The Alien Paradox - ET Contact, Signals from Space, and Cosmic Hitchhikers

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Report of unidentified flying out there, unidentified verial phenomena hoday,
the great.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Weapons being tested by our own or foreign government. The
American people are becoming.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
More interested and for many instances, very alarmed by the
UFO story. So why do you suppost that all of
this has been kept from the world exploring our past,
our future, and the mysteries of our universe.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Where do they come?

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Brock? Why can't you explain.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
That everybody in usology is screaming or disclosure. The future
is now. This is Micah.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Hanks from the high mountains of Appalachia in a bunker
below ground. Welcome, one and all. It is the Micah
Hanks Program. GLAD is always to be getting into gear
and going in pursuit of the anomalous throughout space and
time and all stretches of the cosmos, as we do
every week listen on demand via podcasting apps. So anyway, welcome,

(00:56):
Hope you're all doing great, Hope you all had a
wonderful weekend. It is effective still the weekend from any
of you, because as of this Labor day, I am
sitting behind the microphone and doing my due diligence. As always,
I am here on duty as a sentinel ever, watchfully
observing what's happening out there in the world. Although one
thing I guess I've been a little neglectful of when

(01:16):
it comes to watching things is the latest Hollywood superhero films. Now, look,
I love superheroes. Anybody who really knows me, or has
known me since I was a teenager, knows that I
am one of those Marvel Comics fanatics I used to
love to draw back. When I have more time to
do that, maybe I'll try and get back into that.
But I used to actually aspire to be a comic artist,

(01:37):
and I loved reading comics, and I love the lore.
I love the way that mythology from ancient yore finds
its way into modern comic lore. So, I mean, all
these things fascinate me. And yet I only recently was
able to see the newest Superman film. Still haven't seen
Fantastic four. I'm tracking all the speculations about Avengers doomsday

(01:59):
that continue used to proliferate online. And you know, in
light of all this stuff, the fun entertainment side of
things that steps away from the serious news and the
hard science that we report on so frequently, and also
the mind bending mysteries of the universe that I talk
about on this podcast. You know, there are times where
I think it would be fun to do something a
little more theme toward pop culture, maybe a separate enterprise,

(02:20):
a separate podcast or a live stream or something where
I talk about some of this fun geek culture stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
I got a lot of.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Friends in that space, including the fine folks the family
in fact over there at Nerdrotic. Hope to have them
on joining me here at some point in the near future.
But indeed, if that's something that would interest anybody out
there deep dives into comic lore and the strangeness surrounding
some of the popular superhero archetypes of today, drop me
a line. Let me know. I'm always interested to hear

(02:48):
what kinds of things my listeners might find interesting. Again,
that wouldn't be on this podcast. That would be a
separate endeavor. But considering that I'm perpetually behind schedule on
so many of my other endeavors right now, that may
not be the kind of thing I can immediately contribute to. Maybe,
without the help of a assistant, maybe I need to
put together my own Avengers initiative and assemble a new
team to help tackle some of these very sorts of issues.

(03:12):
But anyway, these opening ruminations are a few things that
have been on my mind this Labor Day weekend. I hope, however,
you're celebrating yours. It has been a lot of fun
and now getting over into news. Speaking of films, apparently
there's going to be a new film rendition based on
a classic from alien abduction law. Specifically, author and Strange

(03:34):
Arrivals podcast host Toby Ball recently spoke with New Hampshire
Public Radio about the famous nineteen sixty one alleged UFO
abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. And this, of course
was a landmark case, not only because this was popularized
in a book by John G. Fuller, but there were
a lot of other components that made this story whatever

(03:58):
it actually entailed, a cultural landmark of sorts. I mean,
we had an interracial couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who
claimed they were taken aboard a unusual aircraft by very
unusual looking beings, some of whom could sort of speak
English according to the story, albeit with a heavy accent.
And of course this story has remained now for decades

(04:20):
a mainstay of the popular lore about the supposed intent
of the occupants of UAP now the Hills. Betty and
Barney did say that there were some physical traces that
they said suggested there had been a real occurrence. Scuff
marks on the top of Barney's shoes as though he
had been dragged. There were strange markings they found on

(04:40):
their vehicle. Betty also said that there were some strange
tears and other things that she noticed on a dress
she'd been wearing during that night drive home when the
alleged encounter took place. Some have offered more down to
earth explanations that include everything from a kind of nighttime
hypnosis that ensues while someone is tired and driving along

(05:01):
the roadway. Even doctor Benjamin Simon, who had been the
psychiatrist who administered hypnotherapy to the couple some time after
the events, had said he thought it was a mutually
shared mental aberration that they'd experienced, largely influenced by dreams
that Betty had had after the fact, and which she
told Barney about and which later probably influenced both of

(05:23):
them when they went in for hypnosis and then allegedly
remembered what happened, but then on the other side of
the equation. There's also the initial investigations by Walter Webb,
an ICAP investigator who spoke with the Hills, and they
provided a lot of descriptions of the craft as well
as the alleged occupants that they said that they saw
within the craft. Namely, Barney had been looking through binoculars

(05:46):
and he said that he saw these individuals standing at
the window and they frightened him. He didn't describe them
as looking grotesque, he said they essentially just looked like people,
but he felt like they were going to get him,
and he remembered all that prior to the hypnosis sessions,
and that was documented in the CAP investigations. So really,
what actually happened and what all that meant where that
falls in our consensus reality still remains a very perplexing

(06:09):
mystery for many even today.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
Now.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
For Toby Ball, speaking with New Hampshire Public Radio, he
remains a bit skeptical of the actual abduction claims. He says,
I don't believe they were actually abducted by aliens, but
he emphasizes the enduring mystery about this story. He said,
one of the reasons why this story has so much
staying power is that there's not an easy answer to
that question of what happened. He pointed to the fatigue

(06:33):
that the Hills experienced, the anxiety, and also some of
the alternative explanations for what might have happened. Some of
those speculative, though they are a bit unsettling even in
the absence of an actual alien abduction incident. But as
he essentially highlighted during the interview, he said, the Betty
and Barney Hill's story has really been sort of the
template for alien abduction stories going forward, and hence why

