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Jan. 13, 2024 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
47:55
Edition 783 - Beatriz Villaroel
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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, still, and this is still the unexplained.
And it's still cold in London as I record these words.
I'm going to have to turn on my little old fan heater to try and make this cold place that I'm in a little more bearable.
Now, the guest on this edition is somebody who's going to talk about something that I don't think you'll have heard discussed before on a forum platform like this one.
Just imagine that there may have been a sign of extraterrestrial life that was manifest in images that astronomers took photographically in the era before we were exploring space.
What if there were signs of things that appeared and then mysteriously disappeared that are present in images that we took during the 1950s, say?
That's an interesting thing, isn't it?
And also, what about the thought, we'll also talk about this, that the way to search for ET, if ET exists, is not to look for signals, to search for them, because we've been doing that for decades now, but to actually go out, maybe even close to home, somewhere around this planet, and look for things that really don't belong there.
Isn't that interesting?
And to hear a scientist say things like that, I think is a very captivating thing and hugely interesting.
So I read a couple of things, a couple of newspaper pieces, in fact, including one recent one, about this person, Beatrice Villa-Roel, assistant professor of physics at Stockholm University, who's been working on exactly these things in a way that I don't know of anybody else who's doing that.
That's a very badly put sentence, but you know what I'm saying.
So Beatrice is the person I'm going to speak to here.
I'm going to play you in just a second the entire conversation that I've had with her.
Please remember that English is not her first language, just as Swedish is not my first language, or perhaps not your first language either.
But what she says is utterly gripping, and I think it deserves to be heard, and I think she deserves to be heard, which is why we're going to include this conversation on the podcast here with Assistant Professor of Physics at Stockholm University, Beatrice Villa-Roel.
Fascinating person.
But you make the decision as to whether you agree with me about that.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his ongoing work on this show.
Thank you to you for all of the emails that you've been sending me.
Gratefully received.
You can always email me through my website, theunexplained.tv.
Check out also my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of the Unexplained with Howard Use, and no other similar page.
We'll do.
Right, this is the conversation then about different ways of maybe checking and finding out that we're not alone with Assistant Professor of Physics at Stockholm University, Beatrice Villaroel.
Beatrice, thank you very much for doing this.
My pleasure.
Thank you for inviting me.
Now, we think it's cold in London at the moment, and we're going to get temperatures, I think, down to about minus two or minus three in the next few days, but I guess that's nothing compared with Stockholm.
That's like summer almost.
Well, actually, we have probably around zero degrees now, but last week we had minus 20.
It was so beautiful.
Boy, it's a long time since I've been to Stockholm, but I think it's a different quality of cold that you have there because you have better blue skies and it's crispy cold.
But anyway, let's not talk about the weather.
Talk to me about you.
Now, you are an assistant professor of physics.
You have made a number of headlines in the last few years.
I've read about you.
Talk to me about what it is that you do in Stockholm.
So I'm an assistant professor or researcher in astrophysics at Nodilta in Stockholm.
And I'm just a very curious person.
So I go where my curiosity takes me.
And I've been very much working with transients, like short-lived phenomena on the sky.
And so in the last years, I've been working very much with a project called the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a center of observations project, where we have been searching for vanishing objects.
So when I talk about vanishing objects, what is interesting here is that it's kind of the reverse of what one usually looks for in a survey.
You have a lot of automated sky surveys that are looking at the sky all the time, and there people usually look at things that appear on the sky.
Now, what I was interested in, or I'm interested in, has been things that vanish.
Let's say you would have maybe a star that would just one day not be there.
And in order to do so, we have been working with the images that were taken before Sputnik 1 in the early 1950s, before the first human satellite, and compared the images of those times with the sky as it looks today.
So that's what I've been doing, a lot of stuff.
That's a great mystery, isn't it, Beatrice?
Sorry to jump in here, but that's the main reason that I contacted you.
I read a newspaper piece saying that there's this cool professor, assistant professor in Stockholm, who is looking at objects in the sky that are there at one instant, or not instant, but at one time, and not there at another time.
Now, we know from SETI, which is using radio methods, that there are sometimes signals from space that appear and disappear.
