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Aug. 5, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
54:28
Edition 744 - UAP Update

After the July 26th Washington UAP Hearing - from the tv show... the views of UFO author/researcher Preston Dennett, Chrissy Newton from The Debrief - who broke the David Grusch UAP revelations , Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute and Professor Bart Kosko... He discusses the UAP story and gives his insights on AI and LLMs... (*Please note there is some very mild audio interference on the sound feed from Bart Kosko)...

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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.
Well, thank you for being part of my show.
I'm looking out the window now.
It is still grey, still muggy.
It is warm, but it's not boiling hot, but it is incredibly humid.
And for a couple of weeks now, I can't actually remember how long.
We've been stuck in this awful cycle here while southern Europe bakes and burns.
Here in the United Kingdom, because we are maritime, because we're further north, we've had this rain, rain, rain, humidity, humidity, humidity.
And it really gets you down.
But not so that I can't do this show, but it is just difficult to function when it is so humid.
And if you live in this country, you will know what I'm talking about here.
You know, we're just not used to being in the tropics, I don't think.
But that's another story for another time.
Thank you very much for all of your emails, for telling me about yourself and also for your suggestions.
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740-odd now.
Oh, boy, as we get to the beginning of August, which we're at at the moment.
Now, we're still digesting the July 26th Congressional Oversight Committee hearings on UAPs, aren't we?
And I appreciate, of course, that some of you are skeptical about what you heard.
All I can say that it is looking like we will be hearing more around about September, maybe a little later, and maybe if something else happens, something develops we'll hear more before.
But I will let you know.
I was interested this week to read a piece on the Hill, which is a website, respected, of course, dealing with affairs in Washington.
And I commend that to you.
This piece is written by Rear Admiral Tim Gollodet, retired U.S. Navy, a man with a considerable track record.
And this is part of what he wrote.
And I quote, It may take time for society to come to grips with this historic hearing, but we will best be served by immediately responding as follows.
Point one, the U.S. Congress should continue to demand the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community disclose UAP information, data, and materials to the public.
Point two, the U.S. government should show leadership in international scientific studies of UAPs.
Point three, the U.S. research community should significantly expand the scientific study of UAPs.
Our tiny planet, he says, orbits a relatively medium-sized star in a galaxy of over 100 billion stars, among a distribution of several hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe.
How arrogant to believe that we are the only species that's developed a means for travel between celestial bodies.
Now that we're finding out otherwise, we must demand disclosure of what the government knows.
Instead of staying asleep at the wheel, we should wake up as a society for the safety, security, and scientific advantages that can be gained.
Those are the words of Rear Admiral Tim Golaudet, retired U.S. Navy, published on the Hill website this week.
Leading on from that, here are some pieces from my TV show recently, just to keep you up to speed with all of this.
First item will be the reaction of UFO author and investigator Preston Dennett, old friend of this show.
Another old friend of this show is item two, Chrissy Newton from the debrief, of course, the people who broke the David Grush story first at the beginning of June.
Chrissy, also a podcaster.
Item three is Seth Szostak, of course, lead astronomer at the SETI Institute.
And another very good friend of this show who helps me out a lot.
You'll get his perspective on all of this as item three.
And after that, Bart Costco.
Professor Bart Costco in California, famous for his worldwide best-selling book on fuzzy thinking and fuzzy logic, now in the days of AI, more relevant than ever and re-released, I think, in the last month or so in digital format.
Professor Bart Cosco and I will talk, as we've talked many times, not only about AI and technical matters, but also about UAP.
So that's the fourth item on this edition of The Unexplained from my TV show to have it here for posterity.
Item number one then, this is Preston Dennett.
It went better than I actually thought it would because there has been really no movement in official circles for decades upon decades.
And we certainly had Project Blue Book, the Condom Committee, the Robertson panel.
These are official government studies, which said there's absolutely nothing to this.
Over the last few years, that's changed.
And this hearing was, yeah, absolutely unprecedented.
I was very much impressed by the very strong rhetoric coming from the Congresspeople saying that there is, in fact, a cover-up and that they are asking for truth and transparency in this subject.
I don't think we've ever heard that strong of rhetoric in Congress before.
So that was really encouraging.
So Preston, what do you think?
And I'm only asking for an opinion here because none of us really know.
What do you think is going to happen next?
How quickly will this move?
I expect it's going to move at a snail's pace.
I mean, this is by no means disclosure.
There was no actual evidence presented.
We're already getting pushback from the Pentagon, the office of AARO, Arrow.
So I just think that this is still a very carefully controlled process that we're going through of disclosure.
And there's going to be pushback.
That's what we're seeing.
I expect at some point we will get photographs, perhaps, some more films, maybe even metal fragments.
Ultimately, the endgame, of course, is seeing the craft and the bodies.
And I don't see that coming anytime soon.
Do you think there are craft and bodies?
Oh, certainly.
Absolutely.
It's not just the Roswell crash in 1947.
I think most researchers who have looked into the crash retrieval phenomena come away convinced.
It is certainly controversial, but the three whistleblowers we saw in this hearing are just the latest three in a long, long line of hundreds of them.
Right.
I think I have to just make one point here, and Steve Bassett on my podcast about all of this made this point, that there were effectively two witnesses and one whistleblower.
David Grush is the whistleblower in the middle.
The other two are not classed as whistleblowers.
They're classed as witnesses, apparently.
I didn't know I was calling them all whistleblowers, but apparently that's part of it.
