This Week in Space 147 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
 

00:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Coming up on this Week in Space. Is the truth really out there? We're going to get to the bottom of UFOs, uaps and conspiracy theorists in general with expert debunker Mick West. So stay tuned.

00:13 - TWiT.tv (Announcement)
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWiT.

00:21 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This is this Week in Space, episode number 147, recorded on February 7th 2025. Not as they seem. Hello and welcome to this Week in Space, the Not as they seem edition. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Bad-Aster Magazine, and I'm joined by my closest ever pal, Tarek Malik, editor-in-chief of Spacecom. Hello sir, hey, how's it going? How are you doing? I'm good. I forgot to put on hold on a second. I forgot to put on my oh, look at this I didn't know we were supposed to wear props what was your idea? I?

00:56
think mine are at a very rakish angle now I was gonna make a tinfoil hat and then the reason I have these on. Oh, you know, we did tinfoil hats about a year and a half ago.

01:05
That was a fun one, yeah the reason I have this on is because we'll soon be speaking with mick west, the incomparable gentleman who has risen to fame as one of the calmest, most reasonable and actually empathetic voices in, among other things, the ufo uap discussion, as a seeker of reason and an explainer, and I came across his work when it was, uh specific to the go fast video one of those UAP videos released well, not released leaked from the Navy that they later said, okay, okay, we'll release the same thing officially.

01:39 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And um, he's not just he's not just a critical thinker and a voice of reason, but he's kind about it which yeah on this yeah, and this discussion between believers.

01:52 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Non-believers can get pretty loud and pretty angry and pretty hot, so it's nice to have somebody come in and calmly discuss it and listen to both sides, which I think is is very unique to a small group of people that includes him. Before we start, however, please don't forget to do us a solid make sure to like, subscribe and other cool podcast things, because we need your love, especially tarik. He doesn't know I'm very sad everybody and now we're here to debunk our questionable humor segment with another quality joke from Nate Tanner hey Tarek.

02:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Hey.

02:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Rod, how do we know that Martians use the metric system? How do we know? How do we know that? I don't know, because they always say take me to your liter. I think we actually used that before, didn't we?

02:41 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I don't know, I don't know, but it's still funny. Thank you, nate.

02:44 - Rod Pyle (Host)
thank you nate yeah, but yeah, keep them coming. He he said a batch of about five, so I probably should have sent him a check, but this is me we're talking about here. Now I've heard that some people want to send us to mars when it's joke time on this show, but you can help send your best, worst or most a different space joke to us at twist at twittv. That's twis at twittv, and now hold it time for headlines.

03:12 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Headline news oh, I always miss it I got it right this time.

03:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, yeah, um, so it's funny you picked at the last minute. I might add, you picked three completely different headlines than the ones that I was looking at, and I get them off of spacecom I know I picked so for everyone listening rod.

03:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Lets me pick all the headlines and then I, I wait until the last minute because I want to know what the big headlines are for the week, and rod, that's not why I'm like t he wants them in there on Tuesday. You're just disorganized and yeah. So I noticed that you also put extra headlines in today because of that. So maybe we'll get there, maybe we can be fast and then we can talk about all of them.

03:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So I just learned something on Discord from Tanya W42. Tanya who said on discord from tanya?

04:09 - Tariq Malik (Host)
w42. Tanya said nice dealie boppers, rod. I didn't know these things had a name. Yeah, your little, your little antenna. They're dealie boppers. I've heard the term before, but it did not come to mind when you put your antenna on, because to me they're just wiggly wobbles, and here I just always thought they were signs of inferior intelligence From the 80s.

04:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, let's talk about SpaceX's Dragon Swap for Starliner crew the story that just keeps giving.

04:34 - Tariq Malik (Host)
This is great because, actually. So this comes from Ars Technica and Eric Berger over there, and this is like on the QT right, Because it came out like yesterday or a day ago as we're recording this.

04:43 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And it's not official yet. That's why we're talking to the world about it.

04:47 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We're actually expecting nasa to be to make an announcement. Maybe they have all we've been recording this uh, this podcast, but but uh, eric, you know, has his sources uh at nasa, amongst the space flight leadership, who says that uh, that nasa could announce as uh uh very soon that the astronauts uh, butch wilmore and sunita williams, uh on the international, you know, the stuck, the stuck starliner astronauts uh could return actually earlier stranded, stranded somebody recently said they were stranded that's right herald clinging to life on the space station At death's door, abandoned.

05:28
I think that Trump called them abandoned, if memory serves. But anyway, the TLDR is that, according to Eric, the powers that be at NASA have decided to bring them home a little bit earlier, not a lot, but a little bit earlier than planned. So instead of late March, which is when they were expected to come back on a SpaceX Dragon Crew-9 spacecraft, they could come home in March, march 19th. The initial plan was that these astronauts who flew up on Starliner they didn't come home because Starliner had its issues they were going to come back on a SpaceX Dragon. Nasa said the next available one for them to come back on was on the Crew-9 Dragon, which just recently launched, and so that was slated to return home in February. But in December NASA pushed it back by at least a month because SpaceX's next Dragon spacecraft for Crew-10, the relief crew was not ready.

06:25
In fact, according to Eric, there's battery problems with that Crew Dragon vehicle because it's a new version of the Dragon spacecraft, and NASA says they can't wait because apparently those problems are still not solved and they may not be able to get that capsule ready to fly until sometime in April, which would be a really big delay. And then they start running on red lines for food, for air, for water, for all that stuff that you don't want to run on red lines for at the space station. So they're gonna swap the Dragon capsule out and the one that they're gonna use was one that was in line for the Axiom Space 4 mission, a private mission, and it's the endurance dragon. It's flown to the space station before they move that up and um, and then I've been sitting here like concentrating on this story and you've been adding alien eyes. Do you think am?

07:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I watching you, am I? No, I just want to. I just want to get through three or four more stories, so I'm trying to compact your answer they're all media.

07:25 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It's a meaty story, okay asteroid impact odds going up.

07:29
But don't worry, this is an important one because people are worried yeah, yeah, we talked about this asteroid on the show before this comes from my colleague, rob lee. It's a really great story at spacecom. I really recommend people check it out. But uh, there was, uh there is, this newfound asteroid, 2024 YR4.

07:45
Nasa and some others announced that it had a one in 83 chance of impacting Earth. That was like a 1.2% chance according to the math. I'm not the math genius, that's what I was told and Rob has found out that those odds have increased slightly, that those odds have increased slightly to one in 43. And so a lot of people you might have seen online are trumpeting this. The odds are going up.

08:11
This asteroid is gonna kill us in 2032, it's gonna hit Earth and, according to Rob and the scientists he's spoken to, it's like not so fast because there's still a 97.7, I think he says chance yeah, 97.7 chance that it's gonna miss us entirely. So before you start like building your bunker or selling off all your worldly possessions, you know, take a step back, have a cup of coffee, have a cup of tea and relax. It's gonna be fine. So it's. It's these. These odds will go down over more and more as they get more observations of it and and so it's a little early to get upset and and worried sky is falling, shake up at Rose cosmos we had.

08:56 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Who was the guy that was there before? Who was crazy Dimitri?

08:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
burgoson, where goes in for years traveling. Everyone needs it. Everyone needs a trampoline to get to, which is rooms.

09:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And then he gets replaced and the poor guy last two and a half years, yeah.

09:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yuri. He was replaced by a Yuri Borisov, and and now Putin has said Dasvidaniya Right, Is that? Is it too soon to say that to to to Yuri, Yuri Borisov? In fact, and this came out of the Moscow Times this week, Putin has replaced him with a relatively young new space chief, Dmitry Bakunov, 37 years old. Yeah, he's 39. We have, Is he 37?

09:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Maybe he's 39.

09:43 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But he was the Russia's deputy transport minister and he led their gonad satellite communication system program, uh, from 2011 to 2019. So he is, uh, he is. Look at this guy I know, wow, he is like, he looks like a gq model I know, look at that why isn't he on the front lines in ukraine?

10:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
what's going on here?

10:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
so, um, uh, so. So you know he's, he's taking the reins from Borisov and then, I guess, to continue Rogozin's legacy, but it'll be interesting to see what happens. Is this because of the relatively turbulent period that was going on with Borisov, the fact that they had, like, the failure of their Luna 25 moon sample return mission, and just like a lot of other issues? There was the leak on the space station, which is in the Russian segment. You had the Soyuz, I think during Borisov's term too, the hole in the Soyuz, all of that stuff which they tried to pin on a NASA astronaut right, because of course desperate astronauts go and drill holes in Russian space yeah, totally not behind instrument panels, we might add yeah, so all right, I get home anyway so.

10:55
So so new chief is the new boss, same as the old boss. We're gonna have to wait and see, and will this at least help them do anything to accelerate their other space programs instead of just keeping on? We're going to have to wait and see too.

11:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and the last I checked their budget was it's very small. I think it was the equivalent of $2 billion US, Is that right?

11:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, it's barely enough to keep the current slate. It's very hard to do anything extra beyond what they're doing at the space station right now.

11:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Which ain't much Okay to do anything extra beyond what they're doing at the space station right now, which which ain't much okay. Um, viper replacement. So viper is the nasa rover, very capable prospecting rover that was going to be delivered the southern pole region, the moon, and go prospecting for water ice and do other scientific analysis. As listeners regular listeners of this show know, it was cancelled by nasa last year, even though it was basically finished and had a ride on a private vendor who was behind schedule. And it's, it's just been a mess.

11:53
Um, inside word is there was not as much agency support for this as there could have been, which maybe could be part of the reason that it got pulled, even though it was complete. But they are now taking NASA, soliciting bids from commercial players other than the one it was originally supposed to fly on to go ahead and finish the mission and get it to the moon. However, the people who were going to launch Viper now have a replacement from a fellow private company called flip, which is not that much smaller. It's half the size and weight, I think, of viper. But is flip viper's dim-witted cousin or is it actually another capable rover?

12:35 - Tariq Malik (Host)
no, it's the flip is actually a moon rover designed by those, the company that did the, the flex rover. Remember when you and I went to that conference a year or so ago and we saw that big, that big moon rover?

12:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
oh, we took our pictures right.

12:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, we took our pictures on it. It's this company called Astrolab and they have built this smaller rover prototype called Flip that is basically snagging NASA's previous ride to the moon with Griffin. Now, the reason that that Viper was pulled is because NASA wasn't sure if Griffin was going to be ready. Currently it still is not ready to go, but they still have the capability to take a rover and so they have found this replacement rover and it's going to give Astrolab both some wheels on the moon. Astrolab, by the way, is based in California and they're going to be able to showcase what this commercial rover can do so that they can take commercial payloads, and what FLIP stands for FLEX.

13:33
Flex is the name of the primary rover, flex Lunar Innovation Platform. It's a four-wheeled rover that weighs about 1,000 pounds. It is not small and it can carry up to 66 pounds of experiments, payload, et cetera, and it can do exploration work on its own but can also test technologies that they want to use on their bigger rover, which is the one that astronauts could use. It's called flexible logistics and exploration and that's a car-sized robot that could carry a couple of astronauts and will fly on a SpaceX lander. So you know the TLDR. There is that A SpaceX lander. Yeah, spacex's Starship is going to carry one of these.

14:14
They've booked a trip on that with the Flex rover, and so they're going to test a lot of what they need for that bigger rover on this smaller one. Okay.

14:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And finally, sorry, but we we got to get through here.

14:30 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You're the one that added extra stories to the news budget. You're the one Because they were good, Mr Whiny Pants.

14:36 - Rod Pyle (Host)
What do Trump's first weeks back in office mean for NASA and spaceflight?

14:40 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, this is a long story, so I just I'm going to put the link in our in our show notes so that our readers and listeners can do it.

14:47
But it's been only a couple of weeks since the Trump administration began and already heads are spinning as well and mike russ over at space news has an excellent, excellent overview of all of the things that have happened that affect uh nasa as well as space exploration. Uh, from the executive orders that have gone out, uh, from the fact that elon musk is running um the doge office to to attack, or, uh, I guess, budget and spending uh initiatives across. I shouldn't say attack but to address, right um, I don't know attack is.

15:27
it depends on which part we're talking about, and of course you can't leave DEI out of that and the dismantling of the diversity and equity and inclusion. So there's a really good rundown there that I really encourage everyone to take a look, because it is a good score sheet for what has happened over the last two weeks and what may be coming down the pipeline. I would say that everyone should be keeping an eye out next Wednesday on the Commercial Space Conference, because that is where Janet Petro, the acting head of NASA, the acting NASA administrator, will be giving a fireside chat which I think might be the first fully public set of comments from her about where she sees NASA going right now in this interim period before they get a permanent administrator. So we're going to be watching that too. That is on February 12th.

16:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I like nodding my head and watching my. What are they called Dingle boppers?

16:17 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Your weeble wobbles my weeble wobbles. The weebles wobble, but they don't fall down.

16:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Your deely boppers, deely boppers, dealie boppers, okay, Before we run to a break, before Big West comes on, I owe an apology to Dr Soraya Faruqi of USRA, who we had an interview with their new director last week, set up by her, who is not the executive assistant or associate, whatever I said, I was caught flat-footed because I hadn't finished doing my homework that day. She is the director of communications and she's a director of communications, unlike me, that has a PhD. I'm a director of communications for the National Space Society with a master's degree. She's got a PhD, so she outrages me. So, soraya, my apology. I misquoted myself and your version of the video is now corrected. All right, now that that stuff's behind us, let's get to Mick West. We'll be right back everybody, so close your hatches and button up.

17:18
We are back with Mick West. Science writer, professional debunker and premier critical thinker. Mick, thanks for joining us today. Glad to be here, rob. We're really glad to have you, and besides the copious writing you do, you've also created a couple of really cool websites. One's called Metabunk, my favorite is called Contrail Science, and you know, I do want to get into a proper start for the episode. But just out of curiosity, how? What made you go so specific as contrail science? Was it just seeing how wacky the conversations were?

17:54 - Mick West (Guest)
Well, it's a very specific conspiracy theory, the chemtrails conspiracy theory, and you know it's just a belief that the government is spraying things, and it's actually cropped up again quite recently. There's a bunch of people in local government who have been convinced by this theory and they've started to introduce legislation banning chemtrails. You know these white lines in the sky which are actually just contrails. So you know, back then I just was kind of interested in flying and things like that and so I I started writing a blog about the science behind contrails and how it explains chemtrails which kind of a fun little thing to write about, and that's kind of the root of all all of this stuff that I've been doing.

18:31 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Doing now I have seen those theories on my social media.

18:36 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It was a surprise to start seeing it there so well and then you know, because we're we're we're writers and we both have venues, we we get those messages on linkedin and facebook and so forth. People are saying you need to tell the truth, they're killing us all and for some reason, it's always how can I put it? It seems like, um, the. The perpetrators are always identified on a particular part of the political spectrum and the victims are always identified as being on another part, broadly, and that always makes you suspect. All right, but, but we're not here just to talk about right, chemtrails, we're here to talk about other things in this guy. So Tarek's gonna have his trademark, uh, early life question for you soon. But, um, what got you started in this particular area of science?

