← UnHerd with Freddie Sayers
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Michael Shermer
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Unherd Host
Hello and welcome back to Unherd. You might have noticed that last week former President of America Barack Obama went on a podcast and said something rather interesting. Take a listen.
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Avi Loeb
Are aliens real?
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Progressive Insurance Advertiser
They're real, but I haven't seen them. And they're not being kept in, what is it?
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Michael Shermer
Area 51.
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Progressive Insurance Advertiser
Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they, they hid it from the President of the United States.
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Unherd Host
This of course led to Donald Trump saying something else quite interesting.
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Michael Shermer
Barack Obama said that aliens are real. Have you seen any evidence of non human visitors to Earth?
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Commentator/Guest
Well, he gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that.
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Michael Shermer
So aliens are real?
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Commentator/Guest
Well, I don't know if they're real or not. I can tell you he gave class information. He's not supposed to be doing that. He made a, he made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information. No, I don't, I don't have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it. Do you believe it, Peter?
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Michael Shermer
Well, the President can declassify anything that he wants to.
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Commentator/Guest
So if you want to make it, I may get him out of trouble
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Unherd Host
by declassifying, which in turn caused a tidal wave of speculation about what, if anything, the two presidents had seen while in office that might have convinced them of the existence of aliens. Since then, Trump has directed the US government to prepare the release of files on UFOs and aliens. And suddenly it seems like we could be closer than ever to knowing are we really alone in the universe. But before you don your helmet and start to storm Area 51, let's take a moment to look at the evidence. I've appealed to two of the biggest experts on this subject to give us the best case for, for and against extraterrestrial life. A returning guest to the channel, it's been about two years since our last video with him, which I enjoyed immensely, is Arvi Loeb. He's a professor at Harvard University, where he chaired the Department of astronomy until 2020. Welcome back to Unherd, Avi.
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Avi Loeb
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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Unherd Host
And on the other side is Michael Sharma. He's a historian of science and the founder of Skeptic magazine and author of a new book, Truth, which is out now, and we've got a link in the description. Welcome to One Herd, Michael.
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Michael Shermer
Oh, you're welcome, as always.
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Unherd Host
Before we start this debate in earnest, it's probably important to mention that you two actually already have a $1,000 bet with each other that by 2030 there will be proof of alien contact. And I want to hear from you the most robust case on both sides of this debate and ask exactly what could be in these declassified documents when they're revealed. But first, Arvi, what was your reaction to Obama's slip of the tongue?
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Avi Loeb
If there is some substance behind it, in other words, evidence that indicates non human intelligence, then of course, it's the biggest revelation of human history. However, since we haven't seen the evidence, we don't know. And therefore, if I take both possibilities into account, I cannot be excited as of yet.
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Unherd Host
Michael, you must be getting fairly tired now of being called up every time this happens. What did you think when you heard this recent revelation from Obama?
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Michael Shermer
I mean, this goes all the way back to Jimmy Carter talking about his UFO experience, which was probably a rocket launch, it now looks like. But, you know, most presidents have made some comments about this. Obama, when he first said that they're real, you know, are. What about aliens? I think they're real. I, I thought he was referring to the videos. These UAP videos, they're real. That gets back to the New York Times 2017 article in which the UFO people said, the New York Times says they're real. But actually what they were saying is the videos are real, they're not fake, these UAP videos. But then he walked it back and the next day said, what I meant was that in a cosmos this vast, with this many stars and galaxies and planets and so on, chances are pretty good there's alien somewhere. It's like, oh, okay, so, you know, most people confuse those two questions. Are they out there somewhere? Had they come here and the UFO people, the UAP people, you know, they're reasonably confident they're here now. And that's not what, you know, SETI scientists and other scientists who study, you know, bacterial grade life on other planets by looking at their atmospheres for oxygen and things like that, they're not thinking about they're here. They're thinking they're out there somewhere.
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Unherd Host
Now, I'LL let you duke it out for a bit between the two of you, Avi, perhaps you can start what is your most robust case for why you've put your own hard earned cash on the line on this bet? Why do you think we are facing an imminent revelation of alien contact with Earth?
