I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy theories large and small.
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
This is mission implausible. Today we have the bad astronomer, Phil Plate. He's an award winning astronomer, educator, and science writer. He's worked with NASA on the Hubble Space Telescope team, and he's written several well received books. So welcome, feel glad to have you with us.
Thank you so nice to be here.
So, Phil, you do a lot of work on debunking common misunderstandings of science and astronomy and educating people on why astronomy is so important. Can you give us just some sense and background on your work and the kind of examples that you talk about.
Well, these days, mostly I'm doing straight science, just talking about all the wonderful things that are happening in the universe. Basically in astronomy. I do still occasionally have to dip my toe into the debunking pool, and this is something I used to do all the time. As a matter of fact, I guess I could say I was a professional skeptic, a critical thinker. And it all started in the nineties when I started seeing just silly ideas about astronomy online. And this was when online was not what
it is today. But I started just debunking these ideas, saying, hey, you know that's not how this really works. Why does the moon look big on the horizon as opposed overhead? And read up on how that works. And in two thousand, Fox TV aired a moon landing denial show called Conspiracy Theory? Did we land on the Moon? And you know, if they'd been honest and just said yes, it would have been a very short show.
It has been estimated that as many as twenty percent of Americans believe we never went to the Moon. Is it really possible that NASA to see the world. According to a former astronaut, it's entirely possible.
Regarding the Apollo mission, I can't say one ercent for sure whether these men walked on the Moon.
I wrote it up on my website and it became really popular. That was my first big sort of viral moment, and ever since a UFO's moon landing. When it comes to science based conspiracy theories or urban legends and that sort of thing, that's when I would come storming in.
I'm going to start up a discript basy talking about espionage astrology, not astronomy and effectiveness. So let's jump back on our time machine. And Hitler was a great believer in astronomy in the cult and especially Googles, And when World War II was just starting, the Nazis, surprisingly enough took astrology is a war effort and they banned private use of astrology. All had to be done by the
state as part of the propaganda effort. I was actually surprised to find that there's been a long history of using astrology and other bogus science for propaganda efforts that sometimes have been quite effective, is as real conspiracies and real conspiracy theories to actually further a political agita. And I was wondering if your sense of like how astrology is used to basically they drafting off of real astronomy to make political purposes or to to you know, to make money things.
If I knew that, I'd be a million well, I know. Yeah. So astrology, I mean, just to be clear, is nonsense. There's no aspect of astrology that works. This has been tested over and over again, including using tests that astrologers themselves have come up with, and then double blind studies where they say, here will agree to these rules, and then they cast their horoscopes or whatever, and what they do is no better than random chance, which is exactly
what astronomer has been saying. But Nancy Reagan used a personal astrologer to schedule, yeah, quickly, that's right, to make appointments for Ronald Reagan to meet with people or to do things or not do things. And this is all silly until it's not silly anymore, which is typical of conspiracy theories and scientific nonsense, pseudoscience or anti science, whatever you want to call it. With astrology, you've got a pretty good head start because, first of all, astrology has
been around for thousands and thousands of years. The constellations, the zodiac, the zodiacal constellations, we base these on the Greek constellations. We're already talking about twenty five hundred years or so, and most ancient civilizations had their own versions of this, the Egyptians and the Babylonians, the Chinese. I could just go on and on. So a lot of people believe this stuff, and it all kind of boils down to people want to remember the hits and forget
the misses. So you know when they say, my astrologer said I was going to to come into money, and then I found a twenty dollars bill, and it's like, yeah, how about all the other times they said you'd come into money and nothing happened. You forget about those. Plus there's a desire to believe, a desire to sort of give up your responsibility about certain things and let whatever is going on over your head take care of it.
So you've got a big head start. There's leverage with people. Yeah, you've got a pretty good place to put your crowbar and pry things open. And we're seeing that now. People are believing almost anything they're being told and it's all nonsense. But if it's coming from the people you believe and the people you have put your trust in, you believe it.
So the British intelligence services knew that the Germans were using astrology to their benefit. And so they hired a guy called Lewis DeWitt and they actually established inside British intelligence, they established a small division form, but they sent him to the US where he made all sorts of predictions
about the Nazis about to fall. And he met in Cleveland with a group of American astrologers and it's sort of unclear what really happened, but he either bribed them or persuaded them to begin casting rogue British astrological projections to help get the US into the war, you know, to push you the US to join World War two.
