This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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Since ancient times, men have speculated about creatures in the sky.
Modern culture is full of extraterrestrials in fiction and in folklore.
If the testimony of witnesses is true, we are being visited by a variety of strange creatures.
Tall, blond, Scandinavians, perhaps coming in peace?
dangerous and cold-hearted reptilians who might be working to take over our Earth governments, and elfishly tiny gray-skinned creatures who can kidnap people right out of their beds and who like to probe their victims in very uncomfortable places and kill our livestock in quite bizarre fashion, if you believe the testimony.
But what kind of evidence would it take to convince a skeptic?
just how likely is it that we are being visited by creatures from another world?
Aliens from Outer Space, today on Monster Talk.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Hi, welcome to Monster Talk, presented by Skeptic Magazine.
Monster Talk is the show that examines monsters under the bright light we call science.
I’m Blake Smith, and together with my co-hosts, Benjamin Radford, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer, and Dr. Kieran Stolzno, skeptical blogger, linguist, and mystery investigator, we talk about monsters with experts who can help us determine what claims are plausible, which are implausible, and which are virtually impossible.
Today our guest is astronomer and author Dr. Phil Plait.
But first we want to chat about aliens from outer space.
A variety of people are reporting aliens of various types today.
As a skeptic, it’s hard for me to believe anything without evidence.
I mean hard evidence to support the idea that creatures are traveling across space and coming here.
But what I find most surprising about the claims, besides the fact that the aliens can bend the laws of physics, is the way that even though they come from other planets, according to the stories…
Why did they appear to be humanoid?
I mean, evolution shows us that body types could be just about anything.
But for some reason, almost all of these aliens appear as humanoid.
Now, one reason might be that the aliens are in a feedback loop from Hollywood and that we base our cultural aliens on the kinds that we see in movies.
But even so, it’s possible that movies could be providing us with other types.
Well, yeah, but it’s easier for special effects creators in films to make a humanoid creature than – I mean I remember there was a – someone was talking about the original – it was either Doctor Who or Star Trek and someone was complaining about the early series about why is it that all the aliens look more or less like people.
And of course the answer was, well, that’s what’s cheap to do with the makeup.
But it is interesting just looking at the history of aliens because I would argue that the history of aliens in popular mythology shows that the original aliens were much more monstrous, if you will, than the ones we have these days.
You look back at, for example, War of the Worlds and other stories of aliens around that time.
There are aliens that are coming to Earth to threaten us, to destroy us and this and that.
Whereas, of course, over the last, say, 30, 40, 50 years, there’s been this change sort of as you talked about.
So from where we go from a monstrous, evil, threatening alien to sort of a good guy, warm, fuzzy, we bring peace and messages if you don’t do better about the earth and clean up the earth and peace and love and all that.
So I would say that in my opinion, aliens –
certainly began as monsters, they’ve since then become more cuddly and friendly.
You make a good point.
Of course, H.P.
Lovecraft was writing way back in the 30s and 40s, and his stories dealt with aliens that were nothing like human.
In fact, humans were less than significant, and it really kind of demonstrated a level of cosmic horror that was… Did you say the cosmic whore?
No, I said cosmic horror that was not known before.
Oh, that’s okay.
That’s okay.
I just want to make sure we’re on the same topic here.
Anyway, I love Lovecraft, and his aliens were not humanoid at all.
So where do you think our stories of alien abduction came from?
Do you think that they were born of Whitley Strieber’s communion book?
No, no.
I think the earliest ones that were really important culturally were Betty and Barney Hill’s abduction.
Their abduction was the one that really sort of set the stage
for what we think of as modern alien abduction, including memory loss and lost time, that kind of thing.
Well, they sort of introduced it into the popular consciousness.
And, of course, there’s a lot of evidence that the story that they had was influenced, or at least Barney’s story was influenced quite heavily by the Outer Limits television show, back to the idea of aliens on television influencing the way the aliens look in the cultural mythos.
Her story also included a lot of medical examination.
And subsequent alien exams and alien abduction stories began to include things like implants of devices and experiments with flesh being taken, eggs being stolen, sperm being stolen, sexual components, probing.
I don’t know why the alien’s anal probe came in to be part of the story, but I think it may be Travis Walton’s story about his abduction that was the first one to have the anal probe and the sort of horrible violations that I’m familiar with.
That doesn’t mean that’s the first one, but…
I really don’t know why the aliens would have this sort of need because it seems like whatever their medical skills are, the rectum is not the best place to get biological info about a species.
But they seem to want cow butts and to probe humans.
It’s very odd.
And as a skeptic, I would say it’s very implausible.
Well, I think from what I’ve read is that typically the way they rationalize that is by suggesting that the aliens are in fact trying to do some sort of hybridization, that they’re trying to
better understand human physiology perhaps in preparation for injecting their own superior alien sperm into our culture.
So again, it’s the same thing – to my mind, it’s the same issue with crop circles.
I mean why – if aliens are creating these, why would they come all the way across the universe and the galaxy just to make circles and wheat?
I mean they really got nothing better to do.
Oh, it really annoys me.
I mean, why would they come all the way here just to make circles?
They’re pretty.
Okay, yeah, they’re pretty, but I mean, it’s really obvious that this is something that human technology can easily reproduce with boards.
