Marketing is hard. But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads. Go to Libsyn ads.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com today. Hey everyone, Michael Shermer here. Time for another episode of the Michael Shermer show. This is a solo commentary on the UFO files. Yes, they've been released finally. Here it is Friday, May 8th. It's a midday here in California. They were released this morning. So I've been and tweeting and reading and scanning and clicking, and just hundreds and thousands of files here to go through. So this will be an unscripted, kind of a quick commentary on how disappointing this was. We were told by many people in the government that aliens are here, and that we know, like, for 100% certain that they're here, and Trump is going to show us the evidence. He himself was a little dubious, but okay, let's see it. Well, it's here. And it's disappointing, as I'll show you throughout this commentary. It's pretty much the same old blurry photographs, grainy videos, artists, reconstructions of what people said they saw. Lots and lots and lots of stories about what people said that they saw. Although for some reason they didn't have their cameras with us. And more recently, they didn't have their cell phones with them to photograph these things. Or if they did, again, it's not very clear what it is exactly we're looking at at all. All this came about, by the way, because Trump, half the things he does, I think, is in response to Obama. Obama, on a podcast episode, said in response to the question, are aliens real? Yes, aliens are real. OK, he walked that back later and said, OK, what I was saying was that I think somewhere in the vast distances of interstellar space, in the cosmos, in our galaxy or some other galaxy, there's probably extraterrestrial intelligence. The aliens are there somewhere. Almost all scientists say that's probably the case, including me. I agree. I think aliens are out there. I don't think they've come here. At least I haven't seen the evidence for it yet. And today's release doesn't help. In fact, it makes it worse. But, I mean, Obama's commentary is just pretty standard Drake equation type, back-in-the-envelope calculation. hundreds of billions of galaxies, maybe as many as a trillion galaxies. Each of these trillion galaxies has hundreds of billions of stars. Pretty much all of these stars have planets. You just start doing the calculations of how many of those planets are about the right size, like the Earth's size, about the right distance from their sun to have liquid water, and so on and so forth. You do all this, and you still get billions and billions of Earth-like planets at the right distance and size and so on, somewhere in the galaxy, surely there is extraterrestrial life. All right? I agree with that. But what most people discount is the astronomical distances between the stars. That is, let's say, our Voyager spacecraft, which is hurtling away at 40,000 miles an hour out of our solar system. If it was going to the nearest star, which is only four light years away, really close by Alpha Centauri system, it would take 70,000 years to get there. It's mostly empty space. The chances of aliens finding us at this particular time in our history is very, very, very low. Not zero, but close to zero. But that's not what believers will have you believe them. That is, they say, they're here. Well, what's the evidence for? Many of us have been asking for decades. I've been hearing breathless claims of disclosure coming any day now since we started Skeptic Magazine in 1992. By the way, here's the latest issue on this very subject, which is, I think, a form of new religious movement that has started. That's why this guy looks like he's praying and something coming on from down on high. I do think aliens are deities for atheists, sky gods for skeptics. It's something like that, but I'm not going to talk about that today. That's in my truth book, my ultimate thesis here. But I just want to address what the claims are made by the government. So let's look at those. All right, I'm going to do some screen sharing here. We'll take a look at the presidential unsealing and reporting system of how that works. Here it is. Share. So you go on the tab, the Department of War, and it gives you some thumbnail sketches, which you can click on to see blowups. I will show you that in a minute. Some of those blowups, a little note from Donald Trump, which he posted on Truth Social. The directive of this whole program, which is transparency, which is, as you'll see, is anything but transparent. To get out what's really going on here, the clearance for release on this particular date, that's today. And then you have these files, lots and lots of files. And these are the pages of files and so on. Let's go to page one just to see what that looks like. We go to number one, just an FBI document here. You click on that, and it gives you this description. This is the FBI's case file on investigative records, eyewitness testimonies, public reports concerning unidentified flying objects and flying disks documented between June 47 and July 68. UFOs, unidentified flying objects. Remember, the U just means it's unidentified. It doesn't mean it's extraterrestrial. It doesn't mean it's conspiratorial. It just means I saw something, I don't know what it is. Full stop. Okay, so let me give my general commentary on that before I continue further. That is, even the hardcore ufologist. Here I use Leslie Keen's, Leslie Keen is the ufologist who authored the 2017 New York Times article about UAPs. And that she says in her book, UFOs, it's called, 95% of all sightings have prosaic terrestrial explanations. You know, their satellites, their