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Aug. 30, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:06:07

Edition 659 - Cruise Speaker Dr David Whitehouse

Former BBC Space/Science Editor - and guest speaker on the Cruise - Dr David Whitehouse on his new and unique book "The Alien Perspective" detailing mankind's engagement - going back 50,000 years - with the idea we may not be alone in the cosmos (*recorded before the Artemis launch)...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Thank you very much for being part of my show.
	I hope that everything is good with you and thank you for the hundreds of messages that I've had on my Facebook page and through email recently.
	They have, for a whole variety of reasons, been gratefully received and greatly appreciated too.
	If you want to make contact with me, you can do that either through the website theunexplained.tv or you can go to the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Us, the one with the logo on it, not to be confused with any other Facebook page.
	What have I got to say?
	The weather in London has, from the point of view that it's been raining, we had half a day of rain, improved.
	It's still kind of muggy, it's still kind of close, and it makes you feel really sluggish and tired.
	You'll know this if you're in the UK or wherever you're having weather like this.
	And I've got to say that as we coast towards September, I'm kind of looking forward to things eventually cooling down a bit.
	It has been a ridiculously hot summer.
	A couple of shout-outs to do.
	Before the guest on this edition, a return visit with Dr. David Whitehouse, who's going to be one of the guests on the cruise.
	He will be speaking for you there.
	David will be talking about his brand new book, Just Out, The Alien Perspective.
	Shout outs.
	David, originally from Dublin, now in Swindon, Wiltshire, nice to hear from you.
	New listener, Stuart.
	Good to hear from you, Stuart.
	And also new listener, Bobby, in Kokomo, Indiana.
	Place that I think was made famous, wasn't it, by the Beach Boys, who made a song all about it, Kokomo.
	And thank you for your poltergeist story as well, Bobby.
	Irene, thank you for getting in touch.
	Daniel, like the Gianni Russo interview that I put out.
	And also Janelle, nice to hear from you.
	Just some of the people, just a few of the people who've been in touch recently with the unexplained.
	So I think that's probably all I have to say.
	The introduction to David Whitehouse, well, this is one of the many internet pieces about him.
	Astronomer and science writer David Whitehouse takes us on a journey through the evolving cosmos as he considers humankind's place in the universe and how our survival depends on otherworldly perspectives.
	He's going to talk with us about how we've been aware that we are not alone or we've suspected that we're not alone probably for tens of thousands of years here on this planet.
	So we'll talk with him about that.
	There is a lot to get into here.
	So Dr. David Whitehouse, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
	Don't forget when you get in touch with me by email or however, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
	And thank you for your good thoughts, too, about my ongoing tinnitus situation that followed an accident at work where very loud sound was poured into my ears.
	I'm getting by and I'm not that I'm recommending this because I don't know, but I read that a vitamin B12 dose every day might help.
	So I'm just from my point of view and I'm not endorsing this.
	I'm starting to try that.
	But any recommendations gratefully received and thank you if you have emailed about that.
	That's all I've got to say, really.
	Thank you to Adam, my webmaster.
	Let's get to Dr. David Whitehouse in Hampshire now and talk about his new book, The Alien Perspective.
	David, thank you for coming on.
	You're welcome.
	David, these are the most exciting times it seems to me that you and I have lived through.
	I think as little boys, both of us, we, and you did something about it by becoming involved in it, but we stared at the skies and we were interested and of course we were enthralled by Apollo and the shuttle that followed.
	It seems to me that this is some kind of golden age that we're in.
	I've just been going through stories, you know, that have appeared in the news this week, and this is not all of them at all.
	A day ago, they were talking about the discovery of CO2, carbon dioxide, on an exoplanet, exciting discovery in itself.
	They've produced a water map of Mars, or what looks like an ancient water map of Mars, the latest on the rock samples taken on Mars.
	A 15-year mission to Uranus has been announced, according to the front page of the Daily Star this morning.
	The imminent launch of Artemis, which is, of course, first phase of the SLS system and NASA's moon missions.
	And that is just one week's news in space.
	This is an astonishing time to live in.
	You know, it is.
	When I was...
	It was the time when we first sent probes to Mars and particularly to Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets.
	And they said, this is an absolutely wonderful time because you can only do this thing once, the first view of Jupiter and its moons, the first close-up view of Saturn and its rings.
	This is the first time it's ever been done.
	And there was a wonderful feeling of exploration.
	But you're right, in the sense that every generation, given the tools and opportunities given to it, unpeal a little bit more about the universe.
	And in the last few years, and increasingly so, the use of much better technology than was available in the past is allowing us a much closer look at these dramatic things.
	I mean, you're quite right.
	That list of stories you put out are just remarkable that we are able to do that.
	And sometimes I sit down and think, well, look at the particular stories, the data of the rocks on Mars, the spectra of the exoplanet showing carbon dioxide.
	I think that is amazing in the detail.
	But then again, I sit back and think, isn't it wonderful that people can do this?
	Yes.
	I mean, yes, it's the simple answer.
	And I guess the slightly more complex answer is yes, but.
	And the but is, why are we doing this?
	You know, is there, I was thinking about this very deeply as I was reading your book this week.
	And the question that was in my head all the time was, why are we doing this?
	Are we doing this because our supposed masters, our political leaders, those who've been in charge for all of these decades, actually know a truth that we don't have time, most of us, to think about.
	And that truth is that we're outgrowing this planet on which we live.
	We're poisoning it.
	We're putting too many people on it.
	So we've got to look for either somewhere else to live Or resources from somewhere else to keep this place going?
	Well, if you don't mind me saying so, Howard, that's never going to happen.
	We are, in our lifetime and in the lifetime of everybody alive and beyond, we're never going to get significant resources from outer space, possibly energy, but that is debatable.
