The UFO Movie THEY Don't Want You to See (2023)

- UFOs. You don't just see them in the sky. But also in the newspapers. Also on television and in old books. and

they

are the talk of the town among your friends. They are in the stories you grew up with and

they

keep coming back into our lives. And now again. Since 2017, the media has been shoving UFOs and alien visitations down our throats. It is the latest fad in the networks of pseudoscience and pseudohistory. The result is that between 2019 and 2021 in the US, the belief that some UFOs are extraterrestrials increased from 33% to 41% according to a recent Gallup poll.

We can't help but think about aliens and UFOs, but to what extent is that thought process based on real science? My name is Brian Dunning. I'm a science writer and I love coming to the desert of the American West to look at that amazing sky. I have been lucky enough to see something, three times in fact, that I didn't know what it could be. I soon discovered what it was, but for a few minutes I experienced a magical rush like no other. There's something up there for which we have no explanation. But deep down we

want

it to be what we expect.

This observatory is one of the places where we look into space, towards the most interesting stars. This makes us wonder who is there. In any piece of sky, how many life forms are there in that small piece of sky? That's something everyone should ask themselves, but here's an even better question. From that little piece of heaven: how many eyes look at us? For me personally, that's the most interesting question there is. I work for a non-profit educational organization. Sometimes we make

movie

s, sometimes we make videos or podcasts. But in that educational function we cannot simply say what we think or what we

want

to be true.

We must limit ourselves to what is verifiable. So we're talking about the latest and greatest state of our knowledge, what scientists have learned so far, how they found it, and what they're still working on. This is our best knowledge and our most recent data. That's what we're going to talk about here. You know I like to ask questions about our neighbors in the universe. You already know that I am fascinated by UFOs and want to know more about them, and you can't help but be exposed to all the attention that UFOs have received in the media over the past few years.

Navy Videos. TV series. Congressional hearings. Personal allusions. You found it everywhere. It is clear that many of us are very interested in these topics. Tonight I want to combine the two. I am going to offer a scientifically based report, free of any personal bias on this topic in which we apparently all have a common interest. What are those things in our airspace? What do we know and how do we know it? What is there (or not) and how do we know? And of course, the million-dollar question, the one that really matters: Do they visit us? Spoiler alert: We don't know all the answers yet, but we do know a lot.

Are you ready for it? Yes. Let's get started. One of the most important questions for us as humans on planet Earth is the possibility of extraterrestrial life, other worlds, perhaps other civilizations, other intelligent beings that are like us in some ways, but not in others. What do people who study these questions think? This is astrobiologist Dr. Kaitlin Rasmussen. I spoke with her at the 107-inch telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. - I think the general opinion in astrobiology is that there must be a lot of life in the Milky Way. I also believe that the Milky Way must be full of life.

Whether that life is intelligent is really a matter of debate, but I have no doubt, nor do many of my colleagues, that there must be a lot of life there. -And her colleague, Miles Currie, also an astrobiologist. - It's fair to say that most astronomers have reached a consensus that we believe there must be some form of life there. Whether it is intelligent life or simply microbes is a completely different question. - And this is Dakotah Tyler. She is an astrophysicist. - Most astronomers believe that there is life in the universe, without a doubt. - A lot, a little? - A lot or a little may depend on what exactly you are talking about in terms of intelligence or advanced civilization, but I would say a lot of life. - That shouldn't be a surprise.

In 1952, Miller and Urey applied a sample of Earth's primordial atmosphere to a test tube, simulated lightning with sparks, and created more than 20 amino acids, the building blocks of life. But nothing in their mix was unique to Earth. It was what would form an atmosphere on any newly formed rocky volcanic planet. The Miller-Urey experiment is repeated periodically. We have now refined it with better estimates of atmospheric composition and are even seeing more amino acids being produced. These same conditions have been found on the rocky planets of the universe since the beginning of time. How many planets is that?

Look at this. This is a NASA video showing all the exoplanets we have discovered so far. We found more than 5,000, but the number is increasing so rapidly that 5,000 will probably seem ridiculously low to you when you watch this documentary. And that dense area of ​​planets does not mean that there are more planets there than elsewhere. It turns out that's the place where we know a lot about this because it's where the Kepler telescope pointed during its first mission, which was a really intensive study of just a small part of the sky. And, in fact, there is more there, many more than Kepler could identify; and this is really what the entire Milky Way looks like.

In fact, we believe there are tens of billions of planets in our local galaxy alone. There are more planets than there are people living on Earth. Billions more. And on all those planets, does any civilization exist today? Civilizations rich with culture, arts, sciences, history and their own space programs? I don't know what your arithmetic tells you, but my arithmetic tells me there should probably be a lot in there. If there are extraterrestrial astrobiologists out there asking the same questions, then our Earth will be the most exciting destination in the universe. Let me explain. When we search for life on other planets, we use spectroscopic analysis to look for the chemical composition of their atmospheres.

By studying the light spectrum we can see if there is water on that planet or if there is chlorophyll present. Astrobiologists have identified many spectra that represent all the different types of chemical bases of life, not just carbon-based ones like ours, but all the other ways that elements can come together to form living matter. And now, even with James Webb, our best space telescopes almost have that capability, but not quite. But we're close, and our next generation of telescopes will surely be able to do it within a few decades. It is almost certain that in this century we will be able to identify exoplanets with some form of life.

So if you think about how many civilizations there are probably out there, some of them will know these things and others will have already looked for exoplanets. Think about what the Earth must look like to them. 71% water on the surface and all chemical signs of life in the atmosphere. Carbon is the most interactive element that exists and organic compounds are found throughout our spectrum. Earth is a dream planet for an alien astrobiologist. We are as attractive as an exoplanet can be. - We are definitely a planet that screams: "There is intelligent life here", not just any life, but life that affects its environment in a technological way. - If we are guided by the law of large numbers, chances are that someone, perhaps dozens, hundreds or thousands, has discovered the incredible spectrum of the Earth.

Someone out there probably knows we're here. They already know something about us. This is an amazing, mind-blowing, mind-blowing idea, and very exciting for those of us who hope that Earth's children will one day meet our neighbors. When we talk about that topic, we must keep in mind that there is a good chance that extraterrestrial civilizations are interested in us and that there is a real scientific basis for it. They probably want to visit us, just as we would like to visit them. All of that is wonderful and surprising, but there we have our first problem. - The reason we, as astronomers, believe that life is so abundant in the universe is because of its immensity.

It's kind of a numbers game. But precisely because of this enormous extension, we do not believe that life will ever reach Earth here. - They can't get here. Remember, we're trying to stick to reality, not the Star Trek universe. That means we have to ask ourselves if we can travel faster than light; because civilizations are going to be very, very, very far away. - As scientists we are limited to what we can test and observe. And what we can observe is that nothing can travel as fast as light, except light itself. It takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate anything with any mass to the speed of light. - So traveling faster than light is impossible due to the branch of physics we call relativity.

In relativity, the faster you move, the heavier you become and the shorter you become. As you approach the speed of light, you become infinitely heavy and infinitely flat. - I hear about relativity, Einstein and the laws of physics. Are these just some ideas that scientists invent? - You might naively think that the laws of physics are something we invent as humans, but they are not enacted laws. Rather, they are based on real observations that we have repeatedly verified to the point that we consider them truly unbreakable laws. - Could it be that aliens could reach us from another part of the universe where different laws of physics could apply? - No, that is impossible.

