Michael Shellenberger on UFOs and Aliens | Ep 52

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]The Trump administration has promised to release all sorts of new files on UFOs.

[00:00:05]We'll talk to author Mike Shelonburgger about how to separate fact from fiction, myth from reality. We're going to maintain a skeptical edge, but keep that little door open to be convinced. All that and more right now.

[00:00:22]So, I've known Michael Shelonburgger for at this point many years, and it seems like we've traveled uh in in somewhat parallel paths. We've looked at homelessness, progressivism, California politics. Um, but I'm really excited to talk to you, Mike, about a conversation we had a number of years ago that has stuck in my head about UFOs. And this might be new territory for people who love and follow your work. Um, but I think you have the most sane, rational, and yet curious perspective on this issue. And so, um, people know you from the Twitter files, from climate change, from San Francisco, but tell us about like how you got into thinking about UFOs and your general uh, you know, theory of how to look at it.

[00:01:09]>> Sure. Well, it's great to talk about it, great to be with you guys, and it's a fun topic to get on, especially today, which you may know is the second big release of videos and documents from the Department of War. Uh, this itself is a massive event, historically very significant. The history of the US government's relationship to UFOs is uh kind of long and complicated, but if you were to summarize it, basically since 1952, if not earlier, the intelligence community has had a policy of essentially debunking and seeking to discredit all UFO sightings and to in including actually to demean and ridicule people that reported the sightings. And that was that was the gen that was the actual recommendation of something called the Robertson Commission which was created by the CIA in 1952. And if you just look at all the events since then I think um that perfectly describes how the US government has dealt with this. So for President Trump to come out with this release is absolutely extraordinary. He should be congratulated for it. Uh he did have to overcome a significant amount of uh resistance from the intelligence community. But I think it's not an exaggeration to say that. It means that we've entered a new era, an era of disclosure rather than an era of secrecy. I think the issue then is, well, what are we looking at here? And I like to think of this as there's basically three ways to think about what we used to call UFOs and now we call UAPs for unidentified anomalous phenomena. You can look at them in the kind of conventional way as extraterrestrials or we now call them nonhuman intelligence or NHI. There's a bunch of fascinating debates about what kind of nonhumans these are, but there's a view that these are non-humans and that they have an a kind of realworld existence.

[00:02:57]I think the second view is the one that is most famously attributed to Jacqu Valet, which is that what we're looking at is really a continuation of spiritual phenomena in different form than existed in the past, but sharing a lot of similarities. And so, Jacqu Valet is this very famous uh scholar and investigator of UFOs. He was played by France Trufo in Steven Spielberg's 1979 Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He's in his 80s now. He's been studying this since his early 20s. He had a incredible UFO sighting as a teenager and but he went in 1968 into the archives in various European capitals and just discovered a huge amount of myth, what was called, I should say, classified as mythology, folklore, stories of fairies and elves. and he views these phenomena as continuous with UFOs. We even had an earlier UFO sighting in the late 19th century in the United States of what they called airships which presented to people as kind of zeppelins almost but extraordinary sightings from people around the country. Um harder to attribute it to social contagion I think uh but that's also one of the one of the ways of looking at this. In fact, that's the third way I think you can look at UFOs and UAPs, which is as some combination of social contagion, a result of hypnosis, a result of a particular kind of psychological conjuring uh building off of genuinely unexplained phenomena that we don't understand, maybe plasma, but natural phenomenon. And then a significant amount of government disinformation. I had mentioned earlier that the position of the US government had been secrecy but there's this other whole history where the US government has spread disinformation about UFOs and that's not a theory that's uh pretty well documented in a number of cases and then in a number of cases I think we see government disinformation uh but can't but can't prove it. And what I would say about these three different ways of looking at UAPs and UFOs is that when you're inside of each of them as a kind of cognitive explanation or as a kind of worldview, it really can explain the entire phenomenon. In other words, you can go around life and explain all of these different facts as one of those three things. as non-human intelligence, as a continuation of spiritual phenomenon as has existed for millions of years or thousands of years or as essentially a social, psychological, political, folklore that was created by the same kind of things that would that we have created religions out of in the past.

[00:05:37]>> So, do you think it's some combination of all three of these things? I mean, is that your personal view of the matter?

[00:05:44]And I I have a couple questions. I'm just going to stack a couple questions and I'll just let you answer them as you go. Um, this is such a fascinating topic. There are so many directions to go with this and maybe you can point us where you think the most material is to for us to mine here. One is why now? Why is this all happening now? Um, why has Trump decided we're, you know, after decades of secrecy and offiscation and disinformation and misdirection, we're suddenly now going to get some real answers. Could it be that this is another instance of misdirection where we're being told this is a moment of transparency, but when in fact, you know, it's just enough to kind of satiate like the the needs for people like you to like get something out of this, but we're not going to get real answers. So, why now? That's like one question. And then imagine the listener who is the scully, okay? you know, uh, the XFiles character who's like the materialist who doesn't buy any of these, uh, sort of newagy philosophical spiritual explanations. You know, anything we're observing can just be, uh, accounted for by, you know, military aircraft, maybe foreign nations, experimental aircraft or something like that. The rest of it just is some combination of experimental or social contagion plus people who are just manipulating the video that they're, you know, uploading to YouTube or whatever.

[00:07:10]So, okay, why now? And then explain to the scalies in the audience why they should take this more seriously.