You may disagree, Preston, but that's what I was told by Steve, who's followed this for a long time.
Now, look, you've written books about the whole piece, a lot about people who've been contactees and abductees.
How do you believe that what you heard on Wednesday ties in if it does to all of that?
Well, I'm certainly still waiting for our governments to even acknowledge the fact that these craft are not only being seen in the sky, but are landing, leaving landing traces, that thousands upon thousands of people report being taken on board, having face-to-face contact.
There's really been no mention of humanoids at all.
And in fact, the congressman said this is not about little green men.
Well, yeah, maybe they're not green, but this is certainly what it's about.
These objects are piloted.
They are technological.
These are craft.
I think that's very much plain to see.
But this is absolutely all connected together.
And I find it really kind of amusing in a weird way that NASA, who says they're now currently looking into this, are cataloging sightings, but say that they don't have enough data to say what these things are.
Really?
Pick up a UFO book.
It's not that hard to find data.
And of course, you know, you go on YouTube any day of the week and you will see videos that purport to show things appearing within the orbit of the International Space Station and other places.
And, you know, maybe the Apollo craft were tracked and maybe something was there monitoring the guys who went to the moon.
So all of that, I've got a feeling might come out.
If this snowball starts to roll down the hill, Preston, I think we might get it all.
Last question, Preston, and thank you for doing this.
Have you given any thought to how you might react, how we as a species may react, if we discover we are, as they say, not alone?
I think we'll take it right in stride.
There's been a lot of polling about this, and most people, certainly in the United States, not only believe UFOs are real, 10 to 20% have seen them.
Most believe our government is hiding information about this.
This is a subject that's saturated our media for a very long time.
I think we're absolutely ready for the truth about this.
I don't suspect our Pentagon is going to cooperate.
Disclosure, it appears to me, is being, as I said, very carefully controlled.
And what we're seeing is only coming forward because they have no choice.
I don't think this is something they're doing voluntarily.
If our government doesn't start disclosing now, they will lose control of the narrative.
They will become irrelevant, not credible.
There's enough evidence now to prove the existence of UFOs in the public arena.
The evidence is there.
Preston Dennett, thank you very much.
I think you summed that up brilliantly.
Do you have a website if people want to check you out just quickly?
Yeah, I do.
Just punch my name in.
It should take you there.
It's www.prestondennett.weebly.com.
Author and investigator Preston Dennett, good to hear from him.
Here's item number two, Chrissy Newton from the debrief.
Honestly, it was unbelievable.
Like it really was historic in its own way as well.
And as you said, God Scob smacked.
I was the exact same way.
And I was waiting to see what everybody would say.
And before I was making my own opinions, we've heard these stories before, but there was also some new information that came to light from David Grush, which was amazing.
I was interested when he was questioned by Tim Burchett about the consequences for people.
Consequences of two things.
Consequences of appearing to be about to speak out about this if you were working on it.
And the consequences in terms of the health consequences for people who've been involved in back engineering.
Now, we didn't get, because it's classified and it's secret, we didn't get firm answers to those things.
But to hear those questions being asked in that public arena was just amazing.
Don't you think?
Unbelievable.
Yeah.
And I think that focusing on the health aspects, and hopefully the government will focus on healthcare a little bit more about this, because they do have the information.
We know that Project Blue Book and other projects that have actually been looking into UAP over the years and in the early 60s have that information on file.
It's just never been generally brought into public light for good reason.
There's health reasons for people.
It's their private information, but they know it.
And David Grush is really focusing on that and talking about the human, real implications that are happening because of UAPs.
Chrissy, when the debrief, you know, your own website broke the David Grush story in the middle of, well, in the first week of June, June the 6th, I think it was, or 5th, depending on which side of the Atlantic, right.
When the debrief broke that, because the Washington Post and the New York Times passed on it, they wanted more time to do whatever they wanted to do with it, did you know what was coming down the track at that point?
Well, we knew, I shouldn't generally say, we knew that there was obviously whistleblowers having conversations.
We knew that.
Having when it was previewed, when we got that is something that's in internal information to the debrief.
But we did know for sure, we've known, and I think majority of people following the UAP topic very closely, we know that whistleblowers were coming forward in hopefully in this year.
We just didn't know when they were going to come forward and when they were going to actually say something under oath potentially or in a skiff or a testify to anything.
So it's amazing that it happened, obviously, this month.
And so we'll see hopefully more that come forward and there will be more.
And we're waiting for that to ourselves.
So absolutely.
Check out the debrief because we obviously will probably have more as it goes on over the course of a couple months.
Sure, you're the same as me.
The question I keep being asked by people is, and I can't answer this, is why has it come to this now?
And one suggestion was made to me in the Conversations that I was having this last week is that this is a generational thing, right?
The generation who abided by the secrecy were doing so because the previous generation were going all the way back as far as Roswell here, told them to do their duty, and boy, did they do it.
But now we've reached another generation, maybe a third generation on from that, and they don't understand why there is secrecy.
And that's why we've come to this.
What do you think?
I agree.
It's not your grandpa's ufology anymore.
We're in a very different world and it's unbelievable to see that.
We're also 90 years of secrecy potentially that's coming forward.
And we look at that, but this is not, UAP is not the only thing.
We look at the JFK files that should be released.
It's been about 50 years now.
So we look at legislation.
And I believe it's Chuck Schumer that is looking that at the Democrats by putting that into legislation by using the same things that I believe the same kind of legislation or wording that they used around the JFK files are using for the UFO and ufology cases as well, which is really interesting.
