, people flying out of an air force base and just going right by one of these circles with a box in it, like what, what, what are you doing of an air force base and just going right by one of these circles with a box in it, like what, what, what are you doing? You're just like hovering there waiting for a jet to go right by you. That's like demonstrative. You know it could also be like foreign tech, but even foreign tech you would expect to be sneakier. That's like weirdly blunt yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't think this is particularly likely, because it just seems like they should be able to. There should be easier ways for them to gather this data than you know than orchestrating near misses in the skies consistently, and I feel like they could gather information more easily. I don't know If they're so powerful that they can fly 200,000 miles an hour or whatever.
Speaker 1:Then they can probably easily tell what our capabilities are relative to them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they certainly wouldn't have to be out there every day, like Ryan Graves has said. But I don't know. But like maybe a proper evidence to that is their consistent interest in nuclear facilities. You know, like maybe there is still I don't know maybe they do feel they need to be monitoring on like a you know, almost daily basis so are you sort of calling this like recognizance, this theory?
Speaker 1:like they're, they're spying on our capabilities and that's why we see them a little bit, or you're you're going a little further and and you're saying that part of their spying is attempting to provoke us to analyze our abilities? That second one, right? I guess that second one yeah okay, right, yeah, I guess it's a punt, but that feels kind of like a three to me, like not not crazy, um, but maybe not the single most likely okay, yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 2:I'm good with a three for the idea that they're teasing out, that they're like gently provoking us to learn more about us, but even that would then be nested within like that doesn't fully explain why they're like gently provoking us to learn more about us. But even that would then be nested within like that doesn't fully explain why they're kind of careful. You know, then there's like a, then there's like a super idea over that, which is that you know something which is they don't want to freak us out, or they're getting ready to vaporize us, or you know.
Speaker 1:Or they're mildly concerned about our abilities.
Speaker 2:Right, right, there's got to be some other explanation that goes hand in hand with that.
Speaker 1:Okay, what else? Well, another dark one is this idea of a psychological technique that manipulates us, that they're slightly careful because they're deliberately creeping us out. I don't love this one. I don't think it's super likely, but people sometimes float this idea that, like, some of these beings in some way consume some negative response from us, Like they eat our fear or whatever. I don't personally give that a ton of credence, but I guess I would also put it in the box of like who fricking knows, because it's so weird that it's hard for me to judge. But yeah, so this just to clarify this idea. It would be that they're they're not hiding completely because they want to freak us out, and so they're they're being a little bit visible because they want to keep us on edge and deliberately unsettle or disturb us.
Speaker 2:You know, what that's making me think is that, you know, there's probably not one explanation for this and there'll probably is some, there's probably some truth to, to a bunch of these, and they're not mutually exclusive. Yeah, that one is. That one is a little. I also don't put much stock in the they eat fear idea. I and I I think I haven't, I haven't encountered this idea in great detail in a lot of places, but I don't think that there's a ton of evidence to support this in the way that we can. We can call evidence uh, you know, we can call some of this other stuff evidence.
Speaker 2:I think like how they behave with our fighter jets, or they're interested in our nuclear facilities, or the lack of mass sightings or mostly appearing at night, or sometimes the radar work and sometimes they're on radar and sometimes they're not.
Speaker 1:Um yeah, I would maybe also add to this pile that there's some negative evidence in that they're not creepier. Um, you could, sort of you could think of some ways for them to freak people out more. Um, like ominously appearing above passenger jet craft and then disappearing, or like hovering over a house and shaking the walls Jetpack rocket pack people in Brazil, like grabbing people off motorcycles or whatever that last year which kind of nudges toward that idea.
Speaker 1:You mentioned that, like some of them might be like this, that maybe, maybe some of them enjoy freaking us out, whether or not, whether they like eat our fear, or they're just like shitty alien teenagers who like freaking people out. I don't know, that's, that's, maybe not, nowhere. I would give this a two, I think, because I don't think we have a ton of evidence, um, but I I don't think we can write it off completely for all of the ufos and beings that we've allegedly seen.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, I'm comfortable with a two for this. I do think your idea that there is really interesting, that maybe they want us to be a little scared, that, even pre-revealing themselves entirely, they want to play some power games with us a little bit and be like just you know, maybe you know we're gonna reveal ourselves to you eventually and like maybe pretty soon, and in the meantime, what we'd like is just some sort of atmospheric awe and fear, that's.
