Are We Alone? The Search for Alien Life (Full Episode) — UFOs: Investigating the Unknown — Nat Geo

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Do you believe that our government is in possession of UAPs? [00:00:05] Speaker 2: Absolutely, based on interviewing over 40 witnesses over four years. [00:00:09] Speaker 1: It had no visible wings or any kind of engines. [00:00:14] Speaker 3: The United States government has gathered a great deal of information about UAPs over many decades, but has refused to share it with the American people. [00:00:22] Speaker 1: So we don't know what it is, but it's something. The U.S. Navy has finally acknowledged that videos appearing to show UFOs flying through the air are real. [00:00:32] Speaker 4: We've seen testimony from pilots. We've seen the videos. We've heard from the witnesses that there is more to this. [00:00:40] Speaker 5: I think people who had the experiences and seen things like I've seen, they're an integral part of this entire phenomenon. [00:00:49] Speaker 6: As I first saw it, it came into view, glinting off the horizon. [00:00:55] Speaker 7: We're going to get to the bottom of it, dadgummit, whatever the truth may be. [00:00:59] Speaker 8: But more and more researchers believe that we won't get to the bottom of anything by waiting for the government's help. [00:01:05] Speaker 6: It's an intelligence failure to not collect the data and not believe it. [00:01:11] Speaker 9: I know how the government works. They're not being fully open and transparent. If an object is seen to go into the water, how about releasing that video that was leaked? [00:01:20] Speaker 8: We've made a lot of progress, but we're not there yet. If we've learned anything over the last 70 years, it's that scientific study of this phenomenon will continue whether the government wants it to or not. [00:01:33] Mitch Randall: We're seeing these independent scientific groups. That's where the action is. And they're willing to dive into this subject and really try to get some measurements. [00:01:40] Speaker 11: If we can gather enough information and data from these phenomena, we might be able to explain what that technology is. [00:01:50] Speaker 7: Any life happening anywhere else would be the most revolutionary discovery in the history of humanity. [00:01:57] Speaker 12: We get reports every night. I don't know what the hell of it is. [00:02:01] Speaker ?: I can rotate right around it. [00:02:16] Speaker 13: I was flying home from Myrtle Beach, going into LaGuardia. I was coming back from a cheer competition with my daughter. It was just pretty outside. It was such a beautiful day out. It was about 2.30. I was looking at the bridge, so I'm like, let's just take some videos. And then I noticed this object going past really fast. What is this? That was really close to the plane. I was honestly, like, alarmed of how close it was, because what if that did hit the plane? When I got home that night, I looked back at the video, and I just really wanted to know what the object was. When I first saw it, I thought maybe a drone, possibly. But it was so fast and so close to the plane that I'm like, there's no way it could be a drone. My dad was in the Navy, and when he saw it, he didn't know what it was either. He thought someone should be aware of it. In case it's a safety hazard, he really encouraged me to send it to the FAA. So that's what I did. And they haven't responded to me, but I'm not this person that goes down this rabbit hole of UFOs and trying to decipher what things are. All I wanted was an answer to what it could be, but I honestly don't know what it is to this day. [00:03:51] Speaker 14: I don't think there's going to be a singular answer, but I'm proceeding as if no one is going to tell us anything and that we have to get our answers ourself. I think that is the best path to lead us to real answers in the future. [00:04:09] Speaker 15: If we really want to solve the UAP problem, we need new data collected by scientists working independently and as scientists, we are in a different position today. The technology to develop your own independent UAP search is available to anyone and it's affordable, makes this now in the domain of the everyman scientist and not purely in the domain of government. [00:04:39] Mitch Randall: For many years, there was no good data on tornadoes, but we had an issue in how to predict where these storms were going to be. So in the 90s, we had an idea, why don't we take our radar to the tornado? We were at the point where we could miniaturize the equipment and it all fit into a truck, and we could drive that to these rare weather events and get right in there and get the data. So that's where the idea of these storm chasing trucks came. And I was involved in that. I'm Mitch Randall. I'm an engineer and a physicist. I've been interested in the UFO subject for decades. I got involved with the Galileo Project, which is a group of scientists that I wanted to do an investigation of UAP. I knew the ideal tool for it would be radar. Radar is a really ideal instrument for detecting objects in the atmosphere at great distances. It can measure quantitatively the position and velocity of objects in space. So over the decades, people have reported UFOs that make these kind of crazy motions like that. And so that's what we're looking for, because airplanes don't do