Dr. David Darling explores how advanced civilizations could detect Earth’s life via oxygen and chlorophyll in our atmosphere, dismissing fears of hostile attention since humanity’s activity—like nuclear tests or melting glaciers—might already signal our existence. He speculates on "junk DNA" messages, extraterrestrial probes monitoring Earth like anthropologists studying tribes, and a 50-50 chance aliens have visited or observed us. Credible reports of defying-gravity "black triangles" since the 1990s and Roswell-era tech claims align with his view that mainstream science underestimates anomalies, though he insists on rigorous verification. Ultimately, Darling argues that humanity’s rapid tech evolution—including AI consciousness—makes extraterrestrial observation plausible, urging open-minded yet evidence-based inquiry into our cosmic neighbors’ potential presence. [Automatically generated summary]
Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the universe's Well, we're in the universe, right?
25 time zones here in the world or so, and every single one of them covered like a great big warm blanket by this show.
This program goes GoPay.
I'm Arpell Honor, joining me with you for the weekend.
And there's quite a bit of news to report, of course.
Gene, which you're probably sick of hearing about, and the people in Florida are totally sick of all the way around.
Florida's fourth hurricane in six weeks, piled on destruction, destruction on destruction, and moved the piles around in already ravaged areas Sunday, as you now know, slicing across Florida like a hot knife through butter.
And there's at least six dead in Florida now.
It was kind of a cruel rerun for many still trying to recover from the earlier hurricanes.
Gene came ashore in the same exact area, hit three weeks ago by Hurricane Francis, and then headed quickly for the panhandle, where 70,000 homes and businesses are still out of power even before Gene arrives.
They still don't have power.
And I'll tell you something.
They were saying last night people might be out of power for three weeks, baby.
You're out of power for three weeks, and you know it.
We depend in this modern world a whole lot on power.
And when you don't have power, you've got a sort of a casket inside your house.
That's about it.
Politically, Democratic presidential candidate Kerry arriving Sunday at a remote resort to practice for this week's debate.
You've got to always wonder how they do that.
How do they practice?
Do they go find the meanest Republican they can find, hire them, and have them just pamper Kerry with questions that he otherwise probably couldn't answer, and then you practice answering them?
I guess.
He did leave a quote with us as he disappeared in for practice, quote, I will never be a president who just says, mission accomplished.
I will get the mission accomplished, said Kerry, and went away to practice.
This is one you might want to note from the Associated Press.
So mainstream stuff here, folks.
Headline, St. Helens activity may signal explosion.
A strengthening series of earthquakes, we've been talking about those for a while, at Mount St. Helens, has now prompted seismologists, in fact today, to warn that the once devastated volcano may see a small explosion soon.
The U.S. Geological Survey issued a notice of volcanic unrest in response to the swarm of hundreds of earthquakes that began on Thursday.
And on that note, we'll break and be right back with the rest of the news, as Mr. Harvey would say.
One of the family is gone.
One of the family, Bill Balance, who had a lot of controversy, you'll recall, with Dr. Laura.
And Bill and I go back a little ways.
He's dead at 85, age 85.
And I'm so sorry to hear it.
Another one of the old radio guys, gone, folks.
Bill Balance.
We had a kind of a competitive show, and there were some fun years.
This is an interesting story from a couple of points of view.
Headline is, Faulty oxygen supply threatens space crew.
Astronauts may have to abandon the space station later this year if a generator, an oxygen generator, cannot be repaired.
Yes, you cannot operate without oxygen.
Crew members may have to abandon the International Space Station late this year if astronauts can't somehow fix already weeks-old oxygen supply problems, according to NASA on Friday.
While space program manager Bill Gerstenmeier said that NASA was a long way, his words, from making the unprecedented move, the assessment reflected concerns over multiple attempts to figure out what's wrong with a Russian-made oxygen generator.
Something.
The station has a 162-day supply of backup oxygen.
If the Russians cannot launch an unmanned capsule by Christmas to replenish oxygen supplies, the astronauts could be recalled.
But that's only if the scientists and the two-man crew don't repair the generator.
Gerstenmeyer said Friday, if for some reason we need to return the crew, we are prepared to return the crew at the right time.
Under that scenario, that station would remain empty perhaps for months.
From The Guardian, where you get a lot of your news that you don't get here.
A new superstrain of the flu virus capable of triggering a global pandemic might emerge from East Asia, according to health officials.
Listen to this.
Scientists working at the World Health Organization fear the arrival of flu season in Asian countries could see the human flu virus merge with, up till now, a lethal, less, no, make that, a lethal strain of bird flu.
You've heard about that, right?
That's already in circulation, producing a more deadly flu virus that could rapidly infect humans.
Recent cases of flu in Thailand have been reported in areas already struggling to control the spread of bird flu.
That's a virus that mostly affects poultry, but has claimed the lives of at least four human beings in recent months.
Health officials warn that people living in regions where the viruses are circulating could catch both at once, raising the prospect of a new and highly virulent form of the flu emerging.
The reality, this is head of the WHO influenza program quoted here, the reality is that if these two viruses meet, they'll exchange genetic information and a new virus could emerge that's as pathogenic as the bird flu virus, but as infectious as human flu.
Yikes, does it seem to you that we are facing an increasing danger from Mother Nature with regard to what she's doing?
She's getting increasingly complex in trying to find new ways to even the balance out there.
And I don't think we need to help her because from the Arizona Daily Star, here's another headline.
Danger seen in plan to resurrect deadly 18 influenza virus.
Now that would be 1918, folks.
University of Washington scientists plan to infect monkeys with a killer flu virus grown from cells exhumed from the victims of the 1918 epidemic.
Now they, of course, hope the insight will gain something in the nature of new information about why millions of people worldwide died from that flu strain, which led to development of better vaccines and drugs that may save lives in the future.
So that would be the upside to digging up the 1918 virus, which they have, and infecting simians with it.
Now, the downside, well, a skeptic, for example, of resurrecting and enlivening the 1918 flu virus said, it's rather critical to first make sure that we are adequately protected against creating a man-made pandemic.
Quote, this project could create a new bug that infects someone in the lab who then walks out at the very end of the day and literally kills tens of millions of people.
That was, let me see, Ed Hammond, director of biotechnology and bioweapons watchdog organization.
Though Hammond said he could accept the noble intentions of the UW scientists, he noted that there are no national laboratory standards for dealing with this particular virus.