And the explanation for those is often that there is something that is going around an orbit that interrupts those signals, those bits of radiation, and that's what makes them pulsate.
That's what makes them appear and disappear.
But the idea of an object in space appearing and then disappearing, that's something that I've never heard about.
Can you talk to me about how that is and what these objects are?
So it depends on how you imagine what is actually an object or if you're actually looking at an event.
Because we were interested in looking for things, let's say finding a star that would be there in, let's say, it would be there for hundreds of years and one day it isn't there.
Because such an example of a star that just vanishes one day could be a so-called failed supernova.
And there are some theoretical predictions that within a certain mass range, some stars, some massive stars, when they die, they don't emit this bright supernova, but they just collapse directly into a black hole.
And this is one of the things that one could find.
But then there were some technosignature predictions that we were thinking of.
For example, if you have a dysosphere that is very fast built around the star, maybe it would vanish.
Or if you would simply have the situation of, let's say, of some kind of technology that extraterrestrial civilization uses, where the civilization makes the star vanish.
It would look like magic to us, but it would just be very, very advanced technology of aliens.
And you actually included that in your thoughts about this?
I mean, for somebody who's involved in mainstream science, that's a pretty big step, isn't it?
It was.
In 2016, when I wrote my first paper about that, it was a big step.
And people were telling me, oh, you know, people are going to think that you're mad.
You shouldn't be doing that.
Your career might be damaged.
And I was like, hey, I want to do this.
And I want to write it the way how I'm thinking about it.
So I did it anyway.
And that's how it all started these searches.
Now, later, we still haven't found that star that has vanished, or I was hoping to find an entire vanishing galaxy.
What an optimist I was.
Instead, what we found were like short-lived events, like very short events on the sky that you can find in images from the 1950s that you couldn't find later.
Many of them refer to these events like vanishing stars, because on the image it looks like a star, like a star that is there in the 50s and that you never find again.
But they are actually some kind of very short-lived transients that were just caught in the old images.
And that has been a very fascinating adventure because from that scene we later found even weirder things and it has just been like, wow, such a journey.
Even, I mean, look, that's what this show is about, really.
The weird bits of science or the bits of science that are beyond the science that most people are involved in.
The thought that you would discover even weirder things than objects appearing perhaps in the 1950s and then you look again 60 years later or whatever and they're not there.
What weirder than that could you find?
What did you find?
When you find several of them appearing and vanishing in a small part of the sky at the same time.
Now, that is weird.
Then you suddenly have a problem because like we found this image with nine stars that appeared and vanished.
There were nine faint stars.
And we started like wondering like, what on earth is this?
So we started like working through explanation after explanation and people were saying, oh, but maybe it's this, maybe it's that.
And we tested all kind of like astronomical explanations you could come up with.
There were zero that could explain that.
Maybe there was something with the images and like some kind of technical error.
And we also failed to identify something that could explain that.
We were thinking maybe like the closest thing that came to that maybe, maybe could produce that, although we are actually not sure at all, it's just a hypothesis, is that maybe there were some kind of unlisted secret atomic bomb tests on that date or on that night when the image was exposed.
However, there were no official tests in the United States.
So that kind of would require a little bit of conspiracy theory.
And yeah, so that became kind of a very interesting thing to work with.
Another explanation that is possible is that we saw some kind of artificial objects, either when they are reflecting the sunlight or when they are emitting light.
And then we talk about artificial objects outside the Earth's atmosphere.
However, remember, there was nothing human up the sky then.
Right, because the conquest of space, the first flight, we're talking about 1960s and you're talking about an image from the 1950s.
We didn't have anything up there as far as we know then.
Exactly.
So it became very, very fun.
So the next thing I did was trying to think about how can I test if there's something up there.
And I proposed that maybe we could test the hypothesis by looking for these kind of transients where a lot of, or not a lot, but several objects appear and vanish at the same time.
Or when I talk about at the same time, it's not actually at the same time, but within the exposure time of the image.
So if the exposure time is 50 minutes, as was usual in those times, then it's within 50 minutes.
Right.
And it couldn't be the same.
You say that multiple objects appeared.
It couldn't be if the exposure time is 50 minutes, could it be one object transiting, making some kind of trajectory?
