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Jan. 7, 2024 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

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Edition 780 - New Year Guest Catchups

Three guests from the radio show looking back at 2023 and ahead to 2024 in Space, UAPs and Tech - Andrew Lound, Nick Pope and Fevzi Turkalp.

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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 definitely Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	2024 is the 18th year of The Unexplained.
	It started in a very small way.
	I have no idea how to do a podcast.
	There will be some people who say, I still have no idea how to do a podcast, but I'm still here, still sitting on my dad's old leather television viewing chair that is very dog-eared now.
	But I've always done that, and I'm very low down doing these recordings, and it seems to work for it.
	But thank you for supporting me, for being there for me through these 18 years.
	Now, this edition of The Unexplained is a little bit of housekeeping, really.
	Some conversations I had that were broadcast on radio to mark the turn of the year.
	Andrew Lound talking about 2023 and 2024 in space, what we've been through and what we can expect.
	Nick Pope talking about where we stand at the end of 2023 as regards UAPs, UFOs, disclosure, and all the rest of that.
	And then Fevzi Turkaup, the gadget detective, and my good friend, on the good, the bad, and the ugly of technology through 2023 and what we can expect in 2024.
	That's what's going to be on this edition.
	My thanks to you for all of your emails.
	Keep those coming.
	Go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
	You can email me from there if you have a guest suggestion or anything to say.
	If you have something that requires a reply or response, please put that in the subject line and then I will be instantly aware of it.
	And sorry that I'm still a little behind on emails and stuff.
	It wasn't the greatest Christmas for a whole bunch of reasons that I won't bore you with, but I didn't get to go away in the end.
	But let's leave that to one side.
	But when you get in touch with me, let me know who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
	I know I always say that like a stuck record, but it's just such a nice thing to find out the geographical spread of people around this world and what they're up to and what they do while they're listening to this show.
	Some people walking dogs, some people on the Chicago transit system, some people driving down the motorway, whatever it might be.
	Nice to hear from you.
	Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, as we go into a brand new year, too.
	Okay, so three items on this show, all taken from the radio show.
	Item number one, space 2023 and 2024, and the great Andrew Lound.
	Okay, livescience.com this week said a new NASA survey identified 17 exoplanets, that's planets that might be kind of like us, that may have the right conditions for liquid water oceans hidden beneath icy shells.
	The planets could be good candidates in the search for alien life.
	It seems that ice is where it's at, isn't it, in the search for life out there?
	It is.
	It's been a complete turnabout phase because we talked about the Goldilocks zone, and the Goldilocks zone was always an area where the Earth is, where you've got water in three forms, gas, solid, and liquid.
	And this is where they thought life was more likely to take place, where carbon chemistry was to happen.
	But the explorations into the outer solar system here, Jupiter and Saturn's moons, has changed the game plan completely now, because we've suddenly looked at those environments and they've gone, oh, wait a minute, because of the ice shell around, say, Europa or Enceladus, that is actually protecting the environment deep underground where there is liquid water, where it is warm enough for liquid water to exist.
	And if the right chemical composition is there, then you can actually have carbon chemistry taking place there.
	And they've actually realized that there are actually more of these icy shelled worlds in our solar system than Earth-like worlds close in to the sun.
	Now, that's likely to happen elsewhere.
	And of course, as they've been looking on exoplanets, they're finding this is the case.
	You've got whole worlds like this.
	And in which case, we might really need to look at these worlds when we're looking for the possibility of life.
	Whether that's intelligent life is another argument here, because, of course, if we look deep in our own oceans, the huge intelligent life we have here, for instance, things like the octopuses and cuttlefish and things like that.
	But they haven't built cities and they don't do electromagnetic communication and things like that.
	So they could be quite an enclosed world, but nonetheless, they're the places to actually go now.
	Also, icy worlds release their heat a lot more slowly than rocky worlds do, which is why they seem to be still active, because they actually retain their heat better than rocky worlds.
	So in which case, then they're much more slow on evolution.
	MSN.com, just linked to all of that reported this week too.
	Scientists have found more evidence that life could exist on one of Saturn's moons with a key molecule discovered.
	The great question has always been whether we're alone or there is alien life out there.
	And with improvements in technology, we're better equipped to delve into the galaxies in that search.
	There's also the possibility that life could exist in this solar system with more organic molecules found on Enceladus, Saturn's sixth biggest moon.
	Enceladus has been a hot topic since I think about 2017, hasn't it?
	Yes, it has.
	I mean, Enceladus is now changing the game plan.
	Enceladus is an icy moon.
	It's smaller than our own moon, for instance.
	It's going around Saturn.
	It doesn't have the same tidal forces affecting it like it does, for instance, on Jupiter's moon Io, which generates an awful lot of heat inside.
	That's not the case on Enceladus.
	Yet Enceladus is incredibly active.
	It has a thin atmosphere, which protects the surface from radiation from Saturn.
	It has geysers, plumes of watery materials shooting out of one section of it.
	The surface appears to be changing on a regular basis.
	It's still over a long period of time.
	But if we look at a planetary body, we look for the impact craters.
	If those impact craters have been rubbed out, it means the surface is changing.
	And that's quite remarkable.
	And we're seeing that on Enceladus.
	And it is happening quite substantially there.
	So there's a lot of internal energy going on there.
	And they've been able now to slowly, this is from the Cassini mission, look at the data which they've had.
	Oddly enough, Earth orbiting telescopes have had a close look as well, strangely enough.
	And they're actually finding material.
	And there's a strong confirmation of, for instance, of hydrogen cyanide.
