Episode 30 UFO Conspiracy Theories Grow Where Evidence Is Weak and Secrecy Is Strong

[00:00:18] Kevin: Today's episode is about the psychology and sociology of UFO conspiracy theories with Dr. Barna Donovan, a communications and media scholar whose work spans popular culture, audience psychology, conspiracy theories, UFO, and media persuasion .

[00:00:38] Emanuel: Hi everyone, and welcome to yet another episode of the Curious Pundits podcast. I'm one of the co-hosts, Emanuel.

[00:00:45] Kevin: I'm the other co-host, Kevin.

[00:00:47] Emanuel: And today, as all the other episodes, we have a very, very special guest. But before we let the guest introduce himself, I'm gonna ask you to please go to curiouspundits.com.

[00:00:58] That's where you'll find links to this episode, previous episodes, future episodes. And follow us, leave us a good review. We're on everywhere you can listen to a podcast from YouTube to Spotify to Apple, Stitcher, and so forth. So curiouspundits.com is the place where you can find out more about us and about our podcast and about our guests as well.

[00:01:20] That being said, Dr. Donovan, welcome.

[00:01:25] Barna: Thank you for having me. Very exciting.

[00:01:28] Emanuel: How would you introduce yourself to our audience?

[00:01:31] Barna: Oh, sure. So I'm a professor of communication and media culture at St. Peter's University in Jersey City. And my areas of research include of films.

[00:01:44] I'm coming from a background in film studies and especially at the analysis of fandom and audiences because a really great art has to make an impact on the audience. So I'm always curious on how people are processing information from film, from popular culture, how it affects them, and then how does their behavior feed back to media creators.

[00:02:10] And films that I'm particularly interested in are conspiracy theory films. And I find it so fascinating because here you have films that can have very fantastic elements, but it's all based on the idea that you have these dark, hidden cabals in the real world, that you're not just watching fiction there.

[00:02:33] And to me, also one of the one areas of fascination are particularly the UFO conspiracy theories and just the entire UFO phenomena as it has been unfolding since the since the middle of the of the 20th century. So it's one of the one of the three great questions, right?

[00:02:53] Is there life in outer space? Is there a God? And is there life after death? So this is this probably could be the one that can be empirically perhaps proven or disproven the life in outer space or perhaps life in alternate dimensions. So I just find this so fascinating that you have so many people who believe that you have these extraordinary incursions into our world.

[00:03:21] And then what are official organizations, governments, the military, business perhaps, do they have some kind of a hand in controlling this information and hiding the truth about all of this? And how is it reflected in entertainment? How do people react to it? Especially now you have so much opportunity for fans to make their feelings known about their favorite films, about their favorite TV shows, and then how you have this constant feedback loop from audience to media.

[00:03:54] And again I'm really, really curious about the UFO phenomenon and then its intersection with popular culture.

[00:04:02] Emanuel: We're curious as well. Before I let Kevin, because I know he has a list of questions as well do I need a tinfoil for this episode?

[00:04:10] Barna: Who knows? You never know what the men in black are what kind of brainwaves they're reading.

[00:04:16] Kevin: One thing I find interesting about the broad concept of conspiracy theories, I think one of the reasons that we allow our imaginations to run wild with conspiracy theories is every once in a while, a conspiracy theory turns out to be true.

[00:04:32] And I'll use, for example, this conspiracy theory that there's a global ring of powerful pedophiles doing terrible things to young girls. Well, it turns out, as we know from the whole Jeffrey Epstein scandal, that was true. And not really in preparation for this episode, but just as a general thing, I went to one of the AI engines.

[00:04:54] It might've been ChatGPT, it might've been Claude, and I said, "Please identify a set of conspiracy theories which have turned out to be true, and whose description could start with the words 'That time the CIA.'" And it just kept spitting them out, and finally I'm like, "Oh, just give me the top 25." So in terms of extraterrestrial visitors and strange things in the sky, there's enough times that some weird conspiracy turns out to be true that I think I understand why we're willing to believe that these strange things in the skies are evidence of visitors from other worlds.

[00:05:34] Which who knows? Maybe they are. But I really don't know where to begin. I mean, um-

[00:05:42] Emanuel: Well, should ask Professor Donovan where should we begin? And

[00:05:47] Kevin: I think- I was just about to. That's a good idea. Like, how did you get into this as a field of study?

[00:05:52] Barna: Well, I was studying studying film, and at one point I saw this miniseries on the on the Syfy Channel about the Bermuda Triangle, and can't remember if it was two or three episodes long, but the punchline on the end of it was that all the mysterious goings-on in the Bermuda Triangle were really caused by the government and a secret experiment and the conspiracy to cover it up.

[00:06:19] And then something clicked in my head where I thought that you have this idea of the hidden cabal, the official, organizations lying to you, and it keeps turning up in popular culture and popular entertainment so much. So I started analyzing how often it's turning up. I'm seeing it all across the genres from horror to action, even comedy TV shows novels, comic books, movies.

[00:06:47] And I took a deeper dive into this, which eventually led to my book, Conspiracy Films, where I'm analyzing both the pop culture, but then also the the history, and really like we're saying, the the sociology and the the psychology of what is it that makes people believe. And personally, just the this question of whether or not there's life not just in outer space, but has it come here?