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Avi Loeb
Well, my argument is simple. Only over the past decade we started discovering with telescopes objects from outside the solar system near Earth. And we haven't really invested in checking whether we have any packages in our mailbox that were produced by alien civilizations. So it's a new research frontier. And one way to look at the science of physics is as a verified method for developing constraints on our imagination. There are infinite possibilities for what the physical reality might be, and only a small minority of these possibilities are realized. So to find out which ones, we use experimental evidence collected carefully with instruments. All of us can attend a science fiction movie, subscribe to cults on social media, place goggles on our head that allow us to access the metaverse or take drugs, and then we would live in a virtual reality where the constraints are vaporized and that would give rise to a pleasurable experience and make us happy. But the raw physical reality that we all share without these supplements is under no obligation to make us happy. Think about the dialogue of an experimental physicist with nature as a relationship. The most long term successful relationships are are those that are based on factual details about the partner rather than on wishful thinking. And so we now have the opportunity to figure out if we are being visited. And that's what I'm working on as a practicing scientist. And that's thrilling because there is a chance that we might find something. Obviously if we will not seek the evidence, we will never find anything. And so I'm excited. But by the anomalies that for example, the first interstellar object Oumuamua showed it was changing its brightness every eight hours by a factor of 10, meaning that it had a very extreme shape. It was also pushed away from the sun without showing any evidence for gas or dust around it. And those are anomalies that make it different than the asteroids and comets that we are used to. And the same is true about 3i Atlas, the more recent interstellar object that was traveling in the plane of the planets around the sun to within 5 degrees and shows three jets coming from its nucleus that are very symmetric relative to each other. Had the nickel with very little iron that we only find in industrial production of nickel alloys. So there are anomalies. That's what intrigues me. But we don't have a conclusive evidence as of yet for a visit. However, we have a path forward because many more interstellar objects will be discovered. There was an interstellar meteor that I went after to the Pacific Ocean and collected materials to check if it's a voyager like probe that collided with Earth from interstellar space. We just announced a new interstellar meteor that we discovered with my postdoc and I'm leading the Galileo project that built three observatories, one in Massachusetts, another in Pennsylvania, and a third one in Nevada, seeking data on millions of objects every year, where we are now starting to analyze that data with artificial intelligence software. We are actually also engaging the public and people are very excited about that. So my excitement is similar to a person who goes on a date. You never know whether you will find a partner, but nevertheless, you will remain lonely if you don't try. That's the mistake of Enrico Fermi when he asked where is everybody? That was very presumptuous of him. I would say you are not that attractive for them to come to you and have lunch with you in Los Alamos. You should build a telescope, observatories, check them out. And you know, we are just at the beginning of that search. So we shouldn't expect to know much until we, you know, spend several years or several decades investing billions of dollars in this search. That's how science is done. We invested billions of dollars in the search for dark matter. We invested billions of dollars in the search for microbes. We haven't found any. We haven't found what dark matter is. But it's the way that science should be done. Those people who say it's an extraordinary claim, but are not willing to allocate the billions of dollars, they're not willing to give their time to the collection of data. You know, those people are anti science. They are basically not willing to engage in the search.
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Unherd Host
Okay, Michael, pour some cold water on Avi's puppyish enthusiasm there. What is the skeptics case for doubt?
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Michael Shermer
Yeah, Avi. Avi needs an app like Tinder where he swipes right for the aliens. Maybe, maybe that's the next Galileo project is an app. I support the Galileo project and to Avi's credit, he's the only one of the, you know, anybody in this space that would take me up on my bet. Thousand dollar Bet that by December 31, 2030, we will not find alien contact or out there or here. And he bets we will. Okay, so the only other person is Nick Pope in that space who would Even talk to me. All the other UAP UFO people, they don't even talk to me. That tells me they're more like. It's more like a religion. They don't treat it like a scientific question, like obvious. That's why I support the Galileo project. I was one of the first to jump on it because it's like, at least there's a pathway forward, there's some way to test it. My frustration with the whole UAP community and the, you know, congressional hearings and people like Grush and David Fravor and all those pilots and so on, you know, they, they all, they all saw something weird in the sky. Okay, what was it? Or they know somebody that touched the alien spacecraft. Okay, who is this? Can't tell you. Where is the alien spaceship? It's in a warehouse. Where's the warehouse? Can't tell you. And it always goes like that. You know, you can see over my shoulder, Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov. On the other side. You know, since the 70s and 80s, I've been following this and I've been hearing, you know, disclosure is coming. We're gonna, it's, it's coming any day now, but it never happens. So maybe that's way forward. Maybe the way forward is, you know, what Avi's doing. Let's go look and see now. I think the odds are pretty low. You know, when Avi went to the South Pacific, I thought he was going to haul up the Millennium Falcon dashboard or something. I didn't realize, you know, it was these little spherules. Okay. Really hard to tell what's going on there. So more tests would be good. But in general, I think they're probably out there somewhere. So the scientists who are using massive telescopes to look at atmospheres of other planets, that sort of thing, that's one avenue forward. Avi' look to see if some of these interstellar objects might not be comets. They may be intentional technological devices of some kind. And one thing we agree on is that if there are aliens, they're not going to be just like five years ahead of us. You know, the UFO story about Roswell is, you know, we had these vacuum tubes and then the aliens crashed in New Mexico. By the way, they always seem to crash. They traverse the vast distances of Illustrator stellar space and they get to New Mexico and they can't seem to land any case. And that we back engineered silicon chips, you know, integrated chips from, from vacuum tubes, as if, you know, we're just five years away. Well, this is ridiculous. If there's Aliens, there'll be like a million years ahead of us. And so these artifacts.