	And that molecule is a key component of life, of the origin of life.
	In other words, the basic raw materials that kicks things going.
	And it looks like carbon chemistry could well be taking place deep underground, the icy surface of Enceladus.
	And if that's the case, I mean, you've got a moon going around Saturn, one of the outer planets, where there's a possibility of microbes living and existing quite happily.
	It's absolutely astounding.
	And in fact, to a certain degree, now we're looking at the icy moons and thinking, well, actually, we probably should be more looking at them than perhaps we should be looking at Mars, which has probably gone through its phase and has actually died.
	But these moons seem to be constantly active.
	Well, unless there's a secret way beneath the surface of Mars that we don't know yet, I totally concur.
	That is how it looks.
	If we were to find a form of life on something like Enceladus, you must have given thought to this.
	I certainly have.
	How would that announcement be made, do you think?
	How would that happen around the world?
	Oh, well, because it's a non-intelligent life form, because it's just simply life, full stop, we know how that's going to be done.
	I mean, if you remember the Martian meteorite, which was supposedly had evidence of fossilized life in it, and that went to Bill Clinton, the American president at the time, who told them, you've got to hold off for a fortnight while I contact world leaders, world religious leaders, and let them know what we're going to do to allow them time to prepare their statements for it.
	And then it was released.
	And that's what will happen.
	It'll go through this procedure where they'll do a peer group review to make sure they're right, first of all.
	And then before they publish the scientific papers in the general media, whoever the country is involved, it's probably going to be the United States, but of course it could easily be China now, to be quite honest, would probably want to notify other world leaders first, just so they're prepared for it, so they know that this announcement is going to be made, that we have for the first time found extraterrestrial life.
	And can you imagine what that's going to do for this planet?
	I mean, it would be an unbelievable thing.
	And it leads to a whole host of questions then.
	Does this material have DNA?
	Is it a DNA-based life structure?
	What type of DNA is it?
	Is it similar to ours or different to ours?
	And my goodness, it'd be absolutely fantastic.
	And it'll be a big race then, obviously, if it could be found, depending how we found it, to actually get to that world where it's been discovered and to do very, very serious research.
	And it would be nice if that was done internationally.
	And flipping the coin, that's one way that we could discover life.
	Life that isn't intelligent, but life that nevertheless exists and we have to talk about it.
	But there is also the ongoing process that I've talked about extensively.
	I talked about on last week's show.
	I will be talking about in January because it's going to come to the fore again in Washington.
	There's this whole question of UAPs, UFOs, whether there has been back engineering of technology that's been discovered from crashed craft, whether we have aliens anywhere.
	I mean, that announcement, if we get some form of disclosure, and I am now somewhat skeptical about it, but it might happen.
	If that were to happen, and, you know, the likes of Steve Bassett at the Paradigm Research Group, he's sure that we're going to hear something in January, very important on the basis of the latest hearings in Washington that, you know, we're at such a remove from over here.
	But if that happens, and they say there's intelligent life, it's been visiting us.
	I don't know what happens.
	If that happens in 2024, we get that announcement.
	I think, and maybe this is why some officials are moving away from it and getting cold feet about it, because it's going to change everything, isn't it, Andy?
	Yes.
	And I do a presentation about this, about looking for extraterrestrial life and what happens if we do.
	And we have a debate in the audience at the end about what should we tell people or not.
	I actually don't think that the majority of humans on this planet are ready for that news.
	I really don't.
	A lot of people are.
	I'm very excited about it, but I think a lot of people aren't.
	And bearing in mind, a great deal of the people on this planet rely on some form of belief structure just to hold their lives together.
	I mean, people say, oh, well, you have a belief, you believe.
	No, people believe in things because it's what holds their life together.
	You suddenly say, well, there's extraterrestrial life out there.
	And they then start going to all whatever texts they believe, whatever religious books they believe, and it doesn't refer to the extraterrestrial life.
	And suddenly there is extraterrestrial life.
	It's going to throw into question everything they've believed.
	And I'm not sure how many people on this planet could actually handle those changes.
	I think the announcement which was made about the possibility of life in that Mars meteorite, or the fossil life, was very interesting how the different religions did respond to that.
	I thought it was quite interesting.
	And of all the religions, some people might have thought Islam might react the most negatively.
	They didn't.
	They actually were the ones that reacted most positively about it, emphasizing the magnificence of God's creation, which I thought was a very nice way of dealing with it.
	And the concept that we're all one, you know, the concept in some religions that we're all one and all united.
	And if you believe if that is in your belief structure, then you can easily embrace the fact that there is something else out there.
	But I agree with you.
	Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.
	And if we get it in 2024, and this is the reason I think we might not, if we get it in 2024, some people are not going to react very well to it.
	That's my thought.
	But let's, you know, let's contemplate it.
	That's all we can do.
	It's a great debate.
	It's a wonderful discussion point.
	This is for a number of people to be brought in to talk about because it's a fantastic one.
	It is.
	And I think it's one, if you get just a moment talking to my listener here, just to have a little think, once the craziness of Christmas is gone and you're into that bit between Christmas and New Year, it's something to think about because if this happens in 2024, we get some kind of news, got to be ready for it.
	But I have a feeling that someone somewhere may stop us taking the ultimate step from hearing all of it.
	But who knows?
	Now, why can't NASA, I was reading about this just a couple of minutes ago before we started this, why can't NASA still not open, that's a double negative, that sample canister that it brought back from the asteroid Bennu?
	They put on this great mission, go to an asteroid, which is moving quite a lick, land on it, scoop up some stuff, put it in a canister, send it back to Earth.