Yeah.
I know.
People walking in a field at night can make crop circles.
It’s really been well-explained, well-documented.
It’s a human hoax that’s turned into something of an art form, and there’s just people out there who don’t understand how simple this is.
But it doesn’t make any sense, and it ties into one of the other problems I have with aliens and the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which actually I find insulting, which is the idea that…
Aliens had to come to Earth and teach people how to do things.
And in Eric Von Daniken’s stories, they come to Earth and they visit us and they give us their technology.
And essentially what they’re teaching us is…
How to stack rocks?
What?
I mean, you know, that doesn’t make any sense.
I mean, they couldn’t teach us anything.
Why stacking rocks?
It’s ridiculous.
Yeah, the rocks they were stacking were very large.
But it’s possible to do with human equipment, ingenuity, and strength and working together.
And it’s insulting to suggest that we needed space aliens to come down here to help show us how to stack rocks.
Ridiculous.
Well, yeah, the whole notion that people and humans aren’t smart enough to be able to pull these things off without extraterrestrial intelligence is just frankly insulting.
In fact, I think –
I think in Karen’s recent piece in The Coral Castle, I think it touches on that as well.
Yes, it does.
That’s one of the theories, that Coral Castle was created by aliens or that Ed Leedskelman was somehow assisted by aliens.
But I don’t know if it’s an insult so much as just a way of explaining things that people can’t understand, something they resort to.
Yeah, it’s that classic component, the thing we keep running into, the argument from ignorance.
It just keeps coming up again and again.
In this case, aliens help build Coral Castle, or aliens are responsible for building crop circles, or aliens are responsible for the pyramids, or aliens are responsible for our rise from primitive man to our current intelligence.
or lack thereof, but whatever.
I think if you’re going to claim aliens, you need to have proof, and there just isn’t any.
One of the things that keeps coming up that I see in television, especially like Linda Moulton Howell’s
is aliens being responsible for cattle mutilations and animal mutilations.
And in these stories, they talk about animals who have their soft parts removed, their rectums are cored out, as they say, their lips removed, their tongues removed, just their eyes with laser precision.
But I happened to run into a neighbor who just came back from a deer hunt.
And he had a very strange experience to report.
But he’s not a guy who knows anything about aliens or that sort of mythology or phenomena, if it is a phenomena.
But what he reported to me was really, really interesting.
He had shot a small deer and wanted to stick around and see if he could get something larger.
So he hung up the deer and field dressed it and put it under a tree and was going to come back within a couple hours to take it back up to the hunting lodge and get it set up so it could be processed.
So they left it hanging and went hunting.
And when they came back, he and his friend,
found the deer completely surrounded by turkey vultures.
And the turkey vultures, as he put it, had totally messed up the deer.
They had eaten its rectum.
That’s one of the first things he pointed out.
They had eaten out its eyes.
They had eaten out the deer’s tongue.
They had eaten the deer’s lips.
Everything that was soft and available, they had torn it away with their sharp mouths and left just a cored out hole.
They got to the bucket of the offal and ate that too.
But the important thing is he was there and saw it.
He didn’t just leave the deer and come back and all the parts were missing when he got back, which would have been weird.
But anyway, it seems to me that that was a pretty good explanation for
for what happens with cattle mutilation.
Birds come in and they take these parts, or predators or coyotes or other animals or creatures come in, mundane things, things from Earth, not aliens with lasers.
It’s just animals here on Earth who normally eat these things come along and take these parts.
I can certainly understand, though, people living in cities from the big smoke who haven’t encountered these sorts of things
events before not being able to understand how they come about.
I don’t think it’s a very good alternative explanation but for people who haven’t seen that at work it could be a mysterious thing.
Yes, mysterious and disgusting.
A lot of the aspects of alien stories have elements that are disturbing and disgusting.
But the real question is, where’s the evidence?
I mean, they make great stories.
They’re very interesting and creepy and mysterious.
But where’s the evidence?
Monster Talk.
Joining us to talk about aliens and the plausibility of such creatures visiting Earth is astronomer Dr. Phil Plait.
Phil is a noted skeptic, the president of the James Randi Education Foundation, a noted science writer through his Bad Astronomy website, and also the author of the book Death from the Skies, now available in paperback.
Thanks for joining us, Dr. Phil.
In your book, you have an entire chapter about aliens coming to Earth, and you talk about a meteorite with the memorable name ALH84001.
Can you tell our listeners about that meteorite and what it means?
Yeah, this is a meteorite that was found in Allen Hills.
That’s where the ALH comes from in the name, in Antarctica.
And Antarctica is a really good place to look for meteorites because if they’re sitting there on the ice…
They’re easy to spot, this rock sitting out in the middle of a field of ice.
So they find a lot up there, and when they got this one back, they realized it was from Mars.
Now, when this news came out, a lot of people were saying, well, how do we know it’s from Mars?
Well, we know it’s from Mars because we have samples of Mars from earlier probes, and we know what the chemistry of Mars is like.
And when you look at this meteorite, there are little tiny bubbles in it.
And when you check the bubbles themselves, what’s in it?
There’s gas, like atmosphere, inside of these little tiny bubbles.
it matches the chemical ratios that we see on Mars.
So we’re pretty sure these things come from Mars.