Speaker 1:That's a really good way of framing it. And the two things that fell into that pocket quickly for me were one, the you, the, the nuclear shutdown, which could be just like reconnaissance, like, maybe there are a few of these, but there's definitely one incident of a UFO like appearing over a nuclear missile facility, spinning up the drives and then turning everything off and disappearing. I don't know, we don't know that the ufo was responsible for that, but, um, it appears the machines turn on, the like missiles start booting up and then they all power down and the ufo disappears. Um, that could just be reconnaissance, like they're checking out whether they could do it, but as you, sort of as you it could also go to this other idea that you just raised, that they're freaking us out or they're just like demonstrating who's boss. A little bit like, like, like also like a wolf might do to a dog or another wolf.
Speaker 1:I feel like I'm almost willing to call this another kind of hopeful scenario that they're actually being kind of polite and caring by freaking us out gently installations, like the graves description of just hovering there while jets go by, I I think this is important enough that we should maybe split it apart, um, from the psychological technique of eating fear. So like freaking us out deliberately for fun, um, or kicks or food, uh, that I would rate lower, like maybe two. But gently demonstrating technological superiority, that I would rate a little bit higher, like maybe a four or even five.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, let's call it a two over four, then two for eating fear and four for just generally wanting to show us who's boss.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounds right to me right to me.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's talk about the next one, which is they may try hard to stay unseen but everyone makes mistakes sometimes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wanted to flag the O'Hare incident in 06 as a good potential example of this, because it's so outside the normal box. The airport is like a very public place. There are a lot of people there, there's also a lot of like sensor equipment. There should have been good footage of this. I think allegedly there were some pictures right, but like they've disappeared, so you can't find this paper trail on the internet. But you can read about the fact that it happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's cool, it's so interesting, so interesting. It's like it's you can file it alongside it's it's one of the only public sightings that you can file alongside like aircraft carrier sightings because, like an aircraft carrier, like it's appearing at a place where there is a tall building and a room full of people whose job it is to look at things in the sky and know what's in the sky all the time. Yeah, um so, and like, unlike you know, when they appear like an aircraft carrier or like buzz, one of our fighter jets, they're interacting with an organization that is secretive and has structures in place to, uh, to control information. Um, whereas appearing in a public setting, like an airport, you're not, you know, you're not interacting with an entity that has controls like that. In fact, you're interacting with something that has, like social media yeah, which they might not necessarily know.
Speaker 1:They might not be able to tell the difference between our, like, military and commercial aviation technology. They probably would.
Speaker 2:They're probably smart enough to know so okay, and there are also so this idea that maybe their shit's breaking down. This is something that grush has said. He said it as part of his congressional testimony when asked like what's the deal?
Speaker 2:they fly a million billion miles and then they crash. And his response to that was like, yeah, we invented cars and we crash cars. So, like shit happens, um, yeah, and reading like valet or richard dolan, or just like, if you read a lot of accounts, um, there are, you do find a bunch where it's like it seemed like it was like it's spinning and it's sparking in the sky, or it's crashed on the ground or it seems like they're working on it. There's a great story in Magonia, I believe it's the airship wave of 18-dickety-five. They land and they're like we need the airships there.
Speaker 2:A guy belays off a rope a human-looking entity and asks the guy for water, and then he or no. No, I'm sorry, I'm confusing it with the Italian pancake story, also from Magonia. It's just one of my favorite ones the Italian-looking aliens who land and ask for some water and then cook pancakes in a guy's front yard and then leave. So I don't know, maybe they were just making a little lunch and ship wasn't broken down. But sorry, I'm rambling, but point is, there are stories where it appears that ships are on the fritz, and I don't think that all of them could fit neatly into this bag of.
Speaker 2:Maybe they're leaving these for us. Maybe they're crashing them on purpose as breadcrumbs for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the sheer number of appearances argue in favor of occasional breakdowns being pretty believable, like if there are thousands of these events every year, then like, yeah, four or five of them might go wrong.