So moving things into legislation is where it needs to start.
And we're seeing that.
So hopefully we change the legislation is updated or changed.
And then coming into 2024, where it'll be fully implemented to, you know, more concrete and more precise terminology.
Because right now it's a little vague, but they're trying to sharpen that up, which is very interesting.
Problem is, Chrissy, if we liken it to JFK, and again, that's a story that both of us have been up and down for so many years.
Going back to the JFK case, we never really got the answers.
We got a pretty credible outline from a couple of authors as to how this happened and who was involved, really.
Do you think that we're going to get more clarity when it comes to this?
I hope so.
I think so.
I think we're going to have, maybe we're never going to get answers, but what we're going to do is get closer.
And, you know, outside of the JFK, you know, there's similarities, obviously, in secrecy, but they're different stories in general, even though people do say conspiracy theorists say the JFK is connected to the UAP topic.
But outside of it, there's more than the UAP topic than now a conspiracy.
We have people saying, coming forward and saying they've seen these things, witnesses and whistleblowers.
We're also changing legislation.
And we're also having a science report that's coming out from NASA in the next month or so.
So we're seeing academics, we're seeing the science community and the political community getting involved and hopefully making change and advocating for this.
So that's a little bit different than the JFK story than we've seen.
But I think we will have obviously not answers, but we'll get closer to potentially being able to really analyze this and do the science around it properly and not be scrutinized anymore.
All of that is a quantum step forward from where we were five years ago, one year ago.
I don't know whether you saw this.
I'm sure you did.
Fox News last night reported, and this is to do with George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell, has to be said, Russian warplanes, quotes, engaged UFOs, chased them and even shot at them at least 45 times by 1993, according to classified Russian documents that George Knapp obtained and smuggled out of the country.
That's just one snippet it says here of information revealed in letters written by both Knapp and Jeremy Corbell.
That's pretty amazing, isn't it?
It is.
It's interesting to hear from Russia now just after that hearing as well.
So it's interesting to see that they did release that.
I'd love to talk to Jeremy and George a little bit about why the timing of that.
But it's true.
If we look at what David Grush has said, you know, if what he's saying is accurate and true, then other powers around the world know about this.
Russia would, China would.
So, and they're all maybe potentially working together to keep some form of secrecy.
And that is what David Grush is saying.
It doesn't mean that it's true.
We need to find evidence of that and we need to find documentation that does support that.
But I'm curious to see now what other foreign adversaries will potentially have to say and what information they'll have coming out.
I believe Japan even recently did a hearing too in a press conference.
I should say, not a hearing.
They did a press conference speaking about their UFO information that they've been collecting over the years too.
So we're seeing this from multiple countries now.
The next thing after that is hopefully this becomes the United Nations conversation.
And this has been brought up twice.
It's brought up once, I think in the early 60s, I believe.
And now we look at bringing it up again, potentially in San Marino, the country hosting it just outside of Italy.
So we'll see that.
And hopefully that's where this goes now, because if it doesn't, it needs to.
And I think that a lot of people are advocating for that as well.
And that's going to mean an awful lot of people in my country.
You know, the Brits are experts in secrecy.
We brought you 007.
You know, we know about secret stuff and we've been doing it brilliantly for centuries here, right?
We're not really on train with this just yet, but we need to be.
And Nick Pope has said in this last couple of days that we need to be opening our UFO files, getting on the train with this.
Not only us, you're talking about nations like you mentioned, Japan.
Japan has a huge interest in all of this.
The French have their own agencies and their own projects about this.
We never hear anything about them.
The Brazilians, other South American nations, the Argentinians, this is going to be or needs to be, we both agree on this, an international thing, yeah?
Yeah, 100%.
You know, it's embedded into so many cultures, folklore.
So, you know, North Americans, I will say, and just Western countries in general, you know, maybe it's not fully embedded in ours, but it is embedded in others.
And they've been following this topic for a very, very long time.
So I think it's maybe we're catching up to some degree as well.
So it will be interesting to see what other countries around the world are going to say.
And again, hopefully it becomes a United Nations conversation where all that data from all different countries working within the United Nations would be able to submit their data for review and be able to come out with a worldly report.
Maybe not just a quarterly report from the government, but a worldly report speaking about all the data that they found and being able to work together as one, you know, looking into this topic universally.
It would be unbelievable.
The world is in such a chronic mess right now.
Maybe it might be something that brings us together.
Last question very, very quickly.
What have you got coming down the track in the pipeline, if anything, on this at the debrief?
Can we expect something soon?
I think Tim McMillan is looking into some conversations right now about the recent Arrow release.
I believe that's happening with Sean Kirkpatrick.
He released a statement on his LinkedIn, I believe it was just this past two days ago, speaking about how he felt that the hearing did not reflect well into Arrow and its staff, I'll say that.
So I believe Tim McMillan might be looking into that, and he's spoken about that on his Twitter.
So you can go check that out.
But there will be more information.
You know, the debrief is always covering this topic and always will from an academic perspective.
So, you know, people can go to the debrief.org and click our little UAP tab and be able to follow all the stories there.
Chrissy Newton, thank you to her for her help at the debrief.
We'll see what else they're going to be coming out with quite soon, I would imagine.
Item number three, Seth Szostak, very old friend of mine in this show, the head astronomer at the SETI Institute.
This is his take on the hearing.
I think that if we were being visited, and you've heard me say this, Howard, I think that that evidence would be really good evidence.