planes, their birds, and their planets, and so on and so forth. There's a laundry list of these things it could be. So in any particular field of study, there's always a residue of anomalies that go unexplained, right? So that 5% of unexplained anomalies, that's probably about right. We just don't know what it is. No theory explains everything. So there's always room for some open-mindedness just in case these anomalies actually account for something. They may not. They may just never be explained. Particularly in this case, these are often one-off events. These aren't things you can just repeat in the lab and then keep measuring. So that's part of the problem there. So we may never know what a lot of these things are. Okay, in any case, so you click on the actual download, which I did for you to save some time here. It looks like this is a four-color envelope. You could see how many times it was copied and handled and opened and checked and so on and so forth. And it begins with this letter dated September 6, 1966, from one Mrs. – it's addressed to Mrs. Levy Dow from none other than J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. He responded. How about that? That's pretty amazing. and date stamped with the FBI there. And it an account of this person letter it her letter to J Edgar Hoover about all the different flying saucer sightings that they made and includes in the envelope here their newsletter their flying saucer convention here, the flying saucer newsletter, Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, yay, with lots of pictures. This, by the way, is very probably, unless it's fake, or an artist's rendition, it's very probably a light behind the person taking the picture out through a window. All right? I have a picture of this in my book that my art director, William Bull, sent me of his own light on his ceiling. Okay. Anyway, that's just a side commentary there. But lots of pictures and things like that. Okay. So that's what it looks like. There's lots and lots of pictures of these here, these things that are thrown up in the sky. We've addressed these many, many times before. I'll stop sharing that now for a moment and go back to Riverside here and give you an example of this. Back to the screen. Sharing and look at an episode we did of a show I hosted called Exploring the Unknown and How Easy It Is to Fake UFO Photographs. Here is a clip from that. This photo, for example, is one of the most famous in the history of UFOs. Over the years, this shot, and another taken moments later, have been examined many times. No one has ever found any telltale signs of fakery, no retouching, or darkroom funny business. But even if they're real photographs, they're not necessarily photographs of a real UFO. To challenge the seemingly unassailable evidence of UFO photographs, we decided to find out how hard it would be to make our own believable UFO photos. Did we go to Hollywood's special effects experts? Not exactly. Meet our crack. Okay, so we had the kids do some fun here just making fake UFOs, and then we tossed them into the sky. It was either hubcaps or we had them hovering using very narrow thread, like this one here. Well, there's a hubcap that we tossed into the air here. I'll show you what that looks like. hubcaps tossed into the air. That's obviously kind of fake. But there's no obvious string hanging onto it. Even this one, which we did, not that one. Let's see, where's the candy? Oh, this one. Okay, this one's pretty cool. This is just a licorice candy box that we're dangling with a very narrow thread. The film, these are old school, these pre-digital cameras, was just dangling there. The photograph does not capture the string on the emulsion film, right? Yeah, they're hanging from a string. Surely we are going to be found out. No sign of a string still. So we took this to an X. Nothing to indicate a string, wire or anything. It is the background and the foreground subject both. So it looks a little more real. That one there, that looks a little more like a candy, licorice candy box. Anyway, that's just kind of a fun idea, just exploring the idea that some of these might be fake. Not all of them. Most of them are not fake. Most of them are just things that are out there that people photograph that they think that they see. Okay, I'll just give you my just general – okay, I've already expressed how disappointed I am. But let me share with you my Twitter posts today just to kind of – again, this is an unscripted just commentary on this stuff. let's do screen share and my X account general commentaries and going through what all these look like here's my general response to everybody all of the UAPers we've seen here daily on X have breathlessly proclaimed disclosure of aliens is coming any day now it's here okay I've been through all the files and I don't see any definitive evidence just more of the same blurry photographs granny videos, artist reconstructions, and lots of anecdotes about weird things in the sky. So to you, to anybody listening, anybody, what am I missing? Okay. Tell me why I should flip from being a skeptic to a believer. What's the, you know, the change in evidence. I want to update my priors and upgrade my credence and so on and so forth in a Bayesian way. Okay. So just continuing on these commentaries. This one, I really like this. The photograph is actually real. This is an artist's rendition of what somebody who stood on these grounds somewhere in the United States. And I like the quote here from President Obama. For those of you who still think we've got little green men underground somewhere, one of the things you learn as president is the government is terrible at keeping secrets. Okay, this is why Trump