that. [00:06:16] Speaker 15: Mitch Randall has developed a passive radar approach to looking for UAP. You're just looking for signals that might be emanating from the object, and based on that, you can determine if there's something anomalous going on. [00:06:30] Mitch Randall: This is a passive radar receiver. So this antenna picks up echoes that come off objects in the sky. And that signal that they're getting is coming from an FM transmitter that's 30 miles south of here. So suppose it's any time day or night, and a UFO flies somewhere over in that area. The signal from the FM transmitter will echo off of the UFO and come here and get received by this antenna. And then we'll be able to see where that is, see what kind of velocity change it had, and be able to track it. Right now, I just have one proof of concept. But my vision is to see thousands of them all over the country. If you're sitting in one place, the chances of you seeing a UAP is maybe not so big. So we need some kind of, like, nationwide network that, if an event occurs, we've got some instruments there to take that data. The idea is that citizens would purchase a consumer product, which they could easily operate and plug in, just like they plug in a printer, and become part of a big mesh network over the whole continental United States. And then this data from each one of these receivers would be combined in a server that would figure out their position of the objects being detected, and then that would be served to the community. [00:07:55] Speaker 15: You can use machine learning algorithms to sift through the mountains of data you're going to collect with these. And so really, you're looking at the sky all the time, identifying all the things that are there, and see what's left over. [00:08:07] Mitch Randall: I think this will answer such an important question we've been asking for years and years and years. I don't know of any other scientific question that has so little data and is so profound. [00:08:27] Speaker 8: We don't know where they're from, why they're here, who they are, but they need to be studied. We need to find out. [00:08:35] Speaker 12: The events being observed are real. There's something behind it that's beyond our technology development. I'm Hal Puthoff. I'm a quantum physicist, PhD from Stanford University. I've set up Earth Tech International and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin. I think UFOs have been a topic that's kind of been off-limits and cringy and a lot of stigma associated with it. I mean, there are still a lot of physicists who think that most of the things that get reported are nonsense or misidentifications and so on. But nonetheless, over time, we've been developing better and better sensors. So the stigma has reduced quite a bit due to this increase, I would say, in scientific data collection. So the general phrase is there are two kinds of people. People who don't look into it and know it's nonsense, and people who do look into it and know it's real. [00:09:43] Speaker 16: If you're seeing something in the sky with your eyes, what if you can also actually measure it through a piece of equipment that's not your eyes? So now you have a recording device that can accurately determine what that object is and give you much more solid information. I was a mechanical engineer for almost 25 years. When I transitioned into an area of French science, I was very fortunate to land an internship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin under Dr. Hal Puthoff. Part of what I did was researching medical effects on people spotting UFOs. So we designed sensors that specifically looked for radiation present when UAPs were there. And then we also noticed other things were happening. [00:10:33] Speaker 15: Jim Sagala has developed a sensor suite to measure radioactivity in the vicinity where there are eyewitness reports of UAP sightings. [00:10:47] Speaker 16: I have been studying the case of a resident in New Hampshire who has been seeing UFOs behind his house for the past two years. These are the videos he recorded. You can see here where it starts splitting off. Now there's three objects where it started out as one object. This is the original video that piqued his interest. So he mounted a trail camera where he is suspected that these objects were happening. And one of the videos is quite revealing. The actual objects ended up appearing right where those trees were. And then he eliminated the possibility that it could be just a natural phenomena or a human-made phenomena. Like airplanes, satellites, stars, drones, and things like that. I suggested to this person that we need to understand what's going on in the environment. So we put a piece of equipment there that would look at all sorts of different signals. So this device was designed specifically to identify the signals present when UFOs fly by a particular area. I put together as many possible signal sensors as I could. One being a high-level camera that is capable of capturing visual and also infrared spectrum. Then at the same time, I could look for these electromagnetic signals that come off of these UFOs. All of those sensors are mounted and they go to this computer here, which then sends all that information over Wi-Fi up to the cloud, where you can view them and you can run it through any kind of models and things like that. He put my device