The lack of regulatory protection, says he, stems from the fact that the influenza is generally regarded as a fairly routine disease.
But this organism, the 1918 virus, is something else, said he.
It's very dangerous and it's very easily spread.
So what Mother Nature does not do, perhaps, we're working on now in labs.
A little environmental news.
Mussels.
Mussels.
Now, look at this.
They found mussels growing on the seabed about 1,300 kilometers, that'd be about 800 miles from the North Pole in what they're saying is a very likely sign of global warming.
The blue mussels, which normally favor the much warmer waters off France or the eastern U.S., were discovered last month off waters near Norway that are normally covered with ice most of the year.
The climate is changing fast, said Georg Johnson, professor of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology, who was among experts who found these mussels were a very good indicator the climate is warming.
And if you look north or south in the world, that's where you'll see the climate changing quickly, very, very quickly.
Where there is normally ice, there is not ice anymore in many locations.
In fact, glaciers once held up by a floating ice shelf off Antarctica are now in the business of sliding off into the sea.
And they're going rather fast, according to scientists, on Tuesday.
Two separate studies from climate researchers and the space agency NASA, that's ours, show the glaciers are flowing into Antarctica's sea, freed by the 2002 breakup of the Larson B. Ice Shelf.
So you see, that wasn't the end of it.
When Larson B. went, that was but the beginning.
Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers said their satellite measurements suggest climate warming can lead to rapid sea level rise.
The teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, and NASA's Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt said, the findings also proved that ice shelves hold back glaciers.
Well, how about that?
We really didn't think there was much to Larson B. Everybody said, oh, so what?
Well, ice shelves hold back glaciers.
Important post-point.
Many teams of researchers are keeping a close eye on parts of Antarctica that they say are melting, steadily melting.
Large ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula have disintegrated in 1995 and then 2002 as a result of global warming, but these floating ice shelves didn't affect sea level as they melted.
Glaciers, on the other hand, do.
They rest on land, you see, and when they slide into the water, they instantly affect sea level.
Just like that.
And here's another one to worry about.
Glaciers in Antarctica are thinning faster than they did in the 1990s, and that was very fast back in the 90s.
Researchers have discovered, though, an unexpected folded section.
This is a folded section of ice beneath the ice cap.
Findings, they say, indicate the ice would be much less stable than they had thought previously.
Glaciers in West Antarctica are discharging 60% more ice into the sea than they are accumulating from snowfall.
That will have a very predictable result, right?
Think about it.
Sending off 60% more ice into the sea than they are accumulating.
So, just thought I, oh, one more item, and then we'll go to the phones.
Korea, North Korea.
The United States and Japan have detected some signs that North Korea may be preparing to launch a ballistic missile with a range capable of hitting almost all of Japan.
Tokyo and Washington had detected the signs after analyzing data from reconnaissance satellites and radio traffic.
North Korean military vehicles, soldiers, possibly missile engineers were converging on several missile bases in the northeastern part of the isolated communist state, so we may well see the Koreans launching something very shortly.
And I don't know, it was a few years ago, one day I went and said, hon, I'm going to try something.
And I went out and threw off the master switch, came in the house.
And I probably have more electronics than just about anybody you know.
And so for me, it was particularly dramatic.
But I mean, even the things, the very basic things that he just mentioned, I mean, it's an eerie, strange, quiescent sort of, you know, stands the hair on the back of your neck up kind of feeling to go into a house like that.
It's D-E-A-D-D.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
This is Neil from San Diego.
Yes.
I wanted to talk about the track of the three hurricanes, Ivan, Francis, and Charlie, that I was looking at a website, and they stated that the tracks all followed a pattern through all the counties that were won by George Bush in the election in 2000.
And then up on top was a quote from a high-ranking general from the Pentagon.
And I guess he said that to paraphrase something that the public should not rule out, that the Defense Department has the ability to control the weather.
And so what I've come to the conclusion is that the people in the Pentagon might think that this present president is in bad taste, so to speak.
So the Pentagon, in a demonstration of power to the American people and demonstrating their feelings about the current sitting president, just took those hurricanes over the exact counties that had gone for Bush.
Well, some things are a little bit too much of a stretch for even me to embrace.
So I'm not going to grab that one, but if you want to, you're welcome to it.
Well, I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have found I have to get no repair Over my hands It's all clear to me now My heart is...
Nothing but a heart is never a danger But a heart and a tears back all the way Nothing but a tear back I have such a sin Please like me, oh why Can I get him?
Nothing but a heart Nothing but a heart and a tear back all the way It's a great situation that I just can't win Please like me, oh why Can I get him?
Listen, I've been getting all these emails about something being up in Cleveland.
What the hell's going on in Cleveland?
unidentified
All I know is, and it's strange, only the station, which is TAM, which carries your show here, is the only thing reporting it was one afternoon talk show host and one local news channel.
But, you know, I don't, I don't know, the word apocalypse to me, and apocalyptic in the biblical sense, carry a much heavier meaning than the things that you named.
You know, wars come and go, and I don't think they're generally referred to as apocalypses.
And maybe what you ought to do is rather than trying to get it out on a national talk show where you're obviously really nervous is to write me a detailed email because you obviously had more that you wanted to say.
I understand you get nervous when you get on the radio.
It's just sort of a hazard of suddenly finding yourself on the air like this person.
Unless it said something like Tesla box or something that would catch my attention, it's possible I missed it because I don't recall, and I was looking for it.
All right, so you tried to find out, ma'am, I presume, what this box was.
You consulted with some people in the time you had?
unidentified
I asked everybody, and only one, I asked a fellow who had studied a lot of Nicole Tesla.
Then I got into it, and I studied more, and I got the Colorado Springs papers, and, you know, just everything I could get my hands on.
And we couldn't figure out what it was, except for it must have been, there were some samples in those big, if you've ever seen those volumes of the Colorado Springs papers that he did, that showed a lot of his inventions.
Yes, I had, after that, I had this tingling in the palm of my hands, and I could, I want to call it laying on hands or whatever, but a lot of heat would generate out of my hands.
I take it the man came and retrieved his Tesla box.
unidentified
He did.
I wish I had taken a picture of it.
I wish I. I so often think of it, and I gave him all the information I had, but they weren't all, and until you said they were all retrieved, I did not know that they had tried to scoop them all up and was very naive because I just opened the store about some of these things.