(06:56):
again now we seem to be seeing a new feature
film that will be based on that. It'll be interesting
to see if this film offers anything that past representations
in cinema haven't already provided when it comes to alien abduction,
and in fact, when it comes to on the screen portrayals,
it's very hard for the core narratives from these historic

(07:17):
cases to be accurately represented, at least in terms of
the terms used by the alleged abductees. You look at
films like Communion based on the book by Qhitley Strieber,
and what's happening in that film starring Christopher Walken is
almost like weird impressionistic art compared to what's described in
the book. You watch Fire in the Sky and Travis

(07:37):
Walton will tell you they made a horror film based
very very loosely on what actually happened to me. So traditionally,
the question really always comes down to how do you
convey the often perplexing, the sometimes revelatory, the sometimes very
frightening experiences that people claim to have had during UFO
experiences to an audience in a theater sitting and watching

(07:59):
a film without having to rely on horror or symbolism.
With the kinds of things that inevitably make their way
into these films, I guess we'll wait and see once
this one makes its way onto screens. But moving from
the cinema and up to Capitol Hill, it was recently
revealed that Congressman Eric Burlison has now introduced a new

(08:19):
version of the long beleaguered UAP Disclosure Act. They're now
calling it, get this the UAP Disclosure Act of twenty
twenty five, and it's being introduced as an amendment to
the National Defense Authorization Act for the forthcoming year. So
in the proposal, Representative Berlsson, according to a statement on
his website has introduced the latest rendition of this Act,

(08:41):
which he says prohibits destruction or alteration of any UAP records,
creates a centralized UAP records collection at the National Archives,
establishes an independent UAP records review board for oversight, requires
disclosure of records within twenty five years unless blocked by
a presidential national security waiver, and also provides for ongoing
Congress oversight. Essentially all the same elements from the original

(09:04):
version that was put forward by Chuck Schumer and Mike
Rowns a couple of years ago. But according to Burlison,
he says, this whole thing is about transparency and trust,
and he emphasizes that this version of the bill will
not compromise national security. Sunlight, he says, is the best disinfectant,
and the American people deserve the truth. Now, I presume
probably that one major difference in this version of the bill,

(09:27):
and again I'll have to take a closer look at
the language, but past versions of the bill had this
eminent domain clause, which ended up being extremely controversial. That
was the main component that everyone really took issue with
in the original version of the bill, and I strongly
suspect that played a role in what led to it
being struck down by certain other members of Congress. Naturally,

(09:49):
a lot of people looked at this and said, well,
this is probably the military industrial complex coming out of
the shadows and trying to thwart one of the most
significant efforts towards UAP disclosure in modern history, really in
history period. But there were probably some other complicating factors
that were far more mundane reasons for why the bill

(10:09):
ended up being watered down, And now the latest attempt
is trying to reintroduce some of those original provisions. Now,
this isn't the first time this year that Representative Burlison
has made news. In fact, he's somewhat stayed in the
news regarding UAP and one major reason for that which
was announced in March of this year, where Burlison said
that whistleblower David Grush had now joined his task force

(10:31):
on the Classification of Federal secrets. Grush, of course, who
testified in twenty twenty three that the US government concealed
programs involving recovered non human craft and blocked proper oversight,
also remains at the heart of this debate, and despite
the fact by the way that his story was first
broken publicly in June of twenty twenty three, by the
debrief my publication, I really have seen a lot less

(10:53):
hard evidence in support of his claims since that time
than I had expected we would by now. It doesn't
mean that there isn't veracity to the claims, but I
do sympathize to an extent with those who have essentially
grown cynical about a lot of this because they have
continued to wait for a new information to be provided,
and really, up until this point we've seen very little. Nonetheless,

(11:14):
for his own part, at the time of the March
twenty twenty five announcement, mister Grushad said that, quote, the
public is rightfully demanding to know the truth. I will
use all my expertise to support Representative Burlison and to
help restore oversight unquote. So maybe mister Burlson will have
more success with the passage of this bill than his
predecessors have. Of course, there are alternatives out there. There

(11:36):
was a very interesting op ed that we featured at
the debrief a while back by my colleague Sean Munger,
where he proposed a very different kind of legislation that
would look at some of the same issues, but in
a more sensible and frankly, in a simpler way. Maybe
I'll toss a link to that in the show notes.
But here before we go to the break, I want
to feature one more note involving congressmen and women and

(11:56):
their ongoing discussion of UAP, because during her recent appearance
on Joe Rogan's podcast, Representative Anna Paulina Luna said that
she and other lawmakers have been provided credible information that
she and her colleagues interpret to be essentially evidence of
interdimensional phenomena or specifically, this is how she framed that.

Speaker 4 (12:17):
This might sound crazy, but based on our investigations and
stuff that we've seen, Okay, there is definitely something that
I think would rival what we know currently with physics
and a tech that potentially is out there that we
don't have the ability to reproduce because it would basically
be like dropping a cell phone right off back during

(12:38):
the time of maybe the cavemands, so like, we just
don't have the tech to develop it yet. What I
can also tell you is based on our interviews and
this has been something that you can go back and
watch with the Congressional hearings. But I was actually able
to ask some of the witnesses, you know, what are
these things? And they keep saying interdimensional. And then when
you talk about the interdimensional aspect of you know, are
these things pre existing maybe outside of what we currently

(13:01):
know as our own dimension. That stuff can kind of
all sound crazy. But at the end of the day,
you know, my job as an investigator is to receive
all the information, decipher it, and then ultimately from a
congressional aspect, if you do have contractors that are withholding
information or operating outside of the purview of the federal government,
I mean, there's budgetary issues, but there's definitely something that

(13:21):
I can tell you with confidence that exists that we
don't know how to explain currently.