And the way this works is there’s an asteroid impact, smacks into the planet, this rock goes flying out into space, it drifts out into space for a while, and then lands into Antarctica or wherever, and it gets picked up.
And when they examine this thing under a microscope…
they found all sorts of interesting stuff.
And they were actually, this was like in 1996, I think it was, when the news came out.
And they had basically four or five reasons that they thought that there was evidence that possibly Mars once had life on it in this rock.
And it depended on, again, chemical ratios.
There was magnetite, which is this magnetic ore. And magnetite can be created abiologically, I suppose you could say.
without life, just chemically, but it also can be excreted to be discreet from bacteria.
And then the last thing they found was this little wormy dude, a little segmented thing, that looks like a bacterium, but it was really, really small, much smaller even than bacteria on Earth.
It was a big uproar and a hubbub and a fuss and a foofaraw and whatever other sort of 200-year-old phrase you can think of.
And it sort of died away because the evidence wasn’t that strong.
Now NASA has released some new stuff saying, hey, maybe we were right all along.
It looks like this magnetite may have been –
indicating that there was life on Mars.
I’ll be honest, I’ve not read the papers yet.
I’m a little bit behind.
I’ve got them sitting on my computer.
I don’t want to comment too much on the new stuff until I actually read the science.
But a lot of people are going ballistic about this, thinking it’s pretty cool.
What kind of life forms are we talking about?
Giant lumbering tripod bug-eyed monsters.
Well, it’s a little rock.
So, you know, they’re not like riding the magic carpet from Mars to here.
So we’re talking fairly primitive bacteria.
But again, you know, this evidence, there’s no smoking gun.
From what I’ve read of the papers, they’re saying, yeah, we can’t exclude life.
It’s not like it’s, you know, there it is in a Petri dish.
But it’s interesting.
Well, given the climate of Mars, what would we expect to see in its inhabitants?
Well, nowadays I’d expect basically nothing.
The atmosphere is only 1% the pressure of Earth.
It’s almost entirely carbon dioxide, which is a relatively inert gas, although trees can breathe it, and we don’t see large-scale vegetation on Mars.
On the other hand, Mars has a lot of water.
It’s in the form of ice.
It’s frozen, but it’s got a lot of it.
They keep finding it closer to the equator than they expected.
They’re basically meteorite impacts that, when they hit the surface, they dig down a little bit when the crater’s excavated.
And there’s an orbiting probe there, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, with a super high-resolution camera.
And these pictures of these craters, some of these craters are fresh.
They’re only a few years old.
And there’s ice all around them.
And they say, yeah, it’s water ice.
We can tell.
So there’s plenty of ice.
on mars or water in the form of ice the question is is there any liquid water because we we don’t think that bacteria can do too well evolving in ice but in water they do pretty well the question is you know is it still there and that’s the question that’s hard to answer without going there with a pickaxe and finding out
From what I’ve heard, there are studies taking place at places like Yellowstone that we can tell a lot from the geothermal activity there and that potentially if life forms existed on other planets, we’d be talking thermophiles or something like that.
Yeah, that’s an interesting direction that this thing has gone.
These so-called extremophiles, bacteria or critters that live in super high temperatures, super cold temperatures, things that would poison us instantly, these black smokers, these vents at the bottom of the ocean that have these tube worms around them, and there’s a tremendous amount of sulfur, and the water is basically well above the boiling point, although there’s so much pressure down there that the water doesn’t actually boil.
And life is there.
And it makes me wonder, did the life evolve first in places that were more habitable and then adapted to those extreme conditions?
Or did they evolve in those extreme conditions?
And there are bacteria that they found in a South African mine two miles underground that live off of rocks that have radioactive decay in it.
And the radioactive decay creates chemicals that these bacteria live off of.
So these things never see sunlight.
But they have an energy source.
So you never know.
And what you said, Karen, about Yellowstone, there are weird bacteria that eat the sulfury minerals that are bubbling up in the devil’s pothole, devil’s teapot, the really crazy colored pond at Yellowstone.
Yeah.
And there are bacteria that live off this stuff.
So it’s not crazy to think that on Mars, on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, or Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, there could be life even under those extreme conditions.
Phil, do you have any reason to assume that that life that you might find on Mars or Jupiter would come to Earth to anally probe hillbillies or anybody else?
Yeah, I get this question a lot when I give lectures, especially when I’m talking to kids.
They always ask me if I believe in UFOs and aliens.
And there’s a long answer to it, but I usually say no and yes.
I think that given what we know about astronomy, how many stars are in the galaxy, how many stars are like the sun, and we’re starting to…
to detect enough planets orbiting other stars to get statistics.
And it’s looking like, at a minimum, 10% of the stars in the galaxy have planets.
So you’re talking about tens of billions of planets.
Some of them are bound to be Earth-like.
Some of them are bound to be able to support life.
So, yeah, sure, I think statistically it’s a near certainty that there’s life out in space.
The question is, are they coming here to anally probe hillbillies or cut the butts out of cows, which I think is silly, because honestly, you just have to come to Earth once, you cut one butt out of a cow, you take it home and you clone it.
It’s a lot cheaper.
So I’m not seeing it.
I’m not seeing the evidence for flying saucers.
And every time I write about this, I get a million UFO people commenting, saying, what about this, what about this?
