19min chapter

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ACFM Trip 40: UFOs

ACFM

CHAPTER

Exploring the UFO Phenomenon

This chapter delves deep into the renewed interest in UFOs, discussing events like the release of US military aircraft videos in 2017 and public hearings by the US Congress. It covers various perspectives on UFO sightings, credibility of claims, and the influence of media on public perception. The conversation also touches on historical beliefs in extraterrestrial beings, information transmission in space, and connections between UFO testimonies, defense officials, and a famous musician.

00:00
Speaker 2
Purple People Eater what's your line he said eating purple people and it sure is fine but that's not the reason I came to your land I want to get a job in a rock and roll band and that
Speaker 1
dear listeners is the secret to aliens
Speaker 3
well I saw the thing coming out of the sky I heard a one long horn one big eye I come Mr. Shakin in the city it looks like a purple people eater to me it was a one-eyed one horn flying purple people eater one-eyed one horn flying purple people eater one-eyed one horn flying purple people eater sure looks strange to me one eye who really came down to earth yeah well we should probably start on why there's there's
Speaker 2
been a renewed interest in them recently like interest in UFOs and explain flying objects which are now often called unidentified anomalous phenomena UAPs it comes and goes interest that you comes in waves and we're in the middle of a really big wave now and that wave probably goes back to like 2017 when a series of videos taken from US aircraft mainly US military aircraft they sort of circulated online and then US government released them publicly it's in 2017 so that sparked the sort of interest in 2022 the US Congress opened its first public hearings into UFOs for like the first one for 50 years and then sort of just after that there was a wave of if you remember the Chinese weather balloon it flew across the the Pacific was seen as ivory UFO or a spy balloon or something like that it was just an errant what Chinese weather balloon at that then caused whoever runs the radar for the for the US Renautics Association I don't know basically the people who manned the radar they lowered the level upon which something would be detected so you have to sort of you know you're only going to detect things which are above a certain level of a wide you just detect every bird in the sky and it would be useless they lowered that a little bit and then suddenly discovered huge amounts of new unidentified flying objects because all of a sudden you could detect more basically and so there was a famous thing last summer where like the US Air Force scrambled and launched like a billion pound missile at something that turned out to be a balloon that somebody bought for fifty dollars off of the shelf of a super market so there was that then and then this summer you know just a couple of months ago there was another sort of hearing in Congress and this this guy David Grusch who was a retired Air Force intelligence officer testified to Congress in a big public hearing about what he claimed to have discovered during his research basically which are pretty out there David Grusch's testimony is none of it is like things he's seen himself or even even reports he's read himself but he says he's taught to like people who have either seen these things or read reports which confirmed these things and his job was to investigate this sort of area for US Air Force
Speaker 1
yeah and the things are we need to clarify what the things which Grusch claims credible sources within the American security agencies have confirmed to him include the fact that the American government is in possession of both crashed alien spacecraft from which they are in the process of extracting advanced technologies and have been for decades and the bodies of crashed aliens the dead bodies of crashed aliens how come alien space pilots are so bad at landing I don't know it's one of the great mysteries that is that's a good one actually so just just to clarify in terms of this wave we're not just talking about Anglo-America we're actually just talking about America is that right or was the or was there a Chinese perspective on this well
Speaker 2
the Chinese perspective is why they shooting down our other balloons but no I mean it's one of those things though when there's publicity about this then sightings of UFOs etc and experiences with UFOs go up and that's what's
Speaker 1
happening at the moment and you know if it goes up globally like does the the US does like US statements on this affect like people around the world or is this an Anglo-America thing that's
Speaker 2
a very good question I don't know the answer to that I suspect it's I suspect it follows US culture and how far that testimony is spreading but I don't know I mean the other thing to say about like David Gruschno is that like he has other claims which are aliens have been killing human beings right some of these alien ships are the size of football fields these are not like there's some very interesting and explained sightings we need to work out what they are these are like bang in the middle of light absolute that while this claims mixed up with conspiracy theories etc the other thing to know about this and then we can move on I think is he's a retired Air Force intelligence officer and he's testifying to Congress so all of these statements have been cleared by the official body that monitors secrets for the US government so the US government has looked at these and said these are not secrets right there's a couple of interpretation you put on that one of them is that this is all true and they don't mind people knowing about this and in fact it's never really been a secret that we have secretly found reverse engineering it sounds unlikely to me basically the other explanation is these are all not true and therefore they're not secret or they could be you know actually the US government wouldn't mind people talking about this sort of stuff and in fact you know David Gruschno could well be somebody who believes this but like it's not the first time that you've had people who work for the US government who making these sorts of claims basically you know it sort of seems to be a repeated pattern and one of the theories about about the whole phenomena of ufology is that it's something that's quite handy to the US secret state and it's something that they lean into and in fact you know some people claim that they in fact try to get these sorts of theories going and you have this reverse thing where people are saying look the US government actually has a program in which they are trying to fool ufologists etc that's where it gets all tricky you see because you know you can say oh well perhaps these are like this phenomenon is purely an earth-based phenomenon but then it's like how does the government relate to that why is the government agreeing for David Gruschno testify and then you get into this hidden secret world in which that just produces its own conspiracy theories and finding firm full footing on all of that is quite