[00:07:18]Well, I think the latter is the the third way of seeing this, which is essentially as a psychosocial political phenomenon. and and you asked me where my own views are. I'm genuinely agnostic. It's um I've become more comfortable holding that, but it is uncomfortable. It's annoying to have this level of uncertainty. I don't work on any other issue where there is where I have the same level of uncertainty about something. I'm pretty clear about a lot of the facts that we're dealing with on things like climate change or energy or homelessness or mental illness or addiction. There's certainly some uncertainties there, but it doesn't compare to this situation where I genuinely can spend long periods of time in my own belief in one of those three belief systems or approaching the same evidence and seeing it in those three different ways. So, I I think they're all three are legitimate and important.

[00:08:12]They're definitely bad actors. There's certainly grifters that are spreading, you know, fairly narcissistic people, uh, whose intentions, I think, are fairly transparent. I think there's also some people that debunk things that they haven't actually debunked and claimed that they've debunked them.

[00:08:28]>> Um, you know, and I think there's people that use this for to advance their own spiritual views. So, there's certainly bad actors, but I think there's actually three legitimate ways of seeing this.

[00:08:37]And when I testified to Congress on this in 2024, I said, "I don't know what they are." Mhm.

[00:08:41]>> Two two of the four witnesses said we don't know and two said that they did.

[00:08:45]>> Why now? I genuinely think that there's no I don't think the Trump administration is playing games with the timing of this. I think that it's it's really you can when you understand the events particularly since 2017. Uh this is the culmination of a lot of work of a lot of people uh including a lot of people who have suffered for uh you know advocating this. My own intervention was to try to put more a focus on the role of the US government because it was very clear to me and I had other whistleblowers, you know, make very clear that the government was just sitting on a lot of information and no good reason to shield it. Uh there's always concerns around sources and methods, but I think we saw today there's redactions where the government is perfectly capable of protecting how it's gathering this information. I think most people in the world know that we have very sophisticated ways of seeing things um all over the place, oceans, land, skies, space. So, it shouldn't be too much of a shock that we have those abilities. Um but yeah, I mean I think that uh it's just genuinely unfolding out of particularly the mainstreaming of this view. I would credit social media.

[00:09:53]I would credit Joe Rogan. I think the Overton window, the the the boundaries of what's acceptable and not acceptable within mainstream discourse have have shifted dramatically. And so now I think the Overton window is much more close to the place that where I'm arguing from is that there is legitimacy to arguing that this is clearly a non-human phenomenon.

[00:10:16]I'll also point out that, you know, the former and current leaders of the intelligence community as well as many members of Congress believe that this is non-human intelligence. They don't dismiss this. Um, and it's bipartisan.

[00:10:29]So, there's people like John Brennan who was central to to Russia gate and uh going after Trump and trying to smear Trump as a agent of Russian disinformation. Uh but you also have uh John Rackcliffe who's the current director of the CIA uh who says there's something real there and it's not adversarial tech. So I think that all three of those ways of looking at this phenomenon are legitimate and we should um we should as people that are serious about the issue, you should be able to understand how to view the phenomenon through those different lenses.

[00:11:01]>> So my question is and and drilling from the perspective of we're calling it like the scully perspective. I come into it with a lot of skepticism. Uh I come into it assuming that it is an error or falsification or manipulation. Um until proven otherwise. And it's something that I haven't spent a lot of time looking into. Um not an area of interest of mine. But like if you were to select one video or artifact or or or cluster of phenomena that makes the strongest case for non-human intelligence. Is there one instance or story or or sighting that you feel like is the uh if not the smoking gun um the strongest available evidence? And can you walk us through it cuz again for people who have no background, no no no no no no reference knowledge, kind of start from the beginning. Give us a tutorial on this on this most strongest evidence.

[00:11:59]>> Yeah, I mean I think the strongest evidence is from the intelligence community and the military. And it that's been the way it's been since uh 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, an accomplished pilot, reported seeing UFOs in Washington State. It's been that way since uh you know we had a 1952 UFO sightings, mass sightings in Washington DC where uh fighter pilots were scrambled uh remains unexplained. So we I think the most persuasive evidence is coming from you know trained military pilots, navy pilots. uh you have episodes that are we see UAP are documented on multiple different sensing uh technologies radar uh we see a lot of infrared now you're seeing normal video plus you have the people shooting the video uh plus we have I think the maybe the mo one of the most interesting phenomenon is that we have a lot of UFOs over nuclear weapons sites as well as nuclear power plants I don't think that you can explain I I think you there is a psychological explanation of it that's interesting. I don't think it is is complete. Uh I think that we see a lot of these orbs but a lot of interactions.

[00:13:15]I'll give you one that's very controversial right now, which is that I believe it's 1969, the Malmstrom uh um air uh Malmstrom is a an air force base with nuclear weapons and a a large UFO appeared over the space and shut down the nuclear weapons. It like turned put them offline. And the Wall Street Journal recently came out with an article that said that that was the military testing electromagnetic technologies uh to use against adversaries and that it was experimenting um on this nuclear missile silo. I think that's preposterous. I I don't think that that explains it. And the reason is I I do not think I I think the military and the intelligence community did some really irresponsible things. But that strikes me as genuinely insane. the idea that you would be engaging in what was a very aggressive action which is you know shutting down your your nuclear uh weapons. Um I don't think that you would see the military the intelligence community doing that. I similarly don't think that this is just secret technologies being tested over New Jersey and over these military bases. Uh that would violate you know all sorts of rules for good reasons in terms of safety. So uh for me it's just a large preponderance of evidence that we now have over almost 80 years uh coming directly from the military itself. You know, we even Oh, another good one is we have a department the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1976 released a study or released a report that was very similar to some of the reports that we're getting now of two fighter pilots that encountered a massive what they called mother ship in the sky that shot out a an orb kind of aggressively at the jets that it it uh locked the the locked up the instrument panels for the pilots. This was all reported in a in a in a declassified defense intelligence analysis. And we have all sorts of other stories like this of sort of mother shiplike uh phenomena that are releasing orbs that appear to be probes. I mean, it's kind of right out of science fiction, but all pretty well documented with pretty reliable, you know, witnesses, usually uh more than one person. 50% of you watching right now aren't subscribed. So, please hit that like button, subscribe now, and share this episode with your family and friends. So it sounds to me like most of what's being described here is this sort of observable observable phenomenon. Uh there's a lot of it. Um not all of it can be explained away by sort of the usual stories about experimental tech or frontier tech or adversarial tech from the Chinese or whatever the Russians. um the sort of explanations given for why it might be seen over place X or or Y don't actually add up don't stand up to reason and when you add up all of this evidence circumstantial any one of them may be it suggests something more there it suggests something that needs a thicker explanation and actually might switch the sort of burden of proof onto the skeptic even um okay that's one thing that's like the observable evidence I guess The next place my mind goes then is there's all this stuff happening. It's been happening for decades.