19:30
explanation, uh, ufos, well, just debunking in general because yeah, you're kind of setting yourself up with a big red bullseye painted on your, on your back yeah, uh, well, I've always been interested in science.

19:43 - Mick West (Guest)
Uh, you know, I read a lot of science fiction as a kid. I learned to read by reading my dad's collection of marvel and dc comics, uh, so I've had this uh strong, strong background in science fiction. That translated into an interest in science, and then at school I preferred doing like mathematical stuff and physics then rather than the than the other subjects, and so I kind of just developed a good skill set for what turned into video game programming, and I did video game programming for a few decades to make some money, and then I kind of retired, and when I retired I just kind of followed my interests, which were things like science and math and stuff like that, and that naturally kind of led to a few topics that people were claiming were interesting, and one of those was chemtrails. There's other things like other conspiracy theories, like the World Trade Center being demolished by explosives, and now, of course, I'm really into UFOs, and that's almost like the perfect mix for my unique set of skills, I guess.

20:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
See Tarek, somebody who ended up doing something different because he could not, because, like you and I, that's all he was capable of doing. And, by the way, mick, when you say, oh, I did some video game programming, say uh, oh, I did some video game programming. That means you're actually, like, responsible for things like tony hawk, uh, the, the skateboarding game, spider-man and guitar hero, which I would assume means you never have to work again as long as you live.

21:15 - Mick West (Guest)
Well, I uh, I would say that because I I really only did tony hawk uh, which is the skateboard I have right there, and I left the company Neversoft. I was one of the founders of the company Neversoft, which created the Tony Hawk franchise, but I left after that, so I missed out on the golden years of Guitar Hero and the other things.

21:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, that Spider-Man game was really hard, I have to say, so it's all right.

21:40 - Mick West (Guest)
Yeah, spider-man, I did a little bit of work on Spider-Man on the PS1, the original one, but that was way back in the day and Neversoft was splitting into two teams and then we came back together and we just did skateboarding games. But yeah, that was kind of a fun time in my life back in the 90s and the early a way stuff that I'm doing right now. I do a lot of programming. Just last night I was coding away and the coding tasks that I'm doing now are very similar to what I was doing back in the early 2000s with Tony Hawk. He said now I have a little AI assistance to help me instead of other programmers.

22:20 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But, yeah, it's very interesting to me how you know that skill set translated into investigating ufos but you know, my kind of trademark question that rod was uh alluding to is usually like what, what is like the space bug, like how it? How did it bite you when, when you were a kid but you kind of hinted at that a bit, you know about, you know reading your dad's comic books and and whatnot. But but I am interested uh about that, that early decision to pursue like coding that that led you kind of on on that, that more kind of computer facing you know engineering type uh of of journey. I mean, was there something that just grew naturally out of your interest in science that led you to computers like that? Or or was it like a different type of um, a fulcrum moment uh, where you decided that you were going to kind of pursue that uh professionally, at least at the outset?

23:13 - Mick West (Guest)
now my interest in computers was a very kind of organic thing. Uh, back when I was in my teens, my grandfather gave me a programmable calculator this would have been in the late 70s I think and he encouraged me to learn how to program it. And so I did. I wrote like very simple games on this, this calculator that had about literally 50 bytes of memory that you could use so you could record keystrokes. And then again my grandfather inspired me because he he was very interested in math and he also he bought himself a computer.

23:47
And you know I I went, I got a paper round and I saved up for a computer, which back then was a zx81 with one kilobyte of memory, and I taught myself to code and it was just a fun thing to do. And you know, being a kid, a teenager, the the fun things to code back then were video games. So you would make simple games on these computers, and as the computers get more and more powerful you can make more and more involved games. And that naturally just kind of led into me going to university to study computer science and then getting a job in the games industry. And now here I am.

24:20 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's awesome. That's awesome. So my daughter just she's going into honors computer science, so it's like an inspiration story I can give her. Thank you so much, Meg.

24:30 - Mick West (Guest)
Well, it's very different nowadays. I think AI is changing the equation quite considerably.

24:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, one would almost say cheating, but that would be unfair. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit. You know, you kind of touched on your childhood and, at least according to a couple of websites, you had an interest as a young man in things like UFOs and psychic phenomenon, but initially, as I read it, not as a doubter but more as somebody who was kind of embracing the possibility of it.

24:58 - Mick West (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I guess as a child I was.

25:01
You know, I grew up catholic, um, I was raised catholic and now I'm no longer catholic and uh, back then you know you believe in essentially magical things, like I believed, if I prayed, uh, then your god would give me things, and we also had little beliefs like that. There were fairies in the woods and things like that was. We were young kids and then you grow up a little bit and then you learn more about science and things and you think, if santa isn't real, uh, berries aren't real, and maybe you start to have doubts about, uh, religious figures as well. But uh, at the same time I'm getting more, more and more interested in science. Uh, and you know, reading all these science fictions. My dad didn't just have a collection of comics, he had a huge collection of of science fiction books. He was a big fan of science fiction. He used to take us as kids to science fiction conventions, which was kind of a weird thing for a, you know, like a seven-year-old kid to be going to this convention with all these grown-ups.

25:55
Uh dressing up as aliens and things, yeah yeah, so I had this, this, this very, you know, uh, I guess you know, interesting upbringing in that sense. And then I just kind of got interested in I I found this magazine called the unexplained, which is a british kind of periodical, and it had all kinds of interesting stuff like ghosts and ufos and strange psychic powers and things like that, and that just fascinated me. And also, at the same time, as you know, reading excuse me, reading books. Uh, I remember a particular one book by roald dahl which I believe has been made into a movie right now. It's about a guy who, uh, you know, thinks he has psychic powers and he trained himself to have psychic powers. You know, I'm like a kid, like I think I can do that, I can train myself to have psychic power. So I tried. That didn't work. But yeah, that was that was you know.

26:49
For for a while you're convinced these things are real. Then you start to investigate them and then this is going to transition between childhood and this belief in the magic and the supernatural and science. And if you get into a lot of science it kind of makes all this stuff. You kind of see this for what it actually is, that a lot of it is just, excuse me, a lot of this is just a belief and not actually evidence-based belief. It's just essentially faith, and so as I grew, I moved more and more towards the science, but I'm still interested in this other stuff, but now from a different perspective. So now I'm looking at how do I explain these things. You know how do I explain you know the what people saw when they think they saw a ghost, and you know now how do I explain what people saw when they think they saw a ufo yeah, yeah, and I I'm interested in that as well, and I'm also interested in why people believe and why that is so seductive, because it seems to be not a uniquely american thing.

27:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But there is a uniquely american flavor to some of the conspiracy theories and how they're embraced by the way I. I just want to mention roald dahl, I mean incredible thinker outside the box and beyond the box, the boxes, and I'm not sure if I was a publisher I would have ever allowed him anywhere near children's books, because he has kind of a twisted mentality. But he wrote, if I recall correctly, he wrote the original screenplay for you Only Live Twice, the Bond movie. I remember that, which actually makes a lot of sense if you remember the movie. Let's go to a quick break. We'll be right back back and Tark can jump in with his next impassioned question. Stand by, by the way I. I just want to say you're talking about going to odd conventions as a kid. Uh, you're lucky alien con didn't exist then, or your brain really would have been twisted in interesting directions. It's a lot of fun actually. It's just not really my thing, tart.