	We did all of that.
	We can't open the canister.
	Yeah, it's partially done.
	Yeah, it's a bit more involved than that.
	The thing that's come as a bit of a shock is the fact they've got far more material than they ever anticipated getting.
	This is the big issue.
	So they've been able to recover SOMAR so far, quite a large piece.
	I think something like 70.3 grams is what they've been able to remove so far.
	There's three sections to all this now.
	There was all this material that got cluttered around it.
	So they had to use very fine ways of removing all the dust and material, get the seal off the side of it where it's all clogged up.
	They got that off.
	Then they've got to the main section and they've been able to lift that up.
	But there's a whole pile of stuff now stuck releasing inside the sampler head.
	And there's an awful lot of it and it's all blocked up.
	And they're going to have to write a new procedure in order to get access to it because of the way it's done.
	It was thought to be very simple.
	It all gets sucked up into one small space, nice and simple.
	It hasn't.
	The stuff's gone everywhere.
	They've got the outer area.
	They've got the secondary area quite happy.
	But now they've got to get into the head itself.
	And what they're going to have to do is sit down and write a new procedure to get access to the actual head where the stuff came flying in because it hadn't anticipated.
	It's actually over successful.
	That's the shock of it.
	It's just over successful.
	And then they're happy.
	But they won't do it.
	Because the other issue is because they're having to go into this section, they're going to have to be very careful that they don't damage or contaminate.
	And that's where the problem lies, which is hence you're going to have to have a new procedure to have a look at it.
	But once they do that, they're having to keep it sealed with an O-ring and protected at this moment in time in the nitrogen atmosphere to make sure it's all nice and safe.
	But once they've got the new procedure up and running, then they're going to remove the last of the samples from the material.
	Bear in mind, some of the samples that they have got have already been distributed around the world to various places.
	Some has already arrived in the United Kingdom.
	The new Shetland spaceport was in the news last weekend, actually on Monday, but I think some of it was revealed in advance on the Sunday.
	This Shetland spaceport, I think it's on the island of Unst, isn't it?
	And that's going to be used for satellite launches.
	Now, that gives us, doesn't it, a space program, kind of?
	It does, yes.
	Saxavoad spaceport on the island of Unst.
	And it's got the full approval now from the Civil Aviation Authority.
	And they can start launches next year.
	And they will be doing launching later next year.
	They're hoping to do their fully launched.
	It's the first fully licensed spaceport in Western Europe, able to launch vertically.
	30 launches a year is the plan.
	That'll be pretty exciting.
	And it's being hopefully that the it's going to be done by a private German rocket firm, which we probably pronounce it Hilmpulse, but they probably pronounce it Hilmpulser for suborbital launch flights.
	So they're not actually going into orbit, but they'll be doing some launches like that.
	And then in 2025, full orbital launches will be done from it.
	And they can do polar launches, which are the most useful actual launches, is to get satellites into polar orbit because the Earth rotates underneath you and your satellite then can actually cover every square millimeter of the planet.
	So that's the best place to actually go for it.
	So yeah, this is really exciting.
	We have, yes, Space Scotland, because Scotland are going to push it.
	I mean, everyone's going to say the United Kingdom.
	Let's be realistic, it's in Scotland.
	The Scottish space program is up and running.
	Great news at the end of the year.
	Now, there was something before we started doing this that you reminded me to remind you about, and I've forgotten because that's me.
	I'm hoping you can remember what it is.
	Oh, eclipse.
	Totally.
	Eclipse moment.
	We've got a big eclipse of the sun coming up on the 8th of April, 2024.
	I'm hopefully going over there and working with a university in Erie.
	So you'll have a direct line to that if you want it.
	But yes, this is an important eclipse because it's an eclipse of the sun across the United States.
	So probably more people than ever before will have an opportunity of observing this eclipse.
	And I'll be here for a couple of minutes, but nonetheless, it's a full eclipse of the sun in one of the most populated regions of the planet.
	So it's going to be absolutely fantastic.
	And so that's good.
	People want to get ready for that because that is going to be one of the big events of the year is the solar eclipse, total solar eclipse in the United States in April.
	Why is it I always think of Bonnie Tyler whenever anybody talks about it?
	Oh, I do too.
	That's like the theme song I use when I do a talk about the eclipses.
	Why is that not a surprise?
	Andrew, listen, thank you very much for all the help you've given me this year.
	You know, my listeners and before they were listeners, the viewers absolutely loved you for reasons that I totally get because you're a top guy.
	And I hope you have a lovely Christmas and a great 2024 and that you keep acquiring spacesuits.
	Oh, we'll do.
	I've actually got three new designs that have arrived.
	So we've got three new ones, including the Orange Orion one.
	So we've got that one now.
	So I'm really pleased about that one.
	So yes, we've got new ones here.
	And thank you for having me on.
	I appreciate the airtime.
	It's wonderful to talk about my favorite subject.
	One very quick thing, just before we say Talata.
	Artemis, of course, the moon mission.
	What's happening in 2024?
	Just a quick one.
	Yes, the Artemis program is going ahead.
	They'll be doing some test launches of capsules to test capsules out, So one of the capsules is going to be launched in 2024 as an Earth orbit to test the systems out of that type of capsule.
	SpaceX may get to do another one of their launches of their vehicle to test it.
	As you know, they're slowly ramping up their launch program for their very heavy booster with their vehicle, which is going to do the first human landing, which is now being pushed probably 2026, 2027.
	But slowly the rate is going up.
	And of course, this is very different from Apollo because Apollo was just NASA, government agency, having private companies build the equipment, but NASA running it.