	But in terms of anything else, that's way beyond the horizon we can see at the moment.
	We have to make do with what we have got and improve our lot.
	And isn't that the role of every generation to improve the world?
	And sometimes it works, and often, as we've seen in history, it doesn't.
	But the reason we find out about planets around other stars, the reason why we try to understand the surface of Mars, the origin of life, and the reason why we search life, search space for life, are severalfold.
	I mean, that's the sort of Carl Sagan reason, is that we do it because it's part of what we are.
	We are an exploratory species.
	We have to find out new things.
	We have to explore, go places, discover things, because that's what got us where we are when we decided to leave Africa millions of years ago.
	And without it, we lose an essential spark, which is our survival instinct.
	That's the sort of philosophical answer for it.
	I mean, there are various other answers, like it's entertaining, it's great fun.
	A lot of people get a great deal of pleasure by learning about and understanding and appreciating the remarkable things we've discovered about the universe.
	It's like it's as important as writing opera, as Shakespeare, as any music.
	It's as important as the Beatles.
	It's part of, as they say, the tapestry of life.
	But it's also important because, in hard financial terms, it's part of the economy.
	And you don't spend money, this rocket that's going into space, the Artemis rocket, the SLS launch system, that's going to take an uncrewed capsule to the moon as the first part of going back to the moon, you know, that's cost billions and billions and billions.
	And yet, where has that money been spent?
	You don't take it up into space and watch it float away.
	You know, it's spent on salaries.
	It's spent in companies and industries.
	People ultimately spend it down the supermarket on cars and on houses.
	So this enriches this whole endeavor, exploring space and astronomy, enriches the technology and skill set of our society because a lot of people are drawn into science because of these wonderful discoveries, but they don't stay in science, but they take their skills with them elsewhere.
	The only thing that critics would say, and you've heard this argument a million times, and it is more apposite now, perhaps, people would say that we are facing multiple crises here.
	We have an energy crisis.
	We have a cost of living crisis.
	We have more people than we know what to do with.
	We've had disease and all sorts of things.
	And I guess some people might question, I am not one of them, and neither are you, but some people might question whether the particular bang we're getting for this buck could be a louder bang if we spent that buck elsewhere.
	In a sense, I agree with that, because going to the moon and exploring the planets and beyond doesn't make sense unless you do the other things, unless you develop stem cell gene therapy, unless you develop the treatments for the degenerative diseases, and unless you look after the health of the population and increase the benefits of all from the economy that we have and give people a good life.
	Because certainly, although you could argue that understanding about the universe is part of giving people a good life, ultimately, people's security, their well-being, their health, the fact that they can look forward to the future and their children get a better lives than those, has a greater claim on the power of science than finding out what the chemical structure of the surface of Mars is.
	I would argue that we spend relatively little on finding out about Mars and we get a benefit from it.
	But I know few scientists who, given the choice, and the choice is not that simple in the sense said, do you spend it money on relieving hunger or do you spend money on a space probe to Saturn?
	We don't get that choice.
	That's not the way society works.
	The decisions are already baked in.
	But I know few scientists who, given that choice, would not go for people instead of planets.
	And I can understand why they might do that.
	Because yes, we can't quantify the benefits as readily as we can, perhaps, with something that prolongs somebody's life or gives us cheaper energy.
	But we don't know what is out there, do we?
	We don't know what we might discover.
	It is the imponderable.
	And we have to say, the only argument I guess we can put up in defense of it all is that, yes, it's a vast spend.
	And yes, that doesn't seem logical in some analyses.
	But if you think about it, check back on that which we have developed and that which we have learned.
	And if you take that forward, then presumably, hopefully, the benefits that we've had in the past will be exponentially more in the future.
	Well, yes, technology improves because science pushes forward.
	You could make the argument that if you want to pump technology, you should go and pump that technology.
	But as we've seen with various governments and various initiatives, governments all over the world are not very good at picking winners.
	Winners emerge naturally from a broad base of scientific research.
	You know, you only have to go back and look at people who said that they didn't see the need for anything more than half a dozen computers in the entire world.
	And that was in the 60s and 70s.
	And now look at the way society has moved.
	So benefits emerge from a broad spectrum of science.
	And sometimes if you try and pick winners, all you do is lose.
	And you have to realize that the game you're in is trying to fertilize as much as you can And take the benefits from that.
	But having said that, the amount of money we spend on science, particularly the attractive science that the public likes in terms of the entertainment of planets and space probes and stars and all that business, is actually relatively small.
	It's less than a tank full of petrol per person per year in the United Kingdom, and completely dwarfed by military spending, particularly in the United States.
	So, yes, these are deep and difficult questions.
	And in a perfect world without conflict, we would allocate our resources much more to the benefit of people in the broader sense than, you know, we as a...
	We have a lot to learn.
	And we certainly do.
	As we try and push forward society, advance society, it goes forward, it goes back.
	And we spend a lot of money on weapons.
	Still do.
	And scientists don't actually use that argument.
	And I've forgotten that statistic.
	Nearly enough, if they did, then I think they might get a lot more sympathy than they do.
	That military spending these days, sadly, and this is becoming a more unstable world, is higher than scientific spending.
	We need to be remembering that.
	And so to the book, David, The Alien Perspective, which seems to me to be a kind of analysis of the history of how we've contemplated our relative position in the cosmos.
	In other words, the question of whether we are alone and what we're going to do about this.
	You have at the top of the book a couple of great quotes that appear on a couple of pages at the beginning.
	One is from Arthur C. Clarke.
	And Arthur C. Clarke says, but the barriers of distance are crumbling.
	One day we shall meet our equals or our masters among the stars.
	You know, that was in 1968 in 2001, a Space Odyssey.
	And that is increasingly these days looking like a fact.
	But historically, it was a little cloudier.
