Samuele Lilliu (SL). The first thing I wanted
to discuss with you is the topic of UFOs and
aliens. Can we just dismiss the topic by saying:
where is the evidence?
Michael Schermer (MS).We could technically.
But there’s two different questions on the
table with aliens and UFOs. The first is:
are they out there somewhere? The second:
had they come here?
So to the first question of course this is
what SETI scientists, professional astronomers,
and physicists are working on. They’re trying
to detect signals from space using radio telescopes
or they’re looking for traces of past advanced
civilizations, such as a Dyson-type sphere
or massive solar panels around a star that
could be used to capture more energy from
the sun of that particular civilization. Now,
so far, it’s come up negative but, as they
like to say in this case, the absence of evidence
is not evidence of absence. [This is] because
we’ve hardly looked anywhere. There’s
on the order of several hundred billion stars
in our galaxy. There’s probably upwards
of a trillion stars in the known universe.
So we just have to remain agnostic and keep
searching.
The second question [is] the one that interests
UFO people, [which] is a completely separate
community of people. The UFO community is
largely not consisting of scientists, physicists,
astronomers and so on. It’s mostly just
kind of amateur, curious people that call
themselves researchers or investigative journalists
or whatever, but they most of them have no
training in science, how it works. It’s
clear from reading their literature and watching
their documentaries [that] they’re starting
with the assumption that aliens have come
here: “We know they’ve come here, now
let’s just try to find evidence of it”.
They’ll say something like “Oh I don’t
know, I’m just asking some curious questions
here about this mysterious lights in the sky
or this this little blob thing that was captured
on camera and so on”.
But, you know, when you get to know them and
you read the literature, it’s clear they
already believe. In science you’re not supposed
to start with the conclusion. Even though
a lot of scientists do because they’re human
but, at least, how it’s conducted, you have
to remain open to the possibility that you’re
wrong. Science begins with the null hypothesis
that your hypothesis is wrong until you prove
otherwise and the burden of proof is on the
claimant, not on the skeptics or the scientific
community to disprove the claim.
If you ask: “Can you prove that aliens have
never come here to Earth?”
Of course I can’t. How would you? How would
you do that? But that the burden of proof
isn’t on me to do, that it’s on you, the
claimant, to show me the evidence you have.
So far the evidence is just crummy, it’s
just so thin that by the principle of ECREE
(Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary
Evidence) made famous by Carl Sagan, although
said by originally by Marcelo Truzzi,[1] which
is really just an expression of Hume’s Principle
of Proportionality that we should proportion
our confidence and our beliefs to the evidence.
The idea that aliens have come here is an
extraordinary claim. How extraordinary is
the evidence? It’s not even ordinary, it’s
really crappy: blurry photographs, grainy
videos, and lots and lots of stories about
things that go bump in the night, when people
are out camping or wandering around in the
desert, etc.
It’s really simple. I would believe everybody,
all scientists and skeptics would believe
if there was concrete evidence.
We already have a model of how this works
in biology. If you want to name a new species
you have to have a type specimen, an actual
physical example of the species and you can
bring it to the conference and photograph
it, put it in a museum, it can be dissected,
it’s photographed and published in peer-reviewed
journals, and everybody can see it. If the
UFO people had something like that an actual
spacecraft…
Now, of course, the rebuttal to that is: “They’re
being hidden away by the government”. This
hidden evidence argument is not an argument.
If you took that to a biology conference and
said “I found a bipedal primate living in
the hinterlands of Canada, call them Bigfoot
or Yeti”.
They’d say “That’s nice, let’s see
it”.
“Oh well it’s being hidden by the Canadian
government, It’s in this warehouse, where
they’re keeping the, you know, the aliens”.
Okay, whatever, that you’d just be laughed
off the stage. That’s not evidence. Of course,
it’s possible that aliens have come here
sometime in the past, but the evidence for
it is pretty thin.
SL. When I sent you my notes about these topics
I wanted to discuss, my starting point was
those three articles from the New York Times[2-4]
and when I read them at the beginning I just
read the headlines, as most people do when
they read tweets and so on, which is probably
a problem. Then I read the full articles and
I said “Well that looks like someone is
confirming there are UFOs and these UFOs are
actually alien spacecraft”. But then I started
doing some fact check and the first thing
I noticed that the author of these articles
is a ufologist…
MS. Leslie Kean, yeah. I read her book, it’s
a fine book, it’s interesting, but it really
it’s just a series of anecdotes and the
fact that the anecdotes are coming from military
leaders, generals, police captains, and government
officials, whatever, is irrelevant because
they’re not any better at observing than
anybody else. Their word is no more trustworthy
than anybody else’s. So why believe them?
It’s amazing that she got that published
in the New York Times because to the average
reader that that’s a New York Times fact-checked
article conducted by a journalist. But that’s
not what it is. It’s written by somebody
who already believes in aliens having come
here. That’s a little deceptive.
As for the claims themselves, I think the
best analysis comes from… well we’ve published
a couple pieces in Skeptic on this, but the
actual camera analysis is conducted by Mick
West. So if you look up his Twitter feed (https://twitter.com/MickWest),
that takes you to his articles. On his website
he shows that the little the Tic-Tac UFO is
obviously a balloon hurtling along. It looks
like it’s hauling at, you know, like a thousand
miles an hour or more, when in fact it’s
not that. It’s an artifact of how the camera
is rotating. He shows through clever analysis
that what looks like this so-called UFO accelerating
at incredible speed is just the camera being
zoomed in or zoomed out at high speed. The
camera itself is causing the visual effects
in the film, not the object itself. He shows
that when the camera zooms or rotates the
entire environment around the UFO is rotating
the exact same way that the UFO is. So it’s
an artifact of the video, not the object that’s
being chased.
So it doesn’t matter if the jet pilot says
“Oh my god, oh look at that, oh dude unbelievable”,
it’s irrelevant, or [if] they give an interview
later saying “I’m an expert on detecting
other craft in my space and I’ve never seen
anything like that”. Okay, so what? You’re
not looking, you’re not seeing what you
think you’re seeing.
The headlines read as if the government is
confirming that aliens are here, when all
they did was confirm that they had a program,
poorly funded by government standards anyway,
that concluded nothing.