To tie up some loose ends in preparation for the paradigm shift that was kick-started by the inevitable 911 attack on the heart and belly of the beastly Bush conspiracy.
Incidentally, the webcam shot up there is the infamous Yeti, of course.
In a moment, I'll throw another one up there that was kind of cute.
Caught that also earlier today.
He's a very photogenic little devil, and he knows it, too.
All right, coming up, this has the potential to be a class three type show.
David Darling is an astronomer, a British astronomer.
He's got a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester, England.
He is author of more than 40 books on subjects ranging from life in the universe to life after death, and from cosmology to consciousness.
My kind of guy.
His latest book is The Universal Book of Astronomy, a 600-page A to Z of astronomy.
His website, The Worlds of David Darling, tackles everything from silicon-based life to UFOs.
Listen to the books he's written.
The Universal Book of Mathematics.
That was a novel.
Just kidding.
To Life Everywhere, the Maverick Science of Astrobiology, to the complete book of spaceflight, from Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity, to his latest, I presume, the Universal Book of Astronomy, from Andromeda Galaxy to Zone of Avoidance.
Not alone jacks up a big question.
Zone of avoidance.
What is the zone?
Is that like the Forbidden Zone or something?
Well, that's one of the questions we'll ask.
But what we're going to explore with this astronomer is the fact that he thinks we may be looking for life in all the wrong places, and he's got some thoughts about it in a moment.
Well, I qualified in astronomy back in the 70s and did some research.
And for the past almost 30 years now, I've been actually writing on astronomy, so combining the two of a freelance writer and working astronomy itself.
Yeah, yeah, and I kind of like to look at the big picture, you know.
That's why I didn't go into research in a big way, is that I like to kind of float around and look at the big questions and even get into philosophical issues, as you know from my books.
So in research, you tend to focus on a very narrow little area and you get super expert on that.
And I don't really have the patience that I like to sort of zoom out and see the whole deal.
Well, I like to try to span the divide, if you like, between the very orthodox scientist, you know, who has to present a certain facade to the world and adopt the kind of party line, and then the people who like to explore more adventurous ideas.
So I like to try to form a bridge between the two.
So I hope in a way that I'm acceptable to both sides of the divide.
All right, a lot of times I don't put much stock in the stock questions they send along to ask a guest, but these are really good ones tonight.
In the past, we've spent a lot of time looking for radio signals from other stars, and that's true we have with SETI.
Now, scientists are beginning to think there may be some better ways to search for signs of alien intelligence closer to home, here in the solar system, maybe even on Earth.
And so the question written is, are we about to come face to face with extraterrestrials on our own very doorstep?
I think there's a very good chance that somewhere within the solar system there is material evidence of other intelligence.
This is prime real estate for life, and any intelligence or civilization out there will have been watching us for a long period of time, be aware of what's happening here on the Earth, just as we're starting to discover other planets elsewhere.
But nevertheless, you would be able to detect life signs, signs of advanced life, even plant life, for example, by detecting the gases in the atmosphere that are released by, for example, oxygen-producing plants.
You know, we'll be able to look at Earth-like planets within a few hundred light years and be able to see things like chlorophyll, molecular oxygen, which are all life indicators.
We'll be able to spot where those life-bearing worlds are within a pretty good distance.
So then it would be your position that a civilization sufficiently advanced, just a little bit past us or even a lot past us, certainly would be able to figure out we're here.
Yeah, within the planetary system around the sun, you know, which would obviously include the Earth itself and the planets and the satellites going around the sun.
Well, we have been, except for some very recent excitement regarding the hydrogen frequency, which I'm still trying to find out about, there was a signal, they thought.
But minus that and how that turns out, that's current news.
We haven't heard anything from anybody else as of yet.
As far as the conventional SETIOs, looking for radio signals from other stars, it's been a long search.
It's been going on since about 1960 now, so over 40 years.
And there have been a few kind of promising signals.
I guess the most exciting one was back in 1977.
That was the so-called WOW signal, which was picked up by Ohio State, their big ear radio telescope, as it was called.
And that was kind of like a spike, you know, a localized frequency that, well, really is still unexplained.
I mean, it could either be a natural radio source of which we don't understand, which is exciting in itself, or the other possibility is an artificial source outside the solar system, which is even more exciting.
We turned Arecibo from a receiver into a transmitter one time.
But it was a little tiny burst.
I mean, if some SETI astronomers way out there somewhere were to have caught that burst, they'd have reacted about like the WOW signal because it would have come and gone and they'd have said, wow, what the hell was that?
This has been within the last three to four years.
Yeah, so Team Encounter, and it's done by a Ukrainian astrophysicist who's actually head of the effort.
And I'll get you the pages on my website, and you can look at it, and people can look at it, and I can give you some more details later in the show when I just check into them.
Well, Doctor, you know, really, in the past, I had heard that we humans here on Earth had settled on the following psychology.
That, yes, we sent out that one thing, and the reason we haven't done anything since is because a lot of people figured it might not be such a good idea to let somebody else know that we're out here because who knows what they might intend.
Yeah.
So when did that fall apart?
Apparently when the Ukrainians began transmitting, see, I hadn't heard about that.
Let me get back to you later in the show on the details because I'm still a little, you know, I don't carry that information right at the front of my mind.
And this was a story that was put out in New Scientist magazine, which again is a British, you know, I don't really want to kind of own up to that, but that was a British magazine.
A lot of things come from British publications and broadcast media that we don't get here in the U.S. And you're here in the U.S., it should be said, right?
Yeah, well, I put this story on my website, so I'm not, you know, I've been kind of promulgating this story right from the start.
And it came out on September the 1st, and the title of the story was Mysterious Signals from 1,000 Light Years Away, which grabbed your attention right away.
Yeah, well, what they do, of course, is, again, it's the Arecibo telescope that's used to pick up this data.
And it's always panning the sky.
And some of the data from that is then processed by zillions of home computers all around the world that have signed up for it.
And it's basically gathering data, it's piggybacking on other observations.
So while astronomers are going around their business, SETI at home is picking, is kind of tracking these things and looking for anything that's suspicious.
And then, you know, if there's a, And if you see the same signal again, then that becomes a candidate signal, kind of a potential.
Well, where we stand with it now, you know, according to the guys in charge of the SETI at home project, Dan Wertheimer, who's the chief scientist of the project, basically said right from the start that the story was blown up out of proportion.
