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The Curious Introvert
A weekly podcast covering societal taboos & cultural blind spots. Join host Meredith Hackwith Edwards as she deep dives with curiosity & nuance into philosophy, society & culture with expert guests.
Episodes frequently feature philosophers, researchers, historians & journalists.
The Curious Introvert
Ep. 356 If Aliens are Real, Why Does No One Care? [REMASTERED]
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What happened to ontological shock?
Michael Glawson, PhD, is a philosopher of science and technology with a background in theology. He’s also the host of the podcast Anomalous Review & the UAP Studies Podcast. In this video, we cover the public’s love affair with cryptids, why new information is unlikely to smash our world view, ancient aliens, data vs entertainment & how the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies collects data.
This episode originally aired on April 14, 2025.
If you liked this episode, you’ll also like episode 276: ARE ALIENS HUMANS FROM THE FUTURE? [REMASTERED]
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2:14 UFOs as "the cryptid we're bored with"
3:24 The double-talk that primed us
5:56 Diana Pasulka and denominations of belief
8:00 The "aliens are demons" camp
9:19 The Alien Resistance Christian group
10:28 Why nothing smashes a worldview
12:24 Michael's personal crisis moment
13:57 Inside the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies
15:16 MUFON, NUFORC, and the data problem
16:53 300 best cases and emerging patterns
19:44 The missing taxonomy for non-human intelligence
21:09 The career risk of studying this openly
23:04 Defending the "petty" reputation concern
25:38 Philosophy vs. data as competing lenses
28:12 Why doesn't the public care?
28:40 Could disclosure hurt our "galactic reputation"?
29:22 The nuclear weapons parallel
30:39 The game theory of disclosure
33:48 UAP apathy vs. religious apathy
35:27 Kahneman's fast and slow thinking
36:23 Economic survival crowds out big questions
37:35 Why the NJ drones felt different
38:23 Michael's anatomy of the NJ drone panic
40:33 The Iran mothership claim debunked
41:07 The germanium-68 "missing nuclear material" myth
42:45 Thousands of unexplained military incursions ignored
44:35 If you could interview an alien
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In 2023, Air Force veteran David Grush became a UAP Task Force whistleblower, saying the task force illegally withheld information from Congress about retrieved intact and partially intact crafts and pilots of non-human origin, aliens. The inspector general called this report urgent and credible. Since then, even more disclosure and testimony has come forth to the same effect. And the public's reaction? My next guest is a PhD philosopher of science and technology with a background in theology and is the host of the Anomalous Review, a podcast that explores UAP with top scientists and experts. He also hosts the podcast for the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. Today we're going to unpack UAP and aliens through a philosophical lens as we ask the question: if UFOs and aliens are disclosed as real by members of the government, why does no one seem to care? Philosopher and fellow podcaster, mind pilgrim and cat person, Dr. Michael Glossen. Thanks for being here.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Thank you for having me. I am a cat person. That's like one of the best inner intros that I've ever had. So thank you, Meredith.
SPEAKER_00Oh, you're very welcome. I think we should start off by me telling you about this Facebook poll that I did. I really wanted to get a feel for like how people in my life or peripheral to my life feel about UAP disclosure on behalf of the government. So I gave them multiple choice, as one does. And I said, if there was an official announcement that the government said aliens are 100% real, how big of a deal does that feel to you? Option A, all my 90s ex-file dreams come true. Option B, they're real, but disclosure is meant to distract us. C, I have bigger problems. And D, my framework of reality would crumble. Do you want to guess which one no one said?
SPEAKER_01D, I bet.
SPEAKER_00You're right. Yeah. I've like I was so shocked because all these years, as you know, the reason that we've heard that there isn't official disclosure is because people would just go into ontological shock, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
SPEAKER_01It doesn't. I don't think it is. And it's it is bewildering, right? There's been all this bizarre news since like 2017 about UAP and UFOs being real, and there doesn't seem to have like moved the needle on how the public behaves very much.
SPEAKER_00I kind of wonder if it's a little bit like cryptids, you know, like if it's part of our human nature to mystify things, to exaggerate and make them legendary, kind of like the Kraken, you know? It was a mystical, mythical creature until I think 2004, and when some fisherman was able to get a full body and now, oh, it's just a big squid. So I kind of wonder if UFOs and aliens are like the cryptid we're bored with because now the government's saying it's real.