wanted to release this, because he didn't like that. Obama was getting a lot of attention for saying what he said about aliens. Okay, let's continue on down the looking at this here. So do you think you can see the photograph of the UAP? Okay, so here's this is the UAP here, that little dot. This is obviously a helicopter. The description in the image for this particular image is it says this, this appears to be a helicopter. Appears to be a helicopter. Really, seriously. Surely, whatever it is this thing was chasing, if that's what it was doing, and filming it or photographing it, could we see those photographs? Well, maybe they'll let us do that. In the meantime, what are these dark rectangles here? These are redactions. All these photos have a little disclaimer. We've redacted things so you can't see where this was taken, when it was taken, why it was taken, what the cameras were that were used because these are all military secrets. Okay, thanks. I thought this was about transparency. Okay, continuing. There it is. There's that little dot right there is the thing that they're interested in. Okay, these are mountain ranges. Okay, this is a long ways away, whatever it is. It's probably a balloon or it could just be a plane coming right at you or coming, going away from you or right at you. You know, it's really hard to say what it is. It's rather embarrassing to not know what this is. Okay, these photographs from Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 allegedly show these mysterious orbs in the moon sky, the sky of the moon here that they're taking this on. Initially here I post that these could be lens flares, which you often see in these photographs taken at grave sites and cemeteries and haunted houses and so on. These are the ghosts. They're just light bouncing around inside the lens of a 35-millimeter camera, which these were. This was shot by a Hasselblad camera. And it may not be that, though, because people, after I posted this, commented that the objects are way far in the distance. The astronauts themselves said, yeah, I see something kind of weird. The light's behind them, so that's not likely to be a lens flare. But remember, they're on the moon. There's no atmosphere. So the night sky is going to be brilliant with stars. You don't see that in most photographs because the camera is just photographing the object nearby, like the astronaut standing there or whatever. But to them, of course, they would see this. These are probably astronomical objects that could be other stars or planets or galaxies or who knows what. Okay, continuing on my commentary. Here I was distressed in going through the files about the number of redactions. Redactions have been made to protect the identity of eyewitnesses the location of government facilities or potentially sensitive information about military sites not related to UAP Okay, look at that. I thought this whole point of this whole thing was transparency. We're going to just show you everything. We're going to give you everything, and then you decide. How am I supposed to decide if the most important information about these sightings is redacted? Okay. All right, this one, September 12, 2023, Mexican Congress heard testimony on UAP from experts that includes these long-debunked fake alien corpses. If this is any indication of the quality of UFO files, we are going to be, you know, God help us, I said, as an atheist. But there it is. You know, they have it right here, you know, that the Mexican Congress hears testimony of alien life. and then they show the fake alien dummies. Even the hardcore ufologists that I've talked to and I've read here have said, those are fake. I know they're fake, and here's how I know, and so on. Okay, fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. I like this one because it's about Russian antics, which have only gotten worse in this regard. Here, this is a document dated October 28th, 29th, 2001. Georgian Foreign Ministry reports a Russian aircraft violated Georgian airspace and bombed areas of the Kordori Gorge. Russians denied it, saying it was a UFO. Thanks, Russia. No surprise there. Putin, of course, wants to deny. This was, you know, remember, post-fall of the Soviet Union. Putin's come into power now in 2001. He wants to piece together the Soviet Union back together. He wants to take the Georgian area back to his country. And so he launched some military action and, of course, denied it when challenged and said, oh, it's a UFO. OK. But you can see in the document here where the alleged Russian planes had violated Georgian airspace and bombed areas of the Kodori Gorge. The ambassador stressed that such incidents of true and have continued could be disastrous for U.S.-Russian relations. Okay. Again, there are hundreds and hundreds of documents like this. So no, I haven't read every last one, but this is what they look like. Okay. No surprise there. Additional commentary. Oh, this one's so much fun. Again, real picture, artist rendition, composite sketch. I did a translation of what that means. It's another story about spooky things that happened for which we have no actual evidence. Okay. Why don't these eyewitnesses ever have cameras with them? Now, this is probably before digital cameras. I believe this was before that. But now there's a billion cameras walking around the Earth and on planes, and they're not there. Why not? Okay. All right. So we looked at that. Let me just give you some of the hype about all of this stuff. The Admiral says Atlantis is real. Okay. He says more than that. But anyways, so let me share this with you here. So this is – the Free Press has been covering this. This is Will Ron. He's been excellent on this. He's been