The laws of physics are the same everywhere. - How do you know that? - We can look back in time with the James Webb Space Telescope; because the further away something is, the longer it takes for light to reach us. And if we look back in time, we can see something called the cosmic microwave background. That's the residual light from the Big Bang and this light dims like a dimmer switch and we can use the laws of physics to say, "Okay, it must have been this bright at that time, and now it's clear at this time." ". in time." And that is perfectly correct.

For example, we know that in various parts of the universe we can look back billions of light years and that the laws of physics are exactly the same as the laws of physics here in - Well, if the laws are the same everywhere now, has it always been like this? - By observing the effects of gravitational lensing, we have managed to determine that gravity now behaves the same as it did 5 billion years ago and 5 billion light years away - The entire universe follows the laws of physics as we know them. We can look back at the universe and compare our observations with some models we created according to the current laws of physics and we can see that they coincide with each other.

So the current laws are the same as the laws of physics from the beginning as far as we can look back - That's disappointing. These barriers to faster than light travel here are the same as. for a civilization on the other side of the universe. And the problems we see now were the same for a civilization a billion years ago. But the problems do not finish there. I call this the Christmas tree problem. It has to do with the time element in communication with our neighbors. Do you think there could be a radio greeting from an extraterrestrial civilization heading through space toward us? - Greetings from extraterrestrial civilizations can fly anywhere in the universe.

The problem is that you have to find the right place and at the right time to receive them. - It turns out that time is as big a problem as distance. Imagine a Christmas tree with twinkling lights. Let's imagine that the tree is the universe and each light in the short time it shines represents the duration of a technological civilization, from the moment they first develop the ability to interact with other civilizations until the moment they end, for example by a gamma ray. explosion or an asteroid that destroys a planet, a war, a pandemic or whatever.

Perhaps they will survive as a technological civilization for a million or a hundred years and disperse throughout the universe in an inconceivable number of such civilizations. But not all of them exist in the same period of time. The chance of two Christmas tree lights that are not too far apart turning on at the same time is small. Even if we traveled through space at almost the speed of light, for two civilizations to make physical contact they would have to be very close to each other and exist at the same time. So it's possible, and it's probably happening, it's probably happening right now somewhere in the universe.

But the Christmas tree problem makes it much less likely that a technological civilization will ever visit a neighbor, and that's a problem we don't like. Then there always comes a moment in the discussion when it is said: The aliens are far ahead of us. Probablyhave discovered laws of physics better than ours. So that they are not hindered by time or space. They are not bound by special relativity. With everything we poor people know, special relativity is one of the most tested and proven laws of physics. But maybe aliens are much smarter than us. Can't aliens, who are smarter than us, circumvent these laws and violate the laws of physics? - You cannot break the laws of physics. - Okay, you can declare that now, like a proclamation, but why can't aliens be smarter than us? - Any sufficiently intelligent alien civilization will invent mathematics.

And their math will tell them the same thing that our math tells us, and those are just the laws of physics. - Well, let's assume for a moment that our math is wrong and that faster-than-light travel is possible. Obviously not all alien civilizations will realize it, but let's consider that a good number of them could. There will be many. When distance no longer matters, problems disappear. Advanced civilizations will begin to visit other civilizations everywhere without distance restrictions. Maybe some want to stay hidden or study us alone, but certainly not all. At least some would have appeared on the White House lawn to say, "Hello, here we are." According to the same way of thinking, some of them will be hostile and destructive.

But look, we're still here. Nobody destroyed us and nobody showed up at the White House. Now think for a moment about time. If there are no hostile or friendly long-distance travelers, that may well mean that there are no long-distance travelers. The absence of visitors is really the best empirical evidence that no one anywhere has yet solved both the Christmas tree problem and the problem of faster-than-light travel. Remember, we noted earlier that special relativity is one of the most proven and proven laws of physics. And furthermore, if we assume that aliens are not subject to the same laws of physics as us, what are we really saying?

Then we say that they can do anything like gods, ghosts or gnomes. - So aliens must obey the same laws of physics as we do. They are not magicians. No Harry Potter. They can't do what they want. - I prefer to think that advanced aliens understand and work with the laws of physics just like we do. But again, I'm just speculating outside of the science. If we want reliable answers to these big questions we ask ourselves, we must stick to reality and not speculate about what gods, ghosts and goblins might be capable of doing. Or Harry Potter.

In logic we call it an "exception plea." We can't just say, "Oh, aliens have no limitations. We poor stupid humans just can't comprehend their superiority." Well, that's not science, it's wishful thinking. It is convincing yourself that something is true just because you want it to be true. I'd like that too, but I also want to know what's really true. We do this by setting the bar high for the quality of evidence we will accept. If we present bad evidence, we weaken our argument; so we only accept good tests. You might think this video seems like good evidence, but it isn't.

It's really bad. I know this because I did it myself using an app on my phone to add a flying saucer to my video. But you should have also known that this is flawed evidence because we call all videos or images anecdotal evidence. That refers to anything that cannot be directly examined or tested. I can study and test this stone directly because I'm holding it, but you can't because you only see it in the video. For you it might be nothing more than a special effect. Images or videos will never reach the high level of evidence we need.

Millions of people can fake videos better than me. And for more than half a century, pranksters have been throwing hubcaps into the air to convince many that they were taking authentic photographs of a flying saucer. People swallowed the bad evidence and ended up being wrong. Tales or stories from television shows about UFOs are also completely anecdotal and very unreliable. And they become more and more exaggerated each time they are retold. Although the people who appear on these shows often seem very credible, we have to try hard not to believe everything that appears on television. We have to force ourselves to be open to information that is not what we want to hear.

This is how we improve our knowledge. Another way we examine evidence to meet our high standards is by attempting to falsify our theories. What does the cancer researcher want most? He wants to find a cure for the specific type of cancer he is researching. So if you get even the slightest positive result, the cancer responds a little better than the rest to this possible cure, you know that the most premature and stupid thing you can do is to immediately exclaim, "I found it! This cancer is cured." Instead, he must look for any possible alternative explanation for that positive result in order to eliminate it.

Maybe it was caused by residue from the appliance cleaning solution. The most important step you can take is to find a way to fake a positive result. This way you ensure that you are left with only the best evidence that can withstand any further investigation. So if the UFO researcher wants to prove conclusively that we are visited by extraterrestrials, he must exercise the same extreme rigor in testing his theory in every possible way against the possibility of other explanations for his evidence. The video in which an airplane appears to make movements that airplanes cannot make could well be an optical illusion due to camera movements.

He needs to rule out that possibility entirely and then look just as hard for other things that might explain the video. So fake it, rule out any other possibility. If we want a credible story, we need to make sure it stands up to scrutiny through falsification. To do that, we'll look at the full history of UFOs that were eventually identified and see what kinds of things have fooled eyewitnesses in the past. Fortunately, we have a lot of data on this. Several authors have created large collections of data and even Wikipedia has an article on the most common explanations for UFO sightings that finally found an explanation.

