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- [Brian] UFOs. They're not just in the skies.
They're in the newspaper.
They're on TV. They're in old books,
and they're what your friends are talking about today.
They're in the stories you heard growing up,
and they keep coming back into our lives.
They're in our lives right now.
Since 2017, the media has been cramming
UFOs and alien visitation down our throats.
It's the latest craze on TV's pseudo-science
and pseudo-history networks.
The result is that between 2019 and 2021,
Americans' belief that some UFOs are aliens
has risen from 33% to 41%
according to a recent Gallup poll.
We can't help but think about aliens and UFOs,
but how much of that thinking is informed
by the real sciences involved?
My name is Brian Dunning, I'm a science writer
and I love coming out here to the desert
in the American west to look up at our amazing skies.
I've personally been lucky enough to see something,
three times in fact,
that I couldn't figure out what it might be.
Now, I did soon learn what they were
but for a few minutes I had a magical rush like no other.
There's something up there,
something we can't explain.
But we all have in the back of our minds what we hope it is.
This observatory is one of the places
where we look deep into space
to peek into the most interesting stars.
It makes us wonder who's out there.
In any given patch of the sky,
how many life forms are there
in just that little field of view?
Now, that's a question that should intrigue anyone,
but here's an even better one.
In that same patch of sky,
how many eyes are there looking back at us?
For me, personally,
that's about the most exciting question there is.
Now, I work for an educational nonprofit.
Sometimes we make movies,
sometimes we make videos or podcasts.
But in that educational role,
we can't just tell you what we think
or what we wish was true.
We're limited to what's verifiable.
So we report on the latest
and the greatest state of our knowledge,
what scientists have learned so far,
how they learned it, what they're still working on.
It's about our best knowledge and the latest data.
That's what we're going to talk about here.
You already know that I love to wonder
about our neighbors in the universe.
You already know that I'm fascinated by UFOs
and I want to learn more about them,
and you can't help but to have been exposed
to all the attention UFOs have been getting in the media
these past few years.
Navy videos. TV series.
Congressional hearings. Personalities.
It's been everywhere.
So obviously a lot of us are very interested
in these things.
So tonight I want to combine these,
I'm going to present a science-based report
free of any personal bias on this subject
that we all seem to have a mutual interest in.
What are these things in our sky?
What do we know, and how do we know it?
Who is out there – or isn't – and how do we know?
And of course, the million dollar question,
the one that really overrides all the others:
Are they visiting us?
Now, spoiler alert, we don't have all the answers yet,
but we do have a lot of them.
Are you ready?
I am.
Let's blast off.
One of the biggest questions we face as human beings
on the planet Earth is the possibility of alien life,
other worlds, maybe other civilizations,
other smart people who are like us in some ways
and unlike us in many others.
So what do the folks who study these questions think?
This is astrobiologist Dr. Kaitlin Rasmussen.
I spoke with her at the 107 inch telescope
at the McDonald Observatory in Texas.
- [Kaitlin] So I think the general opinion
in the field of astrobiology
is that there is a lot of life out there in the galaxy.
I really think that the galaxy
is absolutely teeming with life.
Whether that life is intelligent,
is really up for question, but I have no doubt
and many of my peers have no doubt
that there is a lot of life out there.
- [Brian] And her colleague, Miles Currie,
also an astrobiologist.
- Right, yeah, so I would say most astronomers
have come to the consensus that we think
there is some kind of life out there.
Now, whether that is intelligent life
or just microbes out there is a totally different question.
- [Brian] And this is Dakotah Tyler.
He's an astrophysicist.
- So most astronomers believe that there is life
in the universe, without a doubt.
- A lot, a little?
- A lot or a little could depend
upon exactly what you're talking about
in terms of intelligence or advanced civilization,
but I would say a lot of life.
- That shouldn't come as a surprise.
In 1952, Miller and Urey put a sample
of the primordial Earth's atmosphere into a test tube,
sparked it to simulate lightning,
and created more than 20 amino acids,
the basic building blocks of life.
But there was nothing about their mixture
unique to the Earth.
It was what the atmosphere would consist of
on any newly formed rocky volcanic planet.
The Miller-Urey experiment gets replicated all the time.
Only now we've refined it with better estimates
of the atmospheric composition
and we get even more amino acids produced.
Those same conditions have been happening on rocky planets
throughout the universe since the beginning of time.
So how many planets is that?
Well check this out.
It's a video from NASA showing all the exoplanets
we've found so far.
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We've found over 5,000,
but that number's going up so fast that 5,000
probably sounds comically low
by the time you're watching this.
And that super dense patch of planets right there,
it's not that there are more planets there
than anywhere else,
that's just where we happen to know about a lot of them
because it's where the Kepler space telescope was pointed
for the duration of its initial mission,
which was to do a really deep study
of just one tiny patch of sky.
There are actually even more there,
a lot more, that Kepler wasn't able to resolve;
and that's really what the entire Milky Way looks like.
In fact, we figure there are tens of billions of planets
and that's just right here in our local galaxy.
That's more planets than there are people on Earth.
Billions more.
On all those planets,
are there any civilizations right now?
Rich civilizations with culture, arts, science,
history and space programs of their own?
I don't know what your math tells you
but my math says there are probably many
out there right now.
If there are alien astrobiologists out there
and if they're asking these same questions,
then our Earth is going to be about the most exciting target
in the sky.
Allow me to explain.
When we look for life on other planets,
we use spectroscopic analysis
to look at the chemical makeup of their atmosphere.
By looking at the light spectrum,
we can see if that planet has water,
we can see if it has chlorophyll.
Astrobiologists have identified many spectra we can look for
representing all the different types
of chemical basis for life, not just carbon-based like us,
but all the other ways elements might bond together
to form living matter.
Now even with James Webb,
our best space telescopes almost have the ability,
but not quite.
But we're very close and our next generation telescopes
will for sure, within a few decades.
This century, we will almost certainly
identify exoplanets that have life of some kind.
So considering how many civilizations
are probably out there,
some of them must also know these same things
and some of them have also been looking at exoplanets.
Think of what Earth must look like to them.
71% water on its surface and all the chemical signatures
of life in its atmosphere.
Carbon is the most interactive element there is
and organic compounds are everywhere in our spectrum.
Earth is an alien astrobiologist's dream planet.
We are as enticing as any exoplanet could possibly be.
- We are absolutely a planet that screams,
"There is intelligent life here," not just life in general,
but life that is contributing to its environment
in a technological way.
- Considering the laws of large numbers,
it's highly probable that someone,
maybe tens or hundreds or thousands of them,
have already found Earth's incredible spectrum.
Someone out there probably knows we are here.
They know a few things about us.
That is an amazing, astounding, mind blowing thought,
and it's very exciting for those of us
who hope that the children of Earth
will one day meet our neighbors.
So as we talk about this subject,
let's keep it in context that there's a good chance
there are alien civilizations interested in us
and the scientific basis for that is real.
They'd probably love to visit us
just as much as we'd love to visit them.
Now, all that is wonderful and amazing,
but it's also where we bump into our first problem.
- The reason that, as astronomers,
we believe that life is so abundant in the universe
is because of the vastness.
It's kind of a numbers game.
But that vastness is the same reason
that we don't believe that that life
will ever get here to us on Earth.
- They can't get here.
Remember, we're trying to stick to reality,
not the Star Trek universe.
That means asking if it's possible to travel
faster than light; because civilizations
are going to be very, very far away.
- So as scientists, we are bound
by what we can test and observe.
And what we observe is that nothing can travel
the speed of light except for light itself.
It would take an infinite amount of energy
to accelerate anything with any mass at all
to the speed of light.
- So faster than light travel is not possible
because of the part of physics called relativity.
And in relativity, the faster you move,
the heavier you get and the shorter you get.
And so as you approach the speed of light,
you become infinitely massive and infinitely flat.
- I hear terms like relativity,
like Einstein and laws of physics.
Are these just ideas that human scientists made up?
- So you may naively think that the laws of physics
are something that we came up with as humans,
but these are not legislative laws.