Or is that not possible?
Not a natural object.
And if it's only one single object, it would be jumping in all kinds of directions on the sky.
And where were, in the case of the 1950s objects that you saw, multiple objects, that you couldn't find an explanation for, where exactly...
I don't remember anymore the coordinates, I'm sad to say.
Clearly, they were somewhere far off, were they, as far as you could tell?
When you mean far off?
A long way away.
Oh, you mean altitude.
I thought you meant exactly where.
No, I'm sorry, I should use more specific terms.
Altitude, yeah.
Altitude.
Well, so in order to produce that kind of point sources and instead of a streak, because if you are at low Earth orbit, you're going to produce a streak because things move so fast.
So you would need to be at, let's say, several tens of kilometers altitude in order to produce a flash that is short and leaves a star-looking object, something that looks like a star.
Otherwise, you would have lots of streaks.
The closer you are, the Faster, simply.
Okay, just like if you go to take a photograph with any camera today, if you move the camera as you take the picture and there's a light source, you and you're close to it, you're gonna get a streak.
Yes.
I mean, if you have a if you have a low Earth like satellite moving and you take an image during one hour, you're going to get a beautiful streak.
Or if you have a meteorite passing through, you're going to see this beautiful streak through the image.
And now, if you have this point source, it means that it's far enough away for this flash to occur or for it to look like a flash.
Okay.
Let's do this like a...
We've just got that small digital delay.
But let me just say this, and then I'll say nothing.
But if you have things like that that appear in the 1950s, and they may be a number of kilometers up or whatever, and then you look again and they're not there, that's an era when there are no space probes, Yuri Gagarin hasn't made his flight yet, nobody has.
That would seem to point towards something like UFOs or UAPs or something that it's uncomfortable for science to take on board.
Doesn't it?
Or some entirely new physical phenomena.
I did say tens of thousands of kilometers, right?
Not tens of kilometers, because sometimes I forget to say tens of thousands.
Apologies for it in case I said tens of kilometers when I meant tens of thousands of kilometers.
Right, right.
And where would that be, if it was tens of thousands of kilometers, that would put it beyond the moon, wouldn't it?
No, it's much closer, of course.
It would put it at geosynchronous orbits.
And, well, that's where we have most of the, or very many satellites today and a lot of space debris.
There's a lot of communication satellites placed in geosynchronous orbits.
Of course, it could be even further away.
Maybe if you have something halfway off to the moon, it would also give off this kind of very short-lived glints if it's reflecting the sunlight at those distances.
And could it be some kind of celestial object that's on a sort of orbit and sometimes the sun illuminates parts of it and sometimes the sun doesn't illuminate parts of it.
It just depends when you take the picture.
Or is that really too simplistic?
The problem with some kind of ordinary natural object is that you have a material that is kind of they're usually spherical and they don't have highly reflective material.
And what I should have said, of course, is that these glints appear when you have something that is highly reflective and has a very flat surface, let's say a piece of flat metal or flat glass.
You're not going to get these very short flashes if you have an asteroid reflecting sunlight.
Then you're going to again get streaks.
That's an astonishing thing to come up with, isn't it?
What kind of response when you were first of all talking about this?
I know that scientists are all connected and yes, you're competitive, but there is a lot of cooperation in science and things that are published have to be peer-reviewed and that sort of thing.
So what kind of response when you came out with this did you get?
What did other scientists think?
Well, there were some mixed reactions.
There were some people who were super curious about it and they found it super interesting, like what could it be?
And some people who were skeptical saying, oh, that is just some kind of plate defects.
And so with plate defects, it meant like some kind of error on the photographic plate where the motion would have been scratched in one way or another.
What didn't entirely agree with that idea is because if we look at the example of the nine stars, you have nine of them and all nine looked like real stars, except for that they were very faint.
And recently we found an example where we have three very bright stars and they really look like real stars.
Again, they are indistinguishable from the real stars in the same image.
And I think the chances for that display defects are dropping quite a lot with this new discovery that was made by my colleague Andriki Solano.
And again, you see there are three bright stars in one image and you never see them again.
