Real Scientists Are Finally Discussing UFO Phenomena | Prof Shelley Wright

what if everything you thought you knew about UFOs was wrong most scientists are terrified to discuss the truth behind uaps but today we're diving deep into the shocking realities that have been kept in the dark for far too long alongside my colleague Professor Shelly Wright will take on the most taboo questions is UFO research all pseudo science is disclosure hopelessly stalled do you have to risk your career to study this forbidden topic well not anymore astrophysicist Dr shelle Wright is now breaking the taboo risking her reputation by hunting for real life alien signals if you're ready for the unfiltered truth on uaps and the surprising signs behind it keep watching this conversation will force you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the search for alien intelligence even the scientists were commenting to me how could you go and talk about uaps or UFOs most people just kind of want to know what's going on most people are just going about their lives and they are genuinely curious and because there's this kind of vacuum about real information that's where you get kind of conspiracy theories the people with the loud horns can come in and fill that space welcome everybody to an exciting out of this Universe episode of the into the impossible podcast with not only an eminent astrophysicist and not only a fellow Professor but a very good friend that's Professor Shelly Wright Shelly welcome to the into the impossible podcast thank you for having me I'm excited to be here today I want to first start off with a discussion about what makes you interested in the research that you do explain the types of science that you do both on the in this world or in this universe and maybe stuff that might be a little more far out removed from what normal astrophysicists quote unquote do I love tinkering and making new instruments to explore the universe in new ways that's basically it I love working with Engineers scientists students to make unique cameras spectrographs use new telescopes to really do any discoveries Across the Universe and then one of my deep heart interests is the understanding of life in the universe are we alone is there potentially other civilizations out there could they be communicating with us right now in our own Galaxy and if they were how could we use technology to detect those signals one of the things I always talk about that gets me into trouble when I talk about people I'm I'm sort of an alien pessimist an alien minimalist if you will and that rubs some of my viewers even the wrong way some of my friends get really agitated by the fact that I I have a I would never say the CH the probability is zero but looking through how you know improbable it is that you and I are having this conversation the fact is we don't have any evidence right now that there are other life forms that rise to the level of many many Sigma confidence levels right so I think you know from my perspective it would be one of the biggest if not the biggest discovery of all time but we always have to Tamper that with with our expectations as scientists should be driven by data and one of the arguments I want you to react to is people say things like well you know there's 10 to the 22nd you know possible stars in the observable universe each one of them could have 10 to 100 planets around them or minor bodies there's got to be life out there how do you react to that argument do you think it's possible that there's other life out there we're already proof of one so I think it's a little huous to think that we could not be the only one the question here is in Time and Time is what you know well the age of the universe and the question really is not whether there's other life in the universe or whether there's other life in the Galaxy probably a good standpoint Science question is is there other life that coexist in this moment with us talking right now and if you put it in that frame like you think about the Drake equation which tries to calculate the number of civilizations or communicating civilizations the leading factor of that is time right like the lifetime of Life existing and coexisting with us so you could take the premise that we are one of that 10 of the 22 that's a pretty boring Universe in my opinion but that is an opinion and you know that's where you need data but if you take the premise that we should not be the only ones right that we were a byproduct life was a byproduct bathroom scums a byproduct dogs are cats Dolphins to humans are a byproduct of this universe of our bionic Universe for you then the question is whether they could exist with us in our own Galaxy are they existing around other planets that have similar characterizations of of habitability like Earth and then the rough part here in that calculation is could they potentially be coexisting us in this small sliver right like we our technology in this moment is just the tiniest sliver of time in all of the age of the universe so that I think time is the most important answer to your question now you not only new Drake you also won the Drake award what was Frank like I mean he was one of the guests that kind of got away i' never got to meet him or have a conversation on the Channel with him Frank was is was a brilliant scientist obviously a Pioneer in the field of seti but was a very thoughtful human being right like he really brought in the the importance of science hypothesis the scientific rigor to the field of life in the universe right obviously philosopher you know for hundreds of years have been speculating about life elsewhere beyond Earth but it was really Frank who said okay let's bring science to the table and try to answer this question and he did it for decades right and tried to build up a field with individuals you know he like also shephered Carl Sean into the mix into this field and he was a wonderful Mentor MH now when people discuss the Drake equation I always say it's it's kind of not