#0004 James Fox

Oyerman, 23?

What?

Expera vuela salam

aquí que nitos gugando, me cor el sotano.

Oya wé eson 23 de agua.

Mija, cheque alo internet.

Video, como guigillanario.

Optain wi-fi en máso encones de locar con ATNT fiber con alphi.

ATNT connectar lo cambia todo.

ATNT fiber tener espon lived limita daciani testasars.

Wi-fi extendada de TNT concrabada dinal almes.

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience number 2246 with guest James Fox.

The No Rogan experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is a show where two podcasters with no previous Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan is one of the most listened to people on the planet, whose interviews and opinions influence millions of people.

He's regularly criticized for his views, often by people who've never actually listened to Rogan.

So we listen and where needed, we try to correct the record.

It's a show for anyone who's curious about Joe Rogan, his guests and their claims, as well as for anyone who just wants to understand Joe Rogan's ever-growing media influence.

I'm Michael Marshall and I'm joined by Cecil Cicarello.

And today we're going to be covering Joe's December 24th, 2024 interview with James Fox.

Cecil, how did Joe introduce James in the show?

Can I interject really quickly and just say that when you first texted me this episode, I thought it was Jamie Fox.

And so I was really excited.

I was like, man, I like Jamie Fox.

That should be very interesting.

I know he sort of like did a recent special.

I thought he was plugging a special.

No, it's a very different guy.

This is James Fox, a UFO investigator and documentary filmmaker.

His new film, The Program, is available to stream now.

That's the Joe Rogan description of James Fox.

Yeah, I was way more excited when I realized it was this James Fox and not the other Jamie Foxx.

I have to be completely honest.

I was so much more excited.

So Cecil, is there anything else you've learned about James Fox that we might want to know?

You know, that's pretty much it.

Like most of

about him anywhere is his IMDb bio.

So I'm going to read that.

James Fox is a director and filmmaker specializing in UFO documentaries.

Fox was the director, writer, and producer of the 2003 TV movie Out of the Blue, which explores UFOs and alleged cover-ups by governments.

He wrote and directed the feature-length documentary, The Phenomenon, in 2020.

Most recently, James Fox directed and appeared in Moment of Contact 2022, an exploration of events reported from Vargina.

Brazil in 1966.

I also want to mention before this episode starts in earnest that we are going to be using the term UAP and UFO interchangeably throughout, and they will too.

This UFO

was the standard that people used as a way to describe an unidentified flying object.

The new acronym is UAP.

UAP actually can have two meanings.

It can stand for unidentified aerial phenomena and unidentified anomalous phenomena, which could mean anything.

But they both mean the same thing, but human brains have connected UFO to aliens so much that I think they wanted to get away from the UFO acronym because everybody just, as soon as they heard that word, thought, well, the aliens.

Yeah, exactly.

Although now, obviously, what's going to happen is every time anybody hears UAP, that's going to be the thing for aliens instead.

We're just going to move along.

But it's fine.

You never run out of letters for acronyms.

It's fine.

There's lots of combinations out there that are possible.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

But, you know, it's still unidentified as the key piece, but we're going to keep on going back to it's aliens.

Yeah, exactly.

So, Cecil, this episode, unlike the other episodes that we've heard so far in our listening, this stays fairly on point throughout.

It stays on subject.

So what did they cover in this episode?

So they spend a lot of time talking about drones, the drone appearances that have suddenly stopped.

They were for a while all over the place.

You were hearing about them constantly in the U.S.

in different places, Arizona and New Jersey being some of the most popular places.

That sort of talk is mostly done now, but they were talking a lot about those drones that were appearing all over the country.

They visit that topic throughout multiple times.

It kind of comes back up in the conversation.

They switch up and they begin talking about UAP sightings in the past.

They tell multiple lion, sort of mountain lion, bear, and skunk stories throughout.

And then they shift conversation to talk about aliens living and moving underwater.

They briefly mention the sub that imploded,

the one that the billionaire built.

Yeah, the Titan one.

And then they, yeah, the Titan.

And then they mentioned congressional hearings on UAPs.

And my favorite part, and I, dear listeners, this is the greatest stuff that I've listened to in a long time.

The Pies de Resistance, they spend 15 minutes trying to get Chat GPT to admit that drones are real and that the drones are controlled by either...

uh other world or they are part of a government secret program and that uaps are of otherworldly origin and it is magic yeah they do they really do do that So it looks like our work is going to be cut out for us.

UFOs, that's what we're going to be covering.

It's a lot to cover.

So let's get started in our main event.

So to start out our UFO discussion, Why don't we play a clip?

This is a clip about a close encounter with an otherworldly being.

Now, I want to warn people throughout this episode, James talks.

And when he does, he backtracks quite a bit and clarifies certain points.

He will say a number and then say, oh, maybe it was 16 or 17 or something.

I cut a lot of that stuff out because it's really just filler and there's not a lot to learn from certain things like that.

I tried to keep his final number, the number he would say, or something like that.

But understand that I edited these clips down for brevity.

I did not do it to try to edit out any of his,

any of his words to try to take anything out of context.

You, of course, can listen to the entire episode and see if I am telling you the truth, but I hope that the listeners trust me that I did not try to edit this out to make him look worse.

So here is the first clip.

Three days later, he's in a convoy and it's early in the morning and there's three Jeeps on a dirt road heading out in Ellis Test Range.

And they see what looks like maybe somebody was involved in a plane crash, somebody that was struggling out in the middle of the desert.

It was early in the the morning, it was wintertime, and they're looking at this individual.

They're like, oh my god, is that

person?

That individual looks like they need some help.

They look cold, their skin had a slight blue tint to it, and they're looking at this gentleman and they're like, hey, stop the convoy.

This person needs help, medical attention.

Maybe they had a plane crash.

They pull the convoy over, and as he's getting out, somebody in the truck screams, he's got no effing ears.

And he had the same kind of uniform that they had had on, but the uniform was just immaculate, like like there wasn't any dust on it and he looks at him and he said his eyes were a lot bigger and i starts talking to him in gibberish but he said he started to understand like telepathically everything this this

person and entity being creature alien whatever you want to call it was saying to him and he was looking for some kind of metal

and he didn't know tentillium you mean you mean uh titanium he's like no tentillium or something and and this conversation goes on for for a bit and then the guy just wanders back off and gets into that little craft that looked very similar to what you just saw there and flies away.

And he's already sort of stair-stepped away.

And everybody sort of came out of this comatose state and off and off they went.

Any issues with this story, Marsh?

Yeah, I mean, it's obviously a fascinating story of something that would be

world-breaking and shattering, and

epoch shattering to reveal as true.

But at the moment, all we've got is just the second or even third-hand reporting.

We've got no evidence.

He's just saying, take my word for it, take their word for it, even that this happened.

This, I don't think, is strong enough to lead any kind of belief in aliens from.

This is just a story that someone has told someone who's told him.

Yeah, it's like a game of telephone that we're hearing.

We're hearing this game of telephone.

I also want to point out, too, man, we hear this all the time that the aliens come down and they literally look just like us.

They're bipeds.

They have, you know, they have, they walk on two legs in this case this one had an immaculate uniform so obviously it was somehow either able to like recreate the uniform or recreate in our minds an idea of what the uniform would look like perfectly but yet it couldn't get the skin color or the eye size and it forgot it neglected ears completely it just thought you know i'm gonna i'm gonna put it together a whole human but oh man i forgot the ears or maybe his buddy was borrowing the ears from the costume that day.