These are really observations that we have verified
time and time and time again to the point
that we really consider them unbreakable laws.
- Is it possible that some aliens might come to us
from a different part of the universe
that might have different laws of physics?
- No, it is not possible.
The laws of physics are the same everywhere.
- How do you know?
- So we actually can use the James Webb space telescope
to look back in time because the farther away something is,
the longer light has been traveling to us.
And so when we look back in time,
we can see something called the cosmic microwave background.
Now this is the leftover light from the Big Bang
and this light dims like a dimmer switch
and we've been able to use the laws of physics to say,
"OK, it should have been this bright
at this point in time, and now it's this bright
at this point in time."
And those line up perfectly.
So we know that in different parts of the universe
that we can see billions and billions of light years away,
those laws of physics are exactly the same
as the laws of physics here on Earth.
- OK, so if the laws are the same everywhere now,
have they always been the same?
- By looking at gravitational lensing effects,
we've been able to determine that gravity
behaves the same today as it did 5 billion years ago
and 5 billion light years away.
- The entire universe obeys the laws of physics
as we know it.
We can look way back in the universe
and compare our observations to some of the models
that we create based on the laws of physics we know now
and we can see that these two things match.
So these laws of physics have been the same laws of physics
ever since the beginning as far as we can look back.
- [Brian] So that's disappointing.
These barriers to faster than light travel are the same here
as they are for a civilization
on the other side of the universe.
And those problems we face today
were the same for civilizations a billion years ago.
But the problems don't even end there.
I call this the Christmas tree problem,
and it has to do with the time element of communicating
with our neighbors.
Do you think there might be a radio greeting
from some alien civilization winging its way
through space toward us right now?
- So there may be greetings from alien civilizations
flying all over the place in the universe.
The problem is that you have to look
at the exact right place at the exact right time
to receive it.
- It turns out time is just as big a problem as distance.
Imagine a Christmas tree with strings of blinking lights.
Imagine that tree is the universe and each light
during that brief moment when it's illuminated
is the duration of a technological civilization,
from the moment they first develop the capability
to interact with other civilizations
to the moment they meet their end,
they get hit with a gamma ray burst
or a planet killer asteroid
or a war or a pandemic or whatever.
Maybe they exist as a technological civilization
for a million years or a hundred years,
and they're sprinkled everywhere throughout the cosmos,
an unknowable number of such civilizations.
But they don't all exist at the same time.
The chances of two Christmas tree lights
that are really close together
being on at the same time is small.
Even if we developed space travel at very close
to the speed of light,
for two civilizations to have physical contact
they'd have to be extremely close together
and at the same time.
So it's possible, and it probably happens,
it's probably happening some-where in the universe right now.
But the Christmas tree problem makes it much less likely
that any technological civilization
will ever get to visit a neighbor,
and that's a problem that we hate.
So here's the thing that almost always comes up
at this point in the conversations.
Aliens are more advanced than us.
They've probably figured out the laws of physics
better than we have.
So they're not limited by time or distance.
They're not bound by special relativity.
By all we poor humans know,
special relativity is among the most thoroughly tested
and proven of all the laws of physics.
But hey, maybe the aliens are smarter than us.
Aliens, if they're smarter than us,
can't they get around those laws
and break the laws of physics?
- You cannot break the laws of physics.
- OK, it's nice to just declare that like a proclamation,
but why can't the aliens know more than us?
- So any sufficiently intelligent alien civilization
is going to invent math.
And their math is going to tell them the exact same thing
that our math tells us,
and these are just the laws of physics.
- OK, let's say that we've got the mathematics wrong
and that faster than light travel is possible.
Now, obviously, not all alien civilizations out there
would figure it out, but remember,
there might be a huge number of them out there.
Enough of them would get it.
If distance doesn't matter anymore, the problems go away.
Advanced aliens without distance constraints
would be visiting civilizations everywhere.
Maybe some of them would want to remain hidden
or just examine us, but surely not all of them,
at least some of them would have jumped
onto the White House lawn to say, "Hey, here we are."
And by the same logic,
at least some of them might be hostile and destructive.
But look, we're here.
Nobody has destroyed us
and nobody has appeared on the White House lawn.
So work it backwards. If there are no
hostile or sociable long distance travelers,
that means there probably aren't any
long distance travelers.
Our lack of obvious visitors is really the best
empirical evidence that we have that nobody anywhere
has solved both the Christmas tree problem
and the problem of faster than light travel.
Remember we did point out earlier,
special relativity is among the most thoroughly tested
and proven of all the laws of physics.
Also, when we speculate that aliens
might not be bound by the same laws of physics we are,
what are we really saying?
We're saying they can do anything like gods
or genies or leprechauns.
- So the aliens have to abide by the same laws
of physics that we do, they aren't magic.
They're not Harry Potter.
They just can't do whatever they want.
- I think it's more likely that advanced aliens
understand and work with the laws of physics
the same as we do.
But again, I'm now just speculating outside of science.
If we want to come up with reliable answers
to these big questions we're asking,
we need to stick to reality and not speculate
about what we think gods and genies and leprechauns could do.
Or Harry Potter.
In logic, we call that a special pleading.
We can't just say,
"Oh, the aliens don't have any limitations.
Us poor dumb humans are just not able to comprehend
their superiority."
Well, that's not science, that's wishful thinking.
It's convincing yourself something is true
because you want it to be true.
I want it to be true too
but I also want to understand what's real.
The way we do that is to establish a very high bar
for the quality of evidence that we're going to accept.
If we present bad evidence, it weakens our case;
so we will only accept good evidence.
You might think this video
looks like excellent quality evidence, but it's not.
It's terrible.
I know that, because I made it myself using an app on my phone
to add a flying saucer to my video.
But you should have known it was terrible evidence too
because all videos or pictures
are what we call anecdotal evidence.
That refers to anything
that can't be directly studied or tested.
I can directly study and test this rock
because I'm holding it,
but you can't because you're just watching it on a video.
As far as you are able to prove
it might be nothing more than a special effect.
Pictures or videos will never meet that high bar
of evidence that we need.
Millions of people are better than me at faking videos.
And more than half a century ago,
hoaxers were throwing hubcaps in the air
and absolutely persuading many
that they took authentic photos of a flying saucer.
People accepted bad evidence
and the result was that they were wrong.
Verbal stories or stories presented on UFO TV programs
are also completely anecdotal and very untrustworthy.
They get more and more exaggerated
every time they're retold.
Even though the people on these shows
often seem trustworthy,
we have to force ourselves to not simply believe
everything on television.
We have to force ourselves to be open to information
that's not what we want to hear.
This is how we improve our knowledge.
Another way we scrutinize evidence to make sure
it meets our high bar is to try to falsify our theories.
What does the cancer researcher want most of all?
She wants to find a cure for the particular cancer
she's working on.
So if she gets the slightest positive result,
the cancer responded slightly better
to this one candidate drug than to the others,
she knows the most premature and foolhardy thing she can do
is to immediately declare,
"Yay, I've found it.
This cancer has been cured."
Instead, she has to search for any possible
alternate explanation for that positive result
so she can eliminate it.
Maybe it was caused by
residue from cleaning her test equipment.
The most important step she takes
is to find ways to falsify any positive result.
That's how she makes sure she's left
with only the best evidence that passes all scrutiny.
So if the UFO researcher wants to convincingly show
that aliens are visiting us,
he has to apply that same extreme scrutiny
to his theory to find every possible way
that something else might account for his evidence.
The video that looks like a craft making movements
that airplanes can't,
might just be an optical illusion
from the way the camera's moving.
He has to absolutely eliminate that possibility
and then he has to work just as hard
to find the next thing that might explain the video.
So falsify, eliminate every other possibility
if we want to make a strong case,
we have to make sure it stands up
to the scrutiny of falsification.
So to do that, let's start by looking
at the whole history of UFOs that were eventually identified
and see what kinds of things have fooled eyewitnesses
in the past.
Now, luckily we have lots of data for this.
A number of authors have compiled great big data sets,
and even Wikipedia has an article
on the most common explanations for UFO sightings
that were ultimately explained.