[00:16:35]Do we have anything that we can actually hold? I mean, you then go to these stories of a guy like Bob Lazar. If you don't know who Bob Lazar is, you know, he's a a fixture on like Joe Rogan podcast and so on. And I I don't have his whole story, you know, in front of me, but he's like bend Area 51. He's actually seen the thing. He's held the tools and like worked on the machines.

[00:16:56]Um, is it the consensus of the community? And I know there may not be a consensus. It might kind of be all over the map, but let's just stick with you, Michael. Do you do you have some evidence to suggest there's something more than just these things we're observing? Um, but you know, concrete, the the material object. Did the orb ever fall to the ground? And did some guy from the Air Force pick it up and bring it back to a base somewhere so we could like actually take a look at it?

[00:17:26]Yeah. I mean, so there is a new Bob Lazar documentary out. It's called S4.

[00:17:29]It's on Amazon. It's very good. Just as a film as as people that appreciate fun documentaries. Excellent. It uses AI >> to recreate his story about the about these crashed or or donated is the language they use, craft um from these nonhumans. his the the film shows these really specific descriptions of the power source of the inside of one of the crafts and he also Bobar also describes uh watching apparently US military people uh fly one of them one of the a very classic disc um I find this there's some things about it I find incredibly compelling for example uh you know Bob Lazar took a group of his friends to go to sort of while he was still working there to at night sneak very close to Area 51 where they all reported seeing a UFO that just kind of hovered right over them and um you know Bazar's friend is in this movie and he's always had the same story and he says this really happened and there was all these other people there. I found that really I found that persuasive. I I didn't think he was lying about it. I think he experienced that as true. The stuff I found less convincing was for example in the case where someone's flying this flying saucer in front of Bob Lazar. Uh then the question is it came up for Lazar which was which was simply you know like where could we go with this you know could we go in space and he sort of mumbled it away like you know he wasn't really sure. He says I think he said something like oh it could operate here but it couldn't fly into space. It was very unclear. And I I found that sometimes when the stories trail off like that. I had another case in Brazil of a famous crash in Brazil and I interviewed the surgeon. This is all on Jesse Michaels podcast where Jesse Michaels is one of the major UFO podcasters. And I interviewed the surgeon who claimed that he had seen this alien in a hospital that had been treated after this crash. It's this amazing story. But when I started pressing a bit more on, you know, for example, his conversations with the other doctor and, you know, why was this doctor showing videos of this for years after the story sort of fell apart.

[00:19:46]>> So I do think that you can certainly debunk a lot of these stories or you see them fall apart. Uh but I even there I just think that there's not I mean I think the we get into the abductions we talked about earlier. A lot of the abductions were done under hypnosis. And we we know for a fact that you can implant false memories through hypnosis.

[00:20:07]But even without hypnosis, there's a lot of now research done. There's an anthropologist at Stanford who does research on how God she her book is called How God Becomes Real. And it's how people uh and it's not, by the way, she's not writing it as somebody who doesn't think God exists. She's she's she's agnostic. She's a anthropologist.

[00:20:26]And she's just describing what people are doing to feel like God is real for them. And she just describes a set of things that people do in terms of like imagining that the their minds are more permeable to seek a relationship between their own internal feelings and external events. She herself had various experiences that I think were psychic experiences where she was working with magicians in Britain and they were doing a kind of channeling of their internal energy and she turned her watch off. Um she also woke up one morning and saw three druids in her or sorry six druids in her room uh and doesn't dismiss it as psychosis. So it's uh she's there's a famous you you all may know a famous Harvard psychologist named William James who wrote varieties of the religious experience in 1902 and in his book he said I think there's something more there that's not reducible to psychology or sociology and that's her tradition and she says I I agree with that. I don't think it's reducible and I'm in that tradition too.

[00:21:30]I think that you can come up with a really complete explanation with psychology and sociology, but for me there's still a remainder which keeps the mystery alive.

[00:21:38]>> That's interesting. Yeah. My my general assumption and again could be proven wrong.

[00:21:44]If I kind of track these things over time and as I'm thinking about them, you have that that the ' 50s, '60s, '7s, that's of course the height of the Cold War. There's fear and anxiety about Russia, about the space race, about nuclear weapons. Um, it felt like this New Jersey sightings that happened, I guess, a year or two years ago. Felt similar, but it was the CCP as the standin for the Russians. Um, and then, you know, I took my second son on a Bigfoot hunting expedition, which so a a husband and wife, very amazing couple.

