Name: Skeptic Michael Shermer on UFO Events
Uploaded: 2022-10-26T17:55:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Skeptic Michael Shermer on UFO Events' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Skeptic Michael Shermer on UFO Events' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-26. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience.
But, I mean, again, how do these systems really work?
You know, so this is my kind of conspiracy detection kit.
You know, the grander the conspiracy theory, the less likely it is to be true.
Like, say, Volkswagen cheating the emission standards in Europe.
You know, that's a very specific conspiracy theory.
Turned out to be true.
They really did do that.
And for obvious reasons, profit motive, right?
So if you scale up from that, oh, they're trying to control the entire European
economy
or something like that.
Well, no, that's too big.
They're just trying to make money.
They're just trying to make money, right?
So, you know, the more people that have to be involved, the more elements that
have to come.
People are incompetent.
People can't keep their mouths shut.
For the most part.
For the most part, yes.
Now, to be fair to the other side, you know, if you read about the development
of the U-2
spy plane and the AR-71 Blackbird, you know, this was done in Burbank, near
where you used
to live.
And that's right in the heart of L.A.
How did they do this for all those years that nobody knew about it, right?
Well, they were acting on the interests of the government.
They were trying to be patriots.
They kept their mouths shut because they were trying to win a war against the
evil others.
Right.
So, again, like with the recent UAP sightings, what I want – my initial
response is the
SR-71 Blackbird was – before it was declassified, there were commercial
pilots going, "Oh, my
God.
There's something going 3,000 miles an hour, 50,000 feet above me at 30,000
feet.
This is impossible.
We don't have anything like that."
Well, actually, we did have something like that.
Yeah.
So, I suspect that some of these UAPs, I think in a decade or two, we're going
to find out,
oh, we had these incredible drones that could fly at these speeds.
Yeah.
I tend to lean towards that as well sometimes.
I go back and forth with it.
I had Ryan Graves on recently.
Yeah.
I saw that.
It was a fascinating conversation because the way he was describing things with
no visible
means of propulsion, no technology that we currently know is available could
act in the way those
things were acting.
I wonder if that is what it is, if they have some sort of very advanced drones,
and the fact
that they seem to be transmedium, they seem to be able to enter into the ocean
and then leave
the ocean, I wonder.
I wonder if that's something that we have because these things, they're, you
know, one of the
ones that he described is like a translucent circle with a black sphere inside
of it.
Yes.
Right.
And that when they updated their radar systems in 2014, they started seeing
them all over
the place on their systems.
And that these people spotted them visually and that they were behaving in a
way like at,
you know, 130 mile an hour winds or completely stationary.
I wonder if those are super advanced drones.
Yeah.
A lot of, another problem with these videos is that they're very grainy, blurry.
You can't quite make out what's going on.
Like the one that looks like it goes in the ocean comes back out.
It's not clear that it goes in the ocean because the horizon in the ocean is so
blurry, right?
So I'm a member of this Galileo project at Harvard run by Avi Loeb, the head of
the astronomy department.
I had Avi on.
Yep.
I know.
And, you know, we're, we're, he's raising money to put cameras, high resolution
cameras
all over the world.
Right.
Particularly in the places where people like Graves say they, I mean, when Graves
told
you, I, we saw these things every day, it's like every day.
Yeah.
There, there surely must be high resolution photos of these things.
But those, those jets are not designed to take high resolution video.
They're designed to fight against enemy jets.
Right.
That's what they're designed for.
They're designed to recognize these enemy combatants and engage with them in
the most effective
way possible.
That's not with high resolution digital video.
Right.
Well, that would be the, that would be the solution.
We just need better data.
Right.
Well, I wonder if they want better data.
Now let's assume.
Well, we do.
The government, but listen, the federal government, imagine they are running
top secret
programs using advanced drones and the technology that we're not currently
aware of.
Right.
And that the United States government has these.
They wouldn't want people taking videos of these things.
Why would they?
Right.
But everyone has one of these in their pocket.
I mean, why don't we have-
Yeah, but you can't get digital video of something that's seven miles away
moving at,
you know, the speed of sound.
Well, that's-
Well, that's-
You're not going to get digital video.
That's what we want to do with the Galileo project is get those cameras up
there.
And according to Christopher Mellon, a guy who, you know, did work for the
defense department,
he said there are top secret videos and photographs that he's seen or that he's
aware of-
Yeah.
That are pretty spectacular.
That's-
That they don't understand.
Right.
I've heard him say that.
It's like, okay, then let's see them.