SPEAKER_01I think the cryptid we're bored with is like one of the best pieces of framing that I've ever heard for this. And I'm gonna write that down. I think it's actually, yeah, I think that's kind of the case. I mean, in one sense, there's been this like double narrative that we've heard from experts, you know, quote unquote, there's no nobody's really an expert on this, but like, you know, people who who work in NASA or whatever will would always say, well, on the one hand, yeah, we're like a hundred percent sure that there's gotta be life out there somewhere in the universe. The universe is just too big, it's too complex, blah, blah, blah. But on the other hand, we don't have any really good evidence for it being here, so blah. So that that kind of primes all of us in the public to think, well, yeah, it's somewhere, it's real. We just like haven't found it or it hasn't come here yet. And and then also we've had the setup of like Ancient Aliens and other better shows. I actually just interviewed the creator of Ancient Aliens for one of my podcasts, so I hope he doesn't find find this out. But there there are other better shows uh around the 90s and 2000s that said, well, well, maybe there is kind of some evidence, but it's not the sort of evidence that like NASA wants because you can't like stick it in a lab and make it do whatever you want and measure it in exactly the ways that you want repeatedly. So that combination of the the double talk of, yeah, they're out there, but we don't really have the evidence we want, plus these stories that say, well, maybe there is a little evidence has probably primed all of us to think that, yeah, there's maybe it's here already. So when the news comes out, we're like, we already kind of believed that it was anyway.
SPEAKER_00It's kind of like a confused mind does nothing a little bit.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it's like this the whole society has kind of a confused mind, right? Like, because here's something that really interests me. You can have the situation where a whole society, each individual member already believes something, but that personal belief that each of them has hasn't scaled up into a conversation at like the large group level. So we can have a a situation where everybody in, say, America already believes with like 80% that yeah, there are probably aliens already out there or are already coming here, but we never really talk about it. And so it doesn't scale up to a big national conversation where we all know that we all believe the same thing and we're all talking about it. So then the news comes out and it seems to fall really flat because it doesn't really change anything for any individual's belief. I think that might be kind of the situation that we're facing.
SPEAKER_00Okay, that reminds me of something Diana Pasulka said, because when I was talking to her, I said, I really have this hope that, you know, non-human intelligence, the reveal, the big reveal, would also include the fact that they are sociologically advanced, like they are beyond their sinful nature to use the Bible reference, that their past ego and hate and war and all this stuff. And she said, Well, that's a spiritual belief. And that kind of like took me back, like, wait, what? And she said, Yeah, there's actually denominations of alien beliefs. And so if we combine that with what you just said, that makes total sense. It's almost like if you look at every version of Christianity there is, of course, they're not unified in that belief in the national conversation because you know, we've got slight differences in biblical text and interpretation and application. And the same could be said of alien interpretation or UFO interpretation. So, yeah, everyone's inclined to believe whatever they want anyway. So why does it matter if disclosure happens?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, that's I think that's very much the situation. And what's what's really interesting to me is the more that I've gotten into this subject, because I've only been in this subject like five or six years, and I got into it really accidentally, actually, first by reading Diana Posulka's book. So anybody who likes this interview should absolutely go listen to your interview with her because it's fantastic, and Diana Pasulka's fantastic. But I stumbled into this not having any real strong beliefs one way or the other about it. It actually wasn't a thing I really thought about UFOs. I kind of believed I without even realizing it, that anybody who said that they had seen a UFO was either wrong, like they had seen a satellite or Venus or something, or they were mentally ill in a very small portion of those, like people who had abduction experiences, I sort of assumed it was a mental illness, or they were just lying. And when I stumbled into this subject, I found that can't possibly be true. I've just met too many people who are in very clear positions that indicate that they're sound of mind and intelligent and good, responsible thinkers who've had these experiences. But I also found that there are these weird denominations of belief. Like within the government, there's a sort of cadre of people who, because of their world views, and this is some military people and some legislators, because of their like prior worldviews coming into their careers, they tend to think that anything alien is demonic. And so they don't want to mess with it at all. And this is like a real conversation that I know people in the intelligence community have come out of meetings and have texted me and been like, You'll never believe the conversations that I just had, where people are like, we do not need to invest in censored technologies to figure out what these things in our atmosphere are, because they're probably just demons from hell who are like trying to confuse us or trying to pull us away from the belief in Jesus Christ or something. And that to me is like clearly a real denomination in the like literal sense that Diana Pasulka is kind of meaning. But then there are also these other denominations where it's like, oh yeah, they were they've always been here, they're ancient aliens, or oh yeah, they're people from the future. I think you interviewed Michael Masters who has this idea that they're time travelers from the future. They're kind of us or our descendants who's come back. And then there's like lots of different, there's this whole family tree of beliefs about this stuff. It's it's fascinating.
SPEAKER_00Well, uh, that's interesting that you brought that up about the demons, because I did have one person in my little unofficial Facebook poll that said they're demons or fallen angels. She didn't say that it would crush her worldview, but she said they are demons and fallen angels. And then as I was researching for our discussion, I learned there's a Christian group called the Alien Resistance. Do you know about this?
SPEAKER_01Oh, don't tell me.