Speaker 3 (13:25):
So that is what Luna told Rogan, and as the
conversation went on from there, she essentially framed a lot
of these phenomena that she says that she and her
colleagues have been hearing about in terms of the kinds
of things that we have seen in the Bible and
in traditional texts throughout time, in essence that these may
be phenomena that have been known to humankind under various

(13:46):
names and interpretations and religious ideologies, but that some of
this stuff, if it represents a technology today, may be
in the hands of various defense contractors. But she says
she is confident that there's a real phenomenon and that
there are credible individuals who have come to her and
discussed it, to which Joe Rogan responded, that's actually remarkably vague,

(14:06):
and I guess, in the terms of how Luna phrases
it during the conversation on his podcast, it is pretty vague.
That is a fair assessment on mister Rogan's part. Of course,
Anna Paulina Luna says that there are reasons why she
has to be vague, that there are elements of this
information that are classified, and that she is beholden to
security classifications in terms of what she can say publicly,

(14:28):
But nonetheless, she remains confident that there is a there
there So will future efforts to pass legislation i e.
Barlaston's version of the UAP Disclosure Act or anything else
that may follow. Will they be more successful than past
attempts to bring attention to this on Capitol Hill. I
guess only time will tell, But when we come back,

(14:50):
I'll be telling you about a paradox of sorts involving
alien life. Is it out there?

Speaker 2 (14:55):
What is it?

Speaker 3 (14:56):
And have they ever tried to contact us? We'll dive
into that and more when we return on the Micah
Hanks Program. It was the summer of nineteen fifty at

(15:32):
Los Alamos National Laboratory and four physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller,
Herbert York, and Emil Konopinsky were walking to lunch. Their
conversation drifted, as it often did, from nuclear research to
lighter topics. Someone mentioned a cartoon from The New Yorker

(15:52):
showing aliens stealing trash cans off the streets of New York.
The group laughed, tossing around quips about flying saucers, which
had become a cultural fixation in the postwar years. But
once they sat down, Fermi, never wanted to leave an
idea unfinished, returned to the subject with characteristic bluntness. He

(16:14):
posed a question so disarmingly simple that it has echoed
ever since. Where is everybody behind? That deceptively casual remark
was a serious calculation. Fermi knew the galaxy was billions
of years old, ample time for an advanced civilization to

(16:35):
arise and spread across the stars. Even at modest speeds,
such explorers could have reached every corner of the Milky
Way in a fraction of its lifetime, and yet there
were no visitors, no signals, no clear evidence of anyone else.

(16:55):
The paradox was born in that moment over lunch contradiction
between the apparent likelihood of extraterrestrial civilizations and the silence
of the skies. Over the decades, it has inspired countless theories,
from the idea of a great filter that wipes out
civilizations before they can spread, to the possibility that advanced

(17:18):
life transitions into forms of intelligence that maybe we simply
can't recognize. Fermi never wrote a paper about his question,
but the story endured, passed down by his colleagues and
retold in physics circles until it became the stuff of legend. Today,
the Fermi paradox remains one of science's most profound mysteries,

(17:42):
crystallized in a single haunting question posed casually between bites
at a Los Alamos lunch. If life is common in
the cosmos, then where is everybody welcome back? Given the
milky ways of men age, even a modestly advanced society

(18:03):
could and really should, in theory, spread across the stars
within tens of millions of years. That's a blink of
an eye compared to the galaxies thirteen billion year history.
So seriously, why don't we see them, unless, of course
we actually do, right, And yes, I am talking about
those undesirable UAPs drifting around in our atmosphere because whatever

(18:26):
they may be or may not be, the idea that
some of them could be extraterrestrial probes or even extraterrestrial
craft piloted by the ets themselves, however remote and unlikely
that seems, it is still a possibility. But even if
we accept that possibility, we are still left with the
issue of why we find so little evidence of extraterrestrial

(18:50):
intelligence out there. We don't see very much in the
way of signals or techno signatures, and not for any
want for looking, because we certainly have spent decades trying
to find that evidence. Now it may be possible that
we haven't looked hard enough. Could be possible we haven't
looked in the right places. And in the case of
the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UAP, it could also be that

(19:12):
the phenomena we observe representing said extraterrestrial intelligences are so
evasive and mysterious that we literally cannot reach a consensus
about what they are, and in the absence of direct
evidence that they are indeed from space and intelligently controlled,
we don't recognize them as the intelligence they could actually be.

(19:34):
And so, since the question of what UAP actually are
is still very much open to debate, I want to
stick with fermes fundamental premise. If there's evidence of aliens
all throughout our universe, then why in the world don't
we see them? And there have been a lot of
creative explanations for this that have been put forward over

(19:55):
the decades. Some, for instance, focus on practical limits. They
say interstellar tra vel is simply too costly, or it's
too energy intensive. It would make colonization a poor investment
compared to simply staying at home. The aliens might be homebodies,
in other words, preferring to remain at home and be
cosmic couch potatoes, watching whatever their versions of the Marvel

(20:17):
cinematic universe might be in their domains of space and time.
Other interpretations of the problem might include whether civilizations would
launch expeditions, considering the stamina required to settle and resettle
thousands of star systems. Again, it seems like a good
idea from our limited perspective as a concept, but when

(20:37):
you put it into actual practice it would be a
whole lot of work. So why go to all that trouble?
But then there are the sociological theories too. Maybe the
galaxy is indeed bustling with advanced life, but Earth lies
in a sort of cosmic backwater and nobody bothers to
visit us. Maybe they can't see us, Maybe they don't
like the region of space where we reside. Some have

(20:59):
suggested that we are little more than a zoo, and
that aliens nowhere here but deliberately avoid contact. They like
to watch us from a distance, as if we're some
part of an experiment, or, as the name of this
hypothesis would entail, the zoo hypothesis, as though we were
actually exhibits in a zoo or a museum that are
viewed for the aliens entertainment. Well, each of these ideas

(21:22):
has some appeal, I could admit, but really none fully
resolves Fermei's paradox. Could all civilizations really find travel too expensive,
would every society really lose interest in expansion, especially considering
all the turmoil and the terror, the death of destruction,
the hardships that humans have endured throughout history in the

(21:43):
name of colonialism, expansion into new lands, the acquisition of territory.
If aliens or anything like we are, they certainly might
go to all that trouble, and we may not fear
all the better for it. But as far as the
idea that this truth is a reality but one that's
kept from us, here again, we've got to look at
the human side of this and are all too human
tendency to put things in our very limited terms? Are

