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
S1E13: If UFOs Weren't NHI, What Else Would Have To Be True?
If UFOs aren't NHI, some other weird things must be happening. Given what we know is definitely true, we imagine the potential alternate explanations for UFOs, creature encounters, and coverup allegations. To cap it off, we use our trusty Occam's razor to cut through the chaos.
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What the UFO? Hi, I'm John. With me, as always, is Caleb. Hi, I guess I'm not with you always, but whatever, another episode of WTUFO how you doing today, caleb, I'm okay, I'm a little angry at my friend for not believing in UFOs.
Speaker 2:We're having a protracted email exchange about it and it's grinding my gears a little bit. How about you?
Speaker 1:I'm okay. I don't know I'm. I fell asleep last night listening to abduction by john e mac, so I got about as good a night's sleep as you could expect based on that it's terrifying we recommend it.
Speaker 1:It's really scary and also great. One of the best books I've read on the subject. Um, okay, so this week, uh, we are going to talk about this question of, if it's not ufos and non-human intelligence, what else has to be true, like what? If this is all one big misunderstanding and we're kind of I guess we're black hatting it here this week, right, we're, we're like we're doing red team devil's advocate conversation, which I think is going to be a little hard for us because neither of us really have our heart in it, but I think it's going to be a fun exercise for us also. Probably it's just going to end up having us dig in even more deeply in our current beliefs, but I think it's going to be fun.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 1:Okay, but first I'm going to ambush you with a little game. All right, we're going to play a little game.
Speaker 1:I'm calling this game. Bigfoot is Real. Here's how it works. Are you willing to play? Absolutely All right, here's how it's going to work. Here's how it works. Are you? Are you willing to play? Absolutely all right, here's how it's gonna work. I am going to give you a statement uh, or uh, or an idea, and you are going to rate it on a scale of uh, from no fucking way. Maybe something there, probably something there. And bigfoot is real. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Are you ready to play? Okay, yes, no fucking way, maybe something there, probably something there. Bigfoot is real.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay, number one the CIA never really ended their remote viewing program.
Speaker 2:Probably something there, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:All right, that seems likely, like the CIA would just get quiet about it and we would hear about previous things and they would end the public facing version of their remote viewing program.
Speaker 1:Right, and they would spend millions of dollars on a remote viewing program and then just like shutter it after you know there's like clearly some success there. Yeah, Okay, All right. Number two the Roswell incident involved a real flying saucer.
Speaker 2:Oh man, I'm at probably something there now and like, uh, I previously was not. Like as recently as even six months ago, I think I would have said Roswell is silly, even if the rest of this stuff is real. But all the deathbed confessions and stuff like that have made me think, yeah, it's like between probably something there and Bigfoot is real on that one.
Speaker 1:For me, Okay, all right, I love it.
Speaker 2:Okay, number three governments have made agreements with NHI and or engaged in joint research efforts, as alleged by Paul Benowitz in relation to Dulce Base. Oh man, this is maybe something there. I'm not going to rule this out entirely, but it's like, definitely on the low end it seems really unlikely. But on the other hand, like the secrecy about this has been so intense and scary and weird, can I ask you how you feel about this or no, that's not how this game works.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's not how this game works.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't have the answer.
Speaker 1:All right, maybe something there. You got to ambush me with a game. Okay, next one. Sean Kirkpatrick is an allaround decent guy and a professional just doing his level best in a difficult field oh, maybe something there.
Speaker 2:I don't, I don't think so, but uh, I give that not a, not an absolute zero okay, like he could just be a dick. I think it's like one alternate explanation to be an asset, he's like either a CIA asset or he's just like a grumpy Gus who's like not a very pleasant person and gets pissed off easily and has been an all around jerk about the subject.
Speaker 1:Is this like who, your friend, you've been emailing with?
Speaker 2:Man, my friend's really sweet and not a grumpy gus, he's just really careful and like normie and like wants to be loved by the mainstream tribe of which he thinks himself apart. And I I still love him and I always will, and the essence of friendship is forgiveness. I heard from an irish poet once that's great.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm surprised I didn't get a no fucking way out of you on that one. But all right, I got two questions left. Are you ready? Okay, yes, okay. One. We're in the midst of a carefully orchestrated, slow, slow disclosure campaign being run by a shadowy cabal in the know.
Speaker 2:Uh, hmm, hmm, Low, low, uh, low, low. Um, either no fucking way or probably there might be something there. Uh, there's just so much pushback that I can't give it a bigfoot's reel for sure. Um, if, if they are, I'll, they are doing a really good job of like pretending not to want to be doing this. Um, so, yeah, maybe something there, but probably not okay, all right, last question, you're doing so.
Speaker 1:Thank you, matt gatz. Oh god, really did see a photograph of an orb, not of any human capability that I'm aware of bigfoot's real.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's. I looks like I take the congressman at his word there. Um, that's uh kind of a gross thing to say about the particular congressman and it's a bummer. I mean, my side gig is like making merchandise right now and I made like 24 disclosure t-shirts and Matt Gates is not on any of them because I just like can't bring myself to celebrate this dude as a hero of the movement and also it's such a punchable face he would make a punchable shirt, but uh. But yeah, it seems to me like he talked himself into seeing some actual stuff and I don't remember that quote about the orb, but I buy that one. I buy what he said at face value, because I think of a really good reason for him to make that up.
Speaker 1:All right, congratulations, you did a great job. Your reward is this weird old illustration of a flying saucer that I don't even remember where I found it, but it's fantastic. It's like some somebody's you know, 1800s ass imagining of a cross-section of a flying ship oh my god, that's fantastic, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. Thank you for playing Bigfoot Israel.
Speaker 2:That reminded me of this thing I heard the writer of that New Yorker article about UFOs say recently, which is that they have this historic feature of seeming just a little bit ahead of us and as we get more advanced, they get more advanced and, like in the late eighteens, we saw these weird things people thought were wooden and the airships. Yeah, not sure I totally buy that Cause I don't feel like we've had a ton of change in the form factors since like 1940, but it's an interesting idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is. It is a very interesting idea. I don't know, there's maybe something there I guess to me, god I should.
Speaker 2:I'll send you the rest of this batch of insane illustrations that I have thank you, yes, please title photo um, okay, can I take us into our main thing? Here you ready?
Speaker 1:yeah, would you please?
Speaker 2:right. So I want to set up one quick frame, which is the idea of Occam's razor. I'm sure if you're alive and listening to this you know what that is, but it comes from William of Occam, who's a 14th century philosopher and theologian, and he had this principle of reasoning that the simplest explanation is usually the best one, and it's that's not like a scientific hard and fast rule, but it's a general, generally accepted, strong reasoning tool which people use to think about stuff that's hard to think about. So I just like want to put a pin in Occam's razor here at the beginning and then return to it at the end, because we're going to propose basically alternate explanations for the UFO phenomenon that aren't NHI and we're going to, as you said, ask if it isn't NHI then what else would have to be the case, what else would have to be true? And our general point you know spoilers is to suggest that a lot of really weird things would have to be true.