SPEAKER_00Holy cow. Yeah. So they view aliens as recursions of satanic forces. And they advise that if you should become abducted, that you should call out the name of Jesus and that the abduction will cease.
SPEAKER_01Fascinating. I mean, you're just assuming that's true, right? They haven't really like gotten to test it out.
SPEAKER_00Well, I love that you said that because my cameraman Micah, he was like, Have they tested it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like it is that a we can get data on that. That would be awesome. You'd have like abduction, you know, diffusing tactic or something.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. But it brings up this point that I think it was you that made this on maybe a previous interview or when we were talking earlier off mic, that so many people tend to take this concept of aliens or intelligent life in other parts of our universe, and they amend their religious beliefs in order to incorporate it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, I think that's what we do, whether we have religious beliefs or not. You know, we come across something new and interesting, and we have to like kind of fit it in with our entire worldview. Nothing really ever comes along and just totally smashes your worldview, except from maybe like uh like psychedelics can do that because it changes your modes of perception so deeply, like the way that you perceive the actual frameworks within which you perceive the world directly become rearranged. So that can that can smash your worldview, but not a lot of information can do that, even if it's like something totally off the wall that you never thought was possible, like if we found unicorns or something, that would really conflict with most people's views of reality, but it wouldn't really smash anything. You just have to find some way of making it fit, and that's part of the part of the friction and part of the difficulty of getting this information out because we're not all purely rational, like calculators of belief, right? It's not like if you just lay a data set down in front of everybody, we can kind of do the statistical inferences in our head and be like, well, yeah, the evidence is good, so we have to believe it, and then we'll just like figure it out. Everybody has to take evidence and new information and sort of drag it into their worldview however they can. And some worldviews are really hard to do that with for certain pieces of information, and some are fairly easy. And I think that's part of the friction of getting this topic pushed forward because there really is very, very good data that like a normal, rational person could just look at and go, yeah, well, that's that's a thing. That's clearly a thing. We have to deal with it, we have to look into it, there's something there. But we've had a lot of us built a framework of belief that is so resistant to these ideas, partially because they're associated with things like ancient aliens TV shows on the history channel, which is like 90% garbage, that we say there's no way I'm gonna swallow that because it's comes loaded with all this other crap. And that's a problem I had too. This is like a crisis for me on a personal level when I found that there was really good data for this because I'm like, oh my god, I have to be a UFO person now. Like I have to I can't just deny that this is there's just like good evidence. But now I can't what do I do? Do I talk to people about it at dinner? Do I hide it from my family? Like, do I and yeah, there's consequences to it, but it's it's you know what you have to do.
SPEAKER_00That's so funny. I do want to come back to the the the fact that people are ambivalent to the data. But speaking of data, I think this is a good time to talk about what the SCU does because people like the ancient alien stuff. They like it a lot. Do you know how many times I've had it requested that I interview the ancient aliens host guy a lot? But I'm like, I don't, I don't know about that. But that's like the that's where the appetite is. I think that's a good measurement of the appetite for this kind of thing. We only seem to enjoy it through the lens of entertainment. And when it's pure data, it may lose some of its entertainment. And when I have listened to the SCU podcast and kind of looked into more of what they've done, they seem pretty scientifically rigorous, which is low entertainment value for most people, unfortunately. Can you tell me more about like the process of how they collect data and the purpose of why they're collecting it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So the SCU, the Scientific Coalition of UAP Studies, is very largely composed of people who have PhDs in a science. We have people who work at Lockheed Martin, we have people who are employees of NASA. A lot of professors are part of the group. There's very little sexy about us.
SPEAKER_00If you looked at our list of members, you would it's like the Dewey Decimal system version of UFO studies.