Speaker 4
difficult and just to pull
Speaker 1
back a tiny bit before we get into this and I know we're gonna get into the taxonomy of you know the different aspects of ufology and later but like just in terms of understanding what we're talking about are we primarily talking about when it comes to you know what you were just mentioning here state security all the mysterious and conspiracies we primarily talking about things in the sky or are we also talking about crash landing and alien people because the way that human beings I would imagine the way that human beings experience that is quite different is that anthropologically and historically there could be an argument that's made that human beings have always had a tendency in terms of like the mysteries of life and like ideas around God that there are these other beings or higher powers in the sky which perhaps could be you know understood within different cultures in different ways which gives people that tendency towards that belief which is quite different to having said you know I opened my window one day and there was these these flashing lights and this this man knocked on my door you know who had like a cone head and was like eight foot or whatever is that all part of these kind of stories and narratives or we most mostly talking about spaceships well it depends who you are sketchy so people who study this phenomena do you make those distinctions the clearest distinction I've heard made is between stories which are about you folks proper like supposed aliens craft presumably from space maybe from another dimension or something that don't involve any encounters with aliens and that might include like supposed sightings of dead alien bodies you know being in the possession of the US military or whatever and then there's actual like intelligible counters encounters with other beings who might be extraterrestrial and might be from other planets or I think the different the reason for classifying it that way is that world people have always claimed contact with supernatural entities of some kind there's three aspects of it from that point of view and riverate ships or you just said nah dear because yeah it's also true people have pointed up at the sky and said there's stuff there this was weird stuff like whether it's the gods or whether it's like just stories about cloud ships you know people thought they saw ships like sailing ships in the sky there's that then there's the fact that people have always claimed to have you know various relationships with non-human entities and there's this like very specific phenomenon of UFOs that really start with the flying saucer a scares of the mid 20th century I mean that history briefly is around the mid 20th century you start to get these claims that people are seeing flying saucers these saucer shaped flying objects seem to be some super advanced type of flying craft and I think this this starts during the war and and it's not even initially assumed to their extraterrestrial like it's the fear is that there's some secret weapon being tested by the Nazis or immediately after that by the Soviets and there's these theories about them coming from the hollow center of the earth where beings might be living that we didn't really know about before but then quite shortly after that this lines up with the tradition of bit of fearing that there might be extraterrestrial life which is hostile and the idea that flying saucers are actually from other planets starts to become quite popular I mean again this is quite complicated because the idea that we might be invaded by a hostel aliens starts in the late 19th century the H.G. Wells is novel the War of the Worlds but but my understanding of the precise history is the very first sort of flying saucers sightings in the mid 20th century people weren't assuming they were extraterrestrial and then there's this I remember there's some book gets published in the 40s already 50s called flying saucers come from another world and then people come very preoccupied and then quite shortly after that you start to hear these stories where people claim to have been actually met aliens who landed in flying saucers and maybe took them into their spaceship and things like this and lots of people's claims to be seeing things in the sky. Well that's super interesting because that kind of lines up with what you would think would be happening in the West in terms of like the Enlightenment this idea that you know human beings can are capable of creating you know these different technological innovations so this idea that in the 19th century it's like well this must be these must be things created from this world would be like that would line up with that and then coming into the 20th century you know following the wars etc or around that time people thinking well perhaps it's it's from somewhere else as you know the the belief in the purity of technological advancement perhaps started to crumble. Yeah yeah the other thing the thing I would really stress actually I think it's easy to forget these days I think you can see a shifting over the course of the 50s 60s 70s is it's important to remember now that it wasn't clearly established that there wasn't other organic life as we know it in other planets in our solar system really until the 70s so up to that point it seemed perfectly plausible to people that there might be like civilizations that were only slightly more advanced than ours who could send spacecraft like between Mars and Earth or Venus and Earth. So it's only in the 70s with the Voyager probes going out into the solar system that it becomes clearly established oh actually no there's no life out there so and at that point you have to start saying oh well if these things are coming from another planet they're not like coming from inside our solar system they're coming from in they're crossing into stellar space and that is much a weird concept because as I'm sure we will come back to I mean basically modern physics says you cannot do that nothing nothing can nothing no physical thing nothing can cross into the
Speaker 2