	It seems much clearer now that one day we will meet somebody or something that may or may not be like us, and we'll have to contemplate the fact that we're not the only kids in the playground.
	Yes, I mean, this is the central question.
	I feel in my heart, though I have only circumstantial evidence for this, that there is a lot of life out there in the universe around other stars, and that if you think about it, they could have explored the universe themselves and they could communicate across great distances.
	And that is the, you know, when I was writing the book, I wrote, I had a folder which I wrote contact on.
	And it seems to me that a lot of the book was leading up to the thrill, the fear, the anticipation, the implications of contact.
	When we actually really do either come face to face with an alien or get information about an alien or discover there is life elsewhere.
	It struck me that that was the point at which history changes.
	And a lot of the book is sort of people wanting to search for life in space, sometimes believing they've had contact, analysing what it would mean for religion, for politics, for technology.
	This whole point of contact is such a powerful idea and such a life-changing civilization-changing event that fascinated me in all its various aspects.
	And then I had to sort of say, well, actually, how could we speculate on what alien life would be?
	And the only thing we can do is look at Earth life and perhaps use our imagination to wind it up, to extend it into other areas, to use various bits of science.
	So the book was sort of, if you like, a book about finding life and intelligence in space.
	But as you know, you've read loads of books about finding life in space.
	We all have, about searching for life in space.
	And I thought, I'm not ready to write one of these books unless I can do it in a slightly different way.
	And it took me ages to work out how to make this, find the stories and work out how to exploit the idea of contact and what it means.
	You say in the book, and I quote, I worried about the contrast between the public interest in life in space and the relatively small number of people who've shaped the philosophy of looking for intelligent aliens.
	And I thought it was time for new voices, new ways of thinking, and perhaps fewer bad jokes and brush-offs that cover up legitimate concerns.
	Yeah, it's amazing that so much of the philosophy of looking for aliens in space and how to search for them and what the signal and message would mean and should we reply actually goes back to 1960, goes back to the early 1960s when we first realized, shortly after we first realized, that radio telescopes can send signals across interstellar distances and that we could send signals and we could possibly receive signals.
	And a lot of the ideas were developed then and they are still the mainstream ideas that we have now in terms of looking for signals, looking for beacons, thinking about simple messages, what it would mean, how we could interpret a message, decrypt a message, what it would mean for society.
	It was all fermented in the 1960s with people like Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, Barney Oliver, Kardashov and Shalovsky in Russia.
	And these are the same themes now, but it struck me that with better technology that we have, particularly laser flashes between the stars, and particularly the prospect of quantum communication over great distances, it struck me that there was, if you like, a new angle, a new flavor, new thoughts about aliens, and particularly about should we reply?
	Because if we ever get a signal, because I've been frustrated for many years that when denizens, there was a sort of feeling among the sort of SETI community that it was very close, very small.
	And whenever you criticized or talked about it, you got a bad joke in reply.
	And I didn't think this was very satisfactory.
	So I felt that there were questions which needed a broader discussion in a wider community, if you like, because the thing about science and the thing about life in space and life elsewhere is that so many areas of science are interested in this.
	You know, you talk to biologists, you talk to computer scientists, you talk to roboticists, you talk to chemists.
	They are all interested in life in space.
	And it's not just the people who sit on the end of radio telescopes and look for a tiny signal who should develop the philosophy and have the greatest influence in what we do.
	But there is a frustration about this search for the WOW signal or whatever it may be, isn't there?
	In that we constantly get reports.
	I mean, you detail a report.
	I think one of the first people to do radio astronomy thought in Russia, I think this was, that they'd made a big discovery.
	And that was just the first of a whole raft over the decades of people who thought that there might be something big, and it gets into the newspapers and then it turns out it isn't.
	And more recently, we've had signals that have appeared to be pulsating in a fairly regular manner.
	But we've been able to explain those probably by the fact that whatever it is is emitting some kind of radiation.
	And the reason it pulsates is that periodically in its orbit, it goes behind something else, maybe a moon.
	Yes, it's interesting that when the first radio searches were started in the late 50s and early 60s, and we thought that civilizations would be sending out radio signals to communicate with civilizations in the stars around them, the thing which impressed me greatly is that everybody thought it would be simple.
	Everybody thought it would be relatively straightforward and easy, and that we would find a signal really quickly.
	And among the first searches, Project Osmer I talk about, they found a signal and it was sort of amazing to them, but not terribly surprising because they thought that it would be a straightforward thing to do to find these signals.
	It turned out not, as you said, it turned out to be a false alarm.
	And for 60 years of searches, we've had lots of false alarms and we haven't found anything.
	And this indicates, I think, that people are sometimes reticent to draw conclusions about searching for life in space.
	But certainly the fact that we have found nothing over 60 years and our abilities to search, particularly for radio signals or radio beacons, has improved dramatically, outrageously.
	We can do things in seconds now that would have taken years or decades 60 years ago.
	The truth, the big conclusion that I think people are reluctant to draw is that we live in a quiet area.
	There are no transmitting, strong civilizations in our locality.
	And I mean, within 50 light years, 100 light years or so, it does seem that we are either alone or it is a quiet neighborhood.
	And I think that's a very important truth because we are not in a crowded section of the galaxy, but we're not in an untypical section of our galaxy.
	And if they haven't stood out and we haven't found them, obviously, then that's telling us something about how common life is or what it does.
	Is there a maybe there, though?
	Because it just seems to me, and I know there have been a few newspaper pieces in the last few years about this.
	The maybe factor is that maybe it's quiet because we're looking for things that would communicate with us in ways that we understand.
	What happens if there's something out there that is using technology that we don't understand and that goes over our head?
	Well, that's right.
	The analogy often given is somebody living in the Amazon or the New Guinea jungle who communicates by jungle drums, not knowing about radio.