Speaker 2:It would probably defy Occam's razor to intuit that this non-NHI explanation could be real. That was a bit of a double negative, but I think people get the point. That was a bit of a double negative, but I think people get the point. So the three big things we're going to try to explain with a non-NHI explanation are sightings, encounters and cover-up allegations. Would you like to take us away with sightings or do you want to set up the table anymore?
Speaker 1:No, let's just jump in. I feel intimidated by this a little bit, because I think it's so hard to come up with other explanations that don't strain credulity. So I kind of feel, I guess, like the best we're probably going to do here, at least for ourselves, is to land on explanations that strain our credulity and that maybe even seem like straight up not believable to us.
Speaker 2:But that might be something we can do yeah, there's like a slightly uncomfortable uh feeling of engaging in this activity, partially because we're committed to this other vision and, um, it something feels icky about just sort of like hand waving uh, and we're going to maybe do some of that here. Uh, so we'll just try to stay on the the lines as much as possible. So the sightings good sightings go back at least as far as world war two. There are dappled sightings for hundreds of years before then and there's like ancient aliens evidence, but like good sightings of metallic objects. Basically you're talking about the 40s through today. Uh, I saw a recent poll that said about one in 10 americans have seen a ufo, which suggests about 30 million living americans have seen a ufo. So that's is true around the world. Then maybe we're at almost a billion people Like 800 million people have probably seen some kind of UFO if you extrapolate the American numbers out. So this is a lot of explaining to do, but according to the studies that have been done, it's only like 5 to twenty percent of those that end up being actually interesting. Uh, so a little less explaining.
Speaker 2:Um, and we have had intensive government investigation, including like as of the 50s and 60s when blue book was operational. They looked at over 12 000 cases um, that's per christopher mellon, uh and they did a couple of scientific reports. Blue book commissioned a scientific report by battelle, and then the robertson panel did some science-ish stuff. And then the condon report, you know, was kind of bullshit but they did try to do some real science in it and that was in the late 60s. So it's been a long time, uh, since we did real science about this, been like basically half a century since we did a real scientific study of UFOs, at least in the US. You want to take over?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so let's transition, I guess, into what would have to be true, what could alternate.
Speaker 2:I just want to do one more thing, and then I guess you do what would have to be true. Recent official reports from the Office of the director of national intelligence in America have found that at least some of these things are physical, that some of them demonstrate advanced tech or that they might be doing that, and that we don't have evidence or we couldn't confirm that these were United States objects or adversary objects. So that's the DNI, politely saying we don't know what these are, but again, we think some of them are physical and some of them might be technological. So we're trying to, we have, we have to explain millions of people seeing objects that are probably physical and probably technological, and uh, and these are some alternate explanations. Okay, over to you.
Speaker 1:That's great. You teed that up so wonderfully and I can't help but feel that that ODNI statement no evidence that these were either ours or belong to our adversaries is like the other side of the coin of the no evidence that these are extraterrestrial. You know that's like the vice that you have to put your brain in when you start.
Speaker 2:And it's crazy that headlines always run with no evidence that they're extraterrestrial.
Speaker 1:They could just as easily have no evidence that this is China or Russia Right.
Speaker 2:Or us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right. Well, I guess, off of that, it's just more believable to people that these would be secret, really advanced tech owned by either the US government or Russia or China. It would have to be technology that predated World War Two. Predated the end of World War Two, anyways, because we've got like the Foo Fighter sightings. Predated the end of World War II, anyways, because we've got like the Foo Fighters sightings. Anything else on that you would add, for why it would have to be pre-World War II.
Speaker 2:No, the Foo Fighters are the earliest reliable things that I know. But there's some like 1941, there might have been a crash, but the stuff that I'm reading on starts in World War II.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you'd have to imagine that somebody built secret tech early in the war, right pre the war or mid-war. And of course we know that the Nazis were really into researching crazy experimental technology, and the US was as well, obviously, with building the bomb, which was experimental at the time. The tech would have to have been walled off from the rest of the economy. This, I think, is a point that hit really hard for me when Kelly Chase talked about it on the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast, which is excellent. Something I hadn't really appreciated before is like the just the tonnage of money that it would take to create something like this.
Speaker 1:In all likelihood, to create tech this advanced is like it's on a scale that like really only a state actor could finance, and of course, a bunch of the you know, us military spending is like secret or not accounted for, and like the pentagon can't account for like trillions of dollars of its spending. So you could conceivably have these advanced programs happening in that, you know, out of that pool of money. Um, there's then also because we're, because we have to, you know, come up with some explanation for this. There is this conspiracy theory one of the wackiest that I've encountered that, like the cold war was was just like a bit of theater and like really the us and russia were secretly cooperating on trying to build some tech that could combat the NHI threat, or I guess I'm. I guess I'm like muddying, I guess I'm crossing streams here, cause that can't be true if the aliens aren't real. Okay, so yeah, no, nevermind, that explanation doesn't, doesn't hold any water.
Speaker 2:Yeah you're right, that doesn't have a place in this conversation. But for the record, I think there's like a sort of conspiracy light version of that theory, which is that Russia and America are both having a space race with each other and both aware of NHI and trying to counter that threat. That if in a circumstance where we did know that NHI were here, that both Russia and America and probably China would want to counter that and also we'd be worried about the other nations gaining too much power. So it's believable that we could be in a multi-way race both against each other and NHI.
Speaker 1:Okay, another point here. The tech would also have had to have been kept secret from the Air Force. We know that because the Air Force told the FBI that they were contemplating aliens as an explanation. This suggests it would have to be foreign tech.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's somehow weirdly easier to believe a deep state in the 2020s than it is a deep state in the early days after World War II, the 2020s than it is a deep state in the early days after world war ii, like a deep state in 1952 that was so deep and weird that the air force generals didn't know about our secret tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah, during world war didn't know about it. You would have to. You have to believe that that, like our air force, generals during a world war were unaware of of this secret tech yeah, so I guess that points to it being not america, right like you sort of have to believe that it's not the united states then yeah, it's like it.
Speaker 2:It's like harder to believe that it would be american, given what we know about the internal operations of America. And I would add to this that we did a ton of investigation, which is just like a weird thing to do. If it was our stuff, like, why would the air force spend millions of dollars in dozens of years like intensely investigating this project? That would all have to be a psyop, basically. If they were secretly our machines, yeah, okay, so that would all have to be a psyop, basically.
Speaker 2:If they were secretly our machines, yeah, okay, so that would that means all that we're really saying there is we're parsing the uh, the secret human tech theory into a less and more likely bucket, with the less likely explanation being American, because of what we know about how the American state interacted with flying saucers and tried to track them down. So we're saying that if it is human tech, it's more likely that it's Russian or Chinese. I think you'd probably have to say Russian, though, because in the 1950s, china, as far as I know, did not have anywhere near the technical capacity that would have been needed to do something like this, but if anybody else would have, it would have been China, so it would have to be either Russia or China.
Speaker 1:OK, why don't you cover the last two points here?
