This is a commercial, free archive edition of our live radio show that airs
every Friday at noon, Arizona time on openminds dot TV. Welcome to open
Minds Radio with your host Alejandro Rojas, former official spokesperson from the Mutual UFO
Network. Alejandro who's been a UFO paranormal researcher and journalists for nearly a decade
and has logged hours in the field investigating the paranormal up close and personal,
and now Open Minds Radio presents evidence in the latest news regarding the UFO phenomenon.
Here's your host, Alejandro Rojas. Hello and welcome to Open Minds Radio,
where we're bringing the UFO subject into the light of day. This is
Alejandro Rojas and we have another spectacular show today. I always get so excited
to speak to you people. Today we have who we were supposed to have
last week, doctor Paul Davies. Unfortunately we had a phone issue last week
and luckily he was able to reschedule. But still a lot of people appreciated
hearing me and Jason go over the news for the show. And there's always
so much interesting stuff to talk about in this field, and today we're going
to be talking about a lot of really cool stuff with a skeptic. Yes,
mister Paul Davies is a skeptic when it comes to UFOs and possible extraterrestrial
presence here on Earth. However, because of him, this subject has been
in the news a lot. Paul Davies has a new book coming out that's
called The Eerie Science Silence. It's kind of about SETI and what they're doing
to look into UFOs and extraterrestrials. And he also spoke at the Vatican Reads
recently and the Royal Society's Conference on Astrobiology, all of which has been getting
a lot of news across mainstream media. So all about extraterrestrials. Here's his
bio, which is really interesting. Paul Davies is a British born theoretical physicist.
He's a cosmologist, astrobiologist, and best selling author. He is the
director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and co director of the
Cosmology Initiative at Arizona State University. Although he's all over the world talking on
these subjects, as I mentioned, he spoke at the Vatican and this was
at the Pontifical Academy for Science, his study week on astrobiology, and at
the Vatican the Royal Society's recent conference on astrobiology, and it had kind of
a cool name. It was called the Detection of Extraterrestrial Life and the Consequences
for Science and Society, So that title. It's just kind of cool to
have some major organization out in the UK, some stuffy scientist organization talking about
this stuff. So we're gonna be talking to doctor Davies about all of this
and more. Of course, we talked a lot about how Hillary Clinton was
holding doctor Davies's book when she was meeting with Lawrence Rockefeller, who was trying
to get the Clinton administration to release information on UFOs, So we'll talk about
that as well. Exciting breakthrough when we finally figured out what the book was
that she was holding in their meeting. Otherwise, a little bit of business
before we get into the news. Our magazine, Open Mind Magazine is in
the stores. I've been telling you people that it's been in every store.
But you know, we've got this girl who works with us, Maureene,
who's always got to burst our bubble. Thanks Maureene, just kidding. She's
she's actually there's a lot of cool stuff for us. Now she's back there
just berating me in the corner, but luckily you can't hear her. But
actually, we're not in every bookstore for the first run, but we will
be for the second. So it's only select Barnes and Nobles and Borders book
starters out there that you can get it. But you can always go to
Openminds dot tv and order it. You've got very friendly service and there's lots
of cool stuff to see there on the website while you're ordering. However,
this next edition which is coming out June first, which it has a lot
of Vatican stories in it, including a story from the Jesuits ex lawyer.
I forget exactly what his title was, but essentially someone who worked for the
Jesuits to story on the Vatican and ets and UFOs and all that cool stuff.
So the next magazine will be out soon June first, and all the
stories. We've gotten a lot of great feedback on the magazine. Also local
and if you want to fly out here to Scottsdale, Arizona, you can
come and meet the editors of Open Minds Magazine, which includes myself, and
we'll be talking about our stories at vision Quest Metaphysical Bookstore. That will be
April thirtieth at seven pm and they are at two two two five North Scottsdale
Road, so that will be a lot of fun. And then finally join
us in Roswell and we'll have a lot more information on that coming up July
fourth and Roswell, come and see the fireworks. Hopefully we won't accidentally cause
another UFO crash with the fireworks out there. But Roswell has a big festival
on the fourth of July weekend to commemorate the alleged crash of the UFO back
in nineteen forty seven. So that'll be a lot of fun and we'll be
there. But before we get to our guests, let's get into UFOs.