pretty close to his house. And there was a big spike in some of the sensors that indicated something was in the environment that was making a lot of less magnetic noise. One example is you have the magnetic vector getting hit. Now the magnetic vector is the gravity. It's very difficult to do that. You'd have to have some very, very massive object, like a moon or something like that, to create this kind of spike. And it also happens with the gyroscopic sensor, which is the indication that these objects were twisting around. Those are just two examples. The equipment collects data all day long. I have algorithms that are looking at this. And what this is allowing me to do is understand a pattern as these anomalous events unfold. So every time this individual sees a UFO and is followed with some changes in the environmental signals, Now I can see a correlation. It gives me the ability to start predicting some of these things. [00:13:36] Speaker 8: It's exciting that these independent people are coming on board because they have a certain freedom to explore and develop their own particular approach to studying this UFO phenomenon. But we're still left to wonder, what clues have already been gathered by the one group that has been studying UFOs since the beginning? [00:13:57] Speaker 17: Fundamental question is whether the U.S. government has at its possession materials or information. If they do, I really wish that they would share it with scientists like myself because the sky is not classified. Our oceans are not classified. If we do have a neighbor, we'll have to find it ourselves. [00:14:21] Speaker 18: One of the very positive impacts of the last few years involving the government and UAP is that it has also made the issue more palatable for the academic community and the scientific community. But the scientific community needs scientific data to do serious work. And the government could be and should be sharing more information in its possession to facilitate that. [00:14:57] Speaker 2: The government has a legitimate interest in protecting some classified information. It has an interest in protecting the sources and methods it used for collecting intelligence. I'm a journalist. I don't want people knowing my sources. It's also the case that the intelligence community in particular often overstates the risk to exposing sources and methods that would come from being more transparent about any number of topics with the public. The government classifies way too much information. [00:15:29] Speaker 19: Congress has wanted the UAP subject investigated to make sure that UAPs are not a threat to national security. And that's why the all-domain anomaly resolution office was created in July of 2022. [00:15:46] Speaker 2: Arrow is a government organization whose job is to take all of the information that the government is collecting on UAPs and try and figure out what it is. [00:15:58] Speaker 19: Arrow is supposed to look at the history of the UAP subject from approximately 1945 up until the modern period. They were also supposed to look at any data that has been hidden. [00:16:21] Speaker 20: February 2024, Arrow comes out with what I think is one of the most important documents that the government has issued about UFOs and UAPs in decades. [00:16:33] Speaker 21: And we have breaking news now. A Pentagon review of decades of government investigations into UFO sightings has found no evidence any of those sightings were extraterrestrial. [00:16:42] Speaker 19: They found no evidence to suggest that the United States government or industry possesses any alien technology. The Arrow Report was missing some of the most important sightings of the 21st century. The November 14, 2004 Nimitz case, one of the most difficult cases to explain. The same thing with the Gimbel incidents from the 2015 and 16 cases. [00:17:10] Speaker 2: The big things that stood out to me about the report was, one, how emphatic it was, which was to say, no evidence that this is extraterrestrial, which was a pretty declarative statement. I will say that the report didn't read as much like government reports that I'm used to seeing. It was a bit more casually written. It didn't have tons and tons and tons of footnotes. It wasn't a terribly long report. [00:17:37] Speaker 19: Arrow makes the point that the conclusions are always the same. The Project Blue Book, the Robertson Panel of 1953, and that the Condon Report of 1968, all of these concluded that there was no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. And that's the main point that Arrow's making. [00:17:58] Speaker 4: The bottom line takeaway was, nothing to see here. But that flies in the face of very interesting comments from the former director of that office. [00:18:10] Speaker 22: A very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous. This is a spherical orb, metallic, in the Middle East, 2022, by an MQ-9. This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of. We see these all over the world, and we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers. This one in particular, however, I would point out, demonstrated no enigmatic technical capabilities and was no threat to airborne safety. While we are still looking at it, I don't have any more data other than that. [00:18:50] Speaker 6: They literally said, we have these spheres moving through our war theaters. What metal