By the way, that footage is not new. They
keep saying it’s “brand new”, “just
released”. This is from 15 years ago.
Okay, come on, give it to us! Quit saying
“we’re about to release this huge discovery”.
Okay, what is it? Because skeptics want to
know.
SL. Those footages, one of them is from 2004,
and I think Commander D. Fravor was part of
it in the sense that he was in the fighter
jet. The other ones were from 2014-2015. Now
these footages were released by Louis Elizondo
in 2017. Louis Elizondo is the main protagonist
of these articles and he says that he resigned
from some government office in 2017 because
he wasn’t happy with the way that the UFO
business was dealt with within the government.
So what Leslie Kean’s article doesn’t
say is that in 2017 Elizondo joins a company,
which is called To the Stars Academy of Arts
and Science,[5] which was founded by…
MS. Tom Delonge, yeah a rock star. I mean
nothing wrong with that. Outsiders could make
contributions to science, but come on…
SL. The weird thing is that how come a government
official can apparently freely release information
from the government and he doesn’t get prosecuted?
We know what happened to Julian Assange, Chelsea
Manning…
MS. Yeah that’s a really good point. Yes
that’s a very good point. If they were releasing
something that was real or that was important,
they’d get the same treatment that Julian
Assange have gotten. They haven’t. So I’m
sure the people in government are like “Oh
god that again, yeah let them run with it
because we’re busy with other things over
here”.
SL. So this guy (Luis Elizondo) apparently
lied when he said that he was leading the
program you mentioned which is the AATIP (Advanced
Aerial Threat Identification Program), which
was actually funded by senator Harry Reid
for $22 million. He (Elizondo) said he was
the director, but the pentagon spokesperson
said that he wasn’t directing this program,
so in that case he lied about that.[6] So,
they go ahead with this To the Stars Academy
whatever, which was founded by Tom Delong
but also by a physicist (Harold E. Puthoff),
who also worked as a parapsychologist and
expert of paranormal activities in the 70s…
MS. Yeah, so there was a project made famous
in the in the film “The Men Who Stare at
Goats”, based on the book by John Ronson
that tracks that whole history, where they
were testing remote viewing. You have these,
you know, psychics that are in a basement
somewhere, in a quiet room, sound proof, and
they have these ping-pong balls over their
eyes so that they can’t see anything and
then they have to try to envision where the
missile silos are in Siberia or whatever.
This went on for decades and they spent you
know tens of millions of dollars. Now to the
average listener like you and I that sounds
like a lot of money, but by government standards
that’s the cost overrun on a single stretch
of highway, paving a highway. It’s nothing.
Particularly over many years. It’s okay
that governments try this or that.
That program Stargate was inspired by the
so-called “psychic gap”. Remember the
missile gap. Well then there was an alleged
“psychic gap”, when we found out that
the Russians were testing ESP to try to make
these kind of psychic soldiers.[7] It wasn’t
clear back in the 50s and 60s that this was
impossible. Scientists had yet to really run
a lot of controlled experiments to show that
there’s nothing to this. So why not? Okay
spend a little money just in case, but after
negative results for 10 years, then you dump
it.
And the same thing with the Aerial Threat
Phenomenon Program. So if enough reports come
in, there’s spooky things in our airspace,
well that’s the military’s job to investigate
those things. Okay, fine, go investigate it,
but why drag it out for years and years with
these little teasing articles in the New York
Times like “This is going to be huge, it’s
going to be big”. Just give it to us. Come
on if it’s Russian or Chinese or North Korean
or extra-terrestrial, skeptics want to know,
everybody wants to know. And this idea that
the stock market would crash and the economy
would collapse and people would lose their
minds, this is this is wrong, this is not
true. People do not lose their minds and go
crazy and when there’s incidences like that.
So we want to know!
SL. To the Stars Academy and Tom Delong produced
a documentary called Unidentified that was
released on the History Channel is also available
on Amazon Prime, where Elizondo is the star,
he appears as an investigator that goes and
interviews people and all the evidence is
anecdotal, he doesn’t show any actual thing.
So my question, after seeing all these things,
the documentary and so on, do you think these
articles were a sort of PR campaign for whatever
entertainment is going on with the To the
Stars Academy?
MS. Well not just entertainment. They also
have some investments you can make in their
private company and they advertise that on
their web page. That’s always made me a
little suspicious. Why are you asking people
for money? That’s starting to sound kind
of cultish. Even though apparently they’re
not doing anything illegal, but why mix them?
If you want to start a private company, go
ahead but don’t mix up this kind of general
scientific question of the possibility of
extra-terrestrial visitation or whatever,
with that. So to me that taints it. It’s
like the old tobacco companies funding research
on cigarette smoking and lung cancer that
it’s obvious there’s a potential conflict
of interest.
SL. I was trying to understand what could
be other explanations of what was shown in
the (pentagon) videos. You said maybe it’s
a balloon, it could be an artifact, an illusion,
or could it be that it’s some Russians or
Chinese drones or something or is that too
much?
MS. Well I think it’s probably not even
that, although that would be important to
know. So okay give it to us.
SL. Another option that we can discuss later
it could be that this is a cover-up to hide
some US military technology.
MS. Yeah, but again that’s always a hand
waving explanation for people who don’t
have evidence. That we know it’s there and
the reason we know it’s there is because
they’re hiding the evidence. This very much
reminds me of George Bush’s response to
when the search teams went into Iraq to find
the weapons of mass destruction and they couldn’t
find any.
The initial response by the Bush administration
was: “Well they moved them, that’s how
we know. They had them because we have no
evidence for it.”
It’s like, wait a minute, that’s not an
argument. In fact that’s what the UFO people
say.
“Where’s the Roswell bodies in the spacecraft?”
“Oh, they moved them, that’s how we know.
They’re there.”
“What?”
SL. Maybe we can discuss about the US technology
later. But now I wanted to discuss about Bob
Lazar. Have you seen the podcaster with Joe
Rogan?[8] Do you think that guy is lying or
do you think he’s telling the truth? What
do you think?
MS. I don’t think he’s telling the truth.
Maybe it’s his truth, at this point. You
have to remember the power of self-deception.
