#262 – Garry Nolan: UFOs and Aliens

[0] The following is a conversation with Gary Nolan, professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, respected and very well published in fields of microbiology and pathology.

[1] But he also is known for analyzing UFO artifacts and materials, and for taking a rigorous scientific approach to reports of UFO sightings and experiences.

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[89] This is the Lex Friedman podcast.

[90] and here is my conversation with Gary Nolan.

[91] You are a professor of Stanford studying the biology of the human organism at the level of individual cells.

[92] So let me ask first the big, ridiculous philosophical question.

[93] What is the most beautiful or fascinating aspect of human biology at the level of the cell to you?

[94] The micromachines and the nanomachines that proteins make and become, that to me is the most interesting.

[95] the fact that you have this basically dynamic computer within every cell that's constantly processing its environment, and at the heart of it is DNA, which is a dynamic machine, a dynamic computation process.

[96] People think of the DNA as a linear code.

[97] It's codes within codes, within codes, and it is actually the epigenetic state that's doing this amazing processing.

[98] I mean, if you ever wanted to believe in God, just look inside the cell.

[99] So DNA is both information and computer.

[100] Exactly.

[101] How did that computer come about?

[102] A big continuing on the philosophical question.

[103] Is this both scientific and philosophical?

[104] How did life originate on Earth, do you think?

[105] How did this at every level?

[106] So the very first step and the fascinating complex computer that is DNA, that is multicellular organism, and then maybe the fascinating complex computer that is the human mind?

[107] Well, I think you have to take just one more step back to the complex computer that is the universe, right?

[108] All of the so -called particles or the waves that people think the universe is made of and appears, to me, at least, to be a computational process.

[109] And embedded in that is biology, right?

[110] So all the atoms of a protein, etc., sit in that computational matrix.

[111] From my point of view, it's computing something.

[112] It's computing towards something.

[113] It was created in some ways if you want to believe in God.

[114] And I don't know that I do, but if you want to believe in something, the universe was created or at least enabled to allow for life to form.

[115] And so the DNA, if you ask where does DNA come from and you can go all the way back to Richard Dawkins and the selfish gene hypotheses.

[116] The way I look at DNA, though, is it is not a moment in time.

[117] It assumes the context of the body and the environment in which it's going to live.

[118] And so if you want to ask a question of where and how does information get stored, DNA, although it's only 3 billion base pairs long, contains more information than I think the entire computational memory resources of our current technology.

[119] Because who and what you are is both what you were as an egg all the way through to the day you die and it embodies all the different cell types and organs in your body and so it's a computational reservoir of information and expectation that you will become.

[120] So actually I would sort of turn it around a different way and say if you wanted to create the best memory storage system possible, you could reverse engineer what a human is and create a DNA memory system that is not just the linear version but is also everything that it could become.

[121] When we're talking about DNA, we're talking about Earth and the environment creating DNA.

[122] So this, you're talking about trying to come up with an optimal computer for this particular environment.

[123] Right.

[124] So if you reverse engineer that computer what do you mean by considering all the possible things it could become so who you are today right so three billion bits of information does not explain lex friedman yeah doesn't explain me right but the DNA embodies the expectation of the environment in which you will live yes and grow and become so all the information that is you right is actually not only embedded in the DNA, but it's embedded in the context of the world in which you grow into and develop, right?

[125] So all that information, though, is packed in the expectation of what the DNA expects to see.

[126] Interesting.

[127] So, like, some of the information, is that accurate to say is stored outside the body?

[128] Exactly, yeah.

[129] The information is stored outside because there's a context of expectation.

[130] Isn't that interesting?

[131] Yeah, that's fascinating.

[132] I mean, To linger on this point, if we were to run Earth over again a million times, how many different versions of this type of computer would we get?

[133] I think it would be different each time.

[134] I mean, if you assume there's no such thing as fate, right, and it's not all pre -programmed, you know, and that there is some sort of, let's say, variation or randomness at the beginning, you would get as many different versions of life as you could imagine.

[135] And I don't think it would all be.

[136] unless there's something built into the substrate of the universe.

[137] It wouldn't always be left -handed proteins, right?

[138] But I wonder with the flap of a butterfly wing, what affects it has, because it's possible that this system is really good at finding the efficient answer, and maybe the efficient answer is there's only a small finite set of them for this particular environment.

[139] Exactly, exactly.

[140] Exactly.

[141] That's the kind of in a way, the anthropomorphic universe of the multiverse expectations, right?

[142] That, you know, there's probably a zillion other kinds of universes out there if you believe in multiverse theory.

[143] We only live in the ones where the rules are such that life like ours can exist.

[144] So using that logic, how many alien civilizations do you think are out there?

[145] There's like trillions of environments, aka planets, or maybe you can think even bigger than planets, how many lifelike organisms do you think are out there thriving and maybe how many do you think are long gone, but we're once here?

[146] I think, well, innumerable, I think, in terms of the...

[147] Greater than zero.

[148] Much greater than zero.

[149] I mean, I would just be surprised, what a waste, right, of all that space just for us if we're never going to get there.

[150] that would be my first way to think about it.

[151] But second, I mean, I remember when I was about seven or eight years old, and I would love if any of your listeners could find this National Geographic.

[152] I remember opening the page of the National Geographic.

[153] I was about, again, seven to ten years old.

[154] And it was sort of a current picture of the universe.

[155] It was a brown probably 1968, 1969.

[156] I just remember looking at it and thinking, what kinds of empires have risen and fallen across that space that we'll never know about?

[157] And isn't that sad that we know nothing about something so grand?

[158] And so I've always been a reader of science fiction because I like the creative ideas of what people come up with.

[159] And I especially like science fiction writers that base it in good science, but base it also in evolution, that if you evolve a civilization from something lifelike, right, some sort of biology, its assumptions about the universe will come from the environment in which it grew up.

[160] So, for instance, Larry Niven is a great writer, and he imagines different kinds of civilizations.

[161] In some cases, what happens if intelligence evolved from a herd animal, right?

[162] Would you lead from behind?

[163] Right.

[164] Would you be, you know, in his case, one of them were the so -called puppeteers.

[165] And to them, the moral imperative is cowardice.

[166] You put other people forward to run the risk for you.

[167] right and so he writes entire books around that premise there's another guy uh brin david brin is his name and he writes the so -called um uplift universe books and in those he takes different uh intelligences each from a different evolutionary background and then he posits a civilization based around where and what they came from and so So to me, I mean, that's just fun, but I mean, back to your original question is how many are there?

[168] I think as many stars as we can see.

[169] Now, how many are currently there?

[170] I don't know.