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Avi Loeb
Yeah, I should comment on that point that Michael just mentioned, that the SETI community is also sharing that blame because they've been searching for a technology that was developed 100 years ago for communication, the radio transmission signals. And if the aliens have a science and technology that is a thousand years more mature or million years more mature than ours, they will not use that technology. And so we've been since 1960, we've been for 65 years searching for radio signals. But that to me is very naive in the same way that imagining technologies that we possess being used by aliens is naive.
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Michael Shermer
It's an interesting problem that Avi brings up about anomalies. You know, in the history of science, what do you do with anomalies? You know, many people take those anomalies and spin them up into a whole new worldview, which is what the UFO people do. I'm not saying Avi's not doing that, but he is looking at those anomalies we have now, what, four interstellar objects, Is that right? Three eye atlases. Three. There's been one since then, maybe. Anyway, not very many. There's probably millions of them out there. So once we have a database of, you know, like we have a hundred thousand interstellar objects and 10 of them look like this and the others don't, something like that would help. But with, you know, an N of 3 or 4, it's hard to know what's normal, right?
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Avi Loeb
Exactly. I mean, again, the analogy with dating, you can, if you get married to the first date, you might have missed an opportunity to have a better person, better partner.
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Michael Shermer
But on the other hand, you might have found the right one right away. So you never know.
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Avi Loeb
Well, yeah, but statistically speaking, you need a big sample, and I completely agree with that. So that's what I'm working on. I mean, overall, we are living in an exciting time because we have the scientific tools to figure out whether we are being visited by non human intelligence. The problem is that first, that there is a large swath of the academic community not engaging with this question at all. In fact, the SETI community is banning any discussions on UAP in their conferences, which is anti scientific. In addition to that, we are using survey architecture, for example, telescopes like the Rubin Observatory that can only detect objects moving roughly at the same speed as the planets move around the sun, okay, tens of kilometers per second. If there was an object flying much faster than that, much faster than our rockets, which are also moving roughly at that speed, then we would miss it because it would appear either as a streak that is very faint in our images, so the astronomers would ignore it, or because these images are taken after exposing the telescope over a finite period of time, and the object will just appear as a streak. But in addition to that, it may appear only in one image because it already went in a different place by the time the second image is taken. So we won't know the speed of the object and it will be ignored. And in addition, there are of course, many faint objects. The only objects we can detect right now, interstellar objects, are bigger than a football field within a distance comparable to the Earth's sun separation. And just think about it, you know, there are so many small objects compared to big objects. The only rocket that is comparable in size to a football field is starship. We haven't really used it yet, but in most of it is fuel. So there could be a lot of objects much smaller than that. In fact, I calculated from the sample of interstellar meteors that there should be of order several million objects like the size of a person, like the meteors that we identified within the orbit of the Earth around the sun. And we don't know about them unless they happen to collide with Earth. So, you know, several tens of millions of objects the size of a person coming from interstellar space. The fundamental question is, is any of them artificial in origin and artifact and we just don't have the ability to observe them?
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Michael Shermer
Maybe I can read just a short passage here from my book, which is quoting Leslie Kean. She's the big ufologist who wrote the book Generals, pilots and government Officials Go on the Record. She's the author of that 2017 New York Times cover story about UFOs. She says that roughly 90 to 95% of all sightings by UFO people over the decades are weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets, Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddy, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off the clouds, lights on the ground, lights reflected in a cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole punch clouds, and the list goes on. So back to the question, what do you do with the other 5 to 10%? Okay, so Avi saying, well, let's train our telescopes on it. I say, good. Yeah, okay, that sounds good. Likely the Galileo project will mostly find in that 95% bin, you know, birds and planes and whatever, but, you know, if there's one that stands out. In the meantime, you know, what the ufologists do is they take that 5% and they go, that's, that's it. Aliens are here. We have a whole new thing going on here. Whereas I say it's just anomalies and we don't, we don't have to do anything with them. Just let it sit there.
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Avi Loeb
So, Michael, on that, there is no doubt that any real evidence is diluted by a flood of bullshit and misinformation.
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Michael Shermer
Yes. Right.
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Avi Loeb
So to separate the wheat from the chaff, we must examine carefully what we hold in our hands. And that's what science is all about. And what I resist is the notion that we should divorce ourselves from this question, which is the notion adopted by the SETI community as well as the academic community at large. And I believe this subject deserves to be discussed within the mainstream of physics because government agencies are talking about objects they cannot identify. So suppose we allocate resources to finding out what these are and we end up concluding that these are human made objects. Then at the very least we help national security, that it's not a wasted effort. And that's why I feel that it should be part of the mainstream of physics. Just, you know, we are talking about objects in the sky. These are the kinds of things that we can figure out.