You know, that really the reporter had, you know, it's picked up on the fact that it was a double repeat signal.
But he's saying, well, that's going to happen.
You know, you're looking at thousands, hundreds of thousands of signals, and occasionally you're going to get a repeat just because of noise in the system, basically.
Yeah, well, the reporter was picking through the data and then, you know, he kind of noticed that there'd been this repeat signal and then got excited about it and produced the story without really consulting the scientists involved in the project.
If you have a computer and if you're on our website and you're so inclined, you can send a fast blast to me, which is a question, hopefully one relevant to the guest I have on right now.
And Roger in Post Falls, Idaho has done so with a very good, I think, question because we've discussed this so much on this radio program, Professor.
Many people have noted the similarity of the timeline between when the United States began exploding atomic bombs and when U.S. citizens began seeing UFOs on a very regular basis.
And the exact question from Roger is, can you ask, please, how far radiation signals have traveled from the nuclear bomb tests of the 40s?
In other words, would setting off a nuclear weapon in any way be something that would be particularly detectable from afar?
The sort of equipment that we're developing now and extended a few hundred years even into the future, you would be able to detect gamma radiation of that level from hundreds of light years away, even clear across the galaxy if you have the right equipment.
Yeah, I suppose then if there really is a Federation out there somewhere, somebody's at a control point and he sees something, he goes, damn, there's another planet.
Look at that.
and read the so i mean could not have been i think you And a reason definitely, perhaps, definitely, perhaps, there's a chance for you.
Definitely, perhaps.
For aliens to say, all right, there's one we need to go check out.
Because, I mean, that's when we started getting all these UFO sightings.
Well, yes, but you know, people were equally spookable before that, and since we've had constant, I mean, you would think that the thing would wear off, right?
And you wouldn't get the sightings anymore if that was the reason.
And, you know, the early SETI search for extra-trusted intelligence people that started out back in the 60s, they were radio astronomers, you know, and they were communications engineers.
And this was the era when we first built giant radio telescopes.
So we had the capability for listening for signals at that period.
And so we started doing it.
And it just became the paradigm.
You know, it just became the way SETI went.
You know, this whole field was inhabited by people who were brought up on ham radio.
And they just liked listening for signals from afar.
And that's what they did.
And it just became center stage.
And we ignored our own backyard.
And the other reason I think that scientists have tended to look away from our own solar system for evidence of alien presence is the very fact of UFOs, you know, and the way, you know, UFOs have been elevated in some ways in the popular mind.
Well, no, no, looking for it, looking for it locally would cause your colleagues to think, what the heck are you doing?
And it was the same with astrobiology until recently.
If you were involved in looking for any kind of life within the solar system, you were out on the fringe, you were out on the margins of Orthodox science.
So that's only just become respectable.
So getting SETI, local SETI respectable has taken even longer.
Here's a really serious question for you, Professor.
If you want to try to answer, you can.
But we've had controversies about the moon missions that the U.S. did.
We've had controversies about trips to Mars.
And then when you consider trips to other possible planets that could hold life, for example, you've got to go a very, very long way for a very long time under conditions that some would suggest the human body will never, ever be able to sustain.
That's a very important question.
In other words, we're never going to be spacefarers.
We're not cut out for it physically.
We couldn't make long trips under any circumstances.
Okay, but even the time aspect aside for a second, because maybe we will learn to go fast.
Throw away that one for a moment.
I'm talking about our physiology, our human physiology being unable to sustain itself for long periods way out there, not in low Earth orbit, but way out there.
Yeah, well, you'd have to have artificial gravity.
There's no question about it.
You'd have to have some part of the spacecraft that was rotating to give you, you know, like in 2001, they have that spinning part of the spacecraft, you know, and it gives them gravity.
You'd need that.
You're going to need something like that to get to Mars, for goodness sake, you know.
You can't be away from the Earth for years and in virtually zero gravity.
This is something people miss about the trip to Mars.
You know, you can't do it without artificial gravity.
There's just no way.
Human body cannot, you know, the bones waste away, the muscles, the heart shrinks, everything.
It's a major, major issue.
So, you know, there's no question about it.
If you're going to go on, unless you've got like wart drive where you can get there in a few minutes or something, you know, you're going to have to have artificial gravity.
But that's not really such a big deal.
I mean, if you can fly to the stars, you can rotate part of the spacecraft.
I think the biggest issue as far as survival goes would be protection from radiation, you know, cosmic rays and that kind of thing, which could really damage the cell structure, you know, and you're going to get exposed to a lot of that in space.
But again, radiation shielding would hopefully block some of that.
I think I personally would rank it higher than probably most scientists would.
I think there's a very good, I don't know kind of how percentage-wise, but maybe slightly less than 50-50, but somewhere around that, I would say approximately 50-50.
It's pretty high, for the very reason that within the past few years we have realized that we have the capability to identify life on extrasolar worlds and even advanced life eventually.
And other beings that are, say, a million years ahead of us, which isn't that much in terms of galaxy terms, are going to know that.
They're going to know we're here or there is advanced life here, so there's something of interest on the Earth.
And therefore, it becomes a focal point of attention for anthropological studies, for aliens who are interested in how intelligence evolves.
They might want to be here in person to track that.
I think that if, you know, I would really say that's almost certain in the case where, you know, extraterrestrials do intervene or do our present watching.
They will not want to, you know, affect us in any way.
Just as we do on Earth, you know, if you're doing an anthropological study on a native tribe or something, you don't want to.
You have to to some extent.
If you're there, there's bound to be some involvement, but you want to just observe and not affect.
So yeah, I would say that probably is very much the case.
Well, that leads to all kinds of other questions, but it begins to get awfully speculative about, for example, our environment.
If we're about to go off a cliff with the environment, and it sure feels like we're about to go off a cliff, or about to blow ourselves up, exchange missiles with the Russians or whatever, some biological disaster.
I don't know, but whether there would be intervention at some apocalyptic point.
I'm very much of the view that this planet doesn't have very much longer unless we change our ways, you know, a few centuries perhaps at most before we make it uninhamedable.
The destruction of the ozone layer, exposure of the surface to intense solar ultraviolet, global warming, which is going to melt the polar ice gaps, which is happening already, raising the sea level, therefore making most of the low-lying areas of the Earth uninhabitable, therefore causing massive overcrowding.