The #1 most common cause of solved UFO cases
is misidentification of celestial objects,
basically planets and stars, and mostly Venus,
but also satellites, meteors, and orbital debris.
Every time SpaceX launches a train of Starlink satellites,
which appear in the sky as a giant long line of lights,
I get a ton of messages from people asking me,
"Whoa, what the heck was this?" Celestial objects
fool experienced sky watchers every day;
so they're the most important phenomenon we have to try
and find a match for in order to rule it out.
- With all of the artificial satellites
that are in orbit around the Earth,
it wouldn't be hard to imagine a pilot seeing something
and not knowing exactly what it was, and tagging it
as an unidentified flying object,
which for them it would be.
- And here's an air traffic controller.
You'll meet him soon.
- We've had pilots report a line of aircrafts
a hundred miles across, 30 aircraft, what is it?
- And they're seeing a Starlink train?
- They're seeing, yes.
- The second most common cause of solved UFO cases
is airborne clutter, mostly weather balloons,
but also birds, party balloons, and conventional aircraft
including planes, blimps, especially advertising blimps,
drones, and helicopters.
All of these fool serious UFO spotters every day.
And so we also have to try and match these to our sighting
to eliminate them as the explanation.
Airborne clutter also includes hoaxes,
like knuckleheads launching something on purpose
to trick people.
But hoaxing is such a minuscule part of the UFO phenomenon
that we're really not even going to spend any time on it.
Another common cause of solved UFO cases
is misidentification of lights or objects on the ground.
Horizons can disappear in a number of atmospheric
and lighting conditions,
and lights and other objects on the ground
can often appear to be in the air.
Sometimes it takes some real outside the box thinking
to discover that your UFO was actually something
on the ground.
But again, this fools smart people every day.
The last potential ID for solved UFOs
is perhaps the most important for our purposes
and that's an extraordinary craft.
By an extraordinary craft,
I mean an actual physical vehicle of some kind
that is not an airplane or any other previously known
and familiar type.
An extraordinary craft is one that has capabilities
or characteristics never before seen.
If we had an actual alien spaceship,
that would be an extraordinary craft.
If we had some new kind of vehicle with
flight characteristics that are apparently impossible,
maybe Chinese, maybe Russian, maybe American,
but truly paradigm upending,
that would be an extraordinary craft.
The reason I say this is the most important
for our purposes is that in the entire history of UFOlogy,
in not one single case ever
has an extraordinary craft been found
to be the explanation for a UFO.
Not once. Ever.
Not a single extraordinary craft has ever been found,
at least not that meets our high standard of evidence,
which means rejecting the many anecdotal stories
of captured alien debris.
So if we go through and eliminate
all the more likely possibilities:
celestial objects, airborne clutter,
objects on the ground,
conventional aircraft, and optical illusions,
and if we believe an extraordinary craft
must be responsible for the sighting,
this is where we become the ones
making the extraordinary claim,
and where we must present extraordinary evidence.
To prove something that's truly unprecedented,
our standard of evidence must be crazy high
and that's why it's so important
to go through the falsification process.
So now let's look at the evidence we have
through this filter of setting the bar high
and let's falsify everything we can.
I want to start with a couple of really bad examples,
just to illustrate how easy it is
for a really amazing story to spread
when nobody subjects it to any scrutiny.
Where do we find these?
On television, of course.
People forget that TV shows are entertainment.
Nobody at the network cares how accurate it is.
They only care that you watch.
And so they let the stories get exaggerated
and completely distorted.
One of these is the Rendlesham Forest case from 1980.
At a US Air Force base inside England,
airmen on duty saw some bright lights
flashing through the trees of Rendlesham Forest
just outside the base perimeter.
They went to investigate and found what they described
as a craft of unknown origin landed inside the forest.
They approached it and one of the men studied
and touched it for 45 minutes,
logging the details in a notebook.
But they were ordered never to discuss what happened.
And so it's been called one of the great UFO coverups
in history.
Something that nearly always happens with stories like this
that get told and retold on TV shows
is that each network has to outdo the last one.
And so the eyewitnesses' stories get magnified and expanded
every time another network tells it.
When we go back to the original documentation,
the actual records from that night,
they tell a very different story.
Now, the men did indeed follow a flashing light
through the trees, and suspecting that there might
have been a crash of some kind in the forest,
they called the local constables, who,
being familiar with the area,
found the men were seeing nothing more
than the flashing light of Orfordness Lighthouse
about six miles away
and they did not investigate further.
A colonel from the base accompanied the men
with an audio recorder and recorded the following:
- [Brian] Now every lighthouse has its own unique interval
for how often it flashes.
That way mariners can identify which lighthouse they're seeing.
The Orfordness Lighthouse,
which is sadly gone now,
flashed at an interval of exactly five seconds.
So let's hear that audio again,
but with a beep added every five seconds.
[beep]
- [Brian] What about the guy who said he examined the craft
in the forest writing down the details in his notebook?
That didn't become a part of the story until 1996,
16 years after it happened.
He'd given other interviews on TV shows as recently as 1994
and had never said anything about seeing a craft.
And it wasn't until another TV show in 2003
that he first mentioned having a notebook.
Back in 1980 when this happened,
he had told the Air Force interviewer
that they followed the flashing light
but couldn't get very close to it.
And that's all.
Then every time a new TV show came out about this story,
it got bigger and bigger,
and more story elements were invented.
Go back to the original accounts
and it's documented that nothing interesting
happened at all.
There's no evidence that any of the events
added by the TV shows ever happened.
So Rendlesham Forest does not satisfy
our standard of evidence.
There's another story that highlights the importance
of going back to original accounts.
This one comes from Zimbabwe in 1994.
At a rural school in Africa,
62 children reported that a flying saucer came down
and landed in a field just outside their playground,
and some small men in black came out
and gave them all a telepathic message
that they should take better care of the Earth.
The 62 children drew pictures of the craft
and told the story of what happened.
Their stories and pictures were all consistent.
Even a prominent Harvard professor interviewed them
and reported their story was absolutely authentic.
Moreover, these were said to have been poor African children
who would've had no prior exposure to science fiction
or pop culture, and wouldn't even have known about UFOs
or flying saucers.
It's said to be one of the most compelling cases
of proof of alien visitation.
The problem here is that we don't have any original accounts
of what might have happened there, if anything.
First of all, these were not poor African children
from some village.
This school was among the most expensive private schools
serving Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, 15 minutes away.
These were wealthy kids,
mostly South African and British who had HBO at home
and went to the movies and watched TV.
And what they'd been watching for the past few days
had been nothing but UFO hype.
A great fireball had broken up in the night sky over Africa,
which we later learned had been the re-entry
of the Zenit-2 rocket
from the Russian Cosmos 2290 satellite launch.
The TV and radio stations were buzzing with calls
for photos and the best UFO stories.
The editor of UFO Afrinews heard about the children's story
and went to the school.
She placed them into groups
and held group story sharing sessions.
They made and shared their drawings together.
This is the exact opposite
of how witnesses are supposed to be interviewed,
the most crucial step of which is to separate them
completely as early as possible.
Because now, having influenced one another,
the children's stories were hopelessly cross-contaminated
and so of course the stories were similar.
But the most destructive influencing
came from the Harvard professor two months later.
This was John Mack, an author who firmly believed
in alien abduction. He was actually under investigation
by Harvard at the time
for telling people who wondered if they'd been abducted
by aliens that that's exactly what had happened to them.
His whole thing was persuading people
that they'd been visited by aliens,
to the point of breaking Harvard's ethical standards.
That is not an impartial observer.
Whatever actually happened at the school on that day
is impossible to know, because of the sloppy way
the eyewitness accounts were handled.
We do know that 62 children say they saw something,
but whatever they originally reported was quickly lost
and the great majority of children present,
some 200 others, reported seeing nothing at all.
We are looking for extraordinary hard evidence,
but these two stories offer nothing
but horrible contaminated anecdotes.
Maybe we can find something better
if we look at some of the official government reports.