[00:22:22]We go to, you know, Mount St. Helens, which in a similar way to the nuclear reactors because of the volcanic explosion. It's supposedly the kind of hottest point of Bigfoot sightings. And I I leaned into it. I played into it. I was very serious and we should really look into this and the sounds. We did all these different techniques with the infrared cameras. It was like an amazing trip and he was just like his mind was blown. But you also I also like never quite knew and didn't didn't feel uh you know comfortable to even ask the couple like hey wait a minute do you really believe this or are we all putting on a show for kids and so there is that interesting line of of of I kind of my assumption is you see what you desperately want to see you hear what you desperately want to hear. Is there a throughine psychologically to the people who are involved where you could say, "Yeah, you you probably saw it. Yeah, you probably felt it. Yeah, you probably heard it, but the desire itself conjures the phenomenon. Is that a is that is that possible? Is that a throughine you've seen in people psychologically?"

[00:23:30]>> Yeah, for sure. I mean, imagine ourselves how genuinely terrified people were of nuclear war in the late 50s, early 60s. the uh you know the Cuban missile crisis people genuinely thought that there would be nuclear war and that I mean it was it wasn't it wasn't pretend it wasn't a distant fear it was a genuine fear and so what do you see with the UFO story you see a lot of stories of people describing a higher power a a greater power coming in and essentially warning us against nuclear weapons and demand, you know, urging peace. And this is interpreted extremely literally by people that are convinced of the extraterrestrial or NHI hypothesis. For example, in one of the cases, um, and there were multiple, but in one of the cases of when UFOs allegedly shut down a nuclear weapons site, one of the witnesses said it was like watching a parent take matches away from a child. And so, you see a sort of, you can argue this is a kind of wish fulfillment. uh there was a sense in which our government uh might have gotten us killed that we needed some higher power to come and intervene. But of course it it was already unacceptable at that time to suggest that that was God. And so maybe you we conjured in our imaginations some higher power that would uh save us from ourselves. And so I think it's also not surprising that we see a lot of interest in UFOs when trust in government is very low. Uh so you know 60s7s is a big period. Uh and then we see again really after 2016 another period where distrust in government is very high. I think also politically UFOs in my experience were more something that people that liberal people and people that were anti-establishment on the left were interested in.

[00:25:29]>> Yeah. Now we see it very strong among populist MAGA uh members of Congress uh you know Tim Berchett uh Paulina Luna uh Congresswoman Nancy Mace these are folks that have a very ne often a very negative view of the US military two of those people were in the military um but at the same time it's also among Democrats and so you see I mean I my the hearing was the most extraordinary hearing because every hearing I've been in the treatment by Republicans and Democrats of each other is so terrible and so rude and mean and it's always just like wow I can't believe but then on UFOs it was just like a bro fest you know people were very nice to each other they're very supportive of it and I think that that's part of what's extraordinary about this issue is just how bipartisan it is that um and a real commitment to keeping it bipartisan and to doing things in a bipartisan way >> one quick followup so those three Congress uh congressmen congressw and uh Luna Burchett and uh who was the third one? The Republican >> Mace. But >> that to me is like cause for for even more skepticism because even setting the UFO issue aside, >> if you add in Marjorie Taylor Green, you've kind of got like the crazy ones in Congress. Like even on the other personalities and issues, you kind of listen to these folks, you're like, "Wait a minute. I'm not sure if I take these people seriously." And so isn't that isn't it is is that is that because of the nature of the facts itself or is that because of the nature of the personalities? Um it would suggest to me that the um the personality in that case is more is more determinative. I don't know. Lome do you do you do you track that? Well, no. I mean, I guess what I'm what I'm hearing here, I there's what I want to say is there there's something more here we're trying to wrap our hands around than just this sort of psychossematic expression of anxiety or what I think might be happening now. You know, we don't have the same kind of fears over, you know, nuclear energy and this kind of existential crisis of nuclear weapons or something. But we've had this, this has been an ongoing theme of the show, and Michael, you might agree with this, this kind of epistemic collapse across our culture over the last, I don't know, let's call it a decade, whatever it is. There's this increasing distrust of kind of formal institutional narratives, formal institutional explanations for how the world is, how it works, who's in charge, how things get built, for what purpose, to whose benefit, okay, and so on. And now there's this kind of bipartisan, I guess, populist searching for something else. And I think also still a real anxiety over the fact that that epistemic grounding that we like base our worldview on seems rather thin, seems rather brittle at the moment. And that then, you know, allows in these alternative explanations and different kinds of ways of viewing the world. And UFOs is one of those things that we see like across history and it sort of adapts itself to modern technologies depending on where we are. But I again like I want it to be something more than that. My hunch is actually it's not that's too fasile. That's like too simplistic an explanation. What we're talking about is something here that's like more substantial, more robust. But then I have to admit every time I go to try to point at what that thing is that that feels bigger and and more meaningful, more concrete, I don't know.

[00:29:06]It's evasive. I I can't quite wrap my arms around. And that's why I'm like I'm searching for the physical thing. Like where is it? Where's the orb? And if this is a moment of transparency, why don't they just show us? Like just just show us the thing. like if this is where we're at historically with this, let's not be koi about it, you know?

[00:29:27]Show us the gray man. Show us the thing.

[00:29:29]And and and to the extent we're not getting that makes me more convinced that maybe still we're just going to have to live within this really disappointing and dissatisfying uncertainty. I'm reminded, by the way, I'll let Michael you answer my rant here in a second, but the thing about Fox Moulder is, you know, in in opposition to Scolie in his office behind in his, you know, FBI office, the poster behind him on the wall, it's the UFO, but importantly, what it says is, "I want to believe." Yeah.

[00:30:03]>> There's this stated preference.