[171] I mean, that's the whole question of, you know, how long can a civilization last before it runs out of steam in you, for instance?

[172] Does it just get bored or does it transcend to something else?

[173] Or does it say, I've seen enough and I'm done?

[174] What does running out of steam look like?

[175] It could be destroy itself or get bored.

[176] You know, we've done everything we can and they just decide to stop.

[177] I don't know.

[178] I just don't know.

[179] It's the Elon Musk worry that we stop reproducing or we slow down the reproduction rate to where the population can go to zero.

[180] It can go to zero and we can't and we collapse.

[181] I mean, so the only way to get around that is perhaps create enough machines with AI to take care of us.

[182] what could possibly go wrong you've talked to people that told stories of UFO encounters what is the most fascinating to you about the stories of these UFO encounters that you've heard that people have told you the similarity of them the uniformity of the stories now I just want to say up front a lot of people think that when I speculate, I believe something.

[183] That's not true.

[184] Right.

[185] Speculation is just creativity.

[186] Speculation is the beginning of hypothesis.

[187] None of what I hear in terms of the anecdotes do I necessarily believe are they true.

[188] But I still find them fascinating to listen to it because at some level, there's still raw data.

[189] And you have to listen.

[190] And once you start to hear the same story again and again, again, then you have to say, well, there might be something to it.

[191] I mean, maybe it's some kind of a Jungian background in the human mind and human consciousness that creates these stories again and again.

[192] It's coming out of the DNA.

[193] It's coming out of that pre -programmed something.

[194] And Young talked quite a bit about this kind of thing, the collective unconscious.

[195] But actually, one of the most interesting ones I find is this constant message that you're not taking care of your world.

[196] And this came long before climate change.

[197] It came long before many kinds of, you know, let's say current day memes around, you know, taking care of our planet, pollution, et cetera.

[198] And so, you know, for instance, perhaps the best example of this, the one that I find the most fascinating, is a story out of Zimbabwe, 50 or 60 children.

[199] one afternoon in Zimbabwe, it was a well -educated group of white and black children who had lunchtime in the playground saw a craft, and they saw little men.

[200] And they all ran into the teachers, and they told the same story, and they drew the same pictures.

[201] And the message several of them got was, you are not taking care of your planet.

[202] it.

[203] And it got, you know, there's actually a movie coming out on this episode.

[204] And 30 years later now, the people who were there, the children who have now grown up say it happened to us.

[205] Now, did it happen?

[206] Was it some sort of hallucination or was it an imposed hallucination by something?

[207] Was it material?

[208] I don't know.

[209] But these kids were seven to 10 years old.

[210] You see them on video.

[211] Seven to ten -year -olds can't lie like that.

[212] And so, you know, whether it's real or not, I don't know, but I find that fascinating data.

[213] And again, it's these unconnected stories of individuals with the same story.

[214] That is worthy of further inquiry.

[215] Yeah, so here we are humans with limited cognitive capacities trying to make sense of the world, trying to understand what is real and not.

[216] We have this DNA that somehow in complex ways is interacting with the environment, and then we get these novel ideas that come from the populace, and then they make us wonder about what it all means.

[217] And so how to interpret it.

[218] If you think from an alien perspective, how would you communicate with other life?

[219] like organisms, you perhaps have to find in points on this interaction between the DNA and its manifestations in terms of the human mind and how it interacts with the environment.

[220] So it gets some kind of, all right, what is this DNA?

[221] What is this environment?

[222] I have to get in somehow to like interact with it, to perturb the system to where these little ants, human -like ants, get, like, excited and figure stuff out.

[223] Yeah, yeah, and then somehow steer them, first of all, for investigative purposes, understand, like, oftentimes to understand a system, you have to perturb it.

[224] Exactly.

[225] It's like poke at it.

[226] Do you get excited or not?

[227] And then the, the other ways you want to, if you worry about them, you can steer in one direction or another.

[228] And this kind of idea that we're not taking care of our world, that's interesting.

[229] I mean, that's comforting.

[230] That's hopeful because that means the greater intelligence, which is what I would hope, we want to take care of us.

[231] Like we want to take care of the guerrillas in the national parks in Africa.

[232] Yeah, but we don't want to take care of cockroaches.

[233] So there's a line we draw.

[234] So you have to hope that.

[235] Right now, we're a bunch of angry monkeys and, you know, maybe whatever these intelligences are, are also keeping an eye on us, you know, that you don't want a bunch of, you know, you don't want the angry monkey troop stomping around the local galactic arm.

[236] Do you think these folks are telling the truth?

[237] Do you think they saw what they say they saw?

[238] I think they saw what they said they saw.

[239] But I also think they saw what they were shown.

[240] I mean, if you go back to the whole notion of, okay, how long has this been around.

[241] It didn't just start showing up in 1947, right?

[242] There are stories going back, uh, you know, into the 1800s of people who saw things in their farming, in their farm fields in the US.

[243] It's in, it's in, it's in local newspapers from the 1800s.

[244] It's fascinating.

[245] But if you can go even further back, you know, so to your point of how are, how would you as a higher intelligence represent yourself to a lesser intelligence.

[246] Well, let's go back to pre -civilization.

[247] Maybe you show yourself as the spirits in the forest, and you give messages through that.

[248] Once you get a little bit more civilized, then you show yourself as the gods.

[249] And then you're God.

[250] Well, we don't believe in God anymore necessarily.

[251] Not everybody does.

[252] So what do we believe in?

[253] We believe in technology.

[254] So you show yourself as a form of technology.

[255] Right?

[256] But the common thread is, you're not alone.

[257] And there's something else here with you.

[258] And there's something that's, as you said, watching you.

[259] And at least watching over your shoulder.

[260] But I think that like any good parent, you don't tell your student everything.

[261] You make them learn.

[262] And learning requires mistakes.

[263] Because if you tell them everything, then they get lazy.

[264] You've looked at the brains of or information coming from the brain of some of the people that have had UFO encounters.

[265] What's common about the brain of people who encounter UFOs?

[266] So the study started with a group of, let's say a cohort of individuals that were brought to me and their MRIs to ask about the damage that had been seen in these individuals.

[267] It turns out that the majority of those patients ended up being as far as we can tell Havana syndrome.

[268] And so for me at least, that part of the story ends in terms of the injury.

[269] It's likely almost all Havana syndrome.

[270] That's somebody else's problem now.

[271] That's not my problem.

[272] But when we were looking at the brains of these individuals, we noticed something right in the center of the basal ganglia in many of these individuals that at first we thought was damage.

[273] It was basically an enriched patch of MRI dense neurons that we thought was damage, but then it was showing up in everybody, and then we looked and he said, oh, it's actually not.

