March 18, 2016 • 46 mins
Given the sheer size of the universe, it's overwhelmingly likely that some form of alien life exists - so where the heck are they? Tune in to learn more.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noll, and I am then today. Hopefully you
(00:23):
are still you. Thanks for dropping by. That makes this
stuff they don't want you to know. And boy, we've
been doing uh, we've been doing a lot of doozies.
This is the first time in a while that all
three of us have been in the studio together. I
have returned everyone. Yes, this is the real journeys, I
(00:46):
tell you, gentlemen. Being on a naval base, a huge
naval base that was once a couple of separated institutions
that are now all one big thing. It's fascinating going
through all the security to retrieve the launch codes. You're
not supposed to talk about that here. No, Well, the
(01:06):
badgers out of the bag. What's what's the happens? Beat
the badger back into the bag. So, guys, what happened
while I was there is I got to watch about
five hundred young I guess they're petty officers. They are
They all graduated from the Nuclear Power School in different
varying degrees. Some of them are officers, some of them
will be moving on to go work on a sub
(01:27):
whole another set of lingo right for positions in the
names right, So these are not like shallow bad people.
Their actual title is petty officer. Yeah, and my brother
in law, he was the person I went to go see.
He actually very much dislikes that title, but yes, it was.
It was super cool to see all these guys who
are younger than me, who are going to be going
(01:47):
and working on just huge nuclear powered machines that they
are going to be essentially running the furnaces, you know,
like just making it all happen and running all the systems. Oh,
that's pretty cool. I'd like to have that knowledge. Well
that this brings us to an interesting point. UH listeners,
we'd love to hear any of your military or naval
(02:08):
related stories if you have some experience, because it is
an entirely different world and it's something that if if
you think there's something hidden or interesting that the average
non uh non military member just wouldn't think about or
wouldn't know, UH, and you'd like the rest of your
(02:29):
fellow listeners to hear it, then write to us or
send us a tweet or um, what's a Facebook message?
I've got one for you. Right before we go in,
I did not know that most of our countries nuclear
power systems, just the ones that generate power that's mostly
run by the Navy. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's true.
(02:50):
I I thought I thought they were simply training people
four ships and for submarines and things like that. But
it's to maintain the infrastructure of our nuclear power. Speaking
of correspondence, and we had some folks right in and
we we asked if this should go at the beginning
of the end. We're going to keep it at the
beginning this time, and and see we feel about it.
(03:11):
But ladies and gentlemen, it is time for our shout
out corner. Shout out corners, Yes, shout out corner, the
moment in the show where every week we go to
your comments, your tweets, your community case and we attach
(03:32):
a shout out, a personal touch to send it back
out at you. So today we have several. The first
one comes from Eric or at Eric, who says every
three minutes of the show should have a shout out.
And now any one for myself. So fair, Eric, here's
your shout out. Thank you for the feedback. This was
(03:54):
visa vs. Should the shout out corner be at the
top of the show or the bottom of the show.
Clearly Eric is in the former camp. Well he has
gone a third way. Eric, We'll make a compromise. What
what you can do is play that shout out part
every every three minutes, repute every five whenever you wish.
(04:14):
I think it'll be tough for us to do a
shout out every three minutes. That sounds kind of we'd
have to be a live show, and then it would
be confusing. We would need a fourth person just to
supply all of the shoutouts just while we're going. I think,
what if the shout out? What if we were fueled
by shoutouts? What if that was the only way we
could continue is every three minutes we recharged with a
(04:36):
shout out. I don't know, man, kind of like we've
talked about shoutouts as currency, why not shoutouts as sustenance?
You know this is this is We're gonna tie this
in in a weird way. Uh. Later on in today's podcast,
actually and I love do you point out sustenance. Who's next?
You want to go? You want me to go? Matt.
(04:57):
The next shout out goes out to Steward Lucky. He
sent us an email. We see him all over the place,
guys on our periscope, sending us messages on our Twitter
all the time. Starts. Stewart's really cool and he always
is interacting with us. So guess what, Stewart, huge shout
out to you. You send us something about the tiger
stripes in the Kumtang desert in northwest China. It looks
(05:21):
really interesting. Have you guys seen an image of this? Yeah,
I've seen some images. Yeah, it's really cool. He says.
Could this have something to do with perhaps a Chinese
harp system? Maybe be, But the way it looks, it
looks very very different to me. I would you know,
I would love to look into this more and get
(05:41):
back get back to you on that. With this is
like a pattern that you can see in a flyover
or something I don't know right, you can see on
Google Earth came. So it can't be that that secret
because as we know, Google Earth will cow taw to
any state level oreganization that request. It removes something what
(06:02):
a nightmare. That job must be going in and scrubbing
all the yeah and pixelating it and people you can
probably tell if you know what you're looking at, if
you find the right spot and you say, wow, these
trees or this sand became suddenly sixteen biddish. Yeah. That's
very much a repeating pattern here. So our last last
(06:22):
shot is to Ashley Wazner or Wazner who suggested we
look into the strange noises in the sky that have
been documented on video across the world. This is an
interesting one. I think a few years ago we had
heard about this. Some people have said trumpets in the sky.
Some people had mentioned it's tied as well with the
(06:44):
idea of the hum or some something of that nature.
So these are all great suggestions. We're gonna look into these,
and thank you for writing to us. If you would
like a shout out, then, as always, drop us a
line where conspiracy stuff on Facebook, Twitter, and we're uh,
I don't know, we're kind of all over the internet nowadays, right,
we got the Internet going nuts. And that concludes the
(07:06):
shoutout corner. Let's go right into this. Have you guys,
have you matter you know seeing a UFO I can
I cannot say that I have or not. I do
not believe that I have seen a UFO officially, Well, guys,
(07:30):
as it happens, I have seen what I would consider
unidentified to me, and I was not able to identify
it after the fact. And it was a very unusual
peculiar shape that I'm not used to seeing at the
at the height in the sky that I was seeing it. Um. So,
(07:50):
in a past life, I once was a poor touring
musician um with a group of Satanists called the hell
Blinky sex tet Um. We were released Satanists, but the
name of the band was the hell Blinky sextet Um.
They're actually still around and shout out to Andrew Benjamin
and and all the hell Blinky folks. They played Dragon Con,
they play They're they're kind of a steampunk type band.
(08:12):
That was was sort of a little goth kid playing
the violin with my uh, with my goatee and my
black clothes. Anywhere, Yeah, I can, we can post a picture. Um. Anyway,
we were on a tour and we were traveling through
the Midwest in a rented van and um, you know,
it was in Illinois or somewhere. I remember there was
(08:35):
a lot of corn a lot of corn fields. I've
never really um road tripped in that part of the
country before, so I was kind of taking it in
and looking out the window. I had a little handicam
back in the day, was one of the first little
HD sony handicams, and UM I was shooting footage of
the window, and um, over the corn fields, kind of
far into the horizon, I saw what looked like sort
(08:57):
of a strange geometric, clely shaped object. It was. It
was kind of like a diamond shape um or maybe
like almost like a like a trapezoid kind of I
remember it had very angular and it was it was
just hovering and it wasn't close. It was clearly very far.
But the size that it was for how you know.
(09:20):
And again, the perspective is strange out there when you're
in very flat land. It's hard to kind of judge
distance as well. And I wasn't really used to, you know,
seeing things in this part of the country, so it
was very jarring. And I did get it on video,
and for whatever reason, I do not have the tape anymore.