(22:07):
we really so special that somebody would go to all
the trouble of hiding this truth from us? Again, the
explanations for the so called Fermi paradox are plentiful, but
definitive answers very much like the nature of UAP, remain lacking.
But Fermi's question fundamentally underscores the limits of speculation. As

(22:27):
one critic noted, it's a bit like looking at your window,
not seeing a bear and concluding that bears don't exist.
Admittedly a hard thing to do if you live in Appalachia,
like I do. I've got them outside almost every other day.
But I think you catch the drift of the analogy
on providing and again you look at issues today like
alleged mystery drone sightings. The fact that some people mistake

(22:49):
aircraft and planets and stars and other things for drones
hit literally tends to mean for the most skeptical among
us that there are no sightings of drones as though
don't exist, when in fact, some sightings of alleged mystery
drones probably actually do involve drones. But my point, more

(23:10):
fundamentally is simply that the universe is vast, and our
observations so far are still very limited, and just because
we don't see things does not mean that those things
do not exist. Drones and bears exist, Alien life and
probably intelligent varieties of it almost certainly exist also, And
that's why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or SETI remains

(23:34):
so crucial. While the Fermi paradox is a compelling intellectual puzzle,
only real evidence in the form of radio signals or
techno signatures or other discoveries is going to prove whether
or not we're really alone. Until then, Fermi's lunchtime question
is going to continue to challenge our assumptions about life
in the universe. Paul Sutter, recently, writing about the Fermi

(23:57):
paradox over at Universe Today, added that quote, we should
see advanced civilizations everywhere. We're talking Dyson spheres, stellar engineering,
or signatures of powerful engines. And while we do see
many mysteries out in the universe, unexplained explosions or strange
particles zipping by, we see no need to explain any
observation in the Solar System, galaxy or universe by invoking

(24:19):
advanced alien civilizations. Even when our natural dead explanations don't
explain everything, we find no great pressure to say aliens
did it. He goes on to right that, even leaving
astronomical observations aside, given the abundance of life and intelligence civilizations,
plus the raw amount of time they've had to poke
around the galaxy, our Solar System should have been visited

(24:40):
multiple times by multiple species, either in person or an
alien in this case, or with the robotic craft. We
should have monoliths and nanobots and space jockey skeletons everywhere,
especially on all the airless worlds that have maintained a
record of impacts and events going back over four million years.
So indeed, Paul Sutter asked, where is everybody? But what

(25:02):
if it isn't so much a matter of there's no
evidence of aliens, and instead it is if the aliens
left evidence behind, how certain are we that we would
find it. This very approach to the topic came up
a while back during a discussion I had with astronomer
Adam Frank, who is one of those brilliant forward looking
down to earth astronomers, very down to earth considering he's

(25:24):
a guy who spends all his time looking at the stars.
But Adam is one of those frequent commentators on the
quest for knowledge about our universe, and specifically the search
for extraterrestrials, especially those of the intelligent variety. And this
is what Adam Frank had to say to me during
our discussion about the search for alien life as it
relates to the Fermi paradox.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
Well, why aren't they here? We know they should be everywhere.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
They should have landed on the white out lawn and
announced themselves or already been here forever. And so that
is what the beginning of what we call the direct
Fermi paradox Now, the important thing to understand is there's
also this other Fermi paradise that kind of emerged over
the years, which I call the indirect Fermi paradox, which
after Frank Drake started SETI and people started, you know,
using radio telescopes to listen for do searches, people sort

(26:11):
of got this idea that like, oh, every night astronomers
you know, search the skies for signals of intelligent life.
They've never found any. Therefore there's no one there. That's why,
you know, the indirect Fermi paradox. And the thing about
the indirect Fermi paradox is it doesn't exist because what
people don't realize is that, as we call the giggle factor, right,
SETI was never very well funded.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
It was always kind of marginal at best.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
And as Jason Wright has shown, you know, which based
on an idea from Jill Tarter, if you look at
all the SETI search has ever done, and ask how
much of the sky has we searched? And the answer is,
if we think of this sky as being an ocean,
we've searched a hot tub of water. I know, it's amazing, right,
So you know, if you didn't, if you looked at
a hot tub was worth of ocean and didn't find
any fish. You wouldn't say like, well, there's no fish

(26:56):
in the ocean. So there just is no indirect Fermi paradox.
And of course the directory paradox there is like a
whole cottage industry. You know, if you're really into UFOs
and ufps, you say they are here, that's that, and
then you know. But if you're not, then there's all
kinds of explanations. My group and I talked about this
in the book. We did these models. We simulated the

(27:17):
expansion of a civilization across the galaxy, and we found
that yeah, you know, the expansion front does you know?

Speaker 2 (27:23):
For me was right in that moment he saw. But
we also found was if you allow civilizations to die,
right which probably they, you know, then what can happen
is the steady state is such that you can open
up holes. You can have big holes in the.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Galaxy where there is nobody for ten twenty fifty million years.
And as we know from this paper that I wrote
with Gavin Schmidt, there is no evidence you know, if
aliens landed on Earth one hundred million years ago and
set up a flourishing technological civilization for ten thousand years,
there would be no evidence whatsoever of it because the

(27:59):
Earth gets completely resurfaced after a couple of million years.