Maybe he took the ears out of the costume beforehand.

We're not sure.

It just sounds like when people say this, I automatically think I'm like, the reason why we see aliens the way we see aliens in movies is because it's so much more money to make an alien look not human than it is to just have a guy dressed up in a suit.

And so our brains think an alien needs to look like us.

Like we were badly.

sort of put together through evolution to have bad backs and need to have a some sort of weird posture thing that makes us stand up straight because we can't function very well after a long period of time standing on our two legs.

We're really badly put together.

So we have to presume that other places in the universe put together aliens in the exact same bad way that evolution put us together.

Yeah, exactly.

Because the thing is, like, it's worth us saying up front.

I don't know how you feel about this.

I feel aliens probably exist.

There are probably

life somewhere.

We can't know for sure.

But the chances are, yeah, there might be a decent chance that there's life out there.

If they do exist, they're very unlikely to be able to get here just because of the vast interstellar distances.

If they did manage to get here, they almost certainly, almost definitely do not look like anything like we do.

There's no reason they'd have the same physiology.

They wouldn't look like a regular guy whose eyes are slightly bigger and has no ears.

That's just not what this is going to be down like.

It's going to be much more like something we couldn't possibly imagine was alive is way more likely to be what we'd encounter.

You look at even just life at the very bottom, like the deepest parts of the ocean where the pressures are incredibly high.

We see stuff that does not look like the kind of things we would think were alive.

That's the kind of mind-blowing stuff we would be expecting if we were actually meeting aliens.

Yeah.

And I also want to point out, too, in this economy, it's so sad that that alien has to fly all the way here and ask for like handouts.

It's really tough.

Like, you just got to stand there with your sign that says looking for tritium.

And then you got that sign, a little bowl underneath it.

It's tragic, really.

Tragic.

I'll pay 20 pence for their bus at home.

But if I come on, just give me the, give me the 20 pen of tritium.

Can I Venmo you the tritium?

Is that a thing I can do?

All right, so the next clip is, this is going to be a series of clips that we're going to play that are all based on the same subject.

Now, this is a clip that's introducing one of the players in this, and this is a person named Nick Pope.

So we're going to play that clip now.

Well, I was going to tell you, there's a photograph of a jet circulating.

Can I go into a little bit of detail?

Because everyone's always worried about like, where's the good evidence?

Where's the good photograph?

Show me our photograph photograph again.

No, this was a lost photograph that was recovered.

Okay, so I heard about this in the late 90s.

Tell everybody about it.

Okay, there was a guy, Nick Pope, who investigated part of the UFO desk at the Ministry of Defense of England in the late 90s.

I was interviewing him for a number of my films.

I did a film called Light of the Blue.

I know what I saw before I did the phenomenon.

I asked him, like, hey, man, you were part of the UFO desk at the MOD.

What was the best case you ever saw?

So, what was the best case you ever saw?

Yeah, so we're going to talk about the Calvin UFO.

now the the thing is they're talking about nick pope here what's interesting about nick pope nick pope is a name is someone who's very very well known to uk skeptics like he's given a lot of skeptics in the pub talks back before i got involved in skepticism in organized skepticism 15 years ago so he's been around for for an awful awful long time um and the interesting thing is yeah he's absolutely right that nick pope was one of the people i think he actually even arguably ran the UFO desk at the Ministry of Defense.

And that's brought up as a really important, like, this is the guy.

This is the UFO guy at the MOD.

And what we'll see is this is going to be an argument from authority.

I'm going to, we're going to explain what an argument from authority is a little bit later in the show when we get to our skeptical toolbox.

But it sounds really impressive.

This guy was the

UFO desk at the MOD.

But what you've got to bear in mind is the context of this, is that that wasn't a very prestigious position because it meant that you answered the phone anytime anybody thought they saw anything that was like a UFO.

And you're going to get a load of like crank calls.

You get a load of people who are just wrong about stuff, people misidentifying Mars or misidentifying the moon and all this other stuff.

This wasn't the head of the MOD.

This isn't a high-ranking position.

This is, you take those calls because the MOD need to have that desk.

Because what if one in a million of those things someone has seen in the sky wasn't a misidentified balloon, but was actually like a Russian bomber or something?

You're going to want to know that as a Ministry of Defense.

You want to know what's in your airspace.

So his job was to collect all of those reports and then sift to see if there was anything in any of them that was of military strategic importance.

And the thing is, since he left that role, he actually has done quite a lot of touring and interviews in which I would say he has

certainly given the impression that it was a much more prestigious and important position than it was.

He hasn't talked about like this was answering the phone when you get the person at three in the morning.

He's talked about like it's a lot more in sometimes given the impression that maybe there's some space there for aliens.

Now, in my understanding, he doesn't normally say, and therefore that was aliens.

He just doesn't rule the aliens a bit out and leaves the space there for people to fill that in.

So here is the mystery.

Here is what was reported.

And we couldn't explain it this way.

Dot, dot, dot.

You can fill in the gap on aliens.

What's slightly surprising to me is that in James's sort of, when he shows anything to do with Nick Pope here, and I've seen other clips of stuff that James has done, when Nick Pope is talking to him, he doesn't, Nick Pope doesn't seem to mention to James other possibilities.

Whereas a lot of the time when I've seen Nick Pope being interviewed, he'll say, well, it could be aliens or it could be military technology or it could be these things.

When he's talking to James, or at least the bits of the interview that James shows seem to be just the bits where Nick Pope is leaving the door open for aliens.

Maybe Nick was changing the way he presented things.

Maybe he was,

maybe James has done some creative editing to remove the bits where he offered the other possibilities.

It's hard to know exactly what that is, but that's kind of the context on Nick Pope, I'd say.

You know, you have a guy whose entire career is based on

not just the fact that things like UFOs, unidentified flying objects are

being reported, but there's also this guy also mentions multiple times in this conversation close encounters of what he calls the third kind.

So he's talking about people directly interacting with an alien species.

So this is a guy, I think, who's, you know, we need to mention when people are invested in certain things.

This guy is invested in this being something that it's, it's, it's not not just weird phenomenon or gas in the sky or misidentifying Venus or

a undisclosed military piece of hardware.

It's something else from another planet.

And he's invested in that answer being true.

And so we've got to point that out whenever you get an opportunity.

Also, they say this is the best.

that Nick had ever seen.

If you see this photo, and we will post a link to a story that shows this photo, I don't think this photo is terribly convincing.

Look at this photo.

It feels feels like the Bigfoot footage of the guy in the monkey suit walking in the woods.

It doesn't feel like a, doesn't feel like a big deal.

It feels like a, feels like a photo you could probably explain away.

Yeah.

And the thing is, we will, we will actually talk about this photo quite a lot.

A lot of people have tried to explain it in lots of different ways.

There's a lot of kind of research been done on it.

No one's got to a definitive version of what this is yet.

So it is still, it is probably the most convincing or the most

the report, the photo, that is still the biggest question question mark I would say most the biggest mystery in it yeah all right so this is the next uh clip this is describing how this particular photo that we're just talking about was actually taken and he goes oh man 1990 Scotland there were two poachers it was late in the afternoon they were in a place I now know it's called Calvine they

came upon

in this relatively remote area and they came upon this diamond shaped or disc shaped object that was quite large that was hovering silently really close.

