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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norrey with you or with astrophysicist Adam Frank. His book is called The Little Book of Aliens. We'll tell you in a moment where you can get it. It is a marvelous Adam. What do you think of the witnesses who testified several months ago before Congress? They seem very credible. They were pilots, and what do you think, Well, you know, I've.
Had really great conversations with Ryan Graves, one of the pilots. Yes, what I really like about Ryan is that, you know, he's very agnostic about what it is. Like I like his attitude or he's like, this is what I saw. You know, I'm telling you it didn't look like anything I've ever flown around with before. But I need you to figure it out, right, Somebody go figure out He's not he's not going to a conclusion. He's just reporting
what he saw. And you know, I think it's great that the pilots are able to talk about this without you know, there any kind of stigma. So that's really good. But again there's nothing you know that links There's there's no hard data that links what they saw because you know, personal testimony. There's only science can't really work with personal testimony. So there's still nothing that links to the to the
idea that they're you know, they're non human. And you know, again that's why I support the massive panel and doing that study. I do think, you know, there's a real possiblity. For me, it's probably I'm more inclined to believe that this is going to be about about national defense. And I you know, I book, I talk about the modern history of UAPs and you know where that's led so that people can understand sort of you know where science,
how science would look at this. Now when it comes to the idea that of the alien craft and the garages, I got to say, as a scientist, you know, show me the spaceship until somebody shows me the spaceship and
you know we can go bang around on it. Their their stories and you know in the book I talk about in the nineteen fifties, one of the first government rep whor it's ever done, Project sign There was the head of it, Captain Edward Rupert, wrote a book after he retired in the fifties where he said, oh, there was this report called the Estimate of the Situation that claims there was evidence that UFOs were interplanetary, right, because I didn't really think interstell of them. But of course
that report was never found. People have dug around looking for that report. It was never found. So the idea that there, you know, the military has spaceships has been around forever. We've never really gotten anything from it, so, you know, and for every military guy who says we have spaceships, there's another military guy who says it doesn't. And the problem is it's the government, right, and the government is a giant bureaucracy that good luck getting anything
from them. So I think it's far more likely that we are going to have evidence of life, some kind of life, whether it's dumb life meaning you know, microbes or forests on alien planets via what I called biosignatures or what are called biosignatures or smart life techno signatures on alien worlds before we find we really get anything
from you know, from finding anything about UAPs. Hopefully eventually we'll figure out what UAPs are, but we're so close to getting real data about alien life on alien planets.
Adam, you're scientist, so you don't guess, you don't speculate, But I'm going to ask you. The pilots are seeing something that is something they ever have seen before. They've told you that, what does your gut tell you that might be going on?
Well, my gut tells me because especially as I went back, you know, I did this. I did an op ed for the New York Times when in the two thousand and one about this, and I went back and I was doing lots of reading, and one of the things I stumbled on was the fig INT community, like the community of people from the signals intelligence and electronic intelligence community. And what was interesting, they had lively discussions about all
of it, but none of it was about extraterrestrials. It was all And this is where I learned the term peer state adversaries. You know, other governments using drones using it doesn't have to really be advanced technology. You can actually use simple technologies to spoof something looking like it's moving very fast. And the United States did this itself in the late nineteen fifties. Russia had built this giant radar.
We wanted to know what that radar was capable of of of so we spoofed the signal into it to get the Russians to crank you know, the power upon it. And that's how we detected. That's how we understood what they were capable of. So if I had to take a guess, and again, like you said, I'm just speculating until we actually do the science. You know, we don't know, but that's my speculation. But here's the nexting point, George.
Imagine that we did do the science, and imagine that we found that these things were behaving in a way that no human craft could do, like he was making a right hand turn, you know, at mock five hundred in the book, I discuss well, what would be the next step? Right, you would still have to do more science because if they don't land and announce themselves. Now we found, wow, here's something that is moving in ways that we don't understand. But how you know that? What
do you do next? So you just have to do the next bit of science. So the interesting thing is having an agnostic approach to this means you're just following where the data leads, and every good question that's answered will lead to the next good question.