	This is going to have private companies contracted in to do things.
	We've got some lunar landers dropping onto the surface of the moon as part of the Artemis program next year.
	And this is the lander devices, which actually distribute equipment to the surface of the moon.
	That's being tested out next year as well.
	And slowly, the stages will be developing the gateway space station, which will orbit the moon.
	So the whole program of this towards the moon with Artemis is very, very different from Apollo.
	This is more like the concepts we had of the 1950s of going to the moon with an orbiting space station about the moon, dropping people to the surface, and building a complete infrastructure.
	And that starts to ramp up really heavily in 2024, mostly with a lot of technology testing, testing of the hardware.
	And we're going to see a lot of that until the first humans go around the moon again, once SpaceX have its heavy lift vehicle fully operational.
	And that's slowly going there.
	That's doing very well, actually.
	I think that's going the right direction.
	Andrew Lound talking about space at the end of 2023 as we go into 2024.
	Andrew Lound will be around a great deal more for us in 2024.
	Thank you to him.
	Next up, Nick Pope, who now lives in New York, of course, independent investigator, former MOD man, talking about UAPs and the state of play at the end of 2023.
	I think I'm correct when I said that it's been a roller coaster year, because who would have expected somebody like David Grush to come out and say what he said in the middle of the year?
	And for then there to be a roll call of politicians opining on the issue, which took us through a number of hearings.
	And we were, well, it was suggested that the Schumer amendment to the law would be the gateway to all of this.
	And it seems as we cross over into the new year, that isn't quite so.
	That's right.
	Yes.
	Taking the second point first, the big question mark was what UAP-related provisions are going to go into the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act?
	And the answer to that question is not quite as much as people hoped, because as you say, a lot of what was in the Schumer amendment has not got through.
	So, for example, we do not get an independent review board sitting over any of this.
	We do not get eminent domain whereby the government would retake possession of any materials that had gone to the private sector or to the corporate world.
	What we do get is some provisions that say any programs that are not declared properly to Congress cannot be funded in any way.
	But, you know, that's kind of a circular argument because I think the allegation is that some of these projects are illegal anyway or being done without the proper oversight, which is arguably the same thing.
	So does it really get us any further?
	Well, that is the question.
	And certainly the view of Steve Bassett, who I spoke with a week ago on this show, is that, okay, that isn't quite what we hoped it might be.
	But now the onus is in the, or the ball is in the court and the onus is on the Senate Intelligence Committee in January.
	Is that so?
	That's part of the story, but I think there is some more good news, actually, which people have forgotten in all their obsession with what didn't, didn't get into the 2024 Act.
	People forget what got into the 2023 Act.
	And that is basically a stipulation that by June 2024, the DOD and the intelligence community must report to Congress on any historically mandated programs that have run.
	So in one sense, this remit to tell Congress about anything that they've been running was already passed.
	It's just in the 2023 Act, and a lot of people have forgotten about it.
	But what is that going to deliver, do you think?
	I mean, you can't know 100%.
	I don't expect you to, but what can that deliver?
	It's going to deliver a sort of historical narrative starting on January 1st, 1945 and going onwards.
	And it's going to be split into two volumes.
	The first volume, one assumes, is going to cover the early years, Roswell, Project Sign, Project Grudge, the early years of Blue Book, maybe Blue Book in its entirety, and it will essentially be a historical narrative saying, this is what we did.
	This is the information we have recovered.
	These are the various, I guess, crown jewel rumors and stories.
	This is what we've been able to validate.
	And that may drop by the end of this year, actually, although it's due by June, but they're splitting it, as I say, into two volumes.
	The first one may drop as soon as the end of 2023 or very early 2024.
	So there's something to look forward to.
	And, you know, you said to me a long time ago, and I've never forgotten the phrase, I've used it myself, it's so good, that the best place to hide a book, right, is in a library because there are loads of books there.
	Now, if there's a big document that takes a lot of going through, could there be some truths in there, some nuggets that may lead people from one thing to another, something revelatory that people might miss?
	Do you think?
	Absolutely.
	You and I have talked about Project Condine before as a good example of this, a 468-page classified intelligence assessment of UAP, largely going on about atmospheric plasma phenomena.
	And then tucked away in one of the appendices was a little line that talked about the Rendlesham forest witnesses being exposed to UAP radiation for longer time periods than normal.
	So yeah, absolutely.
	Best place to hide a book is in a library.
	Best place to hide a tree is in a forest.
	Right.
	So when this comes out, if it's the end of this year, if it's the beginning of next year, which is perilously close now, we have to look at it and examine it extremely closely, which I'm hoping some people will.
	Where is David Grush now?
	Because there have been significant developments.
	We're not quite where we expected to be.
	He started the ball rolling more or less.
	Why do you think, and we can only ask for speculation here, we're not hearing more from him?
	Well, I think he is walking in the absolute tightrobe of legal issues.
	I mean, clearly, if he discloses classified information without lawful authority, he will be arrested.
	And I mean, that's Just a given.
	So everything that he says and does, he is having to clear with the Defense Office of Pre-Publication and Security Review, DOPSA.
	And any testimony that he may give to Congress can only be given to people who are sufficiently cleared to receive it.
	And the added complication is that he himself no longer holds a security clearance.
	So if he is to testify again and say anything over and above what he said to the House Oversight Committee earlier this year, A, he has to be temporarily given back a security clearance, which there's no guarantee that will happen.
	And B, you know, he has to check that every single congressional representative and staffer has both the security clearance and the need to know for the particular information that he wants to drop.
	So that's part of it.
