Speaker 1: The Thinking Atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists in this country is going through the.
Speaker 1: Rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I
tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth, not because.
Speaker 2: I put my hand on a book and made a.
Speaker 1: Wish and working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 3: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness.
Truth Usian wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 3: Given that everybody's talking about this story, it was too
good and oppertunity to pass up, so I wanted to
spend about twenty minutes on the drone sightings. There is
video of this conversation. That link is in the description
box of this podcast. We've all been talking about this
flurry of reports around New Jersey and surrounding states. People
are reporting lights in the sky, suspicious drones are flying
over homes and businesses, communities, government offices. What's going on?
Is this some kind of conspiracy? And it's not just
the conspiracy theorists. Everyday people walking around coming up with
some sort of a paranoid speculation about what's happening. The
politicians have jumped on board. I noticed that the mayor
of Montvale, New Jersey, he said he saw some drones
that were flying in sync with each other and he
found it very alarming privacy and security concern. Our paramount
New York Senator Chuck Schumer came forward and he suggested
using high tech drone hunters to get to the bottom
of all of this, And of course Donald Trump had
to get a few words in about I mean it,
really it was a dig at the current administration about
this whole drone debacle.
Speaker 1: And I think they'd be better of saying what it is.
Our military knows and our president knows, and for some
reason they want to keep people in suspense.
Speaker 3: On top of that, we've got mental health experts saying
this is just another mass panic, which is something that
human beings love to do. Right. Brian Dunning, my special guest.
You are the producer of a documentary called The UFO
Movie They Don't Want You to See. You're also well
known as host of the Skeptoid podcasted. You've written a
book called Conspiracies Declassified. Do you get into like UFOs
in that book.
Speaker 2: Not so much that one we do like the nine
to eleven conspiracy. The book came out just as the
whole UAP thing and the congressional hearings were just getting started,
So it wasn't the pop culture phenomenon yet that it
is now.
Speaker 3: The Department of Defense thing right where everybody was like
their declassifying video footage and now the truth shall be known,
and the truth was what nothing?
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, it's just been this relatively small group of
really obsessed, lifelong UFO believers and professionals and authors who
have been incredibly successful at getting the media to sort
of promote their narrative that UFOs are some sort of
interdimensional spiritual beings and it's all wrapped in with life
after death, and it's very strange beliefs that these people have,
but they've been very successful getting congress people on board
and getting these hearings to be run over and over again.
It's fascinating how much it's permeated pop culture in just
a few years.
Speaker 3: This is just another iteration of that. I mean, I've
seen that the footage I see lights points in the sky.
These are the same point in the sky that were
there six months ago, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But that's the way the social contagion works is
when you know, you can see ordinary things all day long.
You live near LaGuardia Airport, you see planes coming in
all day long, and so you don't pay attention to them.
And then suddenly when you hear that everyone is seeing, Hey,
there's drones over LaGuardia. Then you do look and you
do pay attention. You say, oh, there's like a whole long,
of long line of lights appearing to be in formation. Well, yeah,
that's the way that airplanes approach an airport. And suddenly
you have this social contagion. Everyone hears it and suddenly
they attribute everything they see to this new phenomenon.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I'll play Devil's advocate. Why now, I
mean someone seeing something? Are there maybe pranksters who were
throwing some extra drones up there to try to stir
the pots and get it?
Speaker 2: Not necessarily, possibly, but not necessarily. All it takes is
for one person to misinterpret anything, whether they correctly interpreted
a real drone. I mean there's you know, the toy
Dji drones are everywhere, so it's entirely possible, or it
could have just been someone seen an airplane. Just about
two weeks ago, I was on some Japanese TV show
that had a video somebody took very obviously of an
airplane on its final approach. You could see all of
its navigation lights and everything. And this had gone viral
in Japan that everyone was thinking this was some kind
of a UFO, and I had to go on and explain, no,
look here, we can tell it's an airplane because of this, this, this,
and this, so it doesn't have to be a drone
or anything unusual to get one of these rages started.
