008 - Matthew Szydagis on the Scientific Hunt for UAP, Taking the Subject Seriously, and the Smartest Science Fiction - The Anomalous Review

Episode Transcript
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(00:23):
Welcome to the Anomalous Review.This is the official podcast of
the Scientific Coalition for UAPStudies, or SCU.
I'm your host, Michael Glossin. I'm a philosopher of science and
technology and a contributing member of SCU.
Our organization exists to further the serious technical
study of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, and we're

(00:45):
glad to have you listening. My guest today is Doctor Matthew
Judaugus. Matt is an astrophysicist, and
like most people doing rigorous work on the subject of UAP,
anomalous phenomena aren't Matt's only area of interest.
Currently, Matt is Associate Professor of Physics at the
University of Albany, where he conducts experimental research
in Astro particle physics. A lot of that work is geared

(01:08):
toward designing machines and experiments for detecting the
elusive dark matter that astronomers think might be
responsible for holding our galaxies together.
Matt's been working on UAP in his spare time for quite a
while. He is a member of UAPX and the
Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.
Matt's also a science consultantfor shows that often discuss

(01:30):
UAP, and they're in as much as he can.
He acts as a corrective to the much goofier and less rigorous
voices that are often featured in popular entertainment that
deals with UAP. Currently, he's working with the
Disney Plus show The Proof Is Out There.
You might also have seen Matt inthe UAP documentary A Tear in
the Sky, which we discuss a bit in this conversation.

(01:52):
Matt is also a frequent collaborator with Kevin Knuth,
who also teaches at the University of Albany and who's
one of my favorite interviews ofall time.
If you haven't seen that interview with Kevin, you should
definitely queue it up when you're done with this one.
Now, everyone, no matter their perspective on the issue, knows
that the vast, vast majority of UAP sightings can be explained
as prosaic objects like Venus, or terrestrial aircraft or

(02:15):
satellites or meteorites and so on.
This leaves a few percent of UAPsightings, though, that resist
any prosaic explanation. We can think of these as truly
anomalous UAP. If we zoom in on this set of
truly anomalous UAP, we find, 1st, that there are many
thousands of these sightings that can't be explained in a

(02:35):
mundane way. Second, we find that there's an
extraordinary variety among them, from location to the type
of objects sighted, to the number of people who witnessed
the event, to the specific conditions of the encounter.
Several different groups have undertaken the work of analyzing
these accounts into a set of data points and compiling them
into databases so that researchers can perform

(02:56):
scientifically rigorous analysisof them.
SCU, the organization that hoststhis podcast, has produced a
research report that looks at over 300 such cases.
I discussed that report in our next episode with Robert Powell.
1/3 consistent feature of these reports, however, is the
frustratingly consistent fact that they're, almost without

(03:16):
exception, all accidental observations.
People don't witness UAP becausethey were looking for them.
People happen to observe UAP while they're chatting outside
of the cookout, or driving home from soccer practice, or while
they're flying an airplane for their job.
Obviously, this isn't the ideal way of collecting data if you
want to do a serious analysis ofit later.

(03:38):
Ideally, you'd want to be able to plan your observations ahead
of time, bring special equipment, focus on the task of
observation, And you'd want to do this not just once, but over
and over, so that you could build a robust data set.
But who in the world, with the right equipment and the right
scientific expertise, actually goes out looking for UAP?

(03:59):
At least that was the answer until 20/21.
That's when the group UAPX was formed by a collection of
physicists, engineers, and former and current military
contractors. UAPX is working to address this
problem of purely accidental data collection by going out and
actively observing UAP using a wide variety of sensors and

(04:22):
modes of observation. My guest today, Matthew Judagis,
is one of the members of UAPX. We discuss UAPXS 1st research
expedition to Catalina Island off the southern coast of
California and the results that they obtained from that project,
which may have been a first of its kind.
We also got to talk about Matt'sresearch on dark matter, where I

(04:45):
probably annoyed him with some of my philosophical skepticism
about the very idea of dark matter.
But we round out the conversation by talking about
our favorite ideas from science fiction.
I think you'll really enjoy thisepisode.
So here now is my conversation with Doctor Matthew Chidagas.
Welcome to the Anomalous Review,the official podcast of the

(05:07):
Scientific Coalition of UAP Studies.
My name is Michael Glausson. I'm a philosopher of science and
technology, and I'm the host. And today our guest is Matthew
Chidagas. He is a professor at physics at
the University of Albany and a regular on the History Channel's
The Proof Is Out There. Matthew, welcome to the show.
It's great to be here. Yeah.

(05:27):
So the very first thing that I wanted to ask about is the
organization that you are like apretty long time maybe founding
member of, I don't know, UAPX, right?
That's right. What is, what is UAPX and what
do you do? So UAPX is an organization that
is focused on getting data on UAP, not reanalysis of old

(05:54):
cases. So while there are similar
organizations, most UAP or UF organizations, most of them are
very different from UAPX becausethey're focused on reanalysis or
meta analysis of historical cases, which is very valuable,
but is probably part of a largerwhole.

(06:15):
So UAPX has a different approach, which is to go get our
own data on UAPA. And I'm all a member actually,
not just of UAPX, but also of SCU, for which this podcast,
I've actually was a member of SCU.
First, you asked if I was the founding member of UAPX.
Not quite, but close. I was recruited very early on in

(06:35):
existence. By Kevin Knuth.
That's right by Kevin Knuth, whowas in turn recruited by Kevin
Day. So UNPX was Co founded by by
U.S. Navy veterans Kevin Day and Gary
Varice, who were both Nimitz slash Princeton tic tac
encounter with they're not the pilot, you know, like Braver and

(06:56):
Dietrich, but they were they hadother roles on the ships in the
carrier strike like. Radar and sensors and things
like that. Right.
Yeah, exactly. I think Kevin Day was on radar
and and Gary was one of the the the firemen, which means weapons
control. So they, so they were part of
this encounter and I, I since felt a lot of frustration that

(07:20):
it wasn't taken so seriously or maybe that it was taken
seriously, but it wasn't like publicly acknowledged and
handled in the way that they think that like, you know, this
sort of information should be. So they started their own
organization specifically with the aim of collecting entirely
new measurements and data on UAP.

(07:40):
Is there any other organization prior to this or or much part of
this that was doing something like that or is is this a pretty
new kind of project? So if you look at the history of
Ufology or UAP studies or whatever you'd like to call it,
this has happened before, but itwasn't that common.
So there have been attempts likethis before to do, you know,

(08:03):
field expeditions to UFO hotspots or alleged hotspots.
So it's not an entirely new idea, but it.
UAPX was one of the first newer organizations founded in sort of
the post Leslie Keene and Lou Elizondo era after the existence
of a tip was revealed by the NewYork Times and I believe it was

(08:27):
2017. So it's one of the newer
organizations and older efforts,like there's Professor Rutledge
of Southeastern Missouri University in the 70s.
There are a lot of these older efforts, but the older efforts
suffered from the stigma againstthe topic that was much stronger
in the past than it has been recently.

(08:49):
As a result, a lot of the older field expedition efforts were
unable to publish their results in a peer reviewed high impact
scientific journal. Some of them published their
results in journals that are notconsidered scientific enough by
the major community. Or they wrote up their results
in books. And books are great, except that

(09:12):
anyone can write anything. Yeah, there's no peer review for
books. Generally exactly so.
So UFPX is not the first but is one of the first of the new
cohort in the new era after the big reveals of the you know, a
tip program and the the Navy videos like the Tic Tac and the
Goldfast and and the gimbal. So it seems like that makes you

(09:33):
the 1st in, in a sense, at leastqualitatively.
Like if, if the last projects that were really doing this in
the systematic scientific way, we're in the 70s.
I mean the technology gap between now and then is just
vast. So you're not just getting
incrementally better data, you're getting entire
qualitatively new kinds of data.You probably have qualitatively

(09:54):
new analytic methods that you can use on that data and you're
now in a position where you can publish these for peer review
and you've got like a sufficientamount of interest among the
like qualified scientific community that they can actually
do review on it and they're willing to do review on it.
So that seems like you're the 1st of a lot of things that UAPX

(10:16):
trying to go out and actually get your new data.
And it seems like the data that so you, so you made the
distinction between UAPX, which is seeking to generate new data
observationally and other organizations that are looking
at sort of doing metadata analysis on case studies that
already exist. But it's not like those
organizations are looking at theexact same kind of data because

(10:40):
most UAP observations aren't made using anything like the
methods and systems that UAPX does.
So you're not just trying to like add to an already existing
pile, you're creating an entirely different pile from
people just looking up and seeing something in the sky,
which is a great UAP report. I mean, if 50 people in clear

(11:01):
observational conditions see theexact same thing, that is great
high quality evidence, but it's very different from what you
guys are doing. So tell me, tell us what is it
exactly that you're doing? Like what's your setup?
You went on this expedition. I read your, your, I think it's
like 40 something page. First UAP field expedition
report was published a few yearsago.

(11:23):
It's a fantastic piece. It's very detailed, but without
requiring the listeners to, to spend the time of, of going
through the 40 pages. Take us through.
Like what's the setup that you're using when you go out and
observe and where did you take it?
No, We had visible light cameras, We also had infrared
and we had a lot of other sensors.

(11:43):
We had radiation detector at more than one detector actually
of ionizing radiation. Those are the major sensors.
We wanted to do more. But as usual, especially when
you're doing something the firsttime, your plan sometimes exceed
what you're able to actually implement because of person
power and just technical difficulties.

(12:05):
So we don't really have magneticfield detections was one thing
we'd like to add. So we also, we did a lot of
night vision goggle measurements.
Some team members were able to do that.
That's a different spectrum thanLear cameras, for example.
But there they don't actually record.
So we have to do it, you know, like in the style of like Jeremy

(12:28):
Corbell, you know, people like smartphone up to the binoculars.
We could still get stuff that way.
So it was not, we were not at the high ideal that we hold
ourselves to in our first expedition, but it was a really
good trial run where we went to Laguna Beach, CA.
We also. Had a team.

(12:49):
So why there? So that we could view the
Catalina channel. So we also had a team on Avalon
and Catalina Island. The idea was to revisit the
location of the Nimitz encounter.
So that was Kevin Days and Gary Vereese's idea.
And then of course, the criticism always says, well,
that was, you know, two decades earlier.
What, you know, are the Tic Tacsis hanging around.

(13:10):
But really, that's not the only motivation.
Because if you go back and just look at just websites and
newspaper articles about Catalina Island and the Catalina
area sort of in between and nearboth Los Angeles as well as San
Diego, that's supposedly a hot spot completely separate.
Like before we even knew the Nimitz about the Nimitz

(13:30):
encounter, that was 2004, but itwasn't really made public in a
major way until 2017 within. Because of the encounter, right?
That there was that one high profile encounter and then it
becomes. In 2004, but it had.
Been known since then. But but it's been since before
2004. There are stories going back to
the 1970s about alleged encounters with UA, PS and US

(13:54):
OS, unidentified submersible objects, also in the Catalina
Channel. And so that's why it was a
decent place for a selection of a first explanation.
I think it's interesting. This demonstrates how with all
empirical science, there's kind of a gradient between everyday
individuals observations and experience of the world and the

(14:16):
really rigorous scientific studyof it.
Where like you can't do this latter thing without in some
sense starting with and being informed by people's everyday
observations. Like when we discover new
species like the colossal squid or something, we don't know how
to study that other than by listening to people who are
like, yeah, something I was on aboat and I saw one of these
things out right there. So where do you go?