[00:07:12] And you have decades' worth of claims that people saw craft that could not possibly be made on Earth. They make claims that they, they've seen aliens, then the others who claim to have been abducted by aliens. I thought, "Wow, this is just so fascinating." I don't know how anyone could not be interested in this.

[00:07:34] If you have a lot of sane normal, sincere people who are saying that they're seeing something anomalous, something that's completely outside of what is scientifically explainable. So I became a UFO buff, so to speak, and then I'm bringing the academic focus on seeing the greater picture of how now this is having a greater impact on entertainment, and then how entertainment in turn could possibly be shaping what people think they see in the skies or how they feel about claims of of conspiracies.

[00:08:12] Emanuel: These conspiracies, these theories, and especially the ones with, UFOs and beings from other planets or not from Earth, they're not new.

[00:08:23] They're not associated with contemporary. They've been for many, many years before, thousands, if not according to others, hundreds of thousands of years with different civilizations roaming this Earth. Based on what my very basic research and based on articles that I've read and some documentaries that I watch, there was a different view on these aspects, not in the contemporary, modern times. People were being this, I wouldn't say necessarily more openly is the best word to describe it.

[00:08:58] But less concerned, if that makes any sense. Talking about, I don't know, Middle Ages and throughout the, let's say French Revolution, if you are to take a point in time where things have significantly changed. Kinda like where it started our modern era, give or take.

[00:09:15] I think French Revolution is a good point in time to reference it.

[00:09:20] Barna: Yes. You do have the claim that if you look through history, through literature, through religions, through art there are a number of UFO hunters who like to go and look at old paintings from the Renaissance, from the Middle Age, even older than that. And they're saying, whether or not there are things in there that could possibly be something extraterrestrial, something otherworldly.

[00:09:47] So things have been turning up in literature and art for a long time. But it's really as we're entering into the late 19th and into the 20th century when we started looking at this from a technological point of view. It's very interesting that on the end of the the exact date escapes me, 1870 something, I want to say, when there was this wave of airship sightings across the US.

[00:10:13] Many of them out in the Southwest. Where people saw these large oblong-like flying machines that looked like almost like steampunk UFOs like dirigibles. But the technology, the balloon technology was not there yet. And there, from the time in local newspapers, every place from the Midwest out to the West, they would turn up these stories of there's something mysterious that's flying around.

[00:10:41] Some people saw people inside of the inside of the ships, like in a gondola or looking out of a porthole, and they're looking at down at the people on the ground, and then they fly away. And the thinking about it started getting conspiratorial because none of these ships ever landed anywhere.

[00:11:02] So it's this big mystery that here you have, again, at the time you already had hot air balloons. But something like this, a motor-driven, big blimp, they did not exist yet. So it's would've looked plausible that this is some kind of an advanced technology. Who did it? Why are they hiding?

[00:11:22] And what are they going to use this for? Is this some kind of a hostile foreign power who's going to be using this to invade? Is it some sort of a reclusive genius with a lot of money at his disposal working away in some kind of a hidden lab to come up with this brand-new technology?

[00:11:40] So that is where you see the conspiratorialism starting to sneak in, that here we have an unexplained phenomena. Again, none of these ships ever landed. People claim to have seen, occupants, but it's not solved. But I find it interesting that at that time, you already have the thinking going, "Ooh, somebody is actively trying to lie to us and deceive us about this."

[00:12:06] Now, and then later when really the modern age, as many point out as the start of the UFO phenomena in 1947 and where you had this pilot, Kenneth Arnold, who first sighted this fleet of boomerang-shaped, UFOs over Mount Rainier. But some will go and backtrack a couple of years to say that even during World War II you had a lot of airmen who would see these balls of light flying after their planes.

[00:12:36] Now, so at that point it was easy to explain that rationally. But the arguments usually were that it was probably just ball lightning or St. Elmo's Fire on the wing of the planes, and mix that with a great deal of fatigue from flying a bombing mission, or the the stress, the anxiety of being in the middle of a war zone.

[00:12:57] And maybe it's has created these misconceptions and the pilots that they're seeing things that are not there. So at that point the worry of the conspiracy is not emerging yet. It's only when we're getting into the into the 1940s and in '47 with the Kenneth Arnold sighting.

[00:13:15] That's where the term flying saucer is coined from. Although this is interesting that the UFOs that he described were kind of boomerang shaped. But he said they looked kind of like a saucer skipping over the water. And then that phrase stuck and news stories about it. And then later on when this big wave of UFO sightings came in its wake, you had others who were describing circular saucer shaped UFOs.

[00:13:44] And also 1947, of course, you have the famous, Roswell incident which has just so completely permeated the culture. I mean, probably everyone, probably even people who don't even care about the UFO issue, when you mention Roswell, they're going to know. It's just so strongly, completely overtaken the culture.

[00:14:04] And they're gonna tell you the basics and, "Oh, yeah, it crash landed. The government said it was a UFO. The next day they changed their minds. It's nothing but a weather balloon." And it's written off by the press. But what if the first story was correct? It was a flying saucer. And that gets more and more complicated that you have dead bodies.

[00:14:26] Other rumors that there were live bodies. So here the conspiratorialism just gets completely enmeshed in this alleged story that there's some kind of a secret here. This is much more complicated than what the media are letting us know, or what the media are allowed to let us know.