That's what happened in Japan. That's what's happening right now
in New Jersey.
Speaker 3: There is one photograph and I was looking really closely
at it and I'm thinking this obviously helicopter. Everybody screaming drowned.
I think the caption on the news photo said suspected
drone unidentified flying object, and I'm looking at it, going,
that's a chopper. It's a freaking helicopter.
Speaker 2: Who suspects that? One question the Japanese producer, who was
very much a believer that this was something mysterious. One
question he asked me was, how did you come to
the conclusion that it was an airplane. It's like, that's
the starting assumption. That's not the conclusion you eventually reach
when you see an airplane doing a normal airplane thing,
in a normal airplane approach pattern. It's an airplane. There's
no reason to think otherwise. And he couldn't get around.
Why didn't you first assume that this was an alien
spaceship or something else extraordinary. It's just this backwards thinking
process is like that.
Speaker 3: Fox Mulder poster that says, I want to believe did
you share it or maybe I tagged you in it?
It was as a drone identification poster and it showed
every known aircraft, everything from a seven thirty seven, you know,
to a single engine Sesna and it just is drone drone.
Have you seen that thing?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I did, like labeled Aircraft Identification Guide drone drun.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, you know I've played the Trump clip about
him saying, well, this current administration has been awfully slow
in saying something about this, you know, So the implication
is they've dropped the ball. They're either incompetent or they're
hiding something. How would you respond to that?
Speaker 2: It's very difficult to respond to just baseless conspiracy theories.
There's simply no evidence of that. First, we know there's
nothing extraordinary. Well, we don't know there's nothing extraordinary. We
have no evidence that there is anything extraordinary, So there's
nothing for anyone to be covering up. But I mean,
Roseanne Barr is saying this is part of a project Bluebeam.
Have you heard about this Project blue Bean? This is
a new thing that some of the conspiracy crowd is.
They believe that the government is flying drones over us
to acclimate us to the idea of having drones everywhere
so that we'll be softened up when they have their
final solution, when the Deep State rounds us all into
concentration camps for orderly extermination, or it's just the most
bizarre thing.
Speaker 3: I knew the Deep State was going to play into
this sentier later.
Speaker 2: And then Joe Rogan just I guess I just saw
this on Newsweek this morning. I didn't see it or anything,
but Joe Rogan apparently is suggesting the same thing that
these are government deployed drones to acclimate us to you know,
whatever the final solution is going to be, Biden, the
deep State's final solution for Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg
are going to round us into extermination camps.
Speaker 3: Joe Rogan once a moon landing deniers, so he has
a long history of being very late to the Marjorie
Taylor Green, of course, she had turned this into a
referendum on freedom. She's like, well, you're not gonna, you know,
cause me to shelter in place, as if all of
a sudden the government's going to command us to run
into our houses under our roofs or something and put
tinfoil hands on it. But she's like, she's threatening to
point guns in the air. Brian and other people are
echoing that.
Speaker 2: Holy yeh, Nike. The real danger is that there are
congress people and everyone else demanding that the National Guard
be sent out and start actively trying to shoot down
these airplanes. And there's been a number of reports, I
don't know if any of them are confirmed, that residents
are shooting at airplanes because they think they're drones because
of this whole nonsense going on. And then whenever they
do produce a picture of the drone they're shooting at,
it's very obviously an airplane. So this is I mean,
there's definitely a dark serious side to this.
Speaker 3: There are guides that show the light can figures on
various aircraft, what the lights are, what they do, what
their function is, so that people who were interested in
what they were looking at, beyond the conspiracies, the paranoia,
the suspicions, the panic, could actually say, oh, look those
are landing lights, or those are navigation lights or those
you know, there is a method to this that we
can track down. Now we've got people pointing laser pointers
at planes. What's that about, Brian?