And I say, look,
I’m really clear about this.
You cannot show me a fuzzy video.
You cannot show me a fuzzy picture.
Even a picture is no longer trustworthy with that whole Photoshop thing that the kids are using on the inner tubes in the tweeter today.
So you’ve got to have more than that.
Show me a piece of metal with a non-terrestrial isotope ratio on it.
Show me freaking Klaatu and Gort walking out of a flying saucer on the White House lawn.
It wasn’t really a White House lawn in the movie, but give me this.
Give me a minute here.
That’s what I want.
If you’re going to make a claim that there are aliens coming here and visiting us and want us to be good to each other and all that stuff, I’m going to need more than a fuzzy picture of a street light.
Phil, how does isotopic evidence actually demonstrate what planet a metal comes from?
Well, it’s not concrete or it’s not 100%, but basically where the Earth formed in the solar system and the processes it’s gone through over time,
you get a certain ratio of elements.
If you look at, for example, oh, I don’t know, uranium, let’s just say.
There are different forms of uranium.
It’s not just all one thing.
It depends on how many neutrons are in the nucleus of a uranium atom.
They all have the same number of protons in them.
I think it’s 92.
But they have different numbers of neutrons, and that gives you isotopes.
So there’s uranium-235, and there’s uranium-238, and all these different things.
And so the ratio of these isotopes,
sort of depends on where something formed.
So, for example, on this Martian meteorite in the atmosphere of Mars, there are different ratios of elements, different ratios of these isotopes than there are on Earth.
And in a way, it’s like a fingerprint, and you can tell that something came from a certain place.
So if you came from Alps and Tori and you have your spaceship and you leave a piece of metal that has some bizarre ratio of iron in it or molybdenum or nickel or whatever, that would be a pretty clear-cut case.
Now, that doesn’t mean it can’t be faked, but at a bare minimum, I’d like to see something like that.
Really, what I want is Klaatu on the White House lawn.
Phil, how would you fake that?
I mean, I don’t know.
I wouldn’t be able to fake something like that.
How would it be done?
Well, it would be expensive.
You’d have to go to a metallurgical lab and say, I need this much of this isotope and this much of that isotope, and then you would melt them and mix them together.
When I worked on Hubble, for example, we had a special lamp that we used to calibrate our camera, and it had platinum in it.
Platinum happened to be good for what we needed.
The problem is platinum has different isotopes, and it’s smeared out.
the data that we got from this lamp.
So we had to actually get mono isotopic platinum.
It had to be platinum of all one flavor.
And I was told that that single lamp, which was, you know, the size of an overhead projector lamp cost a million dollars.
So that’s platinum and it’s expensive to start with, but, but there you go.
It’d be very expensive to do this, but not, you know, if you were a wealthy billionaire and had a wicked sense of humor and plenty of time, it wouldn’t be impossible.
The claims are certainly never that complex.
They’re always very superficial.
Well, yes, it’s crushed corn stalks.
No human could have walked on these.
Clearly, this was trans-dimensional humans.
It’s my favorite line from Ghostbusters.
No human would stack books this way.
It should be the skeptic mantra.
You probably get asked this all the time, but what’s the way that you like to describe this big astronomical issue that we often overlook, which is how big is our solar system?
Can you talk about that?
I think one of the problems with the whole UFO thing is that we all have a lousy sense of scale, and people just don’t understand how far away the stars are.
You really honestly either have to have aliens who can live practically forever…
Or they have to have faster-than-light drive.
And as far as we know, faster-than-light drive is impossible.
And look.
The Pluto probe, the New Horizons probe, which is like halfway to Pluto, is the fastest, as far as I know, the fastest probe that has ever been launched.
And it’s going to take, what is it, nine years to get to Pluto?
Nine years.
And so that kind of gives you a sense.
I actually filmed a documentary recently where we built a scale model solar system on a football field.
I actually went to the Colts Stadium here in Denver and put the sun on the goal line.
and put pluto on the other goal line and the earth you know i have to i have to look at the numbers but i think the earth was like two yards away or something crazy like that
And it would have been smaller than a grain of sand at that scale.
The solar system is huge.
It would take you 70 years to drive to the sun.
Now, wait a minute.
Do I have that number right?
It might be 70 years to fly an airplane to the sun.
But it takes decades to get there at any sort of terrestrial conveyance.
And even our rockets took three days to get to the moon with Apollo.
So these objects, even the nearest objects, are tremendously far away.
You better pack a lunch if you’re going.
Yeah, I’ve looked at some of the experiments available online to sort of do something similar with peas and grains of sand.
Yeah, the universe is really big.
I mean, Douglas Adams really got that right.
But, I mean, it’s really, really big.
I would say I would call that its defining characteristic.
Its bigness.
That’s why we call it space, folks.
I went to see 2012.
Oh, I’m so sorry.
The beginning of that film, yet another example of Hollywood getting it wrong with the big graphic showing the planets close together for the syzygy.
Yeah, and the planets never actually line up like that.
They did that in Tomb Raider as well and a bunch of other movies.
And yeah, the planet, if there’s any way they can screw up astronomy in Hollywood, that’s pretty much on the chopping block right away.
Well, Phil, let me ask you about that because one of my favorite films and perhaps one of yours as well is Contact.