Well, we can't-
Yeah, but why would they release that?
Yeah.
This is the question is like, if they, just like the Blackbird, just like the
stealth
bomber, many of the other projects that they have that were top secret before
they became
public, why would they release all that information?
Right.
Probably wouldn't.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
I wonder what that stuff is.
And the fact that it happens so often in that very specific area, you know, who
knows?
Another thing I was thinking about with the UAPs is in the history of
technology, no nation
gets very far ahead of any other nation.
Right.
They either back engineer it or copy it or steal the secrets and so on.
It's not likely we would have anything that the Russians and Chinese wouldn't
be pretty
close to having also.
You know, just think of just the development of jets.
Or the development of the nuclear bomb.
The nuclear bomb.
I mean, the Russians had, you know, so 1945 was Hiroshima and 1949 the Russians-
Right.
They stole our secrets.
Right.
So this idea that, you know, these are super advanced drones that we have and
the Russians
and Chinese don't have, it's not likely they would not know the technology that
we know,
the physics, the aerodynamics and the engineering and all that, because they
read the same journals.
They do the same research we do.
So what do you think it is?
Well, I think it's probably multiple things.
I think some of them might be drones that just really high-tech drones.
Some of them are just blurry videos that are, I think the one of the sphere
inside the cube
or the cube inside the sphere is probably a balloon.
A balloon?
Yes.
A balloon that stands stationary at 130 mile an hour winds?
It appears to stand stationary.
It appears with the most sophisticated tracking devices that these military
jets have.
I know.
I know.
These are anomalies.
Yeah.
So we just need better data.
But why would you think it's a balloon?
Well, what else would it be?
Okay.
It might be, you know, it might be a drone.
It's certainly probably not an alien spacecraft and so on.
Certainly, probably not.
Why do you say that?
Well, this kind of gets into the argument of the SETI program.
Yeah.
There's so much empty space out there, the chances of them finding us are
pretty slim.
Really?
I separate the two questions.
But we find planets all the time.
Yeah, but telescopes, not a visitor.
Right.
Telescopes and satellites and all sorts of, you know, things that we send into
space.
But we find planets all the time that are in the Goldilocks zone.
And we have a very, relatively unsophisticated in terms of like what we'd
expect from something
that's capable of intergalactic travel.
Relatively simple technology in comparison to what we would think.
If you took what we have today and you increased our capabilities, you know, a
thousand years
from now, you could imagine that it would be quite easy for someone to at least
send a drone
from another planet to visit Earth and observe.
This is the Fermi paradox.
Yes.
That you know of.
And where are they?
Well, of course, most scientists like him don't think that they're here.
So I separate two questions.
Most scientists?
Most scientists, yeah.
Michio Kaku thinks they're here.
He's been a little fuzzy about that.
He's not totally committed to that.
He's totally committed.
He was here.
You think so?
He was here and he talked about it on the podcast.
He said for the longest time he was a skeptic.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
Okay.
He has kind of come down on that side a little bit.
But why would you be firm on that?
When you think about the fact that there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in
the known universe.
Yes, yes, yes.
Let's separate two questions.
Okay.
Are they out there?
Have they come here?
Are they out there?
Almost certainly.
Let's say 99.9% they're out there.
I would agree with you.
100 billion stars in our galaxy, 100 billion to a trillion galaxies, just do
the numbers.
Yeah.
No matter how improbable it is you get from bacteria to big brains in
civilization, it's going to happen.
Right.
But have they come here?
Okay.
So how good is the evidence for that?
Not very.
It's pretty thin, right?
How good?
It's anecdotal.
It's human.
It's human eyewitnesses.
It's blurry videos, grainy photos.
If they were here, damn it.
Where's the, you know, pick up the widget on the dashboard and bring it back
here.
But just looking at what we know that these fighter pilots have witnessed, the
data that they've acquired, when they're looking at something like Commander
David Fravor, who, when they were off the coast with the Nimitz, when they
tracked that thing that went from above 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet
above sea level in less than a second.
What's that?
I don't know.
Yeah.
What is that thing that they have visual, they have visual contact by multiple
sources and they tracked it and they have video of this thing moving off at
insane rates of speed.
What's that?
Yeah.
I don't know.
This is the problem with anomalies.
No theory explains everything, right?
But if there was any evidence that pointed to something that operated in a way
that we can't comprehend any of the known technologies being able to reproduce,
that's one of them.
But no technologies come out of a vacuum like that.
They always build on previous technologies.
Right.