(14:39):
We, we don't know enough about the thing to have an A priori or
you know, well formed idea yet of where they might go.
So we just rely on observations and we set up and see what we
can see. So that's sort of what you're
doing. You're taking all this history
of observational reports, some of which are well documented
using military equipment and military observers and you're

(15:01):
setting up. But it's, it seemed like a
really good location for other reasons too.
Like you get this interesting, you know, nice observational
vantage points. You have these two vantage
points because you got a channelrunning from, you know, the from
you got California's coast and you've got this channel.
And then you've got the CatalinaIsland and you had observers on
both sides of it. And it's in that Channel that

(15:22):
you were that is that where the Nimitz encountered the object
was within the channel just around the area.
Well, we don't know for sure, I think because, you know, the
exact training area is probably classified, but it's somewhere
around there. Might have been further out
though, Pacific, but yeah, we don't.
It's funny that you mentioned one example.
I'll give you another, which is meteors.

(15:44):
You know, people for thousands of years are saying rocks fall,
rocks don't. Fall from the sky.
Yeah, rocks don't fall from the sky.
They were laughed at, they were insulted.
And the same things happening again.
History repeats itself. So our philosophy and UAPX and
other groups take a similar philosophy like the Galileo
Project, which is to not you don't.
We don't discard eyewitness testimony as you know, useless

(16:07):
because it's unreliable. We have instead a middle of the
road approach between oh, you just believe any crazy thing
people tell you versus throw allof it out.
Our approach is use the eyewitness testimony of past
encounters to inform what type of sensors you want to use to

(16:27):
inform the scientific plan for ascientific expedition.
So it's kind of like a, it's an approach where you, you, you,
you don't, you don't count eyewitness testimony as evidence
or proof of anything exotic, butyou use it partially.
You use it as motivation for what might be good things to
look for. So I mentioned, you know,

(16:48):
magnetic peels that we didn't measure in the first expedition
but wanted to so didn't get the censors working.
Where did that come from? Comes from, you know, stories of
UFO shutting off cars and stuff like that.
So these the even the crazy stories that we may or may not
believe fully and motivate what we do in a scientific
expedition. Yeah.
And that that term belief isn't even really the right thing for

(17:11):
people to insert into the scientific process.
It's like we don't know if we believe this happened or not.
We're trying to figure out if weshould believe it or not by
putting some sensors there and seeing if we can actually
confirm or you can't really disconfirm it, but if you could
get corroborating evidence at least.
So you've got this when you whenyou go out on this expedition,

(17:33):
you've got all these sensors you're seeing.
It sounds like you're saying youcan see the visible light
spectrum. You can see the infrared
spectrum and FLIR and then another part of the infrared
spectrum that you see through night vision goggles, but those
aren't being recorded. So you've got those sorts of
cameras and you've got like an array of them so that you can

(17:53):
see some portion of the night sky.
How much of the sky could you see at one time?
Oh, that's an excellent question.
I don't know. And that's not in our paper
actually it was definitely less than 50% because we're all
pointed in One Direction and we're not seeing overhead or
behind us. And so I would say it's, it's

(18:14):
definitely less than, definitelyless than 50%.
But I think that Despite that, Ithink we actually had too many
cameras. And I mentioned this in the
paper because when you collect too much data, especially when
you've got cameras that are, youknow, maybe older models don't
have or might have some camera noise glitches, you know, camera

(18:35):
artifacts, it makes the data very hard to analyze.
So actually going forward, we actually want to have fewer
cameras and higher quality that of course then run the risk of
like, oh, you know, the UFO is over there.
And we want to try to balance that in the future by doing a
better job of having, for example, one or two, you know,

(18:56):
fisheye cameras that see the entire sky and then have other
cameras that can swing to see where that where that camera,
the larger field of view has seen a detection.
So which we're refining our methods, especially given the
lessons learned from the first expedition.
So that refinement that you justmentioned having like 1 fisheye
lens and then a bunch of other higher quality cameras.

(19:17):
The idea then is that your fisheye camera is surveying the
entire sky, but not really at the right or it's not as a
smooth, consistent resolution, right?
There's some distortion, but itspurpose is to see if there's
anything moving or weird at all.And then those other cameras
will then arrange themselves to to look at it.

(19:37):
So the first one is like movement or odd or shape
detection or something, shadow detection and the others are the
thing. They're really getting the high
quality data that you want to look at.
Exactly. So for example you have a camera
that has a wide angle, but then because it's seeing so much, an
object will just be a dot. But then the other cameras find

(19:58):
that same dot and like, oh, that's an airplane.
You know, those are things we did a little bit of that, but
not enough of that. So we did have a dual camera
system that would sometimes rideon top of the roof of the Osiris
from, from Jeremy McGowan, this famous UFO hunting, you know,
car. It's kind of like I, I've given
Jeremy the compliment of the Osiris kind of being like the,

(20:20):
it's like ecto one from it's from the Ghostbusters, but for
UFOs. So sometimes they would do a
camera system. Right, but most of the time,
unfortunately we split the cameras and we just didn't have
enough cameras for visible light.
We have more than their cameras.And so we have a fisheye on the
truck and then the the the pan tilt zoom camera on the roof.
So that defeats the purpose of what I was just saying.

(20:41):
So again, lessons learned about what we could have done
differently, we could have done better.
You mentioned earlier about, youknow, the two points of view.
Really we were always, we were talking up triangulation.
We didn't end up triangulating anything pretty much because in
order for that to work, you needto have two people saying, you
know, the same object and be sure it's the same object.
And how Are you sure of that? You know, from from both

(21:02):
perspectives. So again, we didn't get to do
any of the type of triangulationwe really wanted to do.
We did some, but it required using things like reference
point of like estimating the cloud ceiling and stuff like
that. But we didn't be.
We weren't able to get the kind we actually wanted where there's
a UFO in the channel and we could see it simultaneously from
the island and mainland. I mean that doing triangulation

(21:25):
in real time like that is a is apretty gnarly skill too.
I mean, you have to be really good at estimating the distance
and like how many arc seconds The thing is above the horizon,
you know? And that's just not a skill that
most people have. They even if they have a really
good pair of binoculars. Yeah, I don't think we're ever
intending. Maybe we were intending one
point. We're ever intending on doing
that live, but after the fact wecould always go back ideally and

(21:50):
look at images, look at videos, and if we knew the metadata and
knew where people were located with those cameras, then we
would be able to do that carefully and slowly, not just a
quick and dirty estimate in the moment.
So would you set up like beaconsor reference points also in in
the future that you could use aslike calibrating sort of

(22:11):
information between cameras? Absolutely.
We did a little bit of that. It's not really in the movie A
Tear in the Sky by director, producer Carolyn Corey, but
there were some deleted scenes Iknow where Jeremy and the Osiris
was using like a laser to calibrate the dual camera
fisheye PTV system, the four dabs.
So yeah, calibrations are extremely important.

(22:34):
And one of our ideas for doing that is actually in the future
deploying simultaneously or maybe serially.
And not just the UFO hotspot, but like a non hotspot, an area
that like has never reported a single UFO so that you can have
control data. And you need to have at least
two kinds of control data, like a completely quiet rural area

(22:56):
with no airplanes or UFOs, and then like next to a bustling
airport, for example, to get a lot of planes, get a lot of
words as well, things like that.So we're looking at trying to
take control data along both positive and negative active in
the future. What happens if you run into the
problem that like Cyreach researchers have where like you
just can't find a spot that doesn't have some sort of

(23:17):
activity in it? Does that just screw up the the
future of UFO research? I'm skeptical that that's the
case. I'm sure there's still areas
that have at least no that have that are low in human airplanes
as well as don't have a let's say an above average number of
UFO reports. Yeah, at least.

(23:38):
I just got that such a place doesn't exist.
I'm sure, I'm sure it does. I mean, we're already looking at
places locally in New York Stateclose to the University of
Albany, where we're looking for potential hotspots, but also
looking for areas where like thelast interesting UFO report is
like from the 70s. So it's a good control area.
So no, I think that it's definitely still possible.

(23:59):
If you're worried about satellites, of course, they'll
always still be satellite guys much more cluttered today than
it used to be, but there's a wayto counter that.
There are app you can look at where is Starlink right now?
Where's the ISS right now? So while yes, no matter where
you go on Earth, it's true you're going to get satellite,
you can't avoid that. So but that you can at least

(24:20):
check against apps, against smartphone apps that track
rocket launches, that track Starlink launches and things
like that. There's like the FA as flight
map and all that you can pull from TIK.
Yeah, and you were pulling from some of these sources while you
were doing the expedition, right?
So you have all these cameras and observers out there, but
you're also comparing what you're observing to like the

(24:40):
what? What are those sources?
Like? I know the FAA is one of them.
What are the other things that you're looking at to say, Oh,
that's probably Starlink or whatever it is.
Yes. So there are plenty of astronomy
apps you can get on, on, you know, on iPhone, on Android,
things like that that won't justlist astronomical objects,
they'll list satellite. You're not going to, they're not
going to explain to helicopters,but they'll take care of
satellite and they'll take care of rockets.

(25:02):
They'll take care of artificial objects.
Not all apps, but some of the apps do that.
Or it's a layer that you can turn on.
And so, yeah, it's just planes. Planes are not enough.
Of course, FAA and ADSB are onlypart of the equation.
You also need to take care of the stuff that you know outside
the atmosphere. Can anybody look at like that
FAA map and see if that if something above them is a plane

(25:26):
or? Yes, I know there are websites
like FlightAware where you can do this and you can see like
these nice colored maps of war. All the, you know, planes are
that are that are broadcasting their transponder signal.
I I don't know how easy it is togo back in time and get
historical records, but it's nottoo difficult to do this live.
And even, you know, it's not just planes of helicopters by a

(25:47):
flight pants to like during the movie, but tear in the skyway
like a helicopter path by where they they veered off of their
flight path probably because they saw wow, what's all that
equipment on that rooftop I'm doing there?
So, you know, I don't know, corporate espionage or
something. Yeah, the cops come too, right?
Then the police come and ask youabout what you're doing.
Oh, yeah. Because, you know, it's kind of

(26:09):
it's, it's the Los Angeles area,nosy neighbors, right, who have
nothing better to do than to complain.
And so somebody complained aboutus.
Like who is it literally kind ofroof hurting anybody?
We were not noisy. We're not like we were partying.
We're very We were pretty quiet most of the time.
I'd be. Suspicious if I looked out my
window and there was a whole camera crew sitting on top of a

(26:30):
a building. I might.
I just asked them myself too. I think I'd call the cops, but
it'd be. Yeah, but in the California
area, I would just. Assume everything's a movie,
right? You're all you're.
Yeah, You're in a movie every moment there.
Exactly. But the neighbors didn't like
having a movie being filmed actually in there.
But you didn't have to leave, did you?
No, well, I can't. For the record, since we're
recording, I can't tell you how we solved that, but maybe off

(26:52):
the record I would. Love to tell?
You later it wasn't the police that came by.
That was the only stage 1, then stage 2, then people were then a
different like not police, some other like office of with agents
came to see if we had a. Filming license interest like oh
OK so like so. It was a multi stage process,
but yeah, once we put them on the scissor lift and brought

(27:14):
them up to see the setup, they thought it was really cool and
then and and nobody wanted to bother us anymore after seeing
the setup pretty much. So that's the key.
You need to always bring a scissor lift with you and just
offer people rides like, oh, youjust this, this will be fun.
Just get on the scissor lift. You won't.
Be well. No, the scissor lift was an
exciting thing. It was taking it to the roof of
seeing our equipment. Oh.
Oh, OK. Yeah, yeah.