And I think there will be maybe more chances to test the various hypotheses and to see how my scientific colleagues will be reacting as we will be continuing working on this line of research.
I mean, look, let's make it very clear to my listener.
What we're talking about is absolutely astonishing, and I'm surprised that I'm not reading and hearing more about it.
And that more scientists, you know, like in my country, we have a lot of astronomers and astrophysicists, that they haven't taken this up.
They should be taking it up, shouldn't they?
I think so.
I think that's, I mean, this all photographic plates offer a view of the sky that you cannot have today.
There were no satellites, no space debris.
So yes, I believe that you might be able to see some phenomena that you today have to fight very hard with the telescopes in order to observe them.
I think this is something they should be looking into and examining and searching, because maybe if we are right and these multiple transients are real, whether it's aliens or something completely different, it's something very important.
It certainly sounds important.
And if you if you look at other photographic plates, presumably they're taken at intervals.
So they start being taken in the 50s, they may be taken in the 60s.
I mean, I don't know whether this happens, but you tell me, 1960s, 70s, 80s, whatever.
Do you see signs of motion or is it just simply snap of a finger, they're there and then they're not?
We never saw any motion, anything like that.
Simply, they were there and then they never were seen again one hour later.
We even used the largest telescope in the world, sorry, largest optical telescope in the world, the Grand Telescope Canarias, to look at some of our examples and we found nothing at the spots.
Just nothing was there.
And you're saying that some of these things appeared and disappeared in the space of one hour?
Yes.
Good lord.
And you've been able to rule out problems with the photographic plates that they were using back then.
There's no problem with those.
Well, we can never rule it out entirely because we don't have access to these, like the real photographic plates we work with, digitized copies.
We have done our best to rule out any errors with them.
Could it be, And, you know, please tell me if it is.
But could it simply be something in the realm of physics that we don't understand yet?
Or do we have to be drawn to the conclusion that something or someone put them there and then took them away?
Let me tell you something interesting about this.
As my colleague discovered this very interesting three transients, the triple transient case, so we were already like, we had already written the first draft of the paper and I told my friend Dave Altman about it.
And Dave, he just tells me suddenly, hey, you know one thing?
19th of July 1952.
You have it in the paper.
I said, yeah, that's what the date when it was discovered.
Do you know what happened on the 19th of July 1952?
I said, no, I have no idea.
How should I know that?
He said, well, you know, you had one of the biggest historical UFO events ever at that time.
And so there was something called the Washington 1952 UFO flag.
That's right, the Washington Nationals, they called it.
Exactly.
Now it gets even more fun because we were like, oh, wow, it's on the same date or whatever.
And I thought, hey, I have a paper from like last year.
So last year I made a paper trying to like where we tried to search for exact signatures of something artificial in space.
We had made a prediction, you look for several that are lying along a line, and then you look through these photographic plates and see if you can find something.
And we had two top candidates that came out.
We made a little table with the two top candidates and three crappy candidates.
We put it on archive.
The paper is still there, unpublished.
Very difficult to get through peer review.
All editors are terrified of just when they read what it is about.
But there was this top candidate that was a one in 10,000.
And that one happened on the, it was written in the table 28th of July 1952.
Turned out that I had the wrong date there.
It was on the 27th of July 1952.
So what happened on the 27th of July 1952?
It's the second weekend of the Washington flap, of this 1952 flap.
So that was just again by chance because this Washington flyover was apparently during two weekends.
So we had one, the turtle transient on the first weekend and this candidate on the second weekend.
I found it quite very, very funny, a very fun coincidence.
I'm not sure what the statistical possibility, probability of that might be, but it would seem the chances of those two things correlating, you could calculate those and that that would be a very, very interesting number.
I mean, look, this-I tried it out.
In 1947, Roswell, could you do that?
Here is a trouble.
The photographic plates from Palomar are not containing that time period.
And then we would have to go to maybe Harvard.
Now, Harvard plates, they have a peculiar story.
So in 1952, they got a new director and he ordered the destruction of one third of the plates.
And he also got rid of some of the logbooks.
And in 1953, his name was Donald Menzel.
And this name is probably very familiar to some people.
He was a very great astronomer.
And in 1953, he also stops Harvard from going and looking at the sky.