I know that's sort of likely story. But at your house,
no nobody showed up at my house. But they probably
(09:42):
just figured that, you know, my dumb self would lose
the thing in which I did, and so I was
no threat to anyone trying to cover anything else. Well,
here's the thing with the men in Black, if if
you were in fact visited by them, you would have
no recollection with Yeah, it's like being roofy by the
men And luck did the UFO have any lights on
it or it was during the day, it's the thing,
(10:04):
So it was in the middle of the day and
it you know, it was just very strange. And the
funny thing is, I've looked, even like in the X
Files and in shows like that where they have uh
photos of supposed UFO sightings. What I saw it looked
very similar to some of these sightings. And I remember
there's an episode in the X Files, I forget which
one it was, where there was some sort of top
(10:27):
secret government craft that would like it was really really
fast and it was you know, setting the ground on
fire because it was remember that one. Anyway, it looked
like kind of what one of those would have been
what would have looked like. But it was really strange,
and to this day have not been able to justify
figure out what it was. Um, you know, very, very
(10:48):
very that's fascinating. And we've had, we've had, especially recently,
a lot of people right in to say, hey, guys,
here's the story I have. I cannot explain it, but
I wanted to tell you about it. And we appreciate
those and maybe when we compile enough we can read
them on air and maybe a UFO listener mail episode. Um,
(11:10):
this brought us to a big question we wanted to
ask today and you have maybe asked yourself this before,
which is where the heck are all the aliens? Where
all the extraterrestrials seems like they would be around, right? Absolutely? So, okay,
this is this is something that blows my mind when
(11:33):
you think about it. Whenever we hear people arguing about
alien life or extraterrestrial stuff, and it's automatically treated as
some sort of tinfoil clap trap. Those people are not
exhibiting those critics rather or not exhibiting critical thinking when
they say that there are no aliens. We can walk
through this because there's this huge paradox, right, given this this,
(11:55):
given the size of the universe, it is, let's just
through the numbers so the observable universe is about ninety
billion light years in diameter, just the part we can see,
just that part. In that billion light years, there at
least a hundred billion galaxies, and planets like the one
(12:17):
we live on are pretty common. They're not They're not
rare by any means. This means that there are trillions
of possibly habitable planets. And this leads us to the
number one thing that blows my mind. The odds are
on our side. With the size of the universe, it
(12:38):
is almost completely inevitable that some other form of life
exists or did exist, or will exist. Here's the downer
to this beautiful thought, right, Uh, the same thing that
(12:59):
means is that aliens definitely exists, and where life definitely
exists in the universe also guarantees that these other forms
of life, um probably won't ever come into contact with us,
or we won't come into contact with them, and and
that's a very unfortunate thing. But it just it's because
we're so vastly far away, right, Yeah, So when you
(13:23):
look at the odds, think of our area of the
universe like a neighborhood, right, And let's call our neighborhood
the Milky Way. So these other life forms may very
likely not be in our neighborhood. They might be in
a different neighborhood. And the reason that this sucks so
(13:48):
bad for us is because we will probably never get
to see them, even if we have great technology, because
the universe is expanding. But whenever the stuff comes up
in you know, pop culture tropes and fiction, it's always
like the aliens just have to make contact with us
because we are so fascinating and great and or awful
(14:12):
if they want to annihilate us, right, And that's you know,
from a logical standpoint, there's some disturbing things in there.
We get this, like, even if we had an amazingly
fast spacecraft, right uh, And even if we somehow had
a social organization or dynamic that allowed us to be
in a spacecraft for a long time and not kill
(14:33):
each other and reproduce effectively and still be cool about everything,
it would still take us billions of years to travel
to another another cosmic neighborhood, yeah, to another galaxy, right
to escape. And even if we could escape our galaxy,
we're not even exactly sure what we're going to encounter.
From a physics standpoint, leaving a galaxy because there there
(14:58):
are all of these effects on on gravitational fields and
all these other things that when you're inside the safety
of even a solar system, when you're trying to escape
that they're's they're huge dangers that we possibly haven't even
accounted for yet. Right, and let's remember that those dangers
would it goes both ways. Another civilization attempting to come
to Earth would also run into those things, if it
(15:20):
we're not from the Milky Way and in between those neighborhoods,
it's the deep, it's the ink. Yeah, it's a very
specific set of conditions that give us the atmosphere and
then the gravity that we experience. And you know that's
why astronauts need such intense equipment when they you know,
(15:40):
even go just outside of our atmosphere. Right, yeah, and
this this ties into something else. Let's get weird with it.
Let's assume or play a thought game with us, folks.
Let's uh, let's imagine that humanity gets its collective junk together,
right where a family show gets its lective stuff together,
(16:01):
cooperates and builds some kind of multi generational spaceship and
arc of sorts. Yes, yeah, essentially, and this thing would
be capable of traveling billions of years. And we have
detected somehow a signal from a nearby galaxy, and we
we say, well, we have the technology to build something
(16:23):
that will last billions of years. We're going to take
this gigantic leap, and we are going to spend more
time than ever in humanity and a conscious pursuit of
a single endeavor. Here's the stuff that would happen that
we would be strange. Even if we survived, I had
(16:44):
some kind of cohesive social structure, we ourselves would probably
evolve along the way due to the exposure, the compromises
we would have to make to this other, uh, this
other environment in which we would live, Which means that
even if everything else went right, and even if there
were still some things, some other intelligent thing to find
(17:05):
when we got there, whatever did land and comes out
of that spaceship would no longer really be human. That's
crazy to think about. So even for that alone, we
wouldn't be there. And did there are ways we could
get around it. Let's imagine if we did cryogenics, you know,
some kind of hibernation. What if we sent robots which honestly,
(17:25):
is probably the the next step. What if we just
sent robots that had our DNA and said, you know,
do us a solid and make some of us once
you get to a cool part, and they would go,
it's a little weird, I don't know. No, No, it
would be great. As long as they didn't have any
(17:46):
kind of extensive historical documentation about humanity, then they would
be well. Of course, once we get to this point
where we can create an arc, at least in this
world that we've created here, perhaps humanity has moved on
from our past aggressiveness and all of that. But that's
that's the strange thing, right, Matt, Like, none of that matters.
(18:07):
None of all these very heady scientific fiction type things
we've mentioned matter. If the destination star explodes, if the
civilization perishes, perhaps due to nuclear war, due to some
other technology, or a gamma ray burst, you know there. Um,
there's so many more ways this could go wrong than
it could ever even go halfway right, especially what you're
(18:29):
saying with the expansion of the universe, and depending on
which direction you're going within the universe, how the expansion
is occurring, because you have to imagine that's time like,
if you're traveling billions of years, the way light functions,
you know, and the expansion you you could be the
billions of years could be exponentially greater. Mm hmm. Yeah,
(18:52):
And that's that's the problem. They're moving goalposts. So let's
say if other galaxies are right out, then let's talk
a little bit of out our neck of the woods.
Let's talk about the Milky Way. So the Milky Way,
our galaxy contains about four hundred billion stars billion with
a b of that four billion around twenty billion um.
(19:14):
Look a lot like the Sun. Yeah, So up to
a fifth of these are about four billion have planets
that orbit within what we call the habitable zone. Uh,
sort of a Goldilocks kind of vibe. Not too hot,
not too cold, just right. If only point one percent
of those star systems point one percent harbor life, um,
(19:37):
we'd still be looking at a million planets with some
sort of life. And what we have to note on
in that regard is that when we say some form
of life, we're not instantly talking space faring civilizations. Quite
the opposite. I'll probably like micro organism, rocking microbes. Yeah, microbes.
(19:59):
Maybe maybe if we're lucky, some kind of higher order
multicellular life, but makes me think of these, uh, these
little guys called the water bears, tartegrades is what they're called.
And they you know, scientists froze them and then revived
them after you know, a decade or something like that.
(20:20):
Very very resilient, little little little guys. Seems that they
can survive space travel even without a helmet. Yeah, which
just kind of if we got weird stuff like this
on our plan if it's so resilient and that could
exist outside of our again very specific set of conditions
that we are, you know, um kind of built for.
(20:41):
I see no reason why this could not exist outside
of our you know. Well, here's another note, and I'm
really I'm really glad you brought that up, because we
have to assume that we have to factor in age
as well as size. So the Milky Way is around
thirteen billion years old after the first For the first
(21:06):
few billion, it was sort of a bad neighborhood. Stuff
was exploding, things were smashing together. Plan It's like a
lot of planets weren't quite planets yet. It was it
was people probably or life force probably didn't live there
during the first billion years if there anything like us,
because which again that's a tremendous assumption because they would
(21:29):
be obliterated so quickly. Even think about things like the
formation of the continents, you know, and plates just smashing
up against one another. You know, we don't. We haven't
really experienced anything like that in our lifetime. It's just
where such a blip. And this idea that you're talking
about about the age makes me think of things like,
you know, the ancient ones, the elder ones, you know,
(21:50):
like you, And that's that's an interest. Okay, yes, we're
gonna tie this in because Earth is a new kid
on the block. Earth is uh well over four billion
years old, which is just nothing. That's that's chump changed.
This means that way before our planet became a thing,
the Milky Way had trillions of chances of opportunities for
(22:15):
life to be created, to to uh life to exist.