SPEAKER_01It is, and that's actually by design in a way, because the sexiness of it is a distraction from doing really good work, and it also attracts a lot of conversations that just don't have any purchase or have a ton of value when you're trying to just get good data. So even if you look at our member list, as a member, if I look at the member list, there are several members who use pseudonyms because they want to do the work, they want to contribute to what SCU is doing, but they don't want a bunch of people like emailing them in their spare time, their theories about where aliens come from or something, which is something that absolutely happens. Like you get a range of really good to really wild emails when you're doing this. But so the way SCU works is that we've got about 300 members, and about half of us have terminal degrees or are working in the you know sort of highest levels of our discipline. And almost all of us are just donating our spare time to this, to looking at data sets that have been collected because there are several organizations that have already collected enormous amounts of data, like MUFON and New Fork, or two organizations. One is the Mutual UFO Network, and one is the National UFO Reporting Center, and they have cataloged like tens of thousands of reports of people who've experienced encounters with UAP. And so, what those organizations have done for decades is if you wrote in and said, Look, this a thing land, I'm a farmer in Idaho, and a thing landed in my field and it burned a big circle in my cornfield and then it you know flew off at an incredible speed or something, they would send somebody out to your cornfield to take measurements and see if the soil was irradiated and take pictures and they'd write it down and they'd stick it in their database. But most of those organizations don't have a ton of people who actually do hard science for a living. They have good investigators, but SCU does have a ton of people who do really hard science in their in their normal jobs, and so we can look at those data sets and we can start to do analyses and see like what can we pull from this? What reasonable conclusions can we draw from all of the information that's been pretty rigorously collected? So, in one report that we put out, I think two years ago, we looked at initially a set of 60,000 cases that had been reported and investigated, and we narrowed those down to about 300 of the ones that had the best evidence that we could find. And out of those 300, we said, what patterns can we now identify in the UFO phenomenon? Like what really sticks out? And we were looking at really kind of basic empirical stuff, like what shapes are the objects? What do they tend to how do they tend to move? Do they have lights on them? Do they accelerate and make noise? Do they seem to interact with the atmosphere? And we came up with a bunch of different profiles that seem to emerge. Like their triangular UAP, their disc-shaped UAP. The disks seem to come in like two or three different aspect ratios. There's like a two by three and a one by seven that are pretty common. The triangular ones don't seem to ever make noise. They also have like electromagnetic effects, like they can stop your car from moving, stop your internal combustion engine because they're probably because they're ionizing all of the air around them so that like the little spark plug doesn't spark right because the air is too ionized. And so we we do that sort of work, and we come out with these really kind of boring white papers that list all of our conclusions, and those are interesting to people in the government, they're interesting to people who work in science, but you couldn't make a good like history channel TV show out of anything that we're doing. But again, that's by design.
SPEAKER_00Do they have any data collected on the actual non-human intelligence?
SPEAKER_01So we have we have access to these databases that have a lot of different information about the encounters that people report having. And some of those absolutely seem to indicate some kind of intelligence or at least effects on consciousness, maybe the easier way to put it. But we haven't done those sorts of analyses yet. It's really hard to do that kind of study when you have this data. Because if you if you want to study like the shape of UAP, we already have an idea of what kind of shapes there are. There's like triangles and squares and circles and whatever. But if you want to study like non-human intelligence, what basic categories would you break it down into at first? And these are conversations we are absolutely having. We're trying, we're in the phase of like trying in the in the time that we can devote to this, trying to say, well, what would a study look like where we could say, here's a taxonomy, or here's like a list of the different kinds of NHI or whatever. But so far it's hard to get a lot of agreement among the sorts of scientists that we have because we're a lot of hard scientists. I'm not hard scientists, I'm not a scientist at all, but the scientists that are there are like physicists and engineers and stuff. We don't have a ton of like psychologists and psychiatrists and anthropologists and sociologists who are the people we'd really want to be able to kind of design and plan this sort of study. But I can tell you that at the level of like conversations among SCU people, they're all super interested in that question. We just aren't sure how to study it at the scientific level or how to produce reports in that way yet.
SPEAKER_00It does feel anthropological in nature. And you mentioned Michael Masters and the conversation that I had with him. That's kind of the bucket that I would put his school of thought in, more of an anthropological study, because they're like time traveling to visit their past selves, essentially. But that's interesting that I guess no anthropologist has come to the table yet. Is that is that like seats open? Is that the situation?
SPEAKER_01Well, we do have some anthropologists at SCU, but every the part of being an academic is that you're forced to specialize so minutely on something. I'm not even sure what specialty, like sub-specialty within anthropology, we would need a person to have to be able to do this because we haven't ever had to create a taxonomy or way of distinguishing different kinds of non-human intelligence before. Like, who has that specialty and also who's willing to put their name on this kind of work and risk people just thinking you're crazy? Because that's such a real anxiety, and people kind of like shit on you all the time. If you start like messing with this stuff, you will get real personal consequences, like in your daily work life, especially if you're an academic, and nobody really wants to risk that. It's like personally really distressing to walk around and think that your colleagues think that you're an idiot or that you're like kind of losing your mind or something, which is what people who don't know anything about this automatically do think. I mean, I used to sort of think that. So, yeah, who are the people who have the right specialties and how can we convince them perhaps against their own own best interests, to to come and like devote their work to that? We're we're not even really sure. But we all know the stories. We all know that there are people who report like mantis entities, there are people who report gray sort of, you know, classic alien forms of you know. Humanoids with like blonde hair and stuff. We know that that's kind of out there, but we all have to look at it and go, like, I don't know what to do with that.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think you hit it on the head. I am skeptical that it's because we don't have a person with that specialty because science within itself is an exploratory act. It's asking questions and investigating what the answer might be. So of course there's no specialty. Like, did we have a specialty when we, you know, went to the moon for the first time? No. Like we were looking into it. Where we were adventurers, we were scientific adventurers. So I do think it's more of a reputation thing and it's more of a like the petty side of the scientific community that everyone's waiting for the other person to speak up first.