a real equation in the sense that I only consider things equations if you can do eror analysis on them and I I once did a calculate actually I did it you you helped me tremendously because you gave a talk at the SEI Institute a couple of months before I gave one eight years ago now it's incredible and I decided oh I'm going to do this calculation of how many people are in the San Diego Zoo right now and if you do it you can get any number you want just depending on you know is it a holiday is it raining like it is today I mean can you believe that we had to do this interview in the rain in San Diego how do you as a professional and and an expert in this field do you look at the Drake equation is it something you take seriously or you utilize as a tool in Your Arsenal or how do you apply it if if at all I think we all do apply it in some sense like the Drake equation basically breaks down the constituents of trying to understand the probability of Life which we were just first talking about it and when they first started with the Drake equation I always thinking about that first variable that he put in there which was actually the rate of star formation so it was presumptuous to think that okay you have to have a planet to have life then planets around Stars so the question was how many stars happen within our galaxy and that was the first variable within it but then there was things that came later which they had no idea in the late 60s about which was like the fraction of stars that have planets the fraction of those stars that have planets have earth like planets and then the fraction of those out of earthlike planets with the habitability of it and what's remarkable in our own careers Brian is that we have answered those questions so I look at the Drake equation where we March from left to right where L is the end that lifetime of civilization we were just talking about and we're answering them so in the framework of Science and astrobiology the Drake equations useful because we need to answer these questions about how common are planets how common are earthlike planets how common are earth like planets we habitability how common is other life like we try to answer these questions even trying to go to Mars even others surfaces and planets within our own solar system and I think we'll continue along that path on the other spectrum of it of course you have biology inter place right biochemistry in place understanding the origins of life things like the RNA world how did how probable is it if you just have organic material you generate life on a Surface right and that's marching the other direction on the Drake equation so to answer your question do scientists sit there and go on the chalkboard with it every day no but I think we use it in a framework to answer the big question of ARB alone MH so let's talk about what you do in terms of your research activity obviously you're a professor now you're the chair of the new le for substitute chair inter subair okay you're an interim chair of the newly formed and incubated astronomy and astrophysics Department congratulations talk about your research and how you divide your portfolio let's let's talk about the conventional astronomy for lack of a better word and then we'll go into the optical seti work that you've been involved with for for quite some time so how do you decide on a daily basis I'm going to do work building a spectrograph or spectr whatever you're you're focusing on that day no pun intended versus you know the work in seti that you're involved with I spent a lot of my time in the lab and trying to build up like I said new technology I really think that's kind of the core of our my research and my research group and that fits into conventional astronomy where we try to build new cameras new spectrographs and I've always interested in being a kind of on the Forefront of that so if I look at my career I was really interested in Adaptive Optics when that first came online when I was a student I said I had to get involved and Adaptive Optics of course is correcting for the Earth's Distortion atmosphere allows stars to twinkle we want to remove them from twinkle and try to get large telescopes to use these to do that to take those images that go behind adaptive objects you have to use pretty like close to kind of even our industry limits in detectors in Optics in cryogenic materials and I think that's really benefited myself in my research group to take that kind of work and try to synthesize that to make like the latest instruments and so my day job so to speak is building large cameras and spectrographs for large based telescopes like kek Observatory and even designing like first light instruments for the even larger extremely large telescopes I've spent almost 15 years involved of Designing kind of backend instrumentation that goes behind 30 m or larger of telescopes and of course the one that will be coming online is the European extremely large telescope in Chile but with all of that and my interest in building new technology for these large telescopes and in the in kind of the wake of Adaptive Optics and the detector technology I was always interested in the pursuit the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the fact that nobody was really doing it that actually you know kind of intrigued me because it's such a you know fundamental question as you have mentioned many times on this show so I I took the abilities of trying to look at new technology and see what we could do to make new instrumentations for things like Optical study if you come to my lab you can go into multiple rooms where we're building things for the largest telescopes on Earth to building completely unique instruments and telescopes that are kind of unique to to anything or on Earth and trying to get them deployed one of the things that's so remarkable about the way that you approach your research is that it's not you know the pie in the sky you know let's build the the particle collider the size of the moon or