And you know a lot of planets came and went
before we ever showed up or moved in. So that
means if only one such civilization existed before us and
created space travel, this will fundamentally change our understanding of
the universe. And you know, we always think of because
(22:37):
of science fiction We always think of an alien species
that can uh, that has space faring technology as being
a future oriented, advanced thing, but it maybe, to your point,
a much older and ancient and eldritch thing, and it
certainly would give them the time to have developed a
(22:58):
different set of technolo apology or to be more advanced,
because again, you look at the timeline of Earth and
um you know what we've what it's taken us to
create the technology and the um you know, society that
we have today. I think if we had a million
years accomplished that stuff. You know, every time I we
(23:22):
talked about this stuff, I think about that game the
Massive or Mass Effect. Have you played Mass Effect at
all or heard about it? Okay? Well, alright, Ben, Well
in that in that game you and I think I've
talked about this before on here, but we in that game,
once a civilization gets advanced enough to travel a certain
(23:44):
distance from their planet, they will encounter this ancient, old
technology that is massive and what it can do is essentially, uh,
have you jumped with light speed to a different part
of the galaxy. But there was an ancient, ancient civilization
that created these things in order to traverse the entire
(24:05):
galaxies because collects the Harbingers, and I don't want to
give things away, but but there is that, Yes, there's
an ancient civilization. And what you're saying Ben in here
is that let's say that one of those really did
exist in the Milky Way, Uh, civilization that could do
that if if it was true and in the real world,
(24:26):
and they built these ships capable of taking you know,
thousand year long trips to get to one part of
the galaxy to the other and then build this huge technology.
It would take millions and millions of years to achieve
some of these things, to colonize the entire galaxy, or
to at least visit the entire galaxy, Which means then
(24:48):
that if this, if some ancient civilization existed, uh, there
would be there. There would be time, enough time if
they were around can and this is such a tremendous
house of cards yet that the question would be where
(25:09):
are they? And that is the million dollar or shall
we say, the billion light year question originally posed by
the legendary physicists and Rico Faremi. This is the Faremi paradox.
If everything we know about the Milky Way and the
larger universe assures us that other forms of life are likely,
if not near inevitable. Then why have we not found any?
(25:30):
Why have we not found one? There are a few possibilities,
you guys want a laundry list them. Yeah, maybe it's
just extremely difficult for life itself to begin. We we
don't really know exactly the mechanisms that make life occur
on a planet. We know a non living things. Yes,
we we know that there are situations which are extremely beneficial,
(25:53):
like being in the habitable zone near a star and
having an atmosphere and all of these other things. But
you know, getting an atmosphere is a huge ordeal in
its own right. Or then maybe it's just really really
difficult for life to evolve past a certain point, so
to like the earlier point you made. No, maybe most
aliens are single celled, relatively primitive organisms. So maybe the
(26:20):
entire universe, like the Milky Way, used to be a
lot more dangerous to life, just made it unsustainable. But
imagine a past that's filled with gamma ray bursts and
exploding stars and black holes, wandering black holes, radiation, all
kinds of existential threats, you know, or or just go
(26:42):
back to the earlier note about evolution. Maybe we just
haven't gotten to the next big evolutionary hurdle. We haven't
gotten over it. It's possible, I guess that we could
invent technology that has species ending consequences. Nuclear weaponry, which
we already have obviously good rent could go wrong, that's safe. Well,
it could render the entire planet completely uninhabitable. Might not
(27:07):
even take something as immediate as a nuclear weapon. We
could just do it to ourselves with you know, climate
change and you know, the right kind of weaponized disease,
or maybe Alphabet or another big company hundreds of years
from now will invent essentially what is a new species
through technology that can then or will have to take
(27:30):
over for us once organic life can't exist or maybe
hundreds of months. That's yeah. This goes into something that
the machine consciousness thing is something that we I'm glad
you mentioned because we're going to get into that too.
Here's the scariest one, in my opinion, what if another
(27:50):
highly sophisticated UH class three kind of civilization does exist,
able to traverse the galaxy with technology such that not
only is it UH not only does it seem part
of the natural world to us, but it is godlike,
(28:10):
And what if this civilization seeks out life forms that
evolved past a certain point, you know, whatever that point,
maybe maybe before you find whatever magic technology it is
that allows you to traverse space, and what if it
destroys them? Yeah, out of self preservation. I mean, you
don't want anyone else coming out in and destroying your
(28:33):
ships or fighting over resources. I mean maybe that could
really be a thing. And and the other factory your
course is time. As we mentioned previous in the previous
podcast about contacting aliens, the likelihood of other life forms
is existing is high, It's very high. But the likelihood
of them existing at the same time as our life
forms is likely much much lower, just because there's so
(28:56):
much time involved. Guys, one more possibility. I'm this is
something that Noel and uh I guess since the previous
podcast to kind of talked about and I can't remember
if it made it on the air, but um, let's okay, No,
maybe you should explain it. What if all biological entities
(29:16):
are just stepping stones to another phase of evolution entirely
like machine minds or created life. This is fascinating to
me because it certainly feels like space is not the
right environment for biological life. Right. There are a lot
of things, the processes that we do, that we have
(29:39):
to do in order to maintain our existence as a
human or as any biological living thing that just aren't
conducive to an environment that's enclosed, like in a spaceship
or something like that. I don't know. Well, it's painful
for the human ego, I'm sure, but it may well
be true. You know, what is what is more within
the reach of our seas Is it to modify ourselves
(30:03):
and our issue such that we are better adapted to
interstellar exploration? Or is it closer within our reach? You know?
Are we Are we the primates that give way to
the next step? Are we the bacteria that are you know?
Are we the unicellular organism that creates something multicellular? You know?
(30:28):
It's it's strange because we tend to think that we
are the masters, yeah, the end result, the masters of
our own evolution. That there was a poem you and
I got close to quoting a few podcasts to go
with the Master of My Fate, The Captain of my soul?
Is it black as the night that covers me, Dark
(30:49):
as the night that covers me black as pitch from
pull to pull. I thank whatever God may be for
my unconquerable soul. I can't arrest we. I think it's
called but uh, it's it's a very human thing, you
know what I mean? And it may not be true.
The id the idea of being somewhere low on the
evolutionary chain is almost like as incomprehensible as imagining what
(31:14):
it's like to to be dead, to not exist, you know,
like try to wrap your just think about like what
what what what does it feel like to not experience?
To you know, I mean, it's you can it can't.
You can't do it right because the thought itself is
an experience. And so to me, like to think of
what would it be like to evolve beyond myself, beyond
beyond what I am, the equipment that I have mentally, physically,
(31:35):
any of that still very incomprehensive. Yeah, it's the old
question of if we make, if we make robotic uh
like hard drive copies of us, if we scan our
brains and our personalities with a fidelity such that they
would be an exact copy, you know, does that is
that us? And if so, what are we? But now
(31:58):
it's time for us to get to something that hopefully listeners,
ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, you will enjoy as well.
We are going to talk about whether, despite all these
all these things, all these numbers, all these statistics we
have looked at, we're going to talk about whether there's
(32:18):
any evidence something like an alien or extraterrestrial has visited Earth.
But first a word from response. Here's where it gets crazy.
(32:38):
This is this is an even bigger question, have aliens
visited Earth? Let's let's talk about UFOs because we're not
the first people to ask this question. Oh no, no, no,
no no. This is a huge question has been around
since I guess since we've been looking at the stars
really and trying to understand what the heck they are?
(32:58):
What is that giant glowing? Yeah, we've been wondering like
what put that there? How did that get there? Is
it something that some outside force did? Can I go
to their? Can that go to me? Yeah? Yeah, very
very simple questions that are actually pretty big. Um. So
if we look at if we kind of zoom through
the human histories, we get to in a time right
(33:22):
after World War Two when there were a lot of
sightings of things in the sky a lot of times
at night, sometimes during the day. Uh that appeared a
bit strange, out of the ordinary, that regular old Joe's
like you and me, Noel and Ben just look up
and go, huh, that's weird. So the Air Force decided
(33:43):
they were going to look into these things UFOs in particular.
They began in night and it was a thing they
called Projects Sign where they were looking at sightings of
UFOs and just kind of collecting as much data as
they could on them, trying to see if they could
explain them through uh means like a balloon in the
air or test going on with an aircraft, even things
(34:05):
such as lightning or you know, lights in the sky.