Now I can’t get inside somebody’s heart
or head or whatever and to any cult leader
or whatever do they really believe the stuff
they’re saying. Maybe they believe it, but
that doesn’t make it true. So whether Bob
Lazar is totally deluded or he’s just making
stuff up I don’t know, but for sure [there
are] people that have fact checked his claims.
Don’t take my word for it as a skeptic,
take Stan Friedman’s word for it. Stan Friedman
is (he just died last year) a really good
guy, even though he and I collided on TV many
times over UFOs. He’s a total UFO believer:
“Absolutely, they’ve come here”.
Now, to his credit, he’s never had any personal
experiences, never been abducted, never seen
a UFO. He just thinks that the evidence is
sufficient to draw that conclusion. So when
he heard the Bob Lazar story, he fact-checked
it.
So, Lazar said he went to MIT and to Caltech.
No he didn’t and in fact he I think he had
the equivalent of like a couple physics classes
at a community college and that’s it. Stan
was able to track that down. But the records
at Caltech and MIT show no Bob Lazar. So Lazar’s
explanation for that is, well, because it’s
top secret and what I was doing was so important
and what I found out was so revelatory that
they erased the records at those universities.
Okay I’m sorry that’s not how it works.
No government can go into MIT or Caltech and
then tell them “we’d like you to scrape
clean the records of this particular student”.
Here they’re not going to do it. It’s
totally illegal and universities really protect
student records. But again, even the argument
itself is another one of these hand-waving
arguments.
SL. But he said that he worked at Los Alamos…
MS. Well than that… Okay, so but Friedman
said “Okay if he’s if he’s gonna lie
about something so easy to check as a student
record and so readily falsifiable…”. There’s
no record at Los Alamos, other than this one
little thing that he worked as a contract
labourer for some little department that did
nothing. But this idea that he worked in this
top secret department that worked on alien
spacecraft, he’s just making that up or
he’s deluded. So again the idea is that
there’s a line of demarcation between science
and pseudoscience that normally scientists
are trying to find, when they’re investigating
a particular claim, some alternative medicine
claim, or whatever, and this is how science
works. You want to just test it. That line
of demarcation is when you hit it to the point
where there’s no way to test it, there’s
no way to find out, if it’s just an assertion.
As Christopher Hitchens likes to say “that
which can be asserted without evidence can
be dismissed without evidence”, full stop.
When it’s not just skeptics drawing the
line of demarcation saying that’s just pseudoscience,
that’s just nonsense, it’s bullshit, but
your own people, ufologists, who are believers
say “No that guy is full of crap, he did
not do what he said he did”, that tells
you how far out, when even your own team says
you’re full of shit.
You saw this with the 9/11 truthers. There’s
different grades of 9/11 [truthers]. There’s
those who say “there were no planes, they
were all like 3D holograms”. The normal
9/11 truthers they go “Wait a minute, that’s
a bunch of bullshit, of course there were
planes, but the planes were remotely controlled”.
Then other 9/11 truthers go “No that’s
a bullshit story here’s what really happened…”.
So when they’re debunking themselves that
shows you how far out on the fringe they are.
SL. It’s not all bullshit about the 9/11
truthers, because there are people suing actually
the Saudi government, for example, for a conspiracy.
MS. Well so here’s a good example of what
we mean by scepticism. Are you skeptical of
global warming or are you skeptical of the
global warming skeptics? Okay so it’s not
just a thing that you are as a skeptic all
the time, not believing anything. We all believe
lots of things. So I am skeptical of the conspiracy
theory that 9/11 was an inside job by the
Bush administration, but I’m not skeptical
that it was a conspiracy. It was a conspiracy.
You know 19 members of Al Qaeda plotting to
fly planes into buildings without telling
us: that’s a conspiracy. We know it was
orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden and so on
and apparently funded by Saudi Arabia, or
at least you know that some of the hijackers
themselves were backed by the Saudi government.
Anyway the point is you know there are real
conspiracies that of which conspiracy theories
are true and other conspiracies are false.
That is, the conspiracy is not real that they
claim, so it depends on each one.
SL. So going back to Bob Lazar, you mentioned
that of course he didn’t go to Caltech and
MIT but apparently he worked at Los Alamos.
So if we assume that he worked at Los Alamos,
there is no way you can get there without
a degree, so maybe he made up that he had
a degree in order to get there…
MS. Yes okay so but again we’re going further
down the rabbit hole of hand waving to kind
of distract from the fact that that there’s
no evidence for these claims. Yes, it’s
possible he faked his degree in order to get
a job. There something like that and that
they were hoodwinked about that. Now that
seems unlikely, given how careful government
agencies are, but we know from history that
they have been duped by imposters. Corporations
have, government agencies have, individuals
have. That happens. Yes, but that doesn’t
make it true.
SL. The other thing that these Bob Lazar believers
bring as a proof that he was right, is element
115 (Moscovium). They says he predicted the
element…
MS. He says he says he predicted it…
SL. Yeah, I mean there were papers before
he mentioned it, talking about the potential
properties of this element 115,[9] which was
after discover in 2004.[10] So that thing
doesn’t mean anything.
MS. Again it’s just an assertion. Where’s
the spacecraft? Come on dude! That is the
most extraordinary claim in this area that
anyone’s ever made: “I saw the spacecraft
myself”. All right, where is it? Well, “They’ve
hidden it or they’ve erased it”.
I used to make this argument with Stan Friedman
too. We were on Larry King live together and
he’s holding up these government documents
with big blacked out paragraphs.
He goes “See here’s the evidence”.
“What’s the evidence? I just see a blacked
out paragraph, I don’t know what I am looking
at”.
“You’re looking at the evidence that I’m
claiming is in there”.
“But I can’t see it and you can’t see
it, you don’t know that you know”.
So in science again to test the claim, there
has to be some way to get at it, to falsify
it, that that you can do it and I can do it
and we can all look at it and see it and see
the results and replicate it.
That’s one of the problems of the replication
crisis we’re going through now, is that
some of those standards were lowered or hacked
a little bit under the “publish or perish”
pressures and so on. So, yes, that does happen
but it’s always the scientists themselves
that catch the errors, the fraud, the mistakes
and so on. Now almost never outsiders, it’s
almost always an insider, graduate student
that sees some shenanigans going on with the
principal investigator and then blows the
whistle. That’s why we have whistle-blower
laws. But the fact that that has happened
doesn’t mean that it happens all the time
and it happened in your particular case that
you want to claim.