	And yes, there may be other technologies and ways to do it we haven't gotten onto yet.
	And perhaps it's part of a cycle in the sense that we will not find them until we develop a certain level of technology.
	But I'm not entirely convinced by that because radio waves are such an obvious way and an easy way to communicate between the stars.
	You can send a signal a great distance through spaces transparent to many of these radio waves.
	And you can send a signal a great distance for a small amount of power.
	And you can also do the same in a certainly different way with a laser beam.
	So the way the universe is made up points with a very big finger or tentacle at radios and lasers as being the obvious way to signal between the stars.
	And if you don't do that, then you are, perhaps if you're an alien, making an obvious choice to saying, we will not do it, the obvious and simple way that simpletons like us could do.
	There has emerged in the last decade, I say, the idea of quantum communications, the idea that aliens would entangle particles with this spooky property of quantum mechanics, which few people understand.
	But basically what it means, it means is that you could send a signal of photons and you could, if you like, imprint on them a structure or a property which you could pick up when you receive those photons.
	And that quantum information, that quantum signature, could actually in some respects travel a lot further.
	And we've made some searches for these quantum entangled photons and not found anything.
	But it is an example, as you say, of a new Horizon, a new technique we didn't think about 20 years ago, and that has occurred to us now.
	And it may well be, you know, I mean, it's not impossible to think that in decades to come we'll find a new technology and then we'll use that to look at the sky or and we'll see something that you know we weren't meant to see when we were less advanced.
	It's interesting that many of the telescopes that we are sending up into space, that James Webb included, but many of the other telescopes in space and the telescopes on the ground, the huge arrays of radio telescopes, the extremely large optical telescopes we're building, cannot have their data analyzed by people.
	The data is analyzed by AI, by machine learning, by neural networks.
	And it may well be that the sign of life in space is something that has to be mined from a vast quantity of data that is found by one of these programs that flags it up to us.
	And we look at it and we think, well, that's strange.
	It may well be that that's a channel we could find out about rather than pointing a radio telescope at a star and hearing a beep, beep, beep.
	There seems to be an undercurrent, maybe, that I picked up from the book of arrogance within us as a species, in that we feel that we can be here.
	We've reached this level of technological sophistication.
	Now we think we can send signals up there, and if we find something, they're going to say, thank you very much for making contact.
	It's so nice to hear from you.
	How are things?
	It may not be that way.
	You know, we may have been, as you say in the book, we might have been quietly observed by something or someone for a very long time who simply haven't got in touch.
	It may be the case.
	We cannot disprove that, or we can do it with search.
	I've got two thoughts about that.
	One is that no matter who we find or what we find in space, and we're likely if we find anything that they will be far more advanced than us, far more developed, have better technology.
	You know, what's it like for a civilization to be 100 million years old?
	You know, they would have solved many of the problems that we face and presumably face many new ones of their own.
	And on one side of the book, I say, look, we should not cower timidly in the face of cosmic power.
	You know, we should be a proud species.
	We have done remarkable things.
	We are remarkable.
	We have a tremendous planet that in any array of life-giving planets out there in space could hold its head up and say what's happened here is remarkable and just as good as that could have happened anywhere else.
	So I think we should be proud of what we are, but also cognizant of the fact that if we do find evidence, and that finding evidence is different from being communicated with, they are likely to be far more advanced than we are.
	And the assumption that they would be eternal princes of peace that would only be interested in our development and helping us is an assumption.
	And, you know, as we all know about science, assumptions can be wrong.
	It may well be that to become an advanced civilization in space and survive for millions, tens, hundreds of millions of years, and particularly to travel between the stars, you have to be a nasty piece of work.
	And would we like to find them?
	You say that we're sending out messages.
	That's a risk.
	And quotes, you quote Jared Diamond, professor of evolutionary biology, Pulitzer Prize winner, quotes, those astronomers now preparing again to beam radio signals out to hoped-for extraterrestrials are, quotes, naïve, even dangerous.
	It could be the case, but I'm reassured a little by the fact that, well, one thing I did when I was writing the book, I thought people had talked to me over the years, and indeed I was a radio astronomer, and I did the calculations myself when I was younger, as to how far our signals could get, our radio signals, our television leakage, our inter-planetary radar signals, you know, they all leak out into space.
	You know, that's that fabulous first scene in cosmos, sorry, in contact, where you pull out from the Earth and you hear older and older radio transmissions.
	You know, that is wonderful.
	But actually, if you do the calculations right, modern calculations as to what the space is between the stars, you find that the information we send out into space doesn't get as far as people thought.
	And that you would have to work extremely hard, even at the nearest stars, to pick up a signal from Earth and interpret it as having some form of intelligence.
	So it's not impossible that aliens further out have got fantastic technologies, fantastically large collection areas for their telescopes, and are able to use tremendous computers to pick out information from the static and say, yeah, that's a radio, you know, that's life there is.
	But it seems that in general, it is much harder to send these signals out than we had thought.
	And that's sort of slightly comforting because all this idea that they would immediately zone in on us and think, oh, we can go to that nearby star system and see what we can plunder.
	It's actually, we're not as obvious in the cosmos as some people think.
	And that is, if you like, a respite in the debate about should we send out signals into space?
	Should we alert ourselves?
	I've known, probably I've known more scientists who say no than who say yes.
	I remember when I was a very young scientist, the late Professor Sir Bernard Lovell was my supervisor for my PhD.
	In fact, I was the only PhD student he ever had.
	And he taught me very little about astronomy because, you know, you just have to get on with it yourself.
	He taught me a lot about Elgar and cricket.
	And that was good.
	I I certainly appreciated that.
	But we we started talking one night.
	I used to be on the tele used to use the radio telescope at George Roman late at night.
	And being the youngster, I got the night shifts.