[00:30:05]>> Yeah.

[00:30:06]>> That you can't really escape. Am I am I buying into this stuff because there's a part of me that wants to or needs to to kind of create this, you know, again, epistemic or psychological or emotional cohesion that is otherwise absent from my from my understanding of the world.

[00:30:25]So, okay, that's my big long rant. Um, but yeah, there's got to be something more, right? This isn't just >> runaway imagination. This isn't just an expression of anxiety, is it?

[00:30:37]I don't think it's reducible to that at all. I think it I think it is a new religion. But in saying that, I'm not saying that it's false or that it's a delusion. That by the way, that poster, the UFO in that poster looks exactly the same as what Bob Lazar said he saw.

[00:30:55]>> Uhhuh.

[00:30:55]>> And so, and you can read that all of these things, you can literally read them through different lenses. On the one hand, you go, "Well, then it's social contagion. He just got it from a hoaxed photo and then he is saying it's real." Or you say, "No, the photo was real and he saw something real." You know, similarly, I want to believe is definitely a huge motivation within the UFO believer community, but I don't want to believe is also a very powerful motivation in the debunker community, which as I mentioned before, there's certainly bad behavior on both sides. um claims of exaggerated certainty about what these things are from believers, but also debunkings that are not actually debunkings. When you really get into it, the person hasn't debunked it and yet is is acting as though they're they have a huge amount of certainty on it. I'll give you one, you know, thing that's fascinating to me is that there has been a lot of documents that were released, letters, memos, reports, and even a handbook for UFO recovery that this handbook is one of my favorites. But there's a whole trove of documents that most people including most UFO believers or I would say, you know, uh more open to the idea that it's non-human, uh they view as as fabrications by the US government. This handbook for UFO crash retrieval is incredible. I mean, it's um it's if it's a hoax, it had to have been done by somebody professional. Like, it even includes like remember the old library?

[00:32:27]I don't know if you guys are old enough to remember, but in the old libraries, you'd write your name on a little card that's tucked. It has that they verified a bunch of these people as real. So, one of the stories that you hear is that, well, this was all created to distract attention from secret US weapons testing.

[00:32:45]>> Uhhuh.

[00:32:46]>> Um, why in the world would that would that lead you to not pay? The idea is that well, if we just if we say it's UFOs, then people won't be interested in it. Um, I find that silly. Like that's it's for me that's in the category of things like the US government was testing an EMT, you know, and created a UFO experience for the missiles running nuclear weapon sites. Strikes me as like insanely um like reckless, not thought out. I don't I'm not persuaded at all by that.

[00:33:17]There's another story the Wall Street Journal told where he said there was sort of a ritual hazing where they were sort of misleading people. I'm sure that exists, but that that doesn't describe the totality of the phenomenon. So, it's um yeah, I just think it's I think it's a really it's very uncomfortable because I think we like to think of like there's things of facts and then there's opinions or there's facts and there's interpretations. But this is a place where you can all have the same facts and you can genuinely put them into these different interpretive frameworks.

[00:33:47]And I think not unjustly. Okay. While there's false debunkings and false positives, um I also think there's just so much room uh for uncertainty that uh that all three of these ways of looking at the phenomenon are necessary and legitimate.

[00:34:01]>> It's interesting. I I I think a lot about not not on UFOs, but there's this whole range of issues that has seemed to migrate from the left to the right, from the one counterculture to another counterculture. And if you look at RFK, perfect example, you know, kind of vaccine skepticism was something that used to be like Salelo and Vashan Island, Washington. And now it's like a MAGA RFK kind of Trump thing. Um, and and UF, I think you're right, UFOs have kind of also I remember growing up, you know, you grew up in Northern California. All three of us are like NorCal. Um, you grew up in Northern California. It's like the crunchy acid heads and and and kind of that that guy in your high school who was like really into all of like it was the occult or UFOs or all these, you know, granola food, whatever. Um, >> and so the politics of it is interesting. So what and and all these questions maybe you can give us your your your overarching meta theory.

[00:34:56]Is it just the the right stop trusting the government? Is it something to do with Trump? Why have all of these issues seemingly migrated from one camp to another in your opinion, Mike?

[00:35:08]>> I mean, there's obviously like a really simple, you know, uh, more obvious explanation of this, which is that the US government lost our trust. Uh, they said that COVID came from nature, not from a lab. They said the COVID vaccine would prevent infection and transmission even though Fiser itself said it wouldn't.

[00:35:24]>> Uh, they said that climate change was an apocalyptic threat. They said that boys can become girls. I mean, just think about the number of things that the medical and governmental establishment said that were obviously wrong and in some cases were deliberate misinformation such as in Russia gate or Hunter Biden's laptop or the various excuses for censorship. So, they've lost our trust. And so, it makes sense that that in that epistemic void, which I know is something that you guys have been talking a lot about, that you would see more legitimacy for these alternative views. I thought one of the things when I was thinking about our conversation today, one of the things I was I was thinking about how you guys have been talking about this epistemic vacuum and one of the observations I just wanted to make about it is I think that the motivations really matter in when you're doing this work of exposing genuine conspiracies or exploring whether something is a conspiracy, which is is your goal to actually get to the bottom of it >> and restore trust in institutions that we all that many of us feel that we need to maintain civilization. In other words, I would like an FBI that is not engaged in politics. I would like a CIA that's not running disinformation operations and trying to censor us. I think if your goal is to sort of keep the the the conspiracizing alive, I think if you have a business incentive to fill two to three hours a day with content, it's not in your interests to just say, "Hey, you know, Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk all on his own, and there's really no evidence that anybody else was involved in that assassination." And if we start going and chasing conspiracies around something where there's no evidence, you might end up making false accusations and that would undermine our wonderful lock in uh system of laws. I mean this uh you know we've all been chasing this question of why are our elites undermining these core pillars of civilization. Now we're sort of seeing that come on to the right. I don't think in a in a deliberate way in a sense that I think the left is is pursuing a rousoe project to unmake western civilization but I I do see it on the right where I don't think that the concern is to actually make the intelligence community you know more honest more transparent more accountable it seems like it's really the goal is to just maintain this you know kind of um ongoing conspiracism and I think there's a difference between investigating con potential conspiracies and engaging in conspiracism which I think just makes us dumber and helps us to misunderstand these institutions.