The most common cause of solved UFO cases is the misidentification of celestial bodies, primarily planets and stars, and especially Venus, but also satellites, meteors, and space debris. Every time SpaceX launches a series of Starlink satellites, which appear in the sky as a giant line of lights, I get a lot of messages from people asking me, "What the hell was that?" Celestial bodies confuse even experienced celestial observers on a daily basis; Therefore, they are the main phenomenon that we must try to link to observation in order to rule it out. - With all those artificial satellites in orbit around the Earth, you can imagine that a pilot who sees something and doesn't know exactly what it is, reports it as an unidentified flying object, whatever that means to him. - And here is an air traffic controller.

You're going to meet him right away. - We have had pilots reporting a line of planes 100 miles long, 30 planes, what is it? - And do you see a Starlink train? - Indeed. - The second most common cause of resolved UFO reports is airborne debris, usually weather balloons, but also birds, party balloons, and regular air traffic, including airplanes, airships, especially advertising blimps, drones, and helicopters. Most serious UFO watchers fall into this trap every day. And therefore we must also try to match these with our observations to eliminate them as an explanation. That air disaster also includes trickery, such as comedians deliberately throwing something into the air to trick people into walking toward it.

But deception is such a small part of the UFO phenomenon that we don't need to spend much time on it. Another common cause of solved UFO cases is the misidentification of lights or objects on the ground. Horizons can disappear in some atmospheric and lighting conditions, and lights and other objects on the ground sometimes appear to hang in the air. Sometimes you have to go off the beaten path to discover that your UFO was actually something on the ground. But, I repeat, there are sensible people who go in there every day. The final possible identification of the resolved UFOs is perhaps the most important for our purposes and that is that this is an extraordinary aircraft.

By extraordinary aircraft I mean an actual physical vehicle of some kind other than an airplane or an already known and ordinary type of vehicle. An extraordinary device has capabilities or features never seen before. A real alien spaceship would be an extraordinary device. If we had a new type of vehicle with clearly impossible flight characteristics, perhaps Chinese, Russian or American, but truly innovative in paradigm, that would be an extraordinary aircraft. The reason I say this is most important for our purposes is that in the entire history of ufology, in no case has an extraordinary device been found to explain a UFO.

Not even once. Never. No extraordinary device has ever been found, at least not according to our high level of testing. That means rejecting the numerous anecdotes about extraterrestrial debris being found. So we review and eliminate all the likely possibilities: celestial bodies, space debris, terrestrial objects, conventional aircraft and optical illusions, and if we believe that an extraordinary device must be responsible for the observation, then this is the point at which we must have a extraordinary claim, and for which we must provide extraordinary evidence. To prove something that has never really happened before, our standard of proof must be extremely high and that is precisely why it is so important to go through the falsification process.

So now let's look at our evidence through this "raising the bar" filter and falsify everything we can. I want to start with some really bad examples just to show how easy it is to spread a really amazing story when no one puts it to any scrutiny. Where do we find that? On television, of course. People forget that television is for relaxing. Nobody cares if it's okay. It's all about the grades. And so the stories become exaggerated and completely distorted. One of them was the Rendlesham Forest case in 1980. At a US Air Force base in England, service pilots saw some bright lights flashing through the trees in Rendlesham Forest, just outside the limits of the base.

They investigated and found what they described as an aircraft of unknown origin that had landed in the woods. They approached and one of the men studied and played it for 45 minutes, writing down the details in a notebook. But they were ordered never to talk about what happened. And that's why this was called one of the great cover-ups in history. What almost always happens with stories like this that are told over and over again on television shows is that each network wants to present a more compelling story than the last. And so, eyewitness stories are magnified and expanded each time a new network uses them.

If we look at the original documentation, the actual notes from that night, they tell a completely different story. Sure enough, the men followed a flashing light through the trees and, suspecting that some kind of accident had occurred in the woods, called the local police, who, knowing the area, discovered that the men had seen nothing but the blinking light. from the Orfordness lighthouse about 6 miles away and did not investigate further. A colonel from the base accompanied the men with an audio recorder and recorded the following: - I just saw a light there. - Wait a minute, calm down.

Where? - Right in that position, right in front of us. Among the trees, there it is again. Look where my flashlight is pointing. There is. - Yes, I see it too. What is it? - We don't know, sir. - It's a strange little red light. - Each headlight has its own unique interval between flashes. This way, boaters can identify which lighthouse they see. The Orfordness Lighthouse, which sadly no longer exists, shone with an interval of exactly 5 seconds. Let's listen to that audio again, but with a beep every 5 seconds. - I just saw a light there. - Wait a minute, calm down.

Where? - Right in that position, right in front of us. Among the trees There it is again. Look where my flashlight is pointing. There is. - Yes, I see it too. What is it? -What about the guy who said he examined the device and wrote down the details in his notebook in the woods? That only became part of history in 1996, 16 years after the events. He had already given interviews on television programsin 1994 and had never mentioned anything about a device. And it wasn't until a television show in 2003 that she first talked about a notebook. When this happened in 1980, she told an Air Force interviewer that they had followed a flashing light but couldn't get close to it.

And that was it. And then every time there was a new TV show about this story, part of it was expanded and more and more elements of the story were invented. Go back to the original reports and it is documented that nothing interesting happened. There is no evidence that the events added by the television shows ever happened. So Rendlesham Forest does not meet our standard of evidence. There is another story that shows the importance of looking back at the original stories. This is from Zimbabwe in 1994. In a rural school in Africa, 62 children reported that a flying saucer descended and landed in a field next to their playground, and that little people dressed in black came out and gave everyone a message. telepathically telling them to improve.

I had to take care of the Earth. The 62 children drew pictures of the device and told the story of what happened. His stories and drawings were all consistent. A prominent Harvard professor interviewed them and described their story as absolutely authentic. Furthermore, they were said to be poor African children who had never seen science fiction or pop culture before, and would not have known anything about UFOs or flying saucers. It is presented as one of the most compelling cases of evidence of extraterrestrial visitation. The problem is that we have no original accounts of what may have happened there, if anything.

To begin with, these were not poor African children from some village. The school was one of the most expensive private schools in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, 15 minutes away. They were rich kids, mainly South African and British, who had HBO at home, went to the

movie

s and watched television. And what they had seen in the last few days was nothing more than exaggerations about UFOs. A huge fireball had erupted over Africa overnight, and we later learned it was the return of the Zenit-2 rocket from the launch of the Russian Cosmos 2290 satellite. Radio and television stations were flooded with calls for photographs and the best stories about UFOs.

The UFO Afrinews editor heard about the children's story and went to the school. He divided them into groups and conducted group storytelling sessions. They made and shared their drawings together. This is the exact opposite of how witnesses should be interviewed, the most crucial step of which is to separate them completely and as soon as possible. Because now, because they had influenced each other, their stories were hopelessly tainted, and therefore, of course, they all looked alike. But the most destructive influence came from the Harvard professor two months later. It was John Mack, an author who strongly believed in alien abduction.

In fact, Harvard was investigating him at the time for telling people who wondered if they had been abducted by aliens that it had actually happened to them. His entire modus operandi consisted of convincing people that they had been visited by aliens, to the point of surpassing Harvard's ethical standards. That is not an impartial observer. It is no longer possible to know what was really going on in that school at the time because of the sloppy way witness reports were handled. We know that 62 children said they had seen something, but what they originally said was quickly lost and the vast majority of the children present, around 200 others, said they had seen nothing at all.