I mean close and they were scared to death and they were kind of hiding out underneath this tree and they're looking at this thing what the are we looking at and one of them had a camera just as he was considering taking his camera out a military jet came in and it came out into the scene and it flew all the way around the disc.

And as it did so, the guy mustered up the courage, came out from under the tree, and he snapped five or six photographs of this object suspended in the air.

So the disc is here, and the plane is flying around.

It's click, click, click, click, click, click.

So yeah, this is the Calvin UFO photo.

This is the photo that I actually already knew this story when I heard it on Rogan.

I was already aware of it.

We actually published to the skeptic magazine that I'm the editor of an analysis of this photo, positing one potential version of what was going on here.

So this is a story that I already knew.

What is worth pointing out is we have the photo, which was recently unearthed.

It was kind of reported for a long time, but no one had a picture of it.

No one had seen the photo.

But everything he's saying about the people were scared, that the thing was hovering silently, all this story around it isn't something you can tell from the photo.

This is something that has to be sort of separate to the photo.

So, you could quite easily have this photo make up any story that you like around it.

This is the story that has been circulated, but even if the photo was of something unusual, unusual, that doesn't mean that all the details of it that aren't in the photo, like the sound that it didn't make, those don't necessarily have to be real.

But yeah, so this is a well-known at this point, UFO case in the UK that I'd already seen.

And people can look upon the skeptic magazine for at least one couple of analyses of what this photo might be.

And that skeptic magazine article opened my eyes in some ways when I looked at it.

I initially saw it and I didn't know what it was.

It feels a little strange, but you're not sure what it is.

It could be a hoax of some kind.

It could be, you know, something like a military something.

You're not sure.

But someone posited that the way it's framed, it looks like there's a sort of a branch of tree branch that's sort of hanging down with some green leaves that are hanging down, sort of almost vine-like.

Yeah.

And then you've got like a very sort of white, it's a very white background.

You've got at the very bottom of the picture, you've got a fence.

So you can see there's a fence.

It looks like we're kind of like, we're lower down.

We're looking through a fence up at the sky.

There's a branch of a tree just in front of the camera towards us.

And then in the, the the at some point in the distance you can see a sort of diamond e-shaped kind of object in the sky and then you do see a jet that's just below it that's kind of flying along and that's that's all the detail we have in the picture there's no yeah even the cloud cover is fairly uniform so it just does seem like you've got just a white background the fence the tree branch and those two objects in the sky yeah and those two objects you know one someone pointed this out and I hadn't really shifted my perspective, but they said like, if you look at it, it might also be a reflection of water.

So what we're seeing might be the water, a something that's in the water that's reflecting the two sides to make a diamond shape.

And then something that's in the water, make it look like there's a Harrier jet.

It's reflecting of the wing.

Yeah, or even more to that.

For me, when I looked at that picture and saw the reflection explanation of it, it looked like the reason it's a diamond shape is that you've got a triangular object above the surface of the water that's reflecting back and therefore forming the other half of the triangle.

And then the jet could actually have been a genuine jet just flying overhead and caught in the reflection.

Oh, interesting, which might look so much like a jet.

Now, that's one explanation.

Other people have analyzed this, and they've said there are reasons to not accept the reflection, that looking at the rock, the reflection doesn't quite work, and maybe that's true.

It's one of the reasons this is still an open conversation.

Um, but that is the that is one of the explanations there.

It's a better explanation for me than aliens, but it is a flawed explanation for uh for some of the analyses that's been done.

Um, also, this idea of that we, the witness, he says you've got the he steps out, he takes six pictures, click, click, click, click, click.

Only one of those pictures has ever surfaced.

So the idea that there were six pictures comes from the witnesses who received the six pictures.

So the people at the newspaper, the people at the RAF, but we have never seen what those other six pictures are.

So when he says a jet came along and flew all the way around, that is what has been reported.

But for me, I don't know how you could disambiguate that from, say,

you took six pictures of a jet doing a fly past, but then showed those pictures out, looked at those pictures out of order, and it would look like the jet is moving around.

And this is actually not too far from the RAF base.

So it may even be that there were jets doing a fly past as a military training exercise where multiple jets went past.

And so in each of those six pictures, it may not be the same jet.

So there is another possibility there.

Without seeing the other pictures to see the jet turned back around and circling it,

we can't be sure that that's what the pictures actually represent at all.

And it could also be, too, that

if it's by an Air Force base, it could also be that there's some sort of technology, a stealth sort of technology or something that they don't want people to know about that they was flying overhead that day.

And they took a photo of a thing that happened to be flying up overhead that they don't want people to know about because it's a secret technology.

And that's also a possibility.

Yeah, absolutely.

Park that for a second.

We will come back to that after this next clip.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

Well, let's get to the next clip then.

This one is a little long.

I kept it intentionally long because I wanted to let him tell the story of how this was discovered and then allegedly covered up.

And the reason why I know this is because the individual who kept one of the prints, thank you very much, Craig Lindsay, RAF press officer, and thank you, David Clark, for uncovering this because it's the most amazing picture ever.

So they go to the local newspaper and they were like, hey, man, we just filmed something in the sky.

We got six prints of it.

It was 35 millimeter.

film footage, right?

And they're going to go public with their story.

Two witnesses, broad daylight,

a UFO, points of reference with a military jet flying around, five or six prints.

That's pretty solid evidence, right?

The local newspaper was like, they're about to go public with it, print the story, and they were like, well, we need a statement from the RAF.

So they contact the press officer, Craig Lindsay, and they were like, hey, what do you make of this UFO these guys took?

And the guy, Craig Lindsay, goes, I don't know what you're talking about.

I haven't seen the picture.

You haven't seen it?

Well, let me send you a print.

This is the newspaper.

Sends him a print, big, big print like this, the one you see today.

And he's like, holy shit, the hell is this?

So he was like, holy, this is crazy.

So he takes a color Xeroxing machine and he sends it to the MOD in London.

And he says, hey, there's a case that you might want to check, you know, you might want to look into.

He said, he went from the office where the Xerox machine was.

And before he can get back to his office, his phone was ringing off the hook.

MOD.

And the MOD basically stepped in, took over the investigation.

They said, you can step down to Craig Lindsay.

He steps down.

He keeps the print, right?

They take over.

Witnesses gone.

Five or six prints gone.

Story killed.

And so I flew to England.

I met with David Clark and his crew, the people that did the analysis work.

Then I went up to Scotland.

I met with Craig Lindsay, the R press officer, gave me the first and only on-camera interview about it.

So I really liked it.

I was excited listening to this clip, I have to say.

Because, I mean, first of all, that is a really solid story.

It's a solid story.

Two witnesses, broad daylight, he got photos.

All of that is great.

Except we don't know who those witnesses are.

Those witnesses, James hasn't spoken to those two witnesses.

Those two witnesses haven't been, haven't like stepped forward at any point.

We only have the second or third hand reports.

of the people who say they met those witnesses.

And we have those reports several decades on as well.

So people's memories can change and things can sort of change along the way.

We can't see all the evidence.

We only have one photo.

We don't have the other photos that are out there.

So all of this sort of the amount of importance we can place on all of those extra bits has to be lowered because we haven't got access to that.

We just have to take their word for it.

But the thing that really excited me about is when David Clark's name came up, because I actually know David Clark reasonably well.

Dave Clark is a journalism, a professor of journalism and folklore at Sheffield Hallam University.

Oh, who hired me to do some journalism lecturing for his undergrads.

So interesting.

Yeah, for several years, I would go and do lessons for Dave's journalism classes about journalism.