It wouldn't be sort of, you know, hearsay, this person said this, that person said that.
There would be, you know, observations from Earth satellites.
There would be observations from the ground.
And the aliens, I doubt that they would really conspire to make sure that the only ones that could find them would be the U.S. military.
Well, you know, maybe other nations are better at keeping all of this stuff secret.
I was thinking that the Brits are very, very good at secrecy.
Well, maybe the Brits are, but, you know, what about the people in the, well, San Marino's been mentioned here today.
You know, you'd have to sort of argue that hundreds of countries are just as good at keeping secrets as the British are.
And of course, one thing that occurred to me while watching all of this, and I'm very excited by it, of course, but I've got to keep my feet on the ground while I keep reaching for the stars, in the words of the immortal disc jockey Casey Kasim.
We have to bear this in mind, that if Tic-Tac UFOs have been coming into and out of our reality all the time everywhere, if weird stuff has been popping up on a daily basis, rather like that story from Stratford-upon-Avon, you know, birthplace of Shakespeare, only this last week or so, you know, even there they're seeing stuff in the sky.
How come those things, the Tic-Tacs and the battleship-sized UFOs, are not being registered by astronomers like yourself?
Yeah, well, if you could argue that maybe that's understandable because most astronomy is done with big telescopes, which means that they're looking at a very small patch of sky.
So if you went out tonight and you look at the sky through a soda straw, you know, you might not see all the air traffic above you, right?
It doesn't mean that it's not there.
It means that the instrument you're using isn't really appropriate for that.
So that doesn't disturb me so much.
It's not that, you know, all these telescopes haven't seen it.
But I would think that maybe amateur astronomers would have seen it.
And there may be 100,000 of those in the world, maybe more.
And they're out every clear night looking at something.
So it's really remarkable that they don't see this stuff.
And we have to bear in mind that you did the SETI at home project and all of that, which involved people all around the world linking their computers together.
You might have thought that it would show up on that.
I don't know.
I'm just arguing the other way here.
Even though people are, for reasons that I understand, getting really excited, and so am I. You know, we have to be realistic about this.
What is the standard of proof then that you want?
There's an awful lot of stuff that's being classified here.
A lot of questions in that hearing.
It was like, we can't tell you here, but we'll tell you in another place.
What is it that you would like?
Well, I mean, you were talking to Chrissy about, you know, this latest brouhaha involving this guy, Grosch, who was a former Department of Defense security guy, right?
So he has some credentials there.
And he's saying, look, you know, the government routinely goes in and retrieves crash debris from, you know, aliens who somehow managed to come, who knows how many light years, across space to visit Earth, and then in the last 200 feet, somehow make a navigation area and crash into the ground.
Now, you know, that's kind of an interesting comment on their navigation abilities, but still, right, that's the story recently.
But I think if that were true, it wouldn't just be Grosch who was saying that, right?
You have, you know, 8,000 operational Earth satellites pirouetting around the planet here, and they should see things.
If there really was something in our airspace from alien manufacturers, do you think they would still allow you to take off from Heathrow?
I mean, you know, that might be dangerous.
So the fact that the lack of corroborating evidence is so striking to me.
That's why I really have trouble with this story.
One of the questions that remained unanswered and classified in secret in that hearing was the question of whether the government of the U.S. has made contact with another civilization.
And that was, as far as I'm aware, unless somebody corrects me, was left hanging in the air like a lot of other stuff.
If we found that there was a welter of evidence that is released that we've had contact with something, these non-human biological materials, entities, whatever they might be, and that these things have been coming here, maybe popping out of another dimension or coming here from a planet unfathomably far away, what happens to SETI?
Well, we might try pointing our antennas in the direction from which this stuff has come if we know that direction.
Sure, you could say that would sort of, you know, kind of make SETI irrelevant because the premise of SETI that there's somebody out there to find has already been proven, at which point you don't really need to prove it again.
But you might want to, you know, keep looking simply because if there's one other alien civilization, if there's one that's out there in the Milky Way, you know, there are undoubtedly more.
It's unlikely there would be two and not three or 3,000 or 3 million.
That takes us right back to the Drake equation that you and I have talked about so many times.
Seth, thank you so much for making time for me again.
Seth Szostak from the SETI Institute.
Now here comes Professor Bart Cosco, somebody who's been on this podcast and on radio shows that I've done many times.
This is his take, not only about UAPs, which we'll talk about first, but also about where we stand with AI and whether AI is so big and clever and such a threat as we might have thought it is these days.
So this is Professor Bart Cosco.
Your thoughts on all of this stuff that we have been consuming about the possible alien technology that might be being hidden, the back engineering that might have been going on?
Your thoughts about that and have you ever come across that in your working life?
Yes, I actually had something like that once.
I camp out in the Mojave Desert.
But I'm an old-fashioned skeptic.
I teach statistics to the people who teach statistics.
I'm as hard-nosed as they come.
And the recent releases have blown a hole in my skepticism.
It's forced me to do what we call make a Bayesian update because it was easy to dismiss, say, well, it's not likely.
I'd mentioned before in my book, Cool Earth, which I dedicated to my old friend Arthur C. Clarke.
Arthur would say, look, when aliens come, the whole planet will know in five minutes.
And that's certainly true if there were an invasion.
But I have some other friends who have looked at this much more carefully than I had.
And it's called the lurker theory.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with that.
Lurker.
Not like someone lurking on a website.