Speaker 3 (28:02):
Mister Frank provides some very interesting perspectives right there again
talking about the limitations of what we would be able
to find even in the event that aliens had been involved.
But there was also a totally different perspective on all
this provided by Christopher Mellen in an essay he published
with us there at the Debrief a while back, titled
the Paradox of Fermi's Paradox. In his essay, Chris essentially

(28:25):
argued that multiple studies, including those by Duncan foregan with
the Royal Observatory Westby and consualise with the University of
Nottingham and others, suggests dozens to hundreds of advanced civilizations
may exist in the Milky Way alone. Even pessimistic estimates,
according to Adam Frank and his colleagues, argue that a
trillion civilizations could have arisen over cosmic history. Amidst these

(28:47):
endless opportunities, mister Mellon wrote, intelligent extraterrestrial life is a
near mathematical certainty, and of course answering the question of
where is everybody? As Enrico Fermi asked, sitting there at
Los Alamos Lab, might have been answered so simply as
by looking at the sky, since, as mister Mellon points out,
uap were observed flying around Los Alamos white moths around

(29:09):
the proverbial candle in the immediate years after the Second
World War. Of course, Melon argues that many uap could
be evidence of extraterrestrials. He further argues that it's very
likely that extraterrestrials would send probes, maybe not to broadcast
radio messages, but simply to observe, because they allow stealthy
observation without revealing their location, and they could also collect

(29:31):
physical samples, in essence doing the very same thing that
we use space probes to achieve, without sending humans to
distant planets or even further reaches of the Solar System
and beyond, as in the case of the famous voyager probes.
In short, there are a range of interpretations that all
offer potential explanations for the Fermi paradox. But when we

(29:52):
come back here in a moment, I want to look
at the question of whether we have received what appear
to be communications from space. In fact, recent studies suggest
there may be new answers to old mysteries involving deep
space signals. We'll dive into that in a moment right
here on the Micah Hanks program in Search of Strange

(30:57):
Signals from Space? Has Earth ever being contacted? We're going
to look at that here in just a moment. First,
I want to remind you we send out additional signals
every week in the form of the X podcast for subscribers,
weekly additional editions from yours truly that complement the main program,

(31:21):
and of course that in addition to monthly specials and
your own unique RSS feed that delivers all this content
to you in one place, ad free. You can sign
up and become an ex subscriber at Micah Hanks dot
com forward slash X. It's a great way to support
the efforts of yours Truly. But getting back into the

(31:42):
heart of this discussion, we are now approaching the question
of signals from space. It was on a warm August
evening in nineteen seventy seven a quiet observatory in Ohio,
to be specific, that recorded a sound that would echo
through decades of speculation and wonder because the Big Ear
Radio Time Telescope, then operated by Ohio State University, had

(32:03):
been scanning the skies in its long running search for
extraterrestrial intelligence, and among the reams of computer printouts filled
with ordinary background noise, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Amen
spotted something extraordinary, a powerful narrow band radio signal that
lasted exactly seventy two seconds. Now, imagine if you were

(32:24):
in his shoes. You're sitting there late at night, and
you suddenly see the detection equipment registering something. It's powerful,
it's obvious. You literally watch what's unfolding, your jaw drops
and you proclaim aloud, wow. That's exactly what Jerry Ahmon
did in this case, because the signal he was observing

(32:46):
was unlike anything here his team had ever seen. It rose,
and it fell with perfect symmetry, just as one would
expect from a genuine cosmic source drifting past the telescope's
fixed view. It was tuned to the hydrogen line as well,
fourteen twenty megahertz, that special frequency, the so called cosmic
watering hole that scientists DeLong argued would be the most

(33:07):
logical choice for interstellar communication. Hydrogen is the most abundant
element in the universe, after all, and so it stands
to reason that it might be selected for use as
a natural common language for any advanced civilization. Well struck
by the numbers in letters charting the signal's intensity. The
official name was six E qu J five, but Aman

(33:29):
circled it in red ink and scribbled a single word
in the margin when he had spoken earlier that evening,
wow in That is the name most popularly associated with
this famous signal, although it was never heard again despite
dozens of follow up searches with more powerful instruments. It
didn't resemble known forms of human interference. It didn't match

(33:50):
the typical profiles of natural radio sources like pulsars or quasars. No,
this was fleeting, singular, and it was provocative, and it
left behind and just enough evidence to fuel one of
the greatest riddles in modern astronomy. Now, for some, the
WOW signal does actually remain the strongest candidate for a
message from another intelligence. After all of extraterrestrials were trying

(34:14):
to attract attention, the hydrogen line would be an obvious
calling card. As I mentioned, a single burst might serve
as a cosmic ping right proof of existence even if
nothing more followed. But to skeptics, the signal could have
just been a rare but natural astrophysical event. Maybe it
was energy from a collapsed star, amplifying faint hydrogen emissions

(34:35):
into something that seemed a whole lot more extraordinary than
it actually was. Well more than half a century later,
the Wow signal continues to occupy a strange sort of
place in the scientific imagination. It's tantalizing, it's also frustrating.
It's little more than a whisper from the stars that
refuses to repeat itself, and so we're left to ask

(34:56):
was it a one time cosmic accident or was it
a deliberate atte empt at contact that we happened to overhear.
Still nobody really knows, although there are a few things
we know about it. First, its duration was about seventy
two seconds, the maximum observation window for the Big Year,
and that, due to the Earth's own rotation, the intensity
of the signal in question reached U on the scale,

(35:19):
which was about thirty times above background noise. Again, it
was reported very close to the hydrogen line, to be specific,
about fourteen twenty point forty five fifty six megahertz. The
bandwidth was narrow greater than ten killerherts confined to a
single receiver channel, and it displayed expected rise and fall
intensity patterns consistent with a real celestial source. Whether it

(35:40):
be something that was artificial or natural, again, that remains
in question. We also know where it was coming from,
east of the galactic center, by about twenty five degrees,
near the region of Sagittarius. At that time, there were
no sun like stars known to exist, but intriguingly, in
twenty twenty two, there was a study that identified not one,
not two, but three potential candidates within that general area

(36:04):
based on those coordinates, and so some considered it to
be a pretty strong candidate for extraterrestrial intelligence, especially due
to the hydrogen line frequency in the signal profile. As
recently as twenty nineteen, Amen was still saying quote, I'm
convinced that the WOW signal certainly has the potential of
being the first signal from extraterrestrial intelligence. But there are

(36:26):
other possibilities. Some have suggested that it could have been
a magnetar, or maybe it could have been another kind
of rare astrophysical event. Energizing a hydrogen cloud. Maybe it
involved interstellar scintillation of weaker continuous signals. Maybe it even
had been something from Earth, like the possible reflection of
terrestrial signals off of something along the lines of space debris.