And that itself is baloney and is dangerous thinking, and it's delaying the remedy.
It's unfortunate, and it's motivated by the fact that a lot of these scientists are involved with political groups that have interests in the oil industry and so forth, and don't really want to curb it, and don't want to curb consumerism.
And unfortunately, it's all retarding the eventual cure.
It's a very dangerous approach.
Most environmental scientists know very well what's happening.
The global changes are afoot, and they've been going on for a number of decades now.
And it's time that these other scientists got on it.
It does seem as though some aspects of the environmental erosion, particularly at the north and south parts of the world, are accelerating, as though we've gone past a certain kind of a trip point or something, and there has been an acceleration.
Because, man, I'll tell you, every week, Professor, I read more and more stories that are profoundly disturbing about what's falling apart and melting.
And it's incredible that not everybody is realizing this.
I personally think that most people are and that they have other motivations for turning a blind eye to it, but it's happening.
Absolutely, it's happening.
Whether it's those or not is irrelevant, it's happening, you know, and we have to try and do something about it, or else we're destroying our habitat, basically, and the habitat of other species, too.
Either we're simply under surveillance, and there is simply a non-intervention policy, and that if this species is so stupid and so dangerous that it's going to destroy itself, well, let it, because we don't want it out of its own planet doing the same thing elsewhere.
So we're kind of like a virus that might infect the galaxy.
Or it may be a phase, and I think this is perhaps the case, that all technological civilizations go through, and maybe elder ones give a helping hand to get you through it.
So yeah, it could go either way, I guess.
I mean, what do I know?
But I think I can see both possibilities, you know.
But either way, you think we're not very far from going off the cliff or having somebody intervene and saying, oh, you're about to go off a cliff here.
Either way, we're within a couple of centuries of that.
It's just now, of course, become morning here on the West Coast.
And morning will now rush west toward the Hawaiian Islands, but we'll be back in just a moment.
It's absolutely apparent the professor thinks that instead of men, if we wish to contact another civilization, he thinks we would send machines, I believe.
And so then, by extension, it seems to me that another civilization would send machines, send machines here in search for life or in monitoring life, but not send biological entities, but rather machines or perhaps sort of biological entities engineered to run the machines.
So I guess, Professor, I'm asking if some of these UFOs that we see might not be alien probes, machines.
Yeah, and I think that's something that we need to start taking really seriously.
I mean, UFOs must include a whole slew of phenomena, you know, from hoaxes to natural phenomena like, you know, ball lightning.
And I think we really do have to consider the possibility that some of them are these very probes that we've been talking about.
And, you know, I think scientists tend to shy away from that possibility, but I do know that quite a few of them in private do consider that to be a possibility.
And, you know, it's just used to be flying sauce and now it's UFO, whatever you call it.
You know, it just carries that stigma as far as mainstream science is concerned.
But there is a phenomenon there.
There's a range of phenomena.
And one of them, one possibility, and science should consider every possibility and it shouldn't be afraid to, you know, tread into ground that is perhaps considered controversial.
But there is that possibility that some of these lights that we see, and I've spoken to people, I know that some of these phenomena are unexplained and they pose a challenge to science.
Some of them do appear to be intelligently directed.
Here recently, a team for Peter Jennings came to interview me, and they promised it's going to be a two-hour special with Peter Jennings on exactly this.
It's not frequently you see the mainstream media stepping in and taking a hard look and that's what they promised.
They better deliver.
Anyway, they were here and so they're beginning to take a look at it.
But here's an extension question, Professor.
If these machines have been here or are here now and one of them perhaps crashed or whatever, we have these very strong stories, as I'm sure you're well aware, of retrieval of what are called alien artifacts or alien craft, some of them stories that include biological entities with them and all the rest of it.
Now, I don't know about you, but to me, it is possible that one of them crashed, and if it did, I don't think our government would tell us.
I mean, the thing, I don't have any inside information that I can pass on, unfortunately, so I can't really sort of, I'm just speculating just like everyone else.
Of course, governments keep secrets.
We know that.
They do that habitually all the time, and they do misinform, and they do things to manipulate the situation to their own end.
We know that.
That's just the way governments have always worked, you know.
The part of it that I find a little bit difficult to believe is that you couldn't do this without involving scientists.
And, you know, scientists don't like to keep secrets.
I know they do keep secrets because, of course, you've got people working on military projects and they're not allowed to disclose information.
But something like that, I don't know whether you could keep it under wraps.
All right, let's talk about evidence for a moment.
If somebody claimed to have an alien artifact, or maybe let's say a piece of a ship, or some material that wasn't of Earth, from their point of view, it was from a crash or something like that, how would you or could you absolutely verify the artifact is alien?
You'd first of all have to get it into a pretty sophisticated materials lab and put it under spectrometers and all the rest of it.
And you'd be looking for a material that, you know, an obviously artificial material, some alloy or other substance, crystalline substance or what have you, that we knew nothing about on Earth.
So you'd be looking for something unusual.
That kind of is obvious, but it is the first thing you'd look for.
If you could demonstrate conclusively that this was an artificial material, and that wouldn't be too difficult to do, and then go beyond that and look at the catalogue of known materials and say, well, this doesn't correspond to anything we know, then the lights start to go on, and you think maybe.
Well, the first thing is that scientists, you know, they're kind of hide-bound characters.
Unless somebody produces an actual paper, it's published in Nature or Science or some reputable, what they call reputable journal, they're not going to sort of get too excited about it.
So I don't know if Carnegie Mellon or the researchers involved actually wrote a paper that was published, but if they didn't, then it would enter, in the scientists' opinion, the realm of hearsay and be dismissed in that fashion, you know.
So the questions would be, well, what's happened to the material now, and is it available for further research, and what happened to the original research, and who wrote what?
you know, he gets muddied water.
So that's what the position of a scientist...
And most scientists are just journeymen.
They're doing pretty routine stuff.
They're not looking for extraterrestrial samples or philosophizing.
They're just kind of going into their labs day after day looking at substance X or whatever.
If contact was made, no matter how it came, whether it came as a SETI signal or it came through some sort of actual contact from another civilization, how do you think it would be handled by the masses?
You know, there's the old Brookings report suggestion of how it might unfold not so pleasantly.
But in the general case, it would just depend on what it was.
How spectacular was it?
How certain were the scientists that this was the real McCall?