But the question is, if, as Kubrick believed, Stanley Kubrick, who worked with Clark and Carl Sagan, believed, if over the billions of years of evolution of life, if somebody came, something came, a probe came probably from the Milky Way galaxy, where would they have left something?
You would want to look for what I call alien trash, like an old space beer can somewhere.
And one place you would look for that, Howard, would be what we call the Lagrange points between the Earth and the Sun or the Earth and the Moon.
This is where the gravity kind of cancels out.
And so you could put something in stable for millions of years, potentially.
There's five of them.
For example, some of your viewers may know of the L5 Society that has called for building a colony, not on the moon, which is great, we'll do that, but between the moon and the earth where it kind of cancels out.
There's an equilateral triangle.
But the four and five Lagrange points are pure candidates to be searched and a little rotation around there.
There's a lot of things.
So it may not just be an alien space station, but there could be remnants.
So another thing to consider is if you go back to evolutionary history, the big event was photosynthesis.
It took about a billion years to get oxygen into the atmosphere, sometimes called the oxygen catastrophe or the great oxygenation.
And that was the effect of blue-green algae.
So you know the formula of photosynthesis.
You take six molecules of water, this kind of stuff, and six molecules of carbon dioxide, zap it with some red or blue light, not green.
Plants don't like green.
That's why they reflect it.
And out comes a molecule of sugar, glucose, plus six molecules of breathable oxygen O2, which is a kind of a poison.
And we do the reverse when we oxidize the sugar in our body.
That's how we're staying alive right now.
That took about a billion years to do.
And now it led to multi-cellular life forms.
Before that, just one cellular.
So the probability, and I teach probability, that somebody, something came by just during that billion, remember, a billion years is a thousand million years.
And a million years is a thousand, thousand.
So it's a long time.
There's excellent chance.
And if they had a fraction of what we know today, they would say, look, if these folks or creatures have multicellular life form, let's put a probe here.
Now, then in more recent years, the probability of that has gone up.
So a lot of us want to see a search right now for the Lagrange points, 1-5 between Earth and Sun and Earth and Moon, and whatever else can be out there.
But when we combine that with testimony under oath, Howard, that's a big deal to go under oath.
I'm also a lawyer.
You never want to go under oath if you can possibly help it.
But the testimony you're referring to last week in Congress was under oath, deliberately put under oath at the request of the testifiers from people with impeccable backgrounds.
And it's the kind of thing you'd, doesn't prove it, but it's consistent with what you'd expect to see as you peel that onion.
And here's my final point on that.
When you think about that, say, well, what would have to be out there that would keep so many people in hiding this, maybe even committing crimes?
How bad, for example, would the knowledge have to be to maintain a vast conspiracy of covering up?
When you say how bad, Bart, what do you mean by how bad?
I mean, so let's put you and I in a position where operating in good faith, we're in the military post-World War II, or wherever it happens to be, and we find something.
We don't know what that is.
And the result of what we find, Howard, is such that you and I agree, contrary to all of our liberal principles, that we must not let this get out.
We might have to resort to extra legal measures to keep it.
What kind of information, as a thought experiment, would that be?
So one example, I think, would be something where if it were a piece of an off-earth craft that, let's say, gave everyone the capability of relatively easily creating a small nuclear weapon, we would not want that to come out.
It would lead to almost instant disaster in society.
So I'm not saying that that's what's the case, but when I look at this and look at David Hume's old theory of let's weigh the relative miracles, if there's something there, I think it's got to be my own take really, really bad because otherwise it would have leaked.
There'd been movie deals on this.
The incentives are too great, but something would have to be pretty horrific.
And when I see experts of that caliber, again, under oath, testifying, it's broken a hole in my skepticism.
Do you know that's a fascinating point?
I suppose another way of looking at it is maybe it's not bad, but maybe it's economically deleterious to business.
In other words, if the alien technologies, assuming there are such things, are so powerful and all-embracing that they could give us eternal life, free energy, all of those sorts of things, there would be vested interests, especially in the mighty United States, but in other countries like my country.
It's very difficult to maintain a conspiracy over decades.
You could do it in the short term.
I just see no way of doing that because there's just too much interest.
The other thing is like the movie with David Bowie, the man who fell to Earth.
He's an alien.
They need water in his planet, whatever it is.
And he comes back and he, where does he go?
First place he goes, and this is your point, he goes to a patent attorney to set up the electrical property so they can bargain to get some of the earth's water.
And if there's just too much money to be made that way, I don't think it's that.
I know there's a concern about religions being forced to update, but religions are very fluid.
They update all the time with New Fact.
My instinct, and this is just from the gut, is it's got to be pretty bad.
That's why they're coming up.
But then we're in a situation.
Sorry, you're saying.
I just watched the other night the classic original movie, The Planet of the Apes, and Charlton Heston Taylor really wants to find out what's out there.
And Dr. Zaya says, you may not like it.
And that may be what happens here.
But nevertheless, we're on board this train.
A lot of us never thought that we would get on board this train.
It's too late to stop it.
Exactly that.
Last question before we move on to the other stuff, the fuzzy logic and the AI that I really want to talk with you about.
Last point on this.
You've worked in science all of your life.
We are being told by those who promulgated information about UAPs in the United States since Roswell, that there are crashed craft.
Those craft contain technology which is beyond anything that we can conceive of.
May have been demonstrated in the sky as described by David Fraver and Ryan Graves.
Who knows?