That is absolutely terrifying and it makes me super uncomfortable to know. And we are talking World War two and Nazis and all of that. So yeah, sure that had to be defeated. But that stuff tends to linger.
So why do you think there is so much science skepticism these days?
It Waxes and Waynes. In the seventies there was all sorts of nonsense, you know, astral projection ESP and all that kind of stuff, and that kind of went away, and then the moon hoax thing was huge for I don't know about a year in two thousand and now that's basically gone away. It's still out there, but it's not a big deal. But what we're seeing now in
the past few years is different. And if you want a conspiracy theory, I might posit that there has been a concerted effort to destroy I can't say anything about other countries, but in America, to destroy people's trust in science. And this has all come not all, but the vast majority is coming from the Republican Party, which is downplaying climate change, building up anti vaxxers. You know, anti vaxx for a while was kind of a crunchy granola thing.
There's a whole history of that, and so it was a left wing thing, but then it got co opted by the right, especially when Gardasil came out, which was a vaccine against a type of virus that can give you cancer. But there are sexual overtones to that, and the right wing took that up in their social case.
And so now this has spread to everything. And there's not any aspect of science, evolution and versus creationism, because a lot of these are religious based, and the right wing Party of the United States has co opted religion, and now the GOP denies everything when it comes to science.
It's horrifying. So it's anti science, but it's also anti expert, anti elite.
Yeah, and that's what makes me think is a concerted effort because it's coming at all levels. Right, they're attacking universities, they're talking about scientists and the elite. That's the perfect word of this anti elitism. It's like, oh, you just think that because you're part of the elite, and it's like, no, I just got an education, and you know, I see what's going on, and so I see this all the time. People argue with me. I go on. I used to
go on TikTok and leave comments. People would say I saw this light in the sky and I think it's UFO and I'd be like, it's Venus. You're looking right at Venus and you're looking at the right direction, and there it is in this guy. And they're like, no, it was doing this and this, and what do you know? And it's like, been an astronomer for forty years, I think I know when I see Venus, but they don't
believe me. So it's mind boggling that people would rather believe they're in group than think for themselves.
Is this something innately human? Or is this something that you see sort of different now being pushed by political forces or certainly the Russians are doing it.
What's your sort of sense of this As a scientist, I'd say it's both. Sometimes there is an innate need to find some sort of outside force that is affecting us, and certainly human our brains have evolved to seek out patterns, and it happens in astronomy all the time. I mean, you look at it at four stars in the sky and say, yes, that's the Great Hunter or a microscope or something like that. And so we have the constellations, and we see it when you see faces in clouds.
And this is another thing I've dealt with a lot in astronomy, because we see rock formations on Mars gas clouds in space and they look like things we're familiar with. They look like faces or whatever. And so that's a fun aspect of this. It's when people start believing that there's more to it. Coincidences happened. And on the flip side, yeah, there are people out there who are absolutely trying to
manipulate others into believing stuff that is clearly wrong. It's nineteen eighty four, you know when you deny the evidence of your eyes, and that's what's happening now, and so it's easy for evildoers to use that unbrelative to manipulate people into denying the evidence that they think might be real like science, and believe in something that's incredibly wrong, like ivermectin, Cure's COVID or anything that comes up that
we've seen in the past few years. In the height of COVID, I was living in Colorado and I had a couple of horses and some goats, and I was always worried that I was going to go to my local feed store and they weren't going to have it when I needed it, And I thought, this is it
seems that seems silly. But again there's an undercurrent of serious trouble here when anti vaxxers are telling people not to get the COVID shot, to not worry about polio and whooping cough and measles and these horrific diseases, and it's people say how common is this and they're like, gommin, because we have vaccine for them. Why do you think this is? Oh?
So, I think bad actors, either for money or for political purpose, often try to use fear. Fear works obviously, but I'm wondering what should we worry about. And I know you've looked at asteroids and things like that. What things in science are things that we actually should be paying more attention to.