In the news, and of course, as always we have our news correspondent
Jason McClelland Jason tell us all about the good afternoon Alejandro, Hello Phoenix,
and Hello world. This is your Open Mind's News Brief for Friday, April
twenty third, twenty ten. In the News this week, NASA's planet hunting
probe, known as Kepler, may have found four hundred Earth life planets,
but don't expect NASA to share any details for a while. NASA has procedures
in place for sharing research data, but details related to the four hundred objects
of interest, as they've been called, were sealed from the public by a
NASA panel until at least February twenty eleven. The panel cited a need to
study the planets more closely as their reason for stealing the information. Yeah,
kind of weird. I mean, they've been looking for extra solar planets and
those that possibly have life for a long time and it's been all supposedly being
shown to the public. Why all of a sudden did they say they've got
to keep this seth secret? Very strange. It is strange, And they
didn't give an answer as to why, right I said, we're doing it.
They just wanted to do it. They think they need more time.
But it's interesting because they don't usually do that. Yeah, but if any
NASA officials are listening and they do find something really cool about these planets,
February twenty eleven is when they say they're going to release the data, and
that's perfect time for our international UFO Congress. Yeah, exactly, so hopefully,
and if they wanted to and we should give them this offer. They
can come down to the UFO Congress and release their information there. We can
certainly make that happen, right absolutely. In other science news, Gary Rufkin,
a professor of genetics at Harvard University, has developed a microfluidics chip that
could be used in the future to shift Martian soil for alien DNA. The
chip would be installed on a soil collecting rover vehicle and would cause any microscopic
life within the Martian dust to release its genetic material. Chemicals in the chip
would then amplify the DNA and label it with fluorescent dyes. Ruffcan estimates his
team as only three percent complete with designing a workable Martian DNA sequencing machine,
but still though it is pretty cool. Yeah cool, you know, put
that baby in a rover and be interesting to see what they find. On
TV this week, the History Channel is running a series entitled Ancient Aliens.
The series explores the evidence of ancient aliens and looks at the ancient alien theory,
a notion fathered by Swiss author Eric Vondanikin. According to the theory,
space travelers visited Earth thousands of years ago, and they talked humans about technology
and influenced ancient religions. Ancient Aliens airs Tuesdays at seven pm, Arizona Time
on the History Channel, and I believe they air reruns on Saturday nights,
so check your local listings. Also in the news, our guests today,
Paul Davies. His new book, The Eerie Silence, Renewing Our Search for
Alien Intelligence, was reviewed in The New York Times this week, adding to
the tremendous amount of mainstream press Professor Davies has already received during the past couple
of months. Yeah, he's gotten just megapress all over the place. I'm
excited to have him on the show today. I know, meet Tim.
That's it from the news. Remember to check out these stories and more.
TV your source for UFO related news. I'm your Open Mindes News correspondent Jason
McClellan. And you've been briefed back to you, Alejandro. Alright. Yes,
when we get Paul Davies on in just a few minutes here, after
our next commercial break, which is coming up in a few seconds, we
will be talking about SETI. He used to be a backer of this group,
and we'll talk more about who and what they are. If you're not
familiar, but he says there's probably better ways to do what they're doing,
which, of course we felt all the time. We'll be talking about the
Vatican and Hillary Clinton with Paul Davies when he comes back after this break.
Hello, and welcome back to Open Minds Radio. This your host Alejandro Rojas,
and we've got a little bit of a delay with Paul Davies getting online.