If that technology has been back-engineered, and the only way to do it in the United States would be to back engineer it through large corporations, maybe on a need-to-know basis, in your career, have you ever had a sniff of any of that going on?
No, I haven't.
But I have heard, have friends who are pilots who've told me things.
And these are hardcore skeptics, and they see things.
And again, they know that you can't be sure this way or that.
But I would know, I did work, just for your audience may find of interest, when I was 23 in the peak of the Cold War 40 years ago, the last wave of it, I worked for the largest defense contractor in the world, Thermodynamics.
And I was an internal mathematical consultant.
I saw a lot of stuff I still can't talk about.
But I don't think I'd ascribe that to alien technology.
But some of those people, if you were to grab some of those people to work on, it would be that.
I used to lecture at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Did you?
Where there may be something.
I think it would be tough.
That's why I'm also concerned that people say, well, maybe this is just Chinese technology.
Chinese technology is largely derivative of American technology.
And Russian technology is so bad, it looks like, that the Russians in their Ukraine engagement are forced to buy drones from Iran and China.
So this is another part of this puzzle that why on earth can we not explain this?
It doesn't look like it's Chinese.
And I think if it were Chinese flying these tic-tac type objects, we would shoot those down in a heartbeat.
Howard, we wouldn't hesitate to do that.
You worked at Wright-Pat, Wright-Patterson Air Base.
I lectured at Wright-Patterson.
Okay, well, you've been there.
There is supposed to be a building or an area there that most people don't have clearance to go to and you're not allowed to sort of go to or talk about.
Were you aware of that?
No, but I'm not surprised.
I mean, it's the same thing.
I often lecture with my friends at the RAND Corporation, which is the think tank for the Air Force, set up by John von Neumann and others after World War II.
It's in Santa Monica.
People may not know that.
Now, you can't go into most of the Rand Corporation.
When I lecture, it's public access kind of thing, subject to getting cleared to come in.
But I would not know, Howard.
But in all those places, just because of the basic problems of maintaining security on Air Force Webbery and others, it's tight.
So I couldn't conclude anything either way, but definitely off-limits to most people.
Well, it's all fascinating, Bart.
And, you know, I knew that you would have been thinking about this.
There are so many unanswered questions about this.
And I guess we're going to get the answer in the fullness of time.
It may be sooner than any of us think.
It could be September when the Senate Intelligence Committee meets.
We might have to wait a little longer.
There might be an enormous, great, explosive revelation very soon.
Who knows?
I'm getting some rumblings that some things have been said behind closed doors that might be very interesting for us, but none of that is.
But I think you're right.
When it breaks, this is called an information cascade.
It'll tend to break catastrophically.
It'll be hard to put the cat back in the bag.
If you go back to Arthur C. Clarke's great novel called A Childhood's End, when the aliens do arrive, you know what they do?
Nothing.
They just sit above us for 50 years so the next two generations adapt to it.
So it could be something like that.
Wow.
Bart, your book, 30 years ago, made headlines everywhere.
It was a great buzzword for everybody.
Fuzzy Logic.
What is and was fuzzy logic?
By the way, the book's title is Fuzzy Thinking, and fuzzy logic is thinking with shades of gray instead of simplistic black-white reasoning, which we all do, we fall back on.
But the trouble with it, it's unreasonable.
It doesn't match fact well.
It works in mathematics, and that's the only place it really works because 2 plus 2 equals 4, 100%, not 0%.
But to say that grass is green is true 100%.
Well, how would you prove that?
The most accurate statements, however, that we have from quantum mechanics are accurate only to a few decimal places.
You would have to get that grass is green accurate to infinitely many decimal places to be comparable to the statement 2 plus 2 equals 4.
So fuzzy thinking and fuzzy logic is trying to get computers to think more like we do, even though the words we write down, often black ink on white pages, look like black, white.
It sort of favors that.
In computer switches, the heart of the digital age are based on current flowing or not, light moving or not, one or zero.
But that's not how we think.
And increasingly, as we move towards so-called, these are all AI systems, but neural brain-like systems that are pattern recognition systems, we realize that all the patterns are fuzzy.
That is, their boundaries are gray.
It's unclear whether it's something like when you become an adult in America, most places it's 18 right on the dot, or when life begins or when life ends, or just what you mean by cool air, That sort of thing.
And when we get to AI today, we're looking at systems that are blindly trained on examples and have some great benefits and the old costs that were associated with them back 30 years ago.
What has changed in 30 years?
The computing power has changed.
And as the book Fuzzy Thinking, which just released digitally, shows that there are a lot of techniques that we couldn't really implement because of computing techniques 30 years ago that work now like what?
We take one of these AI so-called black boxes, trained to recognize your face in an image or to recognize alien patterns if it's detection, whatever it happens to be, and convert it into a set of rules that reason with fuzzy logic so that you have some kind of audit trail, some kind of way of going from input to output.
The new advances, and I linked to this on my webpage, even since a lot of them since I last talked to you, we've kind of come to a marriage with probability theory.
There've been an antagonism with it in fuzzy degrees.
And we can now, if we take a black box and train on it long enough, we pay the high enough price, we can get something you can't get with the popular chat system, which I'm happy to describe how they work.
That is a confidence measure.
So it spits out an answer to you.
It doesn't tell you how confident it is based on what it knows.
And it certainly doesn't tell you whether it's made up anything.
But we can get more of that at a price.
And that's called X AI, explainable AI.
So what we are facing now worldwide is big tech companies in particular taking the computing power based on Moore's law, the doubling of chip density on-off circuits every two years.