Well, in the medical field, I think that's all pretty clear. In astronomy about yeah, yeah, well, there's there's lots to worry about. When it comes to astronomy. There are a handful of things to be concerned about. I say, being concerned means maybe we should pay attention to this versus worrying like this is going to happen and an asteroid impact, for example, we don't need a gigantic dinosaur killer asteroid impact to wipe us out. There are and only be
worried about that. That is, that's a once in a fifty million year event, so that's probably not going to happen. And plus those giant asteroids, we know where almost all of them are, so I'm not too worried about that. The other side, on the other side of this, twenty thirteen, over Russia, there was a nineteen meter asteroids something in the size of a big house came screaming in and exploded twenty thirty miles up in the atmosphere and caused
a lot of damage on the ground. And if that thing had been moving faster, had been bigger, maybe made of metal instead of crumbly rock, it would have done a huge amount of damage. And those sorts of impacts happen every couple of decades.
Now.
Luckily, the Earth is very large, seventy something percent of it is water. What's not water is typically uninhabited. Antarctica is a big empty space, so there's a surface area of the Earth where these things can come in and not do any damage. On the other hand, chel Yabinsk was a city of is a city of a million people or more, and this thing shattered windows and caused over a thousand injuries. So that happens, how often is not too And the small ones we can't really do
anything about. But the bigger ones that are coming in at the size of a football stadium, and those can do much more damage over a region as opposed to a locality, And those are the kind of things that we're looking at more carefully and saying, what can we do about that? Smash it with a rocket. We've done this. The dart mission not too long ago, slammed a spacecraft
into an asteroid and moved it. It worked, worked really well actually, so if there's something in one hundred meter side scale, we can probably prevent that from hitting the Earth.
Which is when you say we give us a little more. I never I don't know about that. Who's we? Was it humans and humans?
The Dart mission, the Double Asteroid Redirect t Test so many acronyms, was a NASA mission that basically approached an asteroid and hit it really hard. It was actually the moon of a small asteroid and changed its orbit, changed the orbital period by quite a bit. And the European Space Agency is doing a follow up mission called Hero which is launching soon, and we'll go there and make
close up measurements and really see what happened. There are a lot of space agencies now India has one China, and it's possible that we can get together and if there's something big enough, we can all do something about it. Or one country just takes the reins and says we're going to do this. That is fraught with international issues because okay, here's an asteroid coming in. It's going to hit the US. So NASA's going to launch a rocket, we hit it, we change its trajectory, and we find out, oh,
now it's going to land in China. Oh that's a problem. So given the time skills here, this is something I think about. This is something I'm concerned about, but not something I lie awake in the middle of the night sweating about. This is something that we're getting better at detecting them and better at figuring out what to do about them.
All right, let's take a break. We'll be right back.
So Phil, let's talk maybe just a little bit about satellite there. I'm assuming they have overt missions, but they may have covert missions. And I've read about something called the Kessler syndrome or the Kessler effect where killer satellite which sort of I guess put badly hit shrapnel in it, which destroys other satellites, that creates more shrampnel, that destroys our ability to operate in low Earth orbit, which means we go back to like manual tie writers and VCRs
and things like that. So what's your sense now, the space race and an espionage and national rivalries with using satellite technology or modern technology to impact how we all live today.
The Kessler syndrome is a real thing, and the idea being that, sure, you could have an anti satellite, which is basically an explosive device in space, and you pull up your satellite next to your enemy's military saturate or something blow years up and the shrapnel will shred their satellite.
The problem is, satellites are orbiting the Earth at eight kilometers a second five five miles per second, which is very fast, twenty thousand miles an hour, and they're moving in a certain direction, typically roughly west east, the same direction to the Earth spins, but not always. There are
some in polar satellites that go north south. But now you've got this expanding cloud of debris, thousands of small parts and it doesn't matter how big they are iffle like a paint moving at twenty thousand miles an hour, Slamming into your satellite could destroy it. Huge energy is involved here. A bullet is small, but it's moving really fast.
That's why it's doing so much damage. If you have a thousand pieces a cloud of this debris which is now miles across and screaming around in lower th orbit at that speed, the odds of one satellite hitting another satellite are very low that it's only happened a few times. The odds of this cloud of debrisating something are much much larger, and when they do, they create another cloud of debris, which then increases the odds and what you get as a runaway effect a cascade. That's what the
Kessler syndrome is. The movie Gravity with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, was based on this idea. The basic idea of that movie was the premise was correct. But yeah, this is a very big concern. If we had as many satellites as we did twenty years ago in space, that would be one thing, a few thousand or even ten thousand. But right now SpaceX is launching thousands of Starlink satellites. Then their plan is to launch tens of thousands.