the solar system you know diameter like some of my past guests have talked about and actually honestly proposed we'll see about that but you actually do things that are practical as well as you know kind of the stretch goals and then the more kind of probable or or lower risk but you know also very high reward in the optical setting so let's let's talk about that you use something called a frel lens so let's talk about what was the thought process that led you to design that particular type of instrument so we have here Galileo galile and this finger popping guy he's holding a telescope obviously he did not invent the telescope that's a myth but but he did Kind of Perfect it in a way and then he made its magnification much much better than before he invented the tripod you know people don't really think about that but he really did that and of course he made images that revolutionize the way that humans look at the at the stars but one of his favorite quotes that I love to to kind of bring out with my students and it's kind of the you know the impetus for what I do is he said we our job as scientist is to measure what's measurable and make measurable what's not already so so when you design a for now walk us through that what was the design choices the tradeoffs cost and don't be afraid to be super technical this this is a great question because it's how experimental physicists operate right because we have to take a science question or a science measurable as you say and you say how do I use the current technology to actually build to that right so you know this our Science question or our science objective was to try to image literally how do you image the entire observable sky and take a picture at every nanc so every one one billionth of a second how do you take a picture of the entire sky and then of course the practicality of that is how do you do that where you could actually afford it that led us into you know it's a as usual a long Winding Road in design and a lot of dead ends and we kind of went to traditional telescopes like Galileo even looking at traditional lenses and refra rors then going to more like Isaac Newton telescopes with mirrors and we kept going down this path and and it it was never really cost effective you couldn't get these large angles across the sky and so we needed a way of thinking about how to make costeffective telescopes with large what do we call field of regard like we want to look at large angles and that's what led us to Fel lenses in fact project scientist here UC San Diego Jerome May who does Optics was like one of the first to said let's try lenses we had thought of it other groups had thought about it before and we said I don't know if that works like maybe we thought they had too poor of image quality but you know those were years past and we said well let's go check out the technology and so we bought a bunch of them brought them into the lab did experimentalist what we do best don't just talk about it we measure it and we measured the lenses and they were they were great in fact they were better than we thought and other people within astronomy had thought we just had not looked at them for a while we published a few papers and realized that this this was the answer to to how to make cost-effective wide field angle telescopes for the science objective we want right it's not always going to work for other projects but as you know we're always trying to get to our science requirement and this case our science requirement was taking a picture across the entire observable sky and then the even crazier part of the technology how to do that every nanc and tell me about the serendipitous kind of alignment with high energy physics and high energy astrophysics you didn't initially plan on that right yeah so the we're talking about a project that's called panoramic setti which was trying to do this all Sky Observatory and so each telescope looks at 10 x 10 square degrees it takes a picture of every Nan we have many telescopes we are looking for you know in this case Optical set kind of what we call Pulse pileup all the light arriving in that nanc which would be un very unusual Stars don't do it maybe like some merging black holes things in you know high energy events could happen but we have detected those actually yet and so we wanted to look for Point sources in the sky we know when in this field that if you take a picture every nanc at Optical light we get kind of flashes of light that happens from high energy particles that hit Earth's atmosphere they're called Tran off showers and about every second we get an event this was noise to us we knew this we were making our our detectors to take our noise of this what's called trof shower and throw it away and you know another person's garbage is another person's treasure and we said okay we should go talk to the high energy folks to see if they want this information and they were interested and we decided to do a campaign where we went to Veritas observatory in Arizona huge dishes they're amazing and we set up our our panas telescopes with them back in 20 2021 and we set them up and to observe at the exact same time the exact same sources and the idea was to try to understand the sensitivity we were to high energy events and the answer is panoramic study was very sensitive and opened up a whole kind of new face space for high energy astrophysics so we made a really nice detector that can detect these Tran off showers and this led into a collaboration for the ourti group with high energy astrophysics to now campaign and do both projects so now talk about why seti is different from Radio listening like Drake and and others were initially interested in the Big Ear project and then I do want to get back to the Galileo project and how that's different from what you're doing but first let's talk about the actual science motivation why would a civilization why would you tune it to look in the optical when radio is a lot easier you know speaking as a dumb radio astronomer it's