A discussion of the agnostic side of UFO investigation

George Noory and Sarah Scoles discuss her work as a UFO researcher who does not use spirituality and religion in her work. They discuss alien abductions, UFO sightings and the difference between God and the Universe.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Nori
with you along with Sarah Scoles. We're talking about her
latest work. They're already here. We'll talk a little bit
later about one of her books that she wrote several
years ago called Making Contact, the Story about Jill Tarter. Jill,
of course is an American astronomer, but her work was

(00:23):
working with SETI as well know Seth shaw Stack. Fascinating
person Sarah that she is, isn't she? Yes, Absolutely, she's
you know, she's been at the head of the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence for decades, which is a hard thing
to be the head of. Absolutely. And the reason why
I brought up the God question is is I wanted

(00:43):
to get your thoughts on the very perplexing question about
how we got here, what we're doing here. And you know,
I don't think it's an accident that things are just
too orderly and they just make sense that there's got
to be some divine intelligence behind it. How it got there,
I don't know, but I just think there's some kind

(01:06):
of order. How about you? Um, I mean I think
we definitely live in the universe that is tuned in
such a way that we can be here. And I
mean when when physicists talk about that, they often talk
about a thing called the anthropic principle, which is really
that if if it weren't a universe that were suitable

(01:28):
to us, then we wouldn't be alive to be thinking
about it. And so that's one answer to that question
that that doesn't involve divine anything. But um uh yeah,
once again, George, another question I don't have the answer to.
But but you but you're right, it is a tuned universe,
to be sure. My next question would have been, who's

(01:49):
the tuner? It's me. It's been me all along. You
did it? You you originated all of us, right, correct? Correct,
You're welcome, Thank you did a good job. Thank you.
Where do we go next with this research? I mean,
how do we get this answer that all of us
have then the questions that all of us, including you,

(02:11):
were looking for, just you know, what's out there? Are
there extraterrestrials? Have they visited here? When do we really
get that definitive answer? Yeah, I think a lot of
people would like to know when I mean, it's it's
a good time for the steady side of things, looking
for cosmic cousins out there in the universe that are

(02:33):
not here. You know, for a long time people have
been searching for a specific type of radio signal that
we think intelligent aliens might broadcast. And now steady scienceists
they're kind of beginning to diversify what they're looking for more.
They have like they're looking for alien lasers first of all,

(02:55):
and then even more unconventional ideas like looking first systems
of planets that look like they've been engineered to be temperate,
so like a set of planets that all look like
the tropics, or looking for pollution in the atmospheres of stars,
and so I think, you know, anytime you are looking
for more and different kinds of signals, you're more likely

(03:17):
to find an answer. And I mean for the for
the are they are already here part of the question.
I think we also live in a data rich time.
For that we have satellites and sensors all over the
planet that we could be collecting and analyzing data relevant

(03:38):
to UFOs on and people mostly haven't in the past,
but we could, and there are a few private organizations
that are doing that. I think one called a hyper
giant and another one I just came across the other
day called sky Hub. And so I mean, coming from
as as you said before, my skeptical perspective, the answer
is always more data to draw more conclusions. But I

(04:00):
think these kinds of systematic investigations are at least the
way that I know to get at What about people, Sarah,
that have had incredible sightings, not just little things I
saw on the roof of a hotel, but they see
truly remarkable things, you know, texture to a saucer, you know, windows,

(04:20):
things like that. You know Kenneth Arnold when he first
spotted these back in forty seven flying over the mountain sides,
Strange things like that. What about these sightings from people?
Because as I say, as I say, if you see
a hundred of them, in ninety nine of them are
explainable man made nature, asteroids, meteorites, ninety nine of the

(04:47):
hundred are explainable. There's still that one you can't explain. Yeah,
and that is actually something that made me kind of
catch the UFO investigation bug. Is because you know a
lot of the hask government investigations and also the way
that traditional scientists talk about UFO studies. You know, when
you bring up the fact that there are there's always

(05:09):
a certain percentage that are unexplained no matter what you do.
You know, the classic azer is to just say, well,
we could explain those other ones. Therefore, we could probably
explain these unexplainable ones if we just had some more data.
But as you bring up, all it takes is one
out of those thousands or millions or however many there are.