It's hard to say.
I think if it was really strong, strong evidence that was almost indisputable, I don't know what you'd get panic.
I mean, it depends.
I mean, it was like an invasion threat, maybe, but if it was just like a really strong signal and, you know, a sort of encyclopedia galactica or something coming over the radio waves, people would get excited, but it wouldn't.
But encode it, you know, millions of years ago in this junk DNA that's eventually going to get passed down to whatever intelligent species evolves on that planet.
And only when they have the technology to analyze that DNA, which is just about where we are now, are they going to be able to read the message perfectly?
Like I say, Paul Davis, this Australian astronomer, cosmologist, initiated that idea, but I kind of just extended that to, you know, from what I just told you there.
It just seems like a pretty neat solution.
And I think the idea that you really do need that technology, you know, you have to be able to analyze the DNA.
So you have to be at a certain level in your technology at the point, you know, and that's when alien intelligence would be interested in you.
So there it is for millions of years, and all of a sudden you crack the code.
Well, it could be like a series of instructions because it may be that all technological species go through the kind of crises that we're going through right now, and it will be at the point where their technology, you know, first reaches roughly where we are.
You know, when you start to get these kind of advanced technologies and you're able to pollute the planet and cause all these environmental crises, that's the point at which you need the warning.
But the whole, anyway, folks, drifting away, but the concept of a message within our DNA, within this so-called, we call junk DNA, maybe it's not junk at all.
Maybe, well, some would say it once had a purpose, or it may, in our evolutionary path, yet have a purpose, or maybe it's just a message.
All right.
That would also suggest, Professor, that we are the aliens.
That we were designed in the fashion you suggested possible and that we basically are the aliens, right?
Well, th that we are part alien at least, yeah, that we are uh not entirely of this world, as it were.
Yeah, yeah, there's certainly that uh whole aspect to it, you know.
I mean, we are extraterrestrial after all, and we come from stardust, whatever, you know, we do come from the stars in that sense, and maybe information-wise, we can.
Right, uh, you know, we are materially extraterrestrial, and maybe also, uh, you know, as we say, you know, part of our actual information makeup is alien as well.
There really is, that our junk DNA contains a message, perhaps from our designers, that it's not junk DNA at all, but like the Bible code, there's a message encoded.
And we're simply supposed to get to the point, and we are very close to that, having just unraveled the human genome, where we can read the message in the junk DNA.
Let's have a little contest, shall we?
What do you think of the 10 most likely things that our junk DNA will say when it's unraveled?
I await your email.
Once again, Professor David Darling.
Professor, I have, again, watched American movies and, oh, I don't know, endless television programs on the subject and done a million radio programs myself.
And the popular view across America, probably across the world, has been developed by E.T., with the little warm, fuzzy little thing that hides in the kids' closet and all that.
It's very friendly.
Just loves kids and little dogs.
Then there's another side presented by people like Dr. David Jacobs and others who say, no, wait a minute.
There is no guarantee that these intelligent beings will necessarily be friendly.
You've always got that streak of violence and confrontation and looking after your own species first.
So I'm kind of in that camp of that an advanced alien probably has overcome some of those tendencies, you know, and isn't going to be just invasion mad.
They're not going to be Klingons necessarily.
But even the Vulcans have wars, you know, in Star Trek.
So I think they've probably both, you know, they'll be kind of human in that sense.
So potentially dangerous, and they will tend to put themselves first because that's how they've got to be top dogs.
And, you know, so there'll be a little bit of both.
And the kind of creature that's going to colonize the galaxy or he's going to explore between the stars is going to have that sort of pushiness about it, that sort of ambition.
How much of a probability, Professor, do you attach to the at least possibility that when we do encounter some other intelligence, what we consider to be intelligence, it will not be biological, it'll be artificial, it'll be machine, it'll be artificial intelligence.
Yeah, I think there's a high probability, very, very high probability, that it will at least be partly artificial, you know, because that's, again, you know, we're going off what's happening here.
And then the second one would be, do you believe there's a cosmic intelligence or a god or whatever you want to call it, you know, but some kind of omniscient being, you know?
The designer, to use your own term, you know?
That would be number two.
And just what their religion is, basically.
It's kind of neat, you know, what their beliefs are.
And then I suppose my third question is kind of cheating, but my third question would be, if you had three questions, what would they be?
Well, the other thing is that a lot of theoretical physicists now, Professor, really are beginning to talk about the possibilities of time travel more seriously all the time.
Well, there are theoretical physicists now who believe that the paradox is not a problem because if you were to go back in time and do something that was a catastrophic paradox, simply another universe, another bubble would form and everything would unfold in a different way.
And yeah, that would be the perfect way around the paradox.
It's not a very economical way, you know, because just going back, you suddenly create a whole universe, it seems fantastic.
But of course, it's not really fantastic because astronomers, cosmologists are talking about that all the time, that we're just one universe of many, perhaps an infinite number of universes out there.
So that isn't a particularly far-fetched idea in terms of even just mainstream physics these days, you know.
Well, I interviewed this really wonderful fellow who wrote a book called The God Part of the Brain.
He contends that we are programmed to worship.
That the human brain is programmed to worship.
And sure enough, you know, he's right.
If you go and you meet with a jungle tribe that's never been exposed to modern civilization, you know, they're sacrificing something to something or worshiping the sun or worshiping something that we're programmed to worship.
And I wonder if that might be in some of that junk DNA.
You know, I mean, I think that we have to, most people anyway, I guess, you know, atheists would be the obvious exception, but I mean, most people have to believe in something.
The possibility that when you die, that's it.
You just snuffed out like a candle, I think, is just not acceptable to most people.
So somebody in the past once said if there isn't a God, we'd have to invent him or it.
And that's probably true.
But that says nothing about whether there really is a God or not.
And that really is the core of my book, Zen Physics.
My personal belief is that the brain does not actually produce consciousness.
This is an old idea.
I'm not the creator of this idea, but I certainly support it.
The brain doesn't create consciousness.
It actually filters it.
The consciousness is a field, if you like, like energy and radiation.
But it's out there, basically.
there is a sea, a field of consciousness, into which each brain taps, you know, and filters it down into our individual state of existence.
I do believe that...
Yeah, well, I mean, the brain obviously does a whole lot.
It handles memory, intelligence, all those kind of things.
There's survival, you know.
But too much consciousness is not good.