	And he was there in the middle of the night with the telescope tracking something and you're keeping an eye on it, you know, like they like the science fiction films had, you know.
	And he'd come in late at night in his old Jaguar, 11 to 12 o'clock at night, just to have a look around just to make sure everything was all right, and then he'd wander off again.
	But one night we started talking about life in space, and he grabbed me by the arm and he said, if we hear the space phone ringing, we must not answer it.
	We would put ourselves in great danger.
	And I've known a lot of scientists who take the same view.
	I mean, even when they discovered pulsars back in the late 60s, these blips, regular blips, that were interpreted initially as LGM1, Little Green Man 1, until they realized that they are spinning super dense stars which act as lighthouses.
	There was a suggestion by Martin Ryder, as a professor of astronomy at Cambridge, that if it turned out to be intelligence, they should destroy the data.
	They should burn it, and they should totally ignore it and forget about it.
	Now, that's interesting, isn't it?
	If we assume that there are some working on the premise that maybe we should destroy the data and maybe not answer the phone, that suggests to me, because I'm a suspicious individual and a journalist, as indeed are you, that maybe somebody has already got that evidence and they've chosen to hide it.
	No, it's not the case.
	I know it would make life more interesting and fascinating and more Watergate and more Hollywood if there was a signal that had been found and it was covered up and analyzed by secret government departments, secret military analysts come in and look at it and we use that technology to develop advanced weapons.
	You know, we used it in some way.
	That's science fiction.
	That is great science fiction and it's a wonderful idea in a world full of wonderful stories.
	This is Hollywood, this is Netflix, this makes great discussion.
	But in reality, and I know many people you speak to would disagree with me, it hasn't happened.
	I mean, when I became a radio astronomer, one of the things that interested, and I started talking to NASA and to all the other radio astronomers, one of the things we all, we youngsters all used to talk about is, have you found any interesting signals?
	What about this?
	What about that?
	And nobody had.
	I mean, I knew a lot of military, I still know a lot of military people.
	And there is nothing there.
	Many of them would like to get an edge up on their enemies with information from space.
	Many would like to keep the information, if they had it, to keep the information private.
	I talk about this in the book.
	I said, if we find signals from space and a government department finds it, does the government have first dibs on the information?
	And can they keep it quiet and patent it?
	Interesting discussions, considering what else happens in what you can patent the rest of science.
	But I'm not afraid.
	I'm actually glad to say that there is no great international conspiracy.
	We have had lots and lots of false alarms, lots and lots of discussions among government officials and military officials about what to do if the false alarm turns out to be real.
	And there are shady, shadowy, semi-secret characters in many countries.
	But it's not the case that somebody has found life or found aliens and they're hiding it from us.
	That hasn't happened.
	I mean, in a way, I'm disappointed because I remember speaking to Carl Sagan about this before he died, and it was clear he was poorly.
	And although he was entirely optimistic that he would survive, he did occasionally say, it would be sad if I died before we'd found them.
	And then he'd say, well, you know, some people think we already have, but I know that's not the case.
	It was sad that Carl Sagan died before we found aliens.
	And if we don't find them from space, that'll happen to all of us because we haven't found them yet.
	Interesting to read in a book like yours that you take time to talk about UFOs and about those people who claim that they've been having alien contact for years.
	A number of those people have been guests on my show.
	One of them you may be aware of is a guy who was a counselor, a politician in Whitby, Yorkshire.
	And, you know, a lot of these people I've spoken to over the years, like him, are perfectly rational when you talk with them and they give accounts of the contact that they've had.
	And you actually put it in the book that there are many people, and there are famed cases like Calvin Parker, Pascagoula, and Travis Walton and many other notable names who I'm sure you've heard of, who say that we've been having contact with something shadowy and something beyond us and something that's interested in us for decades, maybe longer.
	You're quite right.
	I mean, if you're writing a book about life in space, you have to include this because that's the way most people, apart from Hollywood, most people think about life in space through UFOs or whatever we're supposed to call them these days.
	And there are certainly some very interesting stories from people.
	But I've got several approaches to that.
	I mean, what Ronald Reagan said about the Soviets, you know, trust but verify.
	I've heard loads of interesting stories, but I've heard no proof.
	And I'm a hard-bitten journalist and somebody can tell me a story, but I want proof.
	I think that a lot of this, you know, there are two sides To this, I think a lot of the encounters are psychological basis.
	I think they come from the person involved.
	However, well-meaning and sincere they are, they believe it, but I don't think it's reality.
	But there is undoubtedly things in the sky we cannot explain.
	We've seen these pictures and videos from US Air Force pilots tracking these weird objects.
	But I don't put these weird objects in the same ballpark as aliens taking people into a spaceship or landing anywhere.
	UAPs, unidentified aerophenoma, is a fascinating subject.
	And the scrutiny we're giving it now is well deserved.
	And we should have had more scientific scrutiny of UFOs over the years.
	It's been derided, it's been ridiculed, it's been insulted by mainstream scientists, and they shouldn't have done it.
	They should have taken this job, this phenomena, very seriously and not tried to ridicule it.
	So why do you think NASA has changed its tune recently?
	I mean, admittedly, it's got a new director.
	That might have something to do with it.
	But I think the quote was, we're going full on or maybe all out, I think, was the quote on trying to solve or trying to find evidence around this mystery.
	Why the change, do you think?
	The change is because of the videos that were taken by the Air Force pilots, which show something strange, something small, something highly maneuverable.
	Well, it's a highly maneuverable can change direction very quickly, something that can travel in water, something that can accelerate very quickly and seems to be quite small.
	It's a strange phenomenon, and it deserves an explanation.
	And you cannot look at these videos and deny that there's not something there to be looked at.
	And one side of my brain says, well, okay, what does an alien spaceship look like?
	We don't know.
	Could it be?
	But I don't think so at the moment.