(05:33):
And uh, yeah, that's a good point. But as for
the truly incredible sightings, yeah, I mean, I really don't.
I don't know what to do what to do with those,
And it's hard because people's personal accounts are not the
same as hard data, and human senses are fallible and
things like that, and so from from the scientific perspective,

(05:54):
they're never going to get the same weight as a
radar return or something like that. Sure, would you like
to believe that there are extraterrestrials out there in the universe? Yeah? Absolutely.
It would be very strange to me to live in
a universe where nothing was out there. I would even
love to live on an earth that aliens were visiting,

(06:15):
even if that's not necessarily what I think I would
I would love to find out if that was the case.
Sarah Scoles with us. Her website is her name linked
up at Coast to coastam dot com. The book They
Are Already Here came out in March and you can
pick it up on Amazon any other place, Sarah, Amazon's good.
There's a website called indie Bounds ide Bounds that you

(06:38):
can get it at, and then my own website has
links to a few other bookshops where you can buy it.
What about the theory that these are coming from the
inner Earth, that they've always been part of this planet.
What do you think of that one? I don't know
very much about that one. You've heard it? I have
heard it, yeah, And I mean there's there's a version

(06:59):
of it that's a some movies or things like that.
I M. Yeah. I mean, I haven't seen any evidence
that points in that direction, but I would be willing
to consider it if it came my way, Sarah. Since
you've been doing this, which has been how many years
now investigating putting together these two books, let's see having

(07:22):
around six years, because Tarter came out in seventeen, right
right about that. It probably took you what a couple
of years to write it before that? Yeah, yep, so
you've been at this for a long time. What has
been for you? If you were to believe this the
most compelling story that would let you believe it, it's

(07:45):
got to be one. Yeah, that's I'm going to get
you converted yet before this shows? I know, does it
give me a one forty five in the morning asking
hard question? That's right, m I. You know, I a
lot of the people I talked to for this book
had not themselves actually had experiences, even though they were

(08:08):
very interested in it, and so I wouldn't say it
was any of those, but one that John Greenwald told
me about when I was interviewing him that first got
him interested in UFOs. I also find very intriguing. It's
an incident from the nineteen seventies involving Iranian fighter debts
trying to intercept an objects that multiple people saw it

(08:33):
appeared to turn their instruments off. You know, there was
a mothership craft and small craft appeared to come out
of it, and then they landed, and there was no
evidence that they landed. And then later it got cited
in other military documents talking to American pilots about what
you know, that the fact that they would encounter stuff

(08:54):
up there that they couldn't explain, And so I thought
that was interesting from you know, from a nuts and
bolts perspective, and then also from the fact that the
military thought it was interesting enough who included in their
you know, training sorts of documents. I interviewed some of
the people involved in that case, and it's a pretty
darn compelling it really is. Yeah, what about the alien

(09:17):
abduction people? Are they nuts, delusional telling the truth? What
do you think's going on with them? Um? I don't.
I don't know the answer to that question. I mean,
I think some of the things that happen to people
are misinterpretations of things like sleep paralysis, which I'm sure

(09:41):
a lot of people have heard as an explanation, or
you know, the projection of other types of trauma. But
then you have people who don't have things those things
going on, who experienced this, and for that I just
don't I really don't have an answer for that. What
do you think is going on? Well, I think we're
being visited. I think I'll take it even a step further.

(10:05):
I think they seeded us. I think we are they
and they come back and monitor us every once in
a while. I think there maybe a group of people
within our galaxy who do nothing but seed other planets
and jump start them. Pretty interesting. Huh, that is interesting.