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Unherd Host
Is this where perhaps people are provoked into a more conspiratorial mindset around the question of UFOs? Because of course, if they sense a resistance or even censoriousness to go even further in the academic community or in the skeptics community around talking about this subject, that's, I suppose, where the seed of doubt comes in about whether or not we're being given the full picture. And that's where you start having People storming Area 51 dressed as green aliens in the hope that they might find something in there that had been locked away from the public. So is this slight resistance, is that causing that conspiratorial mindset to flourish?
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Avi Loeb
You are exactly right. And I do believe that transparency is, or as other people put it, shining light, cures all diseases. You know, like, so this, we shouldn't keep this in the dark. We should open it up, figure out what it is and move on. And it will save a lot of time. Too many people, because they're wasting their time right now. In the same way that my argument is that string theorists might be wasting their time right now. It's not as if the mainstream of academia is always doing reliable, trusted and tested work you have people that for 50 years occupy the mainstream of theoretical physics that are talking about extra dimensions. And so far, all the experimental data we have indicates just three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. That's it. But nevertheless, they keep doing that. They haven't explained anything that was not explained before. They haven't made any statement about what happened around the Big Bang or what happens inside a black hole. So they're basically, they didn't serve the physics community by making a testable prediction that can be falsified. And you ask yourself, how can that be the mainstream? Why is that more reliable than UAP believers? I'm not sure it is more reliable than UAP believers, You know, so it's not as if this speculation, the tendency to speculations is always within the public. It's also within the mainstream of academia. And my point is that on both ends we should approach it with a grain of salt and always use evidence to guide us because we can waste our time just imagining things.
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Unherd Host
Michael, what say you to that challenge that I make there? That actually, in fact the kind of rationalist skeptics might be somewhat to blame for the proliferation of these conspiracy theories?
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Michael Shermer
Conspiracy theories are a big part of the UFO history of that community. Again, these are different people. These are not Avis in the SETI scientists. These are people that are very conspiratorial minded. Why? Because they don't have evidence. So their conviction that we have been visited, the aliens are here, they have been here. All right? And then people like me say, show me. And they say, well, we can't because it's covered up. Or the aliens are being hidden in Area 51 or at Wright Patterson Air Force Base or at some warehouse outside of Washington D.C. okay, can we see it? No, it's classified. Or the men in black will come and squelch you and so on. So we have to have whistleblower laws to protect them to come forward. And that's sort of where we are now. You know, why don't these people come forward? Finally, Trump has said, all right, I'm putting Pete Hegseth on the, on the job and little Marco, and they're going to tell us, okay, fine. What I think is probably going to happen is they're going to come forward and go, you know, we looked. This is what Obama said. You know, I looked around, I had my people check Area 51, all that. We didn't see anything. You know, Clinton said the same thing. I looked into it. Bush said it. Bush W said, you know, he looked at it. Didn't find anything. So I think Trump and Hegseth and them will say, you know, we checked, we just didn't find anything. And then the uf, the UAP people will say that's because they don't have a need to know. This is a deep state, a deep dark program that even the Secretary of War and the President of the United States himself doesn't know about. Or they'll go the way of, of Representative Luna, who said that the UAPs are interdimensional beings, so by definition you can't see them because they're of a different dimension. And of course there's no physics behind that, as Avi just explained. But that's a convenient conspiracy kind of conspiracy theory. Like the reason I can't show you the evidence is because whatever, they're hiding it or they're invisible or whatever. And so that's where I always turn to Sagan's dragon in Demon Haunted World. Carl had that thought experiment of, you know, I have a dragon in my garage. Would you like to see it? It's like, yeah, that would be cool if dragons are real. So you open the garage and you look around, you see an old bicycle and paint cans and a ladder, but there's no dragon. And I say, well, this is an invisible dragon. And you go, invisible dragon. Okay, how about we sprinkle some flour on the ground and then the dragon walks around and we'll see the footprints of the dragon. And I say, well, no, this is a levitating dragon. It's about a foot off the ground and it's invisible. And you're like, okay, invisible levitating dragon. I know. We'll get one of those, those pandemic thermometer things that you point at people to get their temperature. And we'll point it in around the garage, we'll see the outline of the dragon. No, this is a cold blooded dragon. What about the fire that it breathes now? It's cold fire. Okay, what's the difference between, you know, invisible, levitating, cold blooded, cold fire breathing dragon and no dragon at all? Right, so back to Avi's point. There has to be some way to test for it, or else we're just talking like it's a religious faith. And that's, in my opinion, what the UFO community is. It's a religious faith.