	And you see, that strange object gets then translated into Roswell and Area 51 and all that culture and mythology when it should be kept separate.
	And I think NASA realizes that there is a phenomena there.
	Presidents have known about this, America have known about this for decades.
	There is a phenomena there that cannot be explained, but it is not yet associated with life, with intelligence.
	And we don't know what it is.
	The problem I have is that when you associate that with conspiracy theories and, as I said, Area 51, Roswell, and all these, it's not.
	It's a separate scientific phenomena from the encounters.
	And you have to say, I mean, when we talk about, apart from these new videos that the Air Force has had, and I understand there are more to come, better ones to come.
	Apart from those, and you look at what you call the traditional UFO evidence.
	I mean, I looked at this, is it the Calvin picture?
	The Calvine photos, which we've discussed on my show, on TV and here online, the Calvine pictures were disappeared for decades.
	Well, so what?
	I mean, everything.
	I mean, in a walk of life, things disappear for some reason.
	You lose things, you misplace things.
	But there have been attempts, not just attempts, there have been actual situations where people have had things removed, evidence removed, and they've been told on many occasions, do not talk about this.
	Well, perhaps they have.
	But is that evidence for...
	And when people say that they've been told, they've been warned off, they've been visited, it's always very difficult to get the actual evidence that the police would use to actually make a case, if they had to make a case about this.
	I mean, the Calvin pictures may have been lost.
	And if you look at the Calvin pictures, it strikes me as very typical of the other pictures of the UFOs.
	And I would also, as an aside, say, where are the better pictures?
	We live through the Camcorder age.
	We live in the iPhone age now, where we can produce pictures of anything anywhere in the world on the internet in seconds.
	And yet the quality of these pictures has not improved.
	And the Calvin pictures, I can't understand what the fuss is about because it's clearly an out of focus.
	You can see the caustic optical lines on it very easily.
	And people would look at, people analyzing optical analysis would say, that's out of focus.
	It's in the optical train somewhere.
	It's something that's not being focused properly.
	And the aeroplane underneath it is actually heading in a different direction.
	And I find the UFO pictures totally unconvincing.
	They're either obviously fakes or they're flaws.
	Where is the picture like close encounters, like ET?
	Believe it or not, Howard, I got myself in the 1985 UFO encyclopedia, which was a particular thing I used to dine out on.
	And it's because an article I wrote in The Times saying, I will not believe that we've been visited until these aliens touch down on the White House lawn.
	And I said, I don't care if it's the one in Washington or the one in my back garden.
	The thing about UFOs is that, and close encounters of the three kinds or four kinds or whatever it is these days, is that they are fascinating, they are interesting, but where is the evidence?
	The evidence, I remember as a youngster reading Project Blue book, reading Hynex, Jay Allen Hynex book and reading everything I could about this.
	And I realized pretty soon that when people were talking about UFOs or about artifacts they'd pulled up from crash sites, that there'd come a Time in the book when the evidence would disappear, and it was always a conspiracy, and they were always hard done to and swindled.
	And I realized that that was a trope.
	Whenever you want the hard evidence that somebody has been visited, that somebody has taken a trip in a spaceship, of which there must be a whole garage full of different designs of spaceships and aliens here.
	Whenever you want the harsh evidence, say, yes, I know you tell a great story.
	I am fascinated by your story, as I am fascinated reading science fiction.
	But I'm a hard-bitten journalist.
	Where is the evidence?
	And the evidence is always one place removed.
	There's always a conspiracy.
	It's always in Area 51.
	Somebody visit them and took it away.
	They lost it.
	You know, there's always an excuse, a sub-story as to why you can't have the evidence.
	Well, maybe, but conversely, I would put to you, why would there be so many tens of thousands of stories, often involving highly credible professional people, sometimes pilots, whether they've been able to retain evidence or not for whatever reason that might be?
	Why are there so many stories from people who clearly have no financial interest in gaining from the story?
	And, you know, all they could gain in some cases was ridicule.
	They've had to put themselves on the line.
	Why would people do that?
	You talk about thousands of sightings and lots of people of all aspects of society.
	To me, it doesn't make any difference whether you're a pilot or whether you're a road sweeper.
	I've seen things, but in no case is there a bit of evidence from any of this that's in a museum, that you can look at, that you can analyse, you can put in a television studio and get a scientist to look at.
	It's not in a university lab.
	In no case is there physical evidence.
	Now, people tell great stories and people, psychologically, there is no difference in the makeup and the desires and the performance of pilots or policemen or porters.
	We all have the same basic drives and instincts and we all produce similar stories.
	And there is something psychological inside us that people want to believe.
	And there's some, I would hesitate to call it hallucination, but there's something that happens to some people who interpret, who believe, who embellish that they have been visited and they have taken a trip in a flying saucer or have seen an alien.
	Fascinating stories.
	But after 70 years after Roswell, where's the decent picture?
	Where is the bit of metal we can analyse?
	Where is the...
	If you take away what people tell you and you say physical evidence, that's what the police do first of all.
	Physical evidence, where is it?
	It's scrappy, it's unconvincing, and there's very little of it.
	And after 70 years with a whole menagerie of different designs of spaceships visiting us, doing different things, picking up people from all walks of life in all countries, and you couldn't put on a single table the hard evidence for this.
	So that tells me that while the things the pilots see is something interesting and you can analyze and it's fascinating and is unknown, the close encounters is a people phenomena and not an alien phenomenon.
	But doesn't that, to some degree, debase the story of anybody who ever has an encounter with anything?
	Because you can't bring away a piece from it.
	I mean, look, I've told this on the show before, and I'm sorry for telling it again.
	You never bring a piece from it.
	You never bring a piece of paper.
	Well, I know.
	But people who claim to have implants do not.