I don't know if Russell is covered in the Harvard plate collection or not.
I know it's quite difficult to get Harvard digitized plates because the project has been stalled for a while.
Now, the cool part here is that Tonal Menzel was playing a very active role in the whole Washington flap story because he was debunking it.
He was the most famous UFO debunker of those times.
And his explanation of the Washington flap was used by the US Air Force to say that it was all nothing spectacular happening during it.
So it's a very fun circle that goes around.
I had no idea before we spoke this story was going to be...
I didn't think it would be this interesting.
So this guy at Harvard, what was his name again?
Donald Menzel, he was also like, so this And he was one of the members of the Majestic 12 that were apparently, if I understand it correctly, I'm not an expert on ufology in any way.
The Majestic 12s were set out to cover up after Roswell.
So it was experts on the piece.
That's what they say, and we've talked about that on this show a lot of times.
And that, again, is fascinating.
I never thought any of this would tie into astronomy and astrophysics.
It's fascinating.
So we're saying, we think, that the man who was in charge of the photographic plates at Harvard ordered a third of them to be destroyed.
It wasn't even astronomers who were destroying them.
He just asked his assistant to get rid of them.
Okay.
Well, I mean, that's fascinating.
So where would you, if you're looking for more photographic plates to do experiments of this kind Or to make observations of this kind, where would you go?
Presumably, there are institutions in the United Kingdom, Oxford and Cambridge, for starters.
I'm sure there are lots of them.
It's just that one needs to find some institution that has already digitized them, where there are like comfortable digitized images, because sometimes when you get these digitized images, the coordinates are not really matching what we work with.
So there's quite some one needs to do quite a good research before.
I've been also informed that there's an observatory called the Maria Mitchell Observatory that might have very good plate collection.
So we will hopefully look into that.
But first, we will look at this Washington flap with the palmar plates and see what we can figure out there.
What I'm fascinated by is the fact that your research is not in this moment.
It's actually looking for evidence in a moment when it would have been harder to fake stuff or get stuff wrong because it was all analog.
We hadn't got anything floating up there.
There was nothing that anything could be mistaken for.
So in a way, it's easier to do this research, but in a way, it's more difficult to do this research because presumably you have to go to institutions and ask them if you can see the digitizations of those plates from different times.
And if you tell them why you want them, they might say no.
Well, the digitizations are often online, except for that sometimes the projects aren't really working.
I think that Harvard has a so beautiful project called the Dash program, where they have tried to digitize something like the surviving plate collection.
And however, in the last years, it has been quite difficult to go there.
I think they didn't get enough of funding in order to run the project.
I'm just guessing on that, because it has been difficult to download any images or you find some image you want to download and then it says that there's some kind of error message that comes back at you.
But the digital version, one will be able to get, what is impossible to probably get is physical access to a lot of these original plate collections because they are super sensitive and they need to be in perfect environment.
They're like museum items.
So it depends on each institute how they do it.
There are possibilities how to handle that.
Before we move to another topic, and I've been absolutely blown away by what you said, did anybody, as far as you know, anybody in the previous era in the 1950s, if those phenomena are there for you to observe now, surely somebody back then, if these changes happened sometimes within an hour, surely somebody in that era when those plates were produced would have noticed?
Not at all.
They are super rare.
They are so, so rare that I think it's like I did some estimate of it and it's like it's something like 30,000 times less frequent than any satellite blink on the sky that you can see today.
It's very seldom.
And I think what also might have happened is that people, if they saw something in one plate and they didn't see it in another, they just said, oh, let's throw it away.
That they only took seriously any stars that were seen in multiple plates, subsequent plates, and otherwise said, ah, it's probably crap.
And I think that's what happened.
So they did what you're not supposed to do in journalism or science.
They might have made an assumption, the wrong one.
I suspect so.
I suspect so.
That many of these interesting phenomena might have been missed simply because people wanted to be sure that they actually observe something real.
But during 15 minutes, a lot of things can happen on the sky.
And we do know there is a lot of things happening on the sky during 50 minutes.
And if you always require the same star to be visible for hours, you miss out on all phenomena that are happening on time scales shorter than one hour.