We're looking for extremely strong evidence, but these two stories only provide wildly tainted anecdotes. Maybe we can find something better in official government reports. Perhaps the most disturbing story of all the government UFO reports is the one you may have heard about UFOs being able to thwart American nuclear missiles. If there was anything that warranted further official investigation, it would be that, right? Here, Congressman Mike Gallagher questions the US Navy's UAP task force during a congressional hearing in May 2022. - UAP has also been reported to be observed interacting with and flying over sensitive military installations , especially, but not only at the sites, but also at some facilities that house our strategic nuclear weapons.

One such incident is said to have occurred at Malmstrom Air Force Base, where 10 of our nuclear ICBMs were disabled. At the same time, a bright red sphere could be seen in the sky. I'm not going to comment on the accuracy of this. I'm just asking if you're aware of this and if you have any comments on the accuracy of that story. - Let me pass that on to Mr. Bray, you have been looking at UAPs for the last three years. - This data cannot be found in the UAP working group reports. - Okay, but are you aware of the report or if the data is available anywhere? - I've heard stories.

I have not seen the official data on this. - Well, yes, because they have been available to the public for a long time. The event Gallagher refers to dates back to 1967, more than half a century ago, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, home of the 341st Minuteman ICBM Strategic Missile Wing. The only reason anyone knows about this is this book "Faded Giant", written in 2005 with UFO author Robert Salas. He wrote at least three books about UFOs and was one of the responsible officers on post that day in 1967. To find out more about this, I called a friend. - My name is Hal Bidlack, I am a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force.

In my career, my first appointment was as a finger-on-the-button guy, ICBM launch officer. I eventually earned a PhD and taught at the Air Force Academy for much of my career. - Are there many rocketeers? - It is a relatively small and very close-knit military community. - Have you ever heard anything about this story? - No, and that really makes me suspicious. Like I said, it's a small, close-knit group and sometimes strange things happen and sometimes things go wrong with the rockets, and we know it. But the fact that I've never heard anything about this story is also reason to suspect that it comes from an unreliable source. - Many people have tried to find out what was really going on here, even filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

In 2001, the Air Force issued an 84-page response. Much of this consisted of reports from Boeing engineers, who built the Minuteman, and these engineers were brought in to figure out what went wrong. Apparently, an entire group of 10 rockets had been restarted that day. The report was mainly about the power supply of these launch facilities. Where does the electricity for these launch facilities come from? - Like any homeowner, you are connected to the grid, which is the main source of energy. There are also backups, such as batteries and also diesel generators, in case the power fails or is out of tolerance. - According to this now declassified 1967 report from Malmstrom Air Force Base, Fergus Electric was the company responsible for commercial power.

It says a 7.2 kilovolt transformer shorted the line to the Echo 3 site at 2:50 p.m. dated March 16, 1967. This transformer is located on a farm about two miles south of the Winifred substation. Automatic reclosing switches at the Winifred substation were opened and closed manually after a transformer was replaced earlier in the day. That caused the brine cooler issue on Echo 1. Echo sites 3, 5, 6, 9, and 10 were put into standby mode. Site Echo 1 was put into operation on DC power. Then it is mentioned that the same thing happened at sites 7 and 8. But do you think this makes sense? - Absolute. ICBM sites are, by design, in very rural and remote areas, and depend on the local power grid.

They are also designed to protect themselves. So if a power problem occurred, they would disconnect, start their own power source, and wait for the external power to stabilize again. -Could a power outage like this cause the rockets to restart themselves? - It certainly wouldn't be every day, but you already found out. -So if all that happened was a surge of electricity from a blown transformer, causing the missiles to restart normally, how long were they down? The report states that the precise times could not be determined, but the approximate time between 10 and 40 seconds that the missiles were out of service could be determined. - It seems reasonable to me. - In your experience, would an incident like the one we are talking about have been so insignificant that you would not have known about it? - At that time it would be quite notable, because it was not often that something abnormal happened.

The missiles are approximately 99.9% reliable under alert conditions. It surely would have been known at the time, but it would not have been reported as a shocking event over the years. -In his books, Salas blames the restart of the rockets not on a power outage, but on UFOs, the glowing red spheres that Congressman Gallagher asked about. Well, the Air Force realized that. They discovered, and I quote: "Rumors about unidentified flying objects around the Echo group area during the sortie were debunked. A mobile team, which had checked all of the November group's launch facilities, on the morning of March 16, 1967 , was questioned and confirmed that no unusual activity was observed." Now comes what really happened.

That power outage caused 10 rockets to restart themselves. They were out for a total of 10 to 40 seconds. About eight days later, in the town of Belt, Montana, someone reported a UFO sighting to a local newspaper. There was no logical reason to conclude that one had anything to do with the other. 38 years later, Salas writes a book about what he thinks he remembers and is certain that the UFO and the rocket restart occurred on the same day and in the same place. The records show that he was wrong. I think you are honestly wrong. 38 years is a long time; but still he is wrong.

And now we have something of a conspiracy theory community that thinks there's no way he could have been wrong and that's why the Air Force has to hide the truth, a truth that he exposed in his book. Colonel Bidlack, you and Salas worked in an area that dealt with many classified events. - Sure. -If the Air Force classified and hid something, do you think you would be free to write about it and reveal it? - No I can not. If you did, you could get into serious trouble with the Uniform Code of Military Justice. - Posting about classified events is no laughing matter.

Mark Owen was the pseudonym of one of the Navy SEALs who captured Bin Laden and wrote a book about it in 2012 called "No Easy Day." To publish the book quickly, he and his editor decided not to send it to the Department of Defense for review. Owen was never charged with any crime, but he was forced to turn over the $6.8 million in royalties he earned to the government. Tom Clancy, author of the Jack Ryan novels, was famously questioned by the FBI after the publication of his book "The Hunt for Red October." He apparently revealed classified information, but showed them all the legal sources he had relied on.

So they couldn't do anything to him. Now, he (Salas) continued to write freely about it. He wrote about it in two more books. He talked about it on podcasts and talked about it at UFO conferences. What do you conclude from that? - Well, the Air Force doesn't care, which strongly suggests it's fiction. And as we know, fiction is not classified. - So, the only proof that UFOs can disable our nuclear missiles are the memories of a man from 38 years ago that contradict everything recorded. It couldn't be more anecdotal. The claim that UFOs can disable nuclear arsenals does not meet any reasonable standard of proof.

Now let's talk about the official government UFO reports. We have one from a US president. It doesn't get any more official than that. You may have heard that President Jimmy Carter once saw a UFO in the 1960s, before he became president. It's a story he told the public several times, but it wasn't until the advent of podcasts with their wide reach that we were able to solve the case. The 'Skeptics Guide to the Universe' podcast played an important role here. To tell the story of what happened, we begin with a trip to Plains, Georgia, to the private residence of President Jimmy Carter. - Hello, I'm Josh Carter, welcome to Plains.

I am President Carter's grandson and we are sitting in his office right now. -How did we get President Carter to appear on the Skeptics Guide podcast? - Jay asked a question at the end of each episode that, to engage the audience, could be about any topic. And one of the questions he asked was: - Name the former world leader whomocked believers in UFOs, but then became a believer after seeing one? Think and try to be the first to give a correct answer. Good luck to you all. - And I was like, "Man, I know exactly who he's talking about." So I emailed Skeptics' Guide. -We received an email from someone claiming to be President Jimmy Carter's grandson.