a lot easier to do radio astronomy in many ways why did you just choose or why do people feel that's Optical is is a promising um wavelength range to explore well so just to comment that you know radio setting we've been doing that 60 plus years right and it you it's interesting that was our first technology for you know longrange communication right it's interesting to think of other civilizations would have developed other communication outside of radio radio is a great communication because it's low energy as you know you can build large dishes and transmit it's easy to receive but you can use any right light whether you're at Optical light radio light gamma ray light microwaves they all travel the speed limit so in terms of getting getting to distances from Stars you get there the same amount of time but why Optical setting or right so Charles towns invented the laser right in 1959 wins the wins the Nobel Prize for this in 1961 he wrote a really interesting nature paper about how lasers would be a phenomenal way to do Interstellar or interplanetary communication and if you think about this like that's kind of remarkable that this experimentalist invented the laser and then immediately understood implications at a universe T like scale and the paper basically argued that with a laser you can pack a lot of information in it you can beam it if you know where the person's going to receive it it is a better carrier of information it's incredibly bright so if I sent a signal to you in another planet and you're receiving it you don't have to build a large dish right you can just build a small dish and thinking about back to panoramic study we use you know these very small 20-inch lenses half meter size lenses and even if you do the calculations you can take Earth's technology today go a thousand light years away take a laser shine it back to Earth and our little dish will detect it that's how bright lasers are so lasers became this kind of Realm and Optical set as an interesting realm to look at that wavelength by Optical I mean visible light M now if you're going to send signals you know in between Stars there's gas and dust right and this is why you might you like probably would say well you should probably if you're communicating thousands of light years away communicate radio wavelengths radio so you know we knew this as sad scientists right so one of the arguments in fact is if you were to use a laser or use a Beacon that's not at Radio maybe you would do infrared right and this led into our team also building another kind of like the first near infrared study instrument which I was interested in early on to get to those wavelengths of light as well but you know it's funny over the years you know we always Ed this kind of anthrop morphic am I say that right anthropomorphic view of our technology and how we would do detection right and if you got in the public and you get public talks they'll say well how do you know they would use a laser wouldn't they use something else and they would give a word to something probably in science fiction yeah and you're like I don't but light is everywhere in the universe right and in truth we're not necessarily detecting lasers we can detect anything at visible light that would make a bright flash or look unusual to Nature and everything in St is about detecting something that looks unusual that you know natural phenomenon aren't producing and that's true at Radio wavelengths as well what are the most significant background or systematic sources of astrophysical contamination at Optical study we really don't know yet most of the things I think for our program like panoramic study the things that we may detect the most now are Like Satellites so kind of Earth Technology we tected a lot of planes satellites even people talked about Sprites in the upper atmosphere so kind of local to us that's true in radio set too right we talk about radio interference and most of radioti is removing our own Earth signal from that yeah astrophysically the exciting part is we don't know would pulsars be something potentially yes one of the astrophysics things is is we have ligo of course with gravitational wave discoveries if we have these large angles of field of view perhaps we could correlate an event that may produce what we call an optical counterpart to it but nobody's detected it m yeah and then do you have a protocol you know the signal comes in and they're talking with you know Proxima centu or you you see something of interest do you guys have a protocol for what you would do as the pi as the you know what what would you do if if this comes in or is that not for no it's a great question because we get this question a lot about what we would do and people have their you know sneaky suspicions of whether we get taken away from the Men in Black you know we have candidate signals as you know in experimental you know EXP ments you have kind of false positives as we say that can occur from your instrument it's a noise or it's a signal like a satellite so we have protocols that do verifications so we have like whether you know we flag it like this is an exciting candidate or not and then we go down and do the checklist to see if it's something internal or if it was correlated with something else it usually is very unexciting so we try not to call New York Times in most cases but the question is if there is something exciting you know we do have a proclamation that we would would declare it on astronomer telegram you know just like we would for any other transient source to get other facilities to follow up MH you obviously the the question of you know the the rationale for another civilization to communicate with us I mean there's a famous quote from Stephen Hawking where he says you know basically trying to message to other civilizations is like ringing Galactic Dinner Bell to serve men it's it's a cookbook we be cautious and not send out you know beacons that say that we're here I mean not that that's something you're directly