[274] The other readings on these MRI showed that actually that's living tissue.

[275] That's actually the head of the Caudetanepidon.

[276] And at the time, and I remember even asking a good friend of mine at Stanford, who is a psychiatrist, what does the basal ganglia do?

[277] He said, oh, the basal ganglis is just about movement and nerve and motor control.

[278] I said, well, that's odd because, you know, these other papers that we were reading at the time started to suggest that it was involved with higher intelligence and is actually downstream of the executive function and involved with intuition and planning.

[279] And then if you think about it, if you're going to have motor control, which is centralized in one place, motor control requires knowledge of the environment.

[280] You know, you don't want to move something and hit the table.

[281] Or if you're walking across a room, you want to be aware and cognizant of what you might bump into.

[282] So obviously, all of that planning requires access to all the senses.

[283] It requires access to your desires, memory, knowledge of where and what.

[284] you want and desire to walk nearby like I use the example of you're at a party you want to avoid that person you like that person the waiter's about to drop something all without thinking you maneuver so that actually all that planning is done in the basal ganglia um and it's actually now called the brain within the brain it's a it's a goal processing system subservient to executive function.

[285] So what we think we found there was not something which allows people to talk to UFOs.

[286] I mean, I think the UFO community took a step too far.

[287] What I think we found was a form of higher functioning and processing.

[288] So what we then looked at, and this was the most fascinating part of it.

[289] We looked then at individuals in the families of those, let's say the index case individuals.

[290] And we found that it was actually in families.

[291] And more so, this is the most fascinating part.

[292] We've probably looked now at about 200 just random cases that you can download off of databases online.

[293] You don't see this higher connectivity.

[294] You only find it in what Kit Green would have called or has called higher functioning individuals, people who are, I mean, he called them savants.

[295] I don't have the means to, we haven't done the testing.

[296] But it turns out my family has it, right?

[297] We found it in me, my brother, my sister, my mother.

[298] We found it as well in other individuals, husband and wife pairs.

[299] So statistically, if you had a group of 20 individuals and you found that.

[300] two husband -wife pairs, both of whom had it, and yet it's only found it about, we think, one in 200, 100, 100 individuals.

[301] The fact that two individuals came together, two sets of individuals came together, both of whom had it, implied either a restricted breeding group or attraction.

[302] The reason why it seems to be in, let's say, so -called experiencers or people who claim, if intuition is the ability to see something that other people don't, and I don't mean that in a paranormal sense, but being able to see something just in front of you that other people might just dismiss, well, maybe that's a function of a higher kind of intelligence to say, well, I'm not looking at an artifact.

[303] I'm not looking at something that I should just ignore.

[304] I'm seeing something and I recognize it for not what it is, but that that it is something different than it is normally found in my environment.

[305] Yeah, you know, I have a little bit of that.

[306] I seem to see the magic in a lot of moments.

[307] Like I have a deep, it's obviously, not obviously, but it seems to be chemical in nature that I just am excited about life.

[308] I love life.

[309] I love, like, stupid things.

[310] It feels like I'm high a lot on like mushrooms or something like that, where you'd really appreciate that.

[311] So I'm able to detect something about the environment that maybe others don't, I don't know, but I seem to be over -the -top grateful to be alive for a lot of stupid reasons.

[312] And that's in there somewhere.

[313] I mean, it's kind of interesting because it really is true that our brains, the way we're brought up, but also the genetics, enables us to see certain slices of the world.

[314] And some people are probably more receptive to anomalous information.

[315] They see the magic, the possibility in the novel thing, as opposed to kind of finding the pattern of the common, of the regular.

[316] Some people are more, wait a minute, this is kind of weird.

[317] I mean, a lot of those people probably become scientists too.

[318] Like, huh.

[319] Like, there's this pattern happening over and over and over, and then something weird just happened.

[320] And then you get excited by that weirdness and start to pull the string and discover what is at the core of that weirdness.

[321] And perhaps, is that, you know, maybe by way of question, how does the human perception system deal with anomalous information, do you think?

[322] Well, it first tries to classify it and get it out.

[323] of the way.

[324] If it's not food, if it's not sex, right?

[325] If it's not in the way of my desires, or if it is in the way of my desires, then you focus on it.

[326] And so the, I think the question is, how much spare processing power?

[327] How much CPU cycles do we spend on things that are not those core desires.

[328] What is the most kind of memorable, powerful euophone counter report you ever heard?

[329] Just to you on a personal level, like, something that was really powerful.

[330] Well, I mentioned the Zimbabwe one.

[331] That's particularly interesting.

[332] And one that actually most people don't know about, but family driving down the highway, Two little girls in the back, open glass -topped car, and the little girls see a craft right over their car.

[333] This is in the middle of the day on a busy highway.

[334] The mother sees it.

[335] Nobody can, they look around, nobody else seems to see it.

[336] So the girls take out their camera, take a picture of it.

[337] And then they get home.

[338] they look at the picture there's no craft but there's a little object about 30 feet above their car or so probably about three feet across kind of star -shaped it's not the craft but it's something else there's obviously there was something there and so what were they seeing were they seeing a projection were they seeing and why were only they seeing it and the photograph was capturing something very different than that we're seeing, but there's still an object.

[339] Can you give a little bit of context?

[340] Is this from modern day?

[341] It's modern day.

[342] Oh, yeah, they had a camera.

[343] I mean, they had a cell phone camera.

[344] And this was like a four or five years ago.

[345] Report provided.

[346] By the way, where is like a central place to provide a report?

[347] Is this?

[348] Oh, there's a move on, but this isn't public.

[349] I've seen the picture.

[350] Oh, this is something you've directly interacted with.

[351] Yeah, yeah.

[352] I've seen the picture.

[353] So those moments like that, they captivate your mind.

[354] It's so different and it doesn't fall into the standard story at all.

[355] But in another way, it's kind of a, it's a clear renunciation of this notion that when people see events, they don't all see the same thing.

[356] Now, we've heard this about like traffic accidents.

[357] Different people will see the color of the car differently or the chain of events differently and just tells you that memory isn't anywhere near what we think it is.

[358] But the issue around these so -called UFO reports is that the same people will see a very different thing, almost as if whatever it is is projecting something into the mind rather than it being real, right?

[359] Rather than it being a real manifestation, you know, material in front of you, it's actually almost some sort of an altered virtual reality that is imposed on you.

[360] I mean, you know, I think the company meta and all the virtual reality companies would love to have something like that, right?

[361] Well, you don't have to actually wear something on your face to experience a virtual reality.

[362] What happens if you could just project it?

[363] Well, that's the fundamental question from an alien perspective when you look at ant or as we humans look at ants.