ball do you know that flies around? I don't know of any. So that could pretty easily fall under the umbrella term of a non-human intelligence. [00:19:06] Speaker 19: In science, before you can make that statement that there is no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, you have to define what is the evidence we're looking for to determine whether or not we've seen extraterrestrial intelligence. [00:19:22] Speaker 6: If you're going to give a conclusion, where is your data and what are your methods? [00:19:30] Speaker 19: Science operates in the open. We are never going to get an answer until we work with science and not the intelligence or military groups on the UAP subject. [00:19:44] Speaker 6: As a scientist, I don't need their permission to know what I know. I don't need their permission to collect data. We should stop waiting for daddy government to make the decision for us. [00:19:56] Speaker 1: Avi Loeb is a Harvard theoretical astrophysicist and professor of science. [00:20:01] Speaker 23: Professor Loeb has just come back from a trip that he says has advanced our understanding. Doc, good to see you. What did you find? [00:20:08] Speaker 17: Well, I found that it's easier to recover the truth about interstellar space from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean than it is from government. [00:20:25] Speaker 15: Avi Loeb and his collaborators went on an expedition in the Pacific near Papua New Guinea, where they thought that an interstellar meteor crashed down into the ocean. [00:20:38] Speaker 17: In 2014, the U.S. government satellites reported about an object that collided with Earth roughly a meter in size. It originated from outside the solar system. And it was unusual in that it was moving faster than the speed necessary to escape from the solar systems. So in other words, that meant that it's interstellar in origin. [00:21:02] Speaker 15: Serendipity, you know, anomalies, these are the kinds of ways that we stumble upon new discoveries in science. Even if you're looking for something, you might find something a lot weirder than you thought you were going to find. [00:21:14] Speaker 17: So I decided to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to collect materials. [00:21:21] Speaker 9: Avi's expedition off Papua New Guinea was really exciting because he was going after the debris of the first ever observed interstellar meteor. [00:21:34] Speaker 17: And then meteors explode as a result of their friction on air. The fireball generated releases so much heat that it melts their surface, creating spherols. Spherols are molten droplets from the surfaces of meteors. In the case of the interstellar meteor, the amount of energy released was a few percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy. And so we expected to find some spherols on the ocean floor. The Department of Defense localized the meteor impact site to within seven miles. [00:22:12] Speaker 9: I'm an oceanographer and I reached out to Avi and he welcomed me aboard. I helped him determine how far those fragments drifted through the atmosphere down to the sea surface. I also gave him oceanographic information to help him determine how far the materials drifted from the sea surface to the sea floor. [00:22:35] Speaker 17: We built a sled designed by engineers that has magnets on both sides that we placed on the ocean floor and was able to collect magnetic particles leftover from the explosion of the meteor. [00:22:53] Speaker 15: Avi brought this back and had several collaborators analyze this and they found that there are chemical anomalies in some of these spherols that they claim is different from solar system composition. [00:23:11] Speaker 24: And the composition appears to be different than anything that humans produce. But it's also different from asteroids, from rocks that previously were analyzed. And so that raised the possibility that it may be artificial in origin, technological, a spacecraft. [00:23:35] Speaker 15: Avi Loeb and his collaborators went on an expedition where they thought that an interstellar meteor crashed down into the ocean. What they found were spherols, very, very tiny particles that are from a meteorite. [00:23:57] Speaker 17: We had to examine whether the relative abundances of elements match the pattern that one finds in meteorites in meteorites from the solar system or the Earth's crust or the moon or Mars. And indeed we find that 10% of them out of the 850 spherols that we retrieved appear to have a composition that was never reported before based on meteors from the solar system. It's the first time that humans put their hands on materials from a big object that originated beyond the solar system. [00:24:36] Speaker 8: The general consensus was that it was a meteorite. But Avi Loeb speculated that it could potentially be some kind of extraterrestrial technology. [00:24:46] Speaker 24: It had material strength that was tougher than iron. And so that raised the possibility that it may be artificial in origin, technological, a spacecraft. [00:24:57] Speaker 15: There was a lot of pushback about Avi Loeb's claim. [00:25:06] Speaker 8: Even though it was just an hypothesis, it's just like people couldn't handle the possibility that that would be the case. [00:25:14] Speaker 15: But to be honest, this is how science works. I don't even think this is a bad thing. If you're