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Avi Loeb
I wanted to intervene and defend and basically say that I really appreciate the vision taken by Representative Anna Paulina Luna, because if there is anything hidden from us, we could potentially unravel it. And I will be glad as a scientist to, to take part and help with the interpretation. So if there is something, any substance out there that perhaps was shared with corporations or not, I don't know, I'm happy to look into it. Now I was asked, as a scientist, you know, suppose they ask you to sign a non disclosure agreement? Okay, then you would not be able to share it with your colleagues. Frankly, you know, I'm just like a kid. I'm happy to know by following the scientific method, I want to see it, to examine it. I don't care if people have a lot of likes on social media. You know, when I come out and say I cannot tell you anything, this doesn't bother me at all, at all. I just want to know. I want to know whether we are alone or not. And I don't mind taking it to the grave. But as of now, I haven't really seen the evidence and I would love to see it if it exists. So I really salute Representative Luna. In making all the efforts to do that. I also visited the old Domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Pentagon following their invitation and I asked them frankly, did you see anything? And they said no, except for some FBI reports they said that are really puzzling and actually Representative Luna is trying to get those reports out. I asked them, are you sure you have access to everything? And they said, yes, but who knows? Maybe it's compartmentalized within government. At any event, if it exists, we have to see the beef. Where is the beef?
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Michael Shermer
This is what Elon said. Elon said, I have a free pass to see all the cool stuff in government. When he was head of Doge and he said, I didn't see anything about aliens. And I looked and I would love to believe in aliens. If there's aliens, I'm going to be the first to announce it. It's like, okay, good.
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Unherd Host
To take the position of the conspiracist here, you would then say, of course, Arvi and Elon have both signed NDAs, of course. And that they would obviously say that they saw nothing when they looked into it. And if you were really deep down that rabbit hole, as many people do seem to be, you would say, well, all of these people are in a kind of cabal of alien acknowledgers who don't actually want to share the reality of what's going on with the rest of the world. I mean, army, obviously, this is your chance to break your NDA live on you.
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Avi Loeb
Can I? I never signed an NDA.
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Michael Shermer
I mean, that's what he says anyway. That's just what they would say.
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Avi Loeb
You can verify that. In addition, I would say the only thing I would say about Elon is that I don't think he's the most accomplished space entrepreneur that existed since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Because there are 100 billion suns in in our Milky Way galaxy, about 10% of them, we think, have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly the same separation. And most of the those planets, Earth's sun analogs, are billions of years older than ours. Our house on the cosmic street. So there was plenty of time. It takes less than a billion years for a Voyager like probe to cross the Milky Way galaxy. Definitely. It's feasible. Some people think, oh well, it requires some unknown physics. No, with the 1970s technologies that we used for Voyager, we will cross the Milky Way galaxy in less than a billion years. Okay, so they had plenty of time to reach us before our civilization was born and for the same reason that the Earth was moving around the sun 4.5 billion times before the Vatican even existed. We might have those probes around us before the SETI community banned any discussion about them.
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Michael Shermer
Well, that would mean then that these civilizations are probably dead, long gone. So what you would find, Avi with one of these interstellar objects is probably the remnants of some ancient civilization, which would be spectacular to know.
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Avi Loeb
It's archeology.
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Michael Shermer
Yeah, it's just like space archeology. Yeah. Okay, yes, I'm in favor of all that. But back to the earlier question. I think there's several factors at work here in response to Avi, who's a real scientist at Harvard and so forth. Is there some jealousy on the part of some of these scientists I've talked to that I have on my podcast, like, well, what do you think about avi's? They kind of roll their eyes. Well, you know, I think some of it is jealousy, you know, that, you know, how come there's camera crews every day in Avi's lab and there isn't at this other guy's lab?
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Unherd Host
I think there's more popular than the rest of them. He can't help it.
- [30:48]
Michael Shermer
Yes.
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Avi Loeb
On Friday I had 18 television interviews. One.
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Unherd Host
Now you're just showing off. Now you're just showing off on Friday.
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Avi Loeb
One day.
- [30:56]
Michael Shermer
Yeah. You know, so these scientists that grind away in the lab and they're doing their research on looking for bacterial grade life in some atmosphere around a distant planet, they're like, how come the camera crews aren't in my office? It's like, well, you know, Avi comes across to a lot of the UAP people as a believer. And he'll say, I'm not a believer, I'm a searcher. Okay, fine. But doesn't come across that. So I think that's part of it also. Then really more technically, it's a signal detection problem. Has AVI discovered a hit? You know, is Three Eye Atlas an actual hit? Is it an alien technology or is it just a comet or. Or maybe we just don't know about other comets around? Maybe comets develop differently around other planets. I don't know. I think we don't know. No one knows. So it's a signal detection. Is it correct hit or is it just a false positive? I think scientists tend to be fairly conservative for good reason. Because of the history of science. There's a lot of mistaken ideas. So everybody that thinks they're a Galileo. Actually, most people are not Galileo. Most people in history, I get these. I'm sure Avi gets these papers as well. You know, I have this theory of everything that shows that Einstein was wrong and Newton was wrong and Stephen Hawking was wrong. And here's my theory of the Big Bang or whatever I'm sure Avi gets.