Speaker 2:All right Well so taking that point to the next level, whoever had this tech if a human had this tech, they've been showing extreme restraint in using it. And if it were American, you could point to Vietnam and say, like why didn't we use it there? Russia, you could point to Afghanistan. Russia got run out of Afghanistan and like probably could have used super alien tech to help them win that war pretty easily super alien tech to help them win that war pretty easily. And then in just the past few years it's hard to imagine that they wouldn't have wanted to use it in Ukraine. If they have this tech, they could have just like zipped into the Capitol and done a ton of damage, like in the first couple of weeks of the war.
Speaker 1:So assume that they do have this tech. Then yeah, why? What's the what's the explanation for not using it for so many decades?
Speaker 2:What comes to mind for me is that this tech might be really useful against other state actors with big technology themselves. So like, if you had a Tic Tac you could ram it through an aircraft carrier, blink. But if you're fighting against rebels in caves or jungles, a tic-tac might not be the most useful thing. Like you've got millions of people on the ground in highly covered areas, like maybe the alien tech would help you with that. But if you don't have like giant machines that you can just smash up real good, it might not necessarily help you win that war. Like you could get. Does that make sense to you? Like that is a like carrier or something.
Speaker 1:But yeah, like, just so, like a nuclear bomb isn't going to help you, like you know, secure an urban war environment yeah, so that's the like asymmetric nature of the war.
Speaker 2:The wars is or is something. I don't know much about Ukraine's air capacity, but if you had something like this and you were Russia and you were trying to take down an opposing air force, it should be trivially easy to do that with Tic Tac, like things.
Speaker 1:What about the just like energy implications and the sort of like industrial or economic applications of the tech that we see in the skies? Great question.
Speaker 2:I basically only have a conspiracy answer for this. I think you have to believe in a conspiracy if you want to believe that they kept it secret. Like if a cabal, a military cabal, had super powerful energy tech that didn't make its way into the rest of the economy. The theory would go. I think my natural intuition would be oh, they kept it because they either didn't want to expose the tech so that they could keep the upper hand in emergency war situations, or they wanted to have more profitable forms of energy. Take the lead in the market. So if you're in the Illuminati, you would rather sell fossil fuels because you can make a buck.
Speaker 1:Right, and even if you're Russia, even if you're Russia, you have, like, a lot of oil and gas and you sell that oil and gas to other countries, so maybe you don't want to disrupt that part of the economy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and dropping free energy into the situation would be really good for a lot of things, but it did make me wonder what we would do with a ton more energy, and I think part of the answer now is computing. We would like mine way more Bitcoin, but another good answer is desalination. But neither of those things are necessarily super important to the Russian state. We can do what we need with the energy we have. I'm a big proponent of building more energy capacity, cause I think that'll just be good for humans in myriad ways. But uh, you could also kind of imagine maybe not wanting to share such an incredibly disruptive technology.
Speaker 1:And then, yeah, and lastly, just off of something that you said, if it is like, if they aren't thinking, if it is a weapon, then you could kind of imagine it being like. If it's on the scale with a nuke, that like keeping it secret would maybe be. I don't know, I don't know, I'm not even believing this, as I'm saying it because I think nuclear power is like a deterrent.
Speaker 2:As much as you know, it's like a deterrent more Right, right, and it's a deterrent, because we know about it, because because it's a public.
Speaker 1:As a deterrent, I guess, and maybe the answer is like it is we are kind of using I don't know, I don't know, I'm not sure that that holds water but you would basically have to believe that they would want to keep this super, duper, big weapon secret so that they could just like pull out an ace up their sleeve and, like you know, slap it down and win any like major military conflagration, not like, not like Ukraine, but like if there's like a world war that busts out russia, then would play this card which is a little hard to square with, just like basic human psychology, because, uh, the idea that generation after generation would keep deferring the use of this thing, that would change the world order if you just deployed it at scale it's.
Speaker 2:It's difficult, uh, to imagine that um, which is kind of the whole point of this exercise, but uh, I did quickly want to just say um, sort of conspiratorially, if the idea of, uh, slow deterrence, like like gentle deterrence, um, where if we were to take that seriously, we might find that it maps kind of neatly onto this cautious aliens pattern of behavior, like if you had something that you wanted to keep secret but you needed to show that it was a deterrent, you might sometimes show your hand and it would be around, but it wouldn't be obvious to everyone. So that would match, say, the fact pattern of lots of these UFOs showing up around military bases, but not above Times Square. And you would basically be imagining this like the cautious aliens hypothesis, but with caution for an adversarial tech. So they're like getting some deterrence by demonstrating their capacity with these like rare, occasional showy appearances, but they're still keeping their secret safe by not revealing the technology too broadly. So that would at least be the theory.
Speaker 1:And then go ahead. The last one. I feel like you probably hate this last point. The next most likely explanation after non-human intelligence and secret technology is simply repeated widespread confusion by highly qualified flying experts and radar operators over 80 years, as sensors have changed and improved.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what bothers me about this one is the one white crow theory. I don't remember where this comes from. Some philosopher says all you need to prove that white crows exist is one white crow. So for it to be error, for it to human error, every single incidence of human, of observation, has to be human error, and that's thousands of incidents. So it's it. It's like, not so much the possibility of it happening once. It's the crazy, like flip a coin a thousand times and it lands heads every single time. That's incredibly improbable to me.
Speaker 2:So I'm thinking about, like the pilots in july 1952, before the dc wave, who see this like phalanx of flying objects, uh, and they're like, they watch it for an hour and they decide that it's like keeping the various elements of the v or keeping up with the lead, and they, they come to the conclusion that they're looking at real physical objects. I'm'm thinking about like Kenneth Arnold and Mount Rainier, and I'm thinking about, uh, the astronaut Harris or something. You saw them in Germany. And there are just, there are dozens and dozens or hundreds and hundreds of these incidents where pilots are watching physical objects and it's not enough for one or two of them to be confused, they all have to make an error here, and to me that seems like pretty, pretty staggeringly unlikely. It's not unlikely that any one of them might have an error, although if you tried to tell a pilot that they were following Venus, you know they would probably look at you funny, um, but it does seem incredibly unlikely that that 1100 times the coin would turn up heads and it would just be like either a visual error or a sensor error error.
Speaker 2:And I wanted to tack onto this that sensors have changed a lot over the last 80 years. So if there were a sensor error that was happening, error that was happening in another era, um, then that would have been fixed as the sensors got better over the years, and so we would have to be dealing with new kinds of sensor errors in every sensor that we've ever built, and that seems really unlikely to me. So I think we're stuck with it being technology, and I think that means the only other option other than NHI is is probably Russia. Does that track for you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I kind of think that's where we're landing here. I think that's where we're landing as, like, the most plausible explanation, if it's not an HI.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's move on to the next incredibly difficult nest of thorns I like it. Being encounters, encounters with beings, even closer encounters. You want to do the first half this time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess, so Maybe we can do it together. We know that there are at least thousands of people who claim to have had encounters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one way we know that is that people who have gone public with their stories have said on the record that they have received thousands of messages from people with similar experiences. That's one way we know that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the word similar is really important here too, for, like that, that needs to be. Um, the similarity in the rhymes between all these different experiences needs to be part of our explanation, um, for how it's not NHI. Um, that's pretty crucial, I think. Um a couple examples that we have down, just specifically to hit one, the Zimbabwe school. Um, anything in particular that you want to touch on there.