[00:14:46] So it's a remarkable for that because right post-World War II we still have a very trusting population when it comes to believing what the what the government says. So once they do the follow-up story on Roswell and they basically say, "Oops we made a mistake. It's not a flying saucer after all. It's just a weather balloon," people go with it. However you have the sightings continue. Now at that point there you have these series of studies that the government does. There's Project Sign and a Project Grudge. Later there's going to be a Project Blue Book. And they're doing their very best it seems not to give this an honest look.

[00:15:31] That seems like the fix is in from the beginning, that you have people who describe very detailed sightings and they're just checked off. Oh, it was the Venus. It was through a cloud formation. It was a meteor. You saw the headlights of cars reflecting off of swamp gas.

[00:15:49] And so that's where you see the conspiratorialism that's really take a hold among people interested in UFOs. Here's a phenomenon that not only is it mysterious, but now we have organizations in the world. You have you have governments that are actively trying to keep us from finding out what the answer to the mystery is.

[00:16:10] Emanuel: You need to keep up the mystery a little bit to make it more interesting.

[00:16:15] Kevin: I do have a question now, and it relates to the fact that the United States government has been releasing what people are calling UFO files, and they recently released their fifth batch. And I'm just curious for your take on why are they releasing these files? Like, what's the point?

[00:16:33] Barna: Well, when we're looking at the information in there it's very thin actually.

[00:16:38] Kevin: Very thin.

[00:16:39] Barna: Extremely. So we have some some footage of some some videos. They're extremely grainy. Back in 2017 there was this story written in the New York Times about the, it was called, my goodness, what was it? The black money UFOs, where it showed that even though the government said that they haven't done any investigation of UFOs since they shut down Blue Book back in 1969 it actually was not true. And from the, um, I'm blanking out on the years but there was the there was just very recently a whole new study project Harry Reid the Nevada senator.

[00:17:20] He was funding, allocated funding $22 million for this. So this really is opening people's eyes that, wait a minute. The government has been less than truthful about this. They were studying UFOs when they said that they weren't. So there's this interest. There's this demand of why is this still being kept hidden?

[00:17:42] And then in light of the New York Times story, then we had a wave of these whistleblowers who are making some pretty wild allegations to have seen UFOs a while, in the military. And then you had the quality of the whistleblowers, that all these people are coming from the military, from intelligence.

[00:18:03] Like one of them, David Grusch, he's all over the the media. He has an intelligence military background. So when he's alleging that he has seen and heard evidence of the existence of retrieved UFOs then people are perking up, and then lawmakers are starting to pay attention.

[00:18:23] Or after the New York Times story, focus was put on this incident off the the USS Nimitz, where you had, again, military people, like the Top Gun pilots. Like, these are the best of the best, and they're, uh... What happens is you have- Two fighter jets, so that would be four people in the two planes.

[00:18:43] So you have two excellent pilots that claim to have seen with their eyes a UFO. Their instruments show in both planes that there's something physical, there's a physical object there. It's picked up, back on the ship on radar. So it's very complex and very detailed, and you have just really high quality so to speak people making these allegations.

[00:19:09] So that's all the interest we saw we saw coming forth in Congress. And interestingly enough, across the political spectrum that everybody is being asked now, okay, let's see what's going on. Release all of the files, whatever government agencies might have files on UFO sightings. Let's see it.

[00:19:30] Emanuel: I think the current president got a few votes based on the topic saying that he's gonna release some of the files. So one thing I wanna add is that I do had a conversation with, now retired, I don't think he was general, but He was from the military. He was a pilot. Then he went, he was teaching at a military school the radar, how to read the radars and whatnot.

[00:19:53] So he's one of the instructors there. And he told me personally that there are some things that he cannot-- So not referencing like aliens or like any kind of characters, but there are some things that he saw while as a pilot, like lights and different shapes and forms and including on the radar screen that they shouldn't have been there and he has no explanation to it.

[00:20:15] Now, if I were to be a government, I would say that actually this doesn't play that bad towards my favor to have some conspiracies going on, to have some magic, some around the topic and me semi-disclosing sort of stuff. So maintaining this doubt all in all. I do think that especially right now where technology has advanced so much, there's a sincere danger essentially.

[00:20:44] I'm from Romania originally and now we see reports more and more about the drones from Russia and some from Ukraine as well. Survolating NATO territory essentially because Romania is part of NATO and European Union. Some people have that are close to the border receive text messages every other day to take shelter.

[00:21:04] There's a drone spotted and whatnot. So I'm assuming that this could also be beneficial towards me in, letting me know if there's some sightseeing of this sort. There was a recent one I believe in, on the West Coast, either was Canada, Vancouver or probably, Portland or that area, Oregon and it ended up being a Chinese weather balloon or something similar, In that and I'm thinking, "Okay, I cannot monitor everything. It's not a bad idea if I kinda like entertain this narrative and actually have people report UFOs have a website, have a magazine to write letters and report any UFO seeing." Because at the end of the day, UFO stands for Unidentifiable Flying Object.

[00:21:51] So, back in the day, the Soviet Union was a real threat. Right now China is potentially a real threat and two million times more powerful or, and more technologically advanced than the Soviet Union was, right? So that is a concern. So I'm thinking, "Okay, I cannot monitor everything, you know. It's not a bad idea if I control the media and kinda have people report and think whatever they might think of it." For me, I'm just interested in knowing that it's been there so I can investigate more. So those are some thoughts that I have on the topic.