(27:35):
People would see our equipment and and be just like impressed
and not want to Kick It Out. And you told them what you were
looking for, right? Like we're looking for UFOs.
Honestly, I don't remember. This was three years ago now.
Yeah, I, I stayed out of it whenlike if cops showed up or the
film name, I'm like, well, we'lllet Carolyn take care of it.

(27:55):
Or the, you know, one of the other the film crew people.
And so I don't know what they said.
Maybe. I think at one point I overheard
that they told them we were doing a meteorological thing, so
I don't think we admitted really.
I think it depends who was asking.
That's funny. Little like social engineering
skills for the UAP community. That's right.

(28:16):
So tell me about the UFO DAP. What's a UFO DAP?
It's a tool you used. It's a camera system that is
it's a commercial camera system,but with other tools like
sensors and software added to itby an an A California engineer,
retired engineer Ron old. So it's one of the available
systems you can buy for UFO hunting.

(28:39):
So he again, he didn't design the camera.
It's like a commercial like black, you know, security Dome,
you know, camera. But but Ron's been adding stuff
to it like more sensors, software.
Is this something that a hobbyist member of the public
could invest in and have any usefor?
Or is this a really fancy tool that only is used by scientists?

(29:03):
That's a great question. I think that at a cost of
several $1000, I don't know how many, you know, hobbyists will
be able to get one. I do know many who have.
But yeah, I think operation of the software would be a
significant challenge, unfortunately for the non
scientist engineer. So I can't exactly recommend it

(29:28):
in that way, but. It was useful for you.
It was. It captured our most interesting
ambiguous event. We'll, we'll get to that in a
minute. I don't want to hear the, the
less exciting two questions I have before that are what tell
me about like the the actual cameras digital information

(29:52):
situation. Like, do you know what the
frames per second rate on the cameras were, or whether you
used any sort of compression at all?
Yes, it's all in the paper. So it depending on the camera
model somewhere 20 or 30 and some 60, I don't remember which
was which was all documented in writing of like the Fleer and

(30:13):
the UFO app. Of course, all had, you know,
well known frame rates and resolutions.
You mentioned the specific models of cameras too, so like
you give a very detailed. We're very detailed because we
want to be scientific. We don't want to just say, oh,
we went out with some cameras. Well, what kinds of cameras?
What? Because we want to allow people

(30:34):
to be able to, you know, Google that camera model and find well,
what are the, the, the strengthsand the weaknesses of that
camera so that everything is open.
It is our, so we share our knowledge openly everybody.
So we know the frame rates, we know the resolutions and when we
were doing analysis of the results, we would actually pull

(30:54):
out the raw under full uncompressed images frame by
frame from the videos. So the the information is
temporarily compressed, but we can recover the original
resolution images pulling them out of the video files.
You know the MP fours and the AVis and the different, you know
standard video extensions. We able to pull out full

(31:18):
resolution bitmaps frame by frame when doing our image
analysis. So for people who aren't, you
know, super attuned to the, the world of like digital video
compression, I can imagine somebody feeling a little
anxiety and hearing that, oh, they were temporarily
compressed. But the way compression works is
that they're lossless and lossy versions of compression.

(31:40):
And so your cameras are recording, they're quote
compressing. Most people, I think, hear
compression and they think that that means that there's
necessarily some sort of loss ofimage quality or data, and
that's not the case. No, that's not the case.
That is often the case with a lot of beautiful videos that did
not happen to us. Where what happens is if you
post your videos online, then they're downloaded and then

(32:03):
someone reposts, then it may turn into a game of telephone
with multiple stages of of loss decompression.
We did not do that. And to make sure that that
doesn't happen, we have multiplecopies of the original data so
that if, if something happens, we all have copies of the

(32:23):
original data from the cameras before we started messing with
any files and doing any analysison them.
So that is when we we can avoid this game of telephone of
multiple stages of the decompressing and recompressing
that often happens when people, you know, post UFO videos to
YouTube and things like that andthen they're downloaded by

(32:45):
somebody else from YouTube and then it's not the original
anymore. We do our best to avoid those
types of situations. And there's no.
So we're not seeing a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, no.
And the way that your compression is working is it's
not the sort of codec that is a compression, a decompression

(33:07):
program that makes any sort of guesses.
Like it's not like it subtracts 50% of the pixels and then when
it decompresses it, it just makes a guess as to what was in
those pixels it subtracts. You're getting exactly the data
that. You well, as far as I know
that's not the case. That being said, there were
still weaknesses. So for example, on the flier, we
have data, we have the raw data,but it's not, it's not the full

(33:32):
raw that we would have liked. So it's not like the temperature
or intensities of infrared photons in the flare, it's the
color that was created by the flare software.
So there is one step there wherewe could have gone one level
deeper. So again, it wasn't perfect, but
when we analyze data, we never go off of like a low resolution

(33:54):
version of a clip. We always, if we're doing now,
there's always check back to theoriginal data that we saved
multiple copies of immediately during that.
So you're in in the case you just gave of the FLIR film,
what's being saved is exactly the the heat map that my bit map

(34:15):
that was produced moment to moment.
But what's not being saved are the precise numerical
temperature values of each of those pixels, which would create
an enormous file and could be useful.
But what it all it would ever really produce probably is the
exact lossless bitmap of, you know, FLIR image that that

(34:37):
you've got. So that's not a compression or,
or like loss in this issue. That's just saying we could have
stored way, way more information, but we're not sure
we would have used it in any productive way.
So maybe in the future we will. Well, we could have, it would
have been beneficial, but we just didn't have that with the
models we had and the software we had.
But but yeah, So what I'm talking about is the step
between translating from temperature into a color scale

(35:00):
that we don't have that step. But we do document the full the
model number of the Fleers cameras that we use, as well as
what reporters we use so that anyone can dig deeper if they
wish into our hardware and software chains.
Or So what you what you end up with is when you look at a Fleer

(35:22):
image that you've recorded, you can zoom in on a particular
pixel and you can see its color,and that color will specify a
range of color temperature. That's right.
You and you know that whatever stream of light was hitting that
sensor at the time is within that range, but you don't know
it's exact numerical value. There is some that's right.

(35:44):
There is some loss of information there, but it has
nothing to do with video compression.
It just has to do with the conversion from temperatures
into colors. And so and so, it doesn't mean
that there's any possible error being introduced.
It's just not as highly specificas you would.
Exactly. It's a difference of accuracy
versus precision. To the best of my knowledge and

(36:06):
that of my I think, colleagues, that is a loss of precision but
not of accuracy. From from what I read in the
paper, I don't see any any loss of accuracy.
I I see only losses of degrees of precision, which, that's
right, is not. And it turns out we need to get
our most useful information fromthe clear anyway.
We've got some potential anomalies, but it's not where

(36:28):
our most exciting or most of oureffort was devoted in the end.
Let's talk about the results. What sort of first use the term
anomaly? But there's a conceptual
distinction you make in the paper that I think is really
important and that we should focus on a little bit first
between an anomaly and ambiguity.
What's the difference between those as you guys talk about it?

(36:49):
Well, qualitatively differences.You might not know what
something is initially, and so it's ambiguous.
Could it be weird? Could it be something exotic or
could it be something identifiable?
So technically ambiguity is already AUAP because it's
unidentified doesn't mean you'veidentified it as an, you know,

(37:10):
spacecraft with exotic propulsion, right?
But an anomaly is something where statistically you've shown
that not only something qualitatively strange, but it's
in the paper we specifically refer to, we have a coincidence
timing across different sensors where you have different sensors

(37:31):
all registering something above background.
So for instance, what if you have a a weird shape in the
camera which you also have a radiation detection?
Because that wouldn't make sensebecause no aircraft or
spacecraft that we know of, or, you know, natural atmospheric
phenomenon should be producing ionizing radiation at any
considerable distance. So something to call something

(37:54):
anomalous. We're trying to raise the
standard in the paper to say that you need something across
multiple sensors to be anomalousand it needs to be statistically
significant. That means that it's not just
what's called in science and accidental coincidence, which
means to compare that to the connotation of the word

(38:18):
coincidence, how it's used by non scientists, an accidental
coincidence just means coincidence.
That means those two things are not related, but they just
happen to occur at the same timebecause let's say you have two
or more large volume data sets. And so there is some probability
this data set has always been yeah, that's called accidental

(38:39):
coincidence. And so if something's anomalous,
we're saying you've got an, you've got something that beyond
significantly beyond the accidental coincidence
probability. And there's still,
unfortunately, we try to be quantitative, but there's still
a qualitative dimension because when you've got cameras
involved, sure, you can have a cluster of pixels that's, you
know, a definitely statisticallysignificant, but it's an

(39:02):
airplane or a bird. So there's also the qualitative
dimension in the camera aspect of.
Is the camera image itself qualitatively ambiguous, at
least initial? So let's think of a just a clear
thought example to to demonstrate this distinction
between an ambiguity and an anomaly.

(39:24):
So let's say you and I are standing on top of my building
here looking out at the ocean. I live in Charleston.
The Ocean's pretty close to us and we've both got, let's say
we've got a FLIR camera and we've got a radar sensor maybe,
and we're looking at the information that we have between

(39:47):
US and I see something off in the distance with my eyes and
it's not clear what it is. It's a blur, right?
At that point. We call that an ambiguity,
right? Because a blurry spot in my own
vision could be anything. It could be a swimmer in my eye.
It could be. A bird, it could be a cloud,

(40:08):
could be anything. But if you and I look at, say,
the FLIR image and we see something there too that's
blurry, or maybe, you know, it doesn't have to be blurry, but
we see some object at the same place, you'd say, well, now
we've got an anomaly. Because it's hard to imagine
something that would spoof my own vision as a blur and then

(40:31):
would also spoof the infrared inthe same sort of way.
Is that kind of the idea well? Almost you're you're close
because just because it's in your eyes and in the flare
doesn't mean it's not an airplane or a clone or a flying
animal, right? A bird like a bird.
So our insect. And so I think when we get to

(40:53):
get to anomaly, we need to, we mentioned this in the paper.
You it's not enough to have a coincidence of multiple sensors
and non human sensors and and account for the statistics of
you know of you know two types of sensors having a hiccup or
burp at the same time. There is another aspect to this

(41:16):
and that is what is the null hypothesis or null hypothesis.
In other words, what are the mundane or prosaic explanations
that are possible? The tricky thing here is that
even though we tried to be quantitatively rigorous in the
paper, there's always still a room for non quantitative
interpretation because someone can always come in and claim you
didn't systematically go throughall possible null hypothesis

(41:38):
because it's impossible. You can never you'll forget the
one type of you know we tried tolist in the paper and you know
different explanations for UAP. You can never be comprehensive
in saying what something is not because who's to say you didn't
forget one on your list? But the the important thing is,
is to make a sincere good faith effort across multiple

(41:58):
scientists so people can peer review each other and and help
fill and get some things that people didn't think of.
Oh, did you check this? So did you check that?
And so, yeah, we want to be cautious.
So the example you gave, it's still not an anomaly.
And it would be jumping to conclusions to call that example
given anomaly because what stopsthe example you just said from
being a distant airplane? You need to check things like

(42:20):
the FAA records or look at live ADSB tracking of transponder
signals on white aware website, things like that.
You not, you need to start eliminating possibilities like
let's say there are no wings, OK, but what's the resolution of
your eye or the camera? Would you even see as they would
be there? You have to address these things
which are called systematics or systematic answer.