SL. Another thing about Bob Lazar, he claims
that this layer, the triangle of moscovium
is able to generate gravity and thanks to
this thing then the spacecraft can fly and
all these things. He said that this this material
can exist naturally, but so far the moscovium
that was synthesized can only last 0.6 seconds,
a fraction of a second. So far we haven’t
found any of this moscovium existing in nature.
That doesn’t mean that it has the properties
that he talks about. Another thing that they
say “okay Bob Lazar was right, if you look
at the gimbal video… let’s assume it’s
a spacecraft, that spacecraft flies in the
same way that Bob Lazar described it”. Is
that a coincidence?
MS. Yeah, I forgot about the gimbal thing
in Bob Lazar. Again this is kind of after
the fact reasoning, where someone like him
will say, well look I said something like
that “You know years ago or whatever that
you know”. Again that’s that that’s
a sort of post-hoc reasoning, that’s not
really acceptable. It’s not a reliable avenue
to knowledge. In any case, because of all
the other reasons, again just go right back
to he lied about his credentials. In academia
if you lie about your credentials, you’re
out, your career is over. That’s it.
You make up your data and you get caught,
you’re out. You’re not going to be forgiven.
You can’t come back. It’s just because
so much of the system depends on the kind
of internal trust within labs, within scientific
communities that we’re playing by the rules
that we’ve set up with fairly high standards
of reasoning and evidence. It’s one thing
to make a mistake, everybody makes mistakes,
but when all the mistakes go in one particular
direction, that’s an indication of fraud
and then if something comes forward like a
graduate student or a whistle-blower says
“I saw him make up the data” or you get
caught. In some cases they’ve actually found
the lab notes, where they kind of just wrote
in the data and then made mistakes, screwed
up, and then they got caught the way they
had made up the data. That’s it. It’s
over game over. You can’t come back, you
can go find something else to do.
SL. It depends where you are, it depends on
the institution.
MS. Yeah, well, maybe in Russia…
SL. Sometimes they take revenge with the whistle-blowers.
MS. Oh well that again, I mean, in the battle
days whistle-blowers were not trusted, but
this is why we now have whistle-blower laws,
because enough of what whistle-blowers have
said turned out to be true and that they were
persecuted for coming forward that now we
have protections for them.
I think, I don’t know about Julian Assange,
but Edward Snowden to me comes off with his
super high integrity. Like I really believe
what he is saying. He doesn’t seem to be
doing it for any financial gain. He doesn’t
seem to want political power. It doesn’t
seem to be buying for anything. I read his
book. It’s pretty damning for what he’s
exposing. He doesn’t seem to have any reason
to do this other alternate ulterior motive.
So why not treat him like a whistle-blower?
This is a democracy, we’re supposed to know
about a lot of these things. I understand
there’s national secrets and so on, but
a lot of the stuff he exposed we should have
known about this. Warrantless searches for
example. What? I mean the whole purpose of
having to get a warrant is to protect citizens’
privacies.
Anyway, I think he should be brought back
and not prosecuted. Actually if anything I
think he’s something of a hero.
SL. Someone said that Trump might pardon him.
MS. Well we’ll see. I don’t know if Ed
Snowden could get himself to say something
like “Trump is the greatest president in
the history of the world, maybe the universe”.
He probably would get a pardon.
SL. Okay so the other thing I wanted to discuss
is the documentary Mirage Men by Mark Pilkington,
where they talk about Richard Doty. Richard
Doty was a government official that was tasked
to feed false information, deceptive information,
to UFO researchers. One of them was Paul Bennewitz.
This Bennewitz guy was fed with fake information
about UFOs and aliens that went crazy and
he was hospitalized actually. So Richard Doty
says that this is part of the government strategy
to cover up military devices. So let’s say
that there is some curious guy taking pictures
in a restricted area and then what we do is
that we tell him “Okay look these are UFOs
and this is the story, we’re gonna give
you information”. So the information spreads
virally to the UFO community.
MS. Right, so sort of a false flag operation.
SL. Yeah, kind of.
MS. I haven’t seen this film. I don’t
know the detail. I don’t know this case
at all.
SL. That’s why I was thinking, is it possible
that maybe Bob Lazar was brought to a facility,
where they staged an alien spacecraft and
they told him…
MS. I don’t know. Ask Bob Lazar, he may
inculcate that into his memories.
SL. There is another person called the Linda
M. Howe that said that she provided evidence
of a part of an alien spacecraft, a piece
of metal, a layered metal with bismuth magnesium
zinc silver. She said this is the evidence
of an alien spacecraft and they said “Oh
we can’t make this layered structure here
on this planet, so it must be an alien spacecraft”.
MS. Yeah okay, where is this?
SL. She sold the piece of metal to Tom Delonge…
MS. Yeah, that’s right, yeah, yeah, that’s
right…
SL. …for $30 000.
MS. There we go… Jacques Vallée… yeah…
it’s always the same people that are kind
of in the loop here.
SL. Yeah. Same people.
MS. You know, again extra external validation
like… how about some independent lab that
doesn’t even know what it’s supposed to
be testing, doesn’t know what the agenda
is on the table here? How about having them
test it? Also before you say something that
is out of this world let’s first make sure
that it’s not in this world. The fact that
a particular lab or individual can’t identify
it doesn’t make it extraterrestrial. Again
maybe some Russian/Chinese lab somewhere made
something that we don’t know how to make
so what? That’s still terrestrial.
SL. Yeah, so other scientists said that maybe
it’s the residual of some industrial process,
they spoke about the Betterton-Kroll process,
which is something used to remove bismuth
from lead or you can think about the fordite,
which is the that sort of mineral that you
get where they spray paint cars, the paint
keeps accumulating and then you get this mineral.
MS. Yes, I have a paint job like that on my
bicycle, it’s called “refliptive” paint,
where different angles that you look at the
bike, it’s different completely, different
colours, it’s green from one angle, purple
from another angle, because of those little
particles in there. You know they’re kind
of sprayed on. Depending on the angle, it
reflects different colours. That’s brand
new. It was just invented like three four
years ago. If you showed that to somebody
10 years ago they’d go “I don’t know
how that could possibly be made, therefore
extraterrestrial”.