[00:22:24] Kevin: That's an interesting take because it's entirely possible that the government wants us to go into UFO conspiracy theories, and here I am revealing a conspiracy, right? They want us to go in terms of UFO conspiracy theories- in order to make us think that China is a larger threat than potentially they are, so that we focus public opinion on the adversary of China.

[00:22:51] Like, this is just a thought that popped into my head.

[00:22:54] Barna: I thought first to Emanuel's point that was an excellent idea. That if you just want people looking at the skies, and then reporting things. Because it's not just the the police or the government or the FBI that they that they report to.

[00:23:09] But you have private UFO organizations. There's MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, a national UFO reporting center. So if you want an eye kept on what's in the skies, just, get free surveillance when people are seeing things in the sky and have that report.

[00:23:25] Now, now you might brush that off and say that, "Oh, yeah, they saw just an ordinary drone that some kid was playing with," or, " it was Mars and it was flickering through the clouds," something like that. But at the same time also I think to Kevin's point about looking , am I getting the question correctly? Looking at how re- people react to-

[00:23:48] Kevin: Yeah, yeah. So kinda like helping shape public opinion by creating a stronger threat or a perception of a stronger threat.

[00:23:58] Barna: We have had the CIA in the past admit that they had made up fake UFO stories and seeded them in the media, usually around military installations where they might have been doing some, some experiments on early drones or aircraft to divert attention away from guesses of what kind of high technology is being worked on.

[00:24:24] Usually the thinking was that, well, if everyone's talking about aliens in this area, no one will take it seriously. The media won't take it seriously. Researchers, academia, they will just brush it off, and we can go on with the with the development of this, of this technology. Perhaps if you're spreading theories of alien incursions and imminent alien invasion, maybe you just put people into the mindset that we need to be much more vigilant to perhaps an invasion, to being prepared.

[00:24:56] What to do if we can confirm for a fact that there's life in outer space. Not to mention that they're actually actually coming here. If you're able to manipulate this large scale perception of a culture, then you can control that culture.

[00:25:13] You create fear, that you can control them more effectively. For example, there's this one conspiracy theory, the blue beam conspiracy theory where the theory goes that alien sightings, the UFO sightings, the reports, even the really high quality sightings, maybe they're created by things like holograms and of course, fake AI generated imagery to make people believe that an alien invasion is imminent.

[00:25:45] And because of that, we have to go and increase defense. Cut down on civil liberties. Get onto a war footing basically. Right. So we need to clamp down in the moment of a crisis and get everybody on board. Because that happens all the time when there's a major crisis.

[00:26:05] Right now we're getting ready here to commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and what was so remarkable to me was what happened in the months after the attacks, that suddenly everybody's on the same page. You guys are old enough to remember this. We lived through it.

[00:26:23] In fact it looked like every day was the Fourth of July, right? Everyone was supporting the president, supporting policies, supporting the build-up to invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq. So when someone's frightened enough, then they're all going to be on the same page.

[00:26:41] And that's the interesting thing, too. There are some surveys of Republicans and Democrats, and how many of them believe in the possibility of a UFO visitation. It's roughly the same number, and there might be like a one tiny little percentage point difference based on which survey you're reading it.

[00:26:59] So here, you're seeing this again that we might disagree on a lot of things, but something is spectacular enough, something potentially threatening enough, and everybody gets on the same page. And that's why I think that there's a great deal of a psychological, experiment perhaps, or at least a analysis and study going on behind the the scenes with this.

[00:27:24] And with drones, I mean, it was two winters ago, '24 into '25, when here in New Jersey there was just a wave of drone sightings for weeks, and weeks. And then suddenly we have a declaration from the government was the president's spokesperson, that it was nothing. That we looked at all of this.

[00:27:45] Well, there was an interesting little loophole in there that the suspicious will get caught on, where she said that, it's either airplanes or you have commercial drones, the hobbyists flying their drones, and the FAA was doing a research project. But now it's done, and and that's that.

[00:28:03] So it's not aliens- ... it's not the Chinese, it's not Iran, , not any invaders. Everything's fine. And the media drops it so quickly. Now, I'm wondering where she said the FAA was doing an experiment on what? That's what I would like to know. Now maybe the experiment is on us, that how-

[00:28:21] Kevin: Such an interesting thought.

[00:28:22] Barna: That somebody was sitting there taking notes on all of this. Well, how does the media report it? And what do the- what's FAA? ... feel about it, right?

[00:28:30] Kevin: Wow.

[00:28:31] Emanuel: What's FAA?

[00:28:32] Barna: Oh, the Federal Aviation Administration. So they regulate the

[00:28:36] Kevin: It sounds like you're questioning if the government is leaking stories in order to gauge our collective reaction and response to them.

[00:28:47] Like a large scale psychological experiment on the general population.

[00:28:52] Barna: It could be. I'm. very open-minded. There have been declassified documents saying things like, going back as far as the as the '60s. After the the revolution in Cuba and Castro takes over, about, how can the US possibly create the impression of the second coming of Christ to inspire the Cubans to rise up against Castro?

[00:29:16] Or go back even further before that to World War I where France, I believe was doing some some experiments with projecting images onto clouds of smoke or onto gas, and how could they project the image of the Virgin Mary on there to go and shock the enemy and make them feel like this is the second coming or heavenly interference, and it's time to put down your weapons and surrender.

[00:29:42] So there's precedent to this. So, so that's why when somebody brushes that aside, "Oh, it was a research project and now it's done. That's it." But you don't tell me what the research project was. So my audience studies, psychology, media studies brain goes to work there, and I'm wondering could that have been some form of a stimulus to see how a culture will react to it?