There are other what they call mega constellations of satellites that are being planned, and these things they can fail and they can hit other satellites. The more you have up there, the more likely acclision is. Now there's plans to diorbit these things. If they start to go wrong, they just bring them down, let them burn up. Tens of thousands of satellites it's just you have that many the chances of a collision go up and up, and so, yeah, this is a concern.
It wasn't there reason reporting that the Russians were looking at possibly nuclear explosions in space. You could conceivably use nuclear weapons in space. It doesn't necessarily kill people right away, but it creates these kind of problems.
We've done this. Starfish Prime was a hydrogen bomb that was blown up over the Pacific Ocean in the nineteen fifties, nineteen fifty four i think, and it was done to test, Hey, what happens when you do this? And it turns out that you get a tremendous blast of high energy particles electrons and gamma rays and things like that that interact with Earth's atmosphere and cause an electromagnetic pulse. And this is the kind of thing where you hear about this
in science fiction all the time. Oh, it's an EMP and it blows out our computers. And it turns out, yeah, that's what these things do. You have a tremendous pulse of energy, it passes through your satellite and it creates electric charges inside the satellite that can fry the circuits. And this is a decent concern. A good solar storm can do this, which is something a lot of solar astronomers and engineers are concerned about. The sun blasts off
these big storms. It's a sensely like detonating a hydrogen bomb in space, very similar. So yeah, you can do that. I wouldn't recommend it. First of all, it's against international law. We've signed the Outer Space Treaty so as Russia, I believe, and that makes it illegal to detonate those things in space. On the other hand, what are you going to do about it? Somebody blows up a nuke. The repercussions are awful. You could blow out a lot of satellites. Military satellites
are hardened typically against such things. But what do you do if Russia decides to do that or a rogue president of the United States says I'm going to bomb Greenland? How do you stop them?
Okay, Phil, we have to talk about UFOs at least a little bit. What is your take on the recent space of sightings of aerial phenomenon or perceived sightings going on around in Jersey and let's pretend they're real. What would we actually see? Scientists and how could we prove it or verify that there's stuff up there that isn't just drones through airpor.
My overwhelming take on this is frustration to see the stuff that's been going on for decade and it's just the same stuff over and over again, and you cannot debunk it is whack a mole. All this new stuff is not new. The only thing new about it is that these are we're seeing lights in the sky and it's probably drones. And I remember thinking when drones started to become popular a few years ago, I thought I would hate to be a UFO researcher now because this
is going to destroy anything you can do. It is like trying to build an astronomical observatory in the middle of a football stadium with all the lights around you. There's just going to be so many things up in the sky now. And watching these videos, you know, everybody's taking their videos and posting them online. And I'm looking at that and going, that's Venus, that's Jupiter, that's the moon,
that's an airplane, that's a drone. Those are spotlights. I see a lot of circling circles of light, five or six of them in a circle. Spinning around on a cloud bank, on a low cloud bank. I'm thinking those are spotlights. There's probably a movie theater or somebody trying to get somebody's attention, and people are losing their minds over the stuff. So this is all nonsense.
But what do we as a scientist, what do we have that like can actually see the Have we got radars that are going up, We've got weather saurights, We've got people on the you know, landing airplanes.
I don't know if there's a concerted effort to observe these things and to see what they are. If somebody's got a radar installation that they're using to shoot radar up into the atmosphere and see if and when there's a UFO sighting, that would be really hard to do anyway, because UFO sighting seemed to be sporadic. How would you know where to put your radar assembly.
They're around an airport, right, I mean, yeah, sure, you.