He'll be here very soon. But one thing I wanted to mention about
him, which is kind of cool, and maybe Jason, if you can
share your comments as well, But this is a guy who has an asteroid
named after him. In nineteen ninety two, officially OG six eight seven oh
I think is the name of the asteroid was renamed Paul Davies in his honor.
How cool is that? I did not know that. That's pretty cool.
Yeah. One of the things I want to talk to him about also
is which is interesting that he spoke at the Vatican because he talked about Christianity
having the biggest issue. And what's interesting is this is just prior to the
Vatican having their astrobiology conference, so I'm wondering if it has something to do
with them doing this, but that Christianity, out of all the religions,
really has kind of the hardest problem philosophically with the idea give extraterrestrial intelligence,
and mainly because like Heath hawks about is a second genesis, that this idea
that when Jesus died, he died to save humankind. So if there are
others out there, did he die for them as well? Did he go
talk with them? Did he reincarnate? But really Christianity doesn't allow for the
idea of reincarnation, So a lot of issues there that they're looking into.
The series that's running on the History Channel right now, The Ancient Aliens,
also dives into ancient religions and a lot of what Eric Mondanakin talks about is
religion and aliens playing into that. Yeah, one of the things that I
think is really interesting is that there are a lot of ancient religion and cultures,
or at least you know, a lot of cultures don't have that whole
concept of religion, but it's more of philosophy or origin stories where they came
from, and a lot of them refer to origin stories where they come from
the stars. But it looks like we do have doctor Davies on the line,
so let's bring him up with Hello, doctor Davies. Are you there,
Yes, Hello, Stories of the technical hiccup. Oh, no problem.
We had a bigger technical hiccup last week, so at least we got
you on. Thank goodness, it's wonderful to hear from you, and thank
you so much for coming on the show. It's a pleasure. But I
guess let's start off. We'll start up, you know, the show.
We had sent you some information about Hillary Clinton and your book. We'll get
into that later on, and also the Vatican, but I really want to
start off with your new book, The Eerie Silence, and some of what
you're going into there. And really you're talking about the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
SETI, which I know you had some involvement with in the past, and
how there may be better ways to be looking for intelligent life other than the
radio signal way that they're using. Yes, it's fifty years ago this month
that Frank Drake, a then little known American astronomer, decided to start sweeping
the skies with a radio telescope in the hope of stumbling across a message from
ET. And this is known as SETI the search for rex of terrestrial intelligence.
It's got nothing to do with UFOs or anything of that sort. Sothority
scientific search have now involves a scientists in many countries, and it seemed to
me that after fifty years of receiving nothing but an eerie silence, maybe the
time had come to take stop and ask whether we can improve on what they've
been doing, maybe search for ET in other ways and not just leave it
to a small band of radio astronomers. So my book The Eerie Silence is
both a celebration of their heroic effort, but also opportunity to inject some new
thinking into this field. And what are some of these methods that you think
they can improve upon in their search. A lot of people, I think
are familiar with this subject through the movie Contact, which was based on a
novel by Carl Sagan, and that supposes that there is an alien community somewhere
out there that's deliberately beaming messages at us. And the problem with that is
that the nearest such community, even if you ask a wild optimist, is
likely to be hundreds of light years away, let's say a thousand to take
a round figure. Because nothing travels faster than light. Anybody living a thousand
light years away is going to see Earth as it was a thousand years ago,
and there were no radio telescopes on Earth at that time, so there's
no reason that they should be sending messages directly at us, and so looking
for those sorts of messages I think is pretty helpless. But instead we could
look for beacons, for example. But imagine being a lighthouse keeper. You're
sending out a beam of light sweeping around in all directions. You don't expect
to get a reply. It's a one way type of thing. It's a
beacon that just says hello, or avoid displaced, or comes to this place.