And what do other people then, your friends and maybe associates, think of this?
Because it's pretty unique.
I think there is a diversity.
I think the most common answer is like they don't know what it is.
It's confusing.
It's interesting and it's fascinating.
That's basically maybe how most of my associates look at it.
And if I was a scientist like you, and from what I've read about you, I'm sure this is how you think.
That would just make me want to do more of this.
As we say in England, I'd have the bit between my teeth.
I'd want to run with it.
Of course.
And that's what happens.
One gets very curious.
And of course, we know that there is a risk that it might turn out to be nothing in the end.
And at the same time, there is a chance that it's something very, very important.
And I think it's worth investing lots of time investigating what it is.
It's just too fun.
It's just far too fun and far too interesting.
It makes science into an adventure instead of some boring work where you write papers to get funding for a new step of your career.
And if you were one of the great scientists of the past who made the great discoveries, a lot of those did it because of the excitement.
You know, you use the word fun, I'm sure it's that too, but the excitement of being there and finding something that other people haven't got.
How amazing.
I totally agree.
I totally agree.
It's a very special feeling.
Like when you know it, it kind of resonates in you in a way that is difficult to describe.
The Unexplained, the podcast edition, talking with a remarkable person, Beatriz Villa-Roel, who is an assistant professor at Stockholm University.
And she is looking at something that a lot of people haven't even considered.
A possible answer, well, a possible signpost on the Question about extraterrestrials and ET civilizations and all the rest of it.
A possible signpost in images that we took decades ago before we were even in space.
That, I think, is a very special thing and it warrants more investigation.
So, what are you going to be doing, Beatrice, about this year?
How will you be taking this forward?
You're going to try and identify some more of these plate photographs.
I'm going to be even more provocative, and I'm going to move to the modern sky.
So, we have a new project called the Exoprobe where we're going to try to tackle the same question by filtering away a lot of satellites and space debris with our secret method that we came up with, or I came up with.
And what we will do is that we will place like, start building a network of telescopes, of wide field telescopes with very like high-speed cameras.
And we're going to be watching the sky, the same spot with all these telescopes.
And we will be trying to look for these multiple transients over thousands of hours of observations.
And now, if it's something that is emitting its own light, we will be able to see it, or also if it's something that is reflecting the sunlight.
So that's what we will be doing.
Okay.
Working on the Exopro project, because I'm thinking if we saw it in the past, we should also be able to see it today once we get rid of all the space debris and all the satellites.
And that depends on the quality of your filtering, doesn't it?
If you, you know, this secret technique or process that you've got, the filtering has got to be very good to take out everything that we've got up there, and we've got a lot up there, and then just leave anomalous objects.
Yes, the problem is that it might be a little bit too good even, but we will still work on it.
I think it's going to be a very efficient filtering method, if you say it like that.
And what we also will be doing with this is that in case you see something that's flashing and gives off this short flash, you will be able to, once you have like multiple telescopes, you can actually localize where it is in 3D.
And so you will know where it is.
And you will also be able to take a spectrum of it immediately as it happens.
Because very often, when you have some kind of transient survey, someone sees a fast flash and then sometimes they go and try to, like days later, take a spectrum of it or maybe one hour later.
But if you have something that happens very fast, you want a spectra immediately.
And here we will be trying to get everything like real time, if we say so.
And that's what the exoprobe is about, like trying to validate it with multiple telescopes so that you know for sure that this is not some optical artifact.
Then localize it in 3D and get the characterization of it.
And maybe if you have a really, really good 3D position and you know that there is some very unusual object there, you have the spectrum and you know everything about it, you can actually go there and pick it up.
And that's kind of the bold idea we're working with.
How exciting.
Now, one thing to ask before we move to another topic here, I just want to ask you about one other thing that's been in the newspapers connected with you.
How do you know that some space agency, maybe NASA, which has, we know that NASA does some stuff that's secret, or another space agency isn't already on this?
Well, they might be, but that's their problem.
We will do it anyway.
Oh, that's excellent.
I think that's the complete answer, Beatrice.
Now, something else that you were in the newspapers recently about was the question of why we should be searching for alien artifacts, as well as those signals, radio signals that SETI is searching for.