going to make an extraordinary claim, that is what a scientist should expect, is to have a lot of pushback. [00:25:25] Speaker 7: Scientists are terrible to each other because we hold each other to such high standards. Because that's how science makes progress. [00:25:33] Speaker 17: I think, altogether, the criticism was not warranted. Because, in fact, we did find materials of an unusual composition that we believe originated from an interstellar meteor. As to the question of whether it was natural or artificial, the verdict will come from the bigger pieces that we find. If we find bigger pieces, it's easy to tell the difference between a rock and a technological gadget. Because a gadget may have buttons on it, for example. [00:26:14] Speaker 7: I think if you're really interested in looking for life in the universe, the right place to look is where the life comes from, which is going to be alien planets. [00:26:37] Speaker 11: There are hundreds of billions of planets in existence in just this galaxy alone. Wouldn't it be possible that some of those planets have developed life to possibly as high as ours is, and maybe even beyond? [00:26:54] Speaker 15: I'm an astrobiologist. I think about life in the universe. One possibility is to look far away, to look at other planets orbiting other star systems, exoplanets. [00:27:09] Speaker 7: Scientists, including myself, are studying the atmospheres of alien worlds, looking for things like biosignatures and technosignatures. Biosignatures are things that a biosphere produces, right? So the best example is oxygen. If you saw oxygen in a planet's atmosphere, especially oxygen and methane at the same time, that would be a pretty clear indication that there was a biosphere there, that there was life that was pushing that oxygen and methane out into the atmosphere. And then there's technosignatures, which would be the signatures of technology on a planet. [00:27:47] Speaker 15: It could be a satellite belt around a planet. It could be pollution in the planet's atmosphere. It could be radio waves directed toward Earth. But we also can think about the possibility that life on an exoplanet might send life or technology elsewhere in the galaxy. We have done this ourselves. So we have to then ask ourselves, if there's extraterrestrial life out there and they're interested in looking for other life, they would notice life on Earth. And they could theoretically do that, too. [00:28:26] Speaker 7: But planets are far away. The distances between the stars is psychotic. So if we're going to think about how to get between the stars, what are the options? Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that spacetime itself is malleable. What you're doing is you're bending spacetime, right? So if there's two points that are very far away, kind of bring those two points together, jump off, and then unfold. You know, fold space and then unfold it. [00:28:50] Speaker 12: Just to try to make this more physical, you see a UFO coming along and then it suddenly does a right-angle turn. And people on the ground observing this will say, "Oh, my God, you know, if there's anybody inside that craft, they're going to be squished like tomato sauce." However, since space and time have been re-engineered and manipulated, in that situation, time can be running much faster. And so the people inside the spacecraft are looking out the window, and so they just take a nice, leisurely turn. There's also the idea of wormholes. [00:29:28] Speaker 7: That maybe nature creates these shortcuts between stars. That's an exciting idea. [00:29:35] Speaker 12: It isn't that it's necessarily beyond our physics, it's certainly beyond our engineering, but an advanced civilization may have figured a workaround. [00:29:46] Speaker 8: It's very important to be open to looking at all possible explanations for the UFO phenomenon, because they all are going to point us towards what the ultimate nature of the phenomenon is and what it actually means. [00:30:02] Speaker 7: One possibility that people talk about a lot is that, you know, you can just give up on biology and that anything we meet, anything that's traveling between the stars is actually artificial intelligence. That it's basically machines. [00:30:14] Speaker 25: I think the idea that they're all drones is one people are comfortable with, because they don't have to go to the next step of actually saying, "Okay, wow, there are so-called aliens." Also, I'll say existentially, we have to be open to the idea that we might be dealing with something that we would describe as very, very inhuman, in that it wouldn't be evolved. It might be something described as more machinic or non-organic. It would be very dicey for us to interact with it. [00:30:51] Speaker 12: How is it that we've arrived at where we are and still can't specifically say, "Where does it come from? Who's behind it?" So I took that on as a challenge to say, "Okay, maybe the problem is that we've narrowed our scope too much." So maybe there's some group that's hidden out on the planet with these advanced technologies. [00:31:24] Speaker 26: We believe that our reality is the story. That the story we're in is in fact the way the world really is. And when something doesn't make sense, it means you're being pushed outside of your story. The UFO phenomenon is trying to make us more aware that the story you're in is