Speaker 2:Just that it's a lot of people and they're about our age, so you can still hear them. I think they're probably younger than us, actually, and they're there's, you know, still operational out there, having seen something together, uh, and felt like they had a communication experience in, in just like a really broad daylight style place. So, um, they, you, you need a pretty elaborate explanation, I think, for why 20 children would simultaneously believe something weird and then continue to believe it for the rest of their lives. Yeah, uh. This is the next one I I've wanted to mention is hickson and parker, who I believe their event is in the 70s. You remember these guys?
Speaker 1:they're on a fishing trip. Right, aren't they fishing?
Speaker 2:they're fishing after work, I think yeah and uh, and they, they get taken.
Speaker 2:They get taken. They describe being paralyzed and lifted into a craft of some kind, and they go to the police after this event. They both got, I believe, lacerations in their arms and they've gushed to the police about this crazy story. And the police are like, yeah, okay, why don't you cool your jets for a minute? And they leave them in a cell and they leave a secret recording device on their desk or something, so that they can come back later and say gotcha, we heard you talking about how ridiculous this is and how?
Speaker 1:interrogation room, I guess, or just in the chief's office or something Okay.
Speaker 2:And then they play the tape back later and it turns out is when they left the room, these two guys just talked to each other about how freaking crazy this was, and they didn't change their story at all. They just kept talking to each other about what happened to them. So they went to their. They have both passed away now, but they they lived the rest of their lives believing that this was true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd throw on to this the Travis Walton case, where a bunch of the people involved in that sighting um passed lie detector tests.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, um, when recounting their experience okay and um, I also wanted to mention lonnie zamora. I didn't put him on the record, but he was like a nevada police officer, right oh yeah, zamora is a yeah, that's like a seminal case and he chases an object, uh, and he describes seeing two beings like get into it and then it takes off, and then he drives all over the city chasing it. Great, okay.
Speaker 1:So there's a bunch of good ones. And then John Mack, harvard psychiatrist. He studies I don't know how many I think about. Yeah, okay, 200 experiences over more than a decade. I'm reading this book right now. 200 experiences over more than a decade. I'm reading this book right now and one thing that struck me is the he really takes pains to paint the tell you the patient's journey before they get to to John Mack and like what, what leads them to him. And I mean, I'm only six chapters in, but it's. It's just interesting to see how it's like it's. It's often the same kind of thing of like they talk to like a pastor, and the pastor is like it's like this, like therapist, and the therapist is like huh, talk to this psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist is like you have PTSD but you sound crazy. And then eventually they work their way to like John Mack to the Mac the Mac daddy.
Speaker 2:So yeah, Okay, we should say that John Mack is the head of the psychiatry department at Harvard medical school, where he graduated himself with loud days. So he was like a very serious and seriously respected guy, very smart guy, very empathetic, did a bunch of work with children.
Speaker 1:I believe before he moved into this territory. So you've written here that he said he found no overlapping pathologies.
Speaker 2:Can you explain what that means? Yeah, he, I think his takeaway from interviewing these 200 people, or one of his takeaways, was that they didn't have any shared problem that could be causing these, and so that was, like, I think, probably the most compelling part to him that he didn't see like a pattern across them. Some of them did have like weird psychopathologies of one kind or another, but they weren't shared. There wasn't. There wasn't like a universal truth to the 200 people. So what he was looking for is like some root cause that he could point to and say like this is what manifests as alien abduction syndrome, as you were describing.
Speaker 2:Um, so of those 200 people that he studied, he eventually then wrote the book abduction about, I think maybe like 10 of them or something like that. Uh, and those were the people he felt were like the most psychologically normal with the weirdest experiences. But so I like I think it's like even more important than the fact that they were psychologically normal is that they didn't have shared experiences, like they didn't, they weren't all like abused as kids, or they didn't all undergo some trauma in their early development process, or they didn't all have, you know, schizophrenia or some other like kind of serious mental condition.
Speaker 2:So, that seems very significant. I also found in researching this today that there's some more recent of a small group of like 10 experiencers that finds that they did genuinely have trauma responses to just hearing their stories read back to them in a neutral tone and they they had the same kind of trauma responses that people who had ptsd from war or assault have when they hear their stories read back to them in a neutral tone. So you know, the writers of that study were like well, obviously it's not aliens, but we don't know what else it could be.
Speaker 1:Uh, this is what they're having new and emotional responses yeah, that's really interesting, so that has to be part of our theory. Whatever coming, we're coming up with here a non-nihi explanation, and that comes up in the macbook as well, where he has like, at least with one of the patients, has like another psychiatrist who specializes in trauma come and study a patient and their conclusion is like something definitely happened to this person, but, as you say, couldn't come up with it, so they can't come up with another alternate explanation and we're going to try to do that. Yeah, right, yes, even though neither of us has Harvard physics, psychophysical degrees.
Speaker 2:Although some of these people have physical marks on their bodies, like those two fishermen who had like punctured arms People have described like having a triangle form on their body somewhere, or like a weird series of dots or something People have like wounds or like strange lumps. You know like there are a lot, a lot of different cases. I don't have a hard number on this, but a lot of cases do come with some kind of physical effect. So we have to.
Speaker 1:I feel, and you probably do too particularly icky about even trying to dismiss this, because, like we, you know, I believe experiencers and we believe experiencers on this show generally. That's like our starting point, I think. And so it feels not great for us to try to like explain away or hand wave away people's like physical trauma that they've, they say they've experienced and that, like examination by like medical professionals, confirm you know exists Right.
Speaker 2:And and we're not really speculating that we have a good explanation because, as we just said, the experts who have looked at this have not propounded a good explanation. Nobody's come up with a good explanation and if you search this, there actually are a fair amount of scientific papers that people have written trying to come up with a good explanation and basically nobody has one so far. So I did also just wanted to put a couple of hard numbers on here that I found in the research today, which is that the absolute bare number, bare minimum number of this and this is as of the early thousands um is that at least 1,700 people had reported these cases. Now people assume and I think fairly that the vast majority of these cases go unreported, in the same way that a lot of sexual assault goes unreported and a lot of UFO sightings go unreported. So that 1,700 number that's just people who have been studied in reports. They've reported it to a chain of psychiatrists and they've ended up in a study about this phenomenon. So that's at least 1700. That's still a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Many people might have had these experiences, have floated numbers, um, in the like range of between two percent and six percent of the population might have had these experiences.
Speaker 2:So just looking at america, that's between six and eighteen million people who might have had some experience like this, and I guess this is a good time to mention that a lot of these people have memory occlusion around these events and that, like sometimes, people just are missing time and they don't know what happened.
Speaker 2:So I would imagine that the people who were speculating about these numbers one of whom I think was bud hopkins who was like very into this and sort of on the far forward edge of credulity, I guess you could say, about the whole alien theory of it Um, the people who looked at it and did the numbers think that it's possible that six to 18 million Americans have had some experience like this, whether they remember it or not. And uh, expanding to the broader world, that probably takes you into the 100 million plus range pretty easily, but at the rock hard bare minimum we have at least 1,700 people who have had experiences with beings they couldn't explain. Many of them had trauma responses after this and some showed physical effects effects. So we basically have very thin explanations, but our best alts would have to include over to you yeah, one last thing.