[364] How does this perception system operate?

[365] So not only how does this thing's mind operate, how does the human mind operate, but how does it their perception system operate so that we can like stimulate the perception system properly to get them to think certain things?

[366] And so, you know, that's a really important question.

[367] Humans think that, you know, the only way to communicate is in like 3D or 4D space time.

[368] There's physical objects or maybe you write things into some kind of language.

[369] but there could be just so much more richness in how you can communicate.

[370] And so from an alien perspective where somebody has much greater technological capabilities, you have to figure out how do I use the skills I have to stimulate the limited humans.

[371] Right.

[372] Well, I mean, let's take the ants exam again as an example.

[373] Let's say that you wanted to make ants practical.

[374] You wanted to use them for something.

[375] Right?

[376] You wanted to use them as a form of biological robot.

[377] Now, DARPA and other people have been trying to use insects for, you know, and to turn them into biological robots.

[378] But if you wanted to, you would have to interact with their sense of smell, right?

[379] Their pheromone system that they use to interact with each other.

[380] So you would either create those molecules to talk to them, to make them do it.

[381] I'm not to say talk to them as if they're intelligent, but talk to them to them to manipulate.

[382] them in ways that you want.

[383] Or if you were advanced enough, you would use some sort of electromagnetic or other means to stimulate their neurons in ways that would accomplish the same goal as the pheromones, but by doing it in a sort of a telefactoring way.

[384] So let's say you wanted to telefactor with humans.

[385] You would interact with them, and this is, again, this is a technology which you could imagine possible, you could telefactor information into the sensory system of a human, right?

[386] But then each human is a little bit different.

[387] So either you know enough about them to tailor it to that individual, or you just basically take advantage of whatever the sensory net is that that individual has.

[388] So if you happen to be good at sound, or you happen to be a very visually inclined individual, then maybe the sensory information that you get that's most effective, in terms of transmitting information would come through that portal.

[389] I think the aliens would need to figure out that humans value physical consistency.

[390] So we've discovered physics.

[391] So we want our perception to make sense.

[392] Maybe they don't, you know, that's not an obvious fact of perception, that you have to figure out what kind of things are humans used to observing in this particular environment of Earth and how do we stimulate, the perception system in a way that's not anomalous or not too, doesn't cross that threshold of just like, well, that's way too weird.

[393] Right.

[394] So they have to, I mean, that's not obvious that that should be important.

[395] You know, maybe you want to err on the side of anomaly, like lean into the weirdness.

[396] So communication is complicated.

[397] Yeah.

[398] Well, that's why I always find this issue of people talking about the so -called grays.

[399] as interesting because it is related to what you're saying.

[400] They're different enough, but they're not so different as to be scary, right?

[401] They're not venom -dripping fangs, right?

[402] They're different enough, but it's also like they're what you could imagine us becoming in some distant future.

[403] So is that a purposeful representation?

[404] I don't know.

[405] I mean, I don't believe in the grays, for instance, but I believe that people.

[406] people think that they see it.

[407] So if we're talking about a communication strategy that says, you know, we're like you, but not the same as you, this might be a manifestation that you that you represent in terms of a communication strategy.

[408] What do you make of David's favorite sighting of the Tick -Tac UFO and other pilots who have seen these objects that seem to defied the laws of physics?

[409] Well, I think you have to take them at their word.

[410] Are they fascinating to you?

[411] Oh, absolutely.

[412] No, I know a lot of these people, right?

[413] So I know Lou Elizanto, Chris Mellon, the whole crowd I've been, I saw the videos about three weeks or so before they went public.

[414] I was at a bar with Lou overlooking the Pentagon in Crystal City, and they showed them to me and my hair stood on end.

[415] And he said, he said, this is coming out soon.

[416] And I, I know one of the guys on the inside who was the naval intelligence who had interviewed all of these pilots again before this came out.

[417] And it was hair raising to hear this.

[418] But also exciting that, you know, here's not just people's testimony.

[419] These are credible individuals.

[420] And if you've seen the 60 minute episode with some of the pilots.

[421] pilots, you know, they have no monetary gain.

[422] If anything, they've got negative gain from coming out.

[423] But then you also have all of the simultaneous ship analysis from the USS Princeton and the radar analysis, et cetera.

[424] So, you know, at the end of the day, it's just data.

[425] It's not a conclusion.

[426] I'd be perfectly happy, honestly, perfectly happy if somebody showed that it was a hoax.

[427] I can go back to my day job, right?

[428] That could be a hoax, but other things might not be.

[429] I mean, this is the point.

[430] I mean, this is why it's nice to remove some of the stigma about this topic, because it's all just data and anomalous events are such that there's going to be, they're going to be rare in terms of how much data they represent.

[431] But we have to consider the full range of data to discover the things that actually represent something that's, if we pull at it, we'll discover something that's extraterrestrial or something deep about the phenomena on Earth that we don't yet understand.

[432] Right.

[433] Well, if it only stimulates people, for instance, to think, okay, well, what happens if we could move like that with momentumless movement.

[434] And it stimulates young individuals to go into the sciences to ask those questions.

[435] That to me is fascinating.

[436] I mean, after I've been openly talking about this in the last year, especially, I've had a number of students from top schools who aren't my students come to me and say, if I can help, let me. How can I help?

[437] I never had thought about this before, but you opened you and others, not just you and others, have opened my mind to thinking about this matter.

[438] Yeah, that's why it's actually funny that Elon Musk doesn't think too much about these kinds of propulsion systems that could defy the laws of physics as we currently understand them.

[439] To me, it's a powerful way to think what is possible?

[440] It's inspiring, even if some of the data doesn't represent extraterrestrial vehicles.

[441] I think the observation itself, it's like something you mentioned, which is hypothesizing, imagining these things, considering the possibility of these things, I think opens up your mind in a way that ultimately can create the technology.

[442] First, you have to believe the technology is possible before you can create it.

[443] In my own lab, we always look for, as I've said before, what is inevitable.

[444] and, you know, saying inevitably this is the kind of data we need.

[445] But if we need that kind of data, the instrument we want isn't, doesn't exist.

[446] Okay.

[447] So I imagine the perfect instrument, I can't make it, and you back into something which is practical, and then you, in a sense, reverse engineer the future of what it is that you want to make.

[448] And I've started and sold like at least half a dozen or more companies using that basic premise.

[449] And so it was always something that didn't exist today, but we imagined what we wanted.

[450] And at the time, many people said it couldn't be done.

[451] I mean, for instance, all the gene therapy that's done today with retroviruses came from a group meeting in David Baltimore's lab.

[452] I was a postdoc with him.