	The other part is that, of course, he suffered some fairly devastating pushback when elements in the intelligence community polluted with a journalist to plant some stories about him.
	He must have known that would come, though.
	He must have known, but it still doesn't make it any less of a bitter pill to swallow when it happens, particularly when it pertained to such deeply personal information from a troubling period of his life when he was going through a lot of problems and issues.
	But to have that raked up and made public in that way, even if you're expecting it, doesn't make it easy when it happens.
	Yes, I'm never quite sure why anybody would think that PTSD is an issue to use against somebody, especially somebody who's been in the service of his country.
	But that's another issue that I'm sure will be explored in greater depth at a later time.
	Where are the other whistleblowers then?
	The up to 40 of them, we were told, were in the wings waiting to speak.
	If there are 40 of them and they're waiting, I'm surprised that not one of them has broken ranks.
	Well, they're still in the wings.
	That's the short answer to the question, Howard.
	Yeah.
	Hopefully soon we will be seeing exit or rather enter stage left.
	And, you know, so we'll see.
	But there are a number of people.
	I think some of them, frankly, are going to be people will find stronger than others in terms of what they can actually deliver.
	And really, it's no good just having more of the same and people saying, oh, yeah, I heard that too.
	That's true.
	We're at the where's the beef moment with this?
	And because people have, to some extent, pushed back on David Grush and said, okay, fair dues, but now put up and or shut up.
	And we've talked about the legal issues and the tightrope that he's walking.
	But nonetheless, if you go out so publicly and put yourself out there, at the end of the day, you have to deliver something.
	So the other ones are, I think, choosing their moment very carefully.
	They're probably, there is a degree of collusion between them about how they're going to do this.
	And what you don't want to do is set a date, have it all planned, and then a huge news story drops.
	So you've, I mean, there's an element of luck with all of this, but there's some coordination, a lot of conversations going on behind the scenes.
	And one other thing to watch is, of course, a lot of people have noticed that Lou Elizondo has maybe gone quite quiet recently.
	And one of the reasons for that is, of course, I expect, as with all book publishers, you don't want your author talking too much before the book's actually out, because then it's harder to sell in stories about them.
	But Lou's book is done.
	I'm not sure whether every single I is dotted and T is crossed when it comes to the security review, but that should be dropping in 2024.
	And that's going to be another vehicle by which some of this could come out because he will maybe name some names that we've not heard before.
	And that may well be their curtain call, so to speak.
	You were saying, though, that ultimately the gatekeepers of all of this come in the security reviews and the fact that you always have to refer back and refer up everything that you say or are going to say.
	That applying to Louis Elizondo in his book, that applying to David Grush.
	That's a bit depressing, isn't it?
	Because that means that the lid can be put back on all of this by the U.S. military, the U.S. government.
	That's true.
	On the other hand, those processes are there for very good reasons.
	And I think I've seen this before.
	I've been involved in some leak inquiries when I worked in the Ministry of Defense.
	Actually, interestingly, not on the UFO issue at all, but on some security, counter-terrorism, military policing type issues.
	And I think the problem is that sometimes, and I'm not saying this applies to David Brush, but it is something that we have to bear in mind.
	Sometimes people can look at information that they come across and say, wow, the American people have a right to know this.
	But there are two provisos.
	Firstly, you can't tell the American people without telling everyone, including adversaries.
	But secondly, if you are not the subject matter expert, if you are not the information owner, you can't really conduct the damage assessment of what the harm to the national interest would be if this was disclosed.
	You can have this kind of idea.
	Oh, yeah, I know about UFOs.
	Well, this is harmless enough.
	But what you don't know is that there's someone in a back office going, my goodness, no, no, he doesn't realize that the moment you put that out, what you reveal is X. And I'm, you know, hopefully without having specific examples, people will understand what I'm talking about here.
	But sometimes, like I say, if you're not the information owner, you are not perfectly placed to make that assessment.
	And yes.
	So you can get it wrong.
	You can.
	But if an issue is that big, then I would have thought that somebody amongst the information giving segment, the whistleblowers, the other people who may be there, that somebody will be so incensed by the slowness of all of this, by the fact that it hasn't all happened, that they would just say, here's what I know, and I'm off to Martinique.
	Well, this brings us to the phrase catastrophic disclosure, which I'm sure you've heard bandied around in the last few weeks.
	And this is the idea that there is a slow disclosure plan to drip feed this information out, to acclimatize people, to get them ready for it, possibly because there is a dark side element to it that can't all be done at once.
	And this is the plan.
	But according to some people with knowledge of all this, the fact that some of the Schumer Rounds amendment didn't pass has derailed a portion of this controlled disclosure plan, which brings us to the possibility of this so-called catastrophic disclosure.
	As you say, the idea that somebody, whether authorized or unauthorized, just dumps the whole lot out and says, here it is.
	And of course, a lot of people in the UFO community say, yeah, bring it on.
	Let's do it.
	Why not?
	Then it'll be done.
	But of course, they wouldn't be the ones who would be targeted by the security agencies afterwards.
	That's exactly right.
	So it's one thing for people in the UFO community to say, bring it on, do it.
	It's quite another for somebody to actually do it and A, face the legal sanction or worse, don't forget what David Grush hinted at in his House oversight testimony.
	So that's a factor.
	But the other thing is if this does come with a dark side attached to it, catastrophic disclosure, you know, you might think you want it, but when you have it, it might be quite a different matter.