So I actually know reasonably well.

So because I know him reasonably well, I actually asked him about this case because David is the guy who uncovered the Calvin UFO picture that had hitherto gone unknown for 30 years as just kind of a legend.

So I asked him about this, about what he thinks this was all about.

He actually gave me a quote that I can use.

He said.

He was of the opinion in 2008, 2009, that this was actually just a hoax, that this thing was a deliberate hoax, but he's changed his mind since then.

He thinks it's more likely to show some kind of military exercise because this photo was taken two days after Saddam Hussein invaded

Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Yeah.

So the Saddam Hussein used in Iraq.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so he actually had some military and intelligence contacts to talk about it.

They said they don't think it's a hoax.

These photos did actually make their way all the way to the Pentagon.

Copies of these photos did go to the Pentagon, apparently, according to his contacts.

And according to them and in his opinion, he thinks it's likely there's a secret prototype platform that was being tested, possibly off-target, that was based at a local RAF base at the time.

So that is Dave's opinion of this.

I don't know how I feel about that personally.

That's sort of how he's seeing it.

I don't know if I fully buy the military tech thing, because if

this is 1994, so this is 30 years ago now, I'd ask the question as to where that technology's gone.

If this was a drawn, okay, maybe it was a drawn technology, but like...

do we have a lot of stuff that looks like that?

I don't know.

But certainly this is kind of where Dave's leaning.

So Dave himself, despite being cited by james as uh the authority here who uncovered all this doesn't think this is aliens he thinks that if this is anything it's either a hawks or it's military tech is he a particularly rich man did he get paid off by the rf to say this story is that not not that i'm aware i mean he still works for sheffield hallam university and uh as a working man maybe he's doing that for the love of the game marsh who knows right it is quite possible

i i want to say too you know like this is a a a something that happens with these sightings and we're going to talk about it too with the drones when we get into it later a lot of things happen to be filmed by bases by especially air force bases and i know that the the ufo people who are true believers are going to say something like well yeah that's because the aliens are coming down and they want to check out what we can do and our capabilities or you know the more obvious option is you see something strange in the sky that you've never seen it might be something that one you're probably not used to seeing certain planes or certain types of technology or certain configurations of lights in the sky.

And that may trigger your thinking to think that it's something else.

But this is happening around a place where there is stuff flying in the sky routinely.

And so we have this weird thing where we're like, well, there's stuff flying in the sky there routinely.

It must be from an otherworldly source.

Instead of saying there's stuff flying from this, in the sky routinely, maybe it's something that the government doesn't want us to know.

Or even if they do, don't care that it is, you just don't recognize it as something that's mundane.

Yeah, exactly.

And for me, this is still a really cool picture it's still a really cool story but for me the thing that's really cool about this is that this was um almost like it had a legend status among status amongst ufologists and folklorists for you know 30 years now but dave clark being interested in this story long enough the way he got to this picture was because he found one of the the documents that had been redacted um when it had been sort of reported the mold i think it was even through uh freedom of information or when they released um for the the mod's files the ufor files he went through these and he noticed in the redaction that while they'd redacted the name of the officer at the RAF who was just reported to, they hadn't reacted, they

hadn't redacted his position or like where he was based.

And so he managed to go in through that way to say, well, who was based there at that time?

And found Craig Lindsay and drove up to Scotland to meet Craig Lindsay.

And Craig was like, oh, yeah, I kept a picture.

I kept a copy of it.

It's just in my garage, basically.

And so he managed to uncover this story that had been buried for 30 years

because it was like buried by the system silencing it just because craig lindsay didn't think it was that big a deal and had it like in a box somewhere and dave managed to find it that's the really cool thing about this not that this is the most convincing compelling evidence of alien life that you'll ever see because it's it's just not that this is continuing on with that same piece now this is the guest trying to follow the lead and he's going to use a lot of journalism language here so we're going to lean on you a little marsh what astonished him about it the analysis work they did on it what the witnesses said but we didn't have the witnesses the people that took the photograph we didn't have them, but I was going to report on this anyway, just because, wow, this is the picture that we've all been waiting for.

This picture is phenomenal.

But if you don't have provenance and you don't have the background story on it, it could be AI.

It could be right.

It could be a hoax.

Some people call it a reflection.

Not a reflection, not a hoax.

So.

He's definitively not a reflection.

I take, I retract.

Sorry, James.

I apologize.

It's not a reflection.

Well, I think he actually, I think at one point, he even says he knows it's not a reflection because he's been to the exact spot where the picture was taken.

And I don't think that can be true necessarily because I don't think we know exactly where it was taken.

But he says that he confidently rules out that this is, it's not a hoax.

It's not a hoax.

But he's citing Dave Clark.

Now, David Clark doesn't think you can definitively point out that this isn't a hoax.

He was actually leaning towards hoax for a long time.

So James seems more certain of the inability of this to be a hoax than the person who found this picture and researched this picture.

But he's talking about provenance.

And provenance is really, really important because if you can't establish how was this photo taken, who was it taken by, can I meet the person who took it?

Can they tell me that where they took it?

And whose hands has this photo been through?

You can't tell whether anything has been done to this photo or whether its origin story is true.

If you can't meet the person who took it and have them say it was silent, then the reports of the thing in the air being silent are sort of useless because you can't tell that from the photo.

So provenance is really, really important there.

And so like, yeah, like I said, I asked Dave Clark about this.

He analyzed this.

He also analyzed this with his colleague Andrew Robinson at Sheffield University's Sheffield Hallam University's

folklore department.

So Dave said of

those options, he says, as for the theories about the photo, he said the three most popular are that it's a reflection of a mountain sticking up through the mist, that it's a rock sitting about the lock of the pond, or that it's a dangling Christmas ornament.

But he's not actually convinced by any of those.

Now, for a while, when he would give lectures about this picture and about how to fake UFO pictures, he would actually get people to hold up a Christmas ornament, like a diamond-shaped Christmas ornament, on fishing wire.

So it it was basically invisible.

And you could get it to dangle in a way that would replicate this picture.

One of the problems is it's much harder to do that if you have six photos in a row where other things are moving around and this isn't.

But we don't have that.

We only have word that those pictures exist.

So we can only take that so seriously until we see those five other pictures.

But yes, and if you look up Andrew Robinson at Sheffield Hallam, he's done a load of analysis of these pictures,

putting forward each of these hypotheses and testing them it's really really interesting stuff um they don't come to aliens as a conclusion though all right i'm gonna play this this is the next big break in the story for uh for james i'm ending production of the program and i get a text from David Clark and he goes, something big is about to happen.

And I said, what?

He goes, just sit tight.

I can't go public right now, but something big's going to happen.

Okay, I just want to jump in real quick and just say that's a weird text to get from somebody that says, hey, something big's going to happen, but I can't tell you about it.

Like, that's really very strange.

Yeah, you say that, but I know David Clark, and it's not that strange.

That's perfectly fine.

But

does he send you suspenseful texts all the time?

Or what is happening?

The thing to bear in mind, right?

The thing that will explain that is Dave Clark is a journalist as well.

Like he was a journalist at the Sheffield newspaper, local Sheffield newspaper for a long, long time.

He is a folklorist journalist now.

If he's found something big out, he's not going to give James Fox first before he publishes it himself.

It's his exclusive.

He's got the information.

So like you can say, sit tight, I'm going to get my story story out and then I'll tell you.

But you don't want to give it to James first because James might blow your exclusive.