(42:43):
So it's not enough for somethingto be a statistical anomaly, you
need to account for both statistical and systematic
source of the pair. So then let's go back to to
specify example a little more. I said initially that we had
both radar and Fleer because I was thinking maybe my first
example wouldn't work out. Anyway, I hope so.
Let's go back and say you and I are looking out and we both see

(43:07):
something. We're not sure what it is and we
check the radar and it is there.There's an object there hovering
in the sky at some definite distance that seems to
correspond with what we're seeing with our eyes.
And we check the FLIR now and wesee that there is an object and
it's really cold or really hot, and it's just sitting there.

(43:32):
And we don't have any other object that we can think of that
would behave in this sort of way.
Now, do we have an anomaly or isit still just an ambiguity?
We have to look at the numbers, basically, and in our paper we
emphasize how we need to have some sort of quantitative rigor
and avoid qualitative distinctions whenever we can.

(43:54):
And we still can't avoid them entirely because different
people have different lists of null hypothesis.
But what we can do is look at the numbers.
So let's take the example. We said it's very cold.
So we want to identify with the probability of a random cold
glitch in the flare happening atthe same time as a glitch in the
radar is probably going to be really low, especially if this

(44:16):
is not just A1 frame, right? If the radar is showing it
consistently and the flare is showing it and it is staying,
this is not just one or two camera frames or one or two
sweeps of the radar, then we've we've almost certainly got an
anomaly there statistically speaking.
But with the hot thing you said there, I would be still be very

(44:38):
hesitant to declare some anomaly, even if statistically
it's an anomaly because everything's hot that, you know,
airplanes are hot from propulsion.
Birds produce heat just like other animals like mammals.
And so if it's hot, I would not want to go jump to anomaly yet.

(44:58):
Yet it would statistically be ananomaly already.
But there's still that further distinction of, well, what are
the sources of systematic error?And one of those is there is a
mundane type of object. There is a null hypothesis that
explains that observation. But if if what you were saying
was if it was cold, colder than the environment, that is not,

(45:24):
that is not normal or typical orcommon.
And so if you have the radar saying you have an object and
the fleer showing an object and the object is cold, so we're
stating 3, not 2 facts there, then depending on the
probabilities of a glitch in thefleer and a glitch in the radar
at the same time frame, that is probably an anomaly.

(45:45):
That is worth investigating and investing time and effort and
getting even more data on to tryto identify that.
Because declaring something an anomaly does not identify.
No, definitely not fight it as an anomaly.
That doesn't mean it's an alien spacecraft.
Declaring something an anomaly just means it's worth your time
and effort to go learn more about to try to identify it.

(46:07):
It doesn't automatically identify it as an alien station.
No, absolutely not. And that's, that's a, a sort of
presumption that annoys the hellout of me when I came into this
field initially, is that everybody assumes that what
we're really talking about is alien spacecraft.
And I'm like, I'm not sold on the ET hypothesis or the

(46:29):
spacecraft idea at all. That seems, I guess possible,
but it doesn't seem like the most likely.
I don't even know how to rank the likelihood of.
I I favor that hypothesis, I do find it the most likely.
But Despite that fact I still agree with you because it's a
matter of principle. So to me, I think it's perfectly

(46:51):
fine to entertain the extraterrestrial hypothesis and
the possibility that some tiny fraction of UAP might
legitimately be spacecraft operated by a non human
intelligence. I'm down with that.
But as a matter of principle, you I, I do agree with you that
you cannot just take you FO or you AP where you just means

(47:14):
unidentified. And I am sick and tired of the
wink, wink, nod, nod. Oh, we're talking about
spacecraft when we say that. No, we might be, but it's not
guaranteed. So we should stop making those
terms equivalent. And it drives me absolutely
crazy when those two are are made equivalent.
We could be talking about, you know, what about ball, lightning

(47:36):
and Earth, all kinds of very cool, very exotic natural
phenomena that have nothing to do with it, with aliens or
interdimensional beings, and yetare worth studying, yet are
worth investigating and finding answers for.
So yeah, I, I, I, I, I, I love the extraterrestrial hypothesis,
but I try not to let it of my judgement and make me take the

(48:00):
word UFO and make it equal to alien spacecraft.
I hate when people do that, especially when they start a
conversation with me, assuming immediately that those two 100%
equal and then launching off from there like, and people just
do that implicitly that I'm talking to you just made those
two equal without even telling me, without saying it, and you
just forced it ahead. Yeah, it's not a hypothesis for

(48:22):
them, it's a presumption. It's.
Exactly, exactly. And I'm totally fine with it
being a hypothesis, but can't. But let's stop making a
presumption and stop pretending we're all agreed that all UFOs
are aliens. We've got to stop doing that
because that invites additional ridicule and then increases the
stigma that this investigation topic.

(48:44):
Yeah, totally. And I, I'm the, the thing that
annoys me the most is the this other neglected hypothesis that
I favor, which is that these could be things that we don't
even have a proper concept for yet, that they might be
something we there's no analog to.
Like we, we think of them as, when we think of it in as in the

(49:04):
ETH, the extraterrestrial hypothesis, we tend to think
that of them as craft that are like analogous to, I don't know,
the Starship Enterprise Oregon, a Tesla or something.
And it, it may be that they're that that's the closest analog
we have. But really it's nothing like it
is. It's it's as close to what it is
as like thinking a bird is a plane or something like there's.

(49:27):
Something in. Common but.
Yeah, maybe. Maybe they're not metallic
craft. What if some UAP are alive in
some fashion, right? Literally.
There could be ways that yeah, our, our, our categories might
not even. Yeah, I often wonder like if if
there are inhabitants behind them.
I mean, I sort of do presume that there's some something like

(49:49):
an intelligence behind this. Like if you could just sit down
with it and and somehow establish communication
reliably. And you ask like, are you, are
you an alien or, or what? I think my bet is that the most
appropriate answer would, is, would be that like, yeah, we're
sort of like an alien. We're sort of like a ghost or a

(50:10):
God or a like, I don't know, a gin or something like, like you,
your language and, and culture and history have just not
provided you with the set of concepts necessary to have this
conversation. It's like trying to explain an
iPhone to Aristotle or something.
You know, that's right. Or another example.
I heard this one from Neil deGrasse Tyson.

(50:30):
It would be like explaining to achimpanzee who has learned,
let's say, sign language, and trying to explain when a
chimpanzee asks for a banana. Oh, I don't have another banana
right now, but we'll get anothershipment in from South America.
What's a shipment? What's South America like?

(50:51):
Your chimpanzee, you don't know what the hell those words mean,
and I worry that you could be right.
I hope you're wrong, but I worryyou could be right that there
could be intelligences involved where our neat little categories
start to lose meat. That's what I'm betting on, but
I don't. You say you hope not.

(51:11):
Why do you hope not? Does that just?
Because I want to sit down and have a beer with an alien and
ask them, do they believe in God?
Do they have mathematics? Do they have the same type of
science as we do? I I would be saddened what you
said was correct because I feel like then communication might be
more different. You see what I mean?

(51:32):
If we can't even share a commentframework of of of viewing
reality, I'm not saying you're wrong, not at all.
You could very well be right. Many people have made this case,
Jacques Valet and many other have made the exact case that
you're stating. But I I'm I'm still hoping for
like a good old fashioned aliensthat are just like sentient

(51:53):
beings that evolved on another world.
As long as, like I said, just don't when we're talking about
UFOs, don't automatically equatethe two.
I'm I'm all for doing a podcast interview where it's like, OK,
we're going to talk about aliensand the popular UFOs are aliens.
No problem. Let's just state that up front
now make it a presumption like we're going to talk about UFOs.

(52:14):
And then the next sentence is, so how do you think they build
their ships? Where do they come from?
Yeah, that is exactly what. It means, but some UFOs are
probably like earthquake lights or ball lightning.
They don't build. Nothing's building anything.
It's a natural phenomenon. And so, yeah, I get aggravated
when we kind of just throw all these different phenomena
together and say it's all alien.It probably not, and we should

(52:38):
not do that. Can't be.
If it is, the world is just fullof aliens.
It's like I. Know, yeah, I really doubt there
are that many aliens flying around our atmosphere.
Again, I think a small percentage of UFOs could be
aliens, but I I don't like it when we take every single
unexplained case which is already a small percentage and
say all the unexplained cases those must be aliens.

(52:59):
I'm like, not necessarily. Yeah, I know.
And the ones that are like, you know, 50,000 miles an hour on
the radar, it could be a really,really weird atmospheric
phenomenon we haven't understoodyet that occurs in the Earth
atmosphere. Like it's a.
Totally anti scientific sort of way of thinking too, because it
just shows it off the table of exploration.
Like, well, if it's aliens, you've already decided what it

(53:20):
is, and there's no need to applyany sort of like, rigorous
analytic method to it other thantrying to figure out what sort
of engine they use, which is probably not the right question
if it's. Yeah, exactly.
I I get aggravated, you know, when there's questions about
what kind of engines they use before I'm OK with discussing
those questions. We can talk about, you know,
relativistic travel and warp drive as long as upfront we say,

(53:42):
look, I am assuming UFOs are aliens.
As long as I have stated upfront, we can continue the
conversation from there. Just I just, I just don't like
it when occasionally it's made it's implicit.
Yeah, You have to know what hypothesis you're you're
entertaining during the discussion.
So you did get some. You didn't get any anomalies in
the way that you were describingthem, which if I put a quick and

(54:03):
dirty definition down, it soundslike an anomaly in this paper
means when you have exhausted all of the possible explanations
that are prosaic and you have enough information to know that
which prosaic explanations mightapply and none of them seem to
work, you still got a phenomenon, we'll call that an
anomaly. You didn't get that.
But that sort of definition means that ambiguities can still

(54:28):
be very interesting. You just don't know if they're
anomalies or not because maybe you didn't have the right set of
sensors to be able to tell, oh, that wasn't, you know, ball
lightning or something. So you did get some interesting
ambiguities. Tell us about those.
So our number one most interesting ambiguity that's
almost an anomaly. It's pretty it's it's it's it's
kind of mystically significant. It's kind of a great area

(54:51):
statistically. And none of the prosaic
explanations are perfect. But although some are close,
especially with the recent data we took like, you know, Mick
West style, except, you know, he's got his garage and we've
actually got a real lab, you know, scientific lab.
So like in this, in the style ofMick W, we were trying to mock
up replicate our most famous ambiguity, which was a dark spot

(55:13):
that we observed around 4:00 AM during the week of the
expedition. How do you observe it?
Where did who? What did you see it through?
How many people were the conditions?
But no, people, we only found itmany months later because
unfortunately our original plan of like, if somebody awake 24/7
and have shifts that, that all fell apart because when you're
filming, everybody wants to be in the movie, right?