[453] And one of the other postdocs wasn't able to make retroviruses in a way that he wanted to.

[454] And I realized I had a cell line that would allow us to make retroviruses in two days rather than two months.

[455] And so he and I then worked together to make that system.

[456] And now all gene therapy with retroviruses is done using this basic approach around the whole world.

[457] Because something couldn't be done and we wanted to do it better and we imagined the future.

[458] And so that's, I think, what the whole UFO phenomenon is doing for people.

[459] It's like, well, let's imagine a future where these kinds of technologies are.

[460] But also, let's imagine a future where we don't blow ourselves up, right?

[461] So if these things are there, they manage to not blow themselves up.

[462] So it means that at least one other civilization got past the inflection point.

[463] So if some of the encounters are actually representing alien civilizations, visiting us, why do you think they're doing so?

[464] You suggested that perhaps it's the study understand their own past.

[465] What are some of the motivations do you think?

[466] And again, from our perspective, us as humans, what motivations would we have when we approach other civilizations we might discover in the future?

[467] Well, I think one motivation might be to steer us away from the precipice, right?

[468] Or on the assumption that, you know, even if we make it past the precipice, at least we're not a bunch of psychopaths, you know, running around.

[469] So maybe there's a little bit of motivation there to make sure that you're the neighbor that's growing up next to you is not, you know, unruly.

[470] Um, you know, but I mean, maybe it's sort of a moral imperative like what we have with, you know, creating national parks where animals can continue to live out their lives in a natural way.

[471] I don't know.

[472] I mean, that would be, I mean, the problem is we're imagining from an anthropomorphic viewpoint what an alien might think.

[473] And as I've said before, alien means alien, right?

[474] I mean, not Hollywood aliens, but a whole different way of thinking and a whole different level of experience and, let's say, wisdom, hopefully, that we could only hope to understand.

[475] Now, but if we ever get out there, if we ever make it past our current problems, and even if we don't have faster than light travel, and even if we're only using ram scoops or light sales, to get where we want to go, and it takes us 10 ,000 years to get somewhere or to spread out.

[476] We might encounter such things, and are we just going to stomp all over it, like we did in colonial South America or Africa or all the rest, on our current path, likely.

[477] And so what are we going to learn?

[478] Well, we're getting better and better at understanding what is life.

[479] And I think we're getting better and better of being careful.

[480] not to step on it when we see it.

[481] This is one of the nice things about talking about UFOs.

[482] It expands the Overton window.

[483] It expands our understanding of what possibly could be life.

[484] It gets us to think.

[485] It gets the scientific community to think.

[486] When we go to Mars, when we go to these different moons that possibly have life, we're not looking at legged organisms.

[487] We're looking at some kind of complexity.

[488] that arises in resistance to the natural world.

[489] And there's a lot of interesting...

[490] I like that, resistance to the natural world.

[491] Somehow there's a rebellious process, complex system going on here.

[492] And I don't know the many ways it could take form.

[493] There's a sense for aliens that as the technology develops, they take form more and more as information as something that can influence the space of ideas, of the processing of data itself.

[494] So I just, this idea of embodiment that we humans so admire, physically visible, perceivable embodiment may be a very inefficient thing.

[495] If you think just about your area, You know, we're trying to make smaller and smaller and smaller circuitry that is basically closer and closer to the physics of how the universe operates, right down at the level of quantum computers are basically right down about quantum information storage.

[496] So fast forward, 10 ,000, 100 ,000 years.

[497] maybe somebody found a way to embody AI directly into the physics of the universe, right?

[498] And it doesn't require physical manifestation.

[499] It just, it just sits in space time.

[500] It's just a locally ordered space.

[501] We're just locally ordered space time, right?

[502] You know, I mean, people, but maybe they just found a way to embody it there.

[503] They probably have to get really good at not, you know, trampling on the ants.

[504] The better of your technology gets, the easier it is to accidentally, like, oops.

[505] Just destroy these simpleton biological systems.

[506] We constantly think about whatever these things might be.

[507] We think that they are some sort of a unified force.

[508] Well, maybe they're not unified.

[509] Maybe they are as disparate as you and I are.

[510] And maybe what keeps them from stomping all over the ants is each other.

[511] right, that they are in a self -tension to prevent one or more of them from running amok.

[512] Oh, yeah, I mean, that's kind of the anarchy of nations that we have on Earth.

[513] So there's always, there's always going to be this...

[514] There's a hierarchy.

[515] This hierarchy that's formed of greater and greater intelligences.

[516] And they're all probably also wondering, wait, what's bigger than me?

[517] Exactly.

[518] That's what I always wonder is that maybe that what keeps them in line is something that is beyond them.

[519] Like what created the universe?

[520] I mean, that's probably a question that bothers them too.

[521] What about the communication task itself?

[522] How hard do you think it is for aliens to communicate with humans?

[523] So is this something you think about, about this barrier of communication between biological systems and something else?

[524] how difficult is it to find a common language?

[525] Well, I think if you're smart enough or technologically enabled enough, it's relatively straightforward.

[526] Now, whether your concepts can ever be dumbed down to us, that might be hard.

[527] I mean...

[528] Again, talking to the ants.

[529] Talking to the ants.

[530] On Instagram.

[531] So you want to look good in this picture.

[532] Let me explain to you why.

[533] So that's the essential problem of, you know, perhaps they realize who it is that they're talking to.

[534] And they say, we're rather than muddy the picture, we're only going to give them limited information.

[535] Yeah.

[536] And yeah, maybe we could sit down.

[537] like you and I and have a conversation, but then they would make assumptions, the humans would then make assumptions about us that aren't true, because we're not humans, right?

[538] So let's stay at arm's length.

[539] Let's just let them know that we're here, right?

[540] And here's the limited amount of communication.

[541] Again, this notion that if you give somebody everything, they'll get lazy.

[542] and you know if if they've been around as long as they have they've seen every kind of thing that can go wrong and so it's it's they know as much as they might want to step in that that would be a wrong thing yeah you have to also understand that the the amount of wisdom they carry yeah you know and so it's it's very easy as well for religions to i don't want to i don't want to get into a whole religious conversation, but you could, very easy for, you could see how religions could call them angels or devils or what have you, because, again, if you're trying to fit it into a framework of cultural understanding, the first thing you reach for is God.

[543] And so it, when you, when you look at what these things are, and again, with the angels and the devils, in a similar sort of way, their communication is limited.

[544] They just kind of give little, what's the oracle of Delphi, they kind of give these Delphic pronouncements, and then it's up to you to figure out what it is that they really mean.

[545] Stephen Greer claimed that a skeleton discovered in Atacama region of Chile might be an alien.