I must say he was a little skeptical. - So Steve emailed me back and said, "Okay, we believe your story and what you said, but do you have any proof? What proof can you give us that you are Jimmy Carter's grandson?" I sent him the photo of my wedding with me, my wife and my grandparents by my side. Pretty definitive proof that I am who I say I am. -So I invited Josh on the show to tell us the story of President Carter's UFO sighting. - And I said, "Well, I can go, but wouldn't you rather talk to my grandfather in person?" And he: "Yes, I'm sorry, I prefer to talk to your grandfather than to you.

With all due respect." So I called my grandfather and asked him if he wanted to be in the Skeptics' Guide and he said, "Sure." In 2007, on episode 105 of our podcast, we had President Jimmy Carter as a guest and he told us. the story of him. - In those days I was a district governor of 56 Lions Clubs and I had to visit each of them during my year of service. And one night I was in a small town in southern Georgia, right outside the school, waiting for the sacrament and my life. And all of us, there were 26 of us, if I remember correctly, we all saw a very bright light in the western sky, bright enough to catch our attention, much brighter than a star that was coming closer and closer.

And then it seemed to stop near us. The color changed from white to blue and then to red. And we were all stunned by what we saw. And the light, that's all we could see, not a solid thing, then the light slowly disappeared. the address where it came from. I have a scientific education and I never believed that there were aliens in a spaceship or anything like that, but… It was an unidentified flying object. Obviously unidentified. It flew and was an object. And that is the limit of my experiences with so-called UFOs. - That was his story and it remained that way for several years. -But there's also that Georgia Tech professor, Jere Justus. -As a Georgian by birth, I have always been interested in the history of Georgia and one day I was reading Don Rhodes' book, "Myths and Legends of Georgia." It tells the story of Carter's UFO with a replica of his UFO report.

When I read the details of that description, I thought, "That sounds exactly like someone describing seeing a cloud of barium release." When I started college, I needed some support and I got a job as a research assistant on an Air Force project and one of the cases was about missile launches from Eglin Air Force Base. - What did these missiles do? - The rockets that discharged the barium carried with them a canister, let's say, of barium product and discharged it at a certain height in the atmosphere. At that height it was illuminated by the sun, but it was dark on the Earth's surface. so that good images could be obtained of this bright release of the barium material. - So the barium was illuminated by the sun and you saw it against a dark sky? - That's right. - Then one day, out of the blue, I received an email from this Jere Justus.

He's a professor at Georgia Tech and he emails me saying, "Hi, I think I have the explanation for your grandfather's UFO story." - Sunlight would have been strong enough to ionize some of the barium and the neutral barium would turn blue-green. The ionized barium would appear somewhat reddish and would spread along the field lines of Earth's magnetic field. This was part of studies to determine the characteristics of the Earth's magnetic field at that altitude. - The Air Force absolutely launched those sounding rockets at the time and continues to do so today for all sorts of reasons.

They contained all kinds of different elements that they released into the atmosphere, for example to test the reflectivity of radio waves, as well as other aspects of military operations. Therefore, it is not unusual or strange for someone to have seen such a cloud in the sky. - Because it starts as a small point of light that shines and expands until it becomes a giant sphere that turns red or blue depending on how the sun hits it and how the barium ionizes and diffuses. And I thought, "That sounds exactly like the story I heard my whole life about my grandfather's UFO." - Did you convey that to him?

And what did the president think? -He loved it. I'm glad I finally had an answer and seeing him go from unidentified to identified made him very happy. To find out what it was. Because when my grandfather told the story, many people thought that he had seen Venus. He grew up looking at the sky, became interested in astronomy and became a Navy officer. He knew what Venus was like and it offended him that people thought he didn't know what Venus was. - Professor Justus found the exact launch on the correct day and time when President Carter was at the Lions Club and saw that Carter's estimate of direction and altitude was almost completely correct. -I sent my initial findings to the Carter Center and learned from them that they had passed them on to President Carter for verification and he confirmed that it was plausible that this was indeed what he had seen.

And much to the president's delight, it turned out that his UFO was a rather exotic piece of airborne debris: an artificial barium cloud. Well, the UFO stories that have received the most attention in recent years have been the US Navy videos. First there were three called Gimbal, Go Fast and Nimitz, or also the Tic Tac video. These videos come from the camera screens of the F-18 fighter jets that flew there. Many people now believe that what is shown in these videos comes from an extraordinary device that performs movements that are not feasible with current capabilities. And if you don't understand the meaning of all the numbers and other data that appear on the screens, you could easily have the same impression.

So I wanted to talk to someone who knows all of that on screens and has an even deeper understanding of all of that in those videos. Now it turns out that a friend of mine, Mick West, is one of those guys. Since these videos were released, Mick has repeatedly appeared on television and online around the world to explain what was shown. Before becoming the leading UFO video analyst, Mick made 3D physics simulations for video games. He also designed proprietary software called Sitrec that can combine data from many different sources to reconstruct what videos like this show, a reconstruction that is geospatially accurate. - Sitrec is a tool I developed, it's called Situation Recreation Tool.

The idea is that we take a video of a UFO like this one here and create our own version through a full 3D simulation that is mathematically correct. - So what we have here is the original video along with your 3D reworking? - Heartbeats. As you can see, it looks pretty similar in terms of the way the cloud moves and this little object here moves the same way. I can scroll through the video and we can watch it progress. Here you can see the moving plane that is recording the video and there is the trajectory of the object, the possible trajectory of the object. -And how do you know where the plane was?

How do you know where the object was? Where did you get all this data? - Well, for the plane below, all the data on this screen comes here. We know the tilt angle by using motion capture techniques to extract the angle here. We know where the camera is pointing, 53 degrees left, 2 degrees down. And we can use that to create these lines of sight. And then we see the little plane flying here, we know what its purpose is and what direction it's going. So we know that the other object is somewhere in all of these lines of sight.

But we don't know how far away it is. So I let the user experiment with this kind of thing and with this little slider here we can set how far away the actual theoretical object is. - Let's start with the video of Marina Gimbal. - Alright. - What about this? - This is Gimbal's video. It looks like some kind of saucer-shaped plane flying above the clouds. We look in the infrared. And they claim that it is a true flying saucer that flies without any visible means of propulsion. And it's especially interesting because towards the end of the video it does this little rotation here. which is something a normal airplane can't do.

So what do you think is really going on here? - There are two options. It could be something close to the plane with a strange way of moving. Like here, it could take this weird turn. Or it could be something further away that follows a straight path. And I think the most likely thing for this video is that we're looking at something that's actually quite far away and it could be another plane moving in a straight line and what we're looking at is the back of that plane. - It doesn't look like a plane that's very far away. - No, I think what we're really looking at is not the shape of the device itself, but the shape of the infrared glow of this object, like if you took a flashlight like this and pointed it at the camera, it gets a glow around it with a certain way and because of the way the camera is mounted on this jet, when it goes over a certain area, it actually has to do this rotation and it has to do it because of the gimbal system, which coincidentally the name of the video is the Navy's official name of the video, the Gimbal Video. - Is there something on the screen that tells you the angle of the gimbal? - Nothing tells you the gimbal angle, but what you do get is the azimuth angle and this other angle here is the climb angle.