And at the very beginning of that, there’s a really beautiful sequence sort of showing the radio signals that were going out.
I think it was the television signals.
Do you remember that?
Of course.
It’s one of the best opening sequences ever filmed.
Okay.
I was just going to guess how realistic and how well it was shot.
They still botched it.
Yeah, but you’ve got to say to yourself, you know, Carl Sagan wrote this, so chances are it’s probably going to be better than anything else done.
And basically the one or two mistakes that were in there, there’s one mistake that was just a special effects thing.
You actually fly through the Eagle Nebula, and this is a famous nebula.
It has the Pillars of Creation in it.
If you look up Pillars of Creation on Google, you’ll find the very famous Hubble picture of these three towering dust clouds where stars are forming.
And they go through the nebula, and you’re sort of backing away from the Earth.
And so you go through the nebula, and then you’re seeing it from the other side, but it looks just like it does from this side.
So they got left to right backwards.
Oh, no.
You have to be kind of an anal retentive jerk like me to even see something like that.
The big error in that sequence, if you want to call it that, is that before they even leave the solar system, you’re hearing radio signals from like 30 years ago.
And, of course, the outer solar system isn’t 30 light years away.
It wouldn’t work that way.
But I’m chalking that up to artistic license.
They didn’t match up the radio signals to the distance.
Because it just didn’t work on screen.
And I’m always willing to give a movie the benefit of a doubt to tell a better story if the sacrifice is the science.
As long as they’re not sacrificing it to the point of it becomes a Michael Bay movie or something like that.
I like the new Godzilla movie.
Actually, I enjoyed the new Godzilla movie.
It was just different from the original.
We’re the only two.
Well, you know, my son likes it.
Have you seen Godzilla 2000?
No, no.
Godzilla Final Wars?
They even throw in that one, too.
No.
Yeah, they’ve got all the monsters in that one.
I mean, just like virtually every monster appears in that film.
It’s astonishing.
Wow.
I’ll have to see that.
I’ve always been a Geetra fan myself.
Yeah, yeah.
My son likes him, too.
Three heads!
Come on!
Okay, alien question.
I’ve heard you talk about UFOs and how astronomers should be seeing more of them.
Yeah, this is something I came up with a few years ago.
And basically, it’s not just astronomers.
It’s mostly amateur astronomers.
There aren’t that many professional astronomers, only a few thousand.
And in fact, they’re usually sitting at home or in an observatory computer room with digital computers hooked up to the telescope.
And they’re not actually out there looking at the sky.
But there are amateur astronomers who are out every clear night.
And it’s not really well known how many there are.
We know there are at least several tens of thousands of amateur astronomers just in the U.S. alone.
So you’ve got a huge number of people who are out observing the skies.
And this is dedicated observing.
It’s not just like walking out to their car and glancing up.
And yet, most of these UFO reports are coming from people in just those circumstances.
They’re people who aren’t used to seeing the night sky.
They go out, they’re walking the dog, they’re doing whatever, and they see something.
And yet, if you do this by man hours, there’s no way that this ratio…
is tilted toward people who are not astronomers.
In other words, there are more people looking for longer at the sky who understand the sky and know what they’re looking at, those guys being astronomers, those men and women.
So it seems to me that for every thousand UFOs reported, some fraction, some large fraction, half or more, should be coming from amateur astronomers, and the fact is there aren’t.
Now, I wrote about this in my first book, and I got a guy complaining.
He wrote an article on the web saying, here’s two reports from amateur astronomers.
And I thought, really?
Two reports out of the bazillion that come out every year?
He found two from amateur astronomers.
Come on.
So the point is, people look up in the sky, and when they see a halo around the sun or sundogs, which are…
reflections near the sun caused by ice crystals, or any number of things in the sky that they’re not used to, they report flying saucers, or they’re just not used to seeing them.
That’s my argument, and Stan Friedman, the
ufo guy stan friedman uh took offense at this uh basically saying that astronomers are too busy looking through their telescopes to see it and i thought that was pretty funny because i i’m guessing he must either not know very many amateur astronomers or the ones he knows must be very odd because most of the ones i know are are constantly looking up with binoculars or just their eyes
in between looking through the eyepiece.
And so my argument, I think, still stands.
Most of these reports should be from amateur astronomers.
They’re not.
Ergo, most of the reported UFOs are not real flying saucers.
They’re a mistaken identity.
Yeah, this hits on a common problem in cryptozoology and a lot of paranormal, well, almost every aspect of paranormal investigations I look into, that people argue from ignorance.
It’s the, I don’t know what it is, so it’s an extraterrestrial vehicle.
I don’t know what that animal is, so it’s a Bigfoot.
This just keeps happening all throughout where people admit they’re ignorant, but fill in the blank with the thing that they’re most comfortable with putting there.
Yeah, it’s aliens of the gaps, I guess.
Like God of the gaps, you know, where religious people always say God did it when there’s some gap in our scientific knowledge.
It’s the same sort of thing with flying saucers.
I didn’t understand that.
Therefore, it must be transdimensional aliens from the future who have come back to, you know, anally probe me.
And it’s funny because a lot of these really classic UFO examples, like the Phoenix Lights, are completely explained with military maneuvers and different things like that.
We know, we know that the stealth bomber and the SR-71, well, the SR-71 is a better example, the old Blackbird, is 1970s technology.