Yeah, that's very true.

That's very true.

I'm not thinking of it like that.

I'm thinking of it like a person who's texting with a friend.

And I couldn't imagine sending one of my friends a text to be like, Something big is about to happen, but I'm not going to tell you what.

I mean, I work in this field.

I do that quite often.

There's like, I've got a big thing coming up, and you'll care about it, but I can't tell you until it's published.

Ah, okay, all right.

Let's continue on with the clips.

So, long story short, this guy, Richard Greaves, who was one of the hotel cooks, worked in the kitchen with the photographers, with the two witnesses that took the photograph.

And Richard Greaves

came forward on print, but I contacted David Clark.

I was like, hey,

can you get me an interview with this guy?

And then probably about 10 o'clock that night, I'm in the edit room buttoning the film up, and all of a sudden I get a phone call.

And he's like, I've just come out of the pub.

I'm ready to go.

I was like, okay,

grab a camera, roll it, let's record this.

And he reveals

that he knew the witnesses.

He worked with them in the kitchen.

He gave all the specifics.

He provided their names.

And then he said, two or three nights, four nights after they took that photograph, they were all on a cigarette break at the hotel early evening, pissing rain.

He said a car rolled up.

There were three guys in it, a driver and two men in suits in the back.

They roll up.

They come out.

They say cigarette breaks over.

They pull the two witnesses aside and they...

drill him and you got to hear it directly from the horse's mouth.

Richard Greaves said that when they were were all the people that were not involved with the incident were told go back inside the hotel which they did but they looked through the window and they saw in the pissing rain he said they were out there for 10 or 15 minutes in the pissing rain and that these guys

they came back inside and they were white as a he's a he's he he literally goes um

they uh they came back inside they were white as a fucking ghost and uh which we all get a good laugh out of but uh and then they started drinking heavily and within a couple of weeks they vanished without a trace and they've been gone ever since Yeah, I mean a couple of things here.

The fact that he keeps emphasizing that it was pissing Rin tells me that he's a man who's not spent a lot of time in Scotland.

Like there's going to be pissing Rin.

Like them standing outside for 10 minutes in the pissing Rin is not that unusual.

It's just the climate there, mate.

It's fine.

But his argument is like, well, the absence of witnesses, the fact that the witnesses disappeared and we can't verify their story with them in any way, that just makes this whole story stronger.

You should definitely believe it because we don't know who they are and we can't find them.

He says that he's got the witnesses' names.

That's remarkable.

He doesn't use them.

He doesn't tell us them.

That would be a pretty useful thing.

Like if he said

the people who took the photo were called this and this, for a starter, it would give other people something to work with to try and track them down.

It's really weird that he doesn't, he tells us Richard Graves' names.

He tells us like other names of people involved, Craig Lindsay involved, but he doesn't tell us the names of the people who took the photo, which is a really important detail.

Sure.

I think that's an unusual thing to leave out personally.

Yeah, at the moment, we've got the photo.

Without getting those witnesses, even this guy is just a guy who says that he knew them 30 years ago.

He's willing to say now that he knew them 30 years ago.

That's what we've got to go on.

This isn't making the story stronger.

Yeah, and it's a guy who also just got out of the pub.

I don't know.

I feel like an important piece of this story is that this guy just got out of the pub.

I also want to say, too, one of the major pieces of the story is that these guys vanished without a trace.

That genuinely feels like way more information, way more interesting information than two guys might have taken a photo of a UFO.

I think that if they vanish without a trace for real, but what really happened was they quit and you just lost contact with them.

That's what you really mean to say.

But by saying vanish without a trace, you're able to say, like, it makes it sound like the men in black that came to visit you that totally told you not to talk about this, might have kidnapped these guys a few days later.

At least that's how it sounds to me.

It sounds like he's implying that they vanished without a trace because of this.

Yeah, I agree.

That's, that's definitely feels like what he's implying.

And it, you know, there's lots of other reasons, lots of other ways we could explain this.

But it might just be like, if I get involved in this story from 30 years ago, I get to be in an American movie.

So I'm going to talk about

what I think happened.

And

I'm going to say a lot of things.

And maybe some of those things will make the movie and other things won't make the movie.

Like there's lots of ways that this could come to.

And it doesn't all have to be that Will Smith turned up with his flashy device and made the two people disappear.

All right.

So now I want to move to talk about the drones because they'd spend a lot of time talking about drones in this very specifically.

And And I want to play two very specific clips of Joe and James talking about drones.

And these are the drones that are coming in over New Jersey.

We're trying to get back to what I was talking about earlier.

Logistically, logistically,

if you're letting something go from the ocean, if you're flying it out of the ocean, logistically, you would have to have some sort of a large craft out there that's going to house these things or it's going to launch from.

If it is actually coming from the ocean.

Oh, you see, the drones you're talking about right now.

Right.

yes so either they're ours and if there are ours yeah how do they hide the fact there's a battleship out there if is that possible and if if it's from a submarine how do they develop a submarine that can launch 50 car size or SUV size drones from Joe strikes me as somebody who is curious but not curious enough to do another step like he almost always seems to ask an interesting question but then he fails to bother to look for the next piece and this is one of those examples first the the rumor he's basing this off of is a rumor started by one police officer who said that he saw 50 drones no one took video of it no one took photos of it there's not any images you can't find this anywhere at least i wasn't able to happy to hear a listener if you found a story that happens to show video or has a photo i'm happy to look at it but i will say i couldn't find it in my ability to search through news articles couldn't find 50 drones again this is these these would have been taken at night so he means 50 lights like he didn't see the 50 units themselves.

He saw the lights from 50 drones, which could easily be something much bigger than that with several lights on it or a plane, that type of stuff.

That's what has been misidentified along the way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And also, too, we're talking about an SUV-sized drone, which again, no one has taken a photo of that we can see that it is that actual size.

Like there's not one parked next to an SUV in an AMP parking lot that you can be like, oh, this is exactly the same size as an SUV.

It's what people have been reporting.

but we know that human depth perception is really not very great at a at great distances we can't tell that's why things like forced perspective in movies tricks our brains all the time into thinking things are closer or farther away than they are and bigger and smaller

therefore so yeah absolutely especially when you're looking up at the sky because if you're looking along the ground you could see well that thing there is about the same size as that point of reference you've got something to reference up in the sky you've only got like looking up into the infinity of beyond i mean if exactly a balloon that you held on a string would look bigger than the sun to you it doesn't mean that it is it's just the a question of perspective so you can't easily judge how big things are in the sky and people make these mistakes all the time it's why they occasionally will misreport that they saw a uf4 and it turns out it was the moon they just weren't quite used to looking at it in a certain angle or through certain cloud covered that type of stuff I was walking through downtown Chicago one time, and as I'm walking, I look and I see a guy and he's looking up at the sky kind of off into the distance.

And then another guy walks up and looks up in the sky off into the distance.

And we all kind of congregate.

There's like three or four of us all start to start to come together.

And we all start looking and we're wondering what the hell is flying in the sky.

And it's flying erratically and it's red and it's daytime and it's moving really erratically and it's moving very quickly across around these buildings.

And at first all of us thought it was a drone.

We're like, is that a drone?

But it was moving up and kind of at an angle in ways that we didn't think a drone could move.

And it was very strange.

And then finally someone says, oh, it's a balloon.

And it was one of those mylar balloons that someone had let go.

And once you saw it, you're like, oh, of course, it's a balloon.