[546] You reached out to him and took on the task of proving or disproving that with the rigor of science.

[547] The result is a paper titled Whole Genome Sequencing of Atacama Skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia.

[548] Can you tell this full story?

[549] The story was, as you put it right there, correct.

[550] Reached out, got a sample of the body, did the DNA sequencing, then worked with a team of two other Stanford scientists, and Roche Sequencing Group, Roche Diagnostics, and probably a total team of about 11 or so people.

[551] And as is standard in these kinds of things, the professors actually don't do the work.

[552] The students do the work and figured out the answer.

[553] And then we helped them put together the story.

[554] And the story was simply that it was human, 100%.

[555] I went into it thinking it was originally a monkey of some sort.

[556] I got kind of excited a few months into the process thinking, well, what happens if it is an alien?

[557] Can you describe some of the characteristics of the skeleton that makes it unique and interesting?

[558] Primarily, it had dysmorphias of the brain.

[559] And so the first thing I did, actually, when I got pictures of it, I took it to a local expert at Stanford, and he was on the paper.

[560] and he was the world expert in pediatric bone dysmorphias.

[561] He literally wrote the book on this, because that's what you do.

[562] You go to an expert when it's outside of your field of interest.

[563] And he said, well, I haven't seen this particular collection of mutations before or this physiology before, but here's what I think it might be.

[564] and he said but based on the size of the of the thing and the bone density it would appear to be like six or seven years old now again that's the that's the thing where i think the lay public doesn't understand or takes a speculation like that and turns it into a fact no one ever said that it was that age we only said that the bones made it look like it was that age.

[565] But then we went back and looked for genetic explanations of why things might look the way they did.

[566] And if you, again, read the paper as very carefully caveated to say that these mutations might result in this.

[567] But what we did find was an unexpectedly large number of mutations associated with bone growth in this individual.

[568] And it was just a bad roll of the dice, right?

[569] You roll the dice enough times with enough people born every year and someone will roll the wrong dice all at once.

[570] So the sad part about it was individuals in the UFO community who wanted to think that there was some sort of conspiracy around it, right?

[571] that somebody had somehow convinced all of my students to lie.

[572] I mean, come on.

[573] You know, I would lose my job, first of all, and they would all be, you know, in trouble forever.

[574] Yeah, but also it's just projecting malevolence onto people that doesn't, I don't think exist in normal populace and especially doesn't exist in the scientific community.

[575] The kind of people that go into science, I mean, this is what bothers me with the current distrust of science, is there, they might be naive.

[576] They might not, especially modern science, look at the big picture, philosophical, ethical questions, all that kind of stuff.

[577] But ultimately, they're people with integrity and just a deep curiosity for the discovery of cool little things.

[578] And there's no malevolence, broadly speaking in the scientific community.

[579] So, I mean, there's a bigger story here, which is, you know, there's a hunger in the populace to discover something anomalous, something new.

[580] And, you know, science has to be both open to the anomalous, but also to reject the anomalous when the data doesn't support it.

[581] Right.

[582] What do you make of that, you know, walking that line for you?

[583] Because you're dealing with UFO encounters.

[584] You're dealing with the anomalous.

[585] Well, people have said, let's go back to the Autocoma case, that I was debunking it.

[586] Well, debunking is a loaded term.

[587] It sort of assumes that you were going in purposefully to prove something as wrong.

[588] I wasn't.

[589] I was just going in to collect the data.

[590] And, you know, I showed.

[591] that this one was human.

[592] There was another skull that somebody had at one point.

[593] It was called the Star Child.

[594] They called it the Star Child skull.

[595] I said, you know, I looked at it.

[596] I looked at the DNA sequencing that they had done.

[597] I said, this is human.

[598] End of story.

[599] The people who owned the thing at the time disagreed with me. And then eventually another group came in and proved that I was right.

[600] And it's not about debunking.

[601] It's about getting the more spectacular and hyped cases off the table.

[602] I mean, the reason I got interested in it is because somebody was hyping it.

[603] And not because I wanted to disprove it, but because I just wanted to know.

[604] And let's get it off the table because it's usually the most extravagant things that are most likely to be wrong.

[605] Somewhere in the rubble will be something interesting.

[606] And so that's what you do.

[607] You get the, you get the dross off the table, and then somewhere in the data will be something worth real inquiry.

[608] And that, if you inquire deeply enough, will be extravagant.

[609] Yes, exactly.

[610] And that's what actually excite scientists is to, I mean, you want with the rigor of science to actually reveal the extravagant.

[611] And so look at CRISPR as probably the most perfect example of that.

[612] These weird sequences in bacterial genomes all arrayed one after the other with these strange sequences around them, but when you looked at the sequences, they looked like viruses.

[613] And so how did they get there?

[614] And lo and behold, after, you know, a lot of effort and work, well, a couple of Nobel Prizes went out the door, but these strange things ended up having extraordinarily extravagant possibilities.

[615] You've also looked at UFO materials.

[616] You are in possession of UFO materials yourself.

[617] Claimed UFO materials.

[618] Alleged.

[619] Alleged geophone materials.

[620] That's right.

[621] What's another term?

[622] Weird materials that don't seem to They have a story.

[623] They have a story that doesn't seem to be of natural origins, but it's not, you know, there's a process to proving that, and that process may take decades, if not centuries, because you have to keep pulling at the string and discover where they could possibly.

[624] come from.

[625] But anyway, you're in a possession of some materials of this kind.

[626] Can you describe some of them and maybe also talk to the process of how you investigate them?

[627] How do you analyze them?

[628] Right.

[629] So let's say that there's two classes of materials that I've been given by people.

[630] And they're not given by like the government or anything, just given people who've collected them.

[631] And there's a reasonable chain of evidence associated with them that you believe is not just a pebble, somebody picked up off a road.

[632] There are almost always things that people have claimed have either been dropped off as like some sort of a leftover material, molten metals, or they are from an object that was released from this, so that kind of exploded.

[633] They're almost always metals.

[634] I have some couple of things that might be biological that are interesting that I haven't really spent a lot of time on yet.

[635] When you look at a metal, you basically, well, okay, what are the elements in it?

[636] And what's it made of?

[637] And so there's pretty standard approaches to doing that.

[638] Most of them involve a technology called mass spectrometry.

[639] And there's probably about five or six different kinds of mass spectrometry that you could bring to bear on answering it.

[640] And they either tell you, depending upon the limit of the resolution of the instrument, they either tell you the elements that are there or they tell you the isotopes that are there and you're interested not just in knowing whether something is there or not you're interested in knowing whether they're you know the the amounts of it and in the case of elements how many different isotopes are there and that's kind of where in some of these cases it gets interesting right because in at least one of the materials as we first studied it, the isotope ratios of, in this case, it was magnesium, are way off normal.