Speaker 2: I that's you know, that's always been a problem. Usually
fortunately it's usually just a little red laser pointers that
don't do a lot of damage. But you know that
there are these green lasers that you can get. My
daughter is an astronomer and she gives star talks, and
she's got this green laser that is very dangerous.
Speaker 3: And so the rule is how Brian and forgiving the interruption.
But when you say it can do some damage, what
are you talking about?
Speaker 2: It can blind you the red a red laser pointer.
In fact, anything sold as a laser pointer is low
enough wattage, low enough power that it wouldn't blind you
unless you know you stuck it straight in your eye
for a moment, but you can shine it around at
people in an auditorium and it's you're not going to
blind anyone with that. But these green lasers that are
as much as one hundred times the wattage can be
very very dangerous, and if you shine that in a
plane and it got into a pilot's eye, he could
be immediately blinded. So the rule with the green laser
pointer that she has is nobody ever touches it except her,
no exceptions period, not her professor, nobody else. And that's
the kind of safety protocol you have to have around
these very dangerous lasers. But you can buy them on
the internet, so they're out there. So that's another thing
that we could have a very serious problem with. It
doesn't have to be a pilot. If you're shooting it
at an airline or going by you know, you got
one hundred windows down the side, it could blind any
of the passengers.
Speaker 3: Are we just stupid? I mean, are we just sheet Brian?
You know? I mean, I hate you's word like stupid,
but I just feel like it. People in groups just
do stupid shit all the time. It doesn't All we
need is a bright shiny object to distract us and
send us off into some sort of a frothing panic.
I mean, have you gotten into the psychology of any
of this stuff?
Speaker 2: Oh a lot. I mean every little urban legend or
whatever it is that I'm talking about on my show.
That's always the most fascinating component is how and why
did this belief come to be a thing? And why
do people believe that? You know, they say, as you note,
a person is smart. People are stupid. And it's not
that anyone's stupid. They're human, and we all have You
and I we both have the same fallibilities that the
craziest Marjorie Taylor Greens are falling susceptible to. And it's
that our brains try to misinterpret things in the way
that makes sense to them and what they expect to
see and what they want to see. And that's just
part of being human. And the more experienced you are
at understanding that, I think, the better tools you have
to learn to separate when your brain is doing the
wrong thing. But I certainly find myself being wrong about
things all the time. So it's hard to fault other
people for doing the same thing, you know, particularly when
you've got this. It's I don't want to get political here,
I seriously don't, but go ahead. All of the congress
people that I've heard calling for these to be shot
down have been Republicans. Why is that? I don't know
it is there actually, I mean, they're no stupider than
Democratic congress people. I think that's, you know, a requirement
to be in Congress at all. It's I think it's
just that some of them actually have a narrative that
the Biden administration is not doing anything about this threat.
I think they're just using it as a little bit
of a little bit of political ammunition here to make
Biden look bad.
Speaker 3: Sometimes I wonder, though, if we're so easily distracted, right,
So if they over here pursuing the bright shiny object
and they can get away with shenanigans over there, that's
a whole other conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2: Oh, they get away with shenanigans regardless of where anyone's looking.
Speaker 3: I guess that's true. I'm familiar with things like the
Blooney detection kit. But just in a nutshell, if people
get into this and they start to freak out, and
the headlines make them worry, and they think, what are
these lights in the sky. Is there some things there
like a toolkit for people to sort of bs proof
themselves in this weird age of misinformation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I've done a lot of episodes about that,
and people have written about it in books and other
podcasts have all given the same kind of sets of things.