And then in let see, that was called Project Sign
and it was then they changed their name to Project Grudge,
which was a kind of a separate project where they
were going through and essentially trying to debunk the findings
of Project Sign or just to explain all of them away,
(34:26):
because there were there were a couple of things, a
couple sightings that were considered unexplained still and then in
nineteen fifty three it kind of had its third little iteration,
which became a thing that you probably have heard of,
and we've talked about before on this show, called Project
blue Book, not to be confused with the Kelly Blue
Book or a Project blue Beam, nor the blue books
(34:50):
that you perhaps were issued when you had to do
writing tests. True, so this became Project blue Book in three.
But they were all pursuing similar things in different ways. Yes,
And between ninety and nineteen sixty nine, the Air Force
investigated twelve thousand, six hundred and eighteen reported UFO sightings.
(35:14):
And in this report that talks about the findings of
Project blue Book, grudge and sign and uh nor could
you read that of these total sightings, eleven thousand, nine
hundred and seventeen were found to have been caused by
material objects such as balloons, satellites and aircrafts, immaterial objects
such as lightning reflections, and other natural phenomena, astronomical objects
(35:38):
such as stars, planets, and the sun and moon, weather conditions,
and hoaxes. As indicated, only seven d and one reported
sightings remain unexplained. Great job, noll. I would object to
the language that I uses, however, because only seven one.
That's sort of right, that it's not sort of that
(36:01):
there's no reason for me to add on some kind
of crappy modifier words to that. That's absolutely attempting to
unsuccessfully in my opinion. Uh Bury the lead, Yeah, downplay
it like crazy in the official report. So what were
their official conclusions? Okay, so they had three official conclusions. One,
(36:22):
no UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force
has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.
That's a big word, you know, that word, very important
national security. There has been no evidence submitted to or
discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as unidentified
(36:42):
present technological developments or principles beyond the range of present
day scientific knowledge. And Three, there has been no evidence
indicating that sightings categorized as unidentified are extraterrestrial vehicles. And
then in sixty nine they terminated the project, right, Yes,
(37:05):
that's correct, And I think I think it was President
Carter that wanted to kind of start back up blue Book,
not necessarily the project blue Book itself, but he wanted
the Air Force to look into unidentified flying objects again,
and they turned him down because because well, yes, because
he saw one, and I guess he just thought it
(37:25):
was a good idea, but the Air Force looked back
at these reports and just said, Nah, we're not gonna
do that. That's something that we hear often enough every
time a president is newly elected, not re elected, but
newly elected. Clinton, Right, Clinton was one. I think Bush
may have meant one of the bushes and made some
(37:45):
statements about it. Probably W. Probably not h W given
his past in the CIA. Barack Obama mentioned it. Numerous
presidential nominees will say I will look into this and
what ever they find out, you know, it's not been published,
which goes to the idea of the disclosure project. Let's
(38:06):
also talk about since we we talked about the idea
of this vast chronological scale, let's explore the um conversations
people have about ancient alien visitations, the legends of someone
landing from Afar, the tie ins with biblical creatures such
as the Nephelum who fell from the sky and taught
(38:28):
man agriculture while also sleeping with as many people as
they could. Right, Uh, so we're the Nephelum. Rather, let
me amend that the Nephelum were the result of those
sorts of unions. So you will often hear ladies and
gentlemen arguments that these are these stories, these oral histories
(38:49):
that were later written down, are evidence of some other
life form from beyond the stars, jump starting human evolution
or human social evolution. I I I have to admit,
I kind of like these stories, at least the idea
underlying these stories, because when you if you think about
(39:10):
it logically, you kind of get lost and you start
doubting that this could ever be true. But when you
I like the ideas of time and how large our
galaxy is and how long it's been around, and how
relatively young the Earth is. I like the idea that
perhaps there was some mass, massive, um intelligent, perhaps even
(39:33):
technological life that that existed in the universe or even
in our galaxy, that somehow seated our planet. And I
really like the I think that's kind of what the
story is in Ridley Scott's latest Aliens franchise film. Yeah,
that actually came to mind that a lot of this
stuff just about, like you know, the engineers in that
(39:56):
film seem to be sort of like the next stage
of our evolution. So, yeah, this is this is a
good topic because I was I was planning to bring
this up as well. The theory of pan spermium as
a horrible name, but it is probably one of the
biggest potential discoveries that we can make, along with tracing
(40:16):
the origin or figuring out the providence of the Wow signal,
which you know, of course, is the one of the
most anomalous signals received from space. We have done an
episode touching on that. You can check it out where
we're talking about alien contact, the idea of microbial alien
(40:37):
life coming to Earth. The idea of this pan spermia
theory is in many ways of the plausible ancient alien idea,
and it seems um what do I say plausible, I
mean comparatively plausible. It seems that this could be in
the cards if there were an extraterrestrial higher order being
(41:02):
that came to Earth and sometime in the ancient past. Uh.
I believe that most civilizations or researchers would want everyone
to know about it. If, however, they came during a
modern time, somehow, I believe that there would be an
air of secrecy just given them. Given the fact that
(41:24):
we live in a globally connected world in which many
state actors and corporations are in constant dirty competition, but
in in this alien ancient alien theory, it would be
that perhaps they visited before humanity had evolved into a
conscious mind, to a hunter gatherer situation, because then the
(41:46):
idea would have been that instead of being capable of
learning on their own, early Homo sapiens had somebody appear
out of the sky and plant and teach them how
to plant things. Uh. The clearly you know a long
time less news. Uh. You know that I have personally
quarreled with this because I think there's a lot of
institutionalized racism in ancient alien theories. I'll spare everyone in
(42:09):
the conversation I bring up when this stuff happens, just
to say, you know, if you hear someone tell you
that there's no way ancient Egyptian civilization could have made
the Pyramids, don't just believe them. Look into the vast
amount of research people have done about recreating them. So
at this point, I don't know where else do you
(42:29):
want to go with us. I would just say that
if you're you've probably already seen everything that you could
ever see about ancient alien theory through the History Channel
or H two, or basically by turning on your television
and being near those channels. Um, you'll you've probably learned
everything about the NASCAR lines. We've covered that before. We don't.
(42:49):
I don't think we need to go back over it.
We've covered the via manas, the flying machines, and ancient
Indian ethics. I'd like to look into those and more
depth at some point. I think it's fast and you know,
warrants its own its own podcast, because listeners, if you're
familiar with this, this is the idea that, uh, in
ancient Indian civilizations there were flying machines that were invented,
(43:12):
and that there was actually something very close to an
ancient nuclear war. So we can check that one out
for sure. I don't know, but see also that doesn't
necessarily mean that aliens did it. Ancient civilization did it,
and we're just catting the cycle of building nuclear weapons
and then destroying civilization, and then building nuclear weapons and
(43:32):
then destroying civilization. The argument of great filters that civil
that alien civilizations tend to self destruct before they ever
get to the point where they could communicate with other
people seems pretty likely. Well, that's all I've got. Certainly,
something we see, you know, repeating itself, even in the
short relatively short history of our own planet. You know,
(43:53):
great civilizations kind of crumbling and then being replaced. Oh
and that's a that's a scary thing to how how
how foolish would it sound to an outside civilization to
land right after some devastating war and to say, well, these,
this group of animals was, this group of biological life
(44:13):
forms was close to getting into interstellar travel. But because
their tribes didn't get along, they killed everybody. They didn't
have like a fight club thing with like two leaders,
do get it out. No, they said, everybody dies. And
the fish are like us too, And they're like, yes,
(44:34):
because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time,
cosmically speaking to right. And and when we when, when
we think about this, how how strange this could be?
It also brings up a very specific thing that just
reminded me of No. I. If you think about the
rise and fall of empires, many historians have tried to
(44:55):
trace this, to find a pattern to the cycle, right
a frequency, and and if you look at the empire
that is currently the United States, it's anomalous right now.
And while you know, we as people don't haven't there's
no one who's been alive as long as the U
(45:15):
S has that we know of. Uh So, it seems
like it's stable and it seems like it's solid, but
it's early days yet that's just because inside of it.
And how long will it continue? Will it be or
will it be around when when we see some sort
of alien civilization, when humanity or humanities successors strike out
(45:37):
to the stars. Let us know what you think, folks.
Let us know if you think there have been instances
of alien contact. Let us know if you think we'll
ever find it. Let us know if you think space
is a place for biological entities like us, or if
we are just here just sort of be the midwives
for a new form of life. You can find us
(45:59):
some face speaking Twitter where conspiracy stuff there, and you
can check out every audio podcast that Noel, Matt and
I have ever done, and there are quite a few
now at our website. Stuff they don't want you to
know dot com. And if you don't want to do
any of that, but you still want to talk to us,
because why not? What a check? You can send us
a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy and how
(46:22):
stuff works. Dot
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noll, and I am then today. Hopefully you
(00:23):
are still you. Thanks for dropping by. That makes this
stuff they don't want you to know. And boy, we've
been doing uh, we've been doing a lot of doozies.