[00:30:05] Kevin: Wow, that's an interesting thought. So I can recall a video segment of President Obama back when he was president saying that there was video evidence of things in the sky which we didn't know what they were, and which moved in ways that we couldn't explain.

[00:30:26] And I'm kinda curious if that video of President Obama predates the release of the UFO files, or if the release of the UFO files had already started. Did he inadvertently slip something that other people in the government said, "Oh, we need to provide something to satiate people's curiosity"? Do you know the timing of those events?

[00:30:50] Barna: You might be right. It was around Obama when he was a very personable, very genial individual. So when he's doing interviews, they felt comfortable asking him fun questions like that.

[00:31:02] Kevin: Right.

[00:31:03] Barna: And although I believe that they asked that from his predecessor, from George W. Bush at one time as as well. And then even going back to the '70s when Jimmy Carter said that once he had a UFO sighting. So it was preceding the movement to release this information out.

[00:31:22] Kevin: It may be, and this is pure speculation on my part, that so many people saw Obama say that the government's like, "Hey, we gotta give them something."

[00:31:30] Barna: Oh, sure. Sure, it could have been a prompt that when you have a popular president talking so frankly that, yeah, there are things that we've seen in the sky, and we can't explain it.

[00:31:39] We don't know what it is, and it should be should be looked at, at least should be studied. Then it would look very, very deceptive after. It's very suspicious, right? If if the Pentagon, if the military keeps insisting, "No there's nothing here. There's nothing to see."

[00:31:56] I don't know what the president is saying. So it would make them look very very dishonest. So when you have a president from a popular and well-liked president who can make a light comment like that, it sort of smooths the way for-

[00:32:10] Kevin: Yeah ...

[00:32:10] Barna: for the the discussion of the topic.

[00:32:13] Emanuel: You mentioned yesterday manipulation through AI videos and whatnot. I remember I don't remember that per se, but Orson Welles did it pretty good without AI and scared a lot of people, as I've seen and read some articles about the hoax. But for those who don't know, he, as far as I understand, he did a radio play of War of the Worlds from H.G. Wells. So people thought that there was actually, an invasion from Martians, and I think some committed suicide, some went crazy, and purchased all the toilet paper there was to purchase from the stores, and other behavior like this. One argument I've seen constantly popping up is where have all the UFO sightings have gone, especially since, let's say, 2015, 2016, when modern cell phones have pretty good camera?

[00:33:11] So up until then, we all had all kind of footage shot by personal cameras. The photography and filming wasn't something as accessible as it is starting 2014, 2015, especially with the iPhone, era. So there is an argument to be made for us here, right? Everybody has it.

[00:33:31] Then we, one would have expect to see UFOs all over right now since you can pull up a cell phone. Even somebody in a remote village somewhere on top of a mountain doesn't have any food or things to eat or drink, but there's a high chance he might have a smartphone. So what's your take on this argument?

[00:33:54] Barna: Even though we have the the the cameras, a lot of the things that we see are still fuzzy, and in the distance or it's shaking. Where's the really great video of the UFO going and hovering like, 10 feet above the ground, and they can see the the details or when they go and open the door and the and the alien comes out?

[00:34:16] So yeah since those don't exist, and then you have people who just love playing with their editing software, now they AI software to create fake images. Since we do not have really solid smoking gun perfect footage of a UFO, but these very distant little little glimmers, that's where we should be very cautious about how much we we believe, that this is where we want to be, open-minded but skeptical whichever way you want to turn that.

[00:34:51] And then there's sort of more and more esoteric theories about what's going on, and that they're so fuzzy and they're glowing because they're not solid objects. Maybe it's not even extraterrestrial. It could be interdimensional, and there's auras or force fields around the UFOs that make them look grainy and fuzzy and indistinct.

[00:35:14] Although imagine if you have a person who sees a UFO, they're gonna be very, very discombobulated very shocked and amazed at that point. their hands might be shaking around as they're trying to trying to take the footage. But still this is where I'm keeping one foot in skepticism a bit where you're right that we should have one blockbuster really good close-up iPhone video of a UFO, and we don't.

[00:35:43] Kevin: I remember a video clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson addressing this topic, and the claim he makes in the video is that UFO sightings used to be fairly common, and then when photography was invented, the reports of UFO sightings went down.

[00:35:59] And then when Photoshop was invented, the reports of UFO sightings went up. So if this pattern continues now in the age of AI-generated video, we can expect them to go up again.

[00:36:12] Barna: Oh, absolutely; that I think it's now it's going to make it even harder to determine what video evidence is real and what isn't.

[00:36:20] If at, at this point, automatically, if I go and you can find these all over YouTube and all over social media. Then we have some of those really clear, absolute, you think, case making video of UFO. Immediately my reaction is, "Okay, I wanna see if they did that with AI. I want the best... I'm just automatically assuming this could have been AI, but let's go and put this under the microscope. Let's get the like the the top video analysts and let me see if they can completely explain that that thing is not AI. It's unartificially generated."

[00:37:00] Emanuel: At the beginning of this year, and I went to that rabbit hole, developed not an obsession necessarily, but I was very interested in all the things people were saying about, what was the name? Atlas, something and a few digits. A object from the interstellar. Oh, 3 I Atlas.