(55:34):
So then you're only filming a certain set of hours and then
everyone's exhausted asleep. So we ended up having day and
night instead of having like a night time like night shift
people. I, I drew up this beautiful
chart and sent it to Gary and wenever used it because, you know,
again, it just didn't work with the film crew.
So 0 people observed this ambiguity slash potential

(55:54):
anomaly. Unfortunately, it was discovered
months later and it was observedin the UFO dab camera.
And again, only one camera, which is a huge bummer because
if we had this and let's say we could have declared this and
statistically, rigorously speaking, we could have called
this an anomaly if let's say, one of the FLIR cameras also

(56:16):
caught like a break in the clouds.
That's what it looks like at thesame time from another angle,
the flare cameras were all down.And again, we were really
excited actually initially, Oh, the flare cameras were down
because of, you know, the whole woo woo aspect of, you know,
UFOs school shut off stuff. No, it turns out we just plugged

(56:37):
too much crap and, you know, in a circuit breaker.
So and then originally I thought, wow, look, there was
one flare camera working and it goes down 10 minutes before the
ambiguity. I'm like, oh, that's got to be
connected. Turns out that's coincidence.
It's because that's when the battery ran out because one
flare 1 flare camera had a battery bathtub and so it wasn't

(57:00):
affected by the circuit breaker tripping.
And as a result that kept going and but so the, the, but the the
shutdown or the circuit breaker tripping was like 10:00 PM was
nowhere near 4:00 AM. So it's not clearly unrelated.
And so we have to be careful. We thought originally we had
this great, awesome event that also had like, oh, it shut down

(57:20):
the cameras. Oh my God, it must be the
phenomenon. Unfortunately, that turned out
then that's not turned out to bethe case later.
So that's one of the reasons whywe can't call this ambiguity an
anomaly is we don't have confirmation from a second
camera athlete either same type or different type of camera,
like clear that says this was something in the in the sky and
not an artifact, you know, like in the in the plant.

(57:42):
And so that's why has to remain an ambiguity.
And and we can't say this is anomalous for sure.
It's just a dark spot that sometimes has a white bright,
you know, pixel speckling. Speckling, Yeah.
Just a single spot. Dark Spot.
Yeah, which which in one of our videos, our most famous video of

(58:06):
it, it seems to close or or disappear over a course of
several frames and then these white speckles remain.
Oh, interesting. OK, So what can you say about
what it could be like? What's the range of possible
prosaic explanations? Well, it's a very broad range.
It's all covered in our paper. But there's, you know, a fall

(58:29):
St. cold cloud. There is a family, there is, you
know, meteor, there's cosmic rayshower, there's Black Ops
military, you know, how are you supposed to rule that out,
right? You know, so, so we, we, we
tried to be comprehensive. A star field, it's just stars
through an ordinary hole in the clouds.
The Flock of Seagull. That's a classic, you know, so,

(58:52):
and we tried in our paper to be as quantitative as possible.
A water droplet. That's when I forgot.
It's not that because it disappears too quickly.
So it couldn't be a water droplet evaporating.
We ruled that one out. It's similar, very, very similar
qualitative, but when you you all, we could have all.
We almost concluded that that was a viable option, but it just

(59:14):
disappears too quickly to be beat.
So what do you think it What if you had to bet money?
What would you say that you thought this was?
I think best guess right now is a family that sat on the lens
and took off. This is not a perfect

(59:34):
explanation by any means. And we're we're updating our
paper to talk more about this with an appendix of additional
testing we've done. It still doesn't fit all the
facts. Like it doesn't explain the
white dots. I mean, they could be camera
noise. So the black black spot could be
a family and then the white dotsare camera noise created by the

(59:55):
dark spot, which was in turn created by the fly.
But then why, why? Why don't the white dots?
Follow the expected quantitativebehavior of traditional camera
noise, but that can also be explained.
And so it's a string of things. And so you have to multiply
these, the string, you know, together of improbabilities.

(01:00:16):
But basically there could be this one, this one prosaic
explanation of some sort of of, of insect that's sitting there
for some time and takes off. But it doesn't explain why it
only produces white dots sometimes as some type of camera
noise, but not always. So it doesn't fit all of the
facts, but it fits most of the facts enough to convince someone

(01:00:42):
who's already have enough to convince.
For example, a skeptic or debunker, more accurately, who's
convinced that UFOs are not important, not interesting, and
not worth studying would alreadybe convinced, even though I just
said it fits most of the facts but not all.
Does it. So I'm kind of curious in the

(01:01:02):
degree to which it really does fit the facts.
Do we have like recorded evidence and and like
explanations of how flies would create a dark spot and white
spots? Is that something that's been
documented before and why you would get that particular
effect? Yes, it has not been documented

(01:01:24):
before, but it has been now because when we update our paper
in a few weeks or a couple of months, maybe when we as we go
through scientific peer review, we're going to put out a new
version of the paper. But it's not just going to have
corrections. It'll also have additions
because of how much time has passed.
So we've also done additional testing, which we hope to
include see if the, you know, we've got to see if you know,

(01:01:46):
reviewer and editor agree. But we want to add some more
information and we want to add information on some of the
additional testing we've done, which included we literally like
print it out. I've been saying for years that
we were eventually going to do this.
When I've given talks like at SCU conferences and you would
pick, we literally like pointed out a picture of a family and I

(01:02:07):
like made a black Sharpie on it to make it really black.
And I cut it out, put it on the camera and we blew it off and we
replicated the dark spot and we replicated the white thought.
Let's give you a picture of a family that's a that's
significantly different, right? Why don't we just actually get
some flies? I'd love to, but I haven't yet.
Yeah, eventually, like I, I whatI wanted to do is buy one of

(01:02:31):
those. Well, my colleagues thought this
was good enough with the paper. Yeah.
I I disagree with you actually, that they're significantly
different. Not really.
If you have an auto focus objectright on the lens, it kind of
doesn't matter. Well then once you make it a
family then. But you, was that just to be
funny? That was just to be funny.
OK, No, we were. Just trying to fly.
I want. I want the real.
I know I, I do still want to take what I want to at least

(01:02:53):
find a dead fly or at least get like by like a rubber fly that's
like the correct size and shape and put that one.
But no, I think again, because it's not an anomaly, it's an
ambiguity, we need to ask ourselves if it's worth the
time. Remember, we're all volunteers.
So we're probably not going to do a real fly test because at
this point, I think we've collected enough information to

(01:03:14):
say, OK, it's probably a family.It's time to look to the future,
you know, new data analysis and new expeditions and not
constantly reanalyze the poor quality few frames we have of
something that may be some huge discovery or it's probably just
a fine, you know what I mean? It's all about time investment

(01:03:34):
time. And with an ambiguity versus an
anomaly, the difference is if something not an ambiguity, you
don't waste any time on it. If it's an ambiguity but not an
anomaly, you spend some time on it, but you eventually have to
decide what's diminishing returns.
If something the any an anomaly,you keep going.
So if this was statistically an anomaly, we'd keep pushing and

(01:03:56):
you bet your butt we'd go. We'd go grab a dead fly and do
this again, or grab a plastic fly.
But because it's in the Gray area, we have to ask ourselves
if it's worth continuing to do more of these tests.
OK, let's talk about one theoretical question about the
this ambiguity thing before we go on to to this other paper

(01:04:18):
that you sent me. The theoretical question that
I'm going to pose at the the endof this sort of ambiguity
anomaly distinction discussion is it seems that whatever the
truly anomalous UAP are. They have a.
Lot of options for how to manifest or appear.
I mean, they have lots of different shapes and some of
them seem to be able to move in crazy ways or or change their

(01:04:42):
geometry or their sort of, you know, reflective properties or
whatever. If that's the case, why wouldn't
these things prefer to just manifest in ways that would
always be detected as ambiguities?
You're assuming there that we'redealing with an intelligent.

(01:05:03):
I am, yeah. That's a presumption.
Yeah, OK. Because they seem designed, and
that seems to imply not only intelligence, but some sort of
complex intent. Almost the case, right?
There are very few genuine anomalies because most of the
time people just say 01 blurry image, no one can scoff.
So actually I think that's already the case.

(01:05:25):
And so I think we are in that situation.
But I think that also if we are dealing with an intelligence,
maybe, you know, again, this is wild speculation.
What's the test but to see are we smart enough figure it out
that some of the ambiguities areanomalies.
So I think there's right there is there are rational potential

(01:05:46):
rational explanations for. That I was talking to Gary Nolan
recently and he makes this exactpoint, that he thinks that there
is an element in which these area kind of intelligence test.
Yeah, exactly. At some point we'll be able to
detect them for whatever they are, or for at least more than
just prosaic objects. But we're generally as a whole,
not there yet. OK, so you sent me a second

(01:06:09):
paper that I thought was a lot of fun.
And then I want to recommend thelisteners to check out to and to
send to people who they think might have some interest in
this. Because what you do in this
other paper is you take like just the list of objections to
to seriously studying UAP and kind of go point by point and

(01:06:30):
give your answers as to why thisis a serious topic worthy of the
consideration of serious people.And you give like a dozen of
them. And we're definitely aren't
going to go through all those want to leave good reading for
the audience. But I do want to focus on a few
of those that I thought you gaveparticularly insightful answers
to and let you kind of flesh those out.

(01:06:52):
So first of all, what objection to UAP as a subject do you
encounter the most and are most annoyed by?
That's an excellent question. But first I should stress it's
not really a paper, it's just anethic.
So it's not a scientific paper. Sure.

(01:07:12):
Yeah, not journal. Yeah, it's not a journal.
It's never peer reviewed. It's just me writing on the
Internet for fun. So it's like the equivalent of a
blog post, you know, it's just the, it was the Medium essay
originally and now it can just be found on the VX website.
So it has references though. So I do try to make it at least
serious and rigorous. It's not just me talking out of
my butt. It's got like 200 references,

(01:07:33):
the bibliography, but many of the references are not scholarly
sources of the other websites. But yeah, the number one that I
always encounter is it's kind ofA2 parter, but intimately
connect. It's making the presumption that
UFO equals alien and then jumping to saying that
interstellar travel is impossible.
That's the one I always encounter and that I spend a lot

(01:07:56):
of time on in my essay because again, the extraterrestrial
hypothesis is one of my favorites for good reason.
I do think it has a favor of it,but not proof.
But you know, it does have good evidence.
And I and I do try to tackle theinterstellar travel question to
get sue. I get super attacked on by
people claim that interstellar travel is impossible and will

(01:08:16):
always be impossible for anything.
Yeah, the, the argument there isthat we'll, we'll leave the, the
UAP or aliens assumption aside because we've already covered
that and but the ET hypothesis is worth consideration.
It's the most popular as far as I can tell.
But this other sort of objectionthat, well, if they're ETS, they

(01:08:41):
would have to travel so far thatit would just be prohibitively
resource costly and or, or faster than light travel isn't
possible. So they, you know, would all be
dead before they got here, right.
That's the kind of of argument that that you're talking about.
And what's why do you think that?
I think that's a bad argument too, at least if it's taken to

(01:09:04):
conclude that therefore, you know, they would never undertake
such a a journey. But why do you think it's a bad
argument? It is a horrible argument
because it forgets things like and scientists will make this
argument. It's almost like they forgot
basic physics that they teach orthey learn, you know, in their
own careers. But it doesn't take into account
relativistic time dilation and length infraction.