This is the first time in a while that all
three of us have been in the studio together. I
have returned everyone. Yes, this is the real journeys, I
(00:46):
tell you, gentlemen. Being on a naval base, a huge
naval base that was once a couple of separated institutions
that are now all one big thing. It's fascinating going
through all the security to retrieve the launch codes. You're
not supposed to talk about that here. No, Well, the
(01:06):
badgers out of the bag. What's what's the happens? Beat
the badger back into the bag. So, guys, what happened
while I was there is I got to watch about
five hundred young I guess they're petty officers. They are
They all graduated from the Nuclear Power School in different
varying degrees. Some of them are officers, some of them
will be moving on to go work on a sub
(01:27):
whole another set of lingo right for positions in the
names right, So these are not like shallow bad people.
Their actual title is petty officer. Yeah, and my brother
in law, he was the person I went to go see.
He actually very much dislikes that title, but yes, it was.
It was super cool to see all these guys who
are younger than me, who are going to be going
(01:47):
and working on just huge nuclear powered machines that they
are going to be essentially running the furnaces, you know,
like just making it all happen and running all the systems. Oh,
that's pretty cool. I'd like to have that knowledge. Well
that this brings us to an interesting point. UH listeners,
we'd love to hear any of your military or naval
(02:08):
related stories if you have some experience, because it is
an entirely different world and it's something that if if
you think there's something hidden or interesting that the average
non uh non military member just wouldn't think about or
wouldn't know, UH, and you'd like the rest of your
(02:29):
fellow listeners to hear it, then write to us or
send us a tweet or um, what's a Facebook message?
I've got one for you. Right before we go in,
I did not know that most of our countries nuclear
power systems, just the ones that generate power that's mostly
run by the Navy. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's true.
(02:50):
I I thought I thought they were simply training people
four ships and for submarines and things like that. But
it's to maintain the infrastructure of our nuclear power. Speaking
of correspondence, and we had some folks right in and
we we asked if this should go at the beginning
of the end. We're going to keep it at the
beginning this time, and and see we feel about it.
(03:11):
But ladies and gentlemen, it is time for our shout
out corner. Shout out corners, Yes, shout out corner, the
moment in the show where every week we go to
your comments, your tweets, your community case and we attach
(03:32):
a shout out, a personal touch to send it back
out at you. So today we have several. The first
one comes from Eric or at Eric, who says every
three minutes of the show should have a shout out.
And now any one for myself. So fair, Eric, here's
your shout out. Thank you for the feedback. This was
(03:54):
visa vs. Should the shout out corner be at the
top of the show or the bottom of the show.
Clearly Eric is in the former camp. Well he has
gone a third way. Eric, We'll make a compromise. What
what you can do is play that shout out part
every every three minutes, repute every five whenever you wish.
(04:14):
I think it'll be tough for us to do a
shout out every three minutes. That sounds kind of we'd
have to be a live show, and then it would
be confusing. We would need a fourth person just to
supply all of the shoutouts just while we're going. I think,
what if the shout out? What if we were fueled
by shoutouts? What if that was the only way we
could continue is every three minutes we recharged with a
(04:36):
shout out. I don't know, man, kind of like we've
talked about shoutouts as currency, why not shoutouts as sustenance?
You know this is this is We're gonna tie this
in in a weird way. Uh. Later on in today's podcast,
actually and I love do you point out sustenance. Who's next?
You want to go? You want me to go? Matt.
(04:57):
The next shout out goes out to Steward Lucky. He
sent us an email. We see him all over the place,
guys on our periscope, sending us messages on our Twitter
all the time. Starts. Stewart's really cool and he always
is interacting with us. So guess what, Stewart, huge shout
out to you. You send us something about the tiger
stripes in the Kumtang desert in northwest China. It looks
(05:21):
really interesting. Have you guys seen an image of this? Yeah,
I've seen some images. Yeah, it's really cool. He says.
Could this have something to do with perhaps a Chinese
harp system? Maybe be, But the way it looks, it
looks very very different to me. I would you know,
I would love to look into this more and get
(05:41):
back get back to you on that. With this is
like a pattern that you can see in a flyover
or something I don't know right, you can see on
Google Earth came. So it can't be that that secret
because as we know, Google Earth will cow taw to
any state level oreganization that request. It removes something what
(06:02):
a nightmare. That job must be going in and scrubbing
all the yeah and pixelating it and people you can
probably tell if you know what you're looking at, if
you find the right spot and you say, wow, these
trees or this sand became suddenly sixteen biddish. Yeah. That's
very much a repeating pattern here. So our last last
(06:22):
shot is to Ashley Wazner or Wazner who suggested we
look into the strange noises in the sky that have
been documented on video across the world. This is an
interesting one. I think a few years ago we had
heard about this. Some people have said trumpets in the sky.
Some people had mentioned it's tied as well with the
(06:44):
idea of the hum or some something of that nature.
So these are all great suggestions. We're gonna look into these,
and thank you for writing to us. If you would
like a shout out, then, as always, drop us a
line where conspiracy stuff on Facebook, Twitter, and we're uh,
I don't know, we're kind of all over the internet nowadays, right,
we got the Internet going nuts. And that concludes the
(07:06):
shoutout corner. Let's go right into this. Have you guys,
have you matter you know seeing a UFO I can
I cannot say that I have or not. I do
not believe that I have seen a UFO officially, Well, guys,
(07:30):
as it happens, I have seen what I would consider
unidentified to me, and I was not able to identify
it after the fact. And it was a very unusual
peculiar shape that I'm not used to seeing at the
at the height in the sky that I was seeing it. Um. So,
(07:50):
in a past life, I once was a poor touring
musician um with a group of Satanists called the hell
Blinky sex tet Um. We were released Satanists, but the
name of the band was the hell Blinky sextet Um.
They're actually still around and shout out to Andrew Benjamin
and and all the hell Blinky folks. They played Dragon Con,
they play They're they're kind of a steampunk type band.
(08:12):
That was was sort of a little goth kid playing
the violin with my uh, with my goatee and my
black clothes. Anywhere, Yeah, I can, we can post a picture. Um. Anyway,
we were on a tour and we were traveling through
the Midwest in a rented van and um, you know,
it was in Illinois or somewhere. I remember there was
(08:35):
a lot of corn a lot of corn fields. I've
never really um road tripped in that part of the
country before, so I was kind of taking it in
and looking out the window. I had a little handicam
back in the day, was one of the first little
HD sony handicams, and UM I was shooting footage of
the window, and um, over the corn fields, kind of
far into the horizon, I saw what looked like sort
(08:57):
of a strange geometric, clely shaped object. It was. It
was kind of like a diamond shape um or maybe
like almost like a like a trapezoid kind of I
remember it had very angular and it was it was
just hovering and it wasn't close. It was clearly very far.
But the size that it was for how you know.
(09:20):
And again, the perspective is strange out there when you're
in very flat land. It's hard to kind of judge
distance as well. And I wasn't really used to, you know,
seeing things in this part of the country, so it
was very jarring. And I did get it on video,
and for whatever reason, I do not have the tape anymore.