actually not true. That there's another kind of presence or another kind of mind or another kind of life force that is active in the world. [00:32:00] Speaker 12: Let's open our blinders a bit and not be afraid to examine any potential hypothesis. Yes, it could be ET coming from another part of the galaxy. But what are the other options? And so I wrote a paper called "Ultraterrestrials," which means that they're hidden out here. Maybe there was some investigation of Earth, let's say, millennia ago by some other species. And maybe they have hidden bases on the ocean seabeds that are very advanced. We should be able to get data that either permits us to accept or reject the hypothesis. [00:32:47] Speaker 15: What could be hiding in the ocean is a big unknown. The oceans are incredibly deep, vast, incredibly difficult to get to the deepest parts. And we are constantly surprised at what we discover in the ocean. [00:33:02] Speaker 20: Several of the incidents that pilots have come forward in recent years to talk about have appeared to be objects that are either going into the water or coming out of the water. [00:33:14] Speaker 27: Now we're seeing leaked photos apparently taken from U.S. fighter jets showing a craft that military pilots claim came popping out of the ocean and then shooting straight up into the air. [00:33:24] Speaker 14: There have been reports that we've received at Americans for Safe Aerospace about unidentified submerged objects. They could transition between various mediums, such as space, the atmosphere, or water, apparently without any difficulty or change in its flight mechanics. It is harder to observe these and there's, you know, less of an incentive to talk about. [00:33:54] Speaker 15: There's a famous case of a U.S.O. or an unidentified submerged object that was in a video. And in this one you see an object that's hovering and then seems to disappear into the ocean. [00:34:08] Speaker 9: This video from the U.S.S. Omaha of Southern California in 2019 is from the Combat Information Center that looks at radars and checks for incoming threats, missiles, or aircraft. I really like this video because the people on the ship, they're all sailors. So it catches their attention because it doesn't look like anything else they track and they've had a lot of experience looking at things that they can't explain. [00:34:31] Speaker 19: The drop in speed is very minimal as it moves into the water. So that, that is very unusual. The key difference between a U.S.O. and, for example, typical type of drones that we've developed and some of our adversaries have developed is that as the U.S.O. enters the water, there is very little interaction with the water. [00:34:59] Speaker 9: Does it lead you to wonder, well, if there are these objects, where are U.S.O.s coming from? Is there undersea infrastructure that they reside in? So why not be looking at our seafloor for evidence of their origin? [00:35:23] Speaker 11: Our ocean floors are an enormous mystery to us, just as much of a mystery as are some of the moons orbiting some of the planets in our solar system. And we have very little knowledge about all that's going on in that other world. [00:35:40] Speaker 9: We have not explored even 5% of the ocean volume, and we've only mapped about 25% of the global seafloor, so there's that much we don't know nothing about. The U.S. has a very active ocean exploration program. The Okeanos Explorer knows dedicated ocean exploration ship. They collect all sorts of images and video of sea life, of geological features. They're identifying new species every year. They've done thousands of hours of exploration. And they came across on the seafloor these rows of holes that look entirely man-made. And they were a little over 2,000 meters deep on the seafloor. They were centimeters in size, and they look very perfect geometrically. It looks almost like you took a rake and just, like, dug it into the water, and it created holes. Poles into something below. The scientists on board the ship, they had no explanation for these. They think we need a national program to research USOs. We're keeping our mind open, our aperture open for USO activity, because what is it? What are we seeing? That's the big question, because we still don't know. [00:37:11] Speaker 13: When I say I think it may be a UFO, I don't think it's something, like, from out of this world, really. I just don't know what it is. But I also think that if they ever did find, like, life out there or something like that, I think-- I don't know. I don't think I'd be, like, surprised, but I think it would be really scary. But I also think it's naive to think that we are, like, the only ones out there. [00:37:38] Speaker 2: As a personal matter, I believe that there are non-human forms of intelligence in the universe. And that doesn't strike me as a remotely controversial proposition. But my job as a journalist is not to just believe something is true. I want evidence that it's true. And one of the reasons that I like writing about UAPs and writing about what the government is doing to research UAPs is the government knows an awful lot about stuff that is flying around in the air or that is under the water. I have not seen any evidence that extraterrestrials have visited the Earth that convinces me that it's true. That doesn't mean I don't believe it. I just haven't seen the