Here's the logical fallacies and the cognitive biases you can
look for. But I don't know how useful that isn't
in the real world in the middle of your day,
I think it's probably better to just go on one
of the more reliable fact checking websites. There's a new
one I like a lot called verify This. There's Snopes,
BBC has one. There's a whole list of these that
have been found to be unbiased and pretty much fruity
darn good sources to go to. And when you go
somewhere like the drone thing, you can quickly find out that, no,
there's no evidence that there's any drones, and yes, it's
true that this congress person or that congress person called
for these evident commercial airlines to be shot down. So
there are ways that people kind of can kind of
quickly find out what's really going on. That do fit
into the normal lives of modern humans, and that's not
so much going through a checklist of logical fallacies and
cognitive biases. I think it's more useful just to go
to one of these websites really quick and just check
it out.
Speaker 3: You know, all these denials sound like someone who is
in on the cover up? Brian, Are you sound like
someone who's in on the conspiracy? The more you debunk it,
the more it must be true.
Speaker 2: If I had a nickel for every time I got
called there's a The UFO movie is on YouTube, movies
and TVs so people can make comments on it, and
it's so says oh my god. Although it's like eighty
percent thumbs up and twenty percent thumbs down, the comments
are ninety nine percent negative. The people who really this
gut under their crop are the ones who are really
upset enough to leave a comment, and almost all of
them are saying, obviously, the CIA paid this guy to
make this movie.
Speaker 3: Man, I hope you're getting paid for all of this
sort of cleandestine work, all these yops.
Speaker 2: Having a nickel for every one of those comments would
be more than the CIA ever could have paid.
Speaker 3: It's a lose lose because if it's true, it's true,
and if you debunk it, it's still true. It's maddening.
And of course we've seen this far beyond the drone conspiracies,
but the deep state. You mentioned the QAnon stuff on
dear religions. You know, it's the more they're debunked, the
more you are simply in league with the enemy. It
is frustrating, but it's tiresome. Yet just to put a
punctuation mark on it, no reason to freak out. There
is nothing there, There is no there. There is that
what you're saying, Brian.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it's not just me. The Homeland Security and
FBI put out a joint statement that says, there's one
sentence of it, one concluding sentence. Upon review of available imagery,
it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually
manned aircraft operating lawfully. There are no reported or confirmed
drone sightings in any restricted airspace. So I mean it's official.
You've got it from all the people who analyze these
things professionally for a living online, people like you and
I and many others. And you've got it from Homeland
Security and the FBI. And if you want to stick
to the position that, hey, everyone is lying to me
that I don't know that there's there's much else that
we can do for you.
Speaker 3: And I have a confession before I let you go.
I mean this is probably if I had a drone,
I would be tempted to throw some extra Christmas lights
on it and stick like an alien head on the top,
you know, with lowing eyes, and literally just flight around
the neighborhood, just because I know how easily led people are,
and I would amuse myself with that. So I do
have to wonder if there might be one or two
people out theres who are doing the same, But maybe I.
Speaker 2: Can guarantee there are. Now this has been this has
been so gone, so big, and it's so easy because
so many people have these little commercial drones you can
just buy. You know, I've got one. I could go
do that myself. In fact, maybe I will. I don't
know what the As far as I know, there's nothing
illegal about hanging lights on your drone, as long as
we follow all the other rules, which I don't now.
Speaker 3: In my brain I'm already doing like weight ratios And
how much would it be able to care and how
much does an alien headway at all those other things. Brian,
You're awesome. I'm going to link to your UFO documentary
in the comments because it is relevant here, but I
wanted to check in quickly and just make sure that
we weren't being invaded by aliens, surveilled by the government,
or it wasn't the end of the world. So you're
saying you think we're okay.
Speaker 2: I think you're okay for now. But do keep that
tinfoil handy in case you need it.
Speaker 3: Hian Dunning, thanks for talking to me.
Speaker 2: Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1: Follow The Thinking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter for a
complete archive of podcasts and videos, products like mugs and
t shirts featuring the Thinking Atheist logo, links to atheist
pages and resources, and details on upcoming free thought events
and conventions. Log onto our website, The Thinkingatheist dot com.