	Well, there are those who say, I'm falling back on the who say, who say that they've removed these things and they have these things in various places for analysis.
	But when you talk about anything like this and veering away for just a nanosecond, I saw a ghost in the Radio City Tower in Liverpool.
	And I was not expecting to see anything or anybody.
	There was me and the producer in the building.
	I went to the loo, came back out, and a big, big round tower.
	And I'm looking out and thinking, aren't the lights lovely?
	And then I look to one side, and there is a little man who looks like an old-fashioned Liverpool building watchman.
	And he's got shiny boots and a cap, and I can still have an old tweedy type coat down to his ankles.
	He's very short, as a lot of people were in those days.
	And I looked at him, and I'm about to mouth the words, oh, hello, what are you doing here?
	He disappears before my eyes.
	Now, I couldn't take a photograph of him.
	I don't have any evidence.
	But when I went to my producer colleague, and this is nothing to do with space, but when I went to my producer colleague and said, something strange has just happened, and he said to me, you've seen him, haven't you?
	Apparently, so many people in that building have.
	Now, that might be a manifestation of electromagnetic energy because there are powerful transmitters on top of that building.
	Could be anything, but everybody's seeing the same thing.
	So what I'm saying, bringing it back to the book and to space.
	Very strange, very strange.
	Well, bringing it back to the book and, you know, aliens, etc.
	It's going to be very hard, isn't it, for ordinary observers of these things, wherever they might be, to retain evidence that science would accept.
	No, no, I disagree.
	I disagree.
	I mean, ordinary people record extraordinary things all the time, particularly since a lot of people on the planet, billions of people on the planet, have got cameras in their pockets and have got access to the internet.
	So this, remember in the past before the Camcorda crates, it was very rare to see pictures of aircraft crashing.
	Now the internet's full of them.
	The internet's full of people taking videos of extraordinary things, of extraordinary accidents, places, people, remarkable things that flash onto the internet pretty quickly.
	And you would have thought that, given what people say about flying saucers and close encounters, that during the Camcorda and the iPhone age, that you would get more of these images and they would be better quality.
	And that among them, among the tens of thousands of people who think they've seen something, there would be one fascinating picture that would be of the quality of Steven Spielberg or George Lucas.
	But there isn't.
	Does that mean that David Whitehouse doesn't believe that aliens have been here or indeed are here?
	That we have yet to find them?
	Yes, I do.
	I don't believe in ghosts.
	I don't believe that we've been visited by aliens.
	The evidence is not there.
	I mean, I have got pretty extensive experience of science, of astronomy, and indeed of the shadier areas of, I say the shady, the more discrete areas of the analysis of life in space evidence.
	And there is nothing there.
	People would like there to be there.
	People have to take this seriously because of the implications.
	But how can I say this?
	I've spoken to many people over the years who would know, who do know, who have never been interviewed.
	And you talk to them about Area 51.
	You talk to them about Roswell.
	You talk to them about all this mythology that's come up.
	And they're quite happy, if you like, with the mythology.
	They're unconcerned with the fact that there are people who drive up to Area 51 asking, where are the aliens in the freezers?
	Or how come you built the bluebird spy plane?
	Did you use alien technology?
	The answer is no.
	The world is not as interesting as that.
	It's not as complicated as that.
	Many people would like it to be.
	But I'm afraid that the search for life in space is set on the heavens.
	We're still searching.
	We do not have evidence of alien.
	We do not have aliens.
	We do not have evidence of technology or contact on Earth at the moment.
	I wish it was...
	And I'm quite willing to talk to anybody who says they've been taken up in a spaceship.
	But beyond the story, where's the evidence?
	Assuming one day we find that evidence and we find it through radio astronomy or some other technical means, you discuss in the book the protocol.
	In other words, what do we do?
	And you seem to be somewhat shocked in the book.
	And I can understand why, that we really haven't got much of a plan, really.
	You're quite right.
	There is two aspects to this, because, you know, suppose a radio astronomer or any other type of somebody looking at the sky really found evidence, a signal or even, you know, as we're talking about, an artifact or, you know, something positive you can actually look at and found evidence.
	What do they do?
	What do they do?
	If an astronomer found this, it would make them the most famous scientist in the world and it would be a doorway to great fortune, I presume.
	But what do they do with the information?
	Do they tell their boss?
	Do they call the government?
	There is no plan for this.
	Astronomers have themselves come up with a few principles, such as telling the Secretary General of the United Nations, telling the President of the United States.
	But that's not law.
	That's just what they would hope to do.
	And you and I both know that in the throes of a big story, what you plan to do goes out the window.
	Absolutely.
	And of course, if you talk to Seth Szostak from SETI, which I have many times and I'm sure you have too, he says that there won't be any kind of closedown on the information.
	If something is discovered, it'll be known about pretty much immediately.
	It'll be in the papers.
	It'll be on the news wires.
	People will know about it.
	So when it happens, sorry to carry on rabbiting here, but when it happens, we need to know what we're going to do.
	We probably would.
	I mean, we probably would know about it.
	There are some circumstances when we may not, but, you know, I can tell you when I was working for the BBC as their science correspondent, I regularly used to get a phone call from some scientists saying, I'm just about to do a stint searching for extraterrestrial intelligence with this telescope, with that telescope.
	Here's my hotel number and my cell phone in case you need to get hold of me.
	You know, they were already, you know, in case they found something, they were already, you know, planning their media strategy as to what to do.
	So this shows that perhaps it would be impossible to keep this thing quiet.
	But you have to say the astronomers are very open and plain about this, that they would want to tell everybody.
	Why wouldn't they want to tell everybody?
	Because if Seshotak, when he was at Arecibo, found a signal and it was confirmed with another telescope elsewhere as not being local interference, and somebody from the New York Times phones him and says, I've just heard some, because these things leak.