And you can use it to calculate how big the gimbal angle really needs to be. - I understand. - So if you move this here, you can see that as you move through a certain area, - you have to rotate to stay focused in a certain direction. - That's a really interesting problem because all we have is a video, just the image of what the plane's cameras saw. On a radar screen we could have seen the distance of the object and also how it was moving. But that data doesn't exist and that's why analysts like Mick have to take a long detour and reverse engineer the entire situation. - I think the most likely explanation is that it is another military plane, about 30 or 40 km away, flying away from us and we are just looking at its exhaust gases, its jet engines that are creating that glow. - There you go.

It's probably nothing unusual. - Okay, now let's take a look at the Go Fast video. - This is the video of Go Fast. Something seems to move very quickly here, hence the name Go Fast. We see this little white dot and it looks like it's running across the surface of the ocean. At the beginning of the video, you see them trying to lock on to it, which they eventually do, and now the camera gondola itself is following it. So what's being said here is that it's something with no visible propulsion, it's cold, it looks white, which in this mode means cold, and it moves very, very fast.

So people think that people get really excited about this. - Yes, it also seems very exciting. How can this not move quickly? - Well, the interesting thing about this video is that we can get a lot of information on the screen. Here we have a range of 4.3 nautical miles, which is the distance from the camera to the object. And we look down at a 27 degree angle and we know the altitude of this plane, 25,000 feet. So we can take this angle here and this distance, we can multiply 4.3 times the sine of 27° and find how far it is below the plane.

Simple high school trigonometry. It is therefore about 3.4 km lower. Subtract that from the 25,000 feet (7.6 km) and you get 4.2 km. It then flies 4.2 km above the ocean. So it's not right above the ocean. It is halfway between the plane recording the video and the surface of the sea, which means it is actually moving very slowly. - I've heard people who should be aware of these things, pilots, military pilots, people in government hearings, say, "No, this video shows something happening very quickly." - It seems like something is moving fast. and the illusion is very convincing. Something that is moving quickly far away looks the same as something that is moving slowly nearby.

But you have to stick to trigonometry, you have to take into account the numbers and they just don't do that. If you do the math, you'll find the same result as me. - But even the pilots thought this was something extraordinary. - Can pilots make mistakes in this? Well, I asked another friend, do you remember we saw it before? Jason Bush, who happens to be an air traffic controller. Do pilots occasionally make mistakes like us? - Definitely. They make big and small mistakes every day. - What common mistakes do pilots sometimes make? - Sometimes you misread the height.

Sometimes you see on the news that a pilot tries to land at the wrong airport. This happens in both civil and military aviation. - Are you actually saying that pilots are people? - Pilots are definitely human. - HeThe mistake that so many people make with this video is due to one of the most common optical illusions. It's called motion parallax illusion. Mick recorded this short video in his garden to prove it. He hung this ping pong ball on a tree and then walked past it with his camera. When you zoom in, it looks like the ball is moving at high speed, but it is not moving at all.

Only you move. That's the illusion of motion parallax. That's why the object appears to move over the sea in the Go Fast video. And that's why the distant plane appears to move relative to the clouds in Gimbal's video. So I was wondering if pilots were trained in this common optical illusion. To find out, I flew with another friend, Chris Freeze, a very experienced flight instructor. - I'm on the short list. I have over 3,000 hours of teaching under my belt, I have been a flight instructor for about 15 years. - Chris knows what the pilots are taught and what they are not. - Do pilots know what the motion parallax illusion is? - Probably not with that name.

I mean flight instructors are trained with the idea of ​​parallax when it comes to the cockpit. But when it comes to exercise, I never heard anything about it during my training. - It's an everyday thing that can fool anyone. Do pilots make the same mistakes as other people? - Absolute. Neither pilots nor controllers are perfect. - Pilots are not sky gods, but ordinary people. Also, they only put the pants on one leg at a time. - What makes pilots, especially military ones, better observers than others? - I want to say that they have unique equipment that you will not find on the civilian market.

They have faster planes than the 182 we flew here. But at the end of the day, they're just people flying airplanes. - One of the main conjectures about the nature of what appears in the Go Fast video is, believe it or not, a simple floating weather balloon. It could even be a Mylar party balloon. What you see in the video is exactly what the balloons look like on that type of camera. - I once flew with a student who swore he saw a drone at 4000 feet. It could have been a Mylar balloon. I think it was probably a Mylar balloon considering the altitude and everything, and especially where it was, I mean Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. - I understand that when you are in mid-flight, you are not necessarily going to do Mick's calculations to see how high that point is.

But these are military pilots. Aren't professionals trained to know how far away a point is? - Air traffic controllers are no better at estimating the size or speed of an object. Something could be moving slowly nearby and completely coincide with something moving quickly far away. You have no idea what the speed is unless you know how far it is from you. - Is a trained pilot better than a layman at estimating the size, speed and distance of a point? - No. - Anyway, everything indicates that this thing was nothing more exotic than a balloon. Okay, now let's take a look at Nimitz's video. - The Nimitz video was shot in 2004.

It again shows a small lump in the distance. And the interesting thing about this video is that that little lump seems to make sudden movements from time to time. And there are people who claim that these movements are not consistent with a human device. It's accelerating too fast, so the G-forces would be too high for a human pilot. They claim that he makes sudden movements that are impossible. - Wow. He just flew off the screen at a billion miles an hour. - Yes... It really seems to move. It looks like the device is actually moving. Especially those few moves, right?

Here you can see how it descends from the center to the outside. It seems to hang somewhere in between. And then suddenly it disappears. - Yes. It's in the video anyway. How is that possible? - If you go back and analyze it in depth, you can see that every time he makes a movement, it corresponds to a certain camera movement. We can see the person recording the video switching between modes, zoom levels and camera types throughout the video. And every time that happens, the camera loses its purpose. - Is there something on the screen that allows us to read the zoom level or the camera type? - Here you see it.

It says "NAR", in the corner it says "1X zoom". This combination tells you the zoom level. This is the optical path that is being used, to a limited extent at the moment, and this is the digital zoom. Up here it says "GO" and at certain points in the video it says "TV", here it says "TV". When it switches between TV and IR, if you look at this, could you see that little movement at the beginning? - Yes. - When switching from one camera mode to another, you lose your fixation on the object and continue moving briefly as you did just before.

Here we see the mode change. He makes a small lateral movement. The same thing happens here. Another change of mode, another small lateral movement. What's interesting is when you switch between narrow and wide viewing angles. Here we're at a narrow angle of view, which means we're really zoomed in and we're going to switch to a medium or wide angle of view. Here we do that and see that the object jumps. The reason for this jump is a bit similar to what happens under a microscope. When you look through a microscope and switch from one magnification to another, it appears as if the entire image is moving. - Yes, because the lens moves away. - Yes, the lens, you switch from one lens to another and that's what's happening here.