But it stopped four of us on the street as we're walking in downtown Chicago on our busy days to look at something to be, to be like, holy crap, what is that?

And there's a moment where your brain starts trying to figure out.

You can't tell how big it is because you can't tell.

how far away things are.

Even with buildings as references, you don't know how close it is versus that building.

you can see the building you can see it it sometimes is it's difficult to tell and so like i've even been involved in things i couldn't identify immediately and that happens i mean it just but i think like more often than not the answer is there we just gave up before we got there yeah i agree and we'll come back to the suv in a second but this reminds me something i want a point that i wanted to make in that when it comes to you say that the the answer is often there sometimes it's not an answer it's a range of answers because if you have let's say you have 10 reports of something in the sky, you'd be like, well, this report said that it was lights, this report that it said that it moved in a certain way, this report said that it disappeared in this kind of way.

How can you explain something that could do all of that?

It's like, well, maybe the first one was a plane, and the second one was a balloon, and the third one was something else.

Like, you don't need an explanation that covers all these different attributes because you're actually looking at lots of different things.

You're just looking at them all with the same mentality of thing in the sky might be UFO.

How do I fit all these bits together?

You get the same thing with like reports of cryptozoology.

Like, well, they said it was like, it had the body of a dog, but then it had that, it had like paws and it could pick stuff up.

It's like, yeah, nine of those reports were dogs and the tenth was a raccoon.

But like, if you try and make the same answer fit all 10 reports, it's not going to work because they weren't all 10 the same things.

And that's what's happening with these lights and drones and stuff.

Last thing I want to mention, too, is that

he cannot imagine that there could be a sub out there or a battleship that could hold these things.

Routinely,

let's presume that Joe is true, that what Joe is saying is true, is that there are 50 SUV sized drones.

I don't think that's the case, but let's just presume that's true, that off the ocean come 50 SUV size drones.

And he's incredulous, thinking there's no way that we could have technology that could allow this.

But, you know, an aircraft carrier can carry routinely 60 aircraft.

And we're talking jets.

These are big, way bigger than an SUV.

So you could easily fit something like that.

Even just a sub, a nuclear-capable sub, could have uh tubes that could release these things.

These subs will carry 20 trident missiles, so 20 trident missiles, they're 44 feet long apiece.

You could easily fit probably 60 drones and missile compartments that they could easily blast off and fly off.

I'm not saying that's happening, but I am saying, like, Joe didn't even bother to do a next step, which could say that, well, this almost certainly is something that the U.S.

military could probably do without a lot of real heavy lifting.

It seems like they could probably do something like that pretty easily.

I don't think it's happening, but Joe doesn't even bother to take that next step.

Yeah, it's those kind of key skeptical questions of the first question should always be, is this thing even true?

Before we start to try and explain it, first try and explain, try and figure out if it's true.

And if it is true, can we explain it through some fairly mundane ways first?

And if none of the mundane ways fit, then we can start looking at the extraordinary.

But like we need to first rule out the bog standard stuff and work through

a sequence of less likely things along the way rather than jumping straight to therefore it's aliens or anything like that.

Yeah, or it's some super secret tack that nobody knows.

Yeah.

All right, we're gonna play this next clip.

This is sort of trying to explain the drone activity.

Why would they do that in residential areas?

Why would they have everybody scratching their heads?

All these press conferences.

You're talking about the head of the gang of eight.

Okay.

But if they need to control those,

you're not going to tell the gang if they are really looking for a nuke.

Okay.

let's imagine that this story about

a Ukrainian nuke from the time when they disarmed them, there's one that's unaccounted for.

This is one of those stories that's been on the internet.

I don't know if it's true.

Mad Joe, no cookie.

I'm going to continue the clip.

Yeah.

That it's unaccounted for and that they think it's headed to the United States.

If you were trying to find that thing, like a dirty bomb?

Yeah, or like

just a regular nuke, that if you're looking for gamma rays, like that you could devise a drone that could search for that and you'd fly it over an area and you wouldn't care whether people freaked out because it's more important to find this goddamn thing.

Joe, you're not talking about gamma rays, by the way.

Gamma rays are harder to detect.

Gamma rays are harder to detect than what you're suggesting.

But, you know, like you don't need a SUV-sized drone to outfit like,

let's say, a Geiger counter.

You wouldn't need an SUV-sized drone to do that.

I'm not saying that that's what they're doing.

This whole thing about the sort of radioactive material was blown up because they said that there was

a cargo container that wound up missing some sort of radioactive material.

Now, this isn't radioactive material to make an actual nuclear device.

This isn't material that you would use if there was something like a dirty bomb.

It was from like an MRI machine, right?

So it's missing from a sort of some sort of machine, a medical machine.

And the machine itself was missing.

They found it.

Everything's found.

Everything was found.

And it was found within moments.

But for some reason, the correction doesn't get to these people who want to make a claim that the reason why we see these drones is because there's some sort of radioactive material that they're sniffing out and that's what we should alarm the entire populace about this because that's what they're really doing instead of maybe occasionally people are looking up into the sky and they're seeing stuff that they're not used to seeing yeah and i think right after this joe even even says you know he says something like it almost seems too sexy that the united states have this kind of ability to fly these things around to look for drones look for for nukes it almost seems too sexy and it's like if it seems too sexy, Joel, maybe that's not what's happening.

Like, I know that you want that to be true because we all want the extraordinary thing to be true.

I totally get that instinct.

But whenever we're pulled towards an explanation, that we, even we, when we hear it, we can say, well, that seems a bit too filmic.

I think it even says it's like in a film or something.

We should, that should be a red flag for us to question it.

If it requires that level of

elaborate explanation, that would be like a Hollywood film worth of explanation, a Hollywood film plot.

That may be a sign that we should be looking for something standard before we move on to the extraordinary.

This is the last clip in the UFO section.

This is just talking about evidence for UFOs.

There's no smoke without fire.

There is

so much evidence in terms of eyewitness testimony and radar, some photographic, not as much as we'd like, that something truly inexplicable is taking place in our aerospace, right?

For sure.

Something that, after careful examination, something that, not because of a lack of data in some instances, but that after careful analysis and research, investigation, that comes out the other end and says, I can't explain this, this is going to have to be one of those

unknowns or, you know, falls into that 15% category of

cannot provide a terrestrial or conventional explanation for.

And those are the cases that I've so desperately have been going after for a long time.

There's no smoke without fire, Marsh.

Yeah, I liked him saying this because the thing is, there is smoke without fire.

Sometimes people see steam and they mistake it for smoke.

Other times people see smoke and they don't realize that there's a smoke machine there.

So there isn't a fire, it's just a smoke machine.

Sometimes it's just foggy or the lighting's poor and you can't quite tell.

Like my point is, people misidentify things all the time.

That's what's happening with UFOs as well.

It's not the smoke and the fire, it's not the fire causing the smoke, it's misidentifying an airplane or

or the moon or a reflection or all these kind of other stuff um and he says those ones that they can't the 15 that they can't provide a conventional explanation for i'm not sure the numbers as high as 15 but let's give him the 15

the fact that you can't provide a conventional explanation doesn't mean that you therefore have to accept an unconventional explanation because it just might be that there is a conventional explanation that you can't find and to give an example of that just a random example i thought about this i found a random photo of a chicago street from the year 2015.

okay i've i've put it in the link for you to see there uh cecil yeah it's just of a regular street it's not worth the the the listeners seeing it but at one point there is a lady walking in front of the cab now i could say if you can't tell me the name of that lady you can't give me a conventional explanation for who she is well she must be a ghost then you know it's it's a 10-year-old photo tell me who that lady is right now and if you can't give me her name and address and social security number then the only other explanation is she's a ghost well no it's she was just a lady but maybe the distance that the time that has passed has made it hard for you to get to the conventional explanation, but there still is one, and we shouldn't believe she's a ghost just because we can't figure out exactly who she is right now easily.