I mean, we only need to be aware of a little bit that's going on.
It doesn't help us to survive, to know in detail what's happening throughout the universe, you know.
We just are kind of evolved to just tap into a small bit of what we need to to survive.
And I think that's what the brain's primary function is, is to reduce the consciousness that's available.
And then when you die, when the brain effectively ceases to operate, that safety valve, if you like, is then no longer needed and is discarded.
and all of a sudden, you, when you cease to exist, so the kind of language becomes difficult here, but instead of you, there suddenly is everything.
And that corresponds with many near-death experiences where people...
Yeah, instead of, you know, because what you'd expect at death, if there's nothing after death, is you get a narrowing of consciousness.
And it would be kind of like, you know, it would be like the James Bond shutter, you know, where it kind of closes up and that's it.
It's blackness.
And instead, people give entirely the opposite testimony that, in fact, the one universal characteristic of near-death experiences is that consciousness widens.
Why should it do that if the brain's closing down?
So that kind of fits in with what I believe about the nature of consciousness.
I haven't had one, so I'm kind of having to go off other testaments, but so many of these are told with such conviction that they're not, I don't believe they're hallucinations.
I think people are actually telling what has really happened.
But why should a person, instead of suddenly having this narrow, selfish, private view of the world, all of a sudden, when the brain is just about to shut down, all of a sudden they say, I wasn't there, but everything else was.
And I was just suddenly, I couldn't put it into words, but everything was suddenly there.
That seems to me a very, very striking experience.
And yes, you could explain it in terms of chemicals.
And maybe you can always reduce it to physical terms, you know?
That doesn't take away from what may be the higher reality of it.
I have wondered for a very long time if what we call the metaphysical now, the kind of thing we're talking about right now, and science, will ever actually find a place where they meet.
Professor, you are aware there are some very serious experiments beginning to go on at places like Princeton and elsewhere with regard to consciousness.
The End By the way, I promised I would change the photograph up on my webcam, and I did.
Earlier today, the cat you saw up there first, Yeti, who's the new one of the bunch, I kicked a rock off the porch, and he thought he saw this rock move.
And so the other cat in the photograph, that's Abby.
That had a near-death experience, Abby.
13-year-old, 14-year-old cat now.
Brilliant old cat now, but healthy as hell.
It was great.
And when Yeti thought he saw this rock, he climbed over Abby, and he was looking at this rock, and Abby had an expression on his face like, get that body off me, or the next move you make will be your last one.
Well, the Egyptians worship cats, you know, and they remember that today.
First-time caller, long-time listener, and I want to applaud you for your ability to bring alternative thinking to kind of a myopic populace for the most part.
Well, I was curious if the professor had any knowledge as far as alien, an alien kind of being or beings that I'm calling from the desert in Arizona.
I've spent a lot of time on the reservation and Native American ceremonies.
And several medicine men that I'm familiar with and spend a great deal of time with are of the thought that an alien presence, they call them Star People or Star Nation people, are trying to save the planet with crop circles and using symbols in Wales and in the British countryside in an effort to heal the planet.
I mean, I look at some of these very elaborate ones, and I wonder how the heck could you do that with a lawnmower, you know?
So I keep an open mind on that.
I think crop circles are interesting anyway.
I mean, they're very historical.
They go back centuries.
We know that there weren't lawnmowers in those days.
So whether they were that elaborate in those days or not, I don't know.
So there's certainly some phenomenon there we don't understand.
But I'm particularly interested in the link with the Native American beliefs there, because I've just started up a project with an astrobiologist at Washington State University.
And this is really exciting because it's bringing everything we've talked about tonight in terms of aliens in the solar system right into the scientific mainstream.
We're just starting a project, also including one of his postdocs, where we're trying to treat this whole subject scientifically and build a kind of catalogue of what kind of signs would we expect to find from alien presence, and how would we go about verifying if we did find those signs that they actually were extraterrestrial.
And so I'm kind of keeping it anonymous at the moment, partly because we're just starting the project, we don't know where it's going to go.
Secondly, because it is so controversial that the researcher in question who just moved to Washington State wants to keep it private until we know because he's open-minded enough to do it.
He doesn't want ridicule from his colleagues, and so we're just moving privately on it at the moment, but we do have that.
So if a caller would like to email me with details, I could feed that into the project.
Yeah, you go to my website, you know, and then you'll see it right at the top, you know, a little bar that says email, and it's just DavidDarling at daviddarling.info.
But you can do it through my website, and that's fine.
I'm a graduate student at Embry-Riddle in Aeronautical Science, and through the research that you do as a student, I came across some information regarding the closing days of World War II, that the Germans were, in fact, experimenting with anti-gravity generators, and they did build three saucer-like craft to test them out in.
And the SS, German SS, was sent, I think, in March of 1945 to destroy them.
They were in Romania so that the Soviets wouldn't be able to confiscate them.
And I just wonder if there's any truth in this, because this was due to British intelligence and the OSS, which was the forerunner of the CIA now.
Probably nothing more than the general public on that.
I know there was a book written on that subject recently.
I'm not sure who did that.
Was it Nick Pope or someone, who covered that whole business of anti-gravity, including secret Nazi experiments on it?
It wouldn't surprise me if they were looking at saucer-like crafts, because, of course, the U.S. Air Force was doing work on the Avro car and other things that were saucer-like in design.
There's no question that you can make something like that fly.
Whether they were actually making any progress on anti-gravity research is an entirely different question.
They may have been trying to, whether they actually got anywhere.
Yeah, and also I think it's been, you know, some of the aerospace companies over here, I'm not sure if it's Lockheed or Boeing, but it might have been Boeing actually, were entertaining the concept, you know, and I've had a group looking into it.
Now, whether they're actually doing any practical experiments on it or not is another matter.
There has been some, you know, there's been some research around.
I just don't know how far it's gone.
You know, anti-gravity in conventional physics is pretty way out there.
My question was, since Aboriginal tribes were pretty much around long before the white man, wouldn't they have a higher instance of that, any possibilities?
And that's one of the things we're feeding into our project because we want to look into the sky legends and really look what's out there and what's actually been said, what's been documented, and get to the bottom of these things.
Well, I mean, there were pictures of helmeted figures in caves and craft and saucer-like craft in the sky and all kinds of things from very, very ancient times, right?