involved with but what's your what's your position on that type of messaging to extra chur yeah this is the concept of medy it's a really interesting ethical conversation right there's a two-fold question here one is like if you think there's a Galactic Civilization out there you don't like go out in the forest and scream that I'm right here right that's another phrase that's used that's interesting of course we're constantly leaking I think more of it comes into kind of an ethical question about representing humanity and so as you know there have been you know people with means that go out and have taken radio dishes taken their F favorite Rock album and broadcasted into space you know is that the best representation of humanity should there be kind of United Nations protocols about messaging over time you know there was a lot of work into the Voyager message on how to represent this and how to represent planet Earth as in general I think we're a little young in our infancy to send out messages but MH and the rest might outweigh the rewards you mentioned earlier you know about looking for you know not maybe maybe techno signatures but maybe just bio signatures from Alien in our own solar system so I have an argument i' love to run by you this is a meteorite and this is from this is chelia bin meteorite I have a meteorite and I actually have a martian meteorite that came from Mars This is not that this is actually yours to keep unlike the Martian meteorite so I'll let you take one of these so this is a chunk of Argentinian gold it's actually iron nickel w Cobalt so and you twoo can get it out there as you know go to my website brian.com list ory or SL whatever go tolist I actually cut out the YouTuber so go to Brian king.com list and if you're like Shelly and me and you have a.edu email address you get one guaranteed if you live in the US so go to bring.com and you'll get one and you'll get some information about that one now that one came here via gravity I also have one that came from Mars as I said and you know I scanned it for life never found any life on it but the point I guess I'm trying to make is the fact that we don't see Life on Mars okay it's it's a it would be a long shot but can we use the non-observation of maybe techno signatures in our in our own solar system does that set any limits on the facundity of life in the universe or is that too limited a scope to project into the rest of the gy well as you know the cosmos and our Milky Way is vast and something that's always humbling as an astronomer is the distance between Stars I think the only thing you could say is something about Interstellar travel and the number of people taking vacation here in our solar system now for Mars I think more of it's you know people we take Rovers there as you know to look not just at like whether life exists now I would say more of the argument is did life exist right so if you look back 3.1 billion years ago we know Mars had an ocean we've done a lot of you know discoveries about our own surfaces of other planets within our solar system the question is if this gets back into the origins of life now if we go to Mars and a Rover says wow look there was evidence of Life three billion years ago that it could start either on another surface besides Earth that's a very statistical big deal right because it means not only it can just happen on one surface it can happen on another and not only that it could happen on another surface in the same solar system that marbles me actually the most Briant because the fact that we can take you know our resources today do things like launch the Europa Clipper and go try to study the oceans of EXO you know exomoon Discovery I know you had David Kipping on recently just thinking about life underneath europa's Ocean or Enceladus ocean the moon around Saturn and thinking about organic materials and what organic materials could be there that's fascinating to me that one solar system out of billions we're contemplating not necessarily you know did can life coexist us now in our own solar but could have coexisted in the past yes right you we started this whole podcast thinking about you know the probability of Life the that that should be a measurement actually that even in our scientific nature here in one solar system we're exploring potential signs of previous life and other surfaces yes and when they may have overlap with life on Earth because life on Earth well yeah we can get panspermia and other things here we go but take that to all the other planets we're discover ing now James web Space Telescope is discovering it's an incredibly exciting time and when I started my career you know I was I was always interested in this question of RB alone but I remember sitting in classes in undergrad and people were talking about this Rare Earth hypothesis right book somewhere here yeah that's so you know even in my my little our little short little sliver of time here we know that's not true right and again this is marching down the Drake equation yep so now I want to Pivot to a recent you know I told my wife that you know I saw a star being born when you were on the recent Nova PBS Nova which is you know one of the not only one of my favorite it's one of the oldest you know science and and nature Communications you know and it's one of the best and well done and so your episode was no exceptions talk about the Genesis of that if you will how did you come to get involved with you know PBS Nova and talk a little bit about the role that you played and the other you know contributors to that to that wonderful no I've always been interested in stud and techno signatures in this field of AR alone and there's actually not that many people in this field which is one of my things to advocate for that we need you know more brilliant people entering this field of of seti and astrobiology so when you know Congress basically commiss you know told NASA to commission a committee a civilian committee on trying to understand at you know I'll say the