Another thing we do too is like, you know, we don't look up in the sky very often.

And I think that's one of the things that gets missed all the time is that, you know, like people don't look up often.

And when they do, they see these things that are up in the sky.

But when it's a lot of times, these things have FAA lights on them.

It's not like they're not flying around with the lights that are required for

aircraft to fly around in the sky.

They are flying around with those lights on.

And we see those lights and they fly across the sky.

And maybe they move in a way that we're not used to, but it's maybe it's because we're not used to how quick planes move when they're nearby or farther away.

We're not used to that sort of thing.

We don't spend a lot of time staring up at the sky and paying attention to these things.

And we might not know what a drone looks like when it moves.

And we might not know what a plane looks like when it moves.

And a lot of things things get misreported and if we just pretend that everything gets reported should be investigated as if it's some sort of a crazy phenomenon it's you also have to just wipe out all these very mundane reasons why something could be flying around especially near an airbase it's just it doesn't like use occam's razor you can tell that a lot of the stuff that gets reported this stuff is all just really mundane stuff yeah absolutely we don't look up a lot and also a lot of this stuff that you see you're not the one looking up at it you're seeing a video video of it.

And there's actually a really interesting thing that Joe mentions in the middle of this.

We see, I think, we saw a video of a light in the sky moving around really quickly, it's zipping about really rapidly.

And Joe says, Oh, is this video zoomed in?

And it is zoomed in.

And what's happening is when you zoom in, you're trying to keep that object in frame.

But any amount of movement when you're zoomed in, that object is going to move in the frame quite quickly.

The object is staying still, it's the frame that's moving, but you can't tell that without frames of reference.

And so a lot of these kind of zipping around things are actually just the camera is moving as you're trying to track it, not the object moving very quickly, but it makes it look in the video that the object is doing remarkable things.

For any anyone who's interested in some of the explanations behind these drawings, behind some of those UF4 things, I have to give a shout out for the work of Mick West, who from the website Metabunk.

He writes for Skeptical Inquiry.

He puts out videos.

He's been interviewed a lot about some of these drawn pictures.

And he actually does a great job of actually tracking down what each of these things were.

And some of that is by looking on airplane trackers to say, well, well, what time was this specific video taken?

If I go onto an airplane tracker for that location, you can go online and put in the details of the location of the time, and you'll find out whether a plane was flying overhead at the time.

And you can actually track it down to specific planes.

So yeah, Mick West's work on this is absolutely amazing.

If you want to know what's really going on.

Yeah, it was Elon Musk's private jet every time.

That's what we saw.

All right.

Well, we've talked a lot about UFOs, but we really want to talk very specifically about something that UFO proponents use very often, and that's a very specific argument we're going to get to that in our toolbox segment

wow so that's the tool bag and something just fell out of the tool bag

we have uh we hear a lot that there is uh someone who knows something.

It is an argument from authority.

We hear from these people that there is someone, a high-up someone who knows something and they are giving us this information.

Marsh, why should we be a little skeptical when we hear that?

Yeah, so the argument from authority logical fallacy is essentially when someone is expecting you to believe what they're saying based on the strength of their reputation rather than the strength of their evidence.

So this is right because this person is an expert and he says so.

This is right because my God has told me it.

This is right because this general wouldn't lie about these things.

That is all just a way of distracting you at times, or can be used as a way of distracting you from the actual evidence that's being put forward.

If the evidence isn't great, if the logic of the evidence isn't great, if all that stuff doesn't work, it doesn't matter who's saying it or not.

All right, so let's listen to the argument from authority.

We have a couple of clips to illustrate it.

The first example here is talking about a UFO crash that happened in Brazil.

I've been working with this guy.

We've been communicating on the signal for a long time.

Actually, he was through Proton, he was emailing me stuff about Virginia, the UFO crash in Virginia.

But he was anonymous.

One day, I was like, he's really knowledgeable.

And he was sending me stuff that was really helpful.

Like, you should track down this flight because if it happened, it was going out of this airport.

Go to this base.

And I was like, finally, one day I was like, who are you?

And how do you know what you know?

He goes, I'm a retired United States Air Force Colonel.

I was like, oh.

And he goes, and I'm also an experiencer.

I had an experience back in 1980, blah, blah, blah.

Oh, so what happened to him he had a ufo encounter it's in the movie so yeah so what we have here is this person he has to be more informed his opinions on ufos are more more important because he's a retired air force colonel i mean he's retired so like he's not going to be fully au fait with exactly what's happening right now but the fact that he's had that position that's why we should believe him even though he also says that he's experienced alien abductions which for me would like remove a little bit of his credibility because there is no good evidence for alien abductions.

So we already know he's got an investment in the alien hypothesis.

The fact that he's a colonel doesn't mean that his opinions on aliens are any more likely to be correct, but it's very much being presented as if that's the case.

Yeah, his eyes work just like all the rest of our eyes work.

It's not like he has special eyes because he's a colonel.

He has the same eyes and his brain plays the same tricks on him that everybody else gets their tricks played on them.

So it's not like he has any sort of special thing that makes him different.

Yeah, absolutely.

And there's even

a thing that goes around when it comes to UFO stories where pilots will see something and they will say things like, well, pilots are trained observers.

They're trained to be able to observe things.

And that makes it sound like they are better at understanding everything that they see better than we would be.

But where they're trained to observe stuff, they're not trained to observe aliens.

They're trained to look out for other things that are relevant to their job.

So they can be hyper, they can have a hyper agency detection where they're always looking for, well, this anomaly has to be something significant because it can't be something insignificant because i'm trained to look out for significant things in case it's something really significant so it can actually work against you that kind of idea of being a trained observer and being always alert for something anomalous you can rule out stuff that is just kind of mundane but unexpected next example here this is talking about a person named james sands we have the names of the other military witnesses that were on duty during the encounter the alleged encounter people are going to criticize me because i'm reporting on a close encounter of the third kind but this jason sands says he's willing to do a lie detector test like public.

He's willing to testify under oath that everything he's saying is true.

We have a date, we have a location, and we have the names of the other on-duty officers.

So what I'm hoping is, despite the level of criticism I'm going to receive for reporting on this, is that other individuals that have more information on this are going to be inclined to come forward.

I also met with people in the Senate Armed Service Committee, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sorry, in the House, and they said

Jason Sands is who he says he is.

He checks out.

He is named previously classified or classified programs.

He's identified.

The guy's legit.

His credentials check out.

And so I opted to go ahead and report on it with the hope that more information will come out on it.

Listen, man,

there's nothing wrong with reporting on a story like that.

There's been a bunch of them.

It's not a small number of these things where people have experienced things.

And imagine if it's true.

If it's true.

They're not all liars.

I can't believe they're all liars.

Oh, yeah, it's pretty cool.

But

imagine being that person who had that experience and not have anybody believe you.

Not only that, but it could actually ruin your reputation and your career to talk about this experience.

So yeah, we have here Jason Sands.

He's military and we should believe him because he is who he says he is.

His credentials check out.