[00:37:20] 3 I Atlas. And, the dimension that actually it went-- This was at least the algorithm was feeding me all this, right? Because they kind of like, saw that I watch a few videos and, I thought at one point that all those comments and all that engagement was fake. But I tend to think that unfortunately it's not fake.

[00:37:41] It's very, very real. And some people made a lot of money based on it, I can understand that angle. But, you won't believe how much millions of views people, random people just filming from their car, telling us their expertise, knowledge on the 3 IO Atlas. That's that's the name and how it's a vessel from another, place or another dimension, and someone showing pictures with actually, And I thought that's really, really, um Something I wish I have done if I would have had more time on my plate. But, definitely interesting, approach. And my guess there's a question here. The guess my question is why do people still like to believe these things which are clearly made up?

[00:38:32] Because there is a difference, right? This one was made up, especially from somebody that does have the authority. He's not an ex-former military that actually might have some interactions, you might say, right? He flew military airplanes, probably technology and whatnot. Why do people still fall for this type of things?

[00:38:52] Barna: I think people want to believe. . Back in the in The X-Files, that was one of their catchphrases, "I want to believe."

[00:39:00] And I think people just want to believe. Like we were mentioning in the beginning, that this was one of the, the three big questions.

[00:39:09] Are we alone? Because if we were to find out for sure one way or the other, then it would give us more of a context of where we belong in the universe. If there are civilizations that are more advanced than we are, it could be a sign that that can be achieved. Maybe, humans can accomplish space travel.

[00:39:29] So we just want to believe this. But the evidence is so scant. And then, I mean, sure, you have things that you can't explain. But we don't have that blockbuster smoking gun piece of a UFO wreckage or an alien that we can see. Many people their first impulse is going to want to believe that maybe this is it.

[00:39:50] This is the this is the confirmation that there's something greater than us, that we're not alone in the universe. So those who want to believe a little too much they can be a little troublesome. Then you have the the absolute, denialist.

[00:40:04] I won't even say skeptic. The person who you could show the dead alien, and then probably they're not going to want to accept that either. But for those who have that open mind or that need to believe that there's something fantastic going on, they're going to believe that it's true until the proof is overwhelming.

[00:40:26] Kevin: I heard very recently, and I'm gonna try and find a link to the story Because I think it's really interesting, but we have these rovers up on Mars, and they're rolling around, drilling the rocks, and pulverizing them, and then doing a spectrographic analysis of the material.

[00:40:42] And the story is, like, in one of the sample chambers, we found a fossilized microbe. But the problem is we found one, and one is not enough to extrapolate a pattern. It could be a mistake. So they're being very guarded and careful with announcing this as a breakthrough. but I was fascinated by the story.

[00:41:03] I mean, a fossilized microbe is not what we think of when we think of extraterrestrials. Yeah. But still, it would be significant if it turns out to be true.

[00:41:14] Barna: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Because when you hear the those numbers that you have trillions of galaxies and to think that only one was able to produce intelligent life or any kind of life at all.

[00:41:27] Yeah. a little microbe, you know? Much less intelligent life that when we hear that, we wanna jump and, and glom onto it, and then hope maybe there's there's more than that.

[00:41:39] Kevin: I recall, this was from a long time ago, maybe the '70s, maybe the early '80s, but it was a video and I don't know what the context was. It was a documentary, it was an interview. But basically, the guy was talking about how we, collectively, humans, we frame things we don't know in terms of things we do know.

[00:42:00] So back to your comment earlier about the things in the skies in the late 19th centuries being perceived as dirigible-type airships.

[00:42:10] He says if you go farther back to Middle Ages Europe, these things were attributed to angels. That was the paradigm that they were working with at the time, and that was something that made sense to their understanding of the world. I just find that super interesting.

[00:42:27] Barna: Absolutely. I find that so fascinating, too, because you do have, throughout human history people making some really wild claims of seeing fantastic things like angels and demons and elves and trolls. And the descriptions there are fitting into what a culture could understand at the time. And then with that airship mystery since when you're reading the very detailed descriptions, it sounds so steampunk, basically. It's slightly advanced than where technology was in the 1800s. But still, to us it would be extremely primitive. Why does now a phenomenon not even then not manifest itself as a sleek spaceship, which would make sense to us as a spaceship, but why does it look like something very, industrial?

[00:43:23] Then some of them said things looked like they were plates held together with rivets. So you would see things like that on trains or you'd see factories and large equipment in there. So that's what the people of the 1800s were able to that, that was the framework that they could understand the world through.

[00:43:41] And some kind of a contact with something unusual. And then later as we're getting into the into the '40s, into the '50s now thanks to science fiction we're conceptualizing things like rocket ships and flying saucers. Now they look like flying saucers and flying boomerangs to us.

[00:44:01] So yeah, there is the one one approach to this, the one school of thought, and there's the famous French astronomer, Jacques Vallee, who was really subscribing to this who said that, yeah, here you have actually some kind of an interdimensional phenomena that as an astronomer he'll tell you how extremely far the distances are between planets and how unlikely it is that you can get into your spaceship and fly to another planet.

[00:44:28] And his speculation is that maybe this is something something interdimensional. This is some kind of interaction from a different plane of existence. And the phenomenon always looks, like you said that it looks like something that a culture at a given period in their history would be able to process.