Why should we be looking for things?
And how would we go about looking for things?
Okay, so let me first say, I think the Radio SETI has already done their share of the work.
They have searched for 60 years and they found nothing.
I think it's time to move on from there and actually start looking for artifacts near the Earth.
Sending a probe is quite energy efficient and we already today can build something like the Pioneer and Voyager and send to another system, to a nearby system.
And maybe if you have a very advanced civilization, they are maybe sending out millions of these probes everywhere.
It can be robotic, maybe they have an AI inside them, maybe they are self-replicating.
So it's possible that the galaxy is full of little probes that advanced civilizations have sent.
And I think that might be much more interesting way of looking for ET by looking for these physical artifacts.
And if you look at it, you have just in the Milky Way something like 40 billion Earth-like planets, I mean, that are within the habitable zone of their star.
And I think there are quite good conditions for life, if you say it like that.
I mean, we have so many planets and there are like organic molecules are everywhere.
You have even found amino acids on asteroids and meteorites.
And I think life is probably really abundant.
And now we just need to look for it.
And instead of doing radio searches that anyway haven't produced anything in 60 years, I think we should go to this much more exciting form of looking for ET.
Where would you start?
I would start exactly where we are, near Earth.
Okay.
I would start here and I would explore the solar system and I would try to find anything that is artificial and not human in the solar system.
And how would you know it, Beatrice?
Because you remember Umuamua, this celestial object, cigar-shaped.
Some people said it might be a spaceship, but it was very unusual, very different that passed Earth and I think it's going to be coming back, but not while we're alive.
Some people speculated that that was not a natural object.
I suppose I'm asking, how would you know?
Well, that was the idea I had about that in case you find something with the Exopro project, you go and pick it up and you take it down to the Earth and then you study the material and you study it very carefully.
Maybe it will, of course, bite you back, but Then you know it's not human.
Well, that's another issue, isn't it?
If you're going collecting things, you know, if you're taking a cosmic vacuum cleaner up there and collecting stuff that you think somebody else has made from some other civilization, you don't actually know if you bring it back here.
And there are some scientists who are very worried about what we're bringing back.
You don't know whether it might contain some kind of virus, whether it's some kind of machine that's going to eat you.
You simply won't know.
That's true.
Mike, one can make certain precautions, I'm sure, like and build up precautions so that one kind of doesn't take too large risks, but at the same time, you're not going to be able to leave it there.
I think scientists are far too curious to take the rational road instead of the road of curiosity in such a case.
To sum it all up then, you think that it's not as important as we thought it was to look for signals, you know, like that Jodi Foster movie that I love, Contact, one of my favorite films.
It's so good.
Oh, fantastic.
And she's so good in that.
And it's so credible.
It has you on the edge of your seat.
It's better now in this day and age to start looking for stuff.
Because if you start looking for stuff, there is maybe a higher chance that you might find it.
Of course, because I think Dr. Ellie Araway is still waiting for her signal.
And while she's doing that, we can go and look for the stuff.
Now, the other aspect of this, though, and here I am jumping in again because of that digital debate, but the other aspect of this is, I think it's cool.
I think it's great.
And I think you should be doing it.
Problem is that this is the kind of stuff that costs big bucks.
Where are you going to get the backing for this?
Are you trying?
Well, the first thing is that before one goes and picks up an object, we should first find it.
And I'm sure that if we would be able to very accurately detect a very unusual object in orbit around the Earth, and we would be sure that this is not human, it has weird ways of moving, it has weird spectra, it's completely something we've never seen.
I think we would get support even from big space agencies to go and pick it up.
I think you were about to say patience is a virtue.
No, I think only if you have chocolates.
So observing things that may be anomalous like this, possible candidates to go and check out.
I mean, the only thing that I can think of that, but we know who put it there is Elon Musk's sports car.
Yes, he has put lots of stuff there in space.
He has made my work much more difficult.
Because of that.
I suppose what I'm saying in my clumsy way is, how would you, of all the possible candidates, assuming you get the interest and you get the funding for it, how would you pick the first candidate?
Because you've got to select one possible area to go to or thing that you've observed that might be artificial.
How are you going to do that?