(36:48):
Although some had tried to say it might be radio interference,
that seems unlikely because that specific frequency band around fourteen
twenty megahertz is a protected spectrum. Seems pretty unlikely it
was a earthly radio they could have produced that. Now
a tantalizing possibility there. What if there were a non
terrestrial radio source, and maybe one even closer to home.

(37:10):
In other words, it wasn't something that was signaling from
the stars. What if there was something nearby producing those
radio signals and in an area that is normally not
used for radio operation here on Earth. Of course, all
this remained speculative because over the years, multiple attempts to
replicate the results and to obtain similar signals from that
region of the sky have all produced nothing, and so

(37:33):
it became one of the most iconic mysteries in the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But now there's a new paper
that's come out that argues that maybe we do have
an answer to what this could have been. Veteran space
reporter Leonard David, writing for space dot Com, recently noted
that researchers from the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University

(37:54):
of Puerto Rico at Arecibo are proposing a less extraterrestrial explanation.
Ongoing assessments, he said, led by Abel Mendez, are being
pursued under the Arecibo WOW Project, an initiative established to
analyze unexplained radio signals from space in the search for
et intelligence. According to WAW signal researcher Hector Sossas Navarro,

(38:15):
whose director of the European Solar Telescope Foundation and a
staff scientist at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, he said,
we look at old archives with modern science methodologies, kind
of like space archaeology, and indeed they think they have
unearthed some new clues. According to Abel Mendez, our newly
derived properties may help finally pinpoint the source of the

(38:36):
WOW signal. Mendes and his team have published a paper
and they say that while the group's paper essentially focuses
on revising the known properties of the WOW signal, quote,
we also found new properties that we look forward to
sharing in an upcoming paper. But in essence, they think
that the most likely explanation for the Wow signal is
indeed that it had a natural astrophysical origin. Now, Mendes

(38:58):
points out, this study doesn't close the case. It reopens it,
if anything, but now with a much sharper map in mind,
and spotlighting the prospect that the Wow signal might actually
have involved a sudden brightening of the hydrogen line in
interstellar clouds, which they say could have been triggered by
a powerful transient radiation source according to Leonard David's reporting

(39:19):
there at space, and this might have involved a source
like a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater. According
to Mendez, our results don't solve the mystery, but they
give us the clearest picture yet of what it was
and where it came from. This new precision allows us
to target future observations more effectively than ever before. So
maybe we are indeed now closer than ever to solving

(39:41):
the great mystery of the Wow signal. But again, another
question that comes to mind is is this really the
only time that we've ever found evidence of what might
be interpreted as a signal from the cosmos. Well, actually,
there are other instances that involve an usual, unexplained pulse
signals observed starlight. In fact, there was a study just

(40:02):
a few years ago involving researcher Richard Stanton, a retired
NASA JPL scientist, who conducted a study using a thirty
inch telescope where stars were observed to dim and brighten
within fractions of a second. Yet again, there could be
natural explanations for this. There could also be instrumental factors,
things involving the telescope itself in other words, But another

(40:25):
possibility is that these could be evidence of extraterrestrial operations.
So Stanton targeted over thirteen hundred sun like stars, monitoring
these for signs of what might appear to be extraterrestrial intelligence,
and there were several things that he detected. For instance,
on May fourteenth, twenty twenty three, there were two identical
pulses observed in h D eighty nine three eight nine.

(40:47):
That's a celestial feature near Ursa Major, about one hundred
and two light years away. Prior to that, in twenty nineteen,
there had been similar pulses observed in fifty one pegacy,
otherwise known as HD two one seven one four, but
most recently of all, in January of this year, there
was a third double pulse event observed in HD one

(41:08):
two five one. Now, for Stanton's part, he said, no
single pulse anything like these has ever been found in
more than one thousand, five hundred hours of searching. So
what exactly are we dealing with? Well, for Stanton he
didn't say therefore aliens, but he certainly said these are
a novel series of observations, and in their own way

(41:28):
not unlike the WOW signal, given that these appear to
arise from celestial sources out there, in other words, and
we don't know what causes them. Now many are cautious,
of course, about leaping to the ETI interpretation. Notably Seth
Shostak of the Seti Institute has said that the signals
seem too simple and repetitive to be meaningful attempts at communication.

(41:50):
After Stanton's research came to light, Shostak said that I'm
quote more than a little inclined to say that we're
dealing with astrophysical phenomena here, not an attempt by some
alien society to send interstellar telegrams, while Stanton remains intrigued
primarily because the stars observed appeared to reduce in brightness
by close to twenty five percent in one tenth of
a second, and given his own background with NASA and

(42:12):
its JPL, there's no known stellar process, he says, that
can explain such a rapid change. Furthermore, Stanton argues that
common local explanations like airplanes or satellites, meteors, or asteroids,
which could again fully obscure starlight under the right kinds
of circumstances, have nonetheless been ruled out in these cases
because images taken during these events showed no visible objects whatsoever.

(42:36):
Of course, it could be that something along the lines
of starlight diffraction from unseen space objects much further out
there would mean we haven't really ruled out all of
the potential objects passing through the field of view between
us and these sources of elimination. It could be that
there are atmospheric or instrumental effects that could have caused
the perceived brightening and dimming of these stellar sources. It

(42:59):
could also be that something like gravitational waves, or maybe
something we haven't even discovered yet. What if it has
to do with dark matter or dark energy. In any case,
it could be that there are other factors that are
yet to be determined that could be influencing this, And
so again it's most likely that Stanton is observing some
kind of natural phenomenon, albeit one that remains unexplained, but

(43:22):
we can't rule out the alternative that, Yes, indeed, Stanton
may have also collected evidence of strange signals, repeating signals
at that emanating from deep space, which could of course
involve attempts by extraterrestrial civilizations out there to send beacons
across the cosmos and communicate with anybody out here that
may be watching. For Stanton's part, he thinks more data

(43:45):
is required, and he suggests that in the future a
rays of telescopes, both on the ground and maybe those
also in space, will offer additional observational approaches that would certainly,
in the case of space observatories like the James Webb
Space Telescope, help to rule out the idea of atmospheric
effects and it might indeed help us close in on
whatever these things are. But only with further study, he says,

(44:05):
can this mystery be unraveled. So maybe we have received
messages from the cosmos. But what if those messages were
actually being carried by technology hitch hiking on interstellar space objects.
We'll dive into that intriguing possibility as we wrap things
up right here on the Micah Hanks program. Is it

(44:48):
possible that extraterrestrial technologies could be hitch hiking on interstellar objects,
maybe even some of the ones that are making their
way into our own plan terry neighborhood. Welcome back. Of course,
this has been big news in recent days with a
discovery of Three Eye Atlas, and if you read the

(45:10):
news about this subject, you probably already know that there's
been a lot of speculation about whether this object itself
could be alien technology. And part of the reason this
is such an interesting question for astronomers right now is
because we've only really recently began to confirm the existence
of interstellar objects, beginning with O Muamua in twenty seventeen.