[00:44:48] Kevin: I haven't actually stumbled across the interdimensional, narrative very often, but I think that's super interesting. Because based on what I know about the sheer vastness of the universe, he's got a point. The distances are so vast, the amount of time taken to travel them would be just incredibly vast.

[00:45:09] The amount of energy necessary to travel- Mm-hmm ... those distances. And then of course, as soon as we leave the protective cover of the Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere, everything out there is actively trying to kill us.

[00:45:22] Right? So for reasons of distance, time, energy, and biology, traveling to other stars very likely might be impossible.

[00:45:33] Emanuel: And- This is a topic that's, inspected and very well portrayed in one of the best sci-fi movies ever, Interstellar, by Christopher Nolan, 2014, so already 12 years old, with Matthew McConaughey and... I forgot her name.

[00:45:47] Barna: Right now. So Anne Hathaway was it?

[00:45:50] Emanuel: Anne Hathaway, yeah. Yeah. And Matt Damon, of course.

[00:45:52] Every other movie seems to be with Matt Damon. Matt Damon? Yeah. So-

[00:45:56] Kevin: I haven't seen it. What's the basic premise?

[00:45:59] Emanuel: So first thing is just watch it, and the idea is that the Earth is going away. Humans cannot live there anymore. And it's funny because I'm not giving away much. At the beginning there's some footage about the survivors of a big cataclysm and the director actually used real footage from 1940-something or before the Second World War. I don't remember exactly when there was a big storm somewhere and all the crops died and people were starving and didn't have anything to eat.

[00:46:30] I don't know, could be Texas, could be Arkansas or something. It was a real event that happened in the previous century, and he uses that footage to portray some testimonial type of thing of how humans after, in the not so distant future the Earth collapsing and how it was back then before they survived.

[00:46:51] And they survived because of the technology that was sent by some entities from a different dimension that couldn't communicate directly with us. And the narrative is that it could have been us, but from the distant future where we learn how to manipulate time and space and gravity at the end of the day in such a way that we actually have evolved so much that we can't even communicate simple things to our ancestors.

[00:47:26] So you might correct me if I'm wrong - you have seen the movie?

[00:47:30] Barna: Yes. It's been a while. I remember it had this time loop situation. I need to re-watch it soon. Yeah. But, the idea about about perhaps UFOs being some kind of communication or some manifestation from the future is a theory that has been, has been tossed around for quite a while.

[00:47:50] What if these are actually time travelers, that they're coming from thousands of years in the future, and that's what humans had evolved into. Or maybe they genetically engineered for some reason the short spindly alien with the big head to travel back in time.

[00:48:06] This is why I wish that sci-fi would be more creative sometimes, especially films, is that you have a lot of really colorful theories about interstellar travel, time travel, and interdimensionality out among real people who are grasping with this question.

[00:48:25] What could this be if it's actually a physical object? And that is one of the one of the theories that maybe they're time travelers or they're coming from another dimension because, as we said, the traveling through space involves so many great distances and like you said, such a hostile place.

[00:48:41] I just suddenly remembered a quote from William Shatner after he came back from his space flight, where he said that he actually found just looking into the black void just so terrifying. This great vast universe, and in it you're this teeny tiny speck, and you just feel so vulnerable.

[00:48:59] And on the other side, there's the beauty of the of the planet that keeps you alive. But that was remarkable, especially coming from William Shatner. Captain Kirk would say that space is actually ugly and terrifying. So if this is an anomalous phenomenon, it is something real.

[00:49:16] Does not necessarily need to come from another planet. Now, I guess, theoretically, and I don't have the knowledge of quantum physics and things like that, but as I understand the concept of alternate dimensions is theoretically possible.

[00:49:32] Emanuel: And, to your point, I recently learned that they have let tardigrades, which is the smallest animal from Earth into the space, and they're microscopic, but they're still kinda like animals and probably you can see it.

[00:49:46] And right now I think these cell phones have so good magnifying capabilities that you could probably zoom in. I'm just speculating here. But theoretically once they multiply, then they're aliens because they're not from Earth, right? So there you go. Because I mean, you let a few of them loose in, on places like Mars, Venus, or whatever is close or on the moon and they have these things to survive, and they find a way to adapt and multiply.

[00:50:12] So there you go. You kinda like implanted the alien species in there. But, this conversation can go in so many places and so many branches that I think we should navigate towards a conclusion or some sort of a conclusion for the first part.

[00:50:28] Because we hope, Professor Donovan that you'll be coming back as a guest-

[00:50:32] Barna: Oh, I hope so ...

[00:50:33] Emanuel: sometime in the future.

[00:50:34] Barna: I'd love to.

[00:50:34] Emanuel: Perhaps after a bigger disclosure from the government. The big disclosure that everyone is talking about. I'm gonna say this Steven Spielberg has put a movie this year, it's called Disclosure Day.

[00:50:47] And the trailer is amazing. But, as somebody put it, and that's all the things I'm gonna say to it should be called Disappointment Day.

[00:50:56] Barna: I agree with that. I went into that film with so much hope. Steven Spielberg, he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.

[00:51:04] And it was, not to spoil it for anyone, it was moment before disclosure day. I wanted more imagination, basically. I thought, "Okay, I want Steven Spielberg's imagination running away with me." What could this be? Is it just simply the alien from another planet, or something interdimensional, something spiritual, and then the impact it's going to have on society? So maybe there'll be a sequel.

[00:51:28] Emanuel: Hopefully not as big. But what conclusion are we navigating towards, Professor Donovan?