space I don't think that's true yeah it is true
Speaker 1
why
Speaker 2
is it true it is it's not it just it just takes time basically it can
Speaker 1
do it over hundreds of thousands of years yeah it can do over hundreds of thousands of years but it would take I would take literally hundreds of thousands of years where any physics not just for a physical object but for any form of information to cross the space between stars no
Speaker 2
not that long yeah that long yeah yeah because the stars is like 30 30 light years away so that's like 30 years
Speaker 1
okay that's 30 years if you can go at light
Speaker 2
speed yeah but that's that's like information that's what information travel sir it's
Speaker 1
not that's not the speed in to me no information doesn't retain any coherence at that speed a light notes
Speaker 2
yeah but basically that's how fast that's how fast you know some terms of detectability can travel you could have probes which can just you know fly on for a long long time and you know depending on the level of speed you could get up to you could have generation ships which are like just like 10 generations or something like
Speaker 1
that only if they can go hundreds of thousands of miles an hour yeah like go incredibly incredibly fast
Speaker 2
yeah
Speaker 1
have the dream Jeremy let him have
Speaker 2
the dream I just want to roll back a little bit because it is interesting how it relates up to to sort of like the current level of scientific understanding because like the H. G. Wells war of the world's book was partly inspired by misinterpretations of observations of Mars basically where people are looking at Mars and saw lots of straight lines they assumed that there was a canal system a detailed canal system on Mars which started the wave of thinking they might be a civilization on Mars etc but also and let's just roll back a slightly as well because I think there's also like when we were making the distinctions between the different sort of phenomena we're talking about that there probably are three one of them is like sightings the other one is like remains crash landing remains or physical remains you could account for those with this idea that like what's been going on since the 50s is that people have been misinterpreting stuff with like secret weapons etc produced by the secret states and then people are misinterpreting that data and the state is leaning into it in order to obfuscate what's going on so like the most famous supposed alien crash landing was at Roswell in 1947 and like it's pretty well established that was like a secret balloon which the US government was using to try to monitor rocket launches in in the Soviet Union and then when it when it crashed the first person there misinterpreted it as a UFO remain and the secret states sort of lent into it and said well that's good that will keep people off the trail of what's really going on so you can see that like you know there you can have sort of physical explanations if you want for those sorts of phenomena but the third phenomena which is like yeah for the abduction testimony that's a bit else basically you either have a paranormal or perhaps a psychological or a psycho social explanation for those you know I mean that leads us somewhere else I think that the whole abductions thing and it relates to different series of phenomena like ghost sighting these sorts of things I think that'll be something useful to come back to I think because I think we have to reach for different explanations we're trying to work out what's going on with them
Speaker 1
and I think there's like a development of an understanding of what the role of the state is and how that works with mediated culture because before you have mediated culture in the sense that we have it in the 20th century or whatever like people didn't perhaps know what the government was up to in such you know specific details so this idea that there's a gap between what the public are being told and what you know the state or the deep state is up to and what interests and power one out of these actions is something that is going to produce all sorts of theories and you know interest from from the public or we'd have
Speaker 2
to play something by blink 182 I don't even know any blink 182 songs the lead singer Tom De Long the lead singer of blink 182 is like this really big eulogy is basically and like you know I said in 2017 though these testimonies etc in Congress and stuff like that so there are two guys Luis Elizondo and Christopher Mellon and they were both like ex-defense department officials etc and they came and testified to all of this UFO eulogy stuff and then it was discovered they were actually employed by one of Tom De Long's company called To the Stars which was then doing a big like share issue about to try to get money in order to do UFO research so anyway that's why we need
Speaker 1
to play aliens exist it's blink 182
Speaker 5
creatures from above you used to read me stories as if my dreams are boring we all know conspiracies are dumb
Speaker 2
so there's this book and a documentary actually called Mirage Men's the books written by Mark Pilkington like and that's one of the more coherent arguments that says like basically what's going on is that based there are misidentifications in the 60s and 70s in particular there were like new religious movements were sort of like latching on to these misidentifications these ideas of UFOs and then the secret state has been really leaning into it and in fact Mark Pilkington claims that like they're organized attempts to like obfuscate this stuff to enhance and boost up ufology communities and these sorts of things and even to like you know do look really quite horrendous manipulation of people to convince them that that UFOs exist etc and that they should keep going with
Speaker 1
their investigations that sort of stuff yeah the argument here is that the motivation for the secrets they to do that are multiple like on the one hand it goes back to attempts to just hide the fact that radar-proof stealth technologies were being developed in aeronautics military aeronautics then it also includes the idea that basically trying to convince people that UFOs were real was a useful sort of test exercise in psychology psychological operations and propaganda in the 50s 60s 70s at a time when we do now it is now a matter of record the CIA was completely off the leash in terms of both black ops all over the world of various kinds including like trying to convince people that communists were Satanists and this sort of in indonesia and this sort of thing
Speaker 2
well and

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