Perhaps the most concerning
of all the government UFO accounts
is the story that you may have heard
about UFOs being found to have the ability
to disable United States nuclear missiles.
If anything would warrant official investigation,
it would be that, right?
So here's Congressman Mike Gallagher
grilling representatives of the US Navy's UAP task force
at a congressional hearing in May, 2022.
- [Gallagher] It's also been reported that there have been
UAP observed and interacting with and flying over
sensitive military facilities, particularly
and not just ranges, but some facilities housing
our strategic nuclear forces.
One such incident allegedly occurred
at Malmstrom Air Force Base in which 10 of our nuclear ICBMs
were rendered inoperable.
At the same time, a glowing red orb was observed overhead.
I'm not commenting on the accuracy of this.
I'm simply asking you whether you're aware of it
and whether you have any comment on the accuracy
of that report.
- [Colleague] Let me pass that to Mr. Bray,
you've been looking at UAPs over the last three years.
- [Bray] That data is not within the holdings
of the UAP task force.
- OK, but are you aware of the the report
or that the data exists somewhere?
- I have heard stories.
I have not seen the official data on that.
- Well, I have, because it's been publicly available
for a long time.
The event Gallagher is referring to happened in 1967,
well over half a century ago,
at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana,
home to the 341st strategic missile wing of Minuteman ICBMs.
The only reason anyone knows about this incident
is this book, "Faded Giant", co-written in 2005
by UFO author Robert Salas.
He's written at least three books about UFOs,
and he was actually one of the missile officers
on duty that day in 1967.
So to learn more about this, I called up a friend of mine.
- My name is Hal Bidlack,
I'm a retired Lieutenant Colonel
in the United States Air Force.
In my career, I spent my first assignment
as a finger on the button guy, an ICBM launch officer.
I ultimately earned a PhD and taught
at the Air Force Academy for much of my career.
- Are there a lot of missileers out there?
- It's a relatively small and tight community
within the military.
- So had you heard this story before?
- No, and frankly, that makes me suspicious.
As I said, it's a small, tight community,
and odd things do happen
where missiles break from time to time,
and we know about those.
But the fact that I've never heard of this story
is yet another reason to suspect it's of doubtful origin.
- A lot of people have tried to find out
what really happened there,
including by filing Freedom of Information Act requests.
In 2001, the Air Force responded with 84 pages.
A lot of it consisted of the reports of technicians
from Boeing, which built the Minuteman,
and these technicians were called in
to investigate and figure out what went wrong.
Apparently an entire flight of 10 missiles
all did reboot themselves on that day.
The report focused on the power to these launch facilities.
How do these launch facilities get their power?
- Well just like any homeowner, they plug into the grid,
that is the primary source of power.
There's also backups in terms of batteries
and diesel generators, should that power fail
or be out of tolerance.
- So according to this now declassified 1967 report
from Malmstrom Air Force Base,
Fergus Electric is the company that supplied
the commercial power.
So it says here, a 7.2 kilovolt transformer
shorted in the line to cite Echo three at 14:50,
March 16th, 1967.
This transformer is located on a farm two miles south
of the Winifred substation.
Automatic reclosure switches at Winifred substation
opened and were re-closed manually
after transformer replacement later in the day.
This caused the brine chiller problem at Echo 1.
Sites Echo 3, 5, 6, 9 and 10 transferred to standby power.
Site Echo 1 transferred to direct current operation.
Then it goes on to talk about the same thing happening
at sites 7 and 8.
But does that seem to make sense to you?
- Absolutely.
The ICBM sites are, by design, in very rural
and distant locations,
and they rely on the local power grid.
They're also designed to protect themselves.
So yes, if a current problem occurred,
they would cut themselves off from that,
they'd restart their electrical power,
and wait for the outside current to stabilize.
- Could a power event like this cause the missiles
to reboot themselves?
- Well, it certainly wouldn't be a common event
but it's also not unheard of.
- So if the only thing that happened
was this power surge from the blown transformer,
and that caused the missiles to reboot normally,
how long were they actually down for?
The report goes on to say that the exact time estimates
couldn't be established,
but it was approximately 10 to 40 seconds
that the missiles were offline.
- Seems reasonable.
- So in your experience,
an event like what we're talking about
would've been unremarkable enough
that you say you hadn't heard of it?
- Well in that time and place
it would be remarkable just because it's very uncommon
to have anything out of the ordinary happen.
Missiles have about a 99.9% reliability in On Alert record.
So it would certainly be known at the time,
but it would not be passed down through the years
as some kind of shocking event.
- In his books, Salas actually attributed
the missile restarts not to the power outage, but to UFOs,
the glowing red orbs
that Congressman Gallagher asked about.
Well, the Air Force did check that out.
They found, quote, "Rumors of unidentified flying objects"
around the area of Echo flight during the time of fault
were disproven.
A mobile strike team,
which had checked all November flight's launch facilities,
on the morning of March 16th, 1967,
were questioned and stated that no unusual activity
"or sightings were observed."
Here is what actually happened.
That power outage caused all 10 missiles
to reboot themselves.
They were down for no more than 10 to 40 seconds total.
Then, eight days later in the town of Belt, Montana,
someone reported seeing a UFO to the local paper.
There's no logical reason to conclude one thing
had anything to do with the other.
38 years later, Salas writes a book
about what he thinks he remembers
and he's sure the UFO and the missile reboots
were on the same day at the same place.
The records show he's wrong.
I think he's probably honestly mistaken;
38 years is a long time; but regardless, he's wrong.
And now today we've got something
of a conspiracy theory community who believe
it's impossible that he was mistaken,
and therefore the Air Force must be covering up the truth,
a truth revealed in the book.
So Colonel Bidlack, you and Salas both worked in a field
dealing with a lot of classified events.
- You bet.
- If the Air Force classified something or covered it up,
would you be allowed to freely write about it and reveal it?
- No, I could not.
If I chose to do that,
I'd be setting myself up for significant problems
under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
- Publishing about classified events is no joke.
Mark Owen was the pen name of one of the Navy SEALs
who got Bin Laden, and he wrote a 2012 book about it
called "No Easy Day".
To get the book out fast,
he and his publisher decided to skip submitting the book
to the Department of Defense for review.
Owen never got charged with a crime,
but he had to turn over all 6.8 million dollars in royalties
that he'd made and give it to the government.
Tom Clancy, author of the Jack Ryan novels,
famously got questioned by the FBI after his book
"The Hunt for Red October" came out.
Apparently it did reveal classified information,
but he showed them all the legal sources
where he got everything,
so there wasn't anything they could do.
So he went on to write freely about this.
He wrote about it in two more books.
He's spoken about it on podcasts,
and he's spoken about it at UFO conferences;
What does that tell you?
- Well, it tells you the Air Force just doesn't care,
which strongly suggests that it's fiction.
And as we know, fiction is not classified.
- So the only evidence that UFOs can deactivate
our nuclear missiles is one man's 38 year old memories
that contradict everything that's in the record.
That's about as anecdotal as it gets.
The claim of UFOs having the ability
to disable nuclear arsenals does not meet
any reasonable standard of evidence.
Let's talk more about official government UFO reports.
We have one from a president of the United States,
and that's about as official as you can get.
You may have heard that President Jimmy Carter
once saw a UFO back in the 1960s
before he was the president.
It's a story he's told in public any number of times,
but it wasn't until the wide reach of podcasts
that we were actually able to solve it.
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast
is one that played a role.
To tell the story of what happened, we're going to
begin by traveling down to Plains, Georgia,
to the private residence of President Jimmy Carter.
- Hi, I'm Josh Carter, welcome to Plains.
I'm President Carter's grandson
and we're sitting in his office right now.
- So how did we come to have President Carter
on the Skeptics Guide podcast?
- So Jay would have a question at the end of every episode
that would, for audience engagement,
he would ask a question about any given topic.
And one of the questions that he asked was.
- [Podcaster] Name the former world leader
that used to laugh at UFO believers
but later became a believer himself
when he himself witnessed one?
Think about that and be the first one to answer correctly.
Good luck everyone.