Years ago, I was at a conference. I go to a lot of them, Adam, and there's an individual there who since passed on, but he would attend every event and he would bring with him night vision goggles. His name was Ed Grimsley, and he'd always sit next to me or producer Tom with a little paper bag in his lap. And I'm going, man, this doesn't feel right. This is just weird. You know, I've seen this guy five times at five different events. He sits close to us,
He's got a bag on his lap. This just doesn't seem right. Tom. We got to figure out something here. Finally he came up to us and reaches into the bag and you know, I'm ready to jump the guy and he pulls out night vision goggles and says, George Hi, Ed Grimsly, would you come on the roof with me? And I went no, And he said, well no, let me explain. I've got a group of people up there and we're looking at UFOs with these night vision goggles. Would you come up there? And I said how many
people are up there? He said about half a dozen. I said, okay, let's go. So we go up on the roof and he gives me these night vision goggles at him, and I swear to God, I'm looking at objects in the sky that are not insects, they're not satellites. They're doing ninety degree angle turns, as you just mentioned, stopping and starting, and they're way way up there, grimsly asked,
made it one hundred two hundred miles up perhaps? And there were little tiny little shiny dots just going zoop stop, zoop, right hand turn. I don't know what I saw, but something was up there. It was weird.
Yeah, Well, because this is the interesting thing about this, right, So you know I could I would never say to somebody you didn't see what you saw, right, I wasn't there, I wasn't watching it. So I don't know, right, I can't answer that. But if we want, what we want with science from science is public knowledge, right, something that we can all the data is available, we can all agree on it. And so how would you get that
kind of data about UAPs? And that's you know, one of the things I cover in the book, like what would a scientific search look like? And it turns out it looks a lot like the search that we're doing for alien planets. When we're looking for biosignatures and technosignatures.
The same kind of standards of evidence that we have, the same kind of demand for knowing everything about your instruments is going to be required for looking at you at piece, just like when we use the James Webspace Telescope. So for example, when my colleagues and I, if we were to ever report that we found, say, evidence for city lights on a world that was forty light years away, people are going to come after us, right other scientists.
I mean, you know, because we're people have to understand how mean scientists are to each other for good reason, and that we're we're going to have to know everything about how the space telescope work. You know, we have to know how it receives light when it's forty degrees, how it receives light when it's eighty degrees. And that's the only way that we're going to be able to
answer that question. The same thing with UAP's We're gonna have to build instruments that we know everything about those instruments, and we know everything about how we did the search, so that way we can all you know, that data is there and everybody can look in at it and come to the same conclusion.
In your book, The Little Book of Aliens, you cite the Roswell Crash of nineteen forty seven as a moment in history where the public became a little too obsessed with UFOs. Tell me about that, well.
I think the problem with especially for you look at the effect on the side like SETI, as we talked about before, was that with something like Roswell, you know, all the competing stories and the ways is built on itself, and particularly you know the hoax surrounding you know, those the alien autopsy because of what happened with the aspects
of the you know, people who are UFO culture. Is that the scientific search for extraterrestrials or you know, after a biology got what we call the giggle factor that anybody who you know, any scientists who wanted to study life in the universe, you know, other colleagues would raise their eyes and kind of giggle. And this really affected the funding for SETI. SETI, their funding was cut off. Like basically, there there has been almost no SETI searching.
And all people need to understand that because there was no funding in the nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties when NATHA tried to fund SETI, Congress people stood up and said, we're not going to use taxpayer dollars to look for a little green men in UFOs. So that what happened from Roswell really and things like that really colored the ability of scientists to investigate the possibilities of life in the universe using telescopes and using you know, probes.