Speaker 1:The other thing I was going to flag on a human scale.
Speaker 1:I just watched zero dark 30 for the first time and you know the culmination of the osama bin laden attack is that we flew two stealth helicopters that were like experimental technology into Pakistan and one of them just broke.
Speaker 1:There are these like advanced cutting edge military tech and one of them just stopped working. So it happens to us, it could happen to them, and especially if 1000s or millions of these events are taking place, then it's really not that crazy to imagine every now and then a mistake being made. And so like what I imagine might have happened in the o'hare case is like maybe the stealth went on the fritz that day and like for a little while the shields went down and they just like whatever they're using to obscure visible sighting um, just malfunction and uh, and maybe that, maybe that happens. Maybe they're often over major population centers, but they have really good stealth tech and they go inside a little electromagnetism bubble and we just can't see them with our current instruments or with the naked eye. But then, every now and then, something just doesn't go quite right and we do get a sighting. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2:So I think that it makes it. You think about that. All right, so I think I think that it makes it, I think that's plausible and I think it makes it pretty hard to assign a rating to this one. Um, because we can't know how often their stuff is on the fritz and, yeah, maybe they're all around us all the time. You know. It's like maybe they can slip into the second dimension or something, and um, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I'm kind of leaning high, maybe like three or four I just don't see how it explains the behavior that we see them exhibit though, like the way that they interact with our military, and also the lack of the the. It's not just the lack of mass sightings, it's the fact that there have been mass sightings, and recently we're not seeing mass sightings.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, you're right, it doesn't explain the intentionality. So maybe it's only a two for explaining why they're kind of careful. It's like for me it's like a four in terms of just like believability, yeah, but in terms of explaining this question it's yeah, maybe a two, I agree, okay.
Speaker 2:Okay, we've got a few left on our list here. How you?
Speaker 1:doing. I'm good, I'm looking at our few and I'm thinking maybe we do this like dark one and then they're in a good order the, the dark, the weird and then maybe the hopeful yeah, um, cool, all right, cool.
Speaker 2:so the the first dark one is that maybe they have a bargain with us, or a bargain specifically with you know some military or intelligence leadership?
Speaker 1:And so what we would be imagining there is that they've made a deal whereby they keep their activities somewhat secret and we don't confront them hostily. Is that the idea?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the idea is that they have what the kind of careful behavior we're seeing is like as far as as much as they were willing to offer us in negotiations, that maybe they were like, you know, the humans were like opened with, leave our fighter jets alone. And the aliens were like, okay, you know, we, we, we won't crash into any of them, we won't, you know, directly abduct pilots out of their you know, or whatever, but but like we're still going to buzz your jets every now and then and you know, and maybe it's even a maybe, maybe this accounts for some of the weird, could account for some of the weirdness or variance in the behavior is like that.
Speaker 1:they're kind of like only loosely committed to this agreement that they made with us gave rise to me, uh, to for me is that maybe they would feel more comfortable interacting with military tech if they've made an agreement with what they perceive to be like the military organization, and that they would steer clear of civilian sightings as a result, like it's fair for us to watch your f-18s, but we won't check out times square mm-hmm yeah yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1:This is another one that like ranks low for me because I want it not to be true yeah, um, me too, I also.
Speaker 2:It ranks low for me also because, since they present as being so powerful, why would they even make a deal with us when clearly they're in the driver's seat?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it also probably doesn't explain the show the the like showing us some ankle thing Like it. It could explain why they weren't more public, but it doesn't explain why they are a little public. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, and that's what I'm. That's what I'm getting at with the like maybe it's so, maybe there's a bargain, and then maybe there's a bargain that they're not living up to or that they're like breaking the rules. You know they have cheat days. I'm just going to go deductive, just a few cow anuses. Can't eat just one, all right, okay, so I don't know. Again, this is one that it's pretty hard to assign a thing to. So because, like you know, I'm no longer in the DIA.
Speaker 1:So I don't know, two feels right yeah.