Well, I would talk to some space collection, sorry, space garbage collection company, someone who has been picking up a lot of space garbage and ask them what they think is the easiest.
Let's say I have five candidates and it was okay, which one do you think is going to be the easiest mission?
That's what I would do.
Because I don't even know, maybe we will find it at one particular altitude, maybe we'll find it at a much larger distance from the Earth than we're imagining.
It all depends on where we find it and how good it is and what is the feasibility of our space mission of retrieving it.
We are going back to the moon with the Artemis mission, but there will be other missions and there are other missions.
Is the moon, would the moon be a good place to do this from?
I don't know.
I haven't thought of that.
I would do it directly from the Earth.
However, the moon can be interesting for other reasons.
I mean, maybe there are some remains of technological artifacts that are hiding there on the moon somewhere.
And people, since we haven't been there for a while, maybe we are not seeing them.
And it could be a very nice thing to send some astronauts there, some more astronauts.
How about Mars?
I mean, if we're talking about movies, then, you know, The Martian was a great bit of fiction.
I'm told it's impractical to do what he did in exactly that way.
But there are lots of people who say that the remains of an ancient civilization may be on Mars and that those things may be in plain sight.
What do you think about that?
Well, that's not impossible.
I would also think that an ancient civilization could have left something in orbit around the Earth.
So again, I would be trying to look at artificial objects in space, for example, with the Exoprobe projects or even with the Vasco plates.
I mean, if there was some very great civilization, even on Mars, they might still have left an old probe that is defunct, that has been around the Earth for millions of years and is still there in orbit, moving around.
Boring and sad, but it's still there.
There were some people who said that there was such a thing hovering over the North Pole, the so-called Black Knight satellite that you may have heard reports about, and I think has been widely debunked.
But you still think that by looking close to home, we might actually find something that we just hadn't noticed before?
Yes, because this is the most interesting place in the solar system.
Any smart alien will send most of the stuff here.
How can you know that this is the most interesting place in the solar system?
It might not be.
Well, you're right.
I might be wrong, but it's just a hunch.
It's a great area of research.
And I wish you every success with it.
When you walk through, I don't know whether you've got like, I'm trying to think of Oxford and Cambridge here.
When you walk through the grounds of your fine institution, and Stockholm is such a beautiful city with such lovely open spaces, and I must come back and visit at some point.
But when you meet your colleagues, do they talk to you about this research, or do they talk to you about other things?
Well, they talk to me about the research because I think curiosity is something that is very well spread among scientists.
And I think there are going to be many more scientists doing this kind of research.
There was a stigma, and there is still a stigma, but it's going to be vanishing the coming years, I bet.
And in Stockholm, because people in Sweden are pretty open-minded.
I found people in Sweden.
They're pretty open-minded.
They're pretty accepting.
Is it a good place to do this kind of research?
I'm having a good time here.
I love being here.
It's, of course, my home.
I will have the chance to visit London in two weeks, and I will see how people are reacting on this type of research there.
That will be an inspiration.
I'm sure you love London.
One place in Sweden that I loved, and I'm hoping it's still there and still open to be seen because I want to go back to it, is Skansen.
Oh, yes, it's still there.
Oh, good.
It's been there with all the cute animals and so on.
Just to tell my listeners, Skansen is almost like an old Swedish town complete with the wooden buildings.
There's a guy with a forge making objects in metal.
There's a bakery there.
It's just very, very quaint, very, very beautiful and very, very Swedish.
And we don't have anything like that here.
But you have lots of clubs, I learned today.
Yes, we do.
We have a lot of those.
You will certainly see some lights and stars in those, I think.
Thank you very, very much.
I think it's been a fascinating conversation.
It's not at all what I expected, and I'm absolutely delighted.
And thank you very much for helping me.
My pleasure.
It was very fun.
Thank you.
And talk to you again soon.
A completely different take on astrophysics.
Assistant professor at Stockholm University Beatrice Villaroel.
I think we will talk with her again.
Your thoughts about this conversation and any of my conversations gratefully received.
I'm going to go warm myself up now because it's freezing.
It's too cold for me.
I have a very low tolerance to low temperatures, okay?
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
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, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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