Speaker 1:sorry, I just really interesting trailhead that came up in in um mac's book when I was listening to it last night.
Speaker 1:Um, similar to the, we had psychiatrists look at you know, examine them, and they find that like they really do have a trauma response.
Speaker 1:Um, he employs this thing called the hopkins image recognition test or hopkins image recognition test cards, um, which I think is especially used for um children, but but maybe adults as well.
Speaker 1:Um, it's a set of visual cards that have simple visualizations of images, everyday objects on them, and then mixed in are a few images related to UFOs or alien abductions, like an image of a gray or an image of a flying saucer, and so what they would do is they would have a three-year-old kid or a five-year-old kid who is having like weird nightmares and time missing and saying really creepy stuff, and you show them the cards and then measure, see how they respond when you get to like the gray alien, and in the cases in the MacBook, they like freak out and get like very, very upset. So not as dispositive, I guess, as having a psychiatrist examine them or a trauma expert dismiss out of hand the idea of um hoaxes and people just like making this stuff up because they want attention, because that explanation just does not account for the real trauma responses that people exhibit when they are examined in like a medical setting yeah, you're right.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, black crow, white crow, issue of like. Maybe a couple of hoaxes are there, but like to believe that every single report is a hoax is unreasonable in the extreme yeah, and for us to come up with an for the with a non-NHI explanation.
Speaker 1:Here we kind of need to grapple with the toughest ones, right, because of the crow rule.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of these people also have support groups and just want to live normal lives. They're not selling their story or going broadly public, and those things would be necessary for some kind of hoax to be part of the picture. Yeah, so I agree, that's a good point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hoax trapdoor is just like not available to us, insufficient. So that leads to. We got a couple ideas here one mass delusion um thousands or millions of people about, uh, having delusions, having the same or very similar delusions, yeah um, basically a condition that we don't understand or know the source of, and it doesn't appear in the same way as other mental neurodivergent behavior Yep, and doesn't appear alongside other neurodivergent behavior.
Speaker 2:as Mac has found, there's not you know, I did just want to put as a some kind of barometer here or like metric or post or something that around 24 million people worldwide experience. Some form of schizophrenia, I don't know anything about that. So again, I don't. I'd like you. I just sort of feel uncomfortable in this whole territory because it's like dangerously close to problematically dismissing people's genuine experiences and like psychological conditions.
Speaker 1:Which our broader culture seems like pretty chill with.
Speaker 2:Pretty comfortable doing. Yeah, everybody sees everybody over. Overall, in general, not only are people comfortable doing it, they think it's like obviously intuitive that we all should do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's something.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate about the UFO community. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That they open-mindedness around this stuff and like a sensitivity to willingness to listen. Trauma listen to like what are, medically speaking, you know, trauma people experiencing real trauma we're looking forward to talking to some of those people in the years ahead yeah, absolutely, um, okay.
Speaker 2:So another idea is dreams or hallucinations so severe that they produce trauma responses yeah, um, I mean, I, we're basically talking about the same thing there, but just like, uh, the mind is a powerful thing and the I guess we would be leaning really heavily on the placebo effect here to like, yeah, generate some kind of physical effects from a psychological basis you mean like wounds, like physical injuries?
Speaker 2:yeah, or certainly the trauma response, like maybe you could get an elevated heart rate after having a really severe dream experience. I don't know. That's it's. One good thing about this is there's you could answer that question scientifically, Like if if it's possible to have a trauma response from a dream, we should be able to figure that out right. We should be able to study whether people who have had really bad dreams can exhibit trauma responses to those nightmares.
Speaker 1:But like physical trauma responses. We're talking about the physical stuff.
Speaker 2:I think you would have to, if you were trying to explain it, say that the, the story came after, like, these two fishermen both, like lacerated their arms and like, went into shock and had a crazy dream and then like came out of that dream experience in some communicative fashion, like sharing this story and and the, the like, the physical stimulus then caused the narrative, I think, is what you would have to speculate.
Speaker 2:And you would have to speculate that they somehow collaboratively came to this narrative, which is a similar problem with the Zimbabwe school kids. Like they would have had to jointly agree on this experience, um, to both believe it that much, which it seems like sort of exponentially harder than just one person having a bizarre experience, multiple people having the same bizarre experience and like genuinely believing it and having a trauma response about that man. It seems like that just that seems like a layer of complication. Right, that you would have to. You would have to believe that it was possible for people to have these mutual experiences, um, and both get deranged in the same way and imagine that the same thing happens to them. Uh, and again, since we've ruled out the hoaxes, they would have to both really believe that which is just like seems like another level of challenge to this idea.
Speaker 1:Okay, Over and above individuals having these experiences. Yeah, Okay, so I think where we're landing is like some combination. Okay, so I think where we're landing is like some combination, basically something about the human mind and psyche that we don't understand yet and has not been documented. Yeah, I mean, I even have a hard time believing to like physical trauma then leads to them making up a story because, like in some cases, these are like children or they're like people who are like in their bedrooms at night. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I, you know not like they're like out fishing somewhere where maybe you could get lacerated. So I guess I don't know sleep disorder, some really crazy sleep disorder that we don't understand, um, and then I guess you know another stepping out of the scientific realm or the I don't know stepping out of the like normal Western worldview realm. Um, you could believe that maybe these are sort of like religious experiences or demonic, uh, experiences that people are having yeah, yeah, like this is.
Speaker 2:It reminds me of that, um, in leslie kane's book about, uh, afterlives, she has this like point about people being skeptical of multiple lives on psychic grounds, basically Like one theory to explain all this, like past life evidence is that, like, maybe people are getting psychically imprinted and there's like a thing that seems magic, a different thing that seems magical to us that might actually be real, and so, yeah, that would be another potential be. Another potential explanation is that these, these people are having like genuinely paranormal experiences that just don't happen to be non-human intelligence. I guess you kind of a spirit is a non-human intelligence, right?
Speaker 2:So it doesn't get us out of that. It gets us out of aliens maybe.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't think this is going to satisfy your friend you've been emailing with, probably, if we just say it actually is ghosts instead of aliens. But yeah, you're right, that's just kind of another form of non-human intelligence.
Speaker 1:Shit, so we did a bad job with this one hard, and I think the you know streber whitley. Streber talks in communion about, in like the beginning part, when he's like really trying to figure out how this could be not happening to him. Um, he says something along the lines of like. The only other explanation I can come up with is like because there's so much similarity between experiences that people with no connection to each other in different parts of the world have similar experiences, similar beings, same kind of like you know events. It would have to be something in the human brain that we just don't understand and know what it is. Yet we don't know what triggers it, we don't know how to study it or identify it, but it's embedded in at least some, some of us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think the big picture takeaway from this category is that if there is a psychological explanation for this stuff, we don't have it yet and nobody's proposed it. So if if there is something here, it's a thing that we don't currently understand, which leaves it kind of as a question mark.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but.
Speaker 2:I think that's kind of the point.
Speaker 1:It's complicated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so who knows Something?