[641] And I just don't know why.

[642] It doesn't prove anything.

[643] It just, all it proves is that it was probably accomplished by some kind of an industrial process, whether it's the result of a process or whether, and this is sort of the leftover, or whether it was made that way for a particular purpose, I don't know.

[644] All I know is that it was engineered.

[645] That's it, right?

[646] But then it's, the question is sort of you go one step deeper.

[647] Why would you engineer it?

[648] Right.

[649] Why, and what is the engineered means?

[650] There's all kinds of, it could be a byproduct, it could be, the main result of an engineering process and would be a small part of the engineering process that is the main part?

[651] Well, so the ratios of isotopes for any given element are basically the result of stellar processes.

[652] A supernova blew up sometime several 10s, you know, several billion years ago.

[653] That became a cloud.

[654] those atoms coalesced gravitationally to form another sun and a ring that became a rocky planet and the ratios of the isotopes were determined at the time of that explosion and so everything in the local solar system is more or less of that ratio depending upon certain gravitational different but but by fragments of a percent not whole tens of percent difference.

[655] So what do humans use isotopes for?

[656] Mostly to blow stuff up.

[657] I mean, the vast majority of the isotopes that have been made in the per pound or ton are things like certain ratios of plutonium and uranium to blow stuff up.

[658] We don't make or engineer isotopes, which today is relatively easy to do, but it's still expensive.

[659] for any other reason, apart from, let's say, as anti -cancer, we use stable isotopes in money these days as a counterfeiting tool.

[660] You basically embed certain ratios of isotopes in to make it harder for counterfeiters to accomplish.

[661] But other than that, we don't do anything with that.

[662] So why would you make grams of such material in this one case and drop it around on a minimum?

[663] beach in Brazil.

[664] So which case we're talking about?

[665] This is the Uvah Tuba case.

[666] Can you describe this case a little bit further?

[667] Like what material we're talking about, just the full story of the case?

[668] It's an interesting one.

[669] It's an interesting one.

[670] So a fisherman saw an object that released something or it exploded.

[671] And it was this relative, you know, I've got some big chunks of it, relatively pure magnesium with obviously something else in it because magnesium burns so it had something in it that would other metals, simple alloy, that would prevent it from basically burning up.

[672] And so the question is so then we had two pieces that came from two different chains of custody both claimed to be from the same object.

[673] at least physically when you look at the two things they look the same right so we took small fragments of each of them we put them in an instrument called a secondary ion mass spec which is an extremely sensitive instrument and it can see down to 0 .001 mass units which is important for let's say more arcane reasons but it's a sensitive instrument And so one of the chains of custody, we had two pieces from the same chain of custody and then two pieces from the other chain of custody, one of them had completely normal magnesium isotope ratios, magnesium 24, 25, 26, and the other was off, not just like slightly off, way off.

[674] And they were both off to the same extent.

[675] So, I mean, it was sort of like you had an internal control of what was normal, and you had this other one, which was wrong.

[676] And so you're left with, that's what kind of an open question.

[677] Was this a hoax?

[678] Were these two chains of custody, one of them a hoax, that somebody purposefully introduced those things?

[679] Because you could do it.

[680] It would cost a lot.

[681] I mean, at the time that this was found, I guess the 1970s or so, might have been earlier, I forget, the amount that I had would have cost several tens of thousands of dollars to make.

[682] And again, it's not something you would just throw around, and why would you do it in the hope that some guy 30 years from then would pick it up and study it?

[683] Yeah, it's a very subtle, subtle troll.

[684] It's a long -term plan.

[685] So, so I just don't know, I just don't know what to make of it, except it's interesting, but it's, but, so a different kind of question that you're asking is what constitutes evidence, right?

[686] So is, is this sufficient evidence?

[687] Absolutely not.

[688] But somebody's put it forward.

[689] I have the time.

[690] It's my time.

[691] I'll study it.

[692] And I, my objective is to sort of take those that I think are credible enough.

[693] and do a reasonable analysis, put it out there, and maybe somebody else will come up with an idea as to what it is.

[694] Now, what would be better is some sort of true technology, right?

[695] Something that is obviously, we don't have it.

[696] You know, and people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Seth Shostack have come out rightfully and have said, you know, when you show up with, you know, something really obviously technology that we don't understand, you know, then we'll pay attention, right?

[697] Not just material.

[698] Not just material.

[699] A piece of metal is interesting.

[700] And several of the things that I've looked at and things that people, other things that people have come to me with, we found to be completely banal or were actually pieces of aircraft that were invented back in the 1940s.

[701] And so take them off the table.

[702] See, but I think, again, I think showing up with technology that what humans would find completely novel is actually a really difficult task for aliens because it obviously can't be so novel that we don't recognize it.

[703] For what it is.

[704] For what it is.

[705] And so, and I would say most the technology aliens likely have would be something we don't recognize.

[706] so they it's actually a hard problem how to convince ants like you first have to understand what ants are tweeting about like what they care about in order to like inject into their culture because you know that's why I think it would be the technology that you could present is in the space of ideas is in the it's tried to influence individual humans and with the encounters and try to with this kind of thing that you mentioned about us not taking messages about us not taking care of the world.

[707] It's difficult to, I mean, for them to understand you have to come up with trinkets that impress us.

[708] I mean, maybe the very technology, the fascination with the development of technology and the development of technology, the actual act of innovation itself is the thing that they're communicating.

[709] I mean, this is kind of what Jacques Valet thinks about.

[710] It's the role of...

[711] The control system, he calls it.

[712] The control system.

[713] Well, let me ask about Jacques.

[714] Who is he?

[715] You know him.

[716] Who is Jacques Valet?

[717] What have you learned from him?

[718] About life, about...

[719] About UFOs, about technology, you bought our role in the universe?

[720] Well, I met Jacques, actually, soon after the whole Atacama thing happened, I was visited by those people associated with the government and the whatever around the Havana, what ended up mostly being Havana syndrome patients, but also Jacques at the same time.

[721] And they were actually working behind the scenes with each other, said, oh, here's this Stanford professor who is willing to talk about this stuff and investigate things.

[722] Maybe we should go talk to him.

[723] And he reached out through a colleague and, you know, I had lunch actually at the Rosewood Inn up on near Sandhill.

[724] So, Jacques is one of the first openly active scientists, and he's really a scientist in this area, going back to the 1960s.

[725] And, you know, he's put forward a number of.

[726] of ideas, speculations about what it might be that people interacting with.