	I mean, you wouldn't believe when I was a science journalist how much rumor you had about these things.
	These things leak.
	So what is he going to do when a journalist from the New York Times or NBC phones him and says, have you found an alien signal?
	Well, he's not going to lie about it because it'd look pretty stupid later on.
	Interesting, though, isn't it, to contemplate?
	And you also in the book, and I haven't read anything about this kind of thing before, you talk about the different responses to this.
	Different governments may have different responses to this information.
	Different religions will have different responses.
	Some religions will welcome the presence of whatever it is.
	The Pope himself indicated some years ago, I think 10 years or so ago, that we have cosmic brothers or whatever phrase he used at the time.
	So there will be different responses to this information that, as you say, is going to be out there virtually as soon as it's discovered.
	You're quite right.
	The religious aspect Of finding life in space is enormous.
	There are so many people in this world for whom religion is far more important than science, you know, for billions of people.
	And it's important to them as to what their faith says in relation to finding life in space.
	Say, for instance, we found life in space and it was obviously because it would send us a signal.
	It was obviously intelligent.
	It obviously had obviously a culture, a history, a science.
	What would its religion be?
	Did it believe in a God?
	What was its attitude towards us?
	There are some religions which would say that they are, as you say, our cosmic brothers, different ways for life to express itself in the universe, different expressions of God.
	There are others that would regard them as being, because they weren't human, even if they were intelligent, they would not be on the same level as we are.
	Christianity would have particularly difficult times looking at these creatures because it would be clear that they were intelligent, they were cultured.
	But if they did not have a God, if they did not have the Christianity God, what would be their moral status?
	Would they have souls?
	Or is it only humans that have souls?
	In which case it's a strange God that only gives souls to humans.
	And Christianity is very much about a personal relationship with God.
	Either that or have these aliens also been visited by our same God and received salvation in the same way that Christians do?
	There's all sorts of implications from the various religions with their view of an individual God or of a collective consciousness as to how they would regard an intelligent alien species.
	Many people, I think, would say that, you know, they are the equivalent of us.
	Some religions would say, well, no, they are the equivalent of animals and they do not have our moral status.
	And that's, I think, an important aspect to discuss it, because if we found advanced aliens with their own technology, their own culture, their own history, and perhaps even their own religion, how would that affect our own view of our own religion?
	These are big questions.
	What do you do about that?
	And these are questions you discuss in the book.
	And I don't think I've discussed nearly enough.
	Just at the end of this, I loved your whole examination, your whole consideration is a better word, of the point at which mankind, in the affairs of mankind, changed.
	There was a definite turning point at which man living in caves began to look up into the sky and began to map out, almost as a kind of debate on the walls of the caves, what all that stuff up in the sky might mean.
	You know, it's something that isn't discussed nearly enough, and that's in the book, too.
	You're quite right.
	This is fascinating that about 50,000 years ago, something happened to humans.
	And I don't mean the arrival of the black monolith in 2001 that spurred on our evolution.
	Something happened to our brains in the sense that we started to develop differently.
	We developed in a very short period of time.
	We developed art, language, music.
	And it was clear our brains were moving into overdrive.
	And before that, there were many species of humans and they were all sort of getting on and there were very few people, there were few of us around.
	And most of the humans who've ever lived didn't live out of their teenage years.
	We are here because of teenagers in the past.
	But something happened.
	There was a flowering of ability and of creativity.
	And during this period, the humans which were doing that, Homo sapiens, met the Neanderthals.
	The Homo sapiens moved into Europe and they met the indigenous Neanderthals who were humans, but although they have more abilities than we gave them credit for, were not the same.
	They were a different type of humans.
	They had a slightly different structure, they're a different mentality.
	They couldn't really organize themselves.
	They didn't have the culture that the new humans coming in.
	And that struck me as being an example of contact between two species, same species, same humans, but two different peoples who almost cannot understand each other.
	And somehow one of them dominates and the other disappears.
	And that sort of struck me as being the first example of, if you like, ET contact from which we can draw conclusions as to what might happen, or draw some conclusions, some ideas as to what might happen if we found aliens in space.
	So you're quite right, there's this whole section of the book about this flowering of humanity 50,000 years ago when we realized there were gods, when we thought of gods, we thought of things out there in the sky, in nature, in the heavens that were bigger than us and that were different from us.
	And that struck me as being a good sort of starting point to talk about the alien.
	I love the book.
	It's brilliantly written.
	It's clear, which you would expect from somebody who's a broadcaster.
	You know, you learn to use your words carefully and sparingly, and that you've done.
	And I'm privileged to be one of the first people to speak with you about the book.
	You're going to do a lot of interviews about this, I'm sure, David.
	If you get asked by an American interviewer, for example, because time will be probably more at a premium than it is here on a format like this, Dr. Whitehouse, what is the takeaway point of your book?
	What would be, what would be, because you would be expected to give a short answer.
	What would that answer be?
	What would it mean if we found intelligent life in space?
	How would it change us?
	And do we actually need to find life in space in order to survive in the universe?
	If we're going to live in the universe for a long time and not be a flash in the pan, I have a feeling that species born under the light of different stars have to get together, cooperate, and learn to live together.
	Because this universe won't always be easy to live in.
	And we'll need each other.
	We will, maybe sooner than a lot of people think.
	David, thank you very much.
	People will have a chance to meet you, of course, on the cruise from October the 28th, which will be a fascinating thing.
	Check that out at theunexplainedlive.com.
	The book is called The Alien Perspective.
	The man you've been hearing is Dr. David Whitehouse.
	And David, thank you.
	Thank you, Howard.
	Thanks a lot.
	Always welcome here, Dr. David Whitehouse.
	The new book is called The Alien Perspective, published by Icon Books Now, wherever you are.
	Thank you very much indeed for being part of my show.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
	So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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