- And I was like, "Man, I know exactly"
"who he's talking about." So I emailed the Skeptics Guide.
- We got an email from a guy
who claimed to be President Jimmy Carter's grandson.
And I have to say that I was a little bit skeptical.
- So Steve emailed me back and he goes.
"OK, we believe your story and we believe what you said,
but do you have any proof?
What proof can you give us
that you're Jimmy Carter's grandson?"
And so I sent him my wedding photo with me,
my wife and my grandparents standing next to me.
Pretty definitive proof that I am who I say I am.
- So I invited Josh to come on the show
and tell us the story of President Carter's UFO sighting.
- And I said, "Well, I could,
but would you like to talk to my grandfather instead?"
And he was like,
"Yes, sorry, I'd rather talk to your grandfather than you.
No offense."
So I called my grandfather
and I asked if he would be on the Skeptics Guide,
and he said, "Sure."
- So in 2007, episode 105 of our podcast,
we had on President Jimmy Carter and he told us his story.
- [Steve] So he told that story, and for several years anyway,
that was the end of it.
- Meanwhile, there's this professor from Georgia Tech,
Jere Justus.
- Well, as a native Georgian,
I've always been interested in Georgia history
and was one day reading the book by Don Rhodes,
"Georgia Myth and Legends".
And it gives an account of Carter seeing the UFO
and includes a replica of his actual UFO report.
And when I read the details of that description, I said,
"That sounds exactly like someone describing
seeing a barium release cloud."
When I started graduate school, I needed some support
so I got a job as a research assistant
on an Air Force project and one of the things involved
was rocket launches from Eglin Air Force Base.
- So what were these rockets doing?
- Well, the rockets that released the barium
would take up a canister, if you will,
of barium chemical and release it out
at a point in the atmosphere.
And this would be in sunlight at altitude
but dark on the surface
so you could get good pictures of this glowing release
of barium material.
- So the barium itself was in sunlight
and you're viewing it against a black sky?
- That's correct.
- So one day out of the blue,
I get an email from this guy Jere Justus.
He is a Georgia Tech professor and he just sends me
an email saying,
"Hey, I think I figured out your grandfather's UFO story."
- The sunlight would be strong enough to actually ionize
part of the barium
and the neutral barium would look greenish bluish color.
The ionized barium would look sort of reddish color
and would stretch out along the field lines
of the Earth's magnetic field.
And so this was part of the studies
as to determine characteristics
of the Earth's magnetic field at those altitudes.
- The Air Force was absolutely launching sounding rockets
during that time and continues to to this day
for a variety of purposes.
They would have had different things in them
that they would have dumped in the atmosphere, for example,
to test radio reflectability and other aspects
of military operations.
So it's not unusual or odd at all that a person
could have seen a cloud like that in the sky.
- As it starts out as a small little point of light
that glows and it expands
into a big giant orb that turns red or blue,
depending on how the sun hits it
and how the barium gets ionized and then it dissipates.
And I was like, "Wow, that sounds exactly like the story
that I've heard my entire life
of my grandfather's UFO."
- So did you pass that on?
And what did the president think of that?
- He was excited about it.
He was excited to have an answer
and moving from unidentified to identified,
was very satisfactory for him.
To know what it was.
Because when my grandfather told that story,
a lot of people assumed that he saw Venus.
He grew up looking at the sky,
he grew up interested in astronomy,
he grew up as a naval officer.
He knew what Venus looked like and he was offended
that people thought that he didn't know what Venus was.
- Professor Justus tracked down
the exact launch on the right day and time
that President Carter had been outside the Lions Club,
and found that Carter's estimates of direction
and elevation had been almost exactly right on the money.
- Well, my initial findings,
I sent to the Carter Center and heard back from them
that they had passed it along to President Carter
for his analysis and he basically concurred
that it was plausible that that was indeed what he had seen.
And so to the president's own satisfaction,
it turns out that his UFO was a fairly exotic piece
of airborne clutter: an artificial barium cloud.
OK, so the UFO stories that have gotten
by far the most attention over the past few years
have been the videos that came from the US Navy.
Originally there were three of them called Gimbal, Go Fast,
and Nimitz, also called the Tic Tac video.
These videos are from the camera screens
in the F-18 fighters that were there on the scene.
Now a lot of people feel that what's shown in these videos
are extraordinary craft making movements
beyond the capability of anything we know of.
And if you don't understand the meaning
of all the numbers and other data shown on the screens,
it would be pretty easy to get that same impression.
So I wanted to talk with someone who does understand
all the stuff on the screens,
and who has an even deeper knowledge
of the entire scene being presented in these videos.
Now it just so happens that a friend of mine
by the name of Mick West happens to be that guy.
Ever since these videos were released,
Mick has been making appearances on TV and online
all around the world explaining what we're seeing.
Before he fell into being basically the world's foremost
UFO video analyst, Mick did 3D physics simulations
in video game development.
He's also created a piece of proprietary software
called Sitrec, which can combine data
from many different sources to recreate
what's in videos like these,
a recreation that's geospatially accurate.
- Sitrec is a tool I developed,
it's called the Situation Recreation Tool.
And the idea is that we take a video of a UFO,
like this one here and then make my own version of it
by creating a full 3D simulation
that's mathematically accurate.
- So what we've got here is that's the original video
and that's your 3D recreation?
- That's right.
And as you can see, it's pretty much
the same in terms of the way the cloud moves
and this little object here moves the same way.
And I can zip through the video
and we can see it moving along.
Here's the plane moving along that's taking the video
and here's the track of the object,
the potential track of the object.
- So how do you know where the plane was?
How do you know where the object was?
Where do you get all this data?
- Well, for the plane itself down here we get all the data
from this screen here.
We know what the bank angle is by extracting, by using
motion capture techniques to extract the angle here.
We know the heading of the camera here,
53 degrees left, 2 degrees down.
And we can use that to create these lines of sight here.
And so we've got the little plane flying along here
and we have its targeting part
and we know what direction it's pointing in.
So we know that the other object
is somewhere along all of these lines of sight.
We don't know how far away it is though.
So I allow the user to experiment with things like that
and we take this little slider here
and we can adjust how far away
the actual theoretical object is.
- So let's start with the Navy video called Gimbal,
- Right. - What's up with that?
- So this is the Gimbal video.
It looks like a kind of saucer shaped craft
flying over a cloud base.
It's viewed in infrared.
And the claim is that it's an actual flying saucer
and it's moving with no visible means of propulsion.
And it's particularly interesting
because towards the end of the video
it does this little rotation here,
which isn't something that a normal plane could do.
- So what do you think is actually going on?
- We've got two possibilities here.
It could be something that's close to the plane
in some kinda weird curvy path back here.
We could be doing this weird curve.
Or it's something that could be further away
doing a straight line.
And I think the most likely thing for this particular video
is that what we're looking at
is something that's actually quite far away
and it's perhaps another plane moving in a straight line
and what we're seeing is the back of the plane.
- It doesn't look like a distant jet.
- No, I think what we're actually seeing
isn't the shape of the object itself,
but the shape of the infrared glare from this object,
like if you were to take a flashlight like this one here
and you point it at the camera,
you get a glare around it which is a certain shape
and because of the way the camera on this jet is mounted,
when it traverse a certain angle,
it actually has to do this rotation
and it has to do it because of the gimbal system,
which coincidentally is the name of the video,
the official Navy name of the video, the Gimbal video.
- Is there anything on the screen
that tells you the angle of the gimbal?
- There's nothing that tells you the angle of the gimbal,
but what you do get is this azimuth angle
and this other angle here, which is the elevation angle.
And you can use those to calculate
what the gimbal angle actually has to be.
- I see.
- So if you move this along,
you can see as you move around a certain region,
it has to do a rotation in order to keep pointing
in a certain direction.
- That one's a really interesting problem
because we only have video, just the image
of what the plane's cameras were seeing.
If it was a radar screen,
we would know how far away the object was
and how it was moving.
But that data doesn't exist so that makes analysts like Mick
have to go the long way around and reverse engineer
the entire situation.