	Yeah, no, I think very much, and just as we come to the end of this, and thanks for doing it, Nick, that that is the issue that I've been trying to bring out increasingly in the last two, three weeks or so, probably more, that, you know, you may say we want disclosure, but, you know, do you really, because of all the things that maybe the general public reading newspapers haven't considered about what disclosure might mean, nothing is ever going to be the same.
	If you know all of it and you find out right now, you're not going to feel the same about your governors, your government, you're not going to feel the same about your place in the cosmos.
	You may start feeling scared if you know something that you didn't heretofore know.
	So, you know, I think we need to be giving, and I think we are starting to give, some consideration to that notion of be careful what you wish for, because in 2024, you might get it.
	That's exactly it.
	And it might not be, hey, people, there are aliens and that's it, because everyone would be like, hey, great.
	It may be something much more dark side than that.
	Well, I think that's as far as we ought to go for now, Nick, but there's a lot more to talk about.
	And as I say, close to Christmas, I'm very grateful to you for doing this.
	I hope you get the chance to have a bit of a rest over Christmas.
	What's the first commitment that you've got?
	Is it an Ancient Aliens Live after Christmas?
	No, it's actually the Conscious Life Expo in Los Angeles in very early February.
	So that's going to be a great convention and expo.
	Ancient Aliens Live is taking a little break.
	We'll be back in the spring.
	Nick Pope.
	And finally, Fevzi Turkup, the gadget detective, with some thoughts about technology, what we've been through with it, AI and all the rest of that, through 2023.
	And some of the things, although I suspect we can't predict anything like all of them, some of the things we might be expecting in 2024.
	This is Fevzi Turkup.
	Has it been the year of AI?
	Is that the way that we can categorize 2023 then, Fevzi?
	Yeah, I mean, it's the first time I can remember in my career that I've ever had trouble keeping up with it because it's been relentless.
	You know, several announcements a day sometimes and to keep up with it and to understand what it means in what's such a new technology.
	You know, it's not just, oh, here's another smartphone.
	It's slightly better.
	Things are coming on leaps and bounds.
	And I think the coming year is going to be the year when a lot of this technology starts to become more mainstream with Microsoft's intervention.
	And I use the word advisedly into OpenAI.
	They've already put it into their Microsoft 365 product.
	So they've got the Copilot product, which is a version of OpenAI.
	So you're going to start getting this more smart companies already pushing ahead and starting to push out some of their less smart competition.
	And didn't I read that Google very recently started to incorporate elements of ChatGPT into its product?
	Well, they've incorporated elements of BARD into their product, their own AI product.
	Interestingly enough, they did a demo of the latest incarnation of their AI, and then it was found out that it had been cut to make it look a lot more responsive.
	And what appeared to be a verbal conversation was in fact a series of text prompts.
	But the underlying message to all this is that this technology is coming.
	I think Google would not have been trying to commercialize its technology were it not for the fact that its competition started to do that and then all bets were off.
	And now we have these technologies that arguably are not fully understood.
	These technologies have demonstrated what are known as emergent properties.
	That's to say, they have shown capabilities that were not predicted by their makers and are not fully understood.
	So there's elements of what they do, which are essentially black boxes.
	We understand what goes in and what comes out.
	We're not exactly sure how they're doing it.
	That's a bit of a worry, isn't it, Fevzi?
	Doesn't this speak to something?
	And, you know, I want to try and also talk about the positives of this technology in this last year.
	But doesn't this suggest that here we have the beginnings of something that is potentially out of control?
	There's a number of ways we could be approaching AI development at the moment.
	At the moment, the vast bulk of the brain resources, if you like, is going into making them smarter and bigger language, large language models, larger language models.
	I feel that a larger proportion of that mental capital should be going into safety research.
	How is it that we should be able to understand what they're doing better now before we build bigger versions of what we don't understand?
	And that, of course, is assuming that they understand what they're doing.
	And sometimes with the headlines I read, and you know that I'm not an expert, very far from it, I get the impression that sometimes they're not fully across everything that they're doing in general.
	Well, I mean, this is research.
	I mean, the problem with this is that this is cutting-edge research that's being made into commercial products as it's leaking out the lab.
	I feel that part of what happened at OpenAI recently, where the CEO, Sam Altman, was kicked out by the board and then brought back and then the board was replaced, that was a step change because, so let's take a step back.
	Open AI is called OpenAI because it was largely created to be a canary in the coal mines.
	So that because a lot of AI development was happening in commercial organizations and was confidential and hidden from the public and hidden from governments, the worry of those that helped set up OpenAI was that if the governments in particular didn't understand what was happening, there was zero chance that they had any possibility of regulating it adequately.
	So OpenAI was designed that its developments would happen in the open.
	They'd be non-proprietary.
	And as soon as they produced a version of ChatGPT that was amazing, Microsoft, who had been one of the, I think Microsoft had originally put about, I think it was a billion into it originally.
	They came in, swooped in, shot lots of money at OpenAI.
	And suddenly, I feel what happened is that the management of that company decided that it was better to be a billionaire than to keep true to the dream of what OpenAI was meant to be.
	So OpenAI is no longer open.
	It is very much proprietary.
	It's very much, you could say owned by, I use the word informally, but owned by Microsoft.
	And it's not what it was designed to be.
	It's no longer going to give us that early warning.
	And in fact, they are, you know, the main, one of the main proponents of companies that are going to keep developing stuff that's, you know, we don't know if it's safe or not.
	You know, it would be, think of it like nuclear weapons, think of it like new drugs.
	You know, imagine having new drugs being put straight to market without being understood or tested.
	Well, you know, that is concerning, isn't it?
	And if the scenario is really that, then the first we're going to know about any of it is when something goes wrong and we're reading about it in the morning papers.