It was completely secret until relatively recently, and the top speed of that machine is still top secret.
So we’re talking about stuff that’s been around for 30 or 40 years and is still being held secret.
What the heck does the military have now that they’re not telling us about?
So that’s not a conspiracy theory.
That’s just plain and simple logic.
They’ve had 30 years to improve on the SR-71.
Who knows what’s up there and could be mistaken for a flying saucer.
And we know that people mistake ordinary stuff for a flying saucer.
It happens all the time.
Yeah, the hypothesized Aurora craft and even the blimp craft, people say that it may be accounting for some.
And you know what else?
The unmanned vehicles, those things can do G-force maneuvers that a pilot craft can’t do.
Right.
And we’ve seen a lot of those as well.
There are plenty of these, what are they, UAVs?
Is that right?
Unmanned Automatic Vehicles?
I don’t remember what it stands for.
But yeah, you get these things and that’s where they got a lot of the telemetry over Iraq during the first and second Iraq wars and all that kind of stuff.
And again, yeah, you’re right.
Those things are designed not to be seen, but there are other craft up there.
You know, whenever I see a report that says I saw several lights flying in formation, did right angle turns, my first thought is wedding candles.
You take a garbage bag and you tie a candle underneath it and the candle heats the air up and it basically turns into a hot air balloon.
And these things have been – it happens all the time in the summer.
That’s when a lot of people get married.
And they can fool people.
There was a pilot – I’ve got this on my blog someplace – a pilot from New Jersey who actually was interviewed by the news.
And, of course, they love talking to pilots because people assume, A, pilots are authority figures, and, B, pilots know the sky.
And, in fact, that’s not really true.
Well, not necessarily true, I should say.
And this guy was saying, I saw this thing and it did a right angle turn in the sky and shot off at high speed.
And it was shown conclusively that this was basically a collection of balloons that this guy was fooled by.
So you can’t trust any of these reports.
Eyewitness reports are the worst things to trust, even from somebody you might think is an authority.
Yeah, there’s so many times I’ve seen positions where I watched aircraft, and it appeared that they were standing still in the sky, and then I would change position, and it would appear that suddenly the aircraft had started moving really fast, which was odd.
Oh, heck, if you’re driving and the moon is rising through the trees, it looks like the moon is following you.
You know, that never worked for me.
It works for my daughters, but not me.
It doesn’t look like that way to you?
I’ve never been able to see it.
Well, you’re inhuman.
Bill, speaking of claims, UFO and alien claims, it’s ironic that you live in Colorado and a lot of these claims seem to be coming out of there at the moment.
And in fact, today I was writing about the ET Commission in Denver, the proposal for that.
Could you tell us a bit about that, if you’ve been following that?
Yeah, actually, I heard about it and then started writing up a blog post and then saw yours.
So mine will go up pretty soon, too, link into yours.
Yeah, there’s this guy, Peckman.
He actually had made a bit of his name for himself before the alien thing because he was trying to get the Denver.
city council or the denver government to establish a an alien affairs commission then this alien video came out where he said look it’s an alien in the window and there’s no way this could be faked and then the guys from rocky mountain paranormal society faked it basically in an hour and made their video look better than his which i thought was great and he’s back he evidently has collected enough signatures that he’s forced a ballot initiative in denver
to create this extraterrestrial affairs commission so that people have to investigate UFOs.
And he’s claiming that he’s got private investors so that this won’t cost the government any money.
But that’s ridiculous because it’s going to take up the time of the government, which costs money.
So there’s no way this isn’t going to cost money.
And, oh, and by the way, it’s a freaking waste of time.
uh… you know that at some point you have to wonder what people are thinking uh… when they look at fuzzy pictures and stuff and say yes this is clear evidence of aliens and this is a colossal waste of time happily there’s some uh… there was a government official in denver saying i have real things to worry about i don’t need to worry about this made up stuff so i was pretty happy about that well i hear that he’d falsified a lot of those signatures that he collected as well
Yeah, I saw that on your blog post, but I didn’t have time to look that up.
Where did you hear that?
Well, apparently I’ve been told by a number of sources, by the guys from the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Society, and also there was an article in the Denver Post claiming that, I think he collected about 10,000 signatures and only 4,000 of them were valid, but that was sufficient for this to be put onto the ballot.
Oh, I see, okay.
And I guess some of them were, you know, ALF, ET, Klaatu.
I guess, yeah, 6,000, some of them, yeah.
Do you think this will get passed?
And the thing is, it very well might.
And that’s the part that kills me.
You know, there might be a real thing here.
Carl Sagan used to say that, I think.
Whether these are mass hallucinations or really aliens coming, either way, it’s interesting.
Why are people reporting so many UFOs?
And I think it’s actually a lot more mundane.
Of course, we crave this sort of excitement.
That’s why we go to movies about aliens and why we read science fiction.
But when you come down to the reality of it,
honestly, when you look at these things skeptically, these photographs, these videos, these stories, there’s just nothing to them.
And the UFO people get so upset with me when I say that.
And it’s like, but how can you claim this is an alien when it’s so easy to fake a picture better than this?
And so I just don’t see it.
And I think spending a lot of money on it is just not worth the time.
Well, there’s an interesting parallel with the monsters as well.