But what's remarkable now is that that has really gone away. We've made so many amazing discoveries about exoplanets, about planets orbiting other stars that NASA is now all in and the next big telescope. People don't understand this. The next big telescope that NASA is going to build, you know, billion dollar telescope is called the Habitable World Observatory, so it's tuned to finding life on distant worlds. That's a
huge milestone. And you know, one of the things I want people to understand from the book is how we are and how we're going to do it. This idea of finding city lights or finding evidence of a biospheres. Because oxygen in an atmosphere, we can literally look into alien atmospheres and sniff out their chemical composition. And use that to detect life.
Are you amazed at the progress we're making right now trying to inch towards getting the answers to these questions?
George, I am more than amazed. I'm stunned, because you know, when I was coming up as a graduate student in the late eighties, we didn't even know whether there were any planets out there other than our own truth. It was entirely possible that we were there the eight planets in our solar system, and don't start with me about Pluto. We're the only ones. And now we know every star in this guy has planets.
When I was fifteen, though, I told my science teacher in school that there were planets teeming throughout the universe. You be kept saying, how do you know there's, George, And I said, because the model of what happened in our solar system is the same throughout the universe. Now, I was a kid without any data, without any scientific fact, but I just my gut told me they're everywhere.
And I'm right right that you were right. And the thing is, in nineteen eighty eight, or you'll say nineteen eighty five, when I started graduate school, we didn't know whether there were any other planets, and now we know that there are you know, billions upon billions upon billions of planets, and even more exciting, we know how to look at those planets, how to look into their atmospheres to find evidence of life. You know, what's an interesting
thing that we've learned. Though, also I talk about all the different kinds of planets that we found, the most common kind of planet in the universe is one that's not in our solar system. Right, our Solar system is not average. It's kind of weird.
If you were an alien on another planet in a different solar system looking at Planet Earth with the technology you might possess, what would you conclude?
Yeah, this is an interesting idea that the Earth has shown biosignatures. The Earth has had these signatures of a biosphere, you know, either microbial or about half a billion years ago, that's when multicellular creatures started to evolve on Earth. The Earth has been showing biosignatures for about three billion years now. Our techno signatures are new. It's only been probably in the last one hundred years that we are showing technosignature.
So you'd have to be within one hundred light years of us to be able to detect our radio signatures or the atmospheric pollution that we put in. But you know, certainly Earth has been visible as an inhabited world by just you know, a non intelligent life for at least three billion years.
Tell us about NASA's techno signature's research program you're part of.
Yeah, so this is a wonderful story. So, as I said, you know, NASA had really gotten out of the life business, or at least the intelligent life business, for quite a long time. And in nineteen or sorry, in twenty eighteen, they were in congre someone in Congress put in a bill that said NASA should fund the search for techno signatures, right,
and Son's was like, uh okay. So they convened a meeting that brought us, you know, the people who were interested in it together and we had this amazing three day meeting and that's was like, look, if we get this money, what should we do with it? And it was the most amazing three days of just you know, exploring all kinds of ideas, trying to figure out which ideas were the best, which were the most likely to produce some kind of return. So we talked about things
like city lights. Would you be able to see artificial illumination on the dark side of a planet from forty light years away? Would you be able to see atmosphere chemicals industrial chemicals from forty light years away? And from that meeting a group of collaborators and I put in a grant to study atmospheric techno signature. It was the
first ever grant like that, and we got it. And now since twenty nineteen we have been writing papers and studying the possibilities for how we might find alien civilizations on alien planets.
Oh, that's great. Can you conclude that there's water on these planets?
Not yet, but that's coming very very very soon. There was recently a just about a month ago that James Webb space telescope looked at and this is really exciting George an entirely new class of habitable world, what they call a high Sean world, hydrogen ocean world. And this is a world that is much bigger than the Earth, like probably eight times the mass of the Earth, but it has a hydrogen just pure hydrogen atmosphere and a
liquid water ocean liquid ocean underneath the hydron atmosphere. And James web fake telescope was able to detect both methane and carbon dioxide wow in the atmosphere in a way that told us that, yeah, this is there, probably is, or at least it's likely there's a liquid ocean down there. And where there's liquid water, George, there's you know, good chance that maybe life happens.
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