This object does not move sideways. All that happens is that an optical path rotates into position. This comes down to an internal change in the camera, a small prism rotates or a small mirror rotates. Now, here at the end of the video, what people are talking about the most is happening right here. We have a medium viewing angle, but it will change to a narrow viewing angle, which means it will widen it. And that happens here. So we change the mode, while this indicator is delayed a little bit, and when the camera is active again, the object is just outside the lines and it zooms in, it tries to come back in, it's still outside, it zooms in, and it zooms out here for some reason, and now he lost it, it's gone.

It's off screen. Trying to get it back. Switch to 2X zoom at that point. So this jump here is not a real movement. - Oh... - This is basically changing from one zoom level to another, especially this one. And then the object actually goes out of frame. - Can we look at this with Sitrec and see what that object actually does? - Certainly. So here we see the plane passing by. Just fly in a straight line and look at something in the distance, which is this yellow line that's there in the distance. And we know it has to be somewhere on these sight lines because we know those angle lines.

So a good guess for where it might be, if we look at it from above, is that it's very far away and it's flying a little to the left. - I mean, it looks like something that moves, it seems to move the same amount, a similar distance in a similar time as the plane you're filming. - Yes, you can tell by the fact that these lines are about the same length that it is moving at about the same speed as the plane, suggesting that it is probably a different plane. - But if you look closely, it looks like a strange Tic Tac bump (sweet).

It doesn't look like a plane. And this is the reason. - Here you see some thermal camera images of some jets and you can make out the shape of the jet a little. But when the cameras are in a certain state, a little earlier, the only thing you see is this bulge. Then you can no longer see the shape of the plane because the heat from the engine causes this glow that hides the shape of the plane. I think that's what we see in Gimbal's video. - The other thing I wanted to ask you about is this video of the green pyramid where it appears to be giant green pyramid-shaped spaceships flying in the sky over Navy ships.

What is happening there? - Well, this was a really interesting video. It looks like this video was filmed with night vision. Everything seems green. It's not really green. And it looks like there's some kind of green triangle flying around, which is very interesting. - I also believe it. - And it was filmed by a sailor on a Navy ship. We know it's official and we know it has been reviewed by the UAP working group. and they tried to find out what he was. Here we see some more. We see some more triangles and then there are some below and they don't move.

They are in a very specific configuration. And they stated that it would be a lot of drones in the sky. They said they were drones. That was a drone, here's another one, all triangular drones. - Which would be? - The chance of all of these drones being exactly the same size, shape and orientation is ridiculously small. So I thought, you know, maybe it's just lights and what we're seeing here is the camera aperture causing this effect. - Are there night cameras with that type of aperture? - The interesting thing is that some night cameras have that type of aperture.

Someone at Metabunk looked at their night camera and it had this triangular aperture. This is Jesse's camera, it's a night camera. As you can see, the camera aperture is triangular. And you can see that it is a real night camera. Third generation. - Huh. -And this is the image that he recorded with that night camera. - It looks exactly the same. - It looks exactly the same. We see twinkling lights, which are just stars. And if a plane passed by and its lights flashed, we would see exactly the same thing. And what Jesse does now is adjust the focus a little bit.

And if you blur a little, anything in the image that is a bright point of light will look like green triangles. - So the same thing, you have a kind of scattered noise and all the stars are green triangles. - Looks identical to the Navy video. As the video begins, we see several lights and someone noticed that they were in a specific configuration. We see a very bright light here, also two more here and there. And someone discovered that it is actually Jupiter. And from there you can discover what these other stars are. And it turns out that almost every light in the entire video, except the one that moves and blinks, is a star or a planet.

If we know where Jupiter and the other stars are, we can in principle plot their path across the sky. We can see all those other stars. The one briefly illuminated here is Rasalhague. And we continue forward. Now we see it... these two stars pass by. They are the two faint things we see when it gets fully zoomed in. That's the star Okab. We only see them pass. - Check. Just an ordinary airplane with ordinary flashing navigation lights that we can see passing in front of the stars we see in the sky every night, but some well-meaning guy on a Navy ship is filming it with a night camera that is a bit out of place.

We concentrate and suddenly we see fleets of Chinese drones and a threat to national security or aliens flying over giant green pyramids. That's what happens with all that cultural hysteria. Everything is aliens or everything is threats to Chinese or Russian national security. We tend to completely forget about that standard of quality of evidence. And we're starting to let in garbage from what Mick calls the low information zone. - The low information zone is where UFOs exist. It is the area or distance in which something is difficult to distinguish. If you could get a little closer, if you could get a little closer to the UFO, you could see what it was.

UFOs only exist because they are in the low information zone. - If there was enough information, they would have been identified. Bigfoot is also in the low information zone. - Bigfoot is certainly in the low information zone. Anything that is naturally blurry, I would say, is an example of something from the low information zone. - We must continue to set the bar high and stop giving credibility to something that comes from the low information zone, which by definition does not meet any standard of evidence. And that's why we also need to find something smarter than one of the most popular and favorite generic explanations for UFO sightings: "a secret military plane." This is a special reason that bothers me.

Saying that a UFO that appears to exhibit incredible flight characteristics could be a secret military aircraft is something my skeptical friends do, and it's something my ufologist friends do, and they are both equally wrong. That's a shit, shit, shit statement, but give me a chance to explain. If I say, "Hey, that looks like a car," it's because we know what a car looks like, it has wheels and windows, it's a certain size, and I can make all of that work. What I saw and a car exhibits those characteristics. Now imagine a UFO sighting, something that clearly doesn't behave like an airplane or a balloon or anything familiar.

He maneuvers incredibly fast, he's too big, flames come out of him. What could it be that tells us clearly that it is not an airplane and we believe that it must be an extraordinary airplane? So how could we compare it to a secret military plane? Let's review what the characteristics of a secret military plane are. because they already have at least two. The first is where they are located. As long as they are secret, they will never be where the general public can see them, they will never reach a major population center. Secondly, it's about how they move and look.

Now we don't know whatSecret plane the military might be testing, but we have a century of history of everything every government has flown. Every aircraft that was ever classified, without exception, has flight capabilities on par with other aircraft. And that includes the latest manned and unmanned systems that have entered service. Some were a little faster, some were hard to see, some had advanced electronics. None really looked different from any other aircraft. They didn't have to do it. We've known how to fly for quite some time. Has any government you know ever tested an airplane with truly radical capabilities? - No, I don't know of any country that has ever tested an airplane that radically deviates from any aviation functionality we've ever heard of. - And that's all we know about the secret devices.

We know two things, that they never appear in plain sight where someone could have taken video of them with an iPhone, and that they look and act virtually the same as any other aircraft, which tells us that they share absolutely no properties with a UFO. , which would make us say, "Wow, that can't be a plane." If we are to be consistent in our logic, if we are not at the test site in Nevada and we see something in the sky that is clearly not a plane, then we can be sure of one thing and that is that it is almost certainly not a military plane. secret.

Instead, look at the much more likely explanations, which always turn out to be UFOs, such as celestial bodies or debris in the sky. And this is a really urgent issue because among the people who suspect advanced enemy drones are members of Congress. In May 2022, a subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives held an open hearing on the UFO phenomenon. Scott Bray, who we saw earlier, was the deputy director of the Office of Naval Intelligence and he described the type of expertise they selected to be part of the UAP task force. - Additionally, subject matter experts from various fields, including physics, optics, metallurgy, and meteorology, to name a few, were brought in to expand our knowledge in areas where we may not have our own expertise.