word here UFOs but at that time it was uaps I was asked to serve on the n a UAP committee unidentified and then now a nominalist phenomenon okay and I said yes cuz it was very intriguing that you know our government as well as NASA was interested in kind of going into this realm that in our science Community is taboo yeah we can talk about you know microbial Life on Mars but we can't talk about life and Interstellar travel it's you know there's this kind of divide that occurs and a stigma that occurs in the science Community as well as public right there's like this taboo thing to talk about UFOs and uaps and so I said yes and it was a really fascinating committee to come into it and take a kind of a science data approach to it I also am interested in using new technology as I said to image the night sky so I was looking at NASA's capabilities with what are called GEOS their their satellites their geosynchronous satellites I you know we looked at satellites Earth observing satellites and their capabilities of Imaging and their angular resolution ution the timing and their detectors and so I it was an interesting approach to see what we could detect from the kind of Civilian NASA sense and couple that with both what was being seen you know by military personnel at the time that was going to Congress uh as well as what people say see daily you know and say what they see in the night sky so that was kind of where I entered this world of the uaps and then I was invited to kind of talk about that experience on that re recent PBS Nova where does the committee stand now like is there a second follow-up report I mean maybe you can summarize for those that you know may not be familiar with the actual report out what was the conclusion or what were you know the the preponderance of evidence where does it come down obviously it's not you know that we definitely being visited but there were some caveats and there were a lot of still remaining Mysteries that we don't understand yeah the I think there was some misconceptions by the public because I got a lot of emails about this that at first they thought okay we have a committee of scientists that are going to go in and review every single case that on this date I saw something in the night sky our you know committee charge was to go in and and basically State what is NASA's role and what is kind of inter agency us role in how to identify and address uaps at at large and so we were kind of looking at what data existed we looked at the currence rate like number of people reporting things we had the FAA people there talking about things that were occurring within the FAA what are reporting schemes from Pilots we had brought in people that had you know publicly disclosed and Declassified some things that were done in Military and then looking at that and trying to ask what other data we could apply to these scenarios and in particular it was much more forward-looking so we were looking at how NASA could help with this topic in the future right how can it work with the other inter agencies and I think our committee you know I'm actually proud of the work the committee did um I think we've seen change that came from it the first one was even thinking about faas like how to pilot report cases it turns out you know it used to be like in a little you may know cuz I know you're a pilot but there was a manual and there was a 1 1800 number you would call right to somebody that you would report to and so there was a stigma within that and now there's better reporting for uaps and then there was also this ways that communication between inter agencies of the government communicate when a UAP event occurred and whether you could look at again these satellite informations that came from it and there was a division that started in n to look at this case and how it connects to other government agencies like Arrow the other one that I think maybe is probably the most longlasting is probably trying to break down the stigma the public stigma on this topic is really important and the giggle Factor that's around it because there really is a national security risk here there's a air traffic control risk as well you know we looked at the number of drones being flown looked at the number I was always surprised by the number of balloon launches per day there's 10,000 balloon launches per day across the world a lot of these are industry based MH and so it was you know just looking at this aerial phenomenon and it's a great way to tell the public how amazing the night sky is to look up right to look up I was surprised you know because I talked with several people I've talked with you know pretty much everyone that was in the Nova episode now I've talked to I've talked to you many times you're my upstairs neighbor but on the podcast hakeim o AI L Ryan Graves Mick West I've talked to everyone and what really troubles me is the vitriol that I see and it's primarily in One Direction You Don't See many astronomers you know kind of reing against the public about their you know being ignorant or or that they don't accept the fact that we've discovered you know some advanced technology and for example I had Sarah skols on author many years ago she wrote a book they are already here which talked about the fact that you know 99% of what we saw and even the report says something like 95% or something could be explained and there's there's sorts of plausible ways to explain it but that 5% leaves this ambiguity in the human mind which we're not comfortable with and she talks about how the human mind fills in those gaps with sometimes fanciful stuff but the one thing that stuck out in my interview with her is that she said there's a feeling that the government is maintaining sort of a secet cabal you know just as we covered up 911 or just as we covered up you know the alleged Kennedy assassinate whatever you want to say I mean I'm I'm joking about the alleged but but the point being there's a deep mistrust of of government and then that somehow B leads