(45:33):
That was followed by what's known as Borisov in twenty nineteen,
and now of course Three Eye Atlas. Now, in past
episodes where we have discussed this, mostly in the opening segment,
I've explained why it's most likely that all of these
objects and especially three eye atlas are chunks of rock
or ice or both. They're essentially comet like bodies that

(45:53):
originated in other star systems, and they happen to be
passing through hours. The speculations about alien technology you really
arise from some hypothetical scenarios put forward initially in a
paper by Adam Hibbard, A vi Lobe and another colleague
of theirs, where they said, look, you know, as a
learning exercise, we need to point out some things that
are very weird about three I atlas that could be

(46:16):
interpreted as it being a technological object. It's moving very fast,
it's not gravitationally bound to the Sun, the trajectory its
following will make it invisible to Earth at its nearest approach,
and all these things might be consistent with how we
could expect an extraterrestrial spacecraft performing some surveillance of our
Solar system might behave. I will point out in that

(46:38):
paper the authors say they didn't necessarily endorse that hypothesis,
but again avi Lobe has continued to argue that possibility
and has gotten a lot of attention recently for doing so.
And again I don't think it's necessarily wrong to entertain
the possibility. Many, however, in the astronomical community have pushed
back vehemently and said, we will entertain no discussion whatsoever

(47:00):
that this object has anything to do with technology. It
is just a comet. Leave it alone. Let it be
a comet. Okay, now that all said. We mentioned Adam
Frank earlier and in a recent paper that Adam Frank
was a co author of he and several other astronomers
have now while explicitly saying we maintain that three I

(47:21):
Atlas and its predecessors Borisov and O Muamua are comets,
we're not saying that they're technological devices. But they have
nonetheless said that the rarity and the novelty of interstellar
visitors makes them exciting targets in the search for techno signatures,
in other words, possible signs of extraterrestrial technology. Further, with

(47:43):
the Reuben Observatory expected to find dozens more of these
things in the next decade at least, who knows, it
might end up being really good at finding interstellar objects
and find a whole lot more than that. But in
any case, the expectation that we're going to start seeing
more of these in the years ahead makes systematic study possible,
and so the authors of a new paper argue a

(48:04):
ideal place for us to begin looking for techno signatures
is interstellar objects that enter our Solar system, and here
are the reasons why. In this new paper, they outline
four key categories of technosignature searches involving interstellar objects. One
of these is anomalous trajectories. This one's pretty simple. If

(48:26):
an object suddenly changes speed or direction in ways that
natural physics can't explain, it might be under control. Examples
of this might be unexpected accelerations without comet like outgassing,
or deliberate maneuvers like braking or using gravity assists, basically
the kinds of things that we would do if we
were piloting spacecraft. Continuous tracking would be needed to catch

(48:50):
any of these anomalies. But again, it stands to reason
that if we are observing an object traveling from interstellar
space and it begins to exhibit those qualities, we should
maybe take no and say, Okay, this one's doing something strange.
But again, trajectories aren't the only places where anomalies might arise.
We also have anomalous spectra or colors In other words,

(49:10):
surfaces that reflect light in strange ways, glint like metal maybe,
or that emit waste heat in the infrared that might
suggest artificial materials are present. An object could even reveal
artificial lighting or coatings right Our spacecraft sometimes feature artificial
lighting coatings on the exterior that might be used to

(49:32):
reduce friction during re entry When entering the atmosphere of
an Earth. There might be things like multi band photometry
and spectroscopy which could be crucial for spiting these outliers.
But again I would imagine continuous observation is going to
be requisite if we want to spot these things on
future interstellar visitors. Then of course there are unnatural shapes.

(49:53):
You know, most natural objects are lumpy, they're roundish, or
they're fairly irregular.

Speaker 2 (49:59):
Look at the.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
Most known asteroids, moons, or even planets in our Solar
system and you will generally see these kinds of characteristics roundish, lumpy,
or irregularly shaped. You get some strange ones from time
to time, like that unusual space object Eracoth, which is
actually shaped like a snowman. It looks like two roundish
objects that collided and decided to stick together, and so

(50:22):
the result is you've got this asteroid out there that
looks like an hourglass. So it's not impossible that you
encounter some really strange things. But the kinds of irregular
shapes that the authors of this paper are discussing are
if objects, for instance, had a thin sail like profile,
which of course might be suggestive of a solar light sale,
this would be a propulsion mechanism that would be low

(50:43):
energy and it would be highly effective in terms of
helping an object move through space. Or by contrast, if
it actually had a geometric structure and it looked like
a cylinder, that would be really suspicious. Now that's one
of the intriguing things, however, about oh Muamua, because base
on the observations of that object, and of course involving

(51:04):
the technologies that we had a few years ago, when
it appeared in twenty seventeen, we didn't get a very
clear look at Omuamua, and it appeared to be one
of two things. It was either a very long object
resembling a cigar or again potentially a cylinder, or it
was a really flat pancake type object, and both of
those are pretty intriguing to us because a pancake type

(51:27):
shape might resemble a solar light sale, whereas the elongated shape,
the cigar type shape would be reminiscent of the cylinder
that the authors of this paper says would be the
kind of shape that maybe would be an outlier and
that we should pay attention to. So again, best we
could tell from the somewhat limited data we had about
oh Muamu's shape, you can see why it was so