- I think the most likely explanation
is that it's another military jet
that is just about 20 to 30 miles away,
just flying away and we're just looking
basically up its tailpipe,
at its jet engines and that's creating the glare.
- There you have it.
Probably nothing out of the ordinary at all.
- All right, let's look at the video they call Go Fast.
- This is the Go Fast video.
It looks like something is moving very fast,
hence the name Go Fast.
We see this little white dot and it looks like
it's zipping over the surface of the ocean.
At the start of the video you see them trying
to lock onto it and then they finally do lock onto it
and now the the pod itself is tracking it.
So the claim here is that this is something
with no visible means of propulsion, it's cold,
we see it's white, which means cold in this mode
and it's moving very, very fast.
So people think, people get very excited about this one.
- Yeah, I mean it looks pretty exciting to me.
How could this be something not moving fast?
- Well, the interesting thing about this video
is that we get a lot of information on screen.
We have here this 4.3 nautical miles range,
which is the distance from the camera to the object.
And we have this angle we're looking down, 27 degrees,
and we have the altitude of the plane here, 25,000 feet.
So we can take this angle here and this distance
and we can do 4.3 times the sin of 27
tells you how far below the plane it is.
Very simple high school trigonometry.
Turns out it's about 11,000 feet down.
Subtract that from 25,000 feet, you get 14,000 feet.
So it's actually 14,000 feet above the ocean.
It's not down by the ocean.
It's halfway between this plane that's taking the video
and the ocean service itself,
which means that it's actually moving very slowly.
- [Brian] I've heard people who should know
what they're talking about, pilots, military pilots,
people in these government hearings saying that
"No; what this video shows is something going very fast."
- It looks like it's moving very fast
and it's a very compelling illusion.
Something that's far away moving fast
looks the same as something that's close and moving slow.
But you've got to do the trigonometry,
you've got to take these numbers into account
and they're simply not doing that.
If they do the math, they'll get the same answer that I do.
- But even the pilots thought
that this was something extraordinary.
- Can pilots be wrong about something like that?
Well, I asked another friend of mine,
remember we saw him earlier?
Jason Bush, who happens to be an air traffic controller.
So do pilots ever make mistakes like the rest of us?
- Absolutely.
They make big mistakes, small mistakes every day.
- What are some common mistakes you see pilots make?
- A pilot might read back the wrong altitude,
obviously see it in the news sometimes
where a pilot might try to land at the wrong airport.
Both civilian and military have done that.
- So you're saying pilots are human?
- Pilots are absolutely human.
- The error so many people make with this particular video
is caused by one of the most common optical illusions.
It's called the motion parallax illusion.
Mick shot this little video in his yard to demonstrate it.
He hung this ping pong ball from a tree,
then walked past it with his camera.
When you zoom in, it looks like the ball
is moving at great speed,
but the ball's not moving at all, only you are.
That's the motion parallax illusion.
It's why the object seems to be moving relative to the ocean
in the Go Fast video.
And it's why the distant plane seems to be moving
relative to the clouds in the Gimbal video.
So I wondered if pilots are trained
in this common optical illusion.
To find out, I took a flight with another friend,
Chris Freeze, who's a highly experienced flight instructor.
- I'm on the short list.
I've got over 3000 hours of dual instruction given,
I've been a flight instructor for about 15 years.
- Chris knows what gets taught to pilots and what doesn't.
- Do pilots know what the motion parallax illusion is?
- Probably not in said term.
I mean flight instructors are trained in the idea
of parallax when it comes to the cockpit.
But in terms of motion,
I've never heard it in any of my training.
- It's just a common thing that can fool anyone.
Do pilots make the same kind of mistakes as other people?
- Absolutely.
Pilots are not perfect, controllers are not perfect.
- Pilots are not sky gods, they're regular people.
They put their pants on one leg at a time.
- What is it that makes pilots, especially military pilots,
better observers than the rest of us?
- I mean, they have got some unique equipment
that the civilian market doesn't have.
They've got faster equipment than the 182
that we're flying right here.
But at the end of the day,
they're just people flying airplanes.
- One of the leading guesses for what that thing is
in the Go Fast video is, believe it or not,
a simple weather balloon floating along.
It could even be a Mylar party balloon.
How it looks in the video is exactly how balloons look
on that same camera.
- I had a student the other day, we were flying along,
he swore he saw a drone at 4,000 feet.
It could have been a Mylar balloon.
I think it probably was a Mylar balloon
given the altitude and the like
and especially where it was,
I mean over Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
- I understand that if you are in the heat of flying,
you're not necessarily going to do Mick's same calculations
to see how high that little dot is.
But these are military pilots.
Aren't professionals trained
to be able to tell how far away a dot is?
- Controllers are not better at judging the size
or speed of a single dot.
Something could be up close moving slow
and it could match exactly what something far away
moving fast is going.
You have no idea what the speed is
unless you know how far away something is.
- Is a trained pilot better able than a layperson
to judge the size, speed and distance of a single dot?
- No.
- So in short, all indications are that this was nothing
more exotic than a balloon.
Alright, so now let's look at the Nimitz video.
- Right, so the Nimitz video, shot back in 2004.
Again, it shows a little blob way off in the distance.
And the interesting thing about this video
is that this little blob appears
to make sudden movements now and again
and people have claimed that the movements it's making
are inconsistent with a human craft,
like it's accelerating far too fast,
the G-forces will be far too intense for a human pilot.
So they claim that it makes these sudden movements
which are impossible.
- Wow.
It just went flying off the screen
at a billion miles an hour.
- Yeah.
It looks like it's actually moving.
It looks like there's actual motion of the craft.
There's a couple of movements in particular, right?
Right here you'll see it zip down
from the center to the outside.
It's just like hanging out in the middle there.
Then all of a sudden it seems to disappear.
- Yeah.
Well it's on video. I mean, how do you?
- If you go back and you analyze these in depth,
you'll see that every time it does a movement,
it actually coincides with some kind of camera motion.
We can see that the person taking the video
is actually switching between modes, between zoom levels,
between types of camera throughout the entire video.
And every time it does that, the camera loses lock.
- Is there something on the screen
that tells us what the zoom level is or the type of camera?
- Right here, it says here,
It says "NAR", in the corner, it says, "1X zoom."
These combine to tell you what the zoom level is.
This is the optical path that it's using,
narrow at the moment, and this is digital zoom.
Right up here it says "IR" and in some points in the video
that says "TV", right here it's saying "TV".
And when it switches between TV and IR,
if you watch that here,
you saw that little movement right there at the start?
- Yeah.
- When it switches from one camera mode to another,
it loses lock on the object and it very briefly
just keeps moving in the way it was moving before.
So here we're changing modes.
It does a little movement to the side.
Same thing happened right there.
It just switched modes again,
it did a little movement to the side.
Where it gets interesting is when it changes
between a narrow field of view and a wide field of view.
Here we're in narrow field of view,
meaning we're really zoomed in and we're going to change
to a medium or a wide field of view.
And we do that here, and we see it's had to,
the object zips off.
Now the reason it's zipping off
is kind of similar to what happens with a microscope.
When you're looking through a microscope
and you change from one magnification to another,
you'll see it looks like the whole image is moving.
- Yeah, because the lens actually moves out of the way.
- Yeah, the lens,
you change from one lens to another
and that's what's happening here.
This object isn't moving off to the side.
All that's happening is one optical pathway
is rotating into position.
It's basically an internal thing in the camera,
a little prism rotates or a little mirror rotates.
Now, right at the end of the video,
the one that people talk about the most is this one here.
We're in medium field of view,
but it's going to change to narrow field of view,
means he's going to zoom in on it.
And that happens right about here.
So we change modes, as this indicator lags a little bit,
and when the camera comes back up,
the object is just outside the bars
and it widens the bars, tries to get it back in again,
it's just outside still, widens it,
for some reason it narrows it there
and now it's lost it, it's gone.
It's outside.
It tries to get it again.
It switches to 2X zoom at that point.
So this jump here isn't an actual motion.
- Oh...
- This is actually just switching from one zoom level
to another zoom level, especially that one.