How about just I don’t know, here’s another
principle of science it’s okay to say I
don’t know. This larger principle: before
you say something is out of this world first
make sure it’s not in this world. You know
the little tailings or scrapings from machine
shops, these are notorious UFO artifacts that
turn out to be just the slag left over from
a machine shop. We have some in our office
here that people brought us that we took to
a machine and he goes “oh I can make that
for you” and he did. He’s like oh all
right. Even though the person holding goes
“I have no idea”.
So what reminds me of what we call the pyramidiots,
the people that say “I can’t figure out
how the pyramids were made therefore extraterrestrial”.
In a way it’s just an argument from personal
incredulity, because I can’t think of how
it was done, therefore it couldn’t have
been done by natural means. Maybe you just
don’t know enough, maybe and it’s possible
nobody knows.
MS. You wanted to talk about Graham Hancock
a little bit and ancient archaeology, also
called alternative archaeology and the site
of Gobekli Tepe. We did a whole article on
Skeptic on this, very interesting.[11] It’s
interesting for mainstream scientific reasons
because allegedly monumental architecture
has to be built by so-called advanced civilizations
with large populations that have a division
of labour, agriculture, metallurgy or advanced
stone tool use, and have a large enough population
to make something that massive. So here at
Gobekli Tepe you have a pretty impressive
structure of tens of these stones that weigh
tens of tons that a couple a couple dozen
people couldn’t do seemingly. But this was
11 000 years ago. So this is many thousands
of years before agriculture really took off
to the point where there was a division of
labour and large populations living in cities
that would give you the labour to construct
something monumental like that.
So how did they do it?
Of course now the ancient alien people are
all excited about this. Graham is not one
of those, he just thinks that there was an
advanced terrestrial civilization, not extraterrestrial,
they lived many tens of thousands of years
before our current understanding of when the
first civilizations were and that they’re
the ones that taught the hunter gatherers
how to do this. So the point is that the structures
at Gobekli Tepe, were made by hunter-gatherers,
who, we know, lived in small communities of
a couple dozen to a couple hundred people,
not enough to move around those massive stone
tools. So we think… my response, when I
read about it was “Well maybe we’re just
wrong about what hunter-gatherers can do,
maybe they’re smarter and more sophisticated
than we thought they were”. So why not start
with that rather than again going to the extraterrestrial
or super advanced ancient civilization, because
once you go down that route if that’s true
what else has to be true? That’s another
skeptic principle.
If there was an advanced civilization that
lived say 30 000 years ago, which is what
Graham thinks, where is their trash? Where
are the homes? Where are their stone tools
or metal tools? Where’s their writing? Now
Graham’s response to that is “They didn’t
have any of that because that’s not what
I mean by advanced, I mean, you know, mentally
advanced or psychically advanced or wisdom
advanced”. Okay but that’s not how archaeologists
use that word advanced, they mean something
else, having an alphabet and a calendar and
metal tools, things like that.
I think the real story of Gobekli Tepe and
the mystery there is that we underestimated
the power and intelligence and skills of ancient
peoples. That principle right there goes a
long ways to answering all those ancient alien
questions that began with Erich von Däniken’s
Chariots of the Gods and that launched an
industry, a publishing industry, and then
a kind of search the world for anything spooky
and weird and mysterious that you can’t
explain.
Again just because you can’t explain it
doesn’t mean that there isn’t some archaeologist
or art historian or something like… I really
want to like the Ancient Aliens TV series
on the History Channel but it’s just painful
to watch. They never have a skeptic on. Occasionally
they’ll have on like a real archaeologist
or art historian or somebody that actually
knows something, but they don’t ask them
to address the particular thing that they’re
addressing in the show. How did that thing
there in South America 10 000 feet elevation
of Cusco, Machu Picchu, how did that get made?
Then that person… “Here’s what archaeologists
think that that is how it was made”. They
never do that, they always have the expert
just kind of repeat what the problem is or
“This was a magnificent site and here’s
where it’s located” and then they go to…
what’s his name with the goofy hair… the
guy says “I’m not saying it’s aliens
but it’s aliens”.
Give us what the mainstream scientists think
it is and then go ahead and give us your ancient
alien thing. The reason they don’t do that
I think is because they can see that the mainstream
explanation is always better than the extraterrestrial
explanation and they never have any positive
evidence. Again it’s always the argument
from ignorance or the argument from personal
incredulity “I can’t imagine how they
move those stones so big they could not have
done it through natural means”. How do you
know?
SL. One of the things that you discussed during
that podcast[12]… in particular Hancock
and Carlson brought up several papers, published
papers, supporting two things: (1) that there
was an asteroid or comet impact 13 000 years
ago[13-15] and there are several publications
in Science and other top journals and the
other one was (2) the pre-Clovis occupation
of America.[16-19]
MS. So, the impact hypothesis, you know the
impact hypothesis has gathered some more support
since then that since that podcast. The one
you’re referring to by the way is that the
Joe Rogan podcast with Graham Hancock and
Carlson and myself, then we each had our own
phone a friend expert. Yeah the impact hypothesis
at that time was sort of a hit and miss. Since
then there’s been a few other papers in
support, although there are some skeptics.
Also that that find in San Diego that that
week it was made that week that Graham Hancock
brought up about the mammoth burial, mammoth
site in San Diego that it was dated 130 000
years ago.[20] Now the paper claimed that
that the bones were broken in such a way and
there were some rocks around there that might
have been stone tools would imply that humans
or some kind of hominid broke the bones in
a way to get to the marrow and therefore people
lived in North America 130 000 years ago.
If that were true that would completely overturn
Clovis. Well that is not what the pre-Clovis
archaeologists think at all. They think instead
of 11 to 13 000 years roughly 13, it’s more
like maybe 18 or 20-22. You sort of push the
boundaries depending on the site plus or minus
the error bars on the dates. That’s the
real challenge to Clovis.
Since that podcast there’s again more evidence
for pre-Clovis. So Clovis is probably gone
now. Fine. But I got hammered for being kind
of the defender of the orthodoxy as it were.