[727] And he, the first thing that I learned from him is this notion of what he called Kabuki Theater, that many of the things that people have seen are, I remember reading his books and thinking, he uses this word absurd a lot.

[728] He said, the things that people claim they see are absurd, right?

[729] A ship doesn't land in a farmer's field and then come up and knock on the door and say can I have a glass of water and these are stories literally out of newspapers from the 1930s it's absurd you know and the other thing that people say ships don't crash if you're so technologically advanced you don't crash it's absurd that they crash so he says this is put on as a show it's meant to it's an influence campaign.

[730] Right?

[731] It's not meant to influence individuals.

[732] It's meant to influence a culture as a whole.

[733] Maybe they don't look at us as individuals.

[734] Maybe they look at us as an organism that lives on a planet.

[735] Right.

[736] And perhaps rightfully so.

[737] And so that's how you interact with them.

[738] That's how you influence them.

[739] So that was one of the first things that kind of took me back and realized, wow, there's actually a, maybe there's a puppet master behind.

[740] the scenes that's, you know, doing this influencing and that all this stuff about aliens is just, is not true, per se.

[741] They're just a representation of something that is meant to influence.

[742] So that was probably the most interesting.

[743] I mean, the man is brilliant.

[744] He's also, it can be, and I'm sorry, Jacques, he can also be incredibly annoying to have a conversation with because he will pick apart your arguments or anything that you think you know and show you, why you don't know what you think you know.

[745] And he uses the, he used the example that, for me, that is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is one counter example to any conclusion and you're wrong.

[746] And so I learned from him, I mean, I'm supposed to be a good scientist, but I learned from him, don't talk about conclusions, just talk about the data, because data's not wrong.

[747] I mean, convince yourself that the data is not wrong or not an artifact, but be careful.

[748] about your conclusions because whatever is going on, it's much more complicated than we imagine.

[749] Wow, that's powerful.

[750] Being able to always step back.

[751] Because we humans get excited.

[752] Yeah.

[753] We start to jump to conclusions from the data, but always step back.

[754] Powerful, being able to always step back.

[755] Because we humans get excited.

[756] Yeah.

[757] We start to jump to conclusions from the data, but always step back.

[758] Well, in some of my Twitter feeds, when I dare to go on Twitter, are full of, well, when are you going to give us the answer?

[759] you know, science is not immediate.

[760] You're going to have to be patient.

[761] And even some of my science colleagues have said, well, where's the data?

[762] My answer to them has been, where's been your work to try to produce any?

[763] You know, I'm not here to give you everything on a silver platter.

[764] We talked offline how much I love data and machine learning and so on.

[765] And it's been really disheartening to see the U .S. government not invest as much as they possibly could into this whole process.

[766] So let's jump to the most recent thing, which is what do you make of the report titled Preliminary Assessment, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, that was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021.

[767] So this was like, okay, we're going to step back and we're going to like, where do we stand and where do we hope the future is?

[768] What do you make of that report?

[769] Is it hopeful?

[770] Is it?

[771] I see it is very helpful.

[772] very hopeful.

[773] I think the adults are finally stepping up in and being in charge, right?

[774] In the good sense of adult.

[775] What's that?

[776] In the good sense of adult.

[777] This childlike curiosity is pretty powerful thing.

[778] That's true.

[779] Yeah.

[780] I, it's, but it's also, I think, the people who were worried that the populace at large might run screaming into the streets and riot, you know, have, you know, they basically, the empiric evidence is they're wrong.

[781] You know, these videos and all these things have been out for now, what, five years, most people don't even know about it, right?

[782] So as, as hyped as it's been and all over the newspapers that it's been and et cetera, you know, even Tucker Carlson has talked about it many times on his news program.

[783] Joe Rogan has a lot of people don't know about it.

[784] So I think people, if it's not affecting their day -to -day life, they're going on with their day -to -day life.

[785] So, but that said, I think it was an important sea change in the internal discussions going on in the government because, and the reason being that I think this is actually partly true with the maturation of human social technology, it was becoming so obvious that this stuff was showing up again and again and again around our ships.

[786] They just couldn't keep it quiet anymore, right?

[787] And so it's like, we need to do something about it.

[788] and Lou Elizondo and Chris and others, to their great credit, found the right angle to talk about this.

[789] It says, well, okay, let's say it's not out there.

[790] Maybe it's the Russians, the Chinese, or somebody else.

[791] We should know about this because we damn sure know it's not us.

[792] So that to me is an important thing to finally be a little bit more open about the matter.

[793] But like I often say, I'm not looking for people to give me permission to do anything.

[794] I'm just going to do the analysis myself with what I have.

[795] Avi Loeb has taken the same approach.

[796] He said, I'm not going to wait for the government to give me telescopic information about technologies or things that might be even on our own solar system.

[797] I'm just going to collect it myself.

[798] And that's the right way to do it.

[799] Don't wait for somebody else to give it to you.

[800] It's also possible to inspire a large number of people to do a wider spread data collection.

[801] Yes.

[802] I mean, you yourself can't do a large enough data collection that would, if you're talking about anomalous events.

[803] Right, right.

[804] You should be collecting high -resolution data about everything that's happening on Earth in terms of, like, in terms of the kind of things that would indicate to you a strong signal.

[805] That's something weird to happen here.

[806] And this is why, you know, governments can be good at funding large -scale efforts.

[807] Yes.

[808] I mean, you know, NASA and so on, working with SpaceX with Blue Origin, you know, fund capitalistic, sort of fund companies, fund company efforts to do huge moonshot projects.

[809] And in the same way, do huge moonshot data collection efforts in terms of UFOs.

[810] I mean, we're not, it needs to be like 10x, like one or two orders of magnitude more funding to do this kind of thing.

[811] And I understand on the flip side of that, if you make it about what are the Russians, whether the Chinese doing, you know, make it a question of geopolitics, it gets touchy because now you're kind of taken away from the realm of science and making it military.

[812] Making it military.

[813] Some of the greatest, this is what makes me as an engineer, makes me, truly said that some of the greatest engineering work ever done is by Lockheed Martin, and we will never know about it.

[814] Yeah, I agree.

[815] I agree.

[816] I wish we were, it was different, but it's the world we live in.

[817] You know, but related to that UIP Task Force announcement that you just said, you know, the bill was passed in the Department of Defense that now formally establishes an office to collate that information.

[818] and also to be transparent about it.

[819] Money is now set aside, right?

[820] What do you think of it just in case people don't know, the DOD established a new department to study UFOs called Airborne Naming, come on.

[821] But yes, airborne object identification and management synchronization group.

[822] Do you know how to pronounce that?

[823] No, I do not.

[824] AOI