interviewing, you know, like Diana Pasoka and Avi Loeb, interviewed me and this Admiral, Timothy Gallaudet, who says that the aliens – I just want to just play this for you so that you see to what extent these people are not thinking critically. This is a rear admiral. This guy, he's high up, right? He's smart, educated. and he says it's 100% for sure they're here. Here's him saying it. We do not know this. If we knew it, I would know it. Avi would know it. Everybody would know it. Okay, the SETI people. Here we go. Play this. Admiral, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Will. It's great to be here. Admiral, I want to get into your personal story and how you arrived to all of this in a little bit, but over the past few weeks and months, I've been talking to a lot of people about this issue, and it's really revolving around one question. And that's the question I want to put to you first. What should everyday Americans, just everyday, smart, knowledgeable, reading the newspaper Americans, what should they think about UFOs? Great question, Will. First and foremost, they're real. We're being visited by some type of higher order intelligence that we don't understand and we don't even know their intentions. And it's happening often, frequently, and in our airspace, water space. So that should be a cause of concern for our government. And we know the government knows and is not acknowledging that full new nature of reality. And that's probably my biggest point here is that us being not alone in the universe is probably the story of the century or the millennia. And really, like Galileo, when he changed the entire thought of the Western world, we're at the same inflection point now in our understanding of the universe. All right. Just think about that for a second. This guy thinks he's Galileo. It's like, I know this 100%. I know it's true. The government knows it's true. And we're going to find out about this. And he's right. If this was true, this would be one of the greatest discoveries of all time. You would be Galileo, Newton, Einstein, whatever. If this was true, he does not know that. I know he doesn't know it because I know what he knows, and I know we don't know that. Okay, so this is the ego, the just massive ego involved in these people that make these claims. And you can see the energy in their presentation, their eyes, the way they talk. you know, like, oh my God, oh my God, this is it. Okay. So you can kind of see the motive. I'm not claiming they're making money on it. People call them grifters. I've used that term. I don't mean they're doing it to make money. You want to be the most important person in human history? Yeah, sure. I don't care if I don't make money on that. Okay. So you see that going on there. That's a nice example of that. All right, let's look at another example. This from a film that just came out today. This is with Jeremy Corbell. His film is called Sleeping Dog. It came out today, August 8th, in theaters, and I guess it's going to be released probably on Amazon Prime or whatever next week. Here's a trailer for that. So if I share and but again, you see this kind of this this ego idea like, oh, my God, I have made this incredible discovery. I found out we're not alone in the universe and I'm going to release this. Here it is. Your journalistic credentials be. If you look in the 70s and 80s with the CIA, they used to have reporters on their payroll. They don't respect anybody. Corbell is an investigative journalist who helped detain and release the DoD footage of UFOs. I've been holding a secret for about 11 years, and it's going to be extremely public. It's not a video of any of it. It's not a video of one crowd. It's more than that. Years ago, I went searching for the truth about UFOs. And I found it. He was the most curious kid ever. First person that I pointed a camera at was John Lear. John Lear, son of the famed aviation pioneer. The world pilot The government has between 30 and 50 alien bodies Cole called his phone and she getting done I want to bring a camera and then how open he was with me This was not part of my game plan at all. Flying saucers, flying dead of extraterrestrial origin. David and Mary Strong, they've been here and are here. It's an Alice in Wonderland planet. Very few people will ever find the truth. But everybody is looking for the truth. And a lot of people think that they found the truth. But that's impossible. I'm like the least qualified person on planet Earth. One thing I am is I am worthy of your trust. If you really have stuff that is that sensitive that you cannot release, you're relying on your connection as a journalist, they're not going to come after you, not only you, they're going to come after your family. If I die, the story comes out. It would represent... if you were really afraid, you're going to be killed for exposing this information. Why do these people keep making films, writing books, going on lecture tours, going on podcasts and talking to anybody with a camera? Okay, that's not what you do when you think somebody is going to kill you. Okay, they don't actually believe this. I'm quite certain of this, but that's just to give you a feel for what's coming. And I think the motivation behind this. Here's the Fox News coverage this morning of this, which is a little more, I don't know, tongue in cheek and and a little more skeptical, I think, which is which is good. Here we go. Trump releases the files. Credit or dissuade the American people. President Trump is focused on providing maximum transparency to the public who can ultimately make up their own minds about the information contained in these files. And there's also a fresh look at some historical records. There's this