- [32:06]
Avi Loeb
There are lots of people who claim that they are Napoleon and they usually find their place in mental institutions.
- [32:11]
Michael Shermer
I know, but there's a lot of people that aren't mentally ill. They're just untrained. They think, I've worked this out in my garage and if you'll help me with the math, I'll share the Nobel Prize with you.
- [32:21]
Unherd Host
These are the same kind of people who might be convinced by ChatGPT telling them that they've discovered a kind of corrective theory of the universe. Right. So we're kind of, we're almost. AI is enabling these people to even further believe in their own genius.
- [32:34]
Avi Loeb
This is an excellent point that you're bringing because I suffered over the past three months from AI generated videos in my image and in my voice. It started in November 2025 and it got to a point where I had an 82 year old woman come to my office. Her name is Abby Rockefeller. She happens to be the daughter of David Rockefeller. And she said, I saw a video of you and it was so convincing and I believed you. And so I shared it with my friends and they told me it's fake. And she was completely distressed. And after she spoke with me, I decided to create my own YouTube channel. The only way I can cope, I can fight with AI generated misinformation is by creating my own content. And I really think it's a big problem for the future of science. There will be a lot of fake content and it will be difficult for people to judge what is real and what is not.
- [33:31]
Michael Shermer
Well, same thing with the UFO videos. They're going to be indistinguishable from reality. And then. Then where are we?
- [33:36]
Unherd Host
Yeah, I want to talk about some videos. The military footage that was found from 2017 which shows. I'm sure we'll be able to show it on screen for our viewers. A kind of blurry UFO ish looking thing off the east coast of America and also off the Californian coast. How do we explain that? What are those objects and do they give us any proof of alien life?
- [33:58]
Michael Shermer
No. So these are basically five different videos that have been recycled over and over and over. And they're not from 2017, when the New York Times published that article in 2017 and exposed those videos on their webpage. The videos themselves are from 2004 and 2006. They're much older. Yeah, some off San Diego, down Here and others on the East Coast. They're probably like heat signatures of rockets, of the jet engine, of the jet moving away or moving towards you. I mean, it's easy to be fooled at night. I have a passage in my book from Scott Kelly, the astronaut and pilot, who talks about how easy it is to be fooled as a pilot. When you think you see something, it's clearly this. And you go back and check, oh, I'm completely mistaken. He had one where he thought it was a ufo, and he turned around, went back to see it, and it was a Bart Simpson balloon, okay? And then he has another one of his brother, Martin Mark Kelly, who was in the space shuttle. And they're about to close the bay doors after releasing a satellite, and they see something in there. And they're like, oh, my God, we left a tool in there. There's some object. We got to go do a spacewalk and get this thing. And on and on. They take a high resolution picture of it and blow it up before they don their spacesuits. And it's the space station that's 85 miles away. And they're like, oh, okay. It's a really hard environment. So those particular videos, they're curious, they're interesting. The pilot said they saw something. The Tic Tac did this, and it dropped, you know, 80,000ft in five seconds. That would kill the pilot. But is that in fact really what they saw? Was it something else? It was an artifact of the camera or something like that. And there's some radar signatures that back it up. You know, to me, it's okay to just say, here are some explanations. We don't know for sure what they are, and leave it at that.
- [35:42]
Avi Loeb
Well, so this brings up the most important aspect of the Galileo Project observatories, and that is triangulation. Figuring out the distance of objects by looking at them from different directions. That's critical because otherwise you can't tell the speed by which they're moving. Also, if you are on a highway, you see a black car behind you through your rear view mirror, and then you see a black car ahead of you. You might think that the car is moving really fast, but in fact, it's two different black cars. You know, it's not the same. So you need to carefully monitor the objects and also gauge their distance to figure out their speed, their acceleration. And we just got to this phase right now. For the first time over the past week, we have data from multiple units in the Galileo Project observatories that allow us to Infer distances. We can verify that for airplanes where we get a signal from those airplanes that indicate their distance. So it's working really well and I'm very excited about that because now we are ready to find any anomalous object that flies outside. The characteristics of human made technologies. We haven't found it yet, but we have the capability.