Speaker 2:All right, cool, cool. Um, the next one. I want you to share this one, but this was an episode of uh, whose idea was this? Was this colin keller's idea or no? This was this. Was john michael godier's idea from event horizon? Um, the idea I've. I've written this, as maybe they're not rational actors and we both really love this idea. Do you want to explain it?
Speaker 1:Yes. So Gaudier's idea is that these probes might have been self-replicating von Neumann probes, or some of them may have, and they may have been copied millions or billions or gazillions of times and in that copying their code might have eroded and led to some behavioral hiccups which might result in some quirky, unpredictable behavior and therefore lead to sometimes visibility and sometimes sketchy sneakiness.
Speaker 2:What do you think? I think it's such a fun idea. I again. It's hard to assign a like a likeliness quotient to this. My instinct is like pretty low, though like two one yeah, yeah, maybe maybe one.
Speaker 1:Maybe we give it the rare one because, uh, it has the same problem. I think that indifference has, which is that you would expect if there were real randomness in the system, just more overall public sightings, if they were really super fritzy they would fly over population centers more.
Speaker 2:Okay, One just sort of sidebar or curveball I want to throw into here that is probably I just should have said right at the start is that our, our priors here is that we're, we are mapping human thought systems and points of view onto the phenomenon here. Yeah, I read a great book about dogs, unfortunately titled inside of a dog, by Alexander Horowitz. It's a really cool book that takes like a scientific approach to a dog's brain and like you know, and one of the things, one of the ideas in that is that, like you should, it is it is misguided to try to assign human emotions to like a face that your dog makes. You know you might think that it's happy or sleepy or nervous, but like that's based on how sleepy or nervous, but like that's based on how human faces move, and like we just can't, we just can't presume that that's how they work. So, point being, you know, our ability from this position to assess the motivations and value systems of these, of these entities and craft, is really, really limited.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a responsible caveat to make, but I would throw some lukewarm water on this general idea in this way. There are lots of life forms on Earth millions and millions and we have observed some shared behaviors. They're not universal and, like different life forms, have lots of divergent behavioral sets, but there are some things that almost everybody seems to do. We move toward food, we move toward energy sources, we tend to be driven by survival and reproduction, and so the case there would be that life does tend to share some basic behaviors, and it's therefore not crazy to imagine that life from other places might share at least some of these behaviors.
Speaker 2:OK, cool, yeah, I buy that. Um, all right, let's land on our last idea then here, um, which is another hopeful one. Uh, and I'm gonna start with the butterfly allegory and then turn it to you to do the the deeper exploration of this idea. Um, I was talking to ChatGPT about this butterfly allegory last night. It's a story that gets used to illustrate all sorts of different concepts. It's one of those things that there isn't a single point of origin for it, but the story goes something like one day, a boy finds a butterfly that is struggling to emerge from its cocoon. It's like almost out, but not all the way out, and so the boy, in an attempt to help the butterfly, tries to like nudge it gently out of the of the cocoon, um, thinking that he's helping, but in so doing severs, uh, a ligament that had not yet finished developing, and now the butterfly will will never be able to fly.
Speaker 1:So that's the, that's the sad, uh, you know, kind of entry to this, um, but you, you take it from there okay, I think that's really beautiful and, uh, maybe, if it's true, or if if it's true that that applies to this situation, it's cosmically beautiful that a human folklore metaphor could apply to beings from other galaxies. So I'm going to draw again on this Whitley Strieber interview with Kelly Chase recently. And again, rabbit Hole is an excellent podcast. You should go listen to it, and Whitley Strieber is an excellent commentator. He also has a podcast and books that you should check out if you're interested in this space Probably you did already if you're this deep in a UFO episode.
Speaker 1:So Streber's answer to this question I've got a full quote here is he says they must be creating the secrecy because they could end it by just showing up.
Speaker 1:And he says he's communicated with them frequently over the years and he says he's been back and forth with them many times about this and they don't want to show up.