SPEAKER_01Let me defend a little bit. Because even if you were totally willing to just risk your personal reputation and to study these things, it's not just a petty sort of selfish concern. Because if your reputation doesn't support the work that you do, it doesn't matter how good your work is. No one will read it or take it seriously, right? So when we're doing this sort of work, the end goal really is to convince other academics and the public that there's something here. But if you do a great job and write a great book and all anybody does is look at it and go, dumbass, like then it hasn't done anything in the first place. You've just like ruined your career and gotten nothing in the first place. So like we have to have people who not only are willing to do this, which a lot of us would be. Like, if you just said we'll put you in a room, we'll give you funding, and we'll and somehow we'll magically guarantee that like your professional and personal life won't be ruined by studying this, figure out what the NHI are. There are people, a lot of people who would be willing to do that. I would be willing to do that. But that's not the guarantee. The guarantee could only be we'll put you in a room, we'll give you funding, you can do the best work you can. And then probably when you put it out, everybody will say, What the hell do these people know about NHI anyway? Like, why should we read their book? And your book will just sit there in a library somewhere, probably not even a library on a computer. And then 50 years later you'll be dead and it won't have mattered. Like that's really the concern, is that it won't work.
SPEAKER_00So it's not a matter of a hundred percent vanity of like, I don't, I care about what people think of me. You're saying that it is a very pragmatic reason that the effort will not achieve its goal because it will fall on not just deaf ears but turned backs.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, it won't, it won't do anything. A publisher won't won't publish it. It'll just be a manuscript sitting on your computer because publishers, when you put in like a a proposal for a book, they're like, Who is your audience? Who would buy this book? And if you say no one, because they'll all think I'm crazy, then nobody's gonna publish your book. So it's really a much larger systemic problem. And like academics and scientists can be vain, but we're not that vain. I mean, if you go to a conference, look at these people like half of them don't own a bottle of shampoo, like they're not like like the most arrogant, vain people that you can imagine. They're kind of already like giving up a lot of the good stuff in life to like nerdily follow this thing that they like. So it's it's complex.
SPEAKER_00I love it so much. Okay. So to go back to the data, so what we do have is data on UFOs or UAPs. So as a philosopher, should we filter that data through the lens of philosophy or should we filter it philosophy through the lens of the data?
SPEAKER_01Well, both. You should you should like force both to be friends with one another. The concepts and the data need to all work together. Philosophers aren't super data-driven people. We we think that data is very important, but it's just not the area we work in. And there's a kind of highbrow naivety that a lot of people who think of themselves as science-minded have about data where they say, well, if you don't have data, then what the hell can you what can you do? What conclusions can you draw? And the answer is a lot of conclusions. Like we can prove scientific laws without any data. In fact, one of my favorite examples is Galileo's proof that gravity doesn't accelerate objects of different mass at different rates, was not proven by the empirical experiments. It was proven by a thought experiment that he did. There's a misconception that he just, you know, dropped a bunch of stuff off the leaning tower of Pisa and timed how it fell, but that's not the proof at all. The proof was just a purely abstract philosophical proof. Philosophy has a lot of value in this, and it has a lot of value of being able to set the boundaries of the conversation that we're using the data in. It tells us what sort of data we should collect. That's a philosophical question. It's not a data question. We don't answer questions about data with data, at least fundamentally. We answer them in philosophical ways. And there's all sorts of questions like what is the significance of this? That's a purely philosophical question. It's not a data question. It's the question of our values and our basic categories for understanding reality. So that's what I'm trying to sneak into these SCU conversations whenever I can. And they've been really receptive to it. I was surprised when I joined SU that they were so receptive to a person who doesn't have their background. I mean, I'm a philosopher of science in a way, but like I'm not a scientist. That's just not what I would do. But they've been, you know, generous and open-minded. They're some of the most open-minded people I know, which I guess is probably we've already selected them for open-mindedness because they enjoyed a UFO organization, but it's it's been heartening.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's interesting. Philosophers of science are some of my favorite because to me it brings it to life. That is complimentary to my nature, also. I think what is confusing to me is why the general public is not more eager to chew on this information. And this could be a bias on my part because I am a podcaster. So I'm like, ooh, interesting stuff to talk about. Lots of people want to hear about it. Great. So it benefits me to chew on this information, but it still does confuse me as to why people don't. And so I tend to kind of wonder if we start asking questions, this is one example of where my brain goes, if we start asking questions about other intelligent life, like, does that, could that possibly cause us to rethink our intergalactic public image? You know, like, oh wow, we're a bunch of douchebags. And if a higher species that is beyond, you know, whatever petty shit we're arguing about at the moment looks at our planet and sees mostly misbehaving humans, could that put us at risk for extermination because we are about as useful as mosquitoes?