Eric Weinstein: The UFO Narrative Was Forced On Us

I think that the idea of, I don't even know how to put this, but I've been able to avoid UFOs, Sasquatch, remote viewing, ESP my entire life with relative ease, and when our government takes a position that makes it impossible to avoid that by hiding its data and making provocative statements involving a thermonuclear narrative. You know, the thermonuclear threat did not disappear with the Cold War, and it is fashionable to treat it as if it is a solved problem of our past when it will be a problem throughout any future we might hope to have. I come with an unfun curmudgeonly get-off-my-lawn perspective that you don't mess around with thermonuclear narratives. I think it's wonderful that the internet generation feels so secure that we can have fun with giant bug-eyed aliens and Skinwalker Ranch and cattle mutilations, but when you actually are talking about things probing your airspace or areas in which military presence is found, you're talking about something that potentially could lead to a conflagration. And so, just the way I don't expect people to be singing popular songs in church, I don't really enjoy narratives about UFOs in military airspace. So I think it's really important to recognize that we have now been taken by the New York Times, by the Pentagon, into a very weird place where our scientists don't seem to have any data. There are a tiny number of videos, all of which seem to me to be rather low quality. There's some anecdotal reports, and there's enough claim behind the scenes to warrant a change indicating that we were either lying before, lying now, but whatever it is, we've been putting a tremendous amount of pressure on people not to report things apparently that they see because we don't want career-ending behavior in pilots. This is one of the few issues that I've never been able to fit any curve through the points. Normally the problem is you can fit too many curves through a set of points, then you have to discriminate between which is a likely narrative and which is a less likely narrative. I got nothing at the moment. I don't know any story that I can tell in which it makes sense what we're doing. Either we've become incompetent, we've become bored, we're being visited by something that would be the story of the millennium, or we've been leapfrogged. Every single narrative goes to someplace that makes... I think what we're trying to fit is a sheet that is too small on a mattress that is too large, and every time we get one corner of the fitted sheet onto the mattress, another one pops off. I've never seen anything like this, and it has beaten me in the sense that I don't have a story that I can tell. Michael, when you look at this issue, do you see other narratives besides the simplest Occam's-like explanation? Do you see other narratives, maybe media-driven or popular, pop science-driven? What do you see as bringing this to the forefront of popular culture, 60 Minutes, and every newspaper in America, and Baited Breath? What do you attribute that to? Having some institutional memory here helps. Something similar to this happened in the early 1990s. We founded Skeptic Magazine in 92, and the Roswell incident was all the rage, and there was a lot of pressure on the government to issue a statement, what really happened? All the way up to President Clinton, when he was president, said, all right, I will look into it. Finally, in 1995, the government issued, the Pentagon issued a report on Roswell, in which they said, okay, that stuff back in the 1950s when we said it was a weather balloon, they're referring to this crash debris at Mack Brazel's ranch outside of Roswell, New Mexico. You can see pictures of it online. It looks like balsa wood and tinfoil and so forth. And they said, okay, it wasn't a weather balloon. Like we said, it was this high-altitude surveillance balloon listening for the acoustic signatures of nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere, because we thought that's what the Soviets might've been doing. So that's what crashed. Then they offered other details, you know, well, what about the alien bodies that some people said that they saw? And well, those were some other experiments. We were doing these high-altitude balloon tests where we would heave a crash test dummy out of the balloon at 90,000 feet just to see what happens. And so maybe the people saw the crash dummies being hauled away by the military, that kind of thing. So there was a lot of excitement and buildup to this report, like, oh my God, oh my God, they're going to tell us what really happened. And then when they told us, none of the ufologists said, oh, okay, now we're satisfied and we'll, you know, we'll go home and work on something else. No, no. They just figured the government is still on. So whatever the report is going to be released later this month, if at all, I'm predicting it's not going to say anything particularly revelatory about super advanced drones that the Russians have or alien visitations or anything like that. And ufologists will not be satisfied with it because, you know, short of them saying, yes, it's aliens and we have the bodies, they're in area 51 and we have a camera and you can go live and see it yourself, they won't be satisfied. So I think Eric's got it perfectly, said it perfectly well, that it's being forced on us. That is a commentary on the sort of the media landscape. You know, when the New York Times, the paper of record, all the news that's in the print, you know, the gray lady says UFOs are real, then of course, everybody has to, you know, take notice. But let's deconstruct that for a minute. Now, this wasn't a report in the New York Times, an investigation conducted by New York Times journalists that are, you know, sent out by their bureau chief to look into something. Two of the three authors of that 2017 paper are ufologists. Leslie Keen wrote a best-selling book called UFOs, you know, pilots and generals go on the