Speaker 1:Something else, let's get some stuff. Cover-ups, let's do it.
Speaker 1:Cover-ups. Let's do it. The third category that we feel we need to deal with here to come up with a non-human, a non-non-human explanation, is allegations of a cover-up, and we're really talking about the US here. So things we have to deal with here Roswell, deathbed confessions, hout, marcel Corso, bodies, crafts, reverse engineering, uh, all of these allegations that have been made. Um then you've got David Grush alleging a crash retrieval program. He says something like 32 people have spoken to him about this program 32 people, he said three, I think it's around.
Speaker 1:I think 32 is the number 32.
Speaker 2:Oh, I thought it was 40.
Speaker 1:Okay, oh, 40 Jeep. I think 32 is the number 32? Oh, I thought it was 40. Okay, oh, 40? Jeepers. Okay, well, a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I kind of thought it was 41 for some reason. Oh, okay, great. Then there's, in addition to Grush, there have been other people who have said things about crash retrievals, like you, and I just read one maybe we'll put it in the notes of a person describing talking a person describing talking to their commander about, uh, basically an elite force that does crash retrievals around the world. So it seems like that is, that is a genuine thing that actually happens. Um, and we have like some pretty strong anecdotal evidence that, whether these things are nhi or not, that we actually do have a globe. The United States has a global craft extraction force that goes and picks things up for study.
Speaker 1:Do you think we have to figure out a way to explain that that's not true in order for us to come up with a non?
Speaker 2:I think, I think that's like demonstrably true at this point.
Speaker 1:I think that has to be part of our explanation here, okay yeah, I.
Speaker 2:so basically, I think the crash allegation, the crash retrieval allegations, uh passed the smell test and have enough people have said that things like that exist, that, um, you're basically the. The explanation there is like we're picking up foreign tech and we're going around the world and like recovering our secret tech or recovering crashed foreign tech, and that's what we do with these crash retrieval operations. But I'll see if I can find one more link to this, but my understanding is that it's been like fairly convincing. People have demonstrated fairly convincingly that the United States runs covert crash retrieval operations. Um, even if it's just to like pick up our Blackhawks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay. So what we'd have to believe is that it's they exist, but they're not going after flying saucers. Right that the things they're picking up are human tech okay, but let's not get ahead of ourselves and start explaining away. But that's, that's really used. I'm glad. I'm glad we had this talk um, because I wasn't quite so. I don't know. I guess I haven't seen all of that smoke relating to crash retrieval programs okay, well, yeah, maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 2:it could be, I could. I'm just sort of blankly asserting that and uh, uh, we only have David Grush and this guy that we read there was an article about the CIA, uh, running one of these programs a couple months ago, but I don't have it on my fingertips, um, okay, uh.
Speaker 1:Then we have to also account for disappearing evidence and people being told not to talk, or at least people saying that they've been told not to talk yeah, any other evidence come to mind for you?
Speaker 2:Tim Galladet, I believe, has said on the record that he saw some radar footage or some right, and then it was like sent around on an officer net and then the next day it was deleted and gone. Which?
Speaker 1:he said he didn't even know how that was possible how it was possible that it was removed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:There's then the hovering on the hovering octagon guy whose name escapes me, the guy who says he like saw an octagon with, like us, troops loading. I don't know how credible he is, but he claims that one night they came back from the bar like a few days after that and all of their lockers had been broken into and their phones stolen and we've heard other people say things like the the radar data disappeared.
Speaker 2:I've never heard anybody uh propose a chain of evidence for, like the david fravor claim about the things moving down from 80 000 to 20 000 feet and back up, like if that data exists, it's, somebody has it, uh, who's keeping it secret? Um, and then there are like things like all the roswell files being destroyed, like as you go farther back, stuff that just like got burned or shredded uh and just doesn't exist um, so you need to account for why all this data is going missing yeah, okay, and why that girl and her mom were told to never talk about this or they'll get buried in the desert.
Speaker 2:That was like that's a roswell adjacent story and they were told that by you know.
Speaker 1:Air Force personnel Jesus, all right. Well, let's fit this all into a non NHI explanation. This is fun. I'm having fun. I think this is kind of fun to do. I also like that. It makes you a little uncomfortable. Very Thank you, and to our viewers, thank you for hanging with us through this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good job you guys. So psyop to hide our high-tech craft is like one reasonable explanation, right? So if you see something and you say something, then we take your radar data away and uh we're. We're flying tic-tacs around at just to see if you notice. But then we don't want the radar history of that uh to stay on any of these boats, so we come and delete it and we tell people not to talk about this stuff. It's hard to imagine them being so concerned about project mogul, but maybe they were. It was a different time. Project mogul, but maybe they were. It was a different time.
Speaker 1:Project mogul being the official air force explanation for Roswell Right. So spy balloon, um, okay, crucially, this psyop to hide our craft would have to go back to the forties. Um, or yeah, I mean now I'm thinking of like the explanations we've come up with as stacking, and like we kind of landed on Russia being the most likely culprit here. So I guess it would have to be.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's a psyop to hide the existence of Russian craft that seems weirder, right like if it were a foreign adversary and they showed up on radar. Why would it be important to confiscate that data? Does that make it seem more likely that it's US, like Tim Galladet, looks at footage of this strange object or whatever, and then the powers that be confiscate that object? Why would they confiscate the object footage if it were a Russian device? Does that make any?
Speaker 1:sense Right. Why would you not want your radar operators on your naval aircraft carriers to have access to data relating to highly advanced adversarial tech? Yeah, mind is like you would have to imagine that there is another like pretty robust and utterly secret organization branch of the military that handles all that stuff and that is like the clearinghouse for all that information, and they don't want our normal air force and normal military chains of command to be involved in it.
Speaker 2:They just scrub it and they handle it yeah, and the other explanation would be that it's american and we don't want any information getting out about it so honestly, I find that a little bit more believable, but that doesn't jive with our initial feelings about the 40s and 50s being obviously not american.
Speaker 1:I guess based on how russia has comported itself over the last 80 years. I find it really strains my credulity that they would not have used advanced tech if they've had it since the 1940s. Tech like like this, the oil baron theory, is semi persuasive to me, but it more nudges me back toward thinking that it's the United States. But as we talked about, the Air Force was saying we don't know what this is, maybe it's aliens in the 40s and 50s.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you've got Hill and Cotter saying it definitely wasn't us and I think it couldn't have been Russia.
Speaker 1:So then you have to believe, basically, that there is some like robust deep black corner of our government that knows about this stuff, of the US government that like is building this stuff, flying this stuff and controlling all information and data building this stuff, flying this stuff and controlling all information and data around this stuff yeah, that actually leads me to one thing that I want to share.
Speaker 2:I had a good conversation on twitter, briefly with somebody who was making this case that we shouldn't dismiss the human tech, uh, and he shared two google engram graphs, which is like a graph, uh, like of the historical usage of a term and uh, so I'm going to share them now. One of them is this plasma propulsion, huh, which kicks up pretty high in late 50s, probably in the early 50s. Well, the other one is electromagnetic propulsion, which similarly has a crazy trajectory. So I don't think that's particularly dispositive, because you could believe oh god, how do I get back to this? I just stopped sharing. You could easily believe that they kicked up because we saw UFOs and we started researching this stuff, or you could believe that we started researching this stuff and that caused us to build things that people mistook for UFOs, but it is interesting that it happens right around the time. It doesn't look like it happens early enough to account for the Foo Fighters. I'll do it one more time.