	Yeah.
	And within OpenAI in particular, so Sam Altman, the CEO, was kicked out.
	And the rumor is it was about over-commercialization of this and the links to Microsoft.
	And in fact, Microsoft, despite being a major investor, didn't get any advance notice that Sam Altman was going to be kicked out.
	But Sam Altman was brought back in because the staff who presumably are also benefiting from this huge flow of money coming into the organization all threatened to leave.
	So Sam Altman was brought back and the majority of the board that sacked him was kicked out.
	Now, if you believe that the underlying reason for him being kicked out in the first place was concerns over safety and over-commercialization, well, now he's in complete control, essentially.
	You know, there's really very few constraints upon what OpenAI does and how safe it is.
	And of course, look, he's not here to speak for himself.
	And I hear what you say, and I think we should be concerned.
	But there must be some positives in all of this.
	Otherwise, nobody would want to do it, would they?
	There's two parts to that.
	Yes, definitely there are some positives.
	You know, it will probably cure cancer and solve climate change, for example.
	And before it does all that, we'll all become amazingly more efficient at our jobs.
	And those of us that don't will fall away.
	So we're at the stage now where we're horse-drawn carriage companies.
	And we can be the best horse-drawn carriage companies.
	But unless we adopt the new technology, we're going to cease to trade, as it were.
	Now, the reason why it's happening is not just because there are benefits to it, there are, but it is because it's, think of it as an arms race.
	I mean, the nuclear arms race analogy is sound, but there's two arms races going on.
	One is military and one is commercial.
	So dealing with the commercial side first.
	If you are a business, let's say you're a taxi company, you say, well, I'm not going to have self-driving vehicles, which are, by the way, just AI in a robot, effectively.
	I'm not going to have that.
	Then you're going to go out of business eventually because your costs are going to be higher.
	So in order to keep your costs down and remain competitive, you must develop this technology and you must adopt this technology.
	So there's a constant push from a commercial side of things.
	But then on the military side, it's a bit like nukes.
	If you said, okay, America, we're going to have a moratorium on the development of AI in military.
	We're going to keep to conventional non-AI based weapons.
	You know, the danger is that your enemies will not be doing that and that you could be overrun with AI technology-based weapons.
	So just as with nukes, we have an AI arms race going on.
	And so, yes, there are benefits, but what's driving it in the military space is fear.
	Understandably, because the potential advantages of a country who's got AI-based weaponry is of a similar order to those that have nukes against those that don't.
	So you've got to move ahead, otherwise, all of your competitors will.
	It's the same imperative, really, but you'll see in the commercial sphere.
	So we're looking ahead to 2024 then.
	Just in a few seconds, could you summarize what you think, having looked at 2023, what we might expect?
	Because by the looks of it, all of this is developing and growing exponentially.
	Yeah.
	So obviously the large language models will get larger and they'll get smarter and they will do things that increasingly that we thought only humans would ever be able to do, to think, to be creative, to have empathy, to show understanding.
	All these things will come.
	But possibly as importantly is the fact that AI will go mainstream.
	So at the moment, it's largely slightly geeky people who are tweaking with it and playing with it and being knocked out by it.
	It's like the early days of micros in the early 80s, computers.
	It's sort of geek technology.
	It's going to change in the coming year.
	The technology will be much easier to use and integrate into either your business, if you're, say, a self-employed person, or your day-to-day life.
	So you'll have assistants and AIs that will integrate into your life without you being an expert.
	So we will start to see it going much more mainstream and it will affect our lives.
	So it won't just be loss of jobs and replacement of jobs.
	That will continue to happen.
	But it will also be, we'll start to see the benefits of it as consumers, as self-employed people, just as individuals to have AI assistance that will do more and more for us.
	So it's very seductive technology and we'll start to see that mainstreaming so that the general public will be more obvious.
	The benefits will start to be more obvious.
	We're going into an election year, both in the United States and the United Kingdom.
	Well, I mean, there might be an election in January 25, but it's looking like it might be during 2024.
	We'll see what happens.
	All of the deep fake technology and the digital manipulation technology seems to have reached a peak.
	I keep getting videos dropped into my inbox, which are essentially taking the proverbial out of members of the royal family.
	And some of the recreations look quite convincing, but you can tell what they are.
	I suspect that quite soon there will come a time when you won't be able to tell Febsi.
	And I wonder what we do about that.
	Yeah.
	I mean, six months ago, I did a test on myself to see whether I could reliably spot AI-generated images against natural images, let's say.
	Six months ago, I got 10 out of 10.
	Yesterday, I scored six out of 10.
	God.
	Just slightly better than you would get by chance, right?
	That's in six months.
	Yeah, that's in six months.
	And I know what to look for.
	You know, I've studied quite carefully the artifacts that you tend to see in AI-generated images.
	And I can tell you those artifacts are getting harder and harder to detect.
	And those were some of the things that the experts were telling me a year or two ago would be the things that give it away.
	And if you can't spot them, maybe technology won't be able to spot them.
	Then we really do have a problem.
	Yeah, I used to be able to look at things like fingers, your skin tone, what happened at the edges of a person's hair at the edges and see if it looked natural.
	There were certain things and also the backgrounds were often a bit of a giveaway.
	They were all very high in bokeh, this sort of blurred effect and so forth.
	I mean, some of that still exists.
	It depends which AI model you're looking at, but the cutting edge stuff is really, really difficult to spot, which means that be it images, be it voices, be it videos with voices, you know, being faked, it means that in the context of an election, that we can't really just take at face value anything that we see.