record. The second author, Blumenthal, wrote a book on alien abductions. It was a very positive report about the whole 1980s and early 1990s alien abduction narratives that were recounted, you know, in breathless tones of like, you know, it's here, it's real, it's true. And so this is, you know, this is not a disinterested report by investigative journalists. It's an article by believers. And so it's astonishing to me that people seem to miss that. And all the way up to last week or today, you know, real, that word real is doing a lot of work in those headlines. You know, finally, the government, the Pentagon says they're real. They mean the videos, the videos that have been passed around since 2007. And they keep getting released like, oh, there's new videos. They're not new. They're the same videos that get recycled over and over. And finally, the Pentagon said, okay, look, they're not fake. They're real videos. They were actually shot by Navy jets. They're not made by some, you know, hacker in a basement with his laptop, or CGI in some Hollywood studio. They're actual videos. Okay, that's all it means. But the problem is, is that when people hear real, their brains autocorrect to extraterrestrial. The government has said aliens are real. No, that isn't what they said. Nobody is saying that. And that's the problem. And Eric's right this, how can you ignore it? Yeah, 60 minutes. Oh, my God. How can you ignore that? All right, well, we're done here. You guys are both in agreement. This is a boring debate. Thank you all. Good night. No, I'm just one of the things that bothered me most. And I think a scientist are to blame. And I think the military is to blame. But most of all, I think the media is to blame, as I'll explain in a second. The you know, the topic comes up in the New York Times in the recent headline, Pentagon, you know, our Navy can't rule out this, but they can't prove it either. And, you know, this is like unfalsifiable hypotheses, you know, and with no discriminatory, no sensitivity. And then the other hand, you have you have pilots like Commander Fravor. And again, I have, you know, less courage in my entire body than he has in this little cuticle over here. But isn't that part of the problem? He says things like, you can't, you know, criticize it, because if you're not a fighter pilot, if you don't know what a cap point is, you don't know what a thread vector is. Or he says, you don't know how to operate a FLIR camera, on one hand. On the other hand, we as scientists, and we're all trained here, different branches of science and or social science. And the point being, how do we how do we communicate to the public that no, you don't have to be a pilot to to say something about about a phenomenon and the viability of something that as a phenomenon, physicists can do that. Likewise, you don't have to be a physicist to speculate on the existence of perhaps sightings, eyewitness testimony, etc. So, you know, Michael, I think it's I think it's a it's an interesting time. And I keep asking, who's benefiting from this? We have a headline that's like, you know, you know, unicorns could exist. They can't be ruled out. I you know, my daughter, you know, likes to claim that there's an invisible unicorn. And the proof is that he visits her room every night that there's no residue of the unicorn ever found discovered. So the absence of evidence as our friend Carl Fagan, and my listeners will hate me if I don't put up a sock. But you know, absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of maps. But nevertheless, we're in this narrative now, where people are being asked to speculate on the nature of what scientific proof constituent is constituted by and getting scientists to say things like, well, science never proves anything. I mean, it's very it's a very dangerous time to be in. On the other hand, I can't say anything because I didn't have the courage to put on you. So where do we go? Where do we where do we make an impasse past this impact? But I'm slightly worried that we've misframed the problem that I think we we've got the portion that we all agree on. And we all agree that the videos to an untrained observer, I think all three of us are untrained observers. I mean, I don't know if you could train for this don't seem very impressive. Is that is that a fair statement? Michael? Oh, yeah. Yeah, impressive. Weird. They're weird. But they're not like super high resolution with, you know, data, the infrared, you know, optical thermal radar, blah, blah, blah. And, okay, so put that to one side. The concern is that many of us are hearing a great deal more from other sources that are not usually unreliable people who I've known who I've tracked their histories, people are reaching out. And the claim that I don't know how to evaluate is that there's a great deal more. It's higher resolution. It's actually data rather than sort of video anecdote. It appears that none of our top scientists have access to this at an official level. They may have secret access to it. But I certainly can tell you that I've poked around in, you know, differential geometry, general relativity, and quantum field theory, which would be three places I would want to consult if I thought that I was being visited from another dimension, another part of the galaxy, or that there was a major breakthrough that allowed alien civilizations to visit us easily, or even our own future selves, what have you. And that's the data that really I find fascinating. It's not that, look, these videos, you know, to the extent that they're actually just straight up videos of something, they certainly seem weird. I'm not claiming that it's nothing. But I don't think I've ever said the words Fravor or Tic Tac or Nimitz or any of these things during the entire discussion, which I've been relatively focused on, not because, well, because I don't think that's where the story is. I think that the story is the Pentagon authenticating the existence of a program. I'm, I'm plugging in.