through to a conc comant mistrust of you and me as representing big astronomy or big cosmology I get it you know from a different cohort of people when I'm not alining and railing against you know those that believe that we're definitely being visited but I I get it from people that say the Big Bang never happened and then that will strike a cord in the public and people go on Joe Rogan and op Pine about or the moonlanding didn't happen how do how did you react to that the the vitriol the the complaints I mean not not maybe don't you don't have to speak about to you directly but to other members of the committee I mean can you talk about what kind of negative impacts that maybe are discouraging to scientists because you have a million things you could spend your time on what was kind of the most you know surprising thing about serving on this panel as doing a patriotic Duty that you know I find so commendable yeah it was surprising I would have to say that how much you know my inbox I would say filled up from all corners of this kind of Realm Pro not con or you know even the scientists were commenting to me about accepting this role in the UAP it actually it encouraged me it sounds funny to say this but I think you know most people just kind of want to know what's going on they're not the ones who are you know spouting out vit roll right most people are just going about their lives and they are genuinely curious right and because there's this kind of vacuum about real information that's where you get kind of conspiracy theories people the you know the people with the loud horns can come in and fill that space and I saw it as an opportunity where people that do study the night sky every day people that do fly airplanes every day that deal with airspace and and think about this topic could go into this space that's otherwise taboo and fill it with real information with real facts with real data do we have all the answers no but that's science for you right and so I took it as kind of an invitation and actually a call to say wow there's something going on here like we should we should be tempering this and using you know aam's razors and rational minds and look at data and like investigate this stuff and that's to the scientists too because you know I think there was you know scientist oh good how could you go and talk about uaps or UFOs they would say the word to and I'm like well you know most of the time people are seeing something right and you it's a good opportunity to educate them about how fast does a plane fly right how many degrees per second is that traversing across the sky you know that's it's going really fast it's going like a degree or 10 degrees per second and if you take a video camera with that like you you can get we're looking images so it's an educational moment how do you react just as not an expert in or in being involved with the testimony you know of the so-called I don't to say harvesting but just the that they collections of not only art artifacts but even biologics according to one gentleman David grush talk about that as a scientist as a non-expert in that particular Congressional panel what do you make of that like the the claims a famous you know book came out Lou Alando wrote a book about imminent disclosures imminent what does that sound like to a professional scientist who an astronomer who's got as you and I are talking before we started recording we would love to have you know be visited by aliens if as long as they're not going to eat us and they'd probably you know eat me before they'd eat you but the point is do we how do we like handle these kind of seemingly outrageous claims of of spacecraft that are bigger inside than they are outside and and biologics and things like that that now we're having panels like a congresswoman in in Florida is investigating this in all seriousness so how do you as a scientist react to such things well I think that will always be there and it persisted before you know this became kind of a a lightning rod Topic in the last few years there's always been stories of this and they are always will be right and there's always your you know extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence and that will always in exist for myself as a scientist people could come forward and say what they see and there's ways to investigate it right and we don't have to get overly excited about every time someone walking forward and and claiming things like this so I'm I'm not bothered by it and again I think it's an opportunity that shows that we need to educate the public more about what's happening now regarding like the conspiracies theory as aspects of it I think that will again always be there because there's reasons why things are secured right that things move forward this is nothing new it's been around since Roswell that's yeah and I I appreciated the discussion on the Nova special about Roswell and putting it in context I mentioned the Galileo project P guest many time P guest Avil L and his Galileo project is doing something different it's also looking in the optical but it's doing other things like looking listening for audio signals and explain compare and contrast you know with what they're looking for and what what kinds of complimentarity or multimessenger you might enjoy with them well I I don't know all the details of course about the Galileo project but of course I I think they're trying to look for aerial phenomenon that's in Earth's atmosphere so one of the Striking differences since we talked about kind of science requirements and experimental we're looking for things that are astrophysical and far away and so the way we designs our instruments are different the aperture sizes for the Galileo project are really small at visible light right they're kind of like think about fisheye all Sky cameras so you can think about sensitivity of that I think believe they also use radar and the way that they image the sky is very different than the projects I was talking about where we're