[00:38:03]>> So, Michael, okay. I mean, um, I I think that's right and and that matches my own sort of analysis of the situation and, you know, to get back to the sort of concrete sort of specific details of uh what's going to be coming out in in these document dumps and what what are the concrete things the astute sort of scrupulous observer should be looking for here where, you know, we're moving we're moving along along a spectrum almost or maybe This isn't a perfect analogy, but from sort of skepticism to more serious consideration of the that we're in the presence of non-human technology and perhaps, you know, actual alien life forms themselves are here and even among us right now or who have visited in the relatively recent past and may come again for whatever reason. So moving from skepticism to serious consideration to the kind of evidence where you say okay now I'm convinced this is real this is now in the domain of sort of traditional scientific inquiry what might we see in these document dumps that might move us like further towards that sort of latter understanding of this phenomenon.

[00:39:24]I mean the the main thing is just much greater humility and recognition of just how we are absolutely swimming in mystery and that the establishments for a variety of reasoning every governing establishment to create a sense of legitimacy wants to suggest that it knows more about the world and the universe than it really does know. And and honestly that goes the other way. It goes towards human consciousness, human psychology. I mean, they're still making progress in understanding how we uh kind of conjure, you know, mysterious forces that we don't completely understand. And so I think that um for me what it does is it it should move us into this place of just really a a very high level of openness to these various possibilities uh both of kind of a non-human technology or of some really f I mean if this is just social contagion and a psychological formation. I can't think of anything that compares to it other than perhaps unless you have sort of an if you have an atheist view of past religions you would say this is what a new religion looks like. We haven't spent a lot of time talking about the spiritual dimension of this, >> but one of the first things that you encounter when you investigate UFO cases is that they're just much weirder and more paranormal and more supernatural than just a kind of alien extraterrestrial story. So, if you take the abductions for example, a very common abduction story was that people were being abducted and um used to make hybrid human alien babies and they would abduct people and they would take their sperm and their eggs. any advanced civiliz advanced civilization would need to do that to construct new forms of life. I mean, we're with crisper, we're able to already create designer babies.

[00:41:09]We're getting So, imagine if there's some civilization that's, you know, uh, hundreds or thousands or billions or millions of years older than we are.

[00:41:17]They wouldn't need to be doing something so crude as abducting people out of their bedrooms. So, you have to ask, is there something else going on either psychologically or spiritually? There's a bunch of really amazing testimonials by people that that are in my view without question telling the truth as they understand the truth to be and for example there and not doing it I I'm also skeptical that these are people that are doing it for fame because I think they were experiencing a lot of ridicule and a lot of public embarrassment but just some amazing stories like a a British woman in the countryside in the 1960s with her children had an incredible sighting of a UFO boat that she described as a Mexican hat, like a sombrero, and two people inside that she said were very beautiful people and they had these very particular haircuts and they were just kind of staring at her and everybody saw it and the kids were there and they saw it and she just was like, I saw this and I was ridiculed in my little village in in England for years, but she, you know, says it's true. I think that's one of the most powerful if you just kind of go maybe it was just we don't know what it was. It was more of a spiritual experience. uh maybe better understood as a spiritual experience. Um that's a very profound uh I mean you could say those are angels in a particular in a different era and you would say they're coming and we're learning that we're not alone in this world and there's some other presence there and that's traditionally been the domain of religions and with you know the decline of Judeo-Christian belief it makes sense that if there is some reality to a supernatural world that it would maybe manifest differently.

[00:42:50]Another one of my favorites is there's a black uh folk minister who called himself Yahweh. He called himself Yahweh, by the way. Um, and they had a local TV news camera crew go out to film him to kind of make fun of him and because he said he could conjure UFOs, but sure enough, he conjures like multiple UFOs and it's all being filmed on camera and the the local TV news guys like they're calling the the TV station being like, "It's actually happening."

[00:43:18]And there's just so, you know, the fighter pilots where it's all four of them, two, you know, because it's two people per jet and they're all four of them are just absolutely adamant that they were uh flying around a tic tac and that it was an actual object and it was creating ripples on the ocean. I don't think those are grifters. I don't think those are hoaxers. There's a lot of counter incentives to wanting to do those. I think that they had genuine experiences and it could be as straightforward as non-human intelligence or extraterrestrials but that raises all these other questions about why are they doing this and you know I'll just say you know Jacqu Valet has you know written so many books and he's such a kind of the really the I think the I think most people would agree even the greatest scholar of the phenomenon at least among serious UFO people >> and he comes to a place where he says I think the way you should think of this is that there's sort of a control system that's and he's a computer scientist by the way. Um, help you get a sense of it.

[00:44:14]There's kind of a control system that's helping to evolve humanity >> and that is creating these different objects, phenomena to sort of help us to evolve and it sort of sounds a little bit like God at that point like yeah there's a control system. So you've ended up kind of going and that's he's such an interesting character because he sort of started with the extraterrestrial hypothesis and then ends up in this much more uh spiritual view of it.