(01:09:26):
So no, distances aren't that right.
Not for the traveler. And the times are not that great
at all. You could have you could have
aliens with a lifespan shorter than humans that are still
exploring the Galaxy and it's not a problem.
And you don't need faster than light that be relevant because
of the time dilation and length contraction in special

(01:09:48):
relativity. So actually, faster than light
travel need not apply. It's completely unnecessary for
exploring the universe and it's a very common, shockingly common
logical fallacy that I see everywhere all the time.
And it's made by scientists and engineers even.
Oh, it's too far. Oh, the time is too long faults

(01:10:11):
and fall on both counts. Now then whenever I point this
out, then the the the next step of argumentation is, oh, but the
fuel requirements are so vast and shielding.
And I don't have an answer to that, but I do have historical
examples where we used to think space travel in general, even

(01:10:33):
local traveling the low Earth orbit and going to the moon was
completely impossible and would never happen.
That humanity would literally never figure it out.
We used to say the same thing about air travel and I see the
same arguments brought it out almost the same, but they're
updated obviously for outer space, but they're similar
arguments made for why interstellar travel be

(01:10:55):
impossible. Sure, fuel.
Fuel is problem? Sure.
Shielding problem. Neither of those problems are
problems of physics, they're problems of hearing.
Problems. And then I'm accused of
blithely, what is it that they said on make West's website
about me? I blithely assume that
engineering will figure it out. I've got historical examples of

(01:11:15):
that. Air travel, space travel by
humans. Like, yes, we have figured out
difficult problems, and I'm not blithely assuming that we would
do do so as humans in 10 or 50 or even 100 years or even 1000.
But I think it's extremely naiveto claim that in a Galaxy that's
several billion years old in a universe at 13.8 billion years

(01:11:40):
old, I think it's extremely naive to claim that no
civilization ever, even one thatexists potentially for millions
or billions of years longer thanus, none of them will have
figured this out by now. Really.
That pretty big leap for me. I think to me, that's an

(01:12:00):
extraordinary leap to make to claim that because we'll never
figure out a proper fuel or propellant to be able to achieve
relativistic travel, and we'll never be able to develop
material that can shield againstradiation at high speed.
Because remember that a Starlight is fatal when you're

(01:12:24):
traveling relatively because of Doppler blue shirt.
So there are serious problems toovercome and I do acknowledge
that, but I never claim. I've also been accused of oh, I
have this faith that technology will cure everything.
No, but I do have a reasonable logical, rational claim that
given the thousands, millions orbillions of years, yes,

(01:12:46):
technology will eventually givenenough time, we'll solve the
problems the same way that natural selection through, you
know, how evolution solve problems in the natural world
through natural selection to produce, you know, sentience,
intelligence and different skillsets for different animals and
different types of organisms. I do think that that that that

(01:13:08):
technology evolved also and thatgiven this astronomical time
scale of billions of years whereyou might have civilizations out
there that pre pre day human civilization by a mind
bogglingly large amount of time compared to how long humans have
existed and compared to how humans how long humans have had

(01:13:28):
technology. So I don't I call relativistic
travel a solvable problem. Not saying that blithely not
putting a blind faith in technology, but just saying that
if you multiply those those difficulties and improbabilities
by a massive amount of time, I think it's reasonable to claim
the engineering hurdles would besolved by an advanced

(01:13:50):
civilization. Then figure out the fuel on the
shielding needed. Who achieve relativistic travel?
And even if they don't, who cares?
Then maybe it's like Avi Loeb suggests.
What if the probes are sent out like we've done, you know, like
Voyager that travel for hundredsof thousands of years and again,
the unit the galaxy's billions of years old.
What if, OK, relativistic travelis impossible?

(01:14:12):
Fine, the skeptics still lose the argument because you can
have probes that have been traveling.
You could have probes that aren't necessarily with any
organics in them that are just machine probes.
Like humans have created that travel between star systems for
for hundreds of thousands of years at pathetically slow
speed. So there's always that fall back

(01:14:32):
position that Avi lobe is alwaysstressing.
You know, it's, you know, Astro archaeology, right, or archaeo,
you know that forget the term that we've, you know, created
for that. But basically, and that's not a
new idea either. So no matter what, I've got a
counter argument for that. So even if I'm wrong on argument
number one, I have a backup for that one and a backup to the

(01:14:52):
backup that goes and says like it is very reasonable to expect
technology to make it across based.
Because there are all of these reasons why that would be a
rational assumption to make thatif intelligence in relation to
this, they would have some sort of travel capability far beyond
what humans have. Yeah, and the, the, I agree with

(01:15:15):
you. And I think a way of putting in
a very simple terms, the, the reason I fundamentally read you
is that it seems to me that the burden of proof is on people who
want to say that something couldnever, ever be done right.
To say that something is not within the realm of possibility
is a extremely strong claim. We're not.

(01:15:37):
Nobody's claiming that every person or every race or every
planet has a life on it that's doing, you know, interstellar
travel. But to say that it's a a sort of
theoretically physically insurmountable problem is or
claim that nobody is even reallymaking I mean, so.
Well, no, it is being made on atMetaBank on Mick West.

(01:16:00):
West not serious people, no serious people are making.
I mean, people on a forum can make whatever claim that they
want, but no, no person who actually knows enough physics to
capably handle these conversations.
But there are scientists who should know better who are
making these claims. Neil deGrasse Tyson has made
this claim repeatedly and I havefound this claim in real

(01:16:21):
published written. Not just YouTube videos, but
written scientific papers make the claim that not only is
interstellar travel impossible for humans and any non human
intelligences, it's impossible today and will always be
impossible. That is a shock, shockingly
strong statement for me, For me,I.
Understand. That I mean, for me, I, I, I

(01:16:44):
count on the fingers of one handthe thing that I, I, I
legitimately think are impossible.
And I humbly admit that some of them might turn out to be
possible. But I just can't understand
people who claim that we supposedly know so much physics
already and so much science. We know so much about the
universe that we can make these claims when we don't understand

(01:17:05):
95% of the universe. We understand what dark energy
is, what dark matter is, and andthat's just the known unknown.
What about the unknown? There's.
A lot of unknown. Known.
Yeah. And so I I think it's the height
of hubris to claim that people think that I'm the one with the
hubris that, oh, humans will eventually solve space travel.
No, I humbly admit that it'll probably take centuries.

(01:17:28):
I'm not claiming that by 2000 that mid 21st century will have
warp drive like in the Star Trektimeline.
I'm not claiming it's it's very,very hard.
I'm sure it's very, very hard tosolve the the the fuel and the
shielding problems. But I'm not convinced that even
after billions of years, a lapseand a civilization survived that

(01:17:50):
long survives wars and pandemics, that they wouldn't
figure it out. I I think they quite.
A bench. We need to disentangle two
different questions here. 1 is the question of whether fat true
faster than light travel is possible Yes, and a lot of
people get hung up on the question.
You can actually exceed accelerations beyond the the
speed of light. That's one question.

(01:18:12):
But then the question of whetherinterstellar travel is possible
is a completely different question.
We can leave aside the question for the rest of our discussion
of whether exceeding this the see the speed of light as a
speed limit is even possible. Let's just assume that when
we'll never actually get to accelerate through space faster
than that, or that we'll never be able to like bend warp

(01:18:34):
space-time in some way that kindof gets around the speed of
light is a is a fundamental speed limit.
Let's let's let's focus on the idea that we'll always go
somewhere below the speed of light.
You point out in in one of thesesections of the essay that if
you just accelerate through space at 1G, that's 9.8 meters a

(01:18:55):
second squared, the rate at which objects fall off your
table. It's very.
Comfortable, right? Yeah, it's totally survival.
I think humans can survive like up to 10 or 11 GS or something
before it kills them. But if you just stayed at 1G, if
you can maintain that acceleration through through
empty space, you would be at about the speed of light at the

(01:19:15):
end of the year. Roughly two or three years.
And it also, yeah, it depends what you mean by about because
you'll always keep increasing it.
You'll never hit the speed of light and you'll just get to 99
Percent, 99.9%, etcetera, etcetera.
But yes, this is this is, this has been known for over 100
years. And I point this out in my assay
and again, the criticism is whatabout fuel?

(01:19:36):
Oh, I think astronomer will comeout to fuel.
Ironically, when they set they, they point out that I that I,
that I skip over the fuel and the shielding.
And I think that's because I don't have an answer to that.
I skipped over it because because the essay was already
too long and people were complaining that it's too long,

(01:19:57):
not because I didn't have answers, but any But my answers
would be, as I said earlier, highly speculative because we
don't have an answer for the fuel or the fuel requirement for
it or the shielding. But my point was, is there's
nothing against the known laws of physics that would prevent
this. It's only a question of clever

(01:20:17):
engineering. And I point to history, to human
history. For examples of how engineers
are always overcoming these these these problems.
And yes, I know this is a much worse problem than the
historical examples, but we're also improving our technology,
you know, every year, every decade, every century as you
met. Yeah.
Well, and this is this is again,it's helpful to to distinguish

(01:20:41):
between this sort of problem andthe problem of traveling faster
than the speed of light. What you're saying is that our
current models of physics don't tell us that this is an absolute
impossibility, right? No, it's the opposite.
It's a guaranteed possibility. We do it every day.
The particles in the Large Hadron Collider muons in cosmic

(01:21:02):
rays live longer than they should because of time dilation.
So time dilation and length contraction and relativity are
not under question, except by crack box I mean the.
Problem in the shielding problem.
There's nothing in our models ofphysics that tell us we could
not engineer a fuel or a propulsion and shielding
mechanism that would make this possible.
That's correct. So basically it would be very,

(01:21:24):
very difficult. We don't have a practical easy
solution that we currently know of, but there's nothing in the
laws of physics that they we wouldn't be able to figure this
out eventually for sub life trap.
But the way there is something in our current models of physics
that say you're never going to be able to cleverly engineer a
way to really accelerate throughspace faster than the speed of

(01:21:45):
light. Well, The funny thing is you
could get that too. It's more speculative and I
could give you like 15 publications about how you go
faster than light. But the reason why I don't like
going there is because it's unnecessary.
So what's beautiful is, like yousaid, really it's a 2 step
approach. It's a 2 step approach basically
#1 faster than might absolutely might be possible.
And I can send you 1520 scientific publications that say

(01:22:08):
this from recent years and goingback to, you know, Al Kubiere,
of course, in the classic Seminole paper in the 90s.
But then the second, much stronger part of my argument is
that #1 isn't necessary, that let's give the critics, give the
skeptics. Yes, fast and light travel is
impossible and always will be. I'm willing to grant that, even

(01:22:29):
though I can send you a two dozen scientific papers that say
actually, maybe through warping of space-time with negative
energy we can figure it out someday.
I'm willing to grant FTL and warp drive as impossible.
And then I fall back on the factthat using known facts,
relativistic time dilation, we don't need FTL.