(10:26):
You could tell them we could use them assistance. Lately,
they don't somehow get involved. Once they start things, they
kind of just like leave us to figure it out ourselves. Good,
good scientific experimental procedure. In a couple of minutes before
we take calls next hour, Jill Tarter, you wrote the
book about her. She's a well known astronomer. She was

(10:49):
the former director for CETTI. How did you key in
on her? It's certainly when I watched the movie Contact
when I was about twelve years old, and then watched
the movie, and you know, Contact is a movie about
a radio astronomer who spent her life searching for aliens
and then eventually finds them, and at some point I

(11:12):
determined that this character was based on a real person.
And when I was a teenager, I was just absolutely
obsessed with the movie and Carl Sagan's novel and the
fact that people got to ask these big questions like
you were asking earlier, where do we come from, where
are we going? Who else is out there? I didn't
know that that was part of science, and so once
I found that out and found out that was a

(11:34):
real person's job, I just became totally intrigued by it.
She's still alive. She's seventy six years old, and I
don't know if she's still part of SETTI or not.
Do you. She has retired from working at the organization,
but she is on the board, and I don't think

(11:54):
she's capable of not working, so I'm pretty sure she's
still doing research. And Discover magazine recognized her was one
of the top fifty Important women in Science. That's a
pretty good honor, it is. I mean, what's interesting to
me about Jill, in addition to her subject matter, is
that there were a lot of times in SETI when

(12:16):
SETI could have just gone away. You know, getting funding
for it is hard. For a long time, it was
considered fairly fringe, and she is the one who championed
it through those hard times, and she's really the reason
that it still exists today. In twenty eleven, she delivered
an incredible talk called Intelligent Life in the Universe? Is

(12:38):
anybody out there? It was in the Canary Islands. Some
of the people who were part of that were Queen's
founding guitarist, Brian May, the physicist at the time, Stephen Hawking,
and Richard Dawkins, the biologist, and she developed a lot
of people who followed her and probably join you. Yeah, yeah,

(13:03):
I mean she's she is an inspirational figure, and I think,
unlike a lot of physical scientists, she's really good at
talking about why her work is important to all of us.
You know, why it matters that whether we find out
if we're alone out there, and why people should pay
attention to the sky when they could just keep going

(13:24):
about their daily lives. So I think that resonates with
a lot of people. Sarah's book about Jill Tarter is
called Making Contact Jill Tarter in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Sarah,
do you think there's anything that could move you to
get you to become a believer? What would it take. Yeah,
that's a very hard question, because I feel like even

(13:47):
if I had one of the sidings that you were
talking about earlier, of a saucer where I could see
the texture in the windows, I would doubt myself and
my own senses so it would take quite a bit,
I think, but things things like I was talking about earlier,
collecting lots of this data from from censors and doing

(14:11):
kind of a systematic investigation. I think, because then then
I wouldn't have to be a believer. Then I could
just know. Are we going to get any help from government? Um?
I mean it seems like it seems like we are.
It seems like Um. Since the a Tips story came
out about the Pentagon's program, even though you know, I

(14:32):
have my doubts about the different narratives going around about
that it has gotten you know, their new Navy reporting guidelines.
There's the the report that you mentioned earlier, the intelligence
report that's going to come out. I mean, I think
people high up are paying attention and are interested, even

(14:55):
if it's because they think it's foreign aircraft, it's nevertheless
results in investigation. Would you say that most scientists are
non believers that we have been visited by extraterrestrials? Um? Yeah,
I mean my unscientific assessment of that, because I haven't

(15:16):
done a survey, is yes. I think I think that
while probably a lot of scientists think that they are
out there, they find it harder to believe that they
have excuse me, Delta spaceship and chosen to come here.
I think that's a hard ideas for lots of scientists
to swallow. Sarah, Can people email you through your website? Yeah?

(15:38):
They can. There's a contact page on there that has
my email address. Extraterrestrial Intelligence. We're talking about her latest work.
They are already here. So when people open up this book,
what are they going to see in that first chapter? Um,
they are going to see me having a USOS sighting

(16:00):
that I later identified, but you know, realizing what it's
like to see something that I can't immediately explain in
the sky. And then they're going to hear more about
the revelations that first came out about the advanced their
stay threat identification program. And what do you think of
Louis Alzando? Pretty credible? I have questions about Louis Alsando.

(16:28):
He and I spoke for an article that I wrote
for Wired a few years ago when all of this
first came out. Although he hasn't taken my phone calls
in a long time. Is he hiding from you? I
don't know. You will have to ask him, you know.
He says he ran the a tip program for the Pentagon.

(16:50):
The Pentagon says he didn't, and I would just like
a resolution to that destan that they have so that
we can all yeah where, no where everything. Listen to
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