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, those are really good philosophical questions. I think they're the sorts of questions that in the first place drag people into the subject with serious interest. It's not really the data that that even like really data hungry people get dragged into the subject with. It's those kinds of questions, like what does this mean? Like what would it mean and how would we interact with a completely different, you know, race of beings or whatever? And those are the questions that we all do want to push, but the the hard thing is that the answers in a way almost seem really obvious. Like it seems like we don't need aliens to show up in order for us to say, well, maybe we ought to get rid of our nuclear weapons, or like maybe we shouldn't be proliferating the sorts of weapons that we could use to destroy the entire ecosystem and turn this planet into a radioactive wasteland for 150,000 years. Like you don't really have to drag ETs in to be able to have those answers. So, in a way, the subject kind of the second you bring it up, it automatically excavates and brings to the light all of these things that we fundamentally know to be true that we're like really fucking up with the way that we're running our planet, and we're not sure how to stop because individually, again, most of us aren't like, yeah, make more nukes, just like fuck it, just ruin everything. But somehow we we're stuck on that track, and there are a lot of like big, weird, complex game theoretic reasons why we're kind of stuck. I'll give you an example. So imagine that there's a huge amount of people who are really into the UAP subject who are pushing for this thing they call disclosure. They want like the government to come out and say, yes, we know there's UAP are real, they're not ours, they belong to some aliens that have been here for a long time, or whatever the story is, whatever they think the government may know. I'm not sure the government knows much at all. But they they want the government to come out and say whatever the truth is. But there's these big, gnarly, systemic game theory-like reasons why that's not exactly possible. So imagine that tomorrow the president of the United States came out and said, like, in the White House press pool, they're aliens. We found them in Roswell in 1947. There's like seven different kinds, they're super technologically advanced. We found some of their stuff for reverse engineering at blah, blah, blah. So imagine he said that. Imagine he gave these people the disclosure demanders what they wanted. Immediately, what would happen is other nations that are enemies of ours would come out and say things that totally conflict with that, simply for the purpose of mocking up any public perception. The second that the president said that, either Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin would come out and say, nope, that's our technology. We are more advanced than America. America is putting out this lie about aliens because they don't want people to know that actually North Korea and Russia have much more advanced technology and America should submit to us immediately. And Iran would say, Yep, we can verify that because we bought some of this technology from North Korea and Russia. And it would become a big spiraling conversation where nobody knew what the hell is true anymore, which is kind of where we already are, but it would just become way, way, way worse. That's just one illustration of how gnarly and complex the situation is for even having these conversations, I think.
SPEAKER_00Well, the governmental application of disclosure, I definitely agree that they want to be wise about, you know, all of that, especially when it comes to foreign relations. But it's the individual disinterest among the normal person that still leaves me scratching my head. And maybe it's because I'm coming at it from a data angle. Like you said, people are less interested in data and they're more interested in, you know, I think you said questions, but maybe it's like the meaning for their own lives. Because, you know, as I shared in that Facebook poll, no one said that it would cause ontological shock, but several people said they have bigger problems to worry about. One person said, yeah, but do I have to go to work tomorrow? And then they also said, yeah, UFOs and aliens are real, but disclosure is just meant to distract us. And then they wrote in extra answers. And among those, several said, I don't need the government to tell me what to think or what to believe. I already know it's true. So it's almost like so much information causes it to become background noise anyway, and they they don't care.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's just like uh just like white noise because there's so much static and you're not sure where the signal is. I mean, it feels really similar to the way religion feels in America. Like everybody is actually interested in the questions that religion tries to answer, but you wouldn't know that from the way people live their daily lives or the conversations they have. But the reason that they don't really talk about this stuff is because it feels like there's an infinite number of groups vying for your attention and trying to tell you what the truth is. And how would you know what the truth is if even if it right in front of you? It's like, okay, you could sit down and have a conference where every single person who thinks they know what the truth about religion or UAP is come and give you their speech, and at the end you'd still be like, Well, it's probably one of those, or maybe it's none of those, but I don't know which one it is. So it's almost like exhaustion rather than apathy, I think.