28:44 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, I thought it was my turn to talk, rod, right, that's why it opened on me, that's why I took it away from you. No, actually I had a question about the books that you were interested in reading growing up too, just really quickly, because my family had those Time Life Unexplained Phenomena series of books. That was like my first uh uh exposure to it and I'm just curious if you had those kinds of books or if there was a, a science fiction book in particular, that really gripped you at that kind of formative age. Um, that really stuck with you as well. And hey, that was kind of my, my big question. That was burning from that, that segment there yeah, now there are a lot of books.

29:22 - Mick West (Guest)
I can't remember the name of the authors right now, but like, I read a lot about c clark when I was young, like rendezvous with rama, uh, childhood's end.

29:30
Um, you know, books like that, like, which are about essentially like humanity's first encounter with aliens, which is always a fascinating thing to me, like you know, what would happen when we we encounter an alien species and how it would be different. Uh, and I I really enjoy books where aliens are very different to us. There's a book called um dragon's egg, which is about aliens that live on the surface of a neutron star, essentially, wow, and they operate in a very different time scale to us. So they're actually moving like a like a thousand times as fast as us and they think a thousand times as fast as well. Uh, so you know, that type of stuff was always fascinating to me.

30:05
Um, and I read a lot of the older science fiction stuff, uh, that, because my dad, you know he had this collection of books from when he was younger that he'd kept uh all these years. So I read a lot of books from the the, you know, the 50s, 60s and 70s, uh, so I guess I had a very broad range of sources. Then I went to the library. A lot I was, you know, lucky enough I could just walk down to the local library and then they had a large science fiction uh selection.

30:31 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So I I read quite voraciously, uh, as a child is that something that you were able to apply, because you, of course, have written, uh, your own book with escaping the rabbit hole, uh, which is all about how to debunk conspiracy theories, and people should should definitely check that out. Was that something that you gravitated to from the work that you had, you had been doing Like? Were there any kind of inspirations that came from that? I guess that reading childhood.

30:57 - Mick West (Guest)
Yeah, I definitely wanted to write all my life when I was younger and you know it's one of those things you, everybody wants to write a book and it's hard to get around to doing it. Uh, and you know I was. It was kind of lucky for me in a way that I kind of got forced into writing, escaping the rabbit hole. Uh, just because I was in the right place at the right time. I went on the joe rogan podcast back when he wasn't quite such a uh um, you know the type of person he is now, uh, although he's always been a bit strange jerrogan polarizing figure.

31:26
We'll say indeed, indeed, uh, yes, lots of fans, but, uh, anyway. So I I went on the joe rogan podcast, which is quite big, and the publisher approached me and said you want to write a book about the stuff that you talked about on the show. And I was like sure, let's do it, and you know. Then, of course, like you get into a contract and a timeline and you're forced to write it. I have a problem with procrastination.

31:47
I have worked a lot better in a, uh, you know, you know, you know when I'm working with other people, uh, so it was good to have that kind of external force moving me to write this book, but I I felt it was a book that was needed and is perhaps needed even more now. Uh, there's a lot of disinformation out there. I updated the book recently and I kind of made a distinction between these older conspiracies, uh, which are kind of static and don't really change very much, and these new conspiracies that we have, which are very, very dynamic, kind of changing from day to day, like Q, anon and things like that, and even now the UFO world is is very, very dynamic. This is constantly shifting, whistleblowers coming out and promises of things just around the corner. It's not the the kind of like you know, the nuts and bolts lights in the sky.

32:33 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It was perhaps 10 years ago so you're, you're, you're steering us towards the meat of the conversation, which I appreciate. I just want to ask one thing before we go to the kind of main line of the conversation, which is about UFO theories and observations and some of this emerging so-called whistleblower evidence and all that. What do you think it is, though, about modern society? You know, personally, I kind of blame it on social media, but that's what people my age do when they're not out yelling at the clouds in their front yard. But, you know, as a young person, I would never have looked at a former wrestler like joe rogan or a basketball guy like steph curry to cultivate my opinions about. You know, did we land on the moon, or you do people really get abducted and probed and all that kind of stuff? So there's been this shift towards it just general, generally idolizing, you know, non-academicians, non-scientists, whereas when I was a kid, science was in capital letters with quotes around it. Do you have any thoughts on that, because I find it, to this day, very?

33:41 - Mick West (Guest)
puzzling. It is interesting and I think it kind of boils down to humans' natural state is to believe in weird things and their natural inclination is to believe in things that are wrong. Someone wrote recently, you know, asking why do people believe in weird things? Isn't really the right question to ask. The real question to ask is why do people believe in weird things? Isn't really the right question to ask. The real question to ask is why do people believe in science? What, historically, has meant people actually believe in science? Because science is a difficult thing to believe in because it's complicated.

34:16
It's actually a lot easier from a human perspective to believe in these simple explanations, and simple explanations are often things like conspiracy theories, like did this or the magical thinking aliens did this?

34:26
Or or, at you know it's come from, you know like a big plot or something like that. Um. So humans are kind of naturally inclined to go for these simple, easy explanations and historically we've had something of, um, you know, people thinking sciences is good and institutions are good, and this is because we've actually had these monolithic outlets of information, uh, in terms of, like the national media, uh, and our education system, which, in education system, is still there, but the national media is really fragmented. Far less people watching now. Far more people are watching these other outlets, like Joe Rogan, and they do that simply because they have choice. Now, uh, it's not like the, it's not like preferences have shifted. It's like all of a sudden, we have all these things available and, organically, people are moving to the, to the things that are more in tune with their natural human failings, which is to believe in weird things. So if you've got people believing in weird, if people are saying weird things, they're going to start going to that.

35:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Joe Rogan is way more entertaining and he it resonates more with you know what might be the natural human state you know, believing in conspiracy theories and witness and I think sorry, tarik, but I think there's a key thing there which is to to subscribe, to believe in, be influenced by the kind of things we're going to be talking about here, is fun, it's. It's, for some people, sexier than real science. Um, there's a mystery to it because it can't be proved that I think people find seductive. There's a mystery to it because it can't be proved that I think people find seductive. But and this may be just snobbery on my part, so please feel free to tell me if you disagree Some of the people that approach both Tarek and I are so impassioned and defensive about their beliefs that it leads me to believe.

36:18
You know, there's this kind of general pushback against higher education in the US has been for maybe 10 or 20 years. Um, you know, scientists don't know what they're doing. Anthony fauci, oh, what a scam this kind of stuff. You know, don't you dare have a phd in something. And I I get the sense from some believers not all, I mean some some some believers in this stuff are very well educated and really we've had some on the show who really have worked through it in a logical, rational way. But in a lot of cases my sense of it is. Here's something that makes me special. Here's something that makes me different. I don't have to go spend six years to get some silly PhD. I can go on a couple of websites and dig up stuff that will convince you. Do you think I'm going down the wrong path here?

37:06 - Mick West (Guest)
yeah, I think that's. That's kind of uh, definitely an aspect of it. There's been lots of research into the kind of the psychological factors behind belief in conspiracy theory and, uh, they've done tests, this kind of standard, uh measures of personality, uh like narcissistic and things like that, and one of them is the the need for uniqueness, and some people have a stronger need for uniqueness than other people and those type of people tend to be more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, because everybody likes to feel unique, everyone likes to feel special, but some people it's, it's more of a factor. They don't, you know, they don't really care about fitting in. In fact, they don't want to fit in with what they see as the mainstream. They want to be different, they want to be outliers, they want to be trailblazers and they want to be, in some ways, like messiahs. They want to be people who are saving uh, the, the, the nation from itself. So they, they feel like they're on, you know, the side of good and God when they're doing these things.