[00:51:36] Kevin: Actually, before we get to that, I'm gonna put in a plug for a different Steven Spielberg sci-fi UFO show that I don't know why it's not better known. Right? It's 10 episodes. Each episode is an hour and a half. And in the later episodes, one of the actresses is a six-year-old Dakota Fanning. Yes. So that kind of tells you when it was made. And it's called Taken by Steven Spielberg. And it's every weird little detail about UFO popular culture got thrown in there.

[00:52:09] The Roswell crash, the Lubbock lights. They just threw all kinds of stuff- in, and they spun this multi-generational story. And I don't wanna pretend that it represents anything true and real, but boy, is it a good piece of film.

[00:52:22] Barna: Oh, yes. I remember that. Yeah, the the 10-part miniseries Taken, where basically it's like somebody took an introduction to ufology and it starts in the very beginning with the Foo Fighters and goes through everything that Kenneth Arnold, and Roswell, and crop circles and abductions.

[00:52:38] Kevin: Yeah. Everything. Area 51. Everything is in there. They just threw everything in there, and then they turned it into a really good story.

[00:52:45] Barna: Oh, absolutely.

[00:52:46] Emanuel: We remember that movie's supposed to be entertaining. So if you go a little bit crazy in a movie, I think that's okay, right? One of my favorite movies to this day is still Independence Day one. I didn't mind Independence Day two. I didn't mind the one about the movie that Roland Emmerich did. But Independence one is a great movie at the end of the day, and it's action movie, and it's what I expect from a movie.

[00:53:08] So, do more movies, forget about reality, right? Yeah. Yeah. And try to make them look as real as one can.

[00:53:16] Barna: Independence Day had this really interesting scene in it where I thought it's almost meta here, commenting on how you have the ideas of science fiction and conspiracy theories in entertainment going and seeping into the culture, and then the culture in turn going and, and impacting entertainment where that that's how they they get the the edge to beat back the aliens because Area 51 is real.

[00:53:43] But there's a scene where this old man tells the president that, "Oh, Mr. President why don't we just go to Area 51 where they have the crashed UFO, and then we can take them on and fight them?" And then the president himself says that "No, that's not true. Despite what you might have read in the in the tabloids, that's not real."

[00:54:03] And then his chief of staff says, "Oh, Mr. President, actually." And so yeah, they're beating the beating off the alien. It comes down to using the technology from this conspiracy theory that everybody knows by now. And funny enough, the president himself is not is not aware of it.

[00:54:24] And but it's just completely permeated the culture and tabloids and TV entertainment of all types. So that's, that's I got a really good chuckle from that scene.

[00:54:34] Kevin: I wanna relay a different scene from a different movie Because it plays on that theme, and I just thought it was funny.

[00:54:39] So the movie is Fly Me to the Moon with Scarlett Johansson, and they put together this elaborate plot is not really the right word, but in case the first moon landing of Apollo 11 fails, they wanna have a backup. So they're shooting a fake moon landing in a hangar just to have as a backup in case the real one doesn't go well.

[00:55:00] And there's this one scene where someone says, "And the president signed off on this?" And the guy says, "Well, if he knew about it, I'm sure he would."

[00:55:08] Barna: Right. I haven't seen that one, but it's, it's on the to-be-watched list.

[00:55:14] Kevin: Oh, it's just a cute movie. ... It's just a movie, right? But it's pretty cute, right?

[00:55:18] Barna: Sure, sure.

[00:55:19] Kevin: And that was just a great little, idea that, like, there are things we don't tell the president.

[00:55:25] Barna: Oh, yeah.

[00:55:25] Emanuel: Which he should, right? Because president is there hopefully to mandate. You would think that.

[00:55:30] Barna: Think probably why Obama and Bush got the questions because we just assume, I mean, he's the top guy that, that, that would be, like, the biggest secret. If the president can't find out, then who can?

[00:55:41] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:55:42] Emanuel: That being said, Professor Donovan, Dr. Donovan, or Barna as we refer to in North America if people want to connect with you, learn more about you, learn more about your work, your activities, what's the best place they can find that out? Have a website or your LinkedIn or ...

[00:56:00] Barna: Sure. All of those. I have a website, barnadonovan.com. Also, I have a blog barnadonovan.blogspot.com, also on Facebook, on X, on, oh my God, Instagram, which I haven't used in the longest time. But they have also links to to my email, [email protected].

[00:56:21] So yes, if they wanna they want to get in touch, if they had an abduction experience, I would point them in the direction of the Mutual UFO Network. and they would be able to do a better job helping them than I would. But if you're interested in my other work, the books that I had written, both fiction and nonfiction and film as well, so I can be found.

[00:56:45] Emanuel: The website, barnadonovan.com.

[00:56:47] We'll make sure to put links in the, description- For the benefit of our listeners ... on YouTube, everywhere else. That being said, thank you so much for agreeing to be part of this episode. Again, we hope we find we have you again as a guest in a future episode as well. My name is Emanuel. I'm the co-host of the Curious Pundits podcast.

[00:57:06] Kevin: My name is Kevin. I'm the other co-host.

[00:57:09] Emanuel: You can find us at curiouspundits.com. That's where you'll find links to all of our episodes. Leave us a review, hopefully a positive one. If you disagree with what we said or our guest said, let us know.

[00:57:21] That said, until the next episode.

[00:57:24] Kevin: Thank you for listening.