But if you're talking about something from another planet or something from
another civilization that we're not aware of that's on Earth, maybe that lives
in the water, we don't know.
We don't know.
And when you're seeing these things, when you're talking about people that are
the best fighter pilots that we have available, that are operating with the
most sophisticated fighter jets, with tracking systems that are constantly
being updated.
And then when they update them, they start picking up these things, like Ryan
Graves discussed on the podcast.
Mm-hmm.
Why would you think that those are not possibly something from somewhere else?
It depends on how you want to, like, pose the problem.
So here's how I think about it.
So I take Leslie Keen's book on UFOs and, you know, pilots and generals go on
the record and so on.
In that book, she says 90 to 95% of all sightings have perfectly normal
explanations.
I would probably agree that's true.
Yeah.
So the question is, what do we do with that other 5% of anomalies?
Right.
Okay?
No theory explains everything.
There's always going to be anomalies in every scientific theory.
What do you do with it?
Nothing.
What do you do with it to a graduate student figure it out or, you know, that's
future research, you know.
Rather than going to, you know, a grand theory of visitation by aliens or the
Russians or Chinese have these super advanced technologies that we don't have
or we have them and they don't have.
I mean, again, if we had this technology, surely the Russians have something
pretty close to that.
There's nothing from the videos in Ukraine of any Russian drones that act
anything like these UAPs.
Surely they would use this technology if they had it.
We're not assuming that those UAPs are military in nature and not something
that they use to observe things.
It could be.
I mean, why would we assume that these things, if they're capable of behaving
in this way and they're just some sort of a device that can travel at insane
rates of speed, why would we assume that those things can launch missiles or
act in a military capacity?
Right.
And you know there are UAP sightings over Ukraine.
Yeah, but, okay, so Avi did a nice paper on that showing that these were
artillery shells and not what the other people said they thought it was, that
it was like a drone or a plane or something weird like that.
He showed that if it was what they thought it was, it would have had a much
bigger impact going through the atmosphere at that speed and burning up.
But it didn't, so these are artillery shells.
Anyway, he did a nice paper on that.
Interesting.
Yeah.
But what about these things that supposedly move far faster than the speed of
sound without the sonic boom?
Yeah.
How is that possible?
How is that possible?
That's right.
It's not.
That's where it gets weird.
That's where it gets weird, right.
But that's where the question is.
Is it really moving?
Is it ours?
Is it really moving at that speed or is it a misperception of the video, a miscalculation?
People make, scientists make miscalculations of these sorts of things all the
time.
Yeah, that was one of the things that was posed to David Fravor and he said
they have multiple sources of data.
It's not just like one system that's monitoring these things.
It's multiple systems.
Yeah.
And I follow these guys.
I agree.
They are incredibly credible, right?
And they have good arguments.
What do you do with the anomaly?
I think you are an anti-conspiracy theorist.
That's what I think.
No, I'm a skeptic, Joe.
I know you are.
I know.
You literally are the editor.
I'm just a skeptic.
What's your position in Skeptic Magazine?
I'm the editor-in-chief publisher of Skeptic Magazine.
There it is.
You're literally a skeptic.
Yeah, that is my day job.
Yeah.
But it isn't that I don't believe things.
I mean, I believe the theory of evolution.
I think the Big Bang Theory happened when people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and
my quantum physics friends tell me quantum physics is true.
This is how we know it.
To me, it's weird, spooky.
I don't really understand it, but okay.
You know, we have tons of evidence.

Skeptic Michael Shermer on UFO Events

The Joe Rogan Experience.
But, I mean, again, how do these systems really work?
You know, so this is my kind of conspiracy detection kit.
You know, the grander the conspiracy theory, the less likely it is to be true.
Like, say, Volkswagen cheating the emission standards in Europe.
You know, that's a very specific conspiracy theory.
Turned out to be true.
They really did do that.
And for obvious reasons, profit motive, right?
So if you scale up from that, oh, they're trying to control the entire European
economy
or something like that.
Well, no, that's too big.
They're just trying to make money.
They're just trying to make money, right?
So, you know, the more people that have to be involved, the more elements that
have to come.
People are incompetent.
People can't keep their mouths shut.
For the most part.
For the most part, yes.
Now, to be fair to the other side, you know, if you read about the development
of the U-2
spy plane and the AR-71 Blackbird, you know, this was done in Burbank, near
where you used
to live.
And that's right in the heart of L.A.
How did they do this for all those years that nobody knew about it, right?
Well, they were acting on the interests of the government.
They were trying to be patriots.