And then the object basically just drifts off screen.
- So can we take a look at this in Sitrec
and see what that object is actually doing?
- Sure.
So here we have the plane flying along.
It's basically flying in a straight line
and it's looking up at something off in the distance,
that's this yellow track way off in the distance.
And we know that it's somewhere along these lines of sight
because we have these angular lines.
So we — a good guess as to where it might be
if we then look at this from above
is that it's just way off in the distance
and it's just flying away and a bit to the left.
- I mean it looks like something moving,
it seems to move the same, a similar distance
in a similar amount of time as the plane taking the movie.
- Yes, you can tell by the fact
that these lines here are about the same length
that it's moving at about the same speed
as the plane itself,
which suggests it's probably another plane.
- But if you notice, it's just a weird Tic Tac blob shape.
It's not shaped like a plane.
Here's why.
- So here's some thermal camera footage of some jets
and you can see more or less the shape of the jet there.
But when the camera's in a certain configuration
a little bit earlier, all you see is this blob.
You can't see the actual shape of the plane itself
because the heat of the engine is creating this glare
which obscures the shape of the engine.
And I think that's what we're seeing in the Gimbal video.
- So the other one I wanted to ask you about
is this green pyramid video where we seem to have
giant green pyramid shaped spaceships
flying around in the sky over Navy ships.
What's going on with that?
- Well, this was a really interesting video.
It looks like this video is shot with night vision.
So everything appears green.
It's not actually green.
And it looks like we are seeing some kind
of flying green triangle, which is a very interesting thing.
- I should say so.
- And it is shot by a Navy sailor on a Navy ship.
So we know it's the official thing
and we know that it was looked at by the UAP task force
and they tried to figure out what it was.
Now we see a couple more.
We see a couple more triangles and then there's some more
down here and they're not moving.
They're in a very particular configuration.
And the claim was that this actually shows a whole bunch
of drones in the sky.
They said these were drones.
That's a drone, that was a drone,
all these were triangular shaped drones.
- So what else might they be?
- The odds of all these drones
being all exactly the same size, shape, and orientation
are just ridiculous.
So I thought, you know,
perhaps it's just lights and what we're seeing
is the aperture of the camera is causing this effect.
- Do any of these night vision cameras
have that kind of aperture?
- And the interesting thing is that some
of the night vision cameras do have this type of aperture.
Someone on Metabunk happened to look
at his night vision camera
and it had this triangular aperture.
So this is Jesse's camera, it's a night vision camera.
And as you can see, the aperture of the camera
is triangular.
And you can see it is actually a proper night vision camera.
Third generation.
- Huh.
- So this is the video that he took
with that night vision camera.
- [Brian] It looks exactly the same.
- [Mick] It looks exactly the same.
We are seeing flickering lights,
which are just stars.
And if a plane was to fly by, it was flashing,
we would see the exact same thing.
And what Jesse does is he adjusts the focus slightly.
And when it's just very slightly out of focus,
everything in the scene that's a single bright light
turns into these green triangles.
- [Brian] So the same thing,
you've got some sort of scattered noise
and then the stars are all green triangles.
- It looks identical to the Navy video.
So right at the start of this video,
we see a number of lights and somebody noticed
that there's a particular configuration here.
We see a very bright one here,
one here and then two others here.
And someone figured out that this one here
is actually Jupiter.
And then from there you can figure out
exactly what these other stars are.
And it turns out that pretty much every light
in this entire video, other than the one
that's moving along and flashing, is a star or a planet.
So we take the fact that we know where Jupiter is over here
and these other stars down here,
and we can just basically trace the path across the sky.
We can see all these other stars.
This one right here just popped in very briefly
is Rasalhague.
And we keep going.
Now we see it pass these...
two stars here,
which are the two dim things that we see
when it zooms all the way in, that's the star Okab.
And we see it just pass by.
- Look at that.
Just an ordinary aircraft
with ordinary flashing navigation lights
flying along in front of the stars that we see
in the sky every night,
but one well-meaning guy on a Navy ship films it
with a night vision camera
that's just slightly out of focus
and suddenly we have fleets of Chinese drones
and a national security threat
or aliens flying giant green pyramids.
This is what happens when we have this whole cultural mania.
Everything is aliens or everything is Chinese
or Russian national security threats.
We tend to forget all about having that standard
for quality of evidence.
And we start to allow in garbage
coming from what Mick calls the low information zone.
- The low information zone is where UFOs exist.
It's the region or the distance
at which you can't quite make something out.
And if you could zoom in a little bit bit more,
if you could actually get closer to the UFO,
you'd be able to tell what it was.
UFOs only exist because they're in the low information zone.
- If there was enough information,
they'd be identified.
So Bigfoot is in the low information zone.
- Very much so, Bigfoot is in the low information zone.
Anything that is naturally blurry, I think you could say,
is something that's an example of something
in the low information zone.
- We need to keep our bar high
and we need to stop giving credibility
to anything from the low information zone,
which by definition does not meet any standard of evidence.
And we also need something smarter
than one of the most popular go-to generic explanations
for UFO sightings, a quote, "secret military aircraft".
This is a special pet peeve of mine.
Saying a UFO that seems to display
incredible flight characteristics
might be a secret military aircraft
is something that my skeptic friends do
and it's something that my UFOlogist friends do,
and they are both equally off base.
This is a terrible, terrible, terrible explanation,
but give me a chance to explain why.
If I say, "Hey, that looks like a car."
It's because we know what a car's characteristics are.
It's got wheels and windows and it's about a certain size
and it's rolling along the road.
I was able to match those up with what I saw
and car matches those characteristics.
So now imagine any UFO sighting,
something that's clearly not behaving like an airplane
or a balloon or anything familiar.
It's maneuvering impossibly fast, it's too big,
it has flames, whatever it might be
that clearly tells us it's not an airplane
and we believe it must be an extraordinary craft.
Well then, how were we able to match it
to a secret military aircraft?
Let's go over the characteristics
of secret military aircraft,
because they all have at least two.
First is where they are.
While they're still classified,
they are never out where the general public can see them.
They're at someplace like the Nevada test range,
where nobody will see them.
They're not over a major population center.
Second is what they move and look like.
Now we don't know what classified aircraft
the military might be testing now,
but we have a century of history
of everything every government has ever flown.
Every single aircraft that was ever secret,
without exception, has flight capabilities
in the same ballpark as other aircraft.
And this includes the very newest manned
and unmanned systems to go into service.
Some have been incrementally faster,
some have had low observability features,
some have had advanced electronics.
Not one has ever been truly unlike any other aircraft.
They wouldn't need to be.
We've had flying figured out pretty well for some time.
Has any government that you know of
ever tested an aircraft that has truly radical capabilities?
- No, I know of no nation
that has ever tested an aircraft
that is radically beyond any aviation capability
we've ever heard of.
- And that's really all we know about classified aircraft.
The two things we know, that they are not ever out
in plain view where someone
might have gotten iPhone video of them,
and that they look and perform in the same ballpark
as other aircraft, tell us that they absolutely do not
share any characteristics with some UFO that we see and go,
"Whoa, that can't be a plane."
If we're going to be consistent in our logic,
when we're not inside the Nevada test range
and we see something in the sky
that's obviously not an airplane,
one thing we can be sure of
is that it is almost certainly not
a secret military aircraft.
Look instead to the far more likely explanations,
the ones that UFOs do turn out to be all the time,
like celestial objects and airborne clutter.
And this is a really timely point
because among the people suspecting
advanced enemy drones for everything are congresspeople.
So in May of 2022, a US House subcommittee
held an open hearing on the UFO phenomenon.
Scott Bray, who we saw earlier,
was the Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence
and he described the type of expertise they brought in
to staff the UAP task force.
- Additionally, subject matter experts
from a wide variety of fields including physics,
optics, metallurgy, meteorology,
just to name a few have been brought in
to expand our understanding in areas
where we may not have organic expertise.
In short, we've endeavored to bring
an all hands on deck approach
to better understand this phenomenon.
- Now I know he said there were others too,
but from what he listed,
it sounds like they've already got
an identification in mind.