[00:44:40]>> Yeah. I mean um you know what you're what this is reminding me of because you were asking like what other psychological phenomenon like might approach this and what comes to mind is like how we think about ghosts or these uh ways people describe like near-death experience possession. you know, they get pronounced dead and they they describe in incredibly vivid and consistent detail across contexts like they're going to some other plane and they're observing themselves in in a way that almost defies like materialist explanation and you go, okay, yeah, maybe there's maybe there's something there like this, you know, we get these little peaks, you know, little like piercing the veil of reality just so and we can just like glimpse through it and it's sort of ethereal and we don't see the whole thing but like UFOs and ghosts and whatever they are are these vehicles or something that allow us in different contexts to kind of to see through that.

[00:45:43]I mean, it sounds very woo when you say it out loud and you almost want to like stop yourself cuz you sound like a, you know, >> have either of you had one of these experiences, whether whatever theme, whatever costume, whatever objects, ghosts, demons, possession.

[00:45:59]>> Yes, dreams. Yes, in my dreams. I have a very vivid dream line >> in your waking hours.

[00:46:03]>> It's embarrassing for me to talk about.

[00:46:05]Okay, I don't like to talk about it because it's it's embarrassing, but yes, there have been moments of such vivid dreams, such and they're not lucid dreams like that's a specific kind of thing, but they're lucid in the sense of feeling real and beyond like a normal >> the way that normal dreams are described psychologically. And then they have an impact or get expressed through my waking reality in some fashion that uh I can't explain. I just can't and I would sound like a fool to even try. But I'm I'm convinced like I my experience tells me that this is something that's very real. But that's it's for me it's dreams. It's not UFOs.

[00:46:51]>> Dream Dream's a little different, right?

[00:46:53]If you're driving, if you're, you know, flying a fighter jet, you're not in a dream state. Nothing. And Mike, how about you? Any any of these personal experiences that >> I have. I've had a UFO sighting and it was it was wonderful. And um >> Well, tell the story. What happened?

[00:47:09]That's Yeah. Finally, 40 minutes in, we finally get it.

[00:47:13]>> Yeah. I mean, I should say, too, that I um I'm a Christian. I came back to my Christianity at a very low, dark point in my life when I felt extremely alone.

[00:47:22]And it was a very specific experience where I felt God's presence and that God was with me and it was a very personal experience. Um but it wasn't the only thing that led me back to my Christianity. The other things that there was two other things. One of them was that I remember Jonathan height talking about how the this of the psychological benefits of faith which is something that I has been writing a lot about of the psychological uh detriments of the lack of faith. Um including I think substance abuse disorder. Um, but then the other thing was that I I thought about UFOs and I remember thinking that we really that that there was some reality there that it wasn't entirely explainable by psychological social sociological phenomenon and that that was reason to understand that there's a lot of things that we still don't understand. But um it was probably two years after that that I was hiking in um very typical Southern California, actually very typical California. like I had some time to kill before a talk in Southern California uh at the Nixon Library >> and I just uh I just drove to the end of the road, you know, where the the subdivision becomes open space cuz I saw in Google Maps there was a trail there and I just it was a very strange decision because I I remember having um feeling very excited and sort of optimistic about you know what would come next. This was early 2022.

[00:48:45]And um I was walking in one direction and then I just literally that moment just turned around the other direction and there were three it looked like three stars to me. Um just they were they were just stars. Um but then one of the one on the left pulled off and it literally dragged my left eye but not my right eye with it as it went and it was incredible. And um and then a cloud cover kind of just like right after it happened just kind of came over and it all disappeared. But I I'm confident I was not dreaming. I was not high or drunk. Um and I don't know what it is.

[00:49:20]Uh but I don't think it was drones. Um there was a physical experience uh for me with it. Um so yeah and it was very special and I hope I it is a wonderful thing to have. I will say too that I also there is a lot of people that uh talk about being able to conjure UFOs.

[00:49:38]There's a huge debate right now around a former special forces helicopter operator named Jake Barber. Uh Jesse Michaels has a long interview with him where he tells an extraordinary story of actually recovering an egg-shaped UFO and having had this intense emotional spiritual experience that came right from it, like as though it were almost alive or almost a spiritual being. But he claims that they can attract UFOs similarly to that Yahweh figure. And I think that's a very interesting thing. I mean, I think there's just I think there's a lot of um there's I think there's a lot of phenomena that are not that are not explainable or not debunkable. I don't think the magicians have completely succeeded in in explaining all of that away. And that's the part I think that it is it is it is I think it's wonderful to keep yourself open to those mysteries, but also the coincidences to the the new insights. I think our culture is just very leftrain.

[00:50:39]We're very mechanically oriented. We're very machineoriented. We're very object-oriented.

[00:50:44]It's a very it's sort of not what, you know, and I'm using left and right brain metaphorically, but we don't we're not we're not very open to those experiences. Even people that are religious, I think, you know, they have a very uh the sense in which, you know, God is is far and that this is just a world, you know, that's that's separate from a spiritual reality. But I think part of what's so special about UFOs is that it opens all of us up to having those spiritual experiences.

[00:51:12]>> Interesting. Okay. And it might have something to do with Richard Nixon is the best part about this whole story.

[00:51:18]>> Might have been Richard Nixon. Yeah.

[00:51:19]>> Yeah. That >> you know, it it kind of reminds me and maybe it's just the human capacity for technological innovation and the human capacity for wonder. Uh, I'm still a skeptic, but I do recall this incredible image of Richard Nixon on the telephone um talking to uh the the people on the moon. So, he's talking to the astronauts as they're on the moon and then it's Nixon. Oh, how's it going up there, boys? You know, it's this amazing thing.