SPEAKER_00I do see that perspective. When I compare it though, to what does make the mainstream conversation with a bang, it concerns me about us as a race. Like people seemed a little bit more worried that TikTok was gonna shut down than if there are multiple worlds or UAP and non-human intelligence are real. And in priority of things, I want to know is there another intelligent species out there that I can talk to or that, you know, who are they? I want to know. I have so many questions, but in the mainstream, it's like, you know, TikTok.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's do you know who Daniel Kahneman is? Yeah, wrote this book called Thinking Fast and Slow. Anyone in Nobel in economics, he puts for this interesting idea that there are these kind of two modes that we're always switching between. There's like the sort of fast mode and slow mode, or like narrow focus and wide focus, or something. There's a lot of different ways of explaining it. But there are these like two sets of concerns. There's our like really fundamental general concerns that we might have, and this is different from what Kahneman says, but it's pretty similar. There's like the big questions, and then there's the questions about like what am I gonna have for lunch and what do I have to do at work today, and all those really pretty insignificant but immediate things. And I think that the the lack of passion you see in the public for a lot of things, not just UAP, but a lot of things that really are fundamentally significant, has to do with the fact that we're as a society, as a as a species at this point in our history, we spend almost all of our time in this mode of engaging just with the really immediate stuff. Part of that has to do with like our economic situation. Almost nobody in America is economically secure in the way that a middle class should be. I mean, there's almost no middle class in America, um vast numbers of people, millions, hundreds of millions of people live paycheck to paycheck. And when you're in that position, it's really hard to give a shit about whether there's like aliens on the far side of the moon because my water might be cut off if I don't figure this situation out. And that's not irrational then, that's just like dealing with the things you have to deal with. But if you keep hundreds of millions of people perpetually stuck in the mode of having to deal with the immediate stuff, you can ask them like, don't you care about religion? And they really do, but you've sapped all of their energy from being able to care about that stuff. And it looks like the way they live, looks like the only things they really care about are the immediate things like TikTok. But the truth is that the only things they care about are the things that are real in their life, that they have some purchase and like grasp on. They don't they don't live in a broad capacity, they're not allowed to live in a broad and capacious way that allows them to really sit down and like meditate on the significance of other intelligences in the world that just isn't a reality for them.
SPEAKER_00That's such a good point. And that's probably why the New Jersey drones was a big deal, is because it was literally in people's backyards. Like it was interrupting their day, and people had a direct emotional impact from the presence of well, they went ahead and called them the drones, even though they were technically UAP. And then I didn't find out till like two weeks ago that in January it was announced that they were FAA authorized. I had no idea. I thought, oh wow, we just stopped talking about that. But there was this press release that, oh yeah, they were FAA authorized. I would love to hear your take on all of that because it's just so weird.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's super weird. I'll give you my anatomy of the the drone situation in New Jersey. So in lots of dense cities, there are lots of drones cited all the time. There are a lot of people who own private drones. There are a lot of police organizations that are just getting their hands on drones for reasons that don't make a ton of sense to me. And there are also a lot of private corporations that are working on new drone technologies. For instance, there's a lot of private startups that are working on trying to figure out how to write software that'll help drones do things like Uber Eats delivery for you in a small, dense neighborhood. And they're testing all those things. And there's no rule that says if you're testing a bunch of drones for like Uber Eats delivery, that you have to register with the public and tell them that you're there and tell them why they're gonna be seeing drones flying over their houses and things. Technology just develops much more quickly than our ability to regulate it or like create sensible laws governing it. So if you go into densely populated areas where there are a lot of like you know, Silicon Valley flavored startups, you're gonna see drones. So New Jersey isn't any different. And there are a lot of drone sightings in New Jersey, and it's probably a lot more than than normal, but uh undeniably a huge number of those are exactly these things. And the fact that people, when they report them, report them as drones and not as UAP or as spheres or or whatever suggests that they really are a technology made by humanity because people know what a drone is, it's got flight surfaces, it's got propellers and things on it, whereas UAP, the things that we call UAP, are mystifyingly non-human looking. They don't have wings, they don't have jets, they don't have anything that seems to account for the why they're being able to like hang out in the air or whatever. If you just like randomly Googled, insert densely populated city, drones in the sky, you're gonna find plenty of videos for for any city. So why didn't New Jersey get on the why did that do the New Jersey drones get on the international map? Well, it's because a congressman from New Jersey said that the drones were being launched from an Iranian mothership off the coast. That's that's really what like got traction with the national news at first. That congressman just doesn't happen to know anything that they're talking about. I think they're just wildly bad thinker, and they were getting bad information, and it's not even possible that Iran was launching drones off of a mothership. There a mothership isn't even a real thing that anybody talks about other than like sci-fi people. But the particular ship that he was suggesting, we actually know where it is. There's satellite image from the entire week. It was parked over in Syria where Iran was getting its ass kicked by any anyway, could not possibly be true. It was just wrong, but it got a lot of national attention, and then this sort of traction cycle of traction picked up, and then people started hypothesizing and saying, like, ooh, there was some nuclear material that went missing in New Jersey. Have you heard this story? It was yeah, there's like nuclear material, and maybe the drones are like looking for nuclear material. But if you actually look into the details of any of this, it doesn't make any sense because the nuclear material that was missing, there actually was nuclear material missing, it was a tiny little rod about the size of an ink pen refilled. It was a piece of that that had about a tenth of a gram of germanium-68 that was used to calibrate PET scan machines. It had been depleted and it was being disposed of, and it's about as radioactive as a thousand bananas are, so it's incredibly insignificant amount of radiation. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires us to dispose of these things responsibly and track them. And a container on a container ship had broken open during docking and this thing had rolled out, so they had to register with the NRC and say we have to find this thing because a fish could eat it or whatever. It's actually not even dangerous. You'd have to grind it up and inject it in yourself to hurt yourself, and that might not even work, I'm not sure. But that didn't stop news from saying, like, oh, there's missing nuclear material, nor did the fact that there's not a nuclear or radiation detection mechanism on the planet or even a conceivable one that could detect this amount of radiation from the height the drone flies. It would be just ambient radiation in the soil is is greater in some places. But that got lots and lots, like millions of people are saying, Well, oh, there's missing nuclear material, and there's like drones looking for it and stuff, and these all these things sound pretty plausible. And a congressperson has said that Iran is launching these things, and when you look into all those details, it just rumbles. But what's really bizarre to me is the fact that while all that has gotten tons and tons of national attention, the fact that there have been literally thousands of incursions of UAP over military space all across America and and into the oceans, none of that has gotten any attention. And that's way more disturbing because we know that in those cases something really bizarre has happened. Because if thousands of these incursions have happened over military space and they've been reported by the military, and the military says we haven't caught a single one of these things that's come over a military space, we can know that they are evading our ability to just capture things that invade our military space. They they're not susceptible to you know radio frequency jamming or ultrasound or infrasound ways of shooting drones down or lasers or being captured by nets or being followed by our fighter jets. And that happens thousands and thousands and thousands of times, and we don't know what it is. But the stupid congressman from New Jersey or whatever seems to just eat up tons of attention. It's just really bewildering to me.
SPEAKER_00I can I'm starting to see why people would just fatigue after hearing all of this and all of that. And they're like, what do I have to be? A journalist to figure out what the truth is and a fatigue from feeling manipulated by the news outlets, by the government itself, you know, and the Project Bluebeam people are, of course, very excited that this is this part of the staged information. That the the US government is going to do. But let's end on a happy note, on a philosoph philosophical note, Shelly, because I think about this myself as a podcaster and someone who likes to think about things. And so I'm kind of guessing that you might too. Is if you had a chance to sit down with what we call an alien and record a podcast with them, what are some of the things that you would want to talk about? The questions you would ask?
SPEAKER_01Oh man, if I could sit down with an alien, I would probably so initially I would start, I would want to ask a list of questions about like really basic stuff like what do you think a mind is? And do you think that do you have anything that's analogous to what we call religion? Do you draw the distinction between science and magic in the way that we do? But then I would get really stuck in my head and I would want to know questions like, how do I know if you're lying to me? Like, how do I know what your what are your fundamental values and intentions? And if you're super technologically advanced, how do I know if the thing that I'm sitting across from is actually what you are, if it's just some sort of magical projection that I don't that you're using to sort of baby talk to me? But if we could assume that they're all gonna just like tell the truth and I can I can be assured of that, it would be the the questions that like a five-year-old asks their parents. Like, what do you think about the idea of God and death and morality and meaning? And do you know anything about our religions? And do you like any one better than the other and why? And and also art. I think I I think I would probably end up fixating a lot on art. Like, do they have music? Do they have different senses from ours? And do they have different forms of art that we can't enjoy or we should be enjoying? And I think those are the questions that would make it really matter if we could find other races that have evolved completely distinctly from us. This is the sort of stuff that would make it really significant. It wouldn't be how their propulsion drives work, it would be the things that characterize their daily lives and that give life meaning and make any of this worth doing at all.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well said. Well said. This has been such a fun conversation. I have enjoyed this immensely. Tell people where they can hear more of what you're doing and what SCU is doing.
SPEAKER_01Sure. You can find SCU at exploressu.org. You can find the podcast that I run for SCU. It's called The Anomalous Review. It's on all the normal podcast platforms. I'm also one of the sort of roundtable co-hosts of a podcast called UAP Studies Podcast. It's much more like informal and conversational, and we do lots of interviews with lots of different people in the entertainment industry and things. And if you want to find me on social media, you can just look up Michael Glossen. There's not a ton of us. There's a really old man in Florida who's not me, but I'm the other one. And if you want to talk to me, you can email me at michaelgloson at me.com. I tend to respond and I like to have conversations with people. And yeah, that's that's me.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Thank you so much. This was fantastic.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, Meredith. I've had a really good time. You're a very good interviewer.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.