What is that?

So the mediocrity principle is an idea that there's nothing special about Earth.

It doesn't mean mediocre in the sense of not great or unimpressive, which is how we usually use the term mediocre.

In Latin, it comes from a root that just means average.

And One of the great breakthroughs for modern science starting in the 17th century was the realization that Earth is average in that sense.

There's nothing supernatural about it.

For many centuries, people in the West, just to stick to the West, believed that Earth was created by God in the way that the Bible says and that humanity was placed on Earth in And that is a sign that there's something special and unique about humanity.

So Adam, what is Project OSMA?

So you would think that these are the, uh, the most sterling qualifications a person could have, but then their claims seem pretty dubious.

It's true.

Well, I think that those two people in particular get attention maybe because they're associated with Harvard.

And so the name makes people think these are the top scientists.

So when someone like that says something about UFOs or aliens that goes against scientific consensus, everyone is intrigued.

They're very different.

The kinds of claims they make are very different.

And he just says, life, don't talk to me about life and stuff like that.

What are the, in generalized terms, what should we know and not know about the scientific community and the UFOs?

Well, all the people you mentioned are people who were turned to by the Air Force or the government to figure out what's really going on with UFOs.

Because starting in 1947, really, when the first flying saucers were sighted, People can have continuously since then said they saw things in the sky that didn't seem to be airplanes.

And for the first, say, 20 or 25 years of that, the Defense Department was often concerned because they they thought this was during the Cold War and they thought if it's possible that some sort of aircraft has penetrated our defenses, our airspace.

There was a famous so-called UFO flap in the early 1950s, maybe 1950 or 51 in Washington, DC, where there were a lot of UFO sightings and President Truman was very concerned.

He said, what if the Soviets could do this, if they could send aircraft to Washington, we have to know what's going on in our skies.

And so some of these scientists you mentioned were appointed to commissions to basically study these reports and try to figure out what is going on here.

I wonder, the more you talk about the Air Force involved in this and the American representation of its Air Force, there's a strange Lovey and quality to some of this, isn't there? And I wonder whether also in Hollywood terms, I mean, we've talked about Spielberg, Disclosure Day, E.T., but I wonder even in the 60s, movies like The Manchurian Candidate kind of tiptoed into this area where alien creatures became almost everyday occurrences, even if they weren't formally thought of in terms of UFOs and aliens?

Is there something actually happening in our sky, or how do these flaps happen if nothing's actually out there?

This kind of thing started happening really maybe during World War II with military pilots and then, uh, much more after World War II at a time when jet aircraft and atomic bombs were invented.

And so people were paying attention in a new way to what was going on in the atmosphere.

You know, for most of human history, there was nothing up there, nothing really to see except natural phenomena.

Now, there was this idea that there are human air, air, aircraft, there are artifacts up there, then later satellites and spaceships.

Um, so people are paying attention to the atmosphere in a way that they didn't in the past.

And I think that all of us, when we really start paying attention, we'll see things that we don't know what they are, um, things that don't fit any, any regular pattern.

Mm.

Mm-hmm

... then the evidence is compelling to everyone.

That's sort of what makes it evidence is that everyone who accesses it can show the same thing by doing the same experiment or following the same protocol, uh, and that a scientific, uh, sort of investigation by definition is not about the person doing it.

Uh, it's about rep- replicability.

Anyone can do it.

Anyone anywhere in the world can do it.

It'll turn out the same, and that's what shows that you're talking about something objective about the world.

Not get to the bottom of what that thing could be, but show us the aliens or else.

... not a plausible, not a plausible hypothesis on the surface.

It's not, it's not plausible for, for a couple of reasons.

One is, um, just looking at the question of images, right? There've been...

There are billions and billions of people all the time with a camera in their hand, um, walking around all over Earth with cameras in their hands.

It's...

And no one has ever taken a, a picture of what's really clearly a, an alien or an alien spaceship.

Whenever these images are proposed, it's always something that's sort of, uh, an infrared radar image that looks like a blurry circle or a light in the sky, something like that.

Don't forget-- And don't forget Darwin, you know? [chuckles]

Can you give us an overview of how that has changed the nature of the story and the public expectation?

Sure.

So there are really a couple of eras in the way that the government has responded to UFO reports.

From the late 40s through the mid-1960s, when military pilots or military operators of radar saw anomalous things, things that they didn't understand, reports were collected, and there was an Air Force program that collected the reports called Project Blue Book.

And then in the mid-1960s, there was a report about everything that Project Blue Book had seen over the last 20 years.

And the report said, none of these are alien spacecraft.

We need to stop paying attention to this because there's nothing to see here.

There was Project Blue Book in the 1950s and the 1960s, but it validated the suspicion that the government did have a secret UFO program, right? And that blew minds because it did seem to suggest if such a program existed, then the evidence of alien visitation existed too.

The connections show up in movies like The Terminator or The Matrix, but they also show up in the musings of folks like Elon Musk, And so should we be worried about an AI apocalypse or perhaps a less extreme evolutionary turnabout that transforms humans into AI hybrids, which you could call a type of alien?

You know, this is a question that I wrote about in another, an earlier short book that I did for the same series called The Revolt Against Humanity, which sort of has some thematic connections to this new book about UFOs, which is, it's another way of posing the question, Could there be minds in the universe that aren't human minds? In our experience, in all of human experience until now, the only minds like ours are human minds.

Animals have a kind of mind, but they don't use language.

They don't communicate with us in the way that we communicate with each other.

They don't have technology.

So we are used to thinking that to have a mind means to have a human mind.

And there's a lot of excitement in the tech world among people like Elon Musk about the idea that that might cease to be the case, not because we find a mind around another star system, but because we're actually going to invent this other mind.

But what about your book? What do you hope readers will take away from their encounter with We Want to Believe?

It's like, are you gonna attack the Chinese for what they're doing in Tibet, you know, or Xinjiang or, or wherever? Um, or is it only really another one of these cudgels to go after the same targets this, the, the left types have always wanted to go after?

after?It's a good question.

I mean, a lot of the...

I- I say in the book that in practical terms, on practical political issues, um, when people are, are settler colonial theorists, they probably have a lot of the same goals in mind as other kinds of progressives, um, who don't speak the language of settler colonialism.

But, there are important differences.

Um, th- there are differences in terms of, of the starting point and also where you end up.

So, I, I think you're right to point to anil- a sort of affinity with critical theory that started as a Marxist, um, sort of critique of Western culture, and critical race theory which talked about whiteness and about the centrality of sort of race and slavery in American history.

You know, and that, that was an interest driving ideas rather than ideas driving interest.

Uh, and in that sense, it's, it is a conservative philosophy because it's a, an, a, an attempt to return to a past that is idealized and romanticized, uh, somewhat unrealistically the way Americans used to do the same way by ignoring these, these founding sins.

Yeah, I think that's, that's definitely true.

It's quite, um, clear in a lot of the writing on this subject, especially, uh, writing for popular audiences, the way that Native history is written about.

Um, it, it gets...

It, it touches, to go back to the subject of land acknowledgments.

A land acknowledgment will typically say, uh, "We're on the land, which is the homeland of, of such and such a people who were its guardians from time immemorial or its custodians from time immemorial." Really what that means is that's the people that was there when Europeans made contact.

Um, because these are not-- these are societies with no written records, there's absolutely no way of knowing who was there, you know, 50 years before that or 100 years before that, and North America was inhabited, you know, for tens of thousands of years.

the way I'm seeing the current, um, extreme political views on this issue.