I mean, there are people who have tried to get…
get actual U.S. government-sponsored expeditions to locate Bigfoot and Yeti and things like that.
So there’s always somebody out there who’s complaining that the reason we haven’t found these monsters is because no one’s thrown money at it.
Yeah, except every Yahoo out in the middle of nowhere sees them, and there’s tons of video of them completely faked.
And honestly, I don’t think this is something the government should be investigating.
It’s a little bit like SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
That was a NASA project, and they got basically booted out by Congress.
You know, in my opinion, I think that’s probably the right decision.
I don’t think NASA should be doing something like that.
I think that’s something that should be privately funded.
They are privately funded by Paul Allen from Microsoft, for example.
They get funding from other people as well.
And it frees them up to be able to do things the way they want.
And in fact, SETI is advancing in leaps and bounds.
They’ve got the Paul Allen Array out in California.
And Seth Shostak, one of the lead astronomers there, is fairly convinced that statistically speaking, if there are alien civilizations broadcasting in our galaxy, we should be able to detect them within about 20 years.
I was going to say, there’s the City at Home Project, too, through UC Berkeley, if people want to get involved in this.
Right, that’s not a long time.
That’s a screensaver you can download for your computer.
And it runs when your computer’s not running.
And basically, you get sent packets of SETI data that they collect using radio telescopes.
And you get that, and your computer’s used to process little pieces of it that then get sent back to the central computer, which puts them all together.
Because basically, the amount of data they get, it’s just impossible to analyze it all.
And this has been running for years, and it’s pretty cool.
And you never know.
The person who actually finds that one packet that shows that E.T.’
‘s calling us might be somebody who’s basically not having to be playing World of Warcraft at that particular moment.
And it was actually the first of these background processing devices, and there’s a bunch of them out now, because it’s just too hard to build a computer fast enough to do all this.
But if you get 100,000 people with a screensaver on their computers, that’s a lot of computing power.
It’s certainly a lot more than even a single supercomputer 20 years ago was.
It’s a pretty cool idea.
Phil, have you ever worked at Arecibo or been to Arecibo?
Chupacabra lore suggests that the astronomers there may also be doing genetic research, and that’s what caused the chupacabra to come into existence.
Really?
Because there’s a radio telescope there.
They’re doing biological engineering for things to suck on goats.
Well, see, now it sounds silly when you say it.
Well, we do have genes, and I actually have used my genes to reproduce once, so I guess that makes me something of an expert.
And you’re wearing genes, right?
Flannel, actually, but no, fleece.
Ooh, fleece, which comes from?
We’ve come full circle.
Phil, how does the James Rand Educational Foundation’s charter deal with matters like UFO claims and claims of extraterrestrials visiting the Earth?
Is that something you have to deal with or foresee having to deal with in the future?
That’s actually a tougher question than you might think.
For example, in my opinion, if aliens are coming to visit the Earth, they’re natural.
They evolved on another planet.
They developed the technology to create wormholes or some sort of very fast travel to get here.
And so if they come here, it’s not paranormal at all.
It’s totally natural.
So at what level, how do you define paranormal?
And we could argue about that for a long time.
But if you’re talking about…
Maybe fairies or something that just is completely not supported by modern science.
Fairies, gnomes, I don’t know, maybe even Bigfoot might count because there’s no sort of biological antecedent for Bigfoot.
So maybe that would count.
The charter for the JREF, I don’t know if you could really call it that, but just our sort of our mission is to educate people about science and to be skeptical of claims, to demand evidence of people’s claims.
So look, if somebody comes up and says, here’s Bigfoot, it’s like, oh, look, it’s Harry and the Hendersons.
And we take them to a biology lab and they say, yeah, look, this is a genetically…
clear example of a hominid that is not human and matches the description of Bigfoot, then yeah, we’ll be talking about it.
But until then, these are just claims without evidence, or at least very sketchy evidence.
And so in that sense, it falls under everything else that the JREF does, and that is show us the evidence, and let’s use good science and logic to determine what we’re looking at here.
The JRF is as interested in claims of pseudoscience as claims of the paranormal, isn’t it?
Well, sure.
And it’s one of these things where, again, what’s the dividing line?
If you have guys running around misinterpreting thermal camera readings and claiming everything that bumps in the night is a ghost, is that a pseudoscience or is it paranormal?
And I would say, hey, it’s both.
it just depends on, I suppose, what it is you’re talking about.
Anti-vaxxers, all the alternative medicines that we know don’t work, like chiropractic and homeopathy and acupuncture.
Those might be more pseudoscience than paranormal unless you can show me that homeopathy, which in the end is just distilled water, if that does work, that goes against every law of science we know.
So it would kind of have to be paranormal if it worked.
Happily, we know it doesn’t any more than the placebo effect.
So it’s not even a pseudoscience.
It’s just garbage.
Okay, here’s a question for you.
And this may not be very scientific, but it might be something we do with future guests as well.
What’s your favorite monster?
Oh, my gosh.
I don’t know.
When I was a kid, I was always partial to Godzilla.
I liked Gamera, too.
I had a thing about turtles.
I liked turtles a lot when I was a kid.
Really interested in them.
But I don’t know.
I kind of like… Gamera’s very neat.