They kept their mouths shut because they were trying to win a war against the
evil others.
Right.
So, again, like with the recent UAP sightings, what I want – my initial
response is the
SR-71 Blackbird was – before it was declassified, there were commercial
pilots going, "Oh, my
God.
There's something going 3,000 miles an hour, 50,000 feet above me at 30,000
feet.
This is impossible.
We don't have anything like that."
Well, actually, we did have something like that.
Yeah.
So, I suspect that some of these UAPs, I think in a decade or two, we're going
to find out,
oh, we had these incredible drones that could fly at these speeds.
Yeah.
I tend to lean towards that as well sometimes.
I go back and forth with it.
I had Ryan Graves on recently.
Yeah.
I saw that.
It was a fascinating conversation because the way he was describing things with
no visible
means of propulsion, no technology that we currently know is available could
act in the way those
things were acting.
I wonder if that is what it is, if they have some sort of very advanced drones,
and the fact
that they seem to be transmedium, they seem to be able to enter into the ocean
and then leave
the ocean, I wonder.
I wonder if that's something that we have because these things, they're, you
know, one of the
ones that he described is like a translucent circle with a black sphere inside
of it.
Yes.
Right.
And that when they updated their radar systems in 2014, they started seeing
them all over
the place on their systems.
And that these people spotted them visually and that they were behaving in a
way like at,
you know, 130 mile an hour winds or completely stationary.
I wonder if those are super advanced drones.
Yeah.
A lot of, another problem with these videos is that they're very grainy, blurry.
You can't quite make out what's going on.
Like the one that looks like it goes in the ocean comes back out.
It's not clear that it goes in the ocean because the horizon in the ocean is so
blurry, right?
So I'm a member of this Galileo project at Harvard run by Avi Loeb, the head of
the astronomy department.
I had Avi on.
Yep.
I know.
And, you know, we're, we're, he's raising money to put cameras, high resolution
cameras
all over the world.
Right.
Particularly in the places where people like Graves say they, I mean, when Graves
told
you, I, we saw these things every day, it's like every day.
Yeah.
There, there surely must be high resolution photos of these things.
But those, those jets are not designed to take high resolution video.
They're designed to fight against enemy jets.
Right.
That's what they're designed for.
They're designed to recognize these enemy combatants and engage with them in
the most effective
way possible.
That's not with high resolution digital video.
Right.
Well, that would be the, that would be the solution.
We just need better data.
Right.
Well, I wonder if they want better data.
Now let's assume.
Well, we do.
The government, but listen, the federal government, imagine they are running
top secret
programs using advanced drones and the technology that we're not currently
aware of.
Right.
And that the United States government has these.
They wouldn't want people taking videos of these things.
Why would they?
Right.
But everyone has one of these in their pocket.
I mean, why don't we have-
Yeah, but you can't get digital video of something that's seven miles away
moving at,
you know, the speed of sound.
Well, that's-
Well, that's-
You're not going to get digital video.
That's what we want to do with the Galileo project is get those cameras up
there.
And according to Christopher Mellon, a guy who, you know, did work for the
defense department,
he said there are top secret videos and photographs that he's seen or that he's
aware of-
Yeah.
That are pretty spectacular.
That's-
That they don't understand.
Right.
I've heard him say that.
It's like, okay, then let's see them.
Well, we can't-
Yeah, but why would they release that?
Yeah.
This is the question is like, if they, just like the Blackbird, just like the
stealth
bomber, many of the other projects that they have that were top secret before
they became
public, why would they release all that information?
Right.
Probably wouldn't.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
I wonder what that stuff is.
And the fact that it happens so often in that very specific area, you know, who
knows?
Another thing I was thinking about with the UAPs is in the history of
technology, no nation
gets very far ahead of any other nation.
Right.
They either back engineer it or copy it or steal the secrets and so on.
It's not likely we would have anything that the Russians and Chinese wouldn't
be pretty
close to having also.
You know, just think of just the development of jets.
Or the development of the nuclear bomb.
The nuclear bomb.
I mean, the Russians had, you know, so 1945 was Hiroshima and 1949 the Russians-
Right.
They stole our secrets.
Right.
So this idea that, you know, these are super advanced drones that we have and
the Russians
and Chinese don't have, it's not likely they would not know the technology that
we know,
the physics, the aerodynamics and the engineering and all that, because they
read the same journals.
They do the same research we do.
So what do you think it is?
Well, I think it's probably multiple things.
I think some of them might be drones that just really high-tech drones.