from Apollo 17 included in this big document dump. One of the astronauts says, we've got a few very bright particles or fragments or something that go drifting by as we maneuver. The control center says, Roger, understood. Another astronaut says, there's a whole bunch of big ones on my window down there, just bright. It looks like the 4th of July out of Ron's window. Another astronaut says, yes, now you can see some of them in shape. They're very jagged, angular fragments that are tumbling. This exchange has long been dismissed as floating insulation. But now the White House is saying, while this photo has been previously released and discussed by keen observers, there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly. And this all started, of course, because we asked the president about it in February. Barack Obama said that aliens are real. have you seen any evidence of non-human visitors to earth well he gave class of right information he's not supposed to be doing that you know the aliens are real well i don't know if they're real or not i can tell you he gave classified information he's not supposed to be doing that well he made him he made a big mistake he took it out of classified information no i don't i don't have an opinion on it so the government is trying to answer the question do aliens exist and the answer is they don't know but in an effort of transparency they are giving us all of the material that they are working with as they try to answer that question all right you peter so many questions the internet has been ablaze about this for a long time and one of the things that the uh unidentified that has just been uploaded to the new website which is war.gov there is nothing like that in this batch, but they are going through and they're working to declassify whatever they can because President Trump told them to. And this is different than when he ordered the Kennedy files to be unclassified and just put everything out all at once. It was millions of pages, a huge file. This is going to come out bit by bit as they work through. And you look, you know, we've got some stuff from Apollo 17. We've got some stuff from a couple months ago. There's a ton of material, but they want us to know that they are trying to figure this out. They just don't have an answer about whether or not about what these craps are. Peter, what do you think? You're a betting person. Do you think these aliens are friendly? Should we approach them? What do you suggest if we see them? You know, you hope that they're friendly. I see a lot of people here at the White House, And I think that looks like it might be an alien. And everybody is pretty nice. Okay. They're having a little fun there, which I think is the way to treat this. But that shift, here, let me stop sharing here. But that shift from, you know, anomaly or unexplained something or other to, do you think the aliens are friendly? Okay. That is not usually made tongue in cheek with fun. People are serious about this. They just assume if you can't explain it, it must be aliens. Okay. Anyway, so that's it, I guess. I'm going to continue to read for the weekend and get a story out for you in print in Skeptic. This in the coming days, I just kind of want to nail down a little more specifics to be a little more careful in print than I am here online. But in general, okay, yes, maybe there's more to come. But again, Representative Luna said these are probably interdimensional beings. You're not going to believe what we're going to show you. Well, I haven't seen anything I don't believe that makes me think they're aliens. So again, what am I missing? Interdimensional beings. That doesn't even mean anything. She's been hearing about string theory, I think, with multidimensions. Or the Admiral. Okay, the aliens are really here. you're not going to believe the evidence you're going to see. Okay, well, let's see it. Okay, so again, just as a – I just wrote a book on truth, right? So how do you know what you should believe is true? Okay, I don't believe UFOs are aliens. Not 0%, 0.01%. Okay, I'll give it that number. What would it take to flip it over? Okay, how about just actually showing us the alien spaceships that are allegedly back-engineered and being held in some warehouse somewhere in the United States, we're told. And by the way, we've been spending decades and millions of dollars apparently back-engineering these spaceships because they have such incredible maneuverability and speed. Why aren't we using it in Iran? Huh? Counterfactuals, okay? You know, if the Russians have developed some super-advanced technology, why aren't they using it in Ukraine? All right. If the Chinese have it, why aren't they going to use it? Why haven't they invaded Taiwan? Okay, the counterfactual is always helpful here. I just don't see it. I'll change my mind if the evidence changes. We're being told they're going to release these in dribs and drabs in the coming weeks and months. Okay, fine. I'll make more commentaries, I guess. But I will say that it's all true if I can see the evidence. Not just me. I mean everybody. This is my bet with Avi Loeb for $1,000. bucks, is that NASA, the head of NASA, the whole NASA space agency, the national science organizations, and so on, they all look at that and go, yeah, it's true, we've been visited. My analogy is the Chinese spy balloon. No one talks about the credentials of the pilots of the people that shot down the Chinese spy balloon. Why? We don't need their credentials. We can see the balloon is real and they shot it down and we have the debris. End of story. Okay, that's the problem here. The equivalent of that would do it. All right, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.