We should look for radio beacons in the galaxy that some avanced civilization may
have set up a long time ago. Maybe this is now long vanished civilization
left as a monument or something. But that requires a rather different type of
technique from what the set of astronomers are using at the moment. So it's
just one way that we might extend the search. There are many other ways
suggested in the book as well. Right, some people suggest that there are
some dangers around that. In fact, I was watching a television show recently
where this scientists figured out how to send out signals and he was really excited
and he was telling everybody, Hey, I'm sending out a greeting to aliens
and extraterrestrials out there. And the next scene there's this civilization that said,
we're getting a signal from this planet out here, and they say, okay,
let's go concer it and steal their resources kind of. And some of
the people say, there is maybe a danger to sending out these signals.
Do you believe in that? No, I don't. I don't for one
moment. And there are two things I should say. One is that the
SETI program doesn't send signals. He just listens. But a few people have
sent signals. I was involved myself in a sort of gimmick of that sort
recently. There's no danger at all, because you said it yourself that maybe
they'll come here for our resources, but they would already know about our resources.
They don't ask to tell them. In other words, if that advance,
they will have been observing Earth. What you have to understand in this
game is that Earth is four and a half billion years old. There were
stars and planets around billions of years before Earth even existed. So if there
are alien civilizations popping up all the time around the galaxy, some of those
will have been around for an immense period of time. And we're not just
talking thousands of years. They're looking ten million, one hundred million, a
billion years, and so during that time, there's been plenty of time for
them to come and take Earth if they wanted it. This was an argument
used long ago by the famous physicist inn Rico Fermi. It's often called the
Fermi paradox. Where is everybody? He said, he realized that the aliens
had plenty of time to come here is that's what they wanted to do,
and so they don't need us to tell them. There's no particular reason they
should come here now just because we're here, when they could have come at
any time in the past. Hummans have only been around in a communicative phase
for a very short period of time. You just mentioned how you were involved
with a project with sending out messages and that did get a lot of press.
It seems like a lot of what you're doing is getting a lot of
press. What were the sort of messages? And I saw these new stories
and they were kind of titled the guy Who's going to speak to Et?
Where are the nature of the messages that you sent out? These were just
from young people. We did a Twitter campaign that we said as part of
when I was launching my book in the UK, it was UK Science Week
and so just to get young people interested in science, we invited them to
submit messages and then we picked the best of the bunch. And these were
really just, you know, homespun philosophy. There wasn't anything terribly profound,
and it wasn't intended as a serious attempt because we have no idea where to
point the telescope. We don't know where any extraterrestrial civilization might be. Now
the rules of the game were changed dramatically because we picked up a signal.
If we find that there is a transmitting source at a particular place in the
galaxy, then that's different. Then we have to be very very careful.
And I think I chair something called the SETI Post Detection Task Group, And
with our job, who think ahead? What happens to ET calls on my
watch? What do we do next? And one of the things we don't
do next is tell everybody where in the sky this source is so any crack
pop can command a radio telescope and start blasting away with their own Hence bun
philosophy, setting themselves up as a spokesperson of mankind before we've had a chance
to properly evaluate what we're dealing with. And so that's one thing I think
we're all agreed on. So have you discussed and philosophized on what type of
messages you would send to such a group? Yes, And in my book
I go into this in quite some detail because the way we should look at
this is what I often say to my students. Imagine that Earth was going
to be wiped out in ten years, and you have an opportunity to leave
a message for posterity, Say something about ourselves, our culture, about our
species. What is the thing we most cherish, what is most important?
Surely not our physical form, surely not our sports or politics. What are
the things that we feel are our greatest achievements. Now many people would think,
you know, the great works of art or literature, But the problem
there is that these are hard for people to understand, even from our other
cultures and other species. So we're dealing with beings who've evolved completely separately from
life on Earth and whose brains are wired in totally different ways. There are
going to appreciate our art on music. But there's one thing that we do
have in common, and that is mathematics. Mathematics is universal. The statement
eleven is a prime number is true whether you're here or on Olpha Centaury.