It sounds like he's already decided
these are extraordinary craft.
People like physicists and metallurgists
are qualified to analyze an actual physical object.
And that's a completely different skill set
than trying to identify a blob in the low information zone.
- I think having a metallurgist on the task force
would be a good idea if you have some metal to study.
A lot of these samples that we see being talked about
have a very dubious provenance.
Some of them were just sent in anonymously
with strange letters to radio shows 20 years ago.
- Remember that in every UFO case in history
that has been solved, in not one instance,
not a single one, has the explanation turned out to be
an extraordinary craft.
So the UAP task force seems to be stacked
with people whose expertise
is the least likely to be needed.
So let's go back to the explanations for UFOs
that were ultimately identified.
And since those will explain most future UFOs too,
let's suggest some experts more likely to be successful.
The #1 explanation of solved UFO cases
is misidentification of celestial objects.
Now the task force is in the ballpark
with their meteorologist,
but what they really need is an astronomer.
- The people who spend the most time
looking at the night sky, astronomers, never report UFOs.
And that's because for the most part
we know what we're looking at.
- We understand that a strange light in the sky
might be a comet, it might be a satellite trail.
- And phenomena that can go on in our cameras,
different camera aberrations and lens reflections.
- It could be a sprite in the atmosphere.
There are a number of things that astronomers
will be able to rule out for the government.
- The #2 explanation of solved UFO cases
is airborne clutter.
Now, whenever one of these has been proven
to be the cause of a UFO, the people who found it
have been UFO skeptics,
the people who've spent their lives writing books
and debunking UFO cases.
Now, I know that sounds bad to some of you,
like they wouldn't be very impartial,
but they would be the only task force members
with actual experience doing the job,
and they've done it for decades, in many cases.
Scott Bray said he wanted an all hands on deck approach?
Well, even if you don't like UFO skeptics,
their perspective is one
any truly objective task force must include.
The #3 explanation of solved UFO cases
is misidentification of lights or objects on the ground.
This suggests to me what I think
is the single most important expert
the task force should have
and that's an experienced air crash investigator,
someone from the NTSB.
These are the best experts in what kinds of things
confuse pilots or cause them to be fooled.
They have seen things like motion parallax
and other such illusions fool experienced pilots
time and time again.
They know that stuff better than the pilots do.
My bet is the air crash investigator
would solve more UFO cases than anyone else on the team.
Or even better: crowdsource it.
- I actually have basically a team of people
to help me with these things.
I think of myself as the curator
of a large number of talented people
who help me figure these things out.
And I put it all together and I show it to the public
but it's very much a team effort.
It's very much a crowdsourcing effort.
- What sort of skill sets do some of these people have?
- Some people are good at video analysis.
Some people are good at mathematical analysis.
Some people are just really good at recognizing things.
If you have people who, for example, are experts in kites,
then when they see something that's a kite
that I wouldn't recognize, they can say,
"Oh, that's that particular type of kite."
Or a particular type of plane,
people are experts in aviation.
Some people excel in geolocating things,
tracking things down, where they are
and what time of day it is and things like that.
And some people are just good to bounce ideas off.
- Having physicists and metallurgists
on the task force might sound impressive, but honestly,
it's the wrong skill set for the job.
We want experts with skill sets that give them
a high chance of success, not a near zero chance.
But now it's time to shift gears
and bring this conversation back around to where we started.
We've now talked about the problems with space travel.
We've talked about the deep problems we have
in the kind of UFO evidence
that too many people are putting too much faith in.
So let's talk now about where the extraordinary evidence
is almost certainly going to come from,
because this is where we get back to the good news.
So what is the most likely way
that we'll ultimately meet some given alien civilization?
How will they reach out to us?
Of course, we don't know this,
but we can make some very well educated guesses
going by the one data point that we have:
Ourselves.
We've reached out, how have we tried it?
Because probably someone else with our same objectives
would try the same things.
So actual interstellar travel is a problem
that there really isn't a practical solution to.
It's where we hit that really big stumbling block.
You can't go faster than light.
So we've done the next best thing,
we've sent uncrewed probes out into deep space,
Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2.
The energy requirements are much lower
with an uncrewed probe,
thus the chances of success are much higher.
Now, a downside is these are only one way.
We can't store enough energy aboard them
to come back from far away.
So we sent simple messages about who we are,
where we are, how to find us.
Since this is so much easier to do,
it's reasonable to assume
that other civilizations will also try
the easiest ways first.
Even if not all the civilizations out there try it,
some of them probably would;
so we should probably look for simple,
dumb, low energy probes first.
But there's an even easier way that reaches
farther and faster: radio communication.
We've been deliberately beaming high-powered signals
about ourselves toward interesting targets since 1974.
Now we haven't made a very big effort.
We've really only done this kind of thing a couple of times,
but what we've done reached much farther than our probes,
and it did so at the speed of light.
Compared to sending probes,
sending targeted electromagnetic communications
is immensely cheaper, with a fraction
of the energy requirements.
It has a farther reach
and has that much better chance of success.
Whatever civilizations out there who might want to reach us,
this is probably what most of them would try
and it's the first thing that would get to us.
And we are listening.
So far, we've only ever picked up one decent candidate.
The famous "Wow!" signal detected in 1977
on the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University.
Still to this day, the best explanation for it
is a radio transmission from a point in space
in the direction of Sagittarius.
How far out? Well, we don't know.
It could have been closer than the moon.
It could have been from the other side of the galaxy.
But we never heard anything again from that direction.
But here's the most exciting thing about the "Wow!" signal,
and that's the frequency it was received on.
If you want to reach intelligent aliens with a radio signal,
there are going to be three things
to guide your choice of frequency.
First, you want a frequency
that will cut through atmospheres
and have the best chance of being received.
Second, you want a frequency
that's in a quiet band with no competing background noise.
And third, you want a frequency
that's universally recognized,
like the frequency at which interstellar hydrogen precesses,
to show the receiver that you understand science
and are not just some random noise.
Well, guess what?
The "Wow!" signal's frequency met all three of these.
1.42 gigahertz, which is a band
that astronomers call the waterhole.
They call it the waterhole
because it's like nature's gathering point
on the electromagnetic spectrum.
It's the obvious place
that intelligent interstellar communities
would come to meet and greet.
- Yeah, so I think we would choose
the waterhole frequency to reach out
to another intelligent species.
And that's because it acts as sort of a window
like in a house.
You can't look through the walls of a house
but you can look through the window of a house
and that's kind of how this frequency works.
It's a window.
- An alien civilization might also choose
the waterhole frequency to send a signal to us
because that is the frequency that we would be listening to.
- So we actually know a lot
about how we are most likely to be visited.
For every one crewed alien spacecraft
that might ever come to Earth,
we'd expect visits from low energy uncrewed probes first.
And for every un-crewed alien probe that makes it here,
we'd expect many, many radio telephone calls first.
So far we have exactly one plausible candidate,
but it was very plausible.
And remember what an incredibly inviting neighbor
Earth looks like.
On Earth only a few centuries ago,
everything was so far apart.
People hadn't even heard of most other places,
let alone been able to visit them.
And when they did, just as often it was with a sword
as it was with bread.
But today, we not only have jet planes,
we have the internet linking us all
into a single community in real time.
Anyone can go online and see
and speak to a human on the other side of the planet.
Will we repeat this model with other peoples
in the universe?
It's a possibility, but most people in the history of Earth
have lived their lives and died
within just a few miles of the village
where they were born.
Physics tells us that this is probably the fate
of most intelligent civilizations.
We don't have the power to break the laws of physics,
but we do have the power to keep our porch light on
and our welcome mat spread out.
[hopeful music]
So keep listening, keep sending,
keep hoping, and keep watching.
If we can do that, our chances of eventually becoming
part of an interstellar community of some kind are fair.
Friends we haven't met yet are probably out there.
Some might well have their eye on us.
It might be 10,000 years from now, or it might be tomorrow.
But that signal full of data could come anytime.
I'm Brian Dunning.
Thank you for watching.
[hopeful music]
[energizing music]