Know, and it's like, yeah, an airport where there are tons of airplanes flying around, and you see a light moving in the sky and its first guess is probably an airplane. And you have, for example, the Navy released a bunch of footage declassified this stuff, and these have been these are known what they are. One of them is an airplane in the distance. One of them looks like an object that is moving against the wind at
a rapid speed with the sea in the background. The plane was looking down on the saying and it turns out that's likely a balloon, And it's just perspective making it look like it's moving really rapidly, just like when you're driving down the street and it looks like the trees are whizzing past you and it's no, they're really not. They're stationary. You're the one moving. So there are lots of ways of looking at these things and everything comes
up negative. There are things you can't explain because we just don't happen to know what they are. That maybe it's a balloon, Maybe it's a flock of birds. Maybe it's an alien spaceship coming down to slice up our cows and probe people. But I would always put that at the bottom of the list. You think mundane first,
eliminate the more obvious things. And again with these videos, I'm seeing people saying they're flying saucers or whatever, and I'm thinking there's a hundred other things that you guys don't know. First, like they don't know how their cameras work. They zoom way in and they see this sparkling ball and it's yeah, it's a star and it's out of focus. That's what you're doing. So this kind of stuff is what makes it so frustrating. And if aliens did come,
I guess that was the second part of your question. Yeah, how would you know? And that's a good question if they didn't want to be seen. If you have the technology to go from star to star, which is way beyond what we think is even possible right now according to physics, chances are you're going to have good science to absorb radar. I mean we have that technology now.
The stealth bombers and fighters absorb radar. So if you ping them with radar and nothing returns back to the dish and you just don't see them, it might not be that hard to avoid us, and you wouldn't need to land necessarily, even you could do remote sensing. We do that now. Then people always ask me if you don't believe all of this footage, and I'm like, you have terrible footage. But that's why I don't believe it.
But if you don't believe all this footage, what is going to convince you landing on the White House line? And I'm like, yes, that is the standard of proof that I am looking for. If you're going to make a claim that is so extraordinary, it goes against everything that everybody's been claiming for fifty years. And you want me to believe that they're aliens. I want them to
land on the White House lawn. I want them to have biology that is very different than ours, and when our scientists study it and they say, wow, they have six DNA pairs or something like that, six base pairs, very different than any life on Earth, a metal alloy, or they can tell us something like what's the next star that's going to blow up? It's like that light is on its way to Earth. There's no way we can know what star is going to blow up next,
and they can. They have faster than light travel. They can say, oh, it's going to be this star, and then two years later we see it something like that. That's my standard of proof.
I think if something really is really happening to the United States or to the world are coming from people will look at it and experts will look at it. It'll come out. It doesn't need me to try to say, hey, I think there's something going on there.
I'm pretty familiar with the sky and so if I saw something like that, I'd be like, now, that's very interesting. That's not a satellite, it's not a meteor. Could it be a drone? And think about how higher drones and how fast is this moving. I can work that math out, and if I can't, I can go online and ask people about it. And that's kind of the difference between scientist and a conspiracy theorist. If I don't understand something,
I seek more information. When a conspiracy theorist doesn't understand something, they wedge it into their already preconceived framework and say, the government's lying to you, and this is clearly this this when it's it's not clearly that at all.
Just hold on for a short break. We'll be right back.
So, Philip, I was wondering, how do you feel about astrology and how do you for someone who believes in astrology. What's your easiest way to say, Look, here's the difference between astronomy and astrology. I think a lot of people mix them up.
Five thousand years ago, they were the same thing. It was the study of the stars and how they affected us. And eventually astronomy became a science when we started understanding the motions of the planets and gravity and how all that stuff work. People want to believe in the sort of thing, and I get that. I get that desire to believe in something greater than ourselves. But in the case of astrology, it just falls short. And it's very easy to read your horoscope and think, oh, this pertains
to me. But again, we have tested this over and over again, including again using tests that astrologers have come up with, and when these tests are done correctly, they fail. And when I was part of the skeptic community, part of the critical thinking movement back in the two thousands, we did a lot of testing on this. And it's funny how the skeptical movement had this bizarre almost group of people including scientists and magicians and mind readers mentalists.
But the thing about magicians and mentalists is they know how to fool people. They know what tricks make it look like magic, make it look like something else is going on, and what's really happening, And it's exactly the sort of thing that han men do. I'm not saying astrology is necessarily a con saying it's wrong. And so we tested this and I see mentalists do things that I cannot figure out. How did that person know the date on a coin in my pocket? And they're telling
you the whole time, this isn't real. And so even when it seems like a horoscope accurately predicts you, there are a thousand people out there whose horoscopes completely missed the mark, and you're the one that it worked with, and so you're the one who's now a believer. That's how these things work.
So certain zodiac signs are naturally inclined to excel in espionage due to their unique traits and skills. Gorpio, Capricorn, Virgo, Gemini, and Pisces are the zodiac signs possessing qualities ideal for covert operations and intelligence gathering.