So mathematics is a common currency, a common language, and so of the
laws of physics. Him that if out there is some you know, wonderful
transmitter that they've got technology, they understand basic physics, and the laws of
physics are of course mathematical relationships. So here we have something we've got in
common. We can certainly communicates our level of understanding of mathematical physics. Right,
And so that may sound a bit dull to the average list murder,
right, but it sounds exciting to me. But at least they would they
would think, oh, yeah, they've got as far as you know Einstein's
equations. Well, I want to put you out on one for just a
second. We've got to break to go to But we'll talk more about this
and messages to extraterrestrials when we come back with doctor Paul Davies on Open mind
Radio. This is Open Minds Radio here again your host UFO paranormal researcher and
journalist Alejandro Rojas. Welcome back to your Open Minds Radio. We are here
with doctor Paul Davies talking about some really cool stuff. We're talking about sending
messages to extraterrestrials. And before the break, doctor Davies, you were talking
about sending messages in kind of our common language, which would be math and
physics. So what kind of messages would you send and would it be in
hopes to show them that we have an understanding of this common language. Yes,
my feeling is that we should send stuff that from mathematical physics that we're
very confident about. That is not you know, this year's favor of the
Month theory, that we should, for example, send the equation equals mc
squared. I think it's one that you know, we're pretty confident of simple
equation. Now, of course, we have to define what the terms mean,
and so there are other things that we could send. I don't want
to get too technical here, but there are certain pure numbers which don't have
any units attached and you don't need to define them, which would be recognized
by any civilization that had got to meet moderate understanding of physics, and so
these are pure numbers, would show that we have reached a certain level of
development, that we understand quantum physics and atomic physics and so on, and
so I would start by sending those numbers. Now, what you have to
understand here is that this isn't a lively two way conversation that's going to take
place. Supposing this civilization is a thousand night years away, it's going to
take a thousand years for our messages to reach them and a thousand years for
them to reply. So it's not a question of let's sit down and over
the next few days educate each other into the way we think and learn each
other's language, and then we can have a deeper conversation about other things that
we care about, like patriotism or religion or something. You know that's never
going to happen. The only way that would ever happen is if there is
some sort of alien probe in the solar system, maybe it's been sitting here
for one hundred within years or something dormant, and then the speed of light
issue goes away, because this probe might only be a few light minutes from
us, and then it would be possible to have a conversation with the computer
on this probe. And that's what that would lead me to a question kind
of A lot of the SETI folks feel that it would be impossible to break
the speed of light or for something to travel physically those great distances in a
short amount of time. Do you feel right like that as well? In
this game, you have to take the very best understanding of science, and
our best understanding is that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit,
and that whatever we discover in the future, that isn't going to change.
However, as a scientist, I've learned never to use the word impossible,
because of course we have no idea whether some dramatic change in our understanding may
come along in a few years time. So would be very foolish to say
that the last word has been said the nature of space and time. But
if we take the attitude, well, we can break all the rules of
science, we can throw away the textbooks. Then we just get into idle
speculation. It then becomes fairy stories where SETI tries to do science. So,
in other words, why do we even think that there should be intelligent
life out there in the first place. Well, that's based on our understanding
of biology. So we can't cherry pick the things we like, namely the
biology, and thry out the things we don't like, namely the physics.
So either we're going to be scientific about this and we take the best science
to the best of our understanding and follow through its consequences consistently, or we
just throw all of the science out of the window and we just tell each
other stories. But then that's pretty valueless, I think, right. And
that sort of brings me to our next area of subject, which is the
Vatican and their recent interest in astrobiology. And I've read some of your stories
about some of the philosophical issues that their religion the document would have with the
idea of extraterrestrial life. Why do you think they have such a new renewed
interest in this subject. As a matter of fact, I'm lecturing about this
in Berkeley this evening, and the subject DearS in my heart. So the
first thing to point out is, yes, the Vatican recently had an astrobiology
meeting. I was there. It was last November. It was a straightforward
scientific meeting. There was no discussion of theology, although it was convened by
the head of the Vatican Observatory, and as you probably know, the Vatican
Observatory is located in Arizona, so in a way this is a local story.