Speaker 1:Okay, so what is this chart proposing, then?
Speaker 2:This is like, what the poster was suggesting is that, because these terms are getting used this early and this much, um, it sort of suggests that there might have been like some government, secret government research, um, or secret research by some other organization, uh, that led to plasma propulsion or electromagnetic propulsion, and I would say that's like the best argument that I've seen for the potential of human tech being involved. So it, uh it, it's still a little too late, probably for Foo Fighters, but, um, but it would. It could potentially explain fifties and sixties. And then at that point you're into this like PSYOP question again of like why we're studying it so much and why people like Hill and Cotter are saying they're definitely not ours and they're not Russia, saying they're definitely not ours and they're not russia. So at that point you know if, if we were developing these things, we were also lying about them on like a very big public scale, and not just lying about them, but like conducting phony investigations into them, and like spending a lot of time and energy, um, with this subutterfuge, which I suppose is not like completely insane, like we did some things in world war ii, like build fake fishing villages right to like, uh, divert german bombs.
Speaker 2:And uh, there's some really crazy like spycraft stories about this, one really good one with this woman like built a a fake water bottle stand to smuggle somebody out of an embassy, um, and they basically costumed a person in a thing that looked like a water bottle. Anyway, that's, um, she's the same lady who, uh, who, she had a like a mission impossible moment with george hw bush. You know that story in the office, yeah of it. Oh, so I don't know, it would be elaborate, but, but basically we're back this research. But then there's one other possibility that we maybe danced around but didn't mention, which is that it could be non-governmental american tech. Like, I think you basically have to invoke something at the level of an illuminati to have that theory make any sense. But, like you know, 1940s, elon mus, musk and like the 15 other rich, powerful Rothschild type people build this technology and then, I guess, don't do anything interesting with it except spook military bases. That's hard to believe, cause, like, so what? Like, why would they do that? What? What is the motivation?
Speaker 1:Right, the plutocrat billionaires don't want to make any money off of off of it, yeah that's very hard to believe.
Speaker 2:But that's what you're stuck with, I think like a secret cabal or massive american psyop or crazy early development from r Russia that it didn't use for anything else. I think those are our three. Am I missing anything?
Speaker 1:No, I don't think so. Okay, go ahead. Well, I'm wondering if you feel the need to try to cohere everything we've talked about into like one grand unified theory, or if you think it's enough for us to just or are you dissatisfied enough by just kind of like throwing out all these other, all these explanations and well, I wanted to mention one other sort of more normal psyop theory, which is that we're deliberately creating the impression of advanced craft that aren't human to hide our own activities.
Speaker 2:So some people think this is true. The idea there would be that we're making a big stink about flying saucers so that China and Russia think that these UFOs are alien and maybe won't approach them or they'll be afraid of them in a way that they wouldn't otherwise be of United States tech, and also we can sort of pretend that we don't know anything about them and meanwhile be using this tech to take pictures of their bases and things like that. Another PSYOP theory that goes around is people say they're beating the drums of war here. They're trying to convince you aliens are real so that you'll allow them to invest more money in war machines.
Speaker 1:Aliens are real, so that you'll allow them to invest more money in war machines. Yeah, I mean doing fine with that without the alien right.
Speaker 2:The alien threat arrows theory is basically a game of confused circular telephone by otherwise intelligent. People have just been taken in by the same stories that are bouncing around and don't actually have a credible source.
Speaker 2:People are just passing this information and it doesn't really come from anywhere yep sure there's retrieval of high-tech foreign craft that people thought were nhi, so we could be picking up super advanced tech from other countries and uh, and maybe it is really advanced and it looks like alien tech because it's using electromagnetics or plasma or whatever. Yeah, do you feel a desire to kind of cohesively align these things?
Speaker 1:I guess we, I guess no, I think we're kind of close to it. Anyways, I think we have like a hazy um you know explanation here, but I think we're. I think it's probably not worth really trying because I think it would be like really hard to make it cohesive the first and the third fit together, like the objects and the government cover Right, that kind of fit.
Speaker 2:But the experiences are a different thing. Very problematic for trying to explain this stuff away and specifically their like actual trauma responses are very difficult to explain want to just look once more at specifically the cover-up allegations and try to ask why would david grush be alleging this if it weren't a cover-up? Why I'll let you cover up if there wasn't one. Why the davis wilson memo if there is no secret program? Why rumors of the document?
Speaker 1:if there's no document, it's important to note that, like grush would be breaking the law if, by saying this stuff to congress under oath, like he's putting himself at great, if he's lying, it's, uh, it's a really big risk.
Speaker 2:Um so, he has to either think it's true or be an asset right in a non-right nhi theory. If the cover-up is not real, then he has to either be engaged in a psy-op or fundamentally confused.
Speaker 1:Yeah, both of which are tricky and problematic, but I guess I feel like he really believes it and is just wrong is more believable to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, so Arrow's theory basically is our best counter theory here that these started as rumors and people are quoting each other but there's no original source and there's no fundamental meaning to it. Oh, one other thing we have to explain here is what's with these people who say they're in the program and they're talking to people like ross colthart and danny sheehan yeah, what's that? That would have to be, I think, a psyop also. Right, these basically sheehan sheehan's a little dodgy about this, but roth ross colthart has explicitly said I am talking to people who say they are in a program that is reverse engineering alien craft.
Speaker 1:so either those people are deliberately just misinforming ross colthart and they're that's part of a cia undercover psyop or they're confused because they're working on really high-tech stuff that they think is alien, but secretly it's just hyper advanced human technology I guess, that's not bad I think the if we're taking the psyop, if you're choosing to believe, believe PSYOP angle, I think you need to reckon with the fact that the PSYOP has worked on Chuck Schumer, who's the leader of the Senate and one of the most highly cleared people in our government, as well as Marco Rubio, who's a member of the Gang of Eight Again, some of the highest security clearance in our government and both of them think that there's something going on here. So if you believe that this is a PSYOP of some kind, then you either have to believe that the leadership of the United States Senate is the target of, is a target of the psyop, or you have to believe that they're part of this psyop, and either one of those things should be utterly scandalizing to you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's extremely weird. Both of those options would be extremely strange. Thank you for laying that out. Both of those options would be extremely strange. Thank you for laying that out. Similarly, scandal reminded me that if this energy stuff is real, if we had high-tech stuff like this and we've been dealing with a global climate crisis for the last 50 years, it's a scandal that we haven't applied this technology to solving the global climate crisis, because we could easily do that. If we have unlimited energy, we could just like pull all the carbon out of the air, for example, and we could replace fossil fuels like borderline overnight.
Speaker 2:So that would be a scandal also that's also a really good point.
Speaker 1:So like if you're not believing that it's nhi, you should be utterly scandalized by this, unless you're not even paying enough attention to realize that there are physical, technological craft in the in the skies which is a wide uh slice of the population, unfortunately, yeah.