I know that's sort of likely story. But at your house,
no nobody showed up at my house. But they probably
(09:42):
just figured that, you know, my dumb self would lose
the thing in which I did, and so I was
no threat to anyone trying to cover anything else. Well,
here's the thing with the men in Black, if if
you were in fact visited by them, you would have
no recollection with Yeah, it's like being roofy by the
men And luck did the UFO have any lights on
it or it was during the day, it's the thing,
(10:04):
So it was in the middle of the day and
it you know, it was just very strange. And the
funny thing is, I've looked, even like in the X
Files and in shows like that where they have uh
photos of supposed UFO sightings. What I saw it looked
very similar to some of these sightings. And I remember
there's an episode in the X Files, I forget which
one it was, where there was some sort of top
(10:27):
secret government craft that would like it was really really
fast and it was you know, setting the ground on
fire because it was remember that one. Anyway, it looked
like kind of what one of those would have been
what would have looked like. But it was really strange,
and to this day have not been able to justify
figure out what it was. Um, you know, very, very
(10:48):
very that's fascinating. And we've had, we've had, especially recently,
a lot of people right in to say, hey, guys,
here's the story I have. I cannot explain it, but
I wanted to tell you about it. And we appreciate
those and maybe when we compile enough we can read
them on air and maybe a UFO listener mail episode. Um,
(11:10):
this brought us to a big question we wanted to
ask today and you have maybe asked yourself this before,
which is where the heck are all the aliens? Where
all the extraterrestrials seems like they would be around, right? Absolutely? So, okay,
this is this is something that blows my mind when
(11:33):
you think about it. Whenever we hear people arguing about
alien life or extraterrestrial stuff, and it's automatically treated as
some sort of tinfoil clap trap. Those people are not
exhibiting those critics rather or not exhibiting critical thinking when
they say that there are no aliens. We can walk
through this because there's this huge paradox, right, given this this,
(11:55):
given the size of the universe, it is, let's just
through the numbers so the observable universe is about ninety
billion light years in diameter, just the part we can see,
just that part. In that billion light years, there at
least a hundred billion galaxies, and planets like the one
(12:17):
we live on are pretty common. They're not They're not
rare by any means. This means that there are trillions
of possibly habitable planets. And this leads us to the
number one thing that blows my mind. The odds are
on our side. With the size of the universe, it
(12:38):
is almost completely inevitable that some other form of life
exists or did exist, or will exist. Here's the downer
to this beautiful thought, right, Uh, the same thing that
(12:59):
means is that aliens definitely exists, and where life definitely
exists in the universe also guarantees that these other forms
of life, um probably won't ever come into contact with us,
or we won't come into contact with them, and and
that's a very unfortunate thing. But it just it's because
we're so vastly far away, right, Yeah, So when you
(13:23):
look at the odds, think of our area of the
universe like a neighborhood, right, And let's call our neighborhood
the Milky Way. So these other life forms may very
likely not be in our neighborhood. They might be in
a different neighborhood. And the reason that this sucks so
(13:48):
bad for us is because we will probably never get
to see them, even if we have great technology, because
the universe is expanding. But whenever the stuff comes up
in you know, pop culture tropes and fiction, it's always
like the aliens just have to make contact with us
because we are so fascinating and great and or awful
(14:12):
if they want to annihilate us, right, And that's you know,
from a logical standpoint, there's some disturbing things in there.
We get this, like, even if we had an amazingly
fast spacecraft, right uh, And even if we somehow had
a social organization or dynamic that allowed us to be
in a spacecraft for a long time and not kill
(14:33):
each other and reproduce effectively and still be cool about everything,
it would still take us billions of years to travel
to another another cosmic neighborhood, yeah, to another galaxy, right
to escape. And even if we could escape our galaxy,
we're not even exactly sure what we're going to encounter.
From a physics standpoint, leaving a galaxy because there there
(14:58):
are all of these effects on on gravitational fields and
all these other things that when you're inside the safety
of even a solar system, when you're trying to escape
that they're's they're huge dangers that we possibly haven't even
accounted for yet. Right, and let's remember that those dangers
would it goes both ways. Another civilization attempting to come
to Earth would also run into those things, if it
(15:20):
we're not from the Milky Way and in between those neighborhoods,
it's the deep, it's the ink. Yeah, it's a very
specific set of conditions that give us the atmosphere and
then the gravity that we experience. And you know that's
why astronauts need such intense equipment when they you know,
(15:40):
even go just outside of our atmosphere. Right, yeah, and
this this ties into something else. Let's get weird with it.
Let's assume or play a thought game with us, folks.
Let's uh, let's imagine that humanity gets its collective junk together,
right where a family show gets its lective stuff together,
(16:01):
cooperates and builds some kind of multi generational spaceship and
arc of sorts. Yes, yeah, essentially, and this thing would
be capable of traveling billions of years. And we have
detected somehow a signal from a nearby galaxy, and we
we say, well, we have the technology to build something
(16:23):
that will last billions of years. We're going to take
this gigantic leap, and we are going to spend more
time than ever in humanity and a conscious pursuit of
a single endeavor. Here's the stuff that would happen that
we would be strange. Even if we survived, I had
(16:44):
some kind of cohesive social structure, we ourselves would probably
evolve along the way due to the exposure, the compromises
we would have to make to this other, uh, this
other environment in which we would live, Which means that
even if everything else went right, and even if there
were still some things, some other intelligent thing to find
(17:05):
when we got there, whatever did land and comes out
of that spaceship would no longer really be human. That's
crazy to think about. So even for that alone, we
wouldn't be there. And did there are ways we could
get around it. Let's imagine if we did cryogenics, you know,
some kind of hibernation. What if we sent robots which honestly,
(17:25):
is probably the the next step. What if we just
sent robots that had our DNA and said, you know,
do us a solid and make some of us once
you get to a cool part, and they would go,
it's a little weird, I don't know. No, No, it
would be great. As long as they didn't have any
(17:46):
kind of extensive historical documentation about humanity, then they would
be well. Of course, once we get to this point
where we can create an arc, at least in this
world that we've created here, perhaps humanity has moved on
from our past aggressiveness and all of that. But that's
that's the strange thing, right, Matt, Like, none of that matters.
(18:07):
None of all these very heady scientific fiction type things
we've mentioned matter. If the destination star explodes, if the
civilization perishes, perhaps due to nuclear war, due to some
other technology, or a gamma ray burst, you know there. Um,
there's so many more ways this could go wrong than
it could ever even go halfway right, especially what you're
(18:29):
saying with the expansion of the universe, and depending on
which direction you're going within the universe, how the expansion
is occurring, because you have to imagine that's time like,
if you're traveling billions of years, the way light functions,
you know, and the expansion you you could be the
billions of years could be exponentially greater. Mm hmm. Yeah,
(18:52):
And that's that's the problem. They're moving goalposts. So let's
say if other galaxies are right out, then let's talk
a little bit of out our neck of the woods.
Let's talk about the Milky Way. So the Milky Way,
our galaxy contains about four hundred billion stars billion with
a b of that four billion around twenty billion um.
(19:14):
Look a lot like the Sun. Yeah, So up to
a fifth of these are about four billion have planets
that orbit within what we call the habitable zone. Uh,
sort of a Goldilocks kind of vibe. Not too hot,
not too cold, just right. If only point one percent
of those star systems point one percent harbor life, um,
(19:37):
we'd still be looking at a million planets with some
sort of life. And what we have to note on
in that regard is that when we say some form
of life, we're not instantly talking space faring civilizations. Quite
the opposite. I'll probably like micro organism, rocking microbes. Yeah, microbes.
(19:59):
Maybe maybe if we're lucky, some kind of higher order
multicellular life, but makes me think of these, uh, these
little guys called the water bears, tartegrades is what they're called.
And they you know, scientists froze them and then revived
them after you know, a decade or something like that.
(20:20):
Very very resilient, little little little guys. Seems that they
can survive space travel even without a helmet. Yeah, which
just kind of if we got weird stuff like this
on our plan if it's so resilient and that could
exist outside of our again very specific set of conditions
that we are, you know, um kind of built for.
(20:41):
I see no reason why this could not exist outside
of our you know. Well, here's another note, and I'm
really I'm really glad you brought that up, because we
have to assume that we have to factor in age
as well as size. So the Milky Way is around
thirteen billion years old after the first For the first
(21:06):
few billion, it was sort of a bad neighborhood. Stuff
was exploding, things were smashing together. Plan It's like a
lot of planets weren't quite planets yet. It was it
was people probably or life force probably didn't live there
during the first billion years if there anything like us,
because which again that's a tremendous assumption because they would
(21:29):
be obliterated so quickly. Even think about things like the
formation of the continents, you know, and plates just smashing
up against one another. You know, we don't. We haven't
really experienced anything like that in our lifetime. It's just
where such a blip. And this idea that you're talking
about about the age makes me think of things like,
you know, the ancient ones, the elder ones, you know,
(21:50):
like you, And that's that's an interest. Okay, yes, we're
gonna tie this in because Earth is a new kid
on the block. Earth is uh well over four billion
years old, which is just nothing. That's that's chump changed.
This means that way before our planet became a thing,
the Milky Way had trillions of chances of opportunities for
(22:15):
life to be created, to to uh life to exist.