But the headquarter quarters are in Castel Gondolfo just outside Rome, and the
Vatican Academy of Scientists, which is located in the main Vatican territory, as
one of the oldest scientific academies in the world, where the meeting took place,
and so there's nothing particularly unusual about the fact that they're holding scientific meetings.
For example, the one they did before astrobiology meeting was about genetically modified
food. So the function of the Vatican Academy of Sciences, it is made
up of non religious people as well as Catholics, is to inform the Catholic
Church on scientific matters about which it might need to make policy decisions. So
you see, it's all pretty straightforward. What I don't see in the Catholic
Church, somewhat disappointingly, is an interest in the deep theological implications of et.
For hundreds of years, there was a very lively debate in the Church
about what to do about sentium beings on other planets. And the problem is
this. It's not a problem for other religions, by the way, it's
not a problem for Muslims or Jews or Buddhists. The real problem for Christians
in the following sense. Christians believe that God became incarnate in the figure of
a human being, namely Jesus Christ, in order to save a particular species,
namely humans. So Christians don't believe that Jesus Christ came to save the
chimpanzees or the whales, or the dolphins, or for that matter, the
Neanderthals, who were part of the border family of Homo, but weren't the
same species as us homosapiens. And then you see the difficulty is that if
there are advanced aalium beings who are ahead of us, not just scientifically and
technologically, but maybe ethically as well, in some spiritual sense, are more
like saintly beings than we are, are they not to be saved as well?
And so there was this long debate in the church between those who wanted
multiple incarnations. As a priest a friend of mine said, God taking on
different green flesh to save little green men, and those who think that there's
a deep heresy that there was the incarnation as unique it happened only one species,
one planet, in which case the problem is what does salvation mean for
beings beyond the earth. The Church got itself in a frightful model on this,
and you'll see all sorts of statements by theologians and religious scientists over the
centuries, and then it all went quiet about fifty years ago. And I
think it's done the too halt basket. I'd try to kick it out of
a too heart basket. I think the Church needs to face up to this
and face up to it squarely. Well. Last year, and you're probably
aware of this as well, the gentleman who runs the Vatican Observatory, Father
Funez, he did come out with something that he wrote in the Vatican Journal
that made a lot of news about our space brothers and extraterrestrials and it's okay
to believe in them, and we don't have to be fearful. And he
did skirt the issue that you're speaking of now. But I did notice at
least some papers and some kind of rebirth of that debate a little bit after
he made that mention, right, and he was the one who convened the
meeting in the Vatican, and as I said, we didn't get into the
theological stuff. In my book I quote his memorable phrase, the extraterrestrial is
my brother. But I you know, I have to say that he did
scare the issue. And his predecessor, father George Kaine, an old friend
of mine and a wonderful astrobiologist and astronomer, I think it was a little
bit more upfront. In fact, I can actually quote what he's written on
this if we've just got a moment. He said, God chose a very
specific way to redeem human beings. He sent his only son, Jesus to
them, and Jesus gave up his life so that human beings would be saved
from their sin. Okay, that's standard. Did God do this for extraterrestrials.
Theologians must accept the serious responsibility to rethink some fundamental realities within the context
of religious belief. What is a human being? Jesus Christ fully a human
being exists on more than one planet at more than one time. So he's
raising the question in a very up from way because he's not providing us with
an answer. Right, we do have this he's compromsing it great. Yeah,
we do have to take a small break right now, and then we'll
come back to talk more about this really interesting and we do have a chat
that goes on where we've got a couple of questions there too for you.
So we'll be right back with open Minds Radio. We are with doctor Paul
Davies. Stay tuned, Welcome back to open Minds Radio. Here now former
official spokesperson for the Mutual UFO Network, your host of Open Minds Radio,
Alejandro Rojas, Welcome back. This is a Lejandro Rojas. You're listening to
open Minds Radio and we have doctor Paul Davis on and what a great talk.