evidence for it. [00:38:23] Speaker 7: Every 10 years, astronomers get together and they decide, "What's the most important questions we want to ask over the next 10, 20 years? And what kind of zillion-dollar telescope do we want NASA to build?" And in 2020, the leading project was something called the Habitable Worlds Observatory. It's going to be a telescope that is going to be designed to find life on distant alien worlds. And what that means is astrobiology is going to be one of the leading concerns for astronomers. It is a very exciting time. [00:38:59] Speaker 26: I don't think that physics or history or literature or biology is going to give us our answers. I think all of it together needs to create some new order of knowledge, some other way of ordering higher education around this topic to even begin to get at this question. [00:39:23] Speaker 4: The UFO topic is remarkably complex. There is the nuts and bolts aspect where I'm more comfortable as kind of a national security-focused analytic mind. But there's also the consciousness side of it that deserves, I believe, deep, objective, unbiased analysis. [00:39:46] Speaker 5: There's a lot of people that are telling the same things about what these things might be. And I think it's important to look into it from the human side, too, because it's all part of the bigger picture. And it's important to the answer we're going to get. [00:40:02] Speaker 28: As human beings, we've had a couple of really large revolutions in our psychology. We had, in the 1500s, the Copernican Revolution, which took us out of the center of the universe, the geocentric model. The Darwinian evolution in the 1800s, which was man as related to animals. And then the Freudian revolution in the 1900s, where we really understood that there are unconscious motives and drives that can determine human behavior. And it strikes me that at this moment in time, we're at another point of a massive revolution, where, for eons, we all look up into the sky and wonder, are we alone? We're on the cusp of a deeper understanding of our place in the cosmos. [00:40:49] Speaker 7: Imagine what's going to happen when we find, if we find, that there's life in the universe. If we find life anywhere else, it means that we're actually part of a galactic community of life. And that changes everything about who we think we are, what we think we are, what we think our future might be, that I think it would really force us to rewrite philosophies and religions and politics. [00:41:15] Speaker 8: I think what excites me most about being involved with this topic is just the mystery of it and the intense curiosity that I have about wanting to understand our world, our reality. And this is part of that. It's part of the unseen world out there that we don't comprehend, but it's very, very real. So what does that tell us about who we are as human beings? That's a very profound question for me. [00:41:45] Speaker 23: Why it was so impactful to me, I have a profound thought of humanity and how humanity has to act to survive. And sometimes I'm really frustrated by that. I'm frustrated that people don't take the time to think about what's beyond the earth, what's beyond the stars, what's out there, how can we get there? And I just see all the hate in the world, and I think that's what probably bothers me more than having an alien put his hand on my shoulder. [00:42:22] Speaker 25: We need to be thinking about what the meaning of this is for different parts of humanity. I personally would find it very irresponsible to be working on this professionally in a political capacity, in an intellectual capacity, and to not think that going beyond war, going beyond a global condition in which we have children who are not educated, who are not fed, not having a world in which human rights are respected. You know, if we don't care about those things, then who cares about UIP? [00:43:03] Speaker 15: Let's say we do a comprehensive search, and we find nothing. All we find is evidence that this is it. All we have is life on earth, and it's just dead out there in space. No life, no technology, nothing. Well, that just makes this all the more special. If this is what we have, if this is what life is in the universe, then we have an even greater challenge to protect this life, to preserve it, maybe even to spread it elsewhere in space. So, either way, this is a really important question. And the fact that we can answer this question with science is, I think, a reason that we should put resources into trying to answer this question with science. [00:43:52] Speaker ?: So, I think that we should be able to answer this question with science. So, I think that we should be able to answer this question with science. So, I think that we should be able to answer this question with science. So, I think that we should be able to answer this question with science. So, I think that we should be able to answer this question with science. So, I think that we should be able to answer this question with science. So, I think that we should be able to answer this question with science. So, I think that we should be able to answer this question with science. So, I think that we should be able to answer this question with science. So, I think that we should be able to answer this question with science. So, I think that we should be able to answer this question with science.