So it's 15 doubling since Fuzzy Thinking came out with Harper Collins in London.
Every two years, taking that power and in a huge race to train basically vast neural networks with now up to a half trillion tunable knobs or synapses or wires, whatever you want to call them.
But we can, so they have all kinds of problems.
And we can now take that, in theory, some parts of those anyway, and I call it in the book brain suck it, just like we can by observing your behavior, and convert it into some input-output relations and rules, a given audit trail.
Now, there's a mathematical basis behind it, which I don't want to go into here, but the theorem, and I proved as a kid a long time ago, that a fuzzy system, as odd as it sounds, with rules, can approximate essentially any continuous system.
And it's known as the FAD theorem or the fuzzy approximation theorem.
Neural networks are related to that.
So what's new and what's old?
What's new is explainability, but what's old are these systems like the large language models that like ChatGPT and others that have suddenly and I think prematurely been unleashed on the public.
And so they've got some great benefits, but the problems that were always there back in the 80s and 90s are back now and magnified because of the sheer scale of these models.
Right.
So let's just clarify that for people who are fuzzy of thinking, including me.
The systems that we have now, including ChatGPT, but these new chatbots that are coming up, they work on the basis of absolute.
There's an absolute right.
The answers that you're given are given to you as absolutely right, even if they're absolutely wrong or they're 50% wrong.
Somebody commissioned a biography of me from one of these things and it came out 50% completely wrong.
But it was said in such an authoritative way that you would believe that I was born in Manchester and that I started my career with the BBC, which I didn't.
But all of these things were made as absolute statements.
If you put a fuzzy element into that, then do you start to filter out some of the errors that might creep in by that absolute approach?
You do.
But let's just illustrate some of these errors very quickly.
So there was a recent case in federal court in Manhattan, New York.
And last month, the judge sanctioned the attorneys.
And here's what happened.
They used ChatGPT to create a legal brief.
And it was a complex case, personal injury case, where someone allegedly got hurt because of an airline in Columbia, the country of Columbia.
So that's why it was in federal court.
Okay, so the attorneys went to ChatGPT, and there's nothing wrong with doing that to get some insight on this.
And they put together a brief.
And it contained six legal citations, sources of authority, which in our British-based common law, you know, it's all based on.
So they presented that to the court and apparently didn't adequately check it.
The trouble was that there were no such citations.
We call this hallucination.
The chat system made it up.
So it's not just that it's connecting the wrong dots or connecting them poorly.
It's inventing dots out of whole cloth, as one attorney described it.
And it's been an object lesson.
So that was a case where they're good attorneys and they're careful and they're still back and forth on what's going to happen there.
But you've got to be extremely careful.
Another example that was on the U.S. program called 60 Minutes, repeated two weeks ago tonight, when the 60 Minutes folks interacted with Google and their new BARD, B-A-R-D-S and William Shakespeare BARD system.
And it did some great things.
But then the 60 Minutes folks asked a question about inflation, got an answer, took it home, and they looked at it, and they saw that it was based on five economics texts.
The trouble was there are no such five economics texts.
It made it up.
It didn't hallucinate.
It lied.
And it didn't tell the user it was lying.
Does it make things up?
Sorry to jump in, but does it make things up to make up for gaps in its own understanding?
We're trying to figure that out.
And a study just came out.
It's on the archive from some professors at Stanford and UC Berkeley looking at now what's called, besides hallucination, drift for how these systems change it.
So they took the chat system released in March, asked it questions in the March version, and then asked the same questions last month in June.
So for example, they would give it a number, an integer.
I think they used 17077.
Is it a prime number?
Yes or no?
And it turned out to be that is a prime number.
Now back in March, it got that right 97% of the time.
But last month, it only got that right about 3% of the time or less.
And so the thing drifted and got worse.
Why?
We're not quite sure.
Maybe because you and I and others are interacting with it, saying, hey, that's wrong.
And this brings up an issue that whenever a neural system, let me just explain how that works, but whenever you train them, you in effect untrain them each time you put something new in.
Just like each time you learn something new, your brain is so sensitive that even a single photon of light gets registered in the brain.
So when you put a bunch of patterns in, then if you put new patterns, you forget some of the old patterns, but you don't know which one.
So let me just give you an example of how this works.
If I want to take a neural, a basic neural system, the kind we had for decades, and train on 20 faces, 20 people's faces, like in a classroom, I'm holding here an occasahedral dive.
You can kind of see that, a 20-sided atomic solid.
Okay.
So if I train on it, think of 20 light bulbs at the output.
Each light, one light bulb for you, one light bulb for me, and a light bulb for the other 18 folks.
And each time I take a Howard image, a picture that has a picture of you in it somewhere, and it may be an occluded or noisy image, I want the Howard light bulb to come on, and not the other ones.
And likewise, my, say, you're the first light bulb.
I'm the second.
Any image with me in it, I want the second.
So that's all it does.
And it does it millions, billions, now trillions of times on these large language models that train on Wikipedia, on your social media and everything out there.
Okay.
But when we're done, at least on what we've trained on, we can take those samples that we trained on.
We put in Howard, first light bulb comes on.
But then we'll put in a picture of you that we didn't train on.
This is where it gets interesting.
This is where it gets brain-like.
And it will tend, tend to produce the correct classification, the first light bulb going on.
What really will give you the kind of probability distribution.
And mathematically, it is identical to taking this 20-sided die, this occasahedral die, and rolling it like crap.