38:05
So, yeah, there's definitely psychological factors behind it, but you know, that said, you know they're not huge factors. It's not like. This is why people get into conspiracy theories. It make it more likely that they'll get into conspiracy theories, but pretty much anyone can. It just kind of depends on what information you've been exposed to and, to a certain extent, uh, your circumstances like whether you have a lot of spare time, whether you're surrounded by like-minded people, or you're isolated, or you're surrounded by people who believe in conspiracy theories um, and you know sometimes whether you're a bit more vulnerable because you've gone through some kind of life event, like you've lost your job or you've got a divorce, or you've gone through an illness, or, during the the coronavirus pandemic, a lot of people were forced to stay at home, which was quite, you know, mentally uh debilitating for some people, and you know these things can lead to to things. So it's not just you know, these are just people who want to feel special. That's just something that kind of pushes them in that direction.

39:04 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and I think trailblazers is a good word, because, uh, you know, to be fair, as, as I've kind of alluded to, there are people that that really do genuinely feel that this is the pursuit of something terribly important and they're not. They're not looking to be important, they're just looking to help us, I guess. Help us understand. We're gonna go to another quick ad break, tarek, so hold on to your pearls for a few minutes and we'll be right back go.

39:31 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I was gonna say can I ask my question right or are you gonna? Yeah, well, mick, I'm. I live in New Jersey these days, like all right across the river from from New, which is where spacecom is based. And obviously the big story here is that we have crazy, unexplained drones flying all around and people are catching them on video. Not anymore. Well, there were, there were no one's explained them.

39:58
Over the holidays I had so many pointed out to me that were clearly just airplanes, but that's beyond the point. And of course, in your experience there were a lot of other what we used to call the UFOs, but I guess now they're called UAPs these days, where people have rock solid video evidence about them. And then I watched you very expertly just take down one after another, like on a live newscast In some of the videos we were doing during research. That was pretty expert there, adding to uh, uh, this, this, this trend, you know, and and just where that, where that technology fits in, like the, the story of how these, these, these theories and are are being, you know, put out there. Uh, we had the, the navy videos that were, uh, that made a big splash a few years ago and I think that's the discussion still going on now. Uh, and I'm wondering how you've seen that evolve over time, because we all have one, you know, in the, in the palm of our hand.

41:03 - Mick West (Guest)
You know that we can, we can catch this, and I would have assumed that if the little green men were here or whatnot, we would have a lot more concrete evidence than perhaps that we would have currently yeah, I think it's really made a big change in ufology, uh, since, like you know, the 70s, 80s, 90s and the 2000s, you know, back then, uh, people were asking the same question why don't we have good video of ufos? You know, several people have video cameras would have been the the thing that they would say back then. And now, of course, like, it's literally tens of thousands of times more video cameras and the cameras are a hundred times better. You can just whip them out and be recording 4k video, uh, instantly, and you know they often have multiple zooms and things like that. So it's really kind of changed. You can just whip them out and be recording 4K video instantly, and they often have multiple Zooms and things like that. So it's really kind of changed things.

41:47
And I think the New Jersey drone flap has been very illustrative of what's actually going on here, because we've got a lot of people, thousands, probably thousands of people, at least hundreds of people, people taking video of what they thought were drones, and then they're posting it online and they're saying look at this, look at this, what I saw. You know, I saw this fly over my head. It was definitely not a plane, it was. You know, this car size thing is about 200 feet up, and then they'll show the video. So we've got something that we really didn't have before. We've got this, this collection of eyewitness accounts and then the videos that they took of the of what they they saw. So we've got the whole package, whereas, you know, back in the day we would just have mostly eyewitness accounts and very, very few videos. So now we're able to compare the eye, when it's accounts, to the videos and not only do we have, like the videos we usually have in a lot of cases, the, the location, and we have the, the date and the time and you know, we figure out what direction they're looking in. So we can go back and we can look at the actual flight data around that particular time and pretty much every single case that we looked at, uh, it turned out to be a plane.

42:57
So we've got people actually convinced that they saw something that wasn't a plane and they were convinced it was 200 feet up, and then they take video of it and they're still convinced even after they've seen the video that they themselves took. And then you show them that it was actually a plane and some of them, you know, will reject that. But a lot of them were like oh yeah. But you know, back in the day before we had all this, all we we had were these eyewitness accounts. So we just had people who were convinced they saw a giant triangular craft, car-sized thing with lights flying over their heads 200 feet up. We've got no way of knowing what that actually was, but based on what we've been seeing, it probably was something like a plane. Misidentifications are huge now. They were huge back then.

43:43 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's what they want you to think Right back then. That's what they want you to think Right, rod, that's what they want you to think this brings up a point.

43:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So I worked at Griffith Observatory for about 10 years back in my college days, so in the late 70s, early 80s the era you're talking about when the best you had was probably 400 ASA black and white tri-X film to shoot these things and we would get calls pretty much every day from people. I seen a UFO kind of calls and it became pretty clear. A couple of things became pretty clear to me anyway and became kind of the party line, which is it's really hard for people to identify things in the sky because we're really used to identifying things on the ground. How far is that stop sign, how far is that building? Because I'm judging by the parallax with the building behind it as I'm driving by to tell how far away it is, how much haze? You may not be objectifying it, but how much haze is there between me and the thing I'm looking at?

44:40
And with some things in the sky you lose all those kind of points of comparison and people really have no sense of size, speed, anything else. And I think this kind of was I asked you before we came on about the GoFast video, which is where I first saw your work. These are military pilots, but if you're looking, for instance, at something between your high-speed moving jet and the sea below you that may be moving in a different direction. Even with FLIR radar, it's really hard to tell what's going on, isn't it? Isn't that part of the problem?

45:15 - Mick West (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, the problem is our human brains have not evolved to look at things that are high in the sky. You know, we look at things on the ground. We look at, maybe, birds, but things that are five are high in the sky. You know, we look at things on the ground, we look at, maybe, birds, but things that are five miles up in the sky. We just have no idea things that are five miles below us. You know, the brain just does not compute. Yeah, we don't have the kind of like the, the mental framework to actually look at that. And when it's zoomed in, which isn't the case of this, this go fast video you know, the one you're showing here is the, the gimbal video, but this is a similar type of thing. We're looking at an object that's many miles away. The motion you see isn't actually the motion of the object, it's actually the motion of the camera we're in actually being filmed from an fa18 jet and it's zoomed in, uh, about the optical equivalent of a 2000 millimeter lens on a camera which would be like a, you know, a huge, huge lens. You know most most big zooms, you see, get top out at 600. Uh, so it's, it's about half a degree field of view right there, uh. So this isn't something the human brain can actually comprehend and figure out the relative motion and things like that. And even if you're a fighter pilot, you're not trained to visualize that particular thing in three dimensions. You visualize, you're trained to like intercept things, you're trying to identify threats. You're trained to hit targets. You're not trained to spot ufos. You're not trained to like analyze ufos. Uh, so it's, it's very easy to fall for these, these kind of illusions.

46:38
You know, another big one is one that I saw a lot in the the chemtrail days, which is if a plane is flying towards you, it looks like it's flying, and this is something that just you know. It's quite hard to actually convince people of this thing because you will see these contrails in the sky that are either going straight up or they're going straight down and everybody, just lots of people, just assume that's. You know it's something like a rocket launch, or it's a plane that's descending or it's a plane that's climbing, but these are all just planes in level flight. A plane flying at 40, 40 000 feet, flying away from you, just looks like it's just dropping straight down. If it's flying towards you, it looks like it's going straight up, or if it's to the side of you, it looks like it's going at a bit of an angle and, and you know, until you actually kind of take a step back and look at it from three dimensions, it's very difficult to understand what's going on. And then you get the same thing with ufos you'll see a plane in the distance.

47:32
I had this case just today. Someone sent me a video. It was a light, you know, in the, in the distance, next to venus, and it was slowly rising up in the sky. So it seems like something hovering over the distant hills. But it was actually a plane about 30 miles away, coming straight towards them, and it just looked like it was rising because it was getting closer to them, straight towards them, and it just looked like he was rising because he was getting closer to them.

47:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Huh see, there's an explanation for everything, rod. You know that that's why he's here. Yeah, well, you know I. I did want to ask you those, those Navy videos you know, earlier kind of set off, I don't know if it's like in a renewal or what do you call that, rod it?

48:12 - Mick West (Guest)
was a renaissance. A renaissance, that's the word.

48:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's the word, so much so that you know we cover NASA and NASA put their own committee together and, you know, had a lot of public meetings and everyone was really following it. And I'm just curious if that pattern that you observed there has just, you know, mirrors what we've seen from the UFO reports and investigations of the past, or is it because of the technology involved, like a new era or a new age of both a lot of these claims and and the debunking? Because you said earlier that you know that there's that pattern of everyone reporting it still, but now they have all the video and I would hope that a military video would have all the information that we need to know what's what. But I'm just curious about these cases in particular, if there is something truly different about the technology pace now.

49:06 - Mick West (Guest)
Yeah, well, the videos that we see are actually the technology is not that new? The FLIR 1 video from the Nimitz incident well, the, the videos that we see are actually the technology is not that new. The, the, the FLIR one video from the Nimitz incident. You know that's back from like, uh, 2004 or so, so it's a long time ago, like nearly 20 years ago. Well, it is 20 years ago now, uh, and you know that's.

49:26
But the thing is we as a public have not seen these types of videos before. So these are the things that might have existed, like in the military is like not, not not shown them to you, because they they're in these, military training is classified and stuff like that. And we just got these two ones. There's three ones that were leaked out now the gimbal video, which looks like this flying saucer that's rotating. There's the go fast video, where it looks like it's going very fast over the water, and then this flir one video which comes from the Nimitz incident, which just looks like a little fuzzy Bob blob doing, doing nothing, in the background, and these are all things that are very difficult to understand from from a human perspective, like I was saying. So you know we, you show these things like the gimbal video, for example. It looks like an actual flying saucer, it looks like it's flying along and then it kind of like rotates on its ends, and you know that would be something that's aerodynamically impossible.

50:17
But there are actually explanations for these things. You know the rotation of this, this flying source of the gimbal actually comes from. You know the gimbal system of the camera. You know this is the simulation that I did, uh, where I I took all the parameters that we can get from the video, because there's lots of numbers on screen and created a 3D recreation and it turns out that the rotation of the object matches exactly what the rotation of the camera needs to be to move from one position to another. So it seems like what we're looking at isn't actually a real object as such. There's an object behind it, but's something like the, the heat source. Uh, the, the heat source is, is the engine, and we're seeing these thermal videos, which is another aspect. You know we're looking at thermal videos. We're not looking at visible light, so we're looking at something that looks like a flying saucer, but that's just the shape of the heat signature it's not actually the shape of the object itself.

51:12
It could be just the that you were looking at the tailpipe of an air, of a jet and because that's so hot, uh it, it just kind of flares up in the camera. You get this kind of optical bloom where things spread out a bit and we call it glare within the camera. You know, it's the same thing as like when you this is a little demo, I do all the time I just point my flashlight at the camera and you can see. You can't see the flashlight, fuck aliens. Oh, it's a lot bigger than the flashlight and it only happens when you're pointing the flashlight at the camera.

51:42
So there are potential explanations for these things. But we also have the testimony of the pilots and they are convinced that they saw something amazing. But then you have to think know, we've got all these other things, like I just said, the new jersey thing. Thousands of people thought they saw something amazing. Every single time we can actually analyze the video turns out not to be amazing. That also turns out to be the case with a lot of these military sightings as well see, tarik, I'm not as smart as mick, but I could do the same thing.

52:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Sorry, we're getting a little silly here. We have one more break and we'll be right back, so go nowhere. Mick, I want to talk a little bit about. I mean, as usual, we've gotten through less than half the questions I have, but we'll just have to have you back if you're willing. But I want to talk a little bit about the UFO industry and people, if you don't mind talking about specifics, like Luis Elizondo. So I do two space conferences a year that I help put on that are so-called legitimate space conferences. You know it's for scientists and NASA people and the motivated public and all that we get, you know, 800, 1100 people. All that we get, you know, 800, 1100 people.

52:54
I went to AlienCon a couple of years ago on invitation to speak and actually, you know, had a really good audience of smart, motivated people with smart questions. So it wasn't all you know, rubber antenna and wackos or anything. It was actually a good crowd. But there were like 10 or 12,000 people there and when they wheeled what was left of Eric Vodonikin up on the stage to speak, the auditorium, I think, had a maximum capacity of 2,800. It was estimated there were 3,300 people in there. I mean hanging from the balcony and that kind of thing. So obviously there's a public appreciation for this, but there's also a very lucrative business in it for this. But there's also a very lucrative business in it. Then you see somebody like Elizondo, who seems to come from these unimpeachable background credentials. Is there a story there that you can talk about? Because it left me scratching my head.

53:46 - Mick West (Guest)
Yeah well, I went to alien con last year down in Pasadena.

53:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Very interesting.

53:51 - Mick West (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so might have crossed paths. Briefly, yeah, uh, yeah, and it's very interesting and you see, the they have um encounter events where you can pay an extra 20 bucks to get your photo taken with uh, with Travis uh, travis Taylor or someone like that, someone from these shows. And what they really are this convention uh is is they're basically extensions of the tv show. You know, ancient aliens, there's the secret of skinwalker ranch, and you know there's a there's a show that I'm actually on which is called the proof is out there where they they do a little bit more investigation of things and I'm like one of the voices of reason on that show. Uh, so what? What that convention largely was was the fans of those shows, and they also have, like a traveling road show now, like, uh, ancient aliens and skinwalker ranch. Like, yeah, you go around the country to different places and people like uh see, pay lots of money to see them. Uh, so it is quite lucrative. They are actually making money.

54:48
Uh, lou elizondo, you know he came out in 2017, lou Elizondo, he came out in 2017 as part of Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Enterprise, which is kind of an interesting thing. Tom DeLonge, he was the front man of Blink-182, a rock band, and he started this business to basically leverage UFO disclosure to do entertainment and science. The science dropped away very quickly and it became more about entertainment and now that's kind of dropped away as well and I think all the people who invested in it are basically throwing away their money and most of the people who were part of it have left it and it doesn't really exist anymore. But Elizondo has kept going. He's written a book recently called Imminent, which I thought was actually a joke when they said that was the title, because UFO disclosure has been imminent since the 1940s.

55:40
It's a bit of a running joke that it's always just around the corner. And then he publishes a book saying, yeah, it's just about to happen, it's imminent, uh, but it he? Yeah, I think he's. He's angling for a position in government. He wants to be the ufo czar or the uap czar and he was recently on um donald trump jr's podcast, uh, making the case basically that he should do that. I know his friends with tulsi gabbard and various other people who are now obviously in government. So it seems like you know he might actually be the person running ufo investigations in the future, which I don't think is a very good thing. If you read his book, he doesn't seem to be very interested in investigating.

56:21
He actually has um aliens in his house, he said essentially like really he had glowingbs which he thought were perhaps some kind of alien scout ship or drone, alien drone or something like that, floating down his hallway and going through walls and this happened for weeks and weeks and weeks and he never investigated it. He just like was eh yeah, maybe it's just the weather or something like that. And apparently his neighbors saw them when they were at barbecues and they were just laughing about them. Oh, there are those orbs again. Um, and he has other things, like he said he can remote view. He says that he, he once kind of remotely interrogated a terrorist who was on the other side of the world and appeared as an angel over his bed and shook the bed psychically with a bunch of his psychic friends and he got trained as a psychic soldier, essentially.

57:12 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So he's not really the person I would pick to be running this thing, but you know, he um, he talks a good talk, but I don't think he's actually very good at investigating I grew up in a household very much like that, uh, with a lot of these beliefs and you know seances and stuff, and it was just, yeah, I guess that's what turned me into a nonbeliever was the kind of impassioned belief despite anything.

57:41 - Mick West (Guest)
Well, I think that's what's being revealed now is that a lot of ufology is based upon this belief in the supernatural. We've got all these people coming out and they've all had these you know, basically weird supernatural experiences. Elizondo, you know, has all kinds of you know things going on um the uh.

58:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Like david grush, you know one of these whistleblowers I wanted to ask about him too, because this testimony, so much of his testimony, was well, sir, where did you hear that?

58:11 - Mick West (Guest)
well, a friend of a friend of mine said, and that's not particularly compelling yeah, and this is the other thing about the, the ufo culture, like I think you know where. It seems like there's a lot going on right now. It seems like we've got whistleblowers, we've got congressional hearings, we've got all this stuff. But I think what's actually happening is like the spotlight is coming on to these ants and you know, it's almost like a magnifying glass and they're just kind of scurrying around and all this stuff is being revealed, like it's like you pull the rock back and you you get to see all the, the ants doing their business. Uh, and you know, what's being revealed is that it's just people talking to each other.

58:46
There's no actual evidence. These people saying I believe in aliens because this person told me that he knows someone who worked on this program, or I know someone who worked on this program, but I can't tell you what it is. I know where the UFOs are. I can't tell you what it is. No one will actually give you any actual evidence, but they're all convinced that it's true, because they've all been talking to people who are convinced it's true. And these people have good credentials. Like you know, alexander has reasonable credentials. He worked in government. There's Tim Gallaudet who was, you know, was the head of NOAA. He was an admiral in the Navy. And you know another person who believes in the, in the supernatural, but you know he's got good credentials. You've got Chris Mellon, the former, like you, have a assistant undersecretary for defense or or something I can't remember exactly, but he you know he's got great credentials and he's very interested in ufos, but none of them actually have any real evidence but do you?

59:40 - Tariq Malik (Host)
do you see, because, as we're recording this, this discussion, uh which is fantastic, by the way, thank you so much again for coming on on the show uh, we're just a couple weeks into a new administration, uh, in fact, uh, trump on the show. We're just a couple of weeks into a new administration. In fact, trump on the campaign trail said that if elected, he would declassify the UFO, the Area 51 stuff there. Of course, we haven't heard about that yet, but in the spacecom newsroom we had a whole big discussion about when are we gonna run that story, about what could he do on this whole thing, and I think we ended up running it like over over the holidays. But but do you see a, a imminent announcement that that would come because of, of of at least the claims on that campaign trail now in the administration? And, and, if so, like what should people who are following what are you following? What are you looking for to see if there's actually any merit or anything to even reveal?

01:00:38 - Mick West (Guest)
I hope so. I mean, I really do hope that Trump will declassify the UFO files. That would be great. I think that if there, I think what we're going to find is that there have historically been people in government who believed in UFOs and that there probably are things like special access programs where those people have gone and looked for UFOs, and we know that certain things like this have happened in the past. There was a government program called Project Stargate where the government tried to do remote viewing, and this is there's the movie in the the book Men who Stare at Ghosts. This is stuff that actually happened. This is real. People within government tried to do this. There was this OSAP program started back in the 90s, and this was basically Robert Bigelow, a Las Vegas real estate developer, and his friend Harry Reid. He convinced Harry Reid to get some legislation passed so they could investigate this place called Skinwalker Ranch. Skinwalker Ranch is just a supposedly supernatural ranch in Utah which is now the subject of a TV show and is part of this alien con.

01:01:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We should point out that Robert Bigelow also. I just want to point out that Robert Bigelow also built a room that is currently on the International Space Station right now with Bigelow Aerospace.

01:01:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And flew to inflatable space stations. Before that, which I always found talk about cognitive dissonance, here's this UFO guy who's actually building space hardware based on old NASA designs. That is still inspiring new space station designs. So it was again. That's one of those moments where you think, well, maybe there's more to this than I think as a doubter, because he's obviously a smart guy who's engaged in the business. But then there's youtube was an alchemist.

01:02:26 - Mick West (Guest)
That's right, so like just because someone's a great scientist doesn't mean they can't also believe in magic.

01:02:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, so we kind of touched on this. But what do you think? This shift towards a distrust of science, a distrust of big science, a distrust of academia? Actually, I think a disdain for academia. I I don't have to go very far east from los angeles for people you know. If I wear a stanford t-shirt or something, they'll say, oh, you're one of them, college boys, and it's like I'm not even in arizona. Yet what's going on?

01:03:04 - Mick West (Guest)
yeah well, that's always been a thing anti-intellect intellectualism has been a thing, but I think, uh, recently the the former head of Arrow, sean Kirkpatrick, said that what we're seeing is actually a return to a belief in magic, and I think that is somewhat true. I think that as people are becoming untethered from institutions and institutional knowledge and more going towards individual knowledge on the internet, they tend towards the natural human inclination to believe in magic, and so we're getting people in positions of authority and positions perhaps even within science itself, who are employing magical thinking, and it's a little concerning, perhaps even a lot concerning, and it's something we certainly need to keep an eye on.

01:03:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, so, because this is largely, largely space flight and space technology show, I can't let you go without talking about the Apollo deniers. And there was a couple of years ago there was a study I don't remember if it was the in Marsat or the Ipsos survey, but a fair amount of between, depending on who you ask, how you ask the question and when you ask. 10 to roughly 30 percent of americans think the moon landings were faked don't tell buzz aldrin's the question.

01:04:20
Yeah, he gets a little bad about that. Um 72 percent of russians think we faked it, which kind of makes sense because they're still a little hurt about not being the Soviet Union anymore. Maybe, but oddly, 54% of people in the UK don't think that happened, at least.

01:04:37 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's more than half as surveyed.

01:04:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, so you know, and we've all seen the videos of look, that flag moved. Yeah, it's called static electricity, you know, but at this point. So I used to get this question a lot, especially on Coast to Coast. Well, what do you say about the this and that? It's like I used to go in this long song and dance about look, go to the museums and look at the rockets. Go to the National Archives and go through the millions of documents and feet of film and so forth.

01:05:03
Talk to the moonwalkers, like I have. You know, see if you think they're lying. I did this big song and dance. Now, since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 21st century, I can say look, we have the records of the Soviet Union tracking the Apollo flights around the moon with Doppler radar and all that, and people like Japan and China and India have orbited the moon and taken images of the surface, and if anybody's going to call us out on lying about that, it would be the russians of the chinese. So what part of that don't you get? What are your thoughts?

01:05:38 - Mick West (Guest)
it's. It's a difficult one and yet to some degree, I give up on people that are so entrenched in beliefs like that. Uh, I used to talk to flat earthers, uh, which is extreme, so they killed themselves in rockets, right, I believe, yeah, and yeah, the, the the space race, uh, to put a dent in Flat Earthers, because we actually got photos from space. But then, of course, people went to being space being fake, which you know, probably had some influence on people thinking that the moon landings were fake, because that would, you know, spoil the whole Flat Earth thing. Um, but there's only so much you can do with some people.

01:06:13
A lot of people are going to be amenable to reason. You can show them things. You can show them like these photographs of the landing site from space, but other people are just going to say that's fake. You can show them like these, these records from the Russians. You could. You could do these explanations of you know why is the flag standing up and things like that, and why are shadows at a different angle, but they're not really that interested in it. They've got their belief and they're just going with it. So you've got to try to figure out is the person you're talking to amenable to reason or not?

01:06:44 - Tariq Malik (Host)
and if they're not, yeah, you might be better off debunking some other belief of theirs, because these moon landing ones aren't going to be that, uh, that consequential I would feel like such a chump if I found out that, like the last 20 years of my life have been dedicated to covering a space program where I have rearranged everything at great expense to go and watch these missions launch, and then I find out that it was also dog and pony show. So that's a that's a class action lawsuit against the government coming up.

01:07:18 - Mick West (Guest)
Yeah, I got the same kind of reaction from geoengineering researchers. This is an actual topic, geoengineering, and these people. They're basically trying to figure out how could we manipulate the Earth's climate in the future if we need to, and so they've done all this research into it. It's mostly mathematical modeling, computer models, but then they've got these people saying that chemtrails are a real thing and chemtrails are what's doing this, and they say, like, why would I do that? You can come talk to me. And then they go out and they talk to these chemtrail groups.

01:07:42
There's a guy, david Keith, he went out and he's one of the most famous geoengineering researchers out there and he went out and talked to them and explained to them, like, what he does and things like that. You know, getting a connection with the people themselves is often the most uh compelling thing for for other people, like talking to the actual scientists, uh. But yeah, it's, you've really got to try to uh tune your communication priorities to the individual and what they're going to receive and what's going to, what's going to actually stick so you know, I know we've been talking for a good, a good hour now.

01:08:17 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I did, I did uh. I do feel like I can't let you go if I, if uh, without asking, I guess one kind of fun one. I'm curious if there is one conspiracy theory out there ufo or otherwise that you would love to be true, even if you know it's not right.

01:08:33 - Mick West (Guest)
But you would just internally really love to be true and what that might be I, I mean, I, I mean I guess if I ever just pick one I'd go with, like, let's say, the the free energy conspiracy theory is true and the government's been covering up free energy, zero point energy, because that would be great if we could all just get zero point energy and we could just pluck energy out of the back, vacuum fluctuations or whatever it is, or or out of magnets. That would be really good. And that's kind of like the UFO thing in a way, because a lot of the UFO believers think that the government is denying us a golden age of science with lots of free energy and faster than light travel and, you know, easy, easy transatlantic flights on these flying saucers. So, yeah, hidden technology. If that will be true and we could actually demonstrate that it's true and get that hidden technology revealed, that would be great. Unfortunately, it doesn't really look like it's true, rod do you have one.

01:09:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, I had my goals set so low. I just wanted to be abducted and probed for all these years. We got through almost the whole episode.

01:09:30 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Almost but not quite my goals set so low. I just wanted to be abducted and probed for all these years, always. We got through almost the whole episode almost but not quite okay. Before we go, though, I want uh, can I, can I say mine?

01:09:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I can't say mine no, I thought that was it okay.

01:09:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No, my theory, I just I would like to be true right. That'd be great that there'd be like a whole other world underneath the planet and you know, dinosaurs and godzilla and maybe michael, because you know my theory on that.

01:09:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And Elvis, I thought earlier about you today in this context, and this this fits with my, my construct that this is my conspiracy theory. You're actually a Hobbit and you have very large feet that you've been hiding from me and you want to go down to middle earth. Mick, before we go.

01:10:18 - Mick West (Guest)
I'd like you to talk a little bit about your book, why people will enjoy it. I've bought a copy. They should too sure. My book is escaping the rabbit hole how to debunk conspiracy theories using facts, logic and respect and it's basically how to talk to people who believe in various conspiracy theories and I cover a lot of them specifically, like chemtrails, 9-11, you know, false flags where people think that, like school shootings and things like that are fake. And the newest edition of the book has chapters on coronavirus, election fraud and UFOs and QAnon. So you know, if you have somebody in your life who believes in these conspiracy theories and it's causing a problem, or if you yourself, uh, believe in them and you want to kind of investigate them a little bit more from another perspective, uh, it's kind of tries to teach you how to talk about those particular topics and how do you actually communicate with people and how do you understand people and how do you get them to understand you and how to. How do you actually have a conversation about conspiracy theories?

01:11:15 - Rod Pyle (Host)
well, great update, great, and I think it's great that you you have the word respect in there, because so rarely is compassion or empathy showed on either side of the argument honestly, and it's nice to see somebody advocating for that yeah, I think it's very important to treat people with respect.

01:11:30 - Mick West (Guest)
I know, like you know, we kind of make fun of these strange beliefs, but these are real people and they they believe in them for for reasons. You know their reasons are wrong, but that doesn't mean that they're idiots. You know, some people are idiots, but some people are idiots who don't believe in these theories. You know it's like conspiracy theorists are just a cross-section of society. They're not like worse than us, they're not better than us, they're just. They're just people who happen to have fallen for a conspiracy theory and you've got to respect them as people and talk to them as people and you can help them very well said.

01:12:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, I want to thank you and everybody for joining us today for episode 147. I like to call not, as they seem, um with the resonating voice of reason, mick West. Mick, besides your YouTube and your website that we already mentioned, mickwestcom, are there other places people should go to keep up with your work?

01:12:25 - Mick West (Guest)
Yeah, I do a lot of stuff on metabunkorg, which is my web forum, and unfortunately I'm still on Twitter now. Now x and I'm there because other people are there. I'm not, uh, not endorsing it, but I'm, I'm there if you want to see what I'm doing all right and tarik.

01:12:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Where can we find you being abducted these days?

01:12:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
well, you can find me at spacecom, as always. Uh also, uh also on x at uh tarik j malik. Uh and uh on youtube at Tarek J Malik and on YouTube at space Tron plays. I've been diving pretty deep and getting lost in space in the lore of Marvel rivals and space exploration, so if anyone wants to help me get to grandmaster there, let me know and hit me up.

01:13:02 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, I think Nick could probably tell you how to go through the backdoor code and just, but of course you'd never do that, cause you're an honorable man. Of course you can find me at pilebookscom or at astromagazinecom and or at nssorg, which is the home of the National Space Society. Remember also, you can always drop us a line at twist at twittv. That's T-W-I-S at twittv. We love getting your comments, especially for this episode, because I think we're going to get a few, and I look forward to hearing from you and responding to each and every one of them.

01:13:39
New episodes of the podcast publish every Friday on your favorite podcatcher, so make sure to subscribe, tell your friends, give us reviews, shout it to the stars, because there's people up there listening. We'll take whatever you got and don't forget, we're counting on you to join club twit in 2025. Besides supporting twit, you'll help keep us on the air, and today thank you, mick is an excellent example of our show at its best, and you'll keep me generating my horrid space dad jokes. Also, you'll get the great programming, video streams on the twit network, ad free on Twit, as well as some extras only available there for just $7 a month. You can't even buy a ride on a flying saucer for $7 a month. We appreciate it Helps keep the processes warm here. You can also follow the Twit Tech Podcast Network at Twit on Twitter and on Facebook and twittv on Instagram.

01:14:28
Gentlemen, this has been an absolute pleasure, mick. I really appreciate you coming on. It's a. As I think I mentioned to you. I've been angling to get you on for I don't know three years and finally managed to track you down and I really appreciate you taking the time.

01:14:44 - Mick West (Guest)
Very glad to be here. So fascinating conversation.

01:14:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Thanks everybody, and we'll see you next time.

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