- [36:49]
Michael Shermer
Yeah, let me just add the point on this super advanced technology that these videos apparently represent. The pilot would be killed instantly. So how can it possibly be like that? Well, it must be some warp drive or some anti gravity propulsion system or something like that. How about it's just a mistake in video. It's a video of something you think is going on that actually isn't happening. Because that kind of technology, it is not possible to be earthbound. There's no way the Russians or Chinese would have, you know, centuries ahead of US physics and engineering, as Avi always points out. You know, CERN just spent, you know, billions of dollars on looking for new physics or whatever. And there is no, there is no new physics.
- [37:29]
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- [38:19]
Avi Loeb
well, Michael, let me strengthen what you were saying, but from a completely different perspective. Any object moving through air fast enough will release a lot of heat as a result of friction on air. And that includes also warp drives. Nobody actually studied that. But, but if you have a distortion of space time moving through air, we know that from black holes they glow. I mean there is glow around black holes because the space time distortion heats up the gas around black holes. So I would not be surprised if a warp drive moves through the atmosphere, it generates a fireball. And you would see that just like a meteor generates a fireball. So just attending to exotic explanations does not remove the existence of a, a fireball. And there was a report actually during the war in Ukraine that some astronomers in Ukraine saw an object moving, you know, at a speed of 15 km per second based on some unreliable distance measurement that they had. And I argue that if it was moving so fast through the atmosphere, such an object would have generated a fireball that, you know, would have been like a huge explosion. And they haven't seen that. And I was criticized about it. But, you know, just find me or imagine any physics that would avoid interaction with air or with water, and then I would like to test it. But as of now, we don't know of such physics. And, you know, you might say, okay, well, we are really at our early stage of understanding the physical reality. Sure. But as I said before, that's all we have. Okay, that's all we have in the way that we interpret the physical reality. Of course, there might be things that go beyond our understanding, but until we study them carefully with instruments and verify them, we can't know that they exist. They are just figments of our imagination.
- [40:08]
Michael Shermer
Well, but my larger point is that in the history of science and technology, no country or company ever gets very far ahead of any other company or country because we rip each other off, we spy on each other. All technology comes from previous technology. No invention has ever come out of the blue. And so there's no way the Russians or Chinese would be like a century ahead of us, as if we're still flying biplanes and they're flying this stealth bomber. This is not gonna happen. So if these things were real, they could only be aliens. But again, you're looking at these videos, and the videos are always grainy and blurry and out of focus. And I've even heard the explanation now that they're intentionally blurry because they're warp drive or they're quantum entanglement or, you know, then they give the.
- [40:51]
Avi Loeb
So, Michael, in case there is an invitation by unher of me, let's say a year from now, and I decline the invitation to join you on a debate on this subject, it's because I know the answer, but I cannot disclose it.
- [41:06]
Michael Shermer
That's right.
- [41:06]
Avi Loeb
Okay, so you will have an indirect evidence.
- [41:10]
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- [41:57]
Unherd Host
Now, even if we're not particularly convinced by the military footage, then let's speak about whistleblowers, because I think that's the other kind of form of evidence that people hook onto and are really excited by. So in 2023, there was a former U.S. intelligence officer, someone who has worked inside the U.S. government, who we assume is someone who has seen things that most of us lay people do not see every day, who told in 2023 Congress that they had seen non human biological remains intact from a UAP that had crashed in America. So how do we explain these whistleblowers? He is not the only one. What sort of motivation would somebody have for coming out with something like this?
- [42:37]
Avi Loeb
I mean, any country has a program for retrieval and reverse engineering of materials found in crash sites. And the reason is simple, because sometimes we don't full understand the technological makeup of products from adversarial nations. And the only way for us to figure it out is if, let's say a MiG fighter jet fell down. And we can then examine the electronics inside and we can figure out what the Russians using that goes back to World War I. Here's an example. So there are definitely programs of that nature. Now the fundamental question is, did they recover something that is definitely non human, or is it just a way of avoiding our adversaries from knowing that we know what they have? So one way to do that is to invent a story. Like suppose you go to a crash site and you figure out now there are pilots of either Asian origin or European origin. So obviously there will be different types of biologics that represent different types of humans in those crash sites. But it's possible that the intelligence agencies would prefer to invent a story. Oh, we just recovered some aliens. Now someone would hear that and of course make a whole new understanding of what the US has. But it's actually all related to crash sites of human made debris. The way to find out is of course to see that. Okay, so if I have the privilege of witnessing that, if someone brings me to a room where the evidence is held and I can examine it, I will tell you what it looks like. It's very easy to tell if there is materials from outside the solar system, just checking the isotope composition of it. You know, it wouldn't Take long. I can do a simple laboratory experiment and tell you immediately whether this is material from outside the solar system.