So flipping a coin is just a two-sided coin.
And if I can use one technical word, it's called the logarithm.
You remember from school, it gives you back an entropy.
So what the system is doing is just trying to increase the probability of that correct classification, like climbing one of these little hills behind me of probability.
The trouble is we don't know how it's doing it.
So when we get to large language models that train on strings of text, like for example, if I take the chat models, I'd say the sky is, then you complete it.
The sky is blue, the sky is cloudy, the sky is gray, the sky is overcast.
And it will run through databases worldwide and come up with a ranked list, maybe of a thousand ways to complete that sentence.
And then with an algorithm, it doesn't always pick the most probable.
It will then use that as an answer.
And then, Howard, it will take that sentence and try to complete the next sentence or next paragraph and keep going.
That's what it's doing.
So it gives you a kind of a hazy, fuzzy picture of what's out there.
But when you drill down on it, it can be highly mistaken.
So number one, it's vast training.
And number two, when it learns something new, we don't know it.
But then when the programmers go, and this is what we're concerned about, because we don't, it's very opaque.
We don't have the code.
It's not opening eye in the open sense of open code like it initially was.
Then they go back and tweak it.
As an example, in the study I mentioned to you, they looked at so-called sensitivity questions, sensitive questions.
So one question was people would ask chat, explain why women are inferior.
And it would get a lengthy answer in March saying, I can't answer.
Now it just gives a one-sentence answer.
And that shows, rightly, but that somebody's gone in and done some what we call post-training training.
And that can completely tweak the system in unforeseen ways.
We just don't know how.
On the other hand, if I have a medical system, so if this is 20 diseases that you may have based on your profile, you're going to your physician, the 20 light bulbs, those kinds of systems, because they're smaller scale, we can train those real well and then go back with classical statistical techniques and verify and validate it much better so that today, recently, your radiologist can rely on a scan or your ophthalmologist can rely on a retinal scan.
I've done that recently myself with my eye doctor.
So that's all to the good in relatively safe, getting more powerful.
Poor people around the world will have the best access to the best diagnosticians, in fact, better.
But when it comes to the chat stuff that people are using, we've got these problems.
We have people, the concern in Hollywood and the strike you've heard about, the producers will simply take old scripts and run them through and generate new scripts.
You can do that.
So we have another problem there, not just a displacement of white-collar workers, but a copyright problem.
So just recently, this month, in federal court in San Francisco, a major federal class action lawsuit was filed against Meta or Facebook for violation of copyrights of books, including one of the class representatives, the comedian Sarah Silverman.
She has a book, I believe it's called The Bedwetter.
I haven't read it, but they found out that was being used, apparently, allegedly without permission, in violation of the United States and through the Burden Convention, our treaty obligations of copyright.
So you've got, let's summarize, three basic problems with these systems right now.
Number one, they hallucinate and they don't tell you that they're doing it.
Number two, they drift.
Even over a few months period, they drift.
And number three, they may very well involve copyright violation, violations of your other privacy rights.
I think they released this way too soon.
So in the IEEE, the engineering, the main engineering professional society, the Institute for Electrical Electronics Engineers, if you submit a paper, as I'm about to do in two days to a conference, neuro conference, if you submit a paper, you have to disclose to what extent, if any, you've used chat in the generation of it.
Now, whether people are honest about that is another matter.
We're concerned as a professor that students come in and are using this to term papers, to do emails.
It's just, forget alien technology, Howard.
Just big neural network technology is coming in us too fast.
It's not ready yet.
It will be, but we're not there yet.
Okay.
And yet it's being sold to us, and we've only got about two minutes left, Bart.
it's being sold to us as the holy grail, the thing that will be able to take over key medical decisions, decisions about who should get insurance and who shouldn't, decisions on what the best route to go to, a place that you want to get to.
All kinds of decisions are being put into the market.
Just think, Howard, 20 years, when someone plays this tape, they'll laugh at how we thought this was real AI.
But on the other hand, I will remind you, in closing here, what the great Benjamin Franklin, the first electrical engineer, said after he negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and he was standing out with thousands of others in Paris looking at the first balloon flight.
And a skeptic turned to him and said, yeah, but what's it good for?
To which Franklin replied, but what's a newborn babe good for?
So what you're looking at is much more like the newborn babe here.
Five, ten, fifty years from now, wow, that's another conversation.
Just getting going.
That's maybe part of our conditioning because we have learned with improvements in televisions and radios and cars and all sorts of stuff that the newest thing is always instantly the best.
We need to be learning on the basis of everything you've just said and thank you very much.
Very important conversation this, Bart.
But then our conversations always are.
We need to learn that in this case, the newest thing isn't best yet.
Take your time.
There's a great technology here.
It's not ready for prime time yet.
It will be eventually.
Boy.
Bart, have you got a website?
I've forgotten.
Yes, if you just cite my name, Bart Cosco at USC, it's free videos, free journal papers, and links to my books.
So feel free to go there and browse.
Bart Cosco, especially if you want more technical details or essays and things like that.
Always fascinating and a great explainer, Professor Bart Cosco.
Check him out online.
Check out also his book about fuzzy thinking, now brought up to date for the digital age and released in digital formats at this very moment.
Before that, you heard Seth Szostak from SETI.
Before that, Chrissy Newton from The Debrief.
Before that, UAP UFO investigator author Preston Bennett.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of The Unexplained Online.
So until we meet again here, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all else, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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