It's just funny that we rely on these super outdated constellation ideas. I just wrote about this for Scientific American, that these zodiac signs no longer correspond to where the sun is in the sky. That's what the zodiac signs are. When you say you're a Libra. Then when you were born,
the son was literally in that constellation. But over the past twenty five hundred years, these constellations have shifted, and so when you say you're a Libra, the son was actually in Virgo more likely when you were born.
Maybe this is for people of a different generation. But there was someone called Gene Dixon, and there was something known as the Gene Dixon effect, and she carently claims to have and has some evidence that she predicted Kennedy's assassination, although it was a vague prediction before JFK was assassinated and Dallas. But I have looked into this, and there is something in scientific literature called the Gene Dixon effect.
It basically what she did is she just threw so much shit out there that so she also predicted that we would have World War three in nineteen fifty eight with China. She threw out so many predictions that some of them came true, and she would then advertise those and the ones that didn't come true. She just sort of like God thought, right, And I think that for pseudo science today. QAnon for example, right, I mean threw all sorts of predictions, almost none of them came true.
Maybe a couple did. I mean, you know, it's you know, monkeys and typewriters.
And this is what I was talking about earlier, that people tend to remember the hits and forget the misses. So if you make a ton of predictions, and the beauty of this too is you can be super vague, and a lot of astrology is vague.
And a lot of.
These these psychics and the speakers to the dead, James van Prague and a few others, John Edwards, that were popular fifteen twenty years ago. Now, these guys would do that same thing. They would just throw things out on you and the audience there, did you lose somebody recently? Yes, this is why they're there.
In the audience.
I'm sensing a ja or an m. Is there is that?
Yeah?
Because John and Mary and James and Margaret these very popular names, and they would just throw stuff out like that and zero in on something until they started getting hits. And even then the hits were like not great.
And is somebody now pregnant?
Who died?
Was so the person who passed was pregnant? Yes, okay, there's a reference to two people. There's two people, So I don't know if we're talking about two people involved in this case, but two people perpetrated it, or two people are passed to be passed. You're telling me this is a husband and wife that was pregnant that was killed. Yes, did this make headlines?
Yes?
Okay, they're telling me to talk to you about Scott or skip or something.
S K.
I don't know who that is.
I don't know who that is.
So she's just a friend of yours, like a contemporary. Yes, yes, and it's her dad passed, but her mom's life.
No, both of the parents are alive.
No, she's with an older male that's passed, like a father.
But people, first of all, they wanted to believe in this stuff. And second, yeah, it's like you called it, the gene diiction effect, and we've seen it over and over again. A mentalist friend of mine who is amazing. If you see one of his shows, you just cannot believe this guy is not psychic, and he's not. He's just really good at figuring out this sort of thing and working people that way. He said, anybody in the
audience here, anybody been hit by lightning? And nobody said anything, and he laughed, and this was a skeptic audience, and he said, I always ask that. He said, nobody ever has, but someday somebody will have been. And boy, oh boy, am I going to be a miracle worker that night? And I thought, yeah, can you imagine somebody pulling that out and when you finally get that hit, that's going to really seem like that person is psychic. And yeah,
and we see this over and over again. Look at how many times Donald Trump has lied when he was president and people just forget and he's, oh, yeah, he was wrong about this. It was always two weeks and in two weeks, we'll have an infrastructure plane. In two weeks, we'll do this knowing that in two weeks the news
that's five news cycles away, and people forget. So it's very easy once you've honed your audience, once you prime them this way, that you can make them believe than almost anything, no matter how nonsensical.
What you're saying is, guys, this is your producer, John Stern. There's a conspiracy theory that I heard a couple of years ago that Elon Musk's whole thing about going to Mars is a red herring. He's building up all of his space force not to go to Mars, but to go to an asteroid and drag that asteroid into the orbit of Earth, and that asteroid is mostly gold and in doing so control the Earth's economy. So is that feasible on any level?