This is a lot of fun and I want to let everybody know you
can get his new book and his other books and see what he's up to
at Cosmos dot a, s U dot ed u. The new book,
I want to remind you is The Eerie Silence and his website is Cosmos dot
A, s U dot edu. So, doctor Davis, I had to
cut you off when you were talking about that quote, But did you get
that you know that fully out? I did, Yes, I got to
the end of the quote first. So I'm simply saying that there are a
handful of Christian theologians who these days are prepared to face squarely the dilemma of
extraterrestrial being the problem the problem of the incarnation, which, as I remarked,
is not a problem for other religions. I think, yeah, And
that's why I loved reading about what you had to say about all of that
in the past, because I knew there were issues. I grew up as
a Roman Catholic, and I knew those philosophies, and I hear those things
here and there. You know, even within our community, people debating the
philosophies behind that. So and it does seem like something that at some point
they're going to really need to tackle base on, and at least they're kind
of touching upon it. Yes, I think my attitude is that if you
think about all the Valley who over Darwin's theory of evolution, well they've had
a few decades that sort of come to terms with that. But if we
were to get suddenly evidence, incontrovertible evidence that we're not alone in the universe,
this could be very sudden and very destabilizing. And so for those people
who care about the future of the Christian religion does have a prepared position of
these in cases should happen now, someone asked in the Chat, and I
guess I can preface this with a story from the Royal Society Astrobiological Conference,
which I know you attended as well, Nick, that one too. Yes,
a friend of ours, Nick Pope, who worked for the mob investigating
UFOs, was also there and he found it interesting that at lunch, and
you know, on off time, a lot of these scientists really were into
speculating about all the passibilities of what may be going on right now related to
his work. And he found that really fun, and he was surprised how
open a lot of these scientists were. Someone in the chat was asking,
did you find that same type of atmosphere at the Vatican's conference? Well,
the Vatican conference was a closed conference just for astrobiologists, and I wanted to
say right it outside that astrobiology is almost all not about looking for intelligent dadias.
It's about whether there's microbial life or maths for example. So it's almost
all trying to understand the origin of life on Earth. It's astronomical environment,
organic molecules in space, those sorts of straightforward technical things, and there was
only a small components about SETI. The Conference of the Royal Society was a
public conference. There was an audience and so it was not a not a
closed meeting, and so for that reason there was a lot more widely varying
discussion. So I think it was these raw, different sorts of meetings,
right. So you didn't find that sort of behind the scenes type of conversation
at the Vatican. No, we had just ordinary scientific sessions and you know,
lunches and dinners and so on. We didn't need to talk behind the
scenes because we could talk openly at the meeting itself. There really wasn't an
issue. So that's what's great. That's what I love about your work is
that you get more into philosophying around some of these concepts, such as what
will it mean if we discover extra trestrall ha been even going further into the
possibility of intelligent extra trestural. Absolutely, that's what interests me, who always
has I might say I've had an interest in searching for extra tress in intelligence
ever since Frank Drake started it in nineteen sixty, So you know, I've
been in the game for a long time, and I've been closely associated with
the SETI program and have written about this and have held workshops at Arizona State
University on this topic. And so you know, I feel I'm a whirl
wisher an occasional contributor to the subject. Right, So did Drake. It
was his work that really sparked your interest. Well, Frank Drake was the
pioneer who began this in nineteen sixty and I might say Fank is still in
the game. I saw him recently at the London meeting. We went out
to dinner together. I dedicated my book to him. It says something about
the extraordinary vision of the man that after fifty years of searching the skies hoping
to pick up a message from ET and getting only an eerie silence, he's
never the less upbeat about the prospects for the SETI program. So he's a
bit of a hero of mine. But the thrust of the book is,
alongside doing traditional SETI looking for so called narrowband signals coming from specific sources in
the sky, we should be greatly broadening the search, and earlier I talked
about looking for beacons, but we could look for other things as well,
signs of large scale astro engineering or only sort of anomaly in astronomy that might
stand out and might suggest that it is the footprint of alien technology. We
then have to pick up a message to answer the question are we alone in
the universe. We merely have to see that there's somebody out there doing something.