The reason that orthodoxy was there it was
because almost a century’s worth of research
to support it. Now that doesn’t make the
orthodoxy permanently right. As Einstein famously
said in response to a book called 100 Scientists
Against Einstein, he said “Why do we need
a hundred, one would do if I’m wrong”.
So again, the falsification is key and finding
older sites consistently particularly as they
spread down North America, such that the native
initial Americans coming over didn’t have
to fly down to South America. In other words
there’s kind of a tracing record down the
coast or whatever to see how they got to South
America with those older older dates.
Now the impact hypothesis is still… part
of what’s still under dispute is the mass
extinction of the all the native mammals.
There’s still some scientists claiming that
the impact itself is not enough to explain
that because not all species went extinct
and other species went extinct that were not
affected by the impact. So at the very least
it’s probably over hunting hypothesis and
maybe the weakening of the populations because
of the decimation due to the impact. Something
like that.
There has been a paper published challenging
the San Diego paper in Nature.[21] So people
can read it and decide if… For me I’m
just gonna say you know, I doubt it, that’s
the extraordinary claim. Therefore we need
a lot of evidence to overturn it. Where were
the people a hundred thousand years ago then
there should be sites that are 120 000 years
old, 115 000 years old, 110 000 years old?
In other words there should be a record between
here and there, but to jump from these kind
of pre-Clovis claims of maybe 20-25 000 years
old to 130 000 years old with nothing in between,
that makes me sceptical.
Also it’s good to remember that the site
was discovered because there was a construction
with heavy equipment driving over the bones
that are in the dirt not far below. So another
hypothesis is that the bones were broken because
of the heavy equipment. The stone tools, these
are not like these beautifully crafted Clovis
stones that are obviously artificially produced.
They’re just kind of broken in a way that
if you squint and use your imagination maybe
it was made by a person, but maybe not. Also
130 000 years ago, who would that be? Neanderthals
or Denisovans?
So now we’re off the page of science and
we’re just kind of speculating. It’s fun,
super interesting.
I like Graham. By the way he’s a really
good writer. I like his books. I’ve read
most of his books and I like that he’s there
doing that because science does need its outsiders.
It needs people to challenge the orthodoxy
as long as you’re willing to say usually
the outsiders and the challengers even inside
challengers to the orthodoxy are wrong, they’re
usually wrong. The reason science is so conservative
and careful and cautious is because most ideas
that scientists come up with are wrong. You
know they’re in the lab they’re just spitballing
ideas and let’s just see what we can come
up with and then test it and see what happens.
Again back to Einstein, he wasn’t world
famous until after 1919 when Eddington tested
his general theory of relativity with the
bending of starlight around the sun during
the solar eclipse. Before that no one knew
who Einstein was outside of physics. In physics
he was he was pretty famous but outside of
that he was nobody. He was mostly famous because
of those five papers he wrote in 1905 that
proved the existence of molecules and the
Brownian motion paper and a few other things.
That caught the attention of the professional
community and it got him a real job. But that
isn’t what made him famous. What made him
famous was here’s an actual experiment that
confirmed it. It zagged almost to the perfect
exact point that he said it would. Okay that’s
what it takes.
SL. Which is something that those string theory
guys would need now probably…
MS. I get these letters here. Here’s one.
I just got today. There’s a big package
full of stuff and all these little clippings
and notes and folded papers “It’s the
theory of physics… Einstein was wrong and
newton was wrong and hawking was wrong and
I’ve been working on it in my garage my
whole life and I got it all figured out”.
Okay I really don’t have to read it. The
chances that this guy overturning all that
is pretty much nil.
SL. I got some of those guys on LinkedIn…
it happened to me as well…
MS. That’s right you’re a physicist right
yeah you probably get you probably get those
letters too…
SL. So another thing I forgot to mention before
was, going back to the UFOs, this is very
important, David Hambling, who is a journalist
based in the UK, here, wrote an interesting
article about US Navy Laser Creates Plasma
UFO.[22] There was a patent in 2018,[23] where
they (US Navy) describe a decoy system for
fighter jets that basically works with a laser.
So the laser ionizes the air and then it raster
scans in that region and then it creates an
image, a hologram basically, and this hologram
can be in different frequencies, it can be
in the visible, in the infrared, and the UV.
So this thing can be picked up by other missiles,
people can see it. So this guy was saying,
and I think this is a good explanation, that
maybe what these people are seeing is just
a hologram. This is nothing weird. But if
that’s the case the government is not going
to tell you that this is a hologram, because
this is the decoy system. So they wouldn’t
want you to know. This is not something fancy,
is not weird, it’s something that it’s
within physics. But go and prove it.
SL. Another thing I wanted to ask you is about
the connection between UFOs and transcendental
meditation. Why there seems to be a connection
between these two things? There is another
guy (Steven Greer) that talks about summoning
aliens. He’s got this protocol that he can
use to call aliens…
MS. Right again to me it’s just more hand
waving for why they don’t have physical
evidence for their claims. Well “they’re
interdimensional beings, they’re not they’re
spiritual beings, not physical beings”.
In science fiction there’s kind of this
trend, it’s sort of an evolutionary model
that humans evolve eventually to having large
and larger brains, thinner bodies that are
kind of weak, which is why aliens always look
like these bulbous head with thin little arms
and so on. But if you project it out, eventually,
and this is kind of science fiction really,
is that we’re just pure spirit. You upload
your mind into the cloud and there you are.
This is an actual scenario that some people
think we can achieve immortality by uploading
your connectome, the map of all your neural
connections into the equivalent of the cloud,
whatever that would be. There you are, you’re
up there. No! You wouldn’t be up there,
you’re still there, it would just be a copy,
it’s not you. In any case, it’s not even
a person. But the idea is that far advanced,
far future advanced extraterrestrials, or
far future humans will just be spiritual in
nature, will shed our bodies because even
if you’re chronically frozen and brought
back your body is still just protein, it’s
going to break down or even if you uploaded
your mind into the cloud, but there still
has to be some servers or something that holds
the memory, it’s a giant file that has to
be stored somewhere. You still need some medium
that could be destroyed.
So the next logical step in the fantasy, if
we want to call it that, is that you’re
just pure spirit like soul. This gets to the
idea of insoulment, the ghost in the machine.