There are a lot of asteroids out there. There are a lot of them made of metal. NASA has already launched a mission called Psyche, which is on its way to an asteroid called Psyche that we think is mostly metal, and it's quite large, and there are smaller ones that will have a lot of interesting metals in them, platinum and rare earth metals. Finding one that has enough gold in it to control the Earth's economy strikes me as being unlikely. There's probably more gold in minds that you
could get for much less effort and expense. So yeah, if you want to go to asteroids to mind the metal, and this is something that has been tried already, there have been a few startups that have tried to identify asteroids and build ships that can go to them to mind them. It turns out mining an asteroid is really tough. It's not as simple as they make it seem in science fiction shows. But it's possible, and this is something we may be doing in one hundred years finding that
much gold. I don't think so. Using to control the economy. The guy's got two hundred and fifty billion dollars. He already controls the economy. Conspiracy theories are like a pyramid built upside down, is how I always say it. You've got this one sort of idea that everything rests on, but that idea doesn't make sense. There's no balance there, and you build all this stuff on top of it,
It's gonna fall over. It's much better to flip that pyramid over, get all your basic facts and build from there, as opposed to making up wild ideas and trying to get everything to fit.
So there was this strange relationship between Harry Houdin me and yes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, right, the friends, and then they became bitter enemies. Oh yeah, and who Deny whose job it was was to convince people that he could break the laws of physics, that there was a supernatural because it was like Penn and Teller, because he knew there was no magic. He was he was against
this kind of thing. And in fact, I've got a quote here when he's talking about astrologists, he says, these call them human leeches, sucking every bit of reason and common sense and money from their from their victims. And yet, Sir, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a character who was the absolute hitome of rationality. Right, everything is a rational explanation, whatever it is. But Who Deny could not make Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believe that he could not break.
The laws of physix.
Good, right, he died thinking Who Deni was secretly supernatural and that there was a supernatural So.
I almost mentioned Who Denie earlier when we were talking about the skeptic movement, because Houdini was in many ways one of the pioneers of magicians coming out and saying no, this is all nonsense. And Penn and Teller are a good example of people doing it now. James Randy, Back when I was a kid, the Amazing Randy would go on the Carson Show and would debunk a lot of these things.
Would you welcome, please, the Amazing Randy. What do you think of the phenomenon that's going on now that is getting a lot of the channeling or if somebody speaks through or they'd become the entity or the body or the voice of somebody who's been dead twenty five they're called channelers.
Let's face it, this is spiritualism warmed over. Spiritualist used to be sitting in the dark with your hands overlapping, play the Rock of Ages, and they could do anything in the dark. Edgar Bergen used to do the same thing. He changed his voice and he sounded like Charlie McCarthy. No one ever said Charlie McCarthy was alive. And yet these people are paying three hundred dollars a session to go into these meetings. And these channelers themselves had got made.
One of them said on a TV interview not long ago, Look, we can't prove that it's real, but you can't prove that it isn't. It's a perfectly non falsifiable situation.
Especially towards the end of his life, Randy was taking on speakers to the dead, These people who would say, I'm sensing a presence at your father, blah blah blah. And we call them psychic vultures, these people who would prey on the emotions of the bereaved. It's just awful to watch that happen. And I've certainly met and dealt with enough people who have come into conspiracy theories as
con artists. The Moon landing, remember Planet X, this giant planet in two thousand and three that was going to come by the Earth and destroy humanity. Utter one hundred percent nonsense, not a spec of truth to any of the stuff. But there was this one guy who came in, became part of this sort of cult following around this one person, and then schismed off and started his own thing. It seemed to me that it's possible that this guy was a con man and not part of the believers,
but eventually grew to believe it. And there's a Moonhax denier the same. It came in clearly using con artist tricks to worm his way into this, but then later on really seem to believe it. And of course it's much easier to sell people on stuff if you believe in what you're selling.
So magic in espionage, especially in how we do things, if you're unders fail. It's something that we have looked at.
There are stories, but it's true because I was involved in it in places like Russia where we're under full time surveillance at all times, we have to continue to meet people or achieve our goals or accomplish things even while under surveillance. And so we actually brought in magicians to talk to us about are there ways of which when someone is watching you can do things while they're watching you to get away with things? Can you distract them or like you create the slight of hand, all
these kind of things. You're looking for ways to get people who are perceiving you to misperceive what they're saying.
Well, in espionage, you never know when you need to make a white tiger disappear.
So, Phil, thank you so much for spending time that it's a really interesting and keep up what you're doing, keep up educating the public. I think it's an important time. I think we as a people need to get back to focusing on rationality and sciences.
Thanks for being up frontman for us for keeping people from realizing that we do have space ariens trip at Area fifty one where we are first engineering their technology.
I'm not at liberty to talk about that.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Seipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner mission implausible. It is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures.
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