Speaker 1:And he says quote the first reason is cultural colonization. We have to be farther along, closer to where they are in terms of our understanding of the universe and our ability to manipulate its powers and materials before they show up, otherwise we're going to completely redirect our whole culture toward them. And then he uses the examples of the rare benign interactions between developed and undeveloped human nations and civilizations and in the cases where that wasn't barbaric and horrible, he suggests that what often happens is that the less developed parts of the human civilization reorient toward the more developed parts just to try to be more like them and get what they have. So this idea that he's proposing is that the visiting beings would like us to be cultural peers and they would like us to grow up on our own so that we can interact with them as an adult civilization not influenced too much by them. Bounce it back to you and see what you think.
Speaker 2:Oh God, it's so good and tasty and hopeful again, I think and Avi Loeb kind of touched on a similar idea at the very beginning of his talk at the soul foundation in, uh, uh, last month what? In 2023, I guess? Um, which is that, yeah, that we're, that once we find another intelligent species, civilization that we're no longer alone in in the cosmos and that actually we have partnership in the cosmos. And, uh, yeah, it's a, it's a very warm and and hopeful idea and I think goes hand in hand with the or or can be filed alongside, I guess, the, the, the psychological, the like gentle kind psychological manipulation ideas that we've talked about, and even the slow disclosure, soft revelation, and I would maybe even propose that it could potentially in some way be compatible with the Petri dish idea, which sort of feels like it's on the other end of the spectrum.
Speaker 1:but it's possible that they're growing a friend. Maybe they found us in the wild and they want to cultivate friendship, or maybe they've been cultivating us as a species, partially because they would like companionship us as a species, partially because they would like companionship.
Speaker 2:Man. So interesting. There's so much more we could. We could say about this. Uh, I'm sure we could like talk about this for another two hours. Um, but let's assign a number to this one and and move on. My again hard to assess, and also my, my heart wants it to be likely, so like I really want this to be a four or a five, but I don't know that we have enough evidence for that. What do you think?
Speaker 1:Yeah, same same, but four or five is where I want to put it, and maybe is where I want to put it, and and maybe maybe desirous intuition is enough.
Speaker 2:Maybe sometimes love is okay. Yeah, hey, it's our YouTube show. Okay, let's call it a four. Then let's call it a four that they really want to be our friends, but they want us to develop and be ourselves.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, I have one WTUFO outro, but would you like to zoom out and look back over this before we do that?
Speaker 2:Let's just say the ones that we assigned fours and fives to.
Speaker 1:Okay. The first one is playfulness that maybe seems a little overweighted, I don't know. So, uh, well, that's pretty similar to this cultural peer idea. In a way it's it's related to the positive vision of us working together someday.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Okay, so we can file those alongside each other. Um, psychological technique that helps them manipulate us in some way. Um, we assigned a four to that as well. Uh, to kind of like a power demonstration, Mm, Mm-hmm. Um, and that could be. You could imagine a negative version of that, of a like show us who's boss. But you could also imagine a positive version of that. That's like look what's possible. Um, as a way to nudge our physics and our you know our thinking in a positive direction, in a to like, gently, like incept, you know, an escalation of our scientific advancements it also sounds like setting healthy boundaries in some ways, like it could be how you relate to a household pet, like you set clear lines for them.
Speaker 1:But it could also be how you relate to other people you respect.
Speaker 2:You tell them where your limits are and express your intent yeah, I mean, I don't know if we were to put the nhi and humans in a like relationship metaphor. I think they're being like fairly abusive to us. I don't think it's great, I think it's gaslighting and and abusive. But yeah, conducting science doesn't really work because we're not on, we're not peers with them exactly yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1:I should also maybe say there that streber went on in that interview to say he also thinks there's an element of their behavior toward us that suggests they're extracting something from us that we don't want to give them, and, uh, he doesn't have any more specific information about that. But it it could be simultaneously true that they would like for us to develop into an independent civilization that they can relate with on a higher level and also that, as you say, they're being a little bit abusive and extracting something, maybe above and beyond just conducting science, to preserve our gene lines.
Speaker 2:Okay, and then that brings us to the last idea that we've assigned a four or five to. We assigned a four to the idea that there might be some governing structure and set of rules that these NHI or entities have agreed to amongst themselves, and then we assigned a five to this idea that being kind of careful is a natural position.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that feels right to me, along the lines of the slight concern, the risk mitigation, the way we go on safari. It just seems like one of those things that biological entities might tend to share is like an instinct for self-preservation, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, alongside an instinct for expansion. So, yeah, you know cool, okay, all right, well, that was really fun. I like this list a lot. That was really fun exercise.