Some of them are just blurry videos that are, I think the one of the sphere
inside the cube
or the cube inside the sphere is probably a balloon.
A balloon?
Yes.
A balloon that stands stationary at 130 mile an hour winds?
It appears to stand stationary.
It appears with the most sophisticated tracking devices that these military
jets have.
I know.
I know.
These are anomalies.
Yeah.
So we just need better data.
But why would you think it's a balloon?
Well, what else would it be?
Okay.
It might be, you know, it might be a drone.
It's certainly probably not an alien spacecraft and so on.
Certainly, probably not.
Why do you say that?
Well, this kind of gets into the argument of the SETI program.
Yeah.
There's so much empty space out there, the chances of them finding us are
pretty slim.
Really?
I separate the two questions.
But we find planets all the time.
Yeah, but telescopes, not a visitor.
Right.
Telescopes and satellites and all sorts of, you know, things that we send into
space.
But we find planets all the time that are in the Goldilocks zone.
And we have a very, relatively unsophisticated in terms of like what we'd
expect from something
that's capable of intergalactic travel.
Relatively simple technology in comparison to what we would think.
If you took what we have today and you increased our capabilities, you know, a
thousand years
from now, you could imagine that it would be quite easy for someone to at least
send a drone
from another planet to visit Earth and observe.
This is the Fermi paradox.
Yes.
That you know of.
And where are they?
Well, of course, most scientists like him don't think that they're here.
So I separate two questions.
Most scientists?
Most scientists, yeah.
Michio Kaku thinks they're here.
He's been a little fuzzy about that.
He's not totally committed to that.
He's totally committed.
He was here.
You think so?
He was here and he talked about it on the podcast.
He said for the longest time he was a skeptic.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
Okay.
He has kind of come down on that side a little bit.
But why would you be firm on that?
When you think about the fact that there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in
the known universe.
Yes, yes, yes.
Let's separate two questions.
Okay.
Are they out there?
Have they come here?
Are they out there?
Almost certainly.
Let's say 99.9% they're out there.
I would agree with you.
100 billion stars in our galaxy, 100 billion to a trillion galaxies, just do
the numbers.
Yeah.
No matter how improbable it is you get from bacteria to big brains in
civilization, it's going to happen.
Right.
But have they come here?
Okay.
So how good is the evidence for that?
Not very.
It's pretty thin, right?
How good?
It's anecdotal.
It's human.
It's human eyewitnesses.
It's blurry videos, grainy photos.
If they were here, damn it.
Where's the, you know, pick up the widget on the dashboard and bring it back
here.
But just looking at what we know that these fighter pilots have witnessed, the
data that they've acquired, when they're looking at something like Commander
David Fravor, who, when they were off the coast with the Nimitz, when they
tracked that thing that went from above 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet
above sea level in less than a second.
What's that?
I don't know.
Yeah.
What is that thing that they have visual, they have visual contact by multiple
sources and they tracked it and they have video of this thing moving off at
insane rates of speed.
What's that?
Yeah.
I don't know.
This is the problem with anomalies.
No theory explains everything, right?
But if there was any evidence that pointed to something that operated in a way
that we can't comprehend any of the known technologies being able to reproduce,
that's one of them.
But no technologies come out of a vacuum like that.
They always build on previous technologies.
Right.
But if you're talking about something from another planet or something from
another civilization that we're not aware of that's on Earth, maybe that lives
in the water, we don't know.
We don't know.
And when you're seeing these things, when you're talking about people that are
the best fighter pilots that we have available, that are operating with the
most sophisticated fighter jets, with tracking systems that are constantly
being updated.
And then when they update them, they start picking up these things, like Ryan
Graves discussed on the podcast.
Mm-hmm.
Why would you think that those are not possibly something from somewhere else?
It depends on how you want to, like, pose the problem.
So here's how I think about it.
So I take Leslie Keen's book on UFOs and, you know, pilots and generals go on
the record and so on.
In that book, she says 90 to 95% of all sightings have perfectly normal
explanations.
I would probably agree that's true.
Yeah.
So the question is, what do we do with that other 5% of anomalies?
Right.
Okay?
No theory explains everything.
There's always going to be anomalies in every scientific theory.
What do you do with it?
Nothing.
What do you do with it to a graduate student figure it out or, you know, that's
future research, you know.
Rather than going to, you know, a grand theory of visitation by aliens or the
Russians or Chinese have these super advanced technologies that we don't have
or we have them and they don't have.
I mean, again, if we had this technology, surely the Russians have something
pretty close to 