trying to do something very extreme which is this nanc microsc time regime that's actually interesting because we do detect aerial phenomenon but that's not our goal in fact I have a student here just I have a student here undergrad because I I love part of the joy of also running a lab here at University of California San Diego is working with the students and and educating and getting people excited about the topic of life in the universe but this student is working on trying to detect and correlate airplanes and satellites in real time to what's registered and so we do track some of those aerial phenomena light aware but it's a completely different project different technology yeah different science goal that's exciting and couple things to close with one is you know there's a famous quote from winon Churchill that I really like he said that he succeeded because he proceeded from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm when you come against evidence that maybe disputes or refutes your hypothesis how do you know when to stop like how do you know one to turn off an experiment and I want to segue that into something that the general public can can maybe glean for their benefit which is you know how do you know when you're wrong as a scientist because a lot of you know I I read some study and my audience hates when I mention it but you know if you exclude the times when Venus is up above the Horizon UFO settings in America go down like 70% yes now you think that that would di their enthi a little bit we then claiming that you know there are actually UFOs and we just covering it up or when you see these recent drone sightings in New Jersey and they've got a flashing red light on the right wing and a flashing left green light on the you know that's exactly what all airplanes have in America and around the world actually so how do you know when to you know kind of close the books or or can you say you know well we just don't know enough and we'll always keep searching how how do you as a scientist and how should the general public know when they've been falsified let me just the thing is for study like everyone I think I meet thinks scientists do this but we don't as you know there's only like I think I once testified there's only two dozen dedicated there more in the NBA in Los angelist that's always shocking me so the answer is that there's so much face bace to study we talked about wavelength coverage and radio and visible light and infrared there's new technology to do exploration for it if when you start an experiment like this the reason why this is so interesting to me is that we haven't designed an instrument like this we don't know what we're going to detect do I think we're going to detect intercell communication I always temper that with my students no we're not going to detect that but nobody's ever looked in and as we've learned usually in history what we've learned is that if you look at the universe in new ways you usually disc discover something interesting by the natural world and so I don't know if we'll detect anything I think for this you have to run it for the amount of time we say we're going to run it so as you know we we provide limits okay you do this in cosmology you say I'm going to observe this amount of time to get to this limit you know this very well we do similar things we try to apply to some sensitivity limit to that experiment for myself in this space Bas of experimental study or experimental techno signatures I mean this is an exciting time you can go in any other area either archivally search or build a new instrument so there's no shortage of face space there and you know Jill Tarter always equates it with like us walking down to La Hoya shes here with your pint glass and scooping out water of the ocean and looking in the Pint glass and saying there's no fish in the Pint glass therefore there's no fish in the ocean right although I told her if you don't find some microbes in it there's something really wrong well that's true but you know it's it's the same thing like that that analogy of like the Pint glass to the volume of the ocean I mean comparatively to everything else we've done in astrophysic astrophysics it's it's nothing yeah it's men skule well shelle I always like to conclude the podcast by asking a kind of existential or deep question I want to ask you one that ties into the name of the podcast into the impossible comes from Arthur C Clark's famous saying that the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible and I want to ask you as someone who's done just incredible things I you know always say that one of my highlights of my career is that I was on the committee to hire you 10 15 years ago I believe it and and You' brought so much Renown to this institution what would advice would you give you got 20 seconds 30 seconds with a 25-year-old Shelly Wright what do you say to her what do you tell her to give her the courage to give her the inspiration to go into the impossible as you've done authenticity it's a short life and try to like follow what drives you as a scientist and we're talking about science here as well but you know passion is what Pursuits you want to pour your energy into for the impossible portion of it in science I would say you know take some risk you know you commented on you know your Winston churchold quote which is totally true most of science is failure every day we're running into dead ends and I think to really do cuttingedge science and get to the Forefront of Discovery you have to take some risk and I would say don't be afraid of that shy right thank you so much for being here on the intive possible I hope we have you on many times be appearance now you got your sag after card probably for this wonderful appearance at pbsn we'll have links to that we'll have links to your website and your talks at seti Institute that are so amazing and inspirational thank you so much for everything you do and for coming on the show yeah thank you for having me great thank you