In summary, we have attempted a collaborative approach to better understand the phenomenon. -Now I know he said there were others too, but from what he listed, it seems like they already had an ID in mind. It seems that he has already decided that they are extraordinary devices. People such as physicists and metallurgists are qualified to analyze an existing physical object. And that requires a very different skill than trying to identify a pothole in the low-information zone. - I also think having a metallurgist on the team is a good idea if you have some metal to study.

Many of these monsters being talked about have very questionable origins. Some simply arrived anonymously with strange letters sent to radio shows 20 years ago. - Remember, every UFO case in history that was solved, not a single case, not a single one, the explanation turned out to be an extraordinary device. Therefore, the UAP working group appears to be overloaded with people whose expertise is less likely to be needed. Now let's go back to the explanation of the UFOs that were finally identified. And since they will also explain most future UFOs, let's introduce some experts who might be more successful.

The most common explanation for solved UFO cases is misidentification of celestial objects. Now the task force is nearby with their meteorologist, but what they really need is an astronomer. - The people who spend the most time looking at the night sky, astronomers, never report UFOs. And that's usually due to the fact that we know what we're looking at. - We understand that a strange light in the sky could be a comet or a satellite. - And also what happens in our cameras, like all kinds of camera drift and lens flare. - It could be an elf in the atmosphere.

There are already a number of things that astronomers will be able to rule out for the government. - Explanation number 2 for solved UFO cases is airborne garbage. Whenever something like this could be proven to be the cause of a UFO, the people who found it were UFO skeptics, people who dedicated their lives to writing books and debunking UFO cases. Now, I know this may sound bad to some of you, like you're not very impartial, but you would be the only task force members with actual experience in this work, and they had been doing it in many cases for decades.

Did Scott Bray say he wanted an all-hands-on-deck approach? Even if you don't particularly like UFO skeptics, his perspective belongs in any truly objective working group. Explanation number 3 for solved UFO cases is misidentification of lights or objects on the ground. I think that means the task force's top expert is an experienced accident investigator, someone from the NTSB. These are the leading experts on the kinds of things that confuse or mislead pilots. They are familiar with things like motion parallax and other similar illusions that always fool experienced pilots. They know that kind of thing better than the pilots themselves.

My bet is that the aircraft accident investigator will solve more UFO cases than any other member of the team. Or better yet, do it through crowdsourcing. - In fact, I have a team of people who help me with these matters. I see myself as the manager of a large group of talented people who help me figure these things out. I put it all together and show it to the public, but first and foremost it's a team effort. It is essentially a crowdsourcing feat. - What kind of skills do some of these people have? - Some are good at video analysis.

Others are good at mathematical analysis. Some are just good at recognizing things. For example, if you have people who are kite experts, when they see a kite that I wouldn't recognize, they might say, "Oh, that's that particular type of kite." Or a certain type of airplane, by people who are experts in aviation. Some excel at geolocating things, figuring out where they are, what time of day it is, etc. And some are really good at testing ideas. - Having physicists and metallurgists in the work group seems impressive, but honestly, that is the wrong skill set for this type of work.

We want experts with skills that give them a high chance of success, not almost zero. But now is the time to backtrack and take the conversation back to where we started. We talked about the problems of space travel. We talked about the serious problems we have with the kind of UFO evidence that many people believe. Now let's talk about where the extraordinary evidence will almost certainly come from, because here we return to the good news. What is the most likely route by which we will eventually make contact with another civilization? How will they reach us? We don't know, of course, but we can make some smart guesses based on the only information we have: ourselves.

How do we try to make contact? Because someone else with similar goals as us could be trying the same things. True interstellar travel is a problem for which there really is no practical solution. There we found a real obstacle. You cannot go faster than the speed of light. So we did the next best thing: we sent unmanned spacecraft into deep space, Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2. The power requirements are much lower for an unmanned probe, so the chances of success are much higher. One disadvantage is that it is one-way traffic. We cannot give them enough energy to return from their long journey.

So we gave them simple messages about who we are, where we are and how to find us. Since this is much easier, it is reasonable to assume that other civilizations will also try the easier way first. Although not all civilizations try it, some will; so we should probably look for dumb, low-energy probes first. But there is an even simpler way, which goes further and faster: radio communication. We've been deliberately sending high-powered signals about ourselves and toward targets of interest since 1974. Well, we haven't tried very hard. We only tried it a few times, but what we did was far beyond our probes and they did it at the speed of light.

Compared to sending probes, sending directed electromagnetic communications is immensely cheaper and requires only a fraction of the power requirements. You go further and the chances of success are greater. Any civilization that tries to establish contact will probably try it this way and it is the first thing that could reach us. And we listen. So far we have only found one viable candidate. The famous “Wow!” Signal detected in 1977 at the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University. To date, the best explanation is a radio transmission from a point in space in the direction of Sagittarius. How far?

Well, we don't know. It could have come from closer than the moon. It could also have come from the other side of the Milky Way. But we never heard from that address again. But here comes the most exciting part of the “Wow!” sign. That is its transmission frequency. If you want to reach intelligent aliens with a radio signal, there are three things that will determine your choice of frequency. To start, you want a frequency that can pass through an atmosphere with the best reception possibilities. Second, you want a frequency that is in a quiet range with no background noises.

And third, you want a frequency that is universally recognized, such as the frequency of interstellar hydrogen precession, to show the receiver that you understand the science and that it is not random noise. Well guess what? The frequency of "Wow!" The signal met those three criteria. 1.42 gigahertz, a range astronomers call the "waterhole." They call it that because it is a kind of meeting point of nature in the electromagnetic spectrum. It is the obvious place that intelligent interstellar communities would use to establish contact. - Indeed, then I think we should choose the frequency of the watering hole to make contact with another intelligent species.

Because it works a bit like a window in a house. You can't see through the walls of a house, but you can see through the window of a house and that's how that frequency works. It's a window. - An extraterrestrial civilization could also use the water well frequency to send us a signal because that is the frequency we would hear. - Basically we know a lot about how they are most likely to visit us. For any manned extraterrestrial spacecraft that may visit Earth, we first expect visits from low-energy unmanned spacecraft. And for every unmanned spacecraft that gets here, we expect tons and tons of phone calls first.

So far we only have one plausible candidate, but he was very plausible. And think about how incredibly welcoming neighboring Earth seems. Until a few centuries ago, everything on Earth was very far apart. People hadn't heard of most of the other places, much less been able to visit them. And when they did it, it was as often with the sword as with bread. But today we not only have jet planes, but also the Internet, which connects us all live in a real-time community. Anyone can connect and watch and talk to someone on the other side of the planet.

Will we repeat this model with other peoples in the universe? That's a possibility, but most people throughout our history lived and died just a few miles from the town where they were born. Physics tells us that is probably the fate of most intelligent civilizations. We can't violate the laws of physics, but we can leave the light on at the front door and roll out our welcome mat. So keep listening, keep sending, keep waiting and keep watching. If we can do that, then we have a great chance of eventually joining some kind of interstellar community. There are probably friends there that we don't know yet.

Some may be watching us. It could happen 10,000 years from now, or maybe tomorrow. But that data-filled signal can arrive at any time. I'm Brian Dunning. Thanks for watching.