Speaker 2:so, moving into conclusion gear, let's do Okay. All these possibilities are super strange. I think that's the biggest takeaway. Everything is strange here. It's super weird no matter what part of the cake you slice the NHI are weird, the PSYOPs are weird, the mass illusion is weird. It's all extremely strange. So we're not comparing a bunch of normal, believable alternatives, we're comparing unlikely scenarios and that is quite difficult. So that's what leads me back to Occam's Razor, because it's such a messy, complicated situation and I wanted to kind of like give us a breath of fresh air here on the other side. And Occam's Razor, the nhi extraterrestrial hypothesis, just briefly, please.
Speaker 2:Exoplanets suggest that life exists. In the last 20 years we found a lot of exoplanets. Hundreds of billions are out there for sure. Um, so that means it's, it's very likely that life exists in other places. The fact that life exists in other places means it's at least possible that other intelligent life exists. The scale of the universe suggests that that is likely, because there are just so many places that life could exist that it becomes quite likely that life would attain its intelligence at some point somewhere.
Speaker 1:And the number is that we think one in four stars that we see up in the sky has an Earth-like planet, a planet in the Goldilocks zone around it.
Speaker 2:One in four stars in the night sky 100 billion in our galaxy, and now we maybe think it's two to 400 billion. I don't know, don't quote me on that, I'll look it up another time. But there are lots of stars and there are lots of planets and lots of habitable planets. So all that's really left to assume to get to NHI and extraterrestrials are that propulsion advances are likely and that aliens are likely to be cautious. Propulsion advances are likely and that aliens are likely to be cautious. Taking the second one first, I think it's obvious because we are very cautious when we visit other planets. We will be cautious, we will not announce ourselves, we'll be very careful and we can tell that because that is currently how we interact with the more than 100 uncontacted tribes on Earth. So very strong evidence that intelligent life would be cautious and hide when it visited another planet. So very strong evidence that intelligent life would be conscious, cautious and hide when it visited another planet. So that really only leaves propulsion.
Speaker 2:And this is where a lot of people get off the train with NHI and say it's just so far, everything's so far away and it's so hard to travel between places. But that misses this fundamental march of technology, which is exponential and, as a result very fast. So 150 years ago we couldn't fly, and now we have airliners all over the world and we have rockets that land as of just the last 10 years. So give us even another a hundred years, we're almost certainly going to be able to fly faster than we currently think we possibly could between stars. And if you gave us another thousand, let alone another million years, it's very likely that we will eventually break the laws of physics as we currently understand them by discovering new physics, because we're doing that all the time.
Speaker 2:Just in the last 20 years we've found the Higgs boson. We proved that gravitational waves are real, right Like we're constantly advancing that frontier. So to assume that we won't come up with interstellar propulsion is, I think, not grounded in the evidence, the recent evidence and certainly the last 150 years. So that, to me, suggests that it's actually quite simple to believe that extraterrestrials are visiting Earth cautiously. That is a very clean, simple explanation, and we'd have to pose that against the much more complex explanations we just laid out. Would you like to hop in and take a tour?
Speaker 1:Of what? Of the explanations we just came up with?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, I guess the alternative is that we have hyper advanced technology but we never use it in combat and we never use it to produce energy. Thousands or millions of otherwise psychologically normal people have had hallucinations so vivid that they produce trauma responses and physical marks, and persistent deception and confusion among high-level military officers exists. All pretty complicated theories. Yeah, those are. Those are more complicated, those are more complicated.
Speaker 2:So again, occam's razor is not scientifically, mathematically absolute as a method of thinking about things, but I think when you apply All three of those extreme credulity like I mean, or or like like having hyper advanced technology but never using any comment.
Speaker 1:There are just so many reasons why that is is difficult to swallow. You have to like really contort a lot of things about geopolitics and economics and human psychology and like human nature To make that make sense. Number two the the psychologically normal people having experiences like you have to posit some like really crazy, like undiscovered, ununderstood, uh things about the human brain, um, and then things about the human brain um, and then deception, the idea of a psyop. You have to believe like some pretty crazy conspiracy theories here about how the us government is is behaving that should be a fun inversion.
Speaker 2:Basically, the conspiracy theory is the non-alien theory. Like, in order to believe that it's not aliens, you have to believe there's a massive conspiracy to deceive us into thinking that it's aliens um I also wanted to say about the the tech.
Speaker 2:We've hit this point before, but not only would we have to have the psyop about ufos, we would basically be spending a giant PSYOP on all of our technology, because most of our defense spending goes into building conventional materials and if we'd had Tic-Tac level technology in the fricking forties, we would not be spending trillions of dollars every decade to buy F-22s or 24s or 26s or whatever we're up to now. That would be a huge waste of money. So it would be like a multi-trillion dollar sign-up that we're running every year just to build the technology that we currently use, and we would, in this theory, be pretending is the tip of our spear when in fact we have a secret, much more powerful thing that we just don't build in public yeah that.
Speaker 1:I'm really struck by the fact that we've done 13 episodes and I don't think we've sounded crazier than this one and I don't know.
Speaker 2:There was that moment with the worst case scenarios like hybrid invasions. You're right, living in a garden.
Speaker 1:we do sound pretty crazy there, but I think that this has been the most conspiracy theory laden episode and neither of us are like people who like to play in that swimming pool a lot, naturally, like we're both like kind of trustful of government in general and believers in it. Um so I, I don't know, I'm really. I kind of hope that I live to to see a day where it feels like where what what you just said is is internalized that it's the people who don't believe in a non-human intelligence explanation who are the conspiracy theorists, the people who don't believe in a non-human intelligence explanation, who are the conspiracy?
Speaker 1:theorists. Yeah, there's a neat little hilarity to that.
Speaker 2:I want to maybe end on something that's slightly philosophical but kind of fun. Uh, just drawing from a totally different world, this guy, shane parish, who's actually a former Canadian intelligence officer, has a saying about doing hard stuff and being productive, and it's basically that doing simple things is not always easy, something. Something can be simple and quite difficult. So it's simple to work on your novel every day, but it's actually pretty hard to do that, actually pretty hard to do that. And I think, by analogy, here in this ufo world, there's a very simple explanation for what's going on, which is extraterrestrials visiting earth, but it's profound.
Speaker 2:Uh, it's simple, but it's very weird and yeah I think that's just sort of inherently difficult to grasp, but it doesn't make it not easy. I think if there's one big takeaway everybody should have from this, it's that the simplest explanation is NHI and that the other explanations that could possibly account for all of these phenomenon phenomena are much more complex and require many more things to be true are much more complex and require many more things to be true.
Speaker 1:Well, this has been a great discussion, man. I'm happy to leave it there. I think you encapsulated it really neatly.
Speaker 2:All right, thank you. Congratulations on a first 13 episode run. We'll turn it back around and make 13 more and keep plumbing the depths of this weirdness. And, as always, if you somehow managed to watch all the way to this point, just say anything to us, because we would love to know that you're here in the void with us encountering enormity.
Speaker 1:Please All right, what the UFO? Thanks, bro, see you soon. Bye.