Look, millions of people like the one we just talked to, millions and millions of them, Professor, see these things, and sure, we can take, I don't know, maybe we can take 90% of them and dismiss them somehow or another, maybe even a higher percentage.
But it does seem reasonable that something is happening.
I know somebody personally who is very much involved in the SETI community who has regularly seen these things out in, I think his home is in New Jersey.
And he's totally convinced of them.
He's plotted the flight paths.
He knows they're not regular airliners or anything.
And they fit this classic description of the SETI.
and to defy gravity means that you have essentially discovered a magnificent new source of energy that the world at this moment needs much more desperately than we need some weapon that would mystify our enemies when you think I mean, obviously, yeah, it's hovering.
Well, one of the main reasons that a lot of the people who are looking into this want it all to break open is because they feel we need a new energy source, and we do very desperately, don't we?
The End Once again, Professor Darling, Professor Adam in Cincinnati says, hey, I've got a question for Professor Darling.
I find the most important question about aliens are not who they are, if they're here or not, or why they could be here, but rather what we're going to do about their presence.
In other words, he's somebody who totally is convinced that they're here.
I was intrigued when you were talking earlier about your own theories of consciousness and how the brain was more of a filter.
And I had a traditional background in a disbachaler's level, both psychology and philosophy.
And I was kind of curious, with both your knowledge of physics and your own personal theories on consciousness, where would you put the whole idea of how obviously there are cause and effect, there's a cause and effect level of reality, and then there's a freedom of choice issue.
It's kind of a classical question, but I wanted to throw that out there to see how you would use it with your knowledge of both consciousness and of physics, and how you think that, how do you answer that question?
Yeah, I mean, in terms of physics, you know, as you say, there's always a cause and effect.
The only place where there isn't is kind of in quantum physics, where sometimes things can arise just because they arise, just randomly without a prior cause at all.
So possibly free will, if it exists, truly exists, maybe arises at the quantum level.
unidentified
But do you think that's a possibility?
Because that's always been sort of my interest is sort of at the quantum level.
And you look at some of the early aboriginal myths where they talk about consciousness itself maybe potentially being able to affect the universe or the shape of the universe.
And I wonder if at some point there might not come a day where we can find a connection between that consciousness and something at a quantum level.
Yeah, so I'm not sure if free will exist truly in the sense that it is free or not, or whether it's kind of just something that arrives and we think it's free will, but it's not.
And one other question, just a quick one, was just that with my background, and I'm looking at graduate schools, but I'm very interested in a lot of the more interesting, some people would say, far out subjects having to do with anything from cosmology to extraterrestrial, as well as traditional questions like the one I just asked you.
Where would you recommend someone who wanted to get involved and wanted to find a way that he could start making it more of a bigger part of his life do that?
You can't actually, you know, start from zero and accelerate up to the speed of light, but general relativity, which is the other aspect of relativity, the theory of gravity, does actually provide short circuits in terms of things like wormholes.
There are also ways of engineering space and time.
There's something called the Alcubierre warp drive, which was devised by Mexican physicists, which allows you to create a space-time bubble, essentially deform space-time so you can travel through it.
You're not actually traveling through it, you're traveling around it, in a sense.
So there are ways to short circuit without violating the speed limit, as it were.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Darling.
Hi.
unidentified
Yes, hi.
Hi, Professor.
Hayard.
Look, years ago, I read a study about using drop tubes and jets to create zero gravity right here on Earth.
And it was momentarily able to obtain that particular state, but they were able to combine elements that you cannot do on this Earth unless you were in outer space.
But they did it here momentarily.
I think it was beryllium, beryllium oxide or something.
And Art said earlier that he had something that was like possibly an artifact or whatever from outside of this Earth.
Now, could Art have a piece of junk or could he have something that was its reality, it came from outer space?
Or was it created right here?
And could they prolong zero gravity here on Earth to create that anti-gravity?
What we call zero gravity, for example, you know, if you're in a spacecraft in Earth orbit, really isn't zero gravity because you're still, you know, the Earth screen, you're still in Earth gravity, but you're always falling.
Totally zero gravity doesn't really exist in the sense that you're always being pulled by something.
So I don't know whether zero gravity experiments have to be done.
I mean, anti-gravity experiments don't depend on being in space or on the Earth.
It seems to me that's an irrelevance.
It's really a question of what we mean by anti-gravity.
You know, physicists sometimes mean something different than Well, let me try it for the general public, something that would allow one to neutralize its effects.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Darling.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi.
Hey, thanks, Art.
Mike in Utah, listening on the XM Radio.
On global warming, it seems like there's a couple of different sides to this debate, whether it's we humans that are causing it all or whether we're just in a cycle, maybe a solar cycle that's naturally occurring that warms up the planet.
And as I heard on Mr. Bell's program last night, attributable to the magnetic shift towards the geographical pole, which might even be caused by nuclear testing in Nevada.
So this could be a natural event.
I was wondering, is anybody measuring the global warming effects on the other planets in the solar system that exhibit solar change, such as Mars?
First, Tom Collarline, you're on the air with Professor David Darling.
unidentified
Hi.
Hello, thank you.
It's an honor to speak with you, Art, and it's thrilled, Professor Darling.
First, I must say that I saw the black triangle two nights in a row about a year and a half ago sitting out in my backyard as I used to be wacky about looking for tumbling satellites.
Okay, real quick here, because we're short on time.
So what would the question be?
unidentified
Well, the question is if he has heard anything about any of those types of facilities there, because this gentleman that was driving the vehicle and I were eventually taken there by no means.
There are a number of people, many of them I've interviewed.
Colonel Corso comes to mind, Professor.
Colonel Corso was a very credible person who was a colonel who claimed that he was given technology essentially from the Roswell crash and that he integrated this technology into the private sector through government programs.
And that's how many of today's modern inventions came to be modern inventions.
He siphoned this technology off.
I personally believed the man, or that he believed what he was saying, I guess I should put it that way, that he was giving this technology to private industry.
And indeed, about that time, technology started leaping forward.
But you would think, wouldn't you, Professor, that a civilization capable of terraforming the planet could somehow manage to keep its own house in order?
Yeah, it's a similar sort of out-of-body experience, and it falls into exactly the same category of the body being left behind as a shell and possibly linking with a higher consciousness.
Listen, very quickly, because we're about out of time here, is your latest book, The Universal Book of Astronomy, from Andromeda Galaxy to Zone of Avoidance?