[00:51:50]And so, yeah, I think it's like part of this American um cultural and technological and political infrastructure. I'm still a skeptic. I'm still in the hard skeptic camp. I don't know. Lomz, did Mike change your mind in one direction or another?

[00:52:06]>> No, I mean, I I live in the same kind of ambiguity that I think Mike did coming into this. I feel very agnostic. I'm going to hold up a book here. This is from uh the Harvard psychiatrist uh John Mack written I think in 1990 and this was one of my early encounters with the whole sort of notion around abductions and and UFOs and John Mack who's this well- reggarded psychiatrist writes this book in which you know he he goes into it as a scientist to try to discern what at bottom is the psychological substrate giving rise to these abduction fantasies. But it turns out that whole premise he he he doesn't think is is real. These aren't fantasies. These are real psychological phenomena that just can't be explained in the way that other kinds of hallucinatory or uh sort of moments of psychosis can be explained.

[00:52:58]And so he comes out of this with this sort of very ambiguous thesis which is I don't know. I don't know. We're we're kind of forced to live in the gray area that people don't like. And you see people want to run to one pole or the other to say this is not real at all or in the other direction to say I know for certain and there's the like physical thing in Area 51 and all we need to do is get like 50 dudes and we're going to march on Area 51 and we're going to like storm the you know batter the doors down and there's like the the UFO and it's going to be like Independence Day. We're going to be like Will Smith and get in the machine and like like I don't think that's real either. And it's really unsatisfying to have to like negotiate this middle ground. But uh yeah, I don't see any way out of that unless I mean I don't know there is like the materialist explanation I think might still be out there which is like the fermies paradox thing which >> we have to we can't be alone out here.

[00:53:54]Okay, it's a mathematical impossibility.

[00:53:57]So either intelligence at some point gives rise to self-destruction or the things are out there and ought to be in some way visible to us and may be here right now and have v visited and they are probably so far advanced beyond what we are that they can decide whether they want to be seen or not and when.

[00:54:24]And it's kind of up to them to kind of make that decision. When are they going to reveal themselves to us? And to believe that doesn't require abandoning that kind of leftrain mechanical view of the world. It's all totally coherent, >> right?

[00:54:41]>> And even sort of a necessary belief actually. Um, so I'm I'm actually persuaded by that. I just what I what I am skeptical of, Michael, I'll say, is the government saying, "Okay, now's the time. We're going to be transparent and we're all going to discover something in the next year or two or whatever that settles this debate." I just don't think that's going to happen. And I don't think they have the goods. I think we're just going to have to live within this ambiguity in perpetuity.

[00:55:16]>> All right. And Mike, let's let's give you the last word and I'm hoping you can also just give one book recommendation for someone who is maybe skeptical but you know willing to to to to read a little bit. You give give us kind of last word and and and maybe one one book uh that you'd recommend.

[00:55:32]>> Sure. I mean actually the what I would love to recommend is are there's a couple of documentary films or maybe three. The first would be the phenomenon by James Fox.

[00:55:42]um particularly the the this tells a lot of this really surfaces more of the we call the nuts and bolts version of the story of nonhumans um and it does a really good I think a fair and accurate job and Jacqu Valet is the science adviser on that film he does another one another film after that about the crash in Brazil called a moment of contact and then the third is the age of disclosure which is also a very literal sort of these are ETSs or NHI nuts and bolts But it's very impressive because it's all these different intelligence community people who are saying, you know, this appears to be a different form of life.

[00:56:20]Um, you know, one thing I'll just add is that the if you listen to the core UFO belief story, it's actually a story that like other religions is seeking to explain all previous religions. So keep in mind that if you're saying you basically this the core story we call the the core mythology says that you know extraterrestrials created us they then sent their messengers whether Buddha or Jesus Christ to sort of create religions so that we could create some order and not kill each other and try to find ways to live in harmony. um that that itself becomes a story that is very ambitious in its power to try to then explain all previous stories and it's very easy to slip into. I was in a conversation with somebody where uh they said, "Well, if it's true, then this is the biggest event in human history." And I said, "Well, yeah, unless you were a Christian and you believe that Jesus resurrected himself, in which case that's still the biggest story in history, right?" like but it only makes sense as the biggest story in history if you really believe it as the new religion to replace all others and that's a big power move and we should be very skeptical of that sort of claim to authority and power because uh it's it's clearly there's a lot of ambition there at the same time you know I think what we've been saying is like you watch a movie like the phenomenon and you see you know you know people describing the sightings you see get the documents you get the evidence and you know it's not something that that that has been debunked or is so easily debunkable. I suspect that the most significant contribution to this current release of files is just that this is an absolutely legitimate area of human inquiry and that it does really challenge us epis you know coming back to the you know epistemological challenges that we're all having. It really does challenge us to achieve that ability to hold potentially two seemingly opposite truths >> in our minds at the same time. A lot of people define the ability to do that as a kind of wisdom. And I think it does then as a phenomenon has a chance to uh to to genuinely evolve our own consciousness and make us wiser in understanding something so uncertain.

[00:58:35]>> That's awesome. Well, we'll leave it there. We're going to definitely have you back. Uh you have a new book coming out. You're prolific on Substack.

[00:58:42]Everyone should uh you know follow Mike if you're not already doing so. And uh good to see you, man. Good to see you.

[00:58:47]>> Great to be with you guys.

[00:58:48]>> Yeah, this was great. Thanks.

[00:58:49]>> Thank you.

[00:58:50]>> Bye.