(01:22:49):
It's a it's a distraction. It's sort of like a red herring.
Or maybe straw man is the more accurate term.
It's a strong argument. Basically, people come at me and
we'll say, oh, you'll, we'll never go faster than light.
Therefore, and I'm like, but that's a straw man argument
because you don't need to go faster than light for

(01:23:10):
interstellar travel. Are you possible to explore the
universe? But then again I have a backup
which is but it just so happens fast as light might also be
possible, but I try not to go onthat tangent too often because
then people forget my main argument which is you don't need
it. Time dilation and length
contraction are good enough to get you to explore the farthest

(01:23:31):
reaches of the universe. So let's talk about how that
would work. Let's imagine that we've got
we've got some sort of shieldingmechanism that means we can move
through mostly empty space really, really fast and we won't
hit a single particle of dust and it just annihilated.
And destroy us. Yeah, yeah.
And we've got some propulsion system, let's say it's like a
light sail. We've got some hugely powerful

(01:23:54):
set of lasers on Earth. They're constantly hitting the
back of a, of a, a ship's sort of sail the way wind hits a,
it's a sail in the ocean and it's pushing it and it's
accelerating it at like AG or something comfortable and
totally, you know, within the current or current technological
abilities, you start getting really fast around a year and

(01:24:16):
then time starts getting funky. So we can get really close to
the speed of light that way. And from the perspective here on
Earth, how long would it take this proposed ship that we've
got to get to another star or another Galaxy?

(01:24:37):
That's a great question. So let's talk about the closest
stars, you know, Alpha and Proxima Centauri and it would
take about I believe it's four to five years that from the
perspective of people on Earth. If there are, if we're talking
about probes with people on them, because they can be, you

(01:24:58):
know, unmanned post, which is actually planned.
But let's say that there are actual, there is either human
being or another, you know, intelligence aboard this.
Then depending on how fast you're going, the time is
arbitrarily small. It depends how fast you're
going. There's no one answer.
Are you going 9999.999.999? There's a big difference.

(01:25:21):
I'm not talking about small difference to the person doing
the traveling. Those 4 1/2 those those rough 4
1/2 years or something like thatto the nearest star close to
lightspeed would be could be oneyear, could be a month, could be
a week, it could be a day. I'm not exaggerating.
That's an arbitrarily small amount of time because the

(01:25:43):
faster you go, the more time dilation you experience.
So to the next Galaxy, it's moredramatic.
Let's say we want to send something to the Andromeda
Galaxy. 2,000,000 years would have elapsed on Earth, but for
you, maybe it's 50 years, maybe it's 10 years.
You know, it all depends how fast you're going.
So a homework problem I like to give my students in Physics 3,
so there's not a freshman. You know, people like like to

(01:26:06):
make jokes about freshman or physics problems.
This is a sophomore physics problem.
Going to be more precise, this is a sophomore junior problem or
advanced freshman who's doing special relativity already in
their first year with classical mechanics.
But basically I asked, you know,how long did it take to reach
the Andromed, the Galaxy? And invariably, you know, you
know, 2,000,000 years, 2 millionlight years away.

(01:26:28):
That's only an Earth's time frame.
But if you travel 0.06 meters per second slower, not faster,
slower than the speed of light, you make it there in 5050 Earth
years, which blows people's minds.
And then I'm always shocked whenpeople's minds are blown,
especially in the UAP field. I'm like, this isn't new.
We've known this since 19 O 5. This is basic Einstein theory,

(01:26:50):
relativity. And it's not, It's not.
And we know it's correct. We have mountains of evidence
going back a century. We know relativity is correct
from, you know, I mentioned earlier, particles in the LHC,
cosmic ray particle living longer than they nominally
should. We know relativistic time
dilation is correct and is real.We just don't have the

(01:27:13):
engineering to be able to do it with human.
Yeah, but we do it with subatomic particles on a daily
basis. So and and it was proven with
atomic clock in the 1970's, the famous Heffal and Keating
experiments and we know relativity is correct.
So there. What I just stated is not some
crazy hypothetical speculative thing.
It is period, end of story, correct and true.

(01:27:33):
If we could get over the fuel and shielding issues, which I
mentioned earlier are serious issues that we can't just sweep
under the rug, they are serious issues.
But if we overcame those issues,you can reach the Andromeda
Galaxy without warp Dr. You don't need faster than light
travel, and you can get there inone human life by going slower
than the speed of light. And then people always point

(01:27:54):
out, well, everybody would be dead back on Earth.
So, yeah, I mean, there are examples of nomadic populations.
We have the Pacific Islanders onEarth.
This is my colleague Kevin Knuthalways brings this up.
What's wrong with being nomadic?There are tons of people who
would sign up for this. People say, who would agree to
do this? Are you kidding me?

(01:28:16):
I would be one of the first to sign up to leave Earth forever
and explore the universe. Are you kidding me?
And it was like, people are shocked always at how many
people sign up to go to Mars before, you know, we've even
figured out all the safety, you know, issues.
Yet I think also we are not accounting.
We are also anthropomorphizing. There could be species out there

(01:28:36):
that have an even greater spiritof curiosity and exploration
that humans do. But we don't even have to go
there and argue about anthropomorphization because
humans, we can just look to examples of humans with our
curiosity. Hell yeah.
We'd have people who would say, oh, yeah, by the way, millions
of years will elapse on Earth for you in the next 10 years.

(01:28:56):
I don't care. That's awesome.
Let's go. Let's go tomorrow.
And so I think that that's not aproblem is not having a home
planet and being nomadic. It's not a problem if you solve
the fuel in the shielding. Because honestly, if you solve
the fuel in the shielding, you should be able to solve food and
and basic needs as well. Should not be, I imagine, as

(01:29:18):
difficult as the problems of fuel and shielding.
Especially if you can you solve the fuel in the shielding, then
you can shrink the the journey to such a small number of years
across vast distances that it reduces automatically the other
problems like food and drink andthings like that for the drink.

(01:29:39):
So this this means that minus the shielding and, and the fuel
issues, which are engineering problems, this is within our
grasp. They're even projects right now,
like the Copernicus project thatare trying to make the first von
Neumann probes that will do something exactly like this.
They'll accelerate them out of our star system and to other

(01:30:02):
places where they can start selfreplicating or studying things
right this. Is what?
I know that sounds crazy, but that's the state of.
Our no, but we don't even need to go that far.
There's also another project to send probes to Alpha Centauri by
by the 2000 and 60s, and the idea is to have a swarm of
miniature ships. And so these are just be, you

(01:30:25):
know, robotic probes, but tiny ones with just like a camera or
something. And so this overcomes both the
fuel and the shielding, by the way.
So this is already within our graft, not with humans aboard,
but that's OK, Not with any beings aboard.
Well, this is already within ourgrasp.
That's why I get so angry at peak skeptics who say
interstellar travel is impossible.

(01:30:45):
We're on the cusp already in the21st century because we're
already planning on trying to dothis where this is the way we
have cleverly already thought ofworkarounds of the fuel and, and
chilling problems #1 fuel, no fuel.
You just shoot high-powered lasers.
So this is within our grasp already or only decades away.
You know, we'll still need to create the, you know, array of

(01:31:06):
lasers and prove it works. But this is not a big stretch
from current technology, not at all.
You would basically fire high-powered lasers that tiny,
tiny ships and get them up to the speed of light very quickly.
So they have no fuel, no propellant.
They're just, you know, light sails and lasers.
Check. What about shielding?

(01:31:26):
We've saw that too already. It's a cop out.
You just make 100 or 200 ships. So most of them are not going to
make it because they're going tohit a piece of dust and just
blow up because at near the speed of light.
So that we, we did a cop out though, because we don't have a
solution for shielding. The cop out is, well, just make
a lot of ships and most of them will get destroyed on the way.

(01:31:47):
Oh well, just make a lot of small inexpensive ones.
So this is I believe it's calledStarshot.
I don't remember the name. I think Avi Loeb is also in
charge of of this or chairing isthere there is this project
already exists enhanced for several years.
This idea of just making a swarmof ships with little cameras and
go take a picture of Alpha's entire.

(01:32:07):
And this is already, as I said, very close to what we can
achieve. A day, a little bit more money
and a little more engineering. We should be able to create a
this swarm of nanochips or microchips.
And so I think that it's disingenuous to claim that we
have no solutions to the fuel and the engineering problem.

(01:32:28):
We already have several. And I got so aggravated when on
the Metabunk forums they said, oh, should I get skipped over
the fuel and the shielding? That's because the essay was
already really long. So I'm going to write a Part 2
eventually. I just don't have the time.
And I'm going to debunk all of the debunkers arguments against
my first essay. And I'm going to point by point

(01:32:50):
and and circle their entries from the forum, quote them and
say, yeah, this you want me to address fuel and shielding?
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Here we go.
Here are my points. And but my biggest point will be
I don't have to address fuel andshielding.
Give it a few billion years. I mean, I'm not, I'm not asking

(01:33:10):
people to have faith that we'll have manned probes to Alpha
Centauri tomorrow. That's not my claim at all
anywhere. But somehow I got roped.
I got they, I people, they, theyput up these straw man versions
of the actual arguments I was making.
They could knock them down well.I mean it's not exactly their
fault either. Most of these people don't have
pH, DS and. Exactly, they're not actually

(01:33:33):
scientists. Which is funny because most of
the debunking is being done run by non scientists.
So last, last question that I wanted to to hit you with from
that one, that one article is has to do with the reverse
engineering question. So you say that one thing that
annoys you is this question about like, if we have crashed

(01:33:55):
parts or, or in any sort of retrieved technology, why
haven't we reverse engineered them in like revolutionized the
world? I myself am skeptical of even
the possibility of reverse engineering alien technology.
I think that the nature of technologies are that they
they're not just objects, they're systems.

(01:34:16):
If I gave an iPhone to Leonardo da Vinci, as brilliant as he
was, or, or, you know, Isaac Newton, who was miraculously
intelligent, yes not they wouldn't be able to get
anywhere. But then it's not because they
aren't smart enough. It's partially because they
don't have the concepts they need to understand what the
technology is doing. I mean, you need to know what an
electron is. Another problem, though, is that

(01:34:39):
an iPhone works through a systemof technologies.
It's useless without chargers and a power system and
satellite, GPS, all these other things, servers and software and
stuff. So it would just be a brick.
It would be a kind of a nice geometrical object that wouldn't
do anything then, and reverse engineering would just not get

(01:35:00):
us anywhere. So why should we even think that
reverse engineering is possible if we did retrieve anything?
But if it is possible, why haven't we like revolutionized
the world if there have been crashed, you know?
Piece of well it's it's it's twopoints it's a 2 point answer
because first I am also skeptical even though I've, you

(01:35:21):
know talked to people like Eric Davis I'm friends with with Eric
and we will watch David Grush talk about reverse engineering
programs but to me I'm so skeptical because then again,
you know, where's the evidence you know show me a ship show me
a body of course it's always classified as the answer but
then there's a second layer which is let's for the sake of
arguments, say it's true and grocer's telling the truth and

(01:35:44):
Eric Davis telling the truth let's say it say that for the
sake of argument. Then I agree with your examples.
I gave one just like that in my essay.
That's probably why he gave the,you know, iPhone example.
The example of my essay was giveyour laptop to someone more
recent. Even give take your laptop and
give it to he was. Like Richard Feynman or somebody
or or. No, he was a theorist.