We might not know what they're doing, but it has to be some
evidence of some technology at work, and then we could proclaim that, you
know, over there the particular style, in a particular direction, there is
the footprints of advanced technology. Now, someone who felt that there was already
discovery of the footprint of advanced technology was Lawrence Rockefeller, when he was trying
to with his initiative get the Clintons really into the subject and looking into secret
documents and things like that. And we were excited to find in some pictures
because we thought in this visit that the Clinton's made to one of Rockefeller's ranch,
that they were discussing this topic. And then we found some more evidence
of that when in some of these pictures, Hillary Clinton is holding one of
your books, the book that's correct, Yes, a book Kawi alone,
which I wrote back in the early nineties. It was based on some lectures
I gave in its and my first skirmish with this particular topic. And it
does appear that she's carrying a copy of that book. Correct. Were you
aware that the Clintons were aware of your work? No, it was news
to me when somebody sent me a copy of that picture. I haven't had
an opportunity to discuss it with Hillary Clinton or anybody else. I have had
some exchanges with Lawrence Rockefeller, but not in recent years. Oh great,
And was he inquiring just kind of wanting to know about some of your ideas.
Yes, that's right. He was just invited me to come and sit
down and talk about them. But I haven't had that opportunity, I'm afraid.
Yeah, it seems like that would have been You would have been the
type of person that he would want to include in a think tank over you
know, the implications should he prove what he believed to be true? Yes,
I'm the person. I don't deny it. Of course, I'm involved
in many research projects, many the big questions. In fact, the center
Iran at Arizona State University called the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts and Science,
has his motto confronting the big Question. So we deal with not just intelligent
life and space, but we deal with the origin of the universe and the
origin of life, and the destiny of mankind, and time travel and space
travel, and you know, a whole bunch of fun stuff. I like
to say to people, we research all those things that people love to discuss
at dinn about it, right, all the fun staff And speaking of someone
who does the research on this fun stuff, Grant Cameron, who runs PRESIDENTIALUFO
dot com. He actually has a tight relationship with the Clinton Library, and
he sent this information to the Clinton Library secretary he works with, and she
sent it, I guess through a lot of Hillary Clinton's staff. So at
least there's some discussion there. So hopefully you'll hear from Hillary when she's got
some time. Well, that's right, it's Hillary knows my email address.
Then there's not the slightest problem I look forward to. Yeah, So when
it comes to these ideas of the possibility that there is some evidence that we
have intelligent extraterrestrial contact going on right now, how do you feel about some
of that evidence that you've seen? Well, what I've done in the book
is look at it to deal with it very carefully. I think a lot
of times it's just dismissive about the whole UFO scene. And I said earlier
that SETI Signs has distanced themselves from it. Well, I knew Alan Heinek,
who was head of the Chief Scientific Advisor the US Air Force Project Blue
Book. I visited him at his home. I looked through many of his
reports. We discussed on a number of occasions what was behind these various stories.
And he was the one who coined the term close encounters of the fair
kind, right. And I investigated some reports in Britain, where I was
living at the time, and I think I managed to explain some of them,
and I took a great deal of interest in it. And so I
deal with that in the book and I explain why I think this is a
different set of problems. Right. Unlike many people, I'm not dismissive about
people who make who file these reports. I don't think they just you know,
crackpots and wives. I think they have genuine experiences, right. And
then people are going to have to read your book to get more information on
that because we are out of time. So thank you so much for being
on the show. This is really informational, a lot of fun for me.
Next week we've got Robert salaz On who was at an Air Force base
when nuclear missiles were shut down, when UFOs were seen over the base,
so it's going to be a great show. Join us next week, and
thanks for listening to Open Minds Radio. Keep forget it smooth so much you
was was your feet, the cracks and clas