There’s just something about us that’s
non-material. This is that kind of platonic
idea, Descartes dualism, where there’s the
physical stuff then there’s the mental stuff,
whatever that is, but it’s not physical.
The connection you’re looking for there
it’s not just transcendental meditation
people, but anybody that believes in a kind
of a dualistic nature that has kind of a sci-fi
fantasy-prone personality can dream up a scenario
like that.
SL. The other thing I wanted to discuss was
water memory and homeopathy. What do you think
when this sort of… well that’s considered
a pseudoscience now because many countries
have recognized that homeopathy is basically
a fraud, kind of, it’s a multi-billion industry
and there have been some papers in the past
even in Nature[24,25] and but then the problem
is that in this case this pseudoscience involves
medicine.
MS. But it’s not medicine, this is why it’s
not regulated. In the United States anyway
it’s considered a food product. So in terms
of like what the FDA regulates, as long as
you’re not poisoning people and homeopathy
doesn’t do anything. It’s by definition
an inert substance that’s come in contact
with the allegedly curative substance and
it has the memory of it in its molecule, whatever
that means. So as far as the government regulatory
agencies are concerned it’s harmless, it’s
like taking mega vitamins or whatever, as
long as you don’t hurt anybody, who cares.
It’s not right so it’s not a medicine
that has to meet the higher standards and
this is how they get around that. There’s
thousands, I don’t know, millions of products
in that category that are not medicines and
they even say usually on the box “this is
not a medicine, doesn’t treat you, see your
doctor and so on”. They have those warnings
on there because they’ve probably been sued
or warned that they’re making claims beyond
what they can make as a food product or supplement.
SL. Yeah, I remember James Randy doing the
show, where he ingested I don’t know many,
he overdosed with (homeopathic) sleeping pills.
MS. Yeah, well, it’s because it doesn’t
do anything. And again with anecdotal thinking
if you’re sick and all of a sudden you get
better, whatever you did just before you got
better that’s what gets the credit. So it
doesn’t have to be homeopathy, it could
be acupuncture, acupressure, or some Chinese
medicine, or meditation. Anything really.
SL. I think the problem comes when you go
for this remedy is instead of taking real
medicines.
MS. Yeah so when it’s alternative to a medicine
you actually need that’s when it’s dangerous.
SL. In your book Skeptic[26] you mentioned
that 40% of Americans believe in ESP[27] and
that in 2002 there was a study revealing that
apparently there is no correlation between
science knowledge and paranormal belief, how
is that?
MS. This is held up recently with postmodern
beliefs and the idea that we’re living in
a post-truth world. There’s climate denial
and anti-vaccinations and so on. Turns out
that having scientific knowledge or having
had courses in science does next to nothing
to sort of protect your beliefs from these
alternative and wrong, usually wrong, beliefs.
It’s not having scientific facts themselves
that’s going to do it. It’s really teaching
people how to think about claims and this
is why I teach my course Skepticism 101: How
to Think Like a Scientist, this I teach at
Chapman University and you can get the course
on the Great Courses teaching companies. Great
courses. Most of my books are oriented toward
this. What I’m trying to do is not tell
you what to think about UFOs or psychics or
astrology or conspiracy theories, it’s how
to think about them, because I don’t know
what’s going to come down the pike that’s
going to be popular in a decade from now.
I have no idea. But I want you to be equipped
with certain tools like we’ve been talking
about. Again:
- Before you say something’s out of this
world first make sure that it’s not in this
world
- The burden of proof is not on you to disprove
it’s on the claimant to prove
- Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence
My books there, in which I present those principles.
I think the solution to this post-truth world
we’re supposedly living in, we are not,
is to teach people how to think, when you
hear some particular claim. It could be a
politician or an economist or some pundit
on a on a radio talk show. How do we know
that’s true? Just ask some basic questions.
Where does that claim come from? Did anybody
fact check it? I’ve been impressed with
since the 2016 election the rise in importance
of sites like Politifact and Snopes and our
own Skeptic. These are fact-checking sites
and in some cases whenever Trump gives a speech,
they have a team of fact-checkers right there,
in real time, posting whether what he just
said is true or not, and you know then they
rate it on a scale of one to five. I think
the biggest lies are, you know, the Pinocchio
pants on fire or whatever the long the long
nose, rating. The different sites have different
methods of this. That’s that tells us there’s
a market for that, that people actually want
to know, they care about the truth and that’s
the solution to the problem.
So when someone denies climate or they accept
climate science probably neither one of them
knows much about climate science. It’s a
technical field, I don’t know much about
it. It’s not my area. What you’re doing
is signalling to your tribe that you acknowledge
the value of science and that it’s a hard-earned,
supported consensus science, or you’re signalling
to your tribe that you doubt it because it’s
so politicized. Since Al Gore’s film Inconvenient
Truth kind of popularized climate science
and he was the democratic vice-president so
that made climate science a liberal connection
a claim. Therefore conservatives sort of feel
like they have to be against it, even though
they don’t know anything about it. But neither
does these the person on the other side. So
we’re signalling for other reasons. Call
it virtue signalling.
SL. Basically the question was Why People
Believe Weird Things?[28] that’s an old
book that you wrote in 1995…
MS. That was my first book. There’s a cover
right there. That’s my latest book Giving
the Devil His Due.[12] Yeah so why people
believe weird things. I’m a psychologist
by training and historian of science, I’m
interested in why people believe the claims
they do as well as whether the claims are
true or not so I have kind of a dual role
as the publisher of Skeptic. In both cases
I think they’re both important. Whether
the claim is true or not and then why people
believe it, particularly, when it’s apparent
that it’s not true. So that’s what I focus
on. Again it’s social, it’s virtue signalling,
it’s signalling to your social tribe. Now
there’s a lot of these extra evidentiary
factors at work and why people believe.
SL. You go a lot into politics in your latest
book and maybe we can talk about politics
another time if you have time. This time I
wanted to focus mainly on pseudoscience.
MS. We’ll do that do that for my next book
I want to do on what’s truth how do you
know it’s true. Well that applies to politics,
economics, ideology, morality. I’m a realist.
I want to live in the world of facts and I
think scientific facts can inform at least
even moral questions.