(01:36:05):
He's not a good example. Albert Einstein.
Also most people don't realize he was a theorist.
So everyone wants to give the laptop to Einstein.
I'm like you. Do you realize he was a
theoretical physicist? Not.
Experience Faraday then. Faraday is always my good
example. The the the one of the greatest.
You know, like Maxwell, one of the biggest names in
electromagnetism. A laptop runs on electricity.
He should figure it out, right? Are you kidding me?

(01:36:27):
Especially after the battery runs out and he doesn't have
anywhere to plug in the charger.If he's got that, you know he's
I'm not going to know what the hell that's for.
Do you they would think that it's just a magical screen that
suddenly goes black one day, right?
Because the battery runs out didn't make no progress then it
would make no progress. And what's remarkable about this

(01:36:48):
example is I think you don't need to go.
I I really don't like the examples of like, let's give an
iPhone to Aristotle. That's too extreme.
And I think that we don't need to go that extreme.
You know, Avi Loeb gives the example of give a cell phone to
a caveman. And I'm like, no, no, no, no,
no, no, stop right there. We don't have to go back that
far in time. Literally just go to the 1890s,

(01:37:10):
take a MacBook Pro, take a Dell PC and give it to someone in the
1890s. And it makes the point, I think
more of it because look at the gap of only what a century,
century and a half is enough to make people clueless about how
the technology. Now we could argue, and I don't
know where's the cut off. If we gave a laptop to

(01:37:31):
scientists in the 40s, would they be able to figure out the
1950s? I don't know the answer to that.
Nobody goes to that. But I do think there's a cut off
somewhere. Like I'm sure by the 1980s, Oh
yeah, hell yeah. The time traveler gave your
laptop some in 1980s. They would have better laptop
for today. Like, I know that there's at
some point where we have figuredwe'll figure it out quickly, but

(01:37:51):
I think that it's not that far back in time where people would
be completely clueless. Like the brightest.
If you took 100 of the brightestscientists and engineers, 100 of
them, and put them on the figureout what the hell this MacBook
Pro is, they'd make no progress in my opinion.
Yeah, and we can draw specific lines and explain why.

(01:38:12):
Like if you don't a microscope good enough to look at chip
that's that's had like no nanoscale structures etched into
it, you can't figure out what the hell it does.
It just looks like a thing. So you actually need specific
technologies and specific theories in order to do the
observation and interpretation. But keep going.
That's right, but it's worse. It's worse than that because

(01:38:35):
let's say you have you have all the microscopes to see all the
pieces of the laptop, you still don't know what the hell it
does. You still don't know what it's
for you still it depends again where we drop it off back in
time. If you don't even have
microchips or transistors yet invented yet, you don't have a
clue. And so even if you have the

(01:38:55):
proper tools to do a diagnostic on what the materials are and
what their spatial arrangements are, you're still far cry from
understanding the purpose. And so that's why I think that
even if reverse engineering programs exist, even that they
do exist. And again, I'm leaning more and
more every day towards yes, because of Rush, because of

(01:39:16):
being friends with Eric Davis. So I'm leaning more and more and
more towards yes, but I think they're not making any progress
and I think they're doomed to make no progress.
The reason is, is because I justgave you an example of 100
years. Imagine if you've got something
that's billions of years more advanced, we wouldn't know what
the hell anything was for. Even if we have electron

(01:39:39):
microscopy and we've got, you know, isotopic analysis so we
can figure out exactly what something's made of, exactly
what the facial arrangement is, we still are might be clueless
on the purpose. Yeah, and Adam, for Adam, we
could understand it. Yeah.
What? What the?
Hell does it do? What's it?
And so I think that that's a serious problem that the My

(01:40:01):
Laptop example illustrates, because it only takes a few
decades of removal. From a technology a gap in time
to show that it would be impossible.
And you mentioned systems systems.
So the other thing make it impossible.
Once the charger stopped working, you wouldn't be able,
you'd make even less progress because now you can't even turn
the damn thing on. So unless you figured out what
the charger is and what it's for, you would make even less

(01:40:23):
progress. And that'd be true of any
alleged crashed parts from non human intelligence.
We how do we know how to power it?
How do we know how to turn it onor keep it on?
We probably don't. And so that's another layer
where yes, when it's off and dead, we could figure out what
it's made of maybe, but what does that tell you about how it

(01:40:45):
works when it's on? So even if we have reverse
engineering programs of some sort of non human intelligence,
hell, I am super skeptical we'd never figure anything from
anything because it would just be too hard.
And people who allegedly actually worked on these things
have privately admitted that. So Kevin Knuth, maybe he said

(01:41:06):
that during the episode you had with him, he asked Hal Puda
about this or he had a comment about, oh, I think, you know,
everyone's talking about meta materials for propulsion.
I think it's actually the computer.
And Hal looks at Kevin and says,Kevin, we would know the
difference between the computer,the navigational computer and a
sandwich. And so that's why I'm more

(01:41:28):
likely to believe people who claim they were part of crash
retrieval programs. If they claim we don't know
anything like, yeah, that soundsabout right.
And I'm very skeptical of peoplewho claim, oh, yeah, we figured
it all out, and it's element 115.
And it's just that I'm like, we didn't figure it.
Out I I totally agree and I don't know what our norms are

(01:41:50):
going to be about name and names, but like in in my view,
Bob Lazar, who's gotten maybe the most attention up until.
And Bob Lazar is, and I've said that on the record on multiple,
he's provably like, this is not a gut feeling from me.
No, no, no, no, no, this. He's provably polished.
Everything he says is wrong. Now I don't doubt again like I

(01:42:12):
said, I'm willing to allow for the existence of a crash
retrieval program and reverse engineering program, but we
don't know how it works or we'vemade very minimal progress on
how their stuff works. Whoever they are, again, not
limiting to extraterrestrial being much more open minded.
I think that I'm doubt very skeptical we've made any
progress in understanding how how it all.

(01:42:35):
Works and it and if we did, if if we found it in the sort of
Bob Lazar fantasy story, we finda ship and we just like know how
to open it up and start moving it around.
The thing we should assume is that this was either made by
humans or made by something that's extremely human like
that's been here and using the same technologies as us.

(01:42:56):
This is not like a totally aliengroup because I mean just like
your your, your morphology or Physiology and your senses and
things like even to understand like when you talk about giving
a a laptop to Michael Faraday, what if you gave it to a species
of beings that don't use visiblelight to to see things you.
Know. There you go.
Then they don't see the screen. What if you what if you gave the

(01:43:17):
laptop to a species that only season infrared because of the
the type of star they orbit and type of sunlight they get that's
a perfect or ultraviolet to picksomething and they they're to
them the screen is blank and they have no clue what's wrong
with this laptop computer. It doesn't show it's supposed to
display stuff. That's a perfect example that

(01:43:38):
anything we would attempt to reverse engineer.
What if it's something beyond our sensors?
What if their keyboards, dials and switches that are there but
are invisible, the human eye andhuman touch, but they're obvious
to a member of that race, you know?
And so, yeah, I, I, I totally agree.
And I think that if there is some kind of program, it's

(01:43:58):
doomed to be a waste of taxpayerdollars, which is one of
Grusher's points. Is the money, the black money?
It's just a waste of taxpayer dollars because we're never
going to figure out how that. We might be able to do.
Like interesting materials analysis on stuff that you know,
Gary Nolan. Gary, yeah, Gary's into.
The stuff, and that's super interesting.
It is. Of.

(01:44:18):
You know. I think that if crashes are
real, again, I'm kind of on the fence still, But if they are,
then I think while they might not be usable for reverse
engineering of particular cool applications like anti gravity
levitation, or they could be used to provide definitive

(01:44:39):
evidence of non human intelligence by saying, look,
look at these crazy arrangementsof atoms that we don't know how
to do and isotopic ratios and stuff.
So I do think that unclassified versions of things could be used
to just definitively state, look, people, there's like
there's something going on, there's like a non human
intelligence and they make and they build stuff and we don't

(01:45:00):
know how it works. So I do think the isotopic
analysis and things like that can be helpful.
They're not necessarily going toclue us in though, on how the
these things work. No, but they could also give us
good ideas for our own applications like that.
The piece of, you know, weird material that Gary Nolan looks
at has all these, you know, sortof like almost nano layers of

(01:45:22):
really heavy isotopes. And I think that the initial
question was like, how could youeven manufacture this?
And then a while later we think,Oh, well, you could manufacture
this if you did it in microgravity because layering
these various weights wouldn't, you know, affect each other, the
relative weights wouldn't affecteach other.
And now we have satellites in orbit that are doing

(01:45:44):
microgravity, you know, manufacturing of drugs that then
get shipped down in little pods that are now people are taking
drugs they don't even know wheremanufactured in space.
And it's there might be a historical story to be told
about how that idea and application was derived actually
from analyzing what may be a piece of a crashed UAP, but I

(01:46:04):
don't know. So there is it's scientifically
valuable, but not in the straightforward like sci-fi kind
of way that we all assumed, which is a bummer because that
would be a lot more fun if we could just like figure out a
spaceship and then go to, you know, go wherever we wanted.
But. Yeah.
I mean, we can't even figure outUSB versus USBC.
How are we going to, you know? Yeah, for real.
It's so aggravating. All the airports have USB now

(01:46:26):
and it's like, so just kidding guys.
Now it's USBC. I'm like, you kidding me?
We changed it again. The you know, what's the one
constant about universal serial bus USB?
The one constant about it is that it's not universal.
There's this shape and that shape and like how, how would we
connect? What ports would we connect to

(01:46:47):
on an alien spacecraft? We will be clueless.
And so I do think that if there is, if there are these parts,
again, if Gary has these man, I want him to invite me to visit.
I want to see some of this stuff.
We've got to get the evidence out there and convince more
people in the mainstream scientific community that there
is evidence. But again, going back to the
very beginning of our conversation, I want to take

(01:47:10):
things step by step and I don't want to jump to the conclusion
non human intelligence and physical craft.
I want to start by taking data on what's in the sky and get
evidence of UAP in the sky. But all of these different
averages of research are equallyvaluable.
And I do think that hypothesis like extraterrestrial,
interdimensional and all these non human intelligences, these
hypothesis are worth having on the table but not at the expense

(01:47:34):
of other possibilities. Like, and it's not a competition
between them. Like we can pursue many
different research agendas at the same exact time.
I think that's why it's so exciting that groups like UAPX
and SCU and the Sol Foundation, the Galileo Project all exist.
And it's, we're still trying to kind of like figure out the
landscape of what we all do and like where, what our corners of

(01:47:55):
research are and how to like coordinate among each other.
But it's really a good thing that we're all taking like very
different approaches to how to study this and think about this.
A very strange world that we're in.
Matthew, thank you so much for being here.
This was a fantastic conversation.
The Anomalous Review is a project of the Scientific
Coalition for UAP Studies. It's hosted and produced by me,
Michael Glossen, and edited by Kelly Michelle.

(01:48:18):
Our theme song was written and performed by Thomas Chrisanti.
Communication and PR work is by Preston Dykes.
Our advisory team includes Jennifer Roach, Robert Powell,
Richard Hoffman, Joshua Pearson.And Larry Hancock.
To find out more about SU, checkout Explorer scu.org.

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008 - Matthew Szydagis on the Scientific Hunt for UAP, Taking the Subject Seriously, and the Smartest Science Fiction

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}008 - Matthew Szydagis on the Scientific Hunt for UAP, Taking the Subject Seriously, and the Smartest Science Fiction