And you know a lot of planets came and went
before we ever showed up or moved in. So that
means if only one such civilization existed before us and
created space travel, this will fundamentally change our understanding of
the universe. And you know, we always think of because
(22:37):
of science fiction We always think of an alien species
that can uh, that has space faring technology as being
a future oriented, advanced thing, but it maybe, to your point,
a much older and ancient and eldritch thing, and it
certainly would give them the time to have developed a
(22:58):
different set of technolo apology or to be more advanced,
because again, you look at the timeline of Earth and
um you know what we've what it's taken us to
create the technology and the um you know, society that
we have today. I think if we had a million
years accomplished that stuff. You know, every time I we
(23:22):
talked about this stuff, I think about that game the
Massive or Mass Effect. Have you played Mass Effect at
all or heard about it? Okay? Well, alright, Ben, Well
in that in that game you and I think I've
talked about this before on here, but we in that game,
once a civilization gets advanced enough to travel a certain
(23:44):
distance from their planet, they will encounter this ancient, old
technology that is massive and what it can do is essentially, uh,
have you jumped with light speed to a different part
of the galaxy. But there was an ancient, ancient civilization
that created these things in order to traverse the entire
(24:05):
galaxies because collects the Harbingers, and I don't want to
give things away, but but there is that, Yes, there's
an ancient civilization. And what you're saying Ben in here
is that let's say that one of those really did
exist in the Milky Way, Uh, civilization that could do
that if if it was true and in the real world,
(24:26):
and they built these ships capable of taking you know,
thousand year long trips to get to one part of
the galaxy to the other and then build this huge technology.
It would take millions and millions of years to achieve
some of these things, to colonize the entire galaxy, or
to at least visit the entire galaxy, Which means then
(24:48):
that if this, if some ancient civilization existed, uh, there
would be there. There would be time, enough time if
they were around can and this is such a tremendous
house of cards yet that the question would be where
(25:09):
are they? And that is the million dollar or shall
we say, the billion light year question originally posed by
the legendary physicists and Rico Faremi. This is the Faremi paradox.
If everything we know about the Milky Way and the
larger universe assures us that other forms of life are likely,
if not near inevitable. Then why have we not found any?
(25:30):
Why have we not found one? There are a few possibilities,
you guys want a laundry list them. Yeah, maybe it's
just extremely difficult for life itself to begin. We we
don't really know exactly the mechanisms that make life occur
on a planet. We know a non living things. Yes,
we we know that there are situations which are extremely beneficial,
(25:53):
like being in the habitable zone near a star and
having an atmosphere and all of these other things. But
you know, getting an atmosphere is a huge ordeal in
its own right. Or then maybe it's just really really
difficult for life to evolve past a certain point, so
to like the earlier point you made. No, maybe most
aliens are single celled, relatively primitive organisms. So maybe the
(26:20):
entire universe, like the Milky Way, used to be a
lot more dangerous to life, just made it unsustainable. But
imagine a past that's filled with gamma ray bursts and
exploding stars and black holes, wandering black holes, radiation, all
kinds of existential threats, you know, or or just go
(26:42):
back to the earlier note about evolution. Maybe we just
haven't gotten to the next big evolutionary hurdle. We haven't
gotten over it. It's possible, I guess that we could
invent technology that has species ending consequences. Nuclear weaponry, which
we already have obviously good rent could go wrong, that's safe. Well,
it could render the entire planet completely uninhabitable. Might not
(27:07):
even take something as immediate as a nuclear weapon. We
could just do it to ourselves with you know, climate
change and you know, the right kind of weaponized disease,
or maybe Alphabet or another big company hundreds of years
from now will invent essentially what is a new species
through technology that can then or will have to take
(27:30):
over for us once organic life can't exist or maybe
hundreds of months. That's yeah. This goes into something that
the machine consciousness thing is something that we I'm glad
you mentioned because we're going to get into that too.
Here's the scariest one, in my opinion, what if another
(27:50):
highly sophisticated UH class three kind of civilization does exist,
able to traverse the galaxy with technology such that not
only is it UH not only does it seem part
of the natural world to us, but it is godlike,
(28:10):
And what if this civilization seeks out life forms that
evolved past a certain point, you know, whatever that point,
maybe maybe before you find whatever magic technology it is
that allows you to traverse space, and what if it
destroys them? Yeah, out of self preservation. I mean, you
don't want anyone else coming out in and destroying your
(28:33):
ships or fighting over resources. I mean maybe that could
really be a thing. And and the other factory your
course is time. As we mentioned previous in the previous
podcast about contacting aliens, the likelihood of other life forms
is existing is high, It's very high. But the likelihood
of them existing at the same time as our life
forms is likely much much lower, just because there's so
(28:56):
much time involved. Guys, one more possibility. I'm this is
something that Noel and uh I guess since the previous
podcast to kind of talked about and I can't remember
if it made it on the air, but um, let's okay, No,
maybe you should explain it. What if all biological entities
(29:16):
are just stepping stones to another phase of evolution entirely
like machine minds or created life. This is fascinating to
me because it certainly feels like space is not the
right environment for biological life. Right. There are a lot
of things, the processes that we do, that we have
(29:39):
to do in order to maintain our existence as a
human or as any biological living thing that just aren't
conducive to an environment that's enclosed, like in a spaceship
or something like that. I don't know. Well, it's painful
for the human ego, I'm sure, but it may well
be true. You know, what is what is more within
the reach of our seas Is it to modify ourselves
(30:03):
and our issue such that we are better adapted to
interstellar exploration? Or is it closer within our reach? You know?
Are we Are we the primates that give way to
the next step? Are we the bacteria that are you know?
Are we the unicellular organism that creates something multicellular? You know?
(30:28):
It's it's strange because we tend to think that we
are the masters, yeah, the end result, the masters of
our own evolution. That there was a poem you and
I got close to quoting a few podcasts to go
with the Master of My Fate, The Captain of my soul?
Is it black as the night that covers me, Dark
(30:49):
as the night that covers me black as pitch from
pull to pull. I thank whatever God may be for
my unconquerable soul. I can't arrest we. I think it's
called but uh, it's it's a very human thing, you
know what I mean? And it may not be true.
The id the idea of being somewhere low on the
evolutionary chain is almost like as incomprehensible as imagining what
(31:14):
it's like to to be dead, to not exist, you know,
like try to wrap your just think about like what
what what what does it feel like to not experience?
To you know, I mean, it's you can it can't.
You can't do it right because the thought itself is
an experience. And so to me, like to think of
what would it be like to evolve beyond myself, beyond
beyond what I am, the equipment that I have mentally, physically,
(31:35):
any of that still very incomprehensive. Yeah, it's the old
question of if we make, if we make robotic uh
like hard drive copies of us, if we scan our
brains and our personalities with a fidelity such that they
would be an exact copy, you know, does that is
that us? And if so, what are we? But now
(31:58):
it's time for us to get to something that hopefully listeners,
ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, you will enjoy as well.
We are going to talk about whether, despite all these
all these things, all these numbers, all these statistics we
have looked at, we're going to talk about whether there's
(32:18):
any evidence something like an alien or extraterrestrial has visited Earth.
But first a word from response. Here's where it gets crazy.
(32:38):
This is this is an even bigger question, have aliens
visited Earth? Let's let's talk about UFOs because we're not
the first people to ask this question. Oh no, no, no,
no no. This is a huge question has been around
since I guess since we've been looking at the stars
really and trying to understand what the heck they are?
(32:58):
What is that giant glowing? Yeah, we've been wondering like
what put that there? How did that get there? Is
it something that some outside force did? Can I go
to their? Can that go to me? Yeah? Yeah, very
very simple questions that are actually pretty big. Um. So
if we look at if we kind of zoom through
the human histories, we get to in a time right
(33:22):
after World War Two when there were a lot of
sightings of things in the sky a lot of times
at night, sometimes during the day. Uh that appeared a
bit strange, out of the ordinary, that regular old Joe's
like you and me, Noel and Ben just look up
and go, huh, that's weird. So the Air Force decided
(33:43):
they were going to look into these things UFOs in particular.
They began in night and it was a thing they
called Projects Sign where they were looking at sightings of
UFOs and just kind of collecting as much data as
they could on them, trying to see if they could
explain them through uh means like a balloon in the
air or test going on with an aircraft, even things
(34:05):
such as lightning or you know, lights in the sky.
And then in let see, that was called Project Sign
and it was then they changed their name to Project Grudge,
which was a kind of a separate project where they
were going through and essentially trying to debunk the findings
of Project Sign or just to explain all of them away,
(34:26):
because there were there were a couple of things, a
couple sightings that were considered unexplained still and then in
nineteen fifty three it kind of had its third little iteration,
which became a thing that you probably have heard of,
and we've talked about before on this show, called Project
blue Book, not to be confused with the Kelly Blue
Book or a Project blue Beam, nor the blue books
(34:50):
that you perhaps were issued when you had to do
writing tests. True, so this became Project blue Book in three.