Speaker 1:That was really fun, really good question that you asked like pretty early in our journey here. Why are UFOs kind of careful? Very good question, interesting, thank you.
Speaker 2:UFOs kind of careful. Very good question, interesting. Thank you, okay, what was it that you?
Speaker 1:wanted to share. Okay, my WT UFO outro is from a Joe McGonigal interview with Sean Ryan which is over six hours long. I'll put the link in the place. Yeah, it's. It has a lot to do with uh out-of-body experiences and uh specifically using them as a tool for both spycraft and kind of like private detective work. Like McGonagall describes his favorite applications of this spiritual technology being rescuing missing kids. He rescued like a dozen kids in the course of his career and he also performed work for the intelligence agencies in the military that he sometimes was a little more sketchy about because he can't talk about this thing. But then these, this guy wrote a book. Um, you can find that book, you can listen to this interview and I'll include both the interview and the book and I'll I'll throw in a time code for this crazy thing that I'm about to say.
Speaker 1:Uh, which is kind of like near the end of the interview, in the last, in the fourth hour of the six plus interview, our interview, mcgonigal describes a a remote viewing he did that he didn't know at the time was of ancient Mars. So the his handler handed him an envelope and basically the piece of paper inside said like mars, 1 million bc and you don't get to know that when you're remote viewing you don't get to look at the paper. You just like target your psyche at the thing in the envelope and you come up with what you come up with. And what he came up with was um structures on mars, including a pyramid, uh. And I should quickly say I think they also tested him on some jpl images of current mars and he like accurately described some things that jpl has pictures of which he then went later to jpl and confirmed he like got those pictures and and confirmed that he had guessed correctly or described these things correctly. That doesn't necessarily confirm this next part, which is crazy, but that's why it's here in WT UFO.
Speaker 1:So he described seeing a white pyramid that he feels is some kind of tomb that maybe was intended to be a, a life sustaining building like a, like a deep freeze chamber or something, but that it had run out of time and that the occupants inside had perished. And he told the guy interviewing him that this must be some new technology because, as he understands pyramid structures, it's very hard to have rooms in pyramids because of the physics of the weight, um, uh, and the guy says never mind the tech. He also says at some point the sun looks weird here and the guy's like I don't care about the sun, what's in the pyramid? Uh, the sun would look weird if it were mars, um, which again mcgonigal doesn't know at this point. Anyway, a lot of buildup.
Speaker 1:It's a white pyramid beings in what was suspended animation, but that had now passed away, and he describes them as essentially looking like large humans, like 10 foot tall, human-like creatures. He doesn't describe them as alien-ish or greys, he just says they looked human but like large humans. So that's a data point way out in who knows where Stan to support the idea of, like, I guess, the Petri dish theory. He could also maybe suggest that there's like some convergent evolutionary principle, uh, that leads life, or life in this corner of the universe toward human-like beings. Um, and maybe, if you squint, you don't have to have technology involved to to get like microbes from mars to earth, which then tend to evolve into something like humans. But it could also suggest that there was some civilization that predated our civilization on Earth, that lived in this solar system, or at least visited, and was fairly human-looking. So this is obviously full-on crazy town, but I thought it would be fun to talk about, and I'll direct people to the audio so they can hear it for themselves.
Speaker 2:I mean that's, that's great. Thank you for sharing that. It's wild. I don't really feel the urge to to try to add anything onto that story. Honestly, what do you want to? You want to unpack it a little bit, or shall we just leave things there Do?
Speaker 1:you want to unpack it a little bit, or shall we just leave things there? I think that's probably enough. Given the gossamer nature of that information, it would be foolish to try to build scaffolding on and around it for now.
Speaker 2:Well, just put it on the shelf, as Kelly Chase says. Nice, hold some space for that. Yeah, okay, all right, great Cool great cool man.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, this was fun yeah, thanks a lot.
Speaker 2:Good conversation. All right, I'll see you next week see you next time.