	And the difficulty with it is not just that there are fakes and we can't tell that they're fakes, but that we start to doubt that which is real.
	I think that the point of it all is going to be, isn't it, that we will get to a stage where it's not necessarily that we're going to believe stuff that is faked up and put before us.
	It's that we might get to a stage where we cease to believe anything.
	And that's an even bigger problem.
	And we don't engage.
	Yes, because then we don't engage in the political process.
	This technology has the ability to completely undermine democracies.
	And that's, you know, I mean, because at the moment you've got these things called troll farms and they, you know, they put out fake messages and fake news and so forth all over social media.
	But that's a limited number of people doing it.
	Now with an AI-based system, you know, you can do that at an industrial scale.
	Combine the scale of it with how convincing it is becoming.
	And by the way, this is also for scams.
	I mean, one of the main way of spotting scams is that the English used to be poor.
	Well, that's going away.
	The main way of spotting scams in the future might be that the English is too good because it's just going to be, most people don't have perfect grammar, right?
	So after a while, if it's impeccable, you might begin to suspect.
	It really is very, very difficult.
	It's going to undermine democracies.
	It's going to, you see, at the moment, there's a lot of work going into using AI to spot AI-based fakes.
	So, you know, again, you've got this sort of cat and mouse arms race going on that, you know, the bad guys will use AI to fake something.
	We're increasingly developing AI-based algorithms to try and spot those fakes.
	Think of virus and antivirus software constantly.
	Bad people make more advanced viruses and the antivirus companies try and counter it.
	And it's always, you know, one leaping over the other.
	And I think that's what we're going to see.
	But the chances of humans being able to spot it without any AI intervention is going to be essentially zero.
	So this could actually be the main application of AI to try to counter some of the effects of AI.
	Yes.
	Well, isn't that a great circle?
	Okay, well, also, AI is being used to answer the question of how can we make ourselves safe on an existential level from AI.
	And if you're concerned that AI might be a threat to us as a species, then if your only hope of preventing that is to use AI, then that's kind of a circular argument because you're going to have to trust that your AI is not duplicitous.
	Because, you know, there is already suspicion that AIs could be hiding some of their capabilities from us in order not to freak us out.
	All right.
	Okay.
	Now we've got one minute left, maybe 90 seconds if we're lucky.
	I just want to try and raise this because, you know, it's not all doom and gloom.
	When I was a kid, there used to be ads in our comics for X-ray specs.
	It seems that 2024 could be the year when intelligent glasses and VR augmented headsets and all sorts of things, we finally get this stuff.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So we've had, so far we've had virtual reality where your whole environment is replaced by a virtual fake environment.
	And we've had augmented reality where you can see the real world, but objects are placed in your view.
	And I think Pokemon Go was one of the very early examples of that, where you'd see like a Pokemon character superimposed on the real world.
	Now, with the advent of, for example, Vision Pro, which Apple announced at WWDC Worldwide Developer Conference earlier this year, that's going to come out early in the new year.
	Vision Pro is going to cost, I think, about £3,500.
	But what they've done is that they've pushed ahead with something called mixed reality, which includes augmented reality and virtual reality.
	But it's not just that there are virtual objects in the real space, but that the virtual objects can interact with the real world.
	So you put a virtual object, you put a virtual object on a table, you push it, it knows it's a table, it falls off the table, for example, and that you can react with that.
	So you've got, we're going to see, again, these headsets getting cheaper.
	The MetaQuest 2 from Meta is now selling for around £200, which is about half of what it was selling for previously.
	Even the state-of-the-art one is £400 and something.
	I came across a pair of glasses.
	Now, this really interesting me.
	It was a pair of, not a headset, but looked like a fairly stylish pair of black sunglasses.
	It's called the X-Reel Air 2 Pro.
	And it allows you to, for example, it will project what appears to be 130-inch TV screen, high-definition TV screen into your eyes.
	And it does a really clever trick because if you walk around the room, the screen will walk with you.
	But if you turn your head, it doesn't constantly turn with you.
	So it's like there being a physical screen in a physical space.
	So in reality, when you look at a TV screen, you turn your head, the CV screen doesn't move with you.
	You don't necessarily want that.
	So this thing, which is lightweight, and it's not, I mean, it's not cheap, but it's like four or five hundred pounds, depending which model you buy, which is a lot cheaper than it used to be.
	These things are really turning into real products.
	And I think that they will replace, you know, all these large screen TVs that we buy and projectors and stuff, that will tend to go.
	And also the way we interact with our smartphones will tend to go.
	We'll have maybe the gubbins of that, of the smartphone built into the glasses.
	Maybe you won't need a smartphone anymore.
	Maybe, I mean, I think, you know, Apple has peaked, for example, with its sales of iPhones.
	And I think that they're banking on the Vision Pro headset that they're going to launch as being in the future their revenue stream.
	Because imagine, you don't need screens anymore.
	You don't need TV screens.
	You don't need computer monitors.
	You can have a heads-up display when you're driving, when you're walking down the street and you walk past a coffee shop.
	It will recognize you and offer you a free coffee or some sort of discount if you walk into that store.
	Our world is about to change dramatically.
	Well, we can look forward to that.
	We'll all go around looking like Joe 90.
	There's a dated reference for you.
	And my thanks to FevZ.
	If you want to know anything about him or ask him a question, put into a search engine, gadget detective, Fevzi Turkalp, and you will find him there.
	And you won't be disappointed.
	Before that, Nick Pope and UAPs.
	And before that, Andy Lound talking about space.
	More great guests in the pipeline here through 2024 on The Unexplained Online.
	So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And 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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