- [44:33]
Michael Shermer
Yeah. So my take on these whistleblowers, first of all, there are whistleblower laws now that have been in place for years to protect whistleblowers. So come forward. Okay. Is it possible that they're telling the truth? I think so. Maybe they're just mistaken, you know, so first of all, the change in language, you know, their biologics, their non human intelligence. So, I mean, when I first heard this, because they used to just call them space aliens when I first heard this. Non human intelligence. You mean like dolphins and, and gorillas and chimps and. I mean, there's plenty of non human intelligence and biologics. Right. Of course, they don't mean that. They mean space aliens. Okay. Is it possible that they're simply mistaken? So there are accounts back in the 60s and 70s of commercial airline pilots looking up into the sky exclaiming, oh, my God, look at that. And what they're looking at is either the U2 spy plane or the SR71 Blackbird spy plane that was moving at three or four times the speed of a commercial airliner at 40, 50,000ft above them. And they didn't know about that because these were classified programs. Now we know about these. So it's possible that these whistleblowers are seeing something. Maybe it's a DARPA experimental aircraft or drone, or who knows? They may just be simply mistaken. So instead of saying, are they lying or telling the truth about aliens, how about they're seeing something and they just are unable to identify it. So, you know, like with avi, I say, okay, show us, come on. You know, in this idea of, you know, of a conspiracy, you know, oh, they won't tell us because this will upset the stock market or religions will fall apart. This is nonsense. I mean, if we discovered aliens, NASA would go straight to Congress and say, you got to double our budget because we found aliens and we're going to get out there and we're going to do our own research and we need more money. Or the Department of Defense would ask for Congress for more money. You know, so I, and religious people that have taken surveys over the decades have said, most of them have said, I would have no problem of there being extraterrestrial intelligence either out there or here. My God is big enough for the entire universe. They can have as many life forms as they want. Most people would not be disturbed by this. And I don't think the stock market would be Bothered at all.
- [46:37]
Avi Loeb
You know, I'm being asked quite often, if you find the evidence, will you accept the Nobel Prize that obviously, you know, will be awarded for such a discovery? And I say, no, I will not waste my time on a visit to Sweden because there will be many more urgent things to do. And, you know, I will just play the Bob Dylan card of ignoring it. What is the meaning of money in the day after discovering aliens are here? You know, like, all of these notions go out the window because it brings us to a completely new reality where the perception of our place in the universe is different. Religious, philosophical beliefs will change. The way, I mean, geopolitics is handled will change because we will realize that all humans are part of. Part of the same family. You know, we're all in the same boat and we should work together because there is a neighbor out there. You know, when a neighbor visits your home very often, you don't have a fight with your partner. I mean, it's just. It changes your behavior. So I very much think that the reality will change completely in our future. If we find alien intelligence, and we already have some sort of alien intelligence with us. It's called artificial intelligence, but. But it's made of chips. We tend to think that it thinks like us, but it's just like putting lipstick on a pig. I mean, we are thinking that it resembles us, but it's not. And it gives us a sense of what it's like to meet something alien. However, the AI systems are trained on the same data that we are experiencing here on Earth. Meeting an alien intelligence is far more exhilarating because they had experiences that go beyond the solar system and that we cannot imagine. So I find that to be far more exciting than the AI Revolution, far more exciting than the discovery of Copernicus and Galileo. That we are not at the center of the universe. It will be really the biggest revelation ever.
- [48:41]
Unherd Host
Well, on that note, I think that is probably a good moment to end, and I will release you both to your afternoons. Thank you for being so generous with your time and debating with each other this afternoon. It's been, I mean, enlightening. And Avi, you've done incredibly well given the pressure of the NDA on your shoulders to keep up the acts the whole afternoon.
- [48:58]
Michael Shermer
Well, and I hope.
- [48:59]
Avi Loeb
I wish I knew the answer.
- [49:00]
Michael Shermer
I hope I pay Avi his bet this week. Maybe this is the week.
- [49:04]
Unherd Host
Maybe this is the week. Yes. $1,000 to the Galileo. I noticed that the prize fund was going to go to the Galileo foundation no matter what happens. So I guess it's win win for AAVE anyway.
- [49:14]
Michael Shermer
That's right.
- [49:14]
Unherd Host
Okay, thank you both. Thank you both for your time.
- [49:16]
Michael Shermer
All right.
- [49:17]
Unherd Host
Debate well, that was our definitive aliens debate between Harvard University's Avi Loeb and the Skeptic magazine's Michael Shermer. If you want to find out a bit more about Michael's views on aliens and much more, why not pick up a copy of his book Truth? There is a link in the description. And if you want to hear more from us at Unherd, why not become a subscriber? It's super easy, it's less than the price of coffee, far more stimulating, and you'll get all of our videos straight into your inbox every week. If you want to do that, just go to Unherd. Thanks for joining. This was Unherd.
- [49:50]
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- [50:37]
Avi Loeb
So good, so good, so good.
- [50:40]
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Avi Loeb
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