Well, he isn't credentialed for being able to identify aliens.

We don't have a credential for that.

So there are no credentials that we give.

The fact that he is who he is, nobody is denying,

to my knowledge, nobody needs to deny that Jason Sans is who he says he is.

We can accept that.

We don't have to question that, but we also don't then have to accept that he's absolutely right about close encounters of the third kind.

That's a different step.

And you don't have the credentials or the expertise to make that leap unless you've got the evidence.

And also, too, they go to great lengths to tell you that he's willing to take a lie detector test.

Well, lie detector tests are nothing.

That's a nothing.

That's not doing anything.

That's hooking hooking you up to something and paying attention to some vital statistics on your body and then it's you no one is able to tell whether or not that you are telling the truth or not telling the truth those those things don't work they they don't you can't reliably tell whether or not someone is lying so it's not it's not any might as well wear a mood ring and answer questions it's the same thing there's nothing there that doesn't mean he's telling the truth it just means he's willing to take a faulty test that's all it means yeah and he he could be telling his truth but still be wrong.

Like Joe says, they aren't all liars.

And I agree, they're not all liars.

Lots of them are just wrong.

Lots of people who think that they've seen aliens have misidentified a plane in the sky or have misremembered a certain detail or have fallen for a hoax or have had an experience where they have seen something that wasn't necessarily there.

You know, we know that that's a thing that can happen.

People can have hallucinations and waking dreams and all these different things.

These are all very mundane explanations that don't require you to be a liar, but also don't require you to be correct about having encountered aliens.

This is a third example of argument from authority.

This is talking about David Grush.

And again, I've said this earlier on the show, and I'll say it again is like the reason why I believe David Grush,

who testified, not just because I believe David, but David doesn't have first-hand experience.

I just talked about it.

But the reason why, I know, I know, but the reason why I believe him is because it aligns with my research in the field.

Good for you, Joe.

Yeah, it's great that Joe pushes back that this isn't like I can believe him, but he doesn't have first-hand experience.

He's not got the experience.

He's not got the evidence.

You're believing him, like James is believing him, because it aligns with what James always says.

Information bias, friend.

That's exactly it.

That's exactly it.

And so he's taken David's word on it.

He trusts David.

He's got David's reputation matters.

David's, I think he even says that David himself has like military background and stuff.

And David's, we can take it on his authority because it also agrees with what I think, even though he doesn't have the experience or the evidence himself.

We should be asking for the evidence.

I want to point out, too, and it might be something I bring up later in our gloves off segment, but I just want to mention this too, that just because something has a

congressional hearing doesn't mean that it means anything.

It just means they heard people talk about it.

That's all it means.

It doesn't mean that it gives it automatic validity because there's people who are talking about something.

They looked at Hunter Biden's laptop for six months and they talked about Hunter Biden and all the problems and nothing came of it because there wasn't any evidence.

And the same thing it can happen in other cases.

So just because I don't want people to be tricked to think, well, they're talking about it in Congress and this James Fox brings this up multiple times.

Well, they're talking about it in Congress.

They're talking about it.

They talk about a lot of things in Congress and a lot of those things don't matter.

So just don't pretend that that automatically gives it this wand of credibility that it suddenly becomes something that we should pay attention to and that is undeniably true.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, this might be something we end up touching on in a future future show.

We might touch on Hunter's Biden's laptop in a future show, what the evidence is there.

But when it comes to the UK Parliament as well, there was a UK Parliament meeting, which was talking about the evidence that the COVID vaccine was causing all sorts of damage to people's hearts and causing loads of death.

Now, that meeting was not kind of

in itself evidence that this is true.

It was a guy who was working in the parliament was able to call a meeting and have people tell him stuff that he wanted to hear using one of the rooms in the parliament.

It doesn't mean that that is actually concrete evidence.

And in a way, you want politicians to be able to listen to things, even if those, listen to all sorts of forms of evidence without being judged for doing so.

But we also shouldn't therefore assume that anything they hear is verbatim truth because it was there.

And I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

All right.

So we're going to wrap this episode up.

Before we do, we're going to talk about some of the things that maybe we liked about it.

But I do want to ask you, Marsh, you know, so people know sort of where we stand on this, where do you stand on things in the sky?

Could it be something from another planet?

Where do you stand on otherworldly visitations, that sort of thing?

Can you give me sort of a broad strokes on where you think you stand on those things?

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm going to start from the other end of that equation, which is, which I mentioned sort of briefly at the start.

Is there likely to be life out there in the universe?

I'm quite happy to say that it's probable.

It's likely.

It could well be we live in a universe where we're the only life that ever existed um that would be fascinating it's just as likely that if it erodes here it arose somewhere else in the universe so life reasonably might well exist now does that life exist at the same time that we exist the likelihood is less because the universe is 13.5 or 13.8 billion years old um we've only really existed for a tiny tiny slice of that it might be that there were aliens a billion years ago they've died out we'll never see them we just didn't happen to align so the chances that that they were around at the same time as us is going to be narrower just because of the way time works.

The chances that they're anywhere near us is going to be even narrower because the universe is huge and the ability to get from star to star, unless you're able to do faster than light travel, which we don't think is physically currently possible or physically is possible under our current understanding of physics, the chances that you'll ever encounter any other life in the universe is infinitesimally small because the universe is almost infinitely big.

So I think the chances that there's anything near enough to us to come and visit incredibly slim.

So I think everything that people are seeing in the sky is almost certainly stuff being misidentified, stuff that is a hoax, stuff that is military technology that is being hidden because they don't, because you don't give all your military secrets away.

All of those things are millions and millions and millions of times more likely than it to be aliens.

I think it is the chances of us being visited by aliens is next to nil for all of those different reasons.

If we were able to turn up one single solid piece of evidence, I would readdress the chances immediately and be willing to change my mind on that.

Give me a body that is not composed of carbon-based atoms but is based on a different element.

And we're talking, we'll have another conversation.

But for now, no, I don't think any of the things we've seen in the sky so far are likely to be compelling evidence for aliens because of just the unlikelihood of aliens getting here.

Yeah, I'm pretty much on the exact same wavelength you are.

I

think that possibly there is some sort of life out there.

I don't think there's any real way for us to even communicate with them, even just the communications with something like that that far away.

And also not knowing how to communicate in any reasonable way just doesn't, it doesn't feel like there's any real possibility of that.

I'm happy to be proven wrong.

I am 100%

like, I want to believe this, right?

I'm like, I'm like one of the X-Files guys that's like, I want to believe, like, I 100% want to believe, but it's, it's not anything that i think is a real thing uh i i also am like you like i'm happy to see evidence that's that's absolutely real evidence but instead what we see is most oftentimes is blurry photographs blurry video and thirdhand accounts from somebody who one time got abducted for a little while i don't believe any of that stuff it's not it's not there's nothing in there that feels concrete to me i'm happy to believe if there's really good solid evidence but even the stuff that people say is so solid it's amazing doesn't it doesn't move me even in the slightest well but that's the thing is like you and i both want it to be true that there's aliens joe clearly wants it to be true james clearly wants it to be true the difference between us and them is that we're not willing to overlook the evidence of or kind of conflate the evidence in order to make what we want to be true the case we're we're much more willing to say well i'd like this to be true but i'm willing to say right now that i don't think it is until i'm convinced otherwise rather than starting from the other assumption i want this to be true and i'm going to look for evidence as to why i'm right i'm going to to confirm all my biases by every piece of evidