Recent revelations about the Pentagon's secret UFO study have generated headlines, controversy, and questions. Joining George Knapp in the first half was Dr. Eric Davis (who worked on the study) and previously studied UFOs and related phenomena, including the Skinwalker Ranch, as part of Robert Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science. He discussed his work analyzing UFO files, and the latest updates on the now widely publicized 'Tic Tac' UFO incident. Davis expressed his frustration with those in the UFO research community who have been attacking him on social media and who he says "won’t take ’yes’ for an answer." He says this suspicious attitude towards the limited disclosure of the last few months belies an attitude of those who are "not only ill-informed, they are uninformed."
Davis says that the efforts of Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) and the Pentagon UFO program that was recently revealed were honest and legitimate programs to use the observed properties of UFOs to determine if they could be utilized or back-engineered with present or near-future technology. In fact, Davis said that he and others were tasked with researching "white papers" to determine if in at least 50 years in the future, humans could produce aircraft that could perform the observed characteristics of UFOs, which he said appear to be "tech that is not made on Earth by humans." As for skeptics who say that Navy and other pilots are poor observers whose testimony cannot be trusted, Davis said that as combat experts, "these guys cannot afford to have poor observational skills." Davis also emphasized more than once that “poltergeist or psychic phenomena are a major aspect” of UFO encounters.
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We are just one of almost countless planets in the Universe, and it's likely that many of those planets hosted technologically advanced alien civilizations which may have faced the same challenges we're facing today. In the second half, astrophysicist and NPR commentator Adam Frank shared his latest research on the existence and trajectories of alien civilizations and what they may teach us about our own. He described science as "constrained imagination," and discussed the famous Drake equation, which was formulated to give us an idea of the possibility of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that may have reached an age of technological sophistication. Frank also speculated on the possibility of an earlier Earth civilization, which may have existed 10 to 100 million years ago, and would have left very little trace of itself after that amount of time.
Frank also discussed the record of Earth’s climate and the scientific consensus that temperatures on the planet have remained fairly constant for at least 10,000 years, and added that "we would have to be unbelievably wrong" about the effects of the sun on climate change for it to be a factor in any warming or cooling trends. The climate patterns on other planets (and even some moons) in the solar system can be used as a sort of universal guide to climates. Frank also used the example of Easter Island, and the depletion of natural resources over a few hundred years and how this can be scaled up to a planetary level. He concluded that "climate change shows how powerful we’ve become" as a technological species.