He’s filled with turtle meat.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I actually, in fact, liked Cloverfield a lot.
The monster’s self was interesting, but I liked the movie.
Yeah, I thought his parasites were as frightening as he was, or she was, or it was.
Scared the crap out of me.
I watched again recently, and I thought, yeah, still pretty good.
I don’t see what everybody was complaining about.
Yeah, I was kind of sickened by the handheld camera, but I liked the movie.
And I like, if I had to say what’s my favorite monster movie…
For a sufficiently broad definition of monster movie, I would go with Five Million Years to Earth.
What was released in England is Quatermass and the Pit.
Yeah, I have that movie, too, on DVD.
Watch it every couple years with some friends.
That movie freaked the hell out of me when I was a kid.
And then I saw it again, I don’t know, ten years ago, maybe?
And sat back and thought, this movie freaking rocks.
It’s got everything in it.
It’s got ghosts and goblins and Martians and flying saucers and cavemen and telekinesis and the Devil.
Yes, the Devil, with a capital D. It came out in, like, the 1960s.
It’s one of the Hammer horror movies.
And it’s very slow to start, and it’s a ridiculous movie.
I mean, it just builds on ridiculous premise on ridiculous premise.
And then it ends with London being destroyed, and it’s just fantastic.
Not a very happy, feel-good ending.
It’s one of the reasons I love it.
Yeah, I love this movie.
Like I say, I watch it every few years, that one, and I like to watch John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Both of those movies just really work well, even after all these years.
That’s my favorite horror movie.
I can’t even imagine a better horror movie being made.
There’s actually a scene in the movie where you see a guy.
I mean, the premise of the movie is they unearth this alien in Antarctica.
And it can change its shape.
It actually becomes a person.
It takes you over.
And there’s a scene in the movie where you see it approaching a doorway, and you see a guy’s shadow on the door, and you never find out who that guy is.
And there’s literally no way to know.
You can narrow it down to two people, but you never know which one it is.
And they did that on purpose to keep the suspense going.
You really just don’t know who’s alien and who isn’t.
It’s a fantastic movie.
Yeah, the thing has a rather bleak ending, too.
Another happy, feel-good ending, yeah.
Man, it’s depressing.
Yeah, a lot of these alien visitation scenarios aren’t very happy.
Is it a better ending than the ending of the original Invasion of the Biosnatchers in the 77 version with Donald Sutherland?
Yeah, it’s the same sort of feeling at the end.
You’re like, oh, oh.
Yeah, not a happy ending.
And I’ll say that two of my favorite movies of all time, both directed by John Carpenter, both star Kurt Russell, the other one being Big Trouble in Little China.
Also, for a broad enough definition of a monster movie, there are monsters in it.
Since we’re talking about infrequently filmed scary movies, what do you think about the British film Curse the Demon?
Have you seen that?
Of course.
Yeah, I like that one because the hero of the movie is a skeptic.
Yeah, but he’s wrong.
But he figures it out.
Well, he’s wrong, but when presented with incontrovertible evidence of the supernatural, he uses his knowledge of the paranormal to thwart evil.
That’s another movie that, honestly, when I was a kid, it freaked the hell out of me.
It’s a giant bat demon which picks you up and shakes you to death and throws you down.
You only see it twice, in the very beginning and the very end of the movie.
But the tension in the movie, when the hero is running through the woods and this thing is chasing him, that’s honestly very tense.
And in fact, there’s a Kate Bush song that actually samples that scene.
Yeah, for Hounds of Love.
But she couldn’t actually get the rights.
They had to re-record it.
It’s coming, yeah.
Yeah, it’s in the trees.
It’s coming.
So you’ve got to be a complete monster dork to know this stuff.
Hey.
Okay.
A lot of the information we talked about as far as aliens comes from your extensive… familiar with science fiction and science.
And you’ve written about this in your new book, Death from the Skies, which is out in paperback now, right?
The paperback came out a couple of months ago.
The paperback cover is a lot cooler.
It’s like this comic book…
Nathan Fox.
It’s a famous comic book artist who did it.
But it’s a really terrific cover.
And it’s a great book, and it may just save your life.
Extraordinary claims, Phil.
Thanks for joining us today.
Monster Talk.
Today you heard from Dr. Phil Plait, author of the book Death from the Skies, talking with us about the plausibility of aliens from another planet visiting the Earth.
While the existence of aliens within the confines of the universe seems plausible from a statistical perspective, no evidence of such creatures has been verified by science.
As scientists go on searching the skies for signs of intelligence, we’ll continue to do our part to try and promote it down here.
I’m Blake Smith, and on behalf of Ben Radford and Karen Stolzno, thanks for listening to another episode of Monster Talk.
You can join other skeptics and believers in discussing these and other topics at the Monster Talk section of the official Skeptic Forum, www.skepticforum.com.
You can read more from Ben Radford at Skeptical Inquirer magazine and on his Live Science column.
And you can hear more from Dr. Karen Stolzno at badlanguage.com.
That’s bad-language.com.
skeptic.org, and at her CFI blog, The Naked Skeptic, or even on Twitter.
You can get links to my articles and some ridiculously bad puns by following me on Twitter, twitter.com forward slash DrAtlantis.
These links, of course, will be available in the show notes.
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Can you pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time?
All right, well, just making note.
All right.