(51:49):
compelling to people and why initially Avi Lobe began to
argue that there are some compelling things we are seeing
about this space object that make it a little different
from most that we have ever observed. We should be
paying attention. So here are the authors of this paper,
without saying that's what we think oh Muamua was. Here,
we have them agreeing, hey, look, some of those characteristics

(52:10):
are the kinds of things at very least we should
be looking at, and in fact, if like curve analysis
and if the object comes close enough, even radar imaging
reveals further odd shapes that could help us to determine
in the future what exactly some of these interstellar objects are.
Some of them might actually look like what you'd expect
from a spacecraft. If any of them end up looking

(52:31):
like a saucer or a tic tech, that would be
really interesting. But that brings us to the final of
the four categories of search outlined in the paper, transmissions
and emissions. In other words, signals not coming from somewhere
in deep space, dispatched across the cosmos from the home
of some intelligent civilization. Know these actually being dispatched from

(52:51):
much closer by by an alien technology hitch hiking on
an interstellar object as it enters our Solar system. The
most direct test for this kind of thing, transmissions and
emissions would simply be looking for narrowband radio signals or
optical infrared laser emissions. Even very low power transmissions equivalent

(53:11):
to household technologies that we might have on hand in
our various domiciles, could be picked up if the interstellar
space object is close enough. By monitoring at key times,
which would include its approach per helion and during its
outbound path, would increase the chances of detection of these
kinds of emissions. Now a question we might ask when

(53:35):
we think about the WOW signal, Even if it is
most likely some natural astrophysical source that produced that, what
if indeed there had been the technologies at the time
available to detect interstellar objects speeding through our Solar System,
if there had been any at the time that the
Wile signal was detected. Right in the future, if we

(53:58):
detect any interstellar space object careening through the Solar System,
they begin making their nearest approach to Earth, and then suddenly, bam,
we get another Wow signal. Wouldn't it be intriguing if
the first replication of the famous Wow signal came in
conjunction with astronomical observations of a future entry into our

(54:18):
Solar System of an interstellar space object. One would have
to imagine that if indeed there had been any kind
of correlating data about an interstellar object back in the
nineteen seventies when the original Wow signal was detected, that
would probably help to settle the debate pretty quickly, unless,
of course, we consider the possibility that there's some sort
of natural source of radio emissions that would be directing

(54:39):
a very focused beam along hydrogen emission lines and all
of that seemingly coming from the same direction as an
interstellar space object approaching Earth. In my opinion, that would
probably be pretty unlikely. In truth. But all these things
are considered in this new paper, and of course they
do note that some natural phenomena can mimic strangely behavior. Commets,

(55:01):
for instance, do outgas, asteroids will tumble, Sunlight pressure exerted
on these objects can cause small accelerations that if we
aren't careful, we might misinterpret as being these unusual maneuvers
or other things. Heck, right now, with some of the
observations of three I Atlas and in the past, the
observations of the weird behaviors oh Muamua demonstrated, including its

(55:25):
odd acceleration, actually illustrated how difficult it is to distinguish
natural from artificial explanations for some of these things, and
so anomalies have to be confirmed with rigorous data and
multiple independent observations. But let's be clear, science fiction and
of course hypothetical scenarios that could apply towards science fact,

(55:46):
have been incorporated into our thinking about extraterrestrial visitation for decades.
Scientists have long imagined probes from other civilizations. Take, for instance,
Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, which involved a space crime,
and in truth, when they discovered O Muamua originally The
first proposed name for that object was Rama. Clearly somebody

(56:08):
had been thinking about interstellar space probes at the time
that O Muamu was discovered. They ended up selecting O
Muamou because again I believe it being a traditional Hawaiian
word meaning visitor from Afar or something along those lines.
But we also have had these concepts now for decades,
of self replicating von Neumann probes, generational worldships, things along

(56:29):
these lines that suggest how alien technology could travel across
the galaxy. Humanity has already sent spacecraft like Voyager and
Pioneer out there ourselves, for all we know, those may
be detected by another civilization and recognized as potential techno signatures.
And then finally, good old fashioned dumb space rocks covered
in space dust could be careening through the universe. But

(56:52):
they also could be carrying some very interesting packages. By that,
I mean imagine a scenario like this. An intelligent civilization
varies a probe in the cometary dust surrounding an object
like three I Atlas, and as it goes careening maybe
for centuries, maybe for millions of years, for all we
know through space, that probe remains buried in a dormant

(57:16):
state beneath the surface of that astroid. And let's say
the asteroid enters our solar system, and as it begins
to make its way into the center of the solar
system and it approaches the Sun, the heat from the
Sun begins to warm the exterior of the asteroid, and
then it begins to do what three eye atlas is doing.
We start seeing a cometary coma as kind of a
dust cloud as material begins to evaporate off the surface. Well,

(57:40):
what if some sort of an interstellar space object with
a probe buried beneath its surface. As portions of that
surface material begin to evaporate off of the object and
it begins to resemble a comet. What if this natural
process unearths a probe buried on the object. Eventually the
probe escapes from the surface of the object, it continues

(58:01):
to be heated by the Sun itself, and maybe solar
equipment on board that probe began to power it up.
Wouldn't that be a novel way for a probe designed
by an ancient alien civilization sometimes somewhere long ago a
great distance from Earth. Wouldn't that be an amazing way
for it to hitchhike on an interstellar object, and once

(58:23):
it makes its way to our solar system, suddenly it
is unearthed through natural processes, activated through solar radiation, and
then whatever the ancient mission of said ancient alien probe
may be, it gets to work. Maybe we shouldn't be
arguing about whether three I Atlas is alien technology. Maybe
we should be looking in its near vicinity in the

(58:45):
months ahead and see if it's dropping off any little
hitchhikers as it makes its way into our solar system.
Food forethought. Indeed, as always, you can follow my work
online at Michael Hank dot com and the debrief dot org.
That wraps things up for now. You guys, take care,

(59:05):
and of course we'll catch you next time. Stay strange
out there,