April 20, 2025 • 38 mins
In classic Mission Implausible style, astronomer Phil Plait comes on to debunk a litany of space conspiracy theories and other pseudo-science scams.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Thank you so nice to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
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
(01:18):
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,
(01:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
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.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
Regarding the Apollo mission, I can't say one ercent for
sure whether these men walked on the Moon.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:14):
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
(03:35):
make money things.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:17):
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
(04:39):
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
(05:01):
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,
(05:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
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
(06:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
So why do you think there is so much science
skepticism these days?
Speaker 3 (06:36):
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
(06:58):
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
(07:21):
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
(07:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
It's horrifying. So it's anti science, but it's also anti expert,
anti elite.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
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
(08:29):
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
(08:50):
believe they're in group than think for themselves.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
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
(09:26):
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
(09:48):
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
(10:10):
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
(10:32):
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
(10:53):
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?
Speaker 1 (11:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
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,
(11:45):
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,
(12:06):
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
(12:28):
happen every couple of decades.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Now.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
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
(12:53):
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
(13:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
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?
Speaker 3 (13:38):
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
(13:59):
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
(14:19):
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
(14:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
All right, let's take a break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
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
(15:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
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
(16:10):
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,
(16:32):
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.
(16:55):
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,
(17:16):
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
(17:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
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
(18:30):
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
(18:53):
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.
(19:13):
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?
Speaker 2 (19:31):
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
(19:54):
just drones through airpor.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
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
(20:16):
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,
(20:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
They're around an airport, right, I mean, yeah, sure, you.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
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
(21:57):
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
(22:18):
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,
(22:40):
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,
(23:01):
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.
(23:21):
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.
(23:42):
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
(24:02):
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,
(24:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
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,
(25:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
Just hold on for a short break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
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
(26:03):
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
(26:24):
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
(26:45):
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
(27:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
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
(28:13):
so when you say you're a Libra, the son was
actually in Virgo more likely when you were born.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
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
(28:39):
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
(29:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
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.
Speaker 6 (29:27):
And a lot of.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
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.
Speaker 6 (29:42):
In the audience.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
I'm sensing a ja or an m. Is there is that?
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (29:46):
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.
Speaker 7 (30:01):
And is somebody now pregnant?
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Who died?
Speaker 7 (30:04):
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?
Speaker 8 (30:24):
Yes?
Speaker 7 (30:26):
Okay, they're telling me to talk to you about Scott
or skip or something.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
S K.
Speaker 7 (30:35):
I don't know who that is.
Speaker 8 (30:36):
I don't know who that is.
Speaker 7 (30:37):
So she's just a friend of yours, like a contemporary. Yes, yes,
and it's her dad passed, but her mom's life.
Speaker 9 (30:42):
No, both of the parents are alive.
Speaker 7 (30:44):
No, she's with an older male that's passed, like a father.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
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
(31:11):
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,
(31:34):
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
(31:57):
them this way, that you can make them believe than
almost anything, no matter how nonsensical.
Speaker 6 (32:02):
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
(32:23):
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?
Speaker 3 (32:33):
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
(32:56):
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.
(33:17):
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
(33:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
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
(34:16):
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
(34:38):
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.
Speaker 6 (34:52):
The laws of physix.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Good, right, he died thinking Who Deni was secretly supernatural
and that there was a supernatural So.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
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.
Speaker 8 (35:18):
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.
Speaker 5 (35:37):
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.
(35:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
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
(36:29):
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.
(36:50):
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
(37:10):
much easier to sell people on stuff if you believe
in what you're selling.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
So magic in espionage, especially in how we do things,
if you're unders fail. It's something that we have looked at.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
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
(37:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Well, in espionage, you never know when you need to
make a white tiger disappear.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
I'm not at liberty to talk about that.
Speaker 9 (38:29):
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.
Speaker 6 (38:43):
For iHeart Podcasts,
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.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Thank you so nice to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
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
(01:18):
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,
(01:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
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.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
Regarding the Apollo mission, I can't say one ercent for
sure whether these men walked on the Moon.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:14):
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
(03:35):
make money things.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:17):
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
(04:39):
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
(05:01):
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,
(05:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
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
(06:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
So why do you think there is so much science
skepticism these days?
Speaker 3 (06:36):
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
(06:58):
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
(07:21):
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
(07:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
It's horrifying. So it's anti science, but it's also anti expert,
anti elite.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
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
(08:29):
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
(08:50):
believe they're in group than think for themselves.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
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
(09:26):
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
(09:48):
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
(10:10):
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
(10:32):
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
(10:53):
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?
Speaker 1 (11:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
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,
(11:45):
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,
(12:06):
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
(12:28):
happen every couple of decades.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Now.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
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
(12:53):
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
(13:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
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?
Speaker 3 (13:38):
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
(13:59):
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
(14:19):
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
(14:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
All right, let's take a break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
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
(15:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
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
(16:10):
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,
(16:32):
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.
(16:55):
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,
(17:16):
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
(17:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
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
(18:30):
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
(18:53):
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.
(19:13):
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?
Speaker 2 (19:31):
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
(19:54):
just drones through airpor.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
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
(20:16):
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,
(20:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
They're around an airport, right, I mean, yeah, sure, you.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
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
(21:57):
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
(22:18):
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,
(22:40):
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,
(23:01):
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.
(23:21):
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.
(23:42):
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
(24:02):
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,
(24:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
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,
(25:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
Just hold on for a short break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
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
(26:03):
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
(26:24):
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
(26:45):
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
(27:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
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
(28:13):
so when you say you're a Libra, the son was
actually in Virgo more likely when you were born.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
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
(28:39):
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
(29:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
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.
Speaker 6 (29:27):
And a lot of.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
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.
Speaker 6 (29:42):
In the audience.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
I'm sensing a ja or an m. Is there is that?
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (29:46):
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.
Speaker 7 (30:01):
And is somebody now pregnant?
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Who died?
Speaker 7 (30:04):
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?
Speaker 8 (30:24):
Yes?
Speaker 7 (30:26):
Okay, they're telling me to talk to you about Scott
or skip or something.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
S K.
Speaker 7 (30:35):
I don't know who that is.
Speaker 8 (30:36):
I don't know who that is.
Speaker 7 (30:37):
So she's just a friend of yours, like a contemporary. Yes, yes,
and it's her dad passed, but her mom's life.
Speaker 9 (30:42):
No, both of the parents are alive.
Speaker 7 (30:44):
No, she's with an older male that's passed, like a father.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
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
(31:11):
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,
(31:34):
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
(31:57):
them this way, that you can make them believe than
almost anything, no matter how nonsensical.
Speaker 6 (32:02):
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
(32:23):
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?
Speaker 3 (32:33):
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
(32:56):
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.
(33:17):
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
(33:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
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
(34:16):
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
(34:38):
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.
Speaker 6 (34:52):
The laws of physix.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Good, right, he died thinking Who Deni was secretly supernatural
and that there was a supernatural So.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
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.
Speaker 8 (35:18):
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.
Speaker 5 (35:37):
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.
(35:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
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
(36:29):
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.
(36:50):
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
(37:10):
much easier to sell people on stuff if you believe
in what you're selling.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
So magic in espionage, especially in how we do things,
if you're unders fail. It's something that we have looked at.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
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
(37:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Well, in espionage, you never know when you need to
make a white tiger disappear.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
I'm not at liberty to talk about that.
Speaker 9 (38:29):
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.
Speaker 6 (38:43):
For iHeart Podcasts,
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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