SL. But apparently there are people that think
that truth is subjective, there is a problem
with the relativism…
MS. They tend to be on the left and that’s
worrisome to me because that kind of first
of all reinforces the Christian conservative
right, that there are these supernatural given
divine command morals. But that’s wrong,
they’re wrong about that. But that doesn’t
mean therefore everything is relative and
there are no real moral values, there’s
just opinions people have and cultural shifts
and changes that happen. “Slavery was popular
and now it’s condemned but maybe it’ll
be accepted again someday, who knows. It’s
all just relative”. No, I disagree with
that anyway. I argue that, I have a couple
of essays in that book, you just held up Giving
the Devil his Due, arguing against that particular
claim, that relativist claim.
SL. So cold fusion is… well first of all
let’s say what proper fusion is. Fusion
is what happens in the sun. You have atoms
that merge together and then they release
extreme amounts of energy and that’s how
the sun burns basically. We can reproduce
this on Earth with hydrogen bombs but also
with the nuclear reactors, TOKAMAKS for example,
but there are people that claim that these
things can be done at room temperature. There
was a paper in 1989 and now there is this
guy called Andrea Rossi who is trying to sell
a device called E-Cat.[29] The interesting
thing about this device is that the Australian
skeptics basically asked the guy if they could
inspect the device but the guy said “No
I’m not going to allow you to inspect it”
and they offered him one million dollars for
that and the guy said “No”.
MS. That’s a red flag. You claim to have
a device that gives you energy too cheap to
meter it’s going to save the world and so
on. That was a claim made about coal fusion.
But at least to their credit Pons and Fleischmann,
said “go ahead and test it, here’s how
we did it” and then no one could replicate
it. They realized it was just a chemical reaction,
not a nuclear reaction. But their mistake
was to hold the press conference first and
make promises that “we’re going to change
the world” before the replication. Now most
of the perpetual motion machine people they
don’t even want to be tested because they
know their game is up then.
SL. Quantum quackery and mysticism. Why do
you think people again want to merge mysticism
with quantum mechanics?
MS. Quantum physics is spooky and weird and
consciousness is spooky and weird so they
must be connected. How about there’s just
a lot of spooky and weird things out there,
doesn’t mean they’re necessarily connected.
We will have an explanation for consciousness
that neuroscientists are working on. There’s
some interesting ideas there or maybe it’s
conceptually the wrong question to ask. It
may just be a brute fact of nature that consciousness
exists full stop, whatever it is, who knows.
But that has nothing to do with quantum physics.
Quantum physics as far as I know is very very
very well supported. But it’s in the realm
of the subatomic, it’s not at the macro
level, although there are some claims that
you can get some quantum effects at the macro
level. Okay then what does quantum mean, if
it’s at the macro level? Anyway that’s
a different story. But in terms of what you’re
asking, is again as soon as there’s something
super interesting and weird in the physical
sciences isn’t long before people in psychology
or social psychology or whatever glom onto
it or particularly in ESP research looking
for some causal explanation. Now the part
of the problem is there’s nothing to explain,
people cannot read other people’s minds,
people cannot read the backs of playing cards,
they cannot do any of those ESP paranormal
PSI-type phenomenon that therefore needs an
explanation like quantum physics, there’s
nothing to explain because they can’t do
it.
SL. Do you remember the documentary What the
Bleep?
MS. Yeah, What the Bleep Do We Know!? Yeah,
of course, I saw it, we reviewed that and
I wrote about it. Yeah it’s the same thing.
There’s nothing to explain beyond statistical
chance and randomness and coincidence and
so on that are alleged to be mysteries that
need some kind of spooky explanation, no explanation
is needed because there’s nothing that needs
explaining.
SL. Funding research on weird things. Let’s
say that you are having a panel of peer reviewers
and someone comes to you and it tells you
“Okay we’re looking for funding for this
specific project”, but that project is a
bit weird so how would you judge? How do you
balance between being too much skeptic and
being too much on the other side? Where is
the balance?
MS. First of all… funding… private funding
agencies can do whatever they want. Bill Gates
can fund whatever he wants or the Templeton
Foundation fund whatever they want. So if
they want to fund paranormal research okay
fine. I’m not going to object to that. Although
I will say that that particular area has been
researched now for well over a century and
there’s still nothing to sink your teeth
into. There was the last big one was Bem’s
research from what was that 2010-2011, of
the you know backward causality, about extra
sensory perception of anticipating what’s
going to appear on the screen, this computer
screen, that was hidden and that the people
could do it slightly more better than chance.
Well turns out there was some methodological
problems. He ran nine experiments, but only
reported two of them. Why didn’t you report
the other seven? Because they didn’t come
out as significant. So it’s called the file
drawer problem, which is emblematic of another
larger problem in the replication crisis,
is that you know experimenters start off in
one direction and then change their mind and
do something else and they report it is if
that something else was what they plan to
do all along, but they went down that route
the first place because the original one wasn’t
going anywhere. But again file drawer problem,
we don’t get to read about that.
Stuart Ritchie has a great book about this
that just came out, it’s called Science
Fictions and it’s really great. The last
chapter outlines what has to be done. There’s
these common websites now where you post the
research you’re going to conduct. “This
is what I’m going to do, I’m going to
run these six experiments and here’s how
I’m going to do it and I will report the
results of all of them, so none of this cherry
picking your data, you know or throwing out
the high and low scores to make it come out
statistically significant, and so on and that’s
a good corrective for that problem. But it
really began with the Bem the ESP experiment.
That’s the last one anyone’s come up with.
That’s kind of made a public notice that
ESP might be real. So you’re talking since
the you know the 1880s or so, when the two
psychical societies one in England and one
in the United States started conducting experiments.
These were real scientists trying to do really
good research. That’s where the Zener cards
were invented for example. So here we are.
We got a 130-140 years of experiments and
still we got nothing. So why would you spend
any more money on that? Spend money on how
to improve batteries for electric cars or
something that’s going to be a little more
useful and have some results. In other words
I’m not against it. Go look for Bigfoot
if you want. But the fact that people have
been searching for Bigfoot for over for centuries
now and we still don’t have a body, probably
means it is not out there.
SL. Thank you very much.
MS. Well thanks for having me on the show.