But they were all pursuing similar things in different ways. Yes,
And between ninety and nineteen sixty nine, the Air Force
investigated twelve thousand, six hundred and eighteen reported UFO sightings.
(35:14):
And in this report that talks about the findings of
Project blue Book, grudge and sign and uh nor could
you read that of these total sightings, eleven thousand, nine
hundred and seventeen were found to have been caused by
material objects such as balloons, satellites and aircrafts, immaterial objects
such as lightning reflections, and other natural phenomena, astronomical objects
(35:38):
such as stars, planets, and the sun and moon, weather conditions,
and hoaxes. As indicated, only seven d and one reported
sightings remain unexplained. Great job, noll. I would object to
the language that I uses, however, because only seven one.
That's sort of right, that it's not sort of that
(36:01):
there's no reason for me to add on some kind
of crappy modifier words to that. That's absolutely attempting to
unsuccessfully in my opinion. Uh Bury the lead, Yeah, downplay
it like crazy in the official report. So what were
their official conclusions? Okay, so they had three official conclusions. One,
(36:22):
no UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force
has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.
That's a big word, you know, that word, very important
national security. There has been no evidence submitted to or
discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as unidentified
(36:42):
present technological developments or principles beyond the range of present
day scientific knowledge. And Three, there has been no evidence
indicating that sightings categorized as unidentified are extraterrestrial vehicles. And
then in sixty nine they terminated the project, right, Yes,
(37:05):
that's correct, And I think I think it was President
Carter that wanted to kind of start back up blue Book,
not necessarily the project blue Book itself, but he wanted
the Air Force to look into unidentified flying objects again,
and they turned him down because because well, yes, because
he saw one, and I guess he just thought it
(37:25):
was a good idea, but the Air Force looked back
at these reports and just said, Nah, we're not gonna
do that. That's something that we hear often enough every
time a president is newly elected, not re elected, but
newly elected. Clinton, Right, Clinton was one. I think Bush
may have meant one of the bushes and made some
(37:45):
statements about it. Probably W. Probably not h W given
his past in the CIA. Barack Obama mentioned it. Numerous
presidential nominees will say I will look into this and
what ever they find out, you know, it's not been published,
which goes to the idea of the disclosure project. Let's
(38:06):
also talk about since we we talked about the idea
of this vast chronological scale, let's explore the um conversations
people have about ancient alien visitations, the legends of someone
landing from Afar, the tie ins with biblical creatures such
as the Nephelum who fell from the sky and taught
(38:28):
man agriculture while also sleeping with as many people as
they could. Right, Uh, so we're the Nephelum. Rather, let
me amend that the Nephelum were the result of those
sorts of unions. So you will often hear ladies and
gentlemen arguments that these are these stories, these oral histories
(38:49):
that were later written down, are evidence of some other
life form from beyond the stars, jump starting human evolution
or human social evolution. I I I have to admit,
I kind of like these stories, at least the idea
underlying these stories, because when you if you think about
(39:10):
it logically, you kind of get lost and you start
doubting that this could ever be true. But when you
I like the ideas of time and how large our
galaxy is and how long it's been around, and how
relatively young the Earth is. I like the idea that
perhaps there was some mass, massive, um intelligent, perhaps even
(39:33):
technological life that that existed in the universe or even
in our galaxy, that somehow seated our planet. And I
really like the I think that's kind of what the
story is in Ridley Scott's latest Aliens franchise film. Yeah,
that actually came to mind that a lot of this
stuff just about, like you know, the engineers in that
(39:56):
film seem to be sort of like the next stage
of our evolution. So, yeah, this is this is a
good topic because I was I was planning to bring
this up as well. The theory of pan spermium as
a horrible name, but it is probably one of the
biggest potential discoveries that we can make, along with tracing
(40:16):
the origin or figuring out the providence of the Wow signal,
which you know, of course, is the one of the
most anomalous signals received from space. We have done an
episode touching on that. You can check it out where
we're talking about alien contact, the idea of microbial alien
(40:37):
life coming to Earth. The idea of this pan spermia
theory is in many ways of the plausible ancient alien idea,
and it seems um what do I say plausible, I
mean comparatively plausible. It seems that this could be in
the cards if there were an extraterrestrial higher order being
(41:02):
that came to Earth and sometime in the ancient past. Uh.
I believe that most civilizations or researchers would want everyone
to know about it. If, however, they came during a
modern time, somehow, I believe that there would be an
air of secrecy just given them. Given the fact that
(41:24):
we live in a globally connected world in which many
state actors and corporations are in constant dirty competition, but
in in this alien ancient alien theory, it would be
that perhaps they visited before humanity had evolved into a
conscious mind, to a hunter gatherer situation, because then the
(41:46):
idea would have been that instead of being capable of
learning on their own, early Homo sapiens had somebody appear
out of the sky and plant and teach them how
to plant things. Uh. The clearly you know a long
time less news. Uh. You know that I have personally
quarreled with this because I think there's a lot of
institutionalized racism in ancient alien theories. I'll spare everyone in
(42:09):
the conversation I bring up when this stuff happens, just
to say, you know, if you hear someone tell you
that there's no way ancient Egyptian civilization could have made
the Pyramids, don't just believe them. Look into the vast
amount of research people have done about recreating them. So
at this point, I don't know where else do you
(42:29):
want to go with us. I would just say that
if you're you've probably already seen everything that you could
ever see about ancient alien theory through the History Channel
or H two, or basically by turning on your television
and being near those channels. Um, you'll you've probably learned
everything about the NASCAR lines. We've covered that before. We don't.
(42:49):
I don't think we need to go back over it.
We've covered the via manas, the flying machines, and ancient
Indian ethics. I'd like to look into those and more
depth at some point. I think it's fast and you know,
warrants its own its own podcast, because listeners, if you're
familiar with this, this is the idea that, uh, in
ancient Indian civilizations there were flying machines that were invented,
(43:12):
and that there was actually something very close to an
ancient nuclear war. So we can check that one out
for sure. I don't know, but see also that doesn't
necessarily mean that aliens did it. Ancient civilization did it,
and we're just catting the cycle of building nuclear weapons
and then destroying civilization, and then building nuclear weapons and
(43:32):
then destroying civilization. The argument of great filters that civil
that alien civilizations tend to self destruct before they ever
get to the point where they could communicate with other
people seems pretty likely. Well, that's all I've got. Certainly,
something we see, you know, repeating itself, even in the
short relatively short history of our own planet. You know,
(43:53):
great civilizations kind of crumbling and then being replaced. Oh
and that's a that's a scary thing to how how
how foolish would it sound to an outside civilization to
land right after some devastating war and to say, well, these,
this group of animals was, this group of biological life
(44:13):
forms was close to getting into interstellar travel. But because
their tribes didn't get along, they killed everybody. They didn't
have like a fight club thing with like two leaders,
do get it out. No, they said, everybody dies. And
the fish are like us too, And they're like, yes,
(44:34):
because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time,
cosmically speaking to right. And and when we when, when
we think about this, how how strange this could be?
It also brings up a very specific thing that just
reminded me of No. I. If you think about the
rise and fall of empires, many historians have tried to
(44:55):
trace this, to find a pattern to the cycle, right
a frequency, and and if you look at the empire
that is currently the United States, it's anomalous right now.
And while you know, we as people don't haven't there's
no one who's been alive as long as the U
(45:15):
S has that we know of. Uh So, it seems
like it's stable and it seems like it's solid, but
it's early days yet that's just because inside of it.
And how long will it continue? Will it be or
will it be around when when we see some sort
of alien civilization, when humanity or humanities successors strike out
(45:37):
to the stars. Let us know what you think, folks.
Let us know if you think there have been instances
of alien contact. Let us know if you think we'll
ever find it. Let us know if you think space
is a place for biological entities like us, or if
we are just here just sort of be the midwives
for a new form of life. You can find us
(45:59):
some face speaking Twitter where conspiracy stuff there, and you
can check out every audio podcast that Noel, Matt and
I have ever done, and there are quite a few
now at our website. Stuff they don't want you to
know dot com. And if you don't want to do
any of that, but you still want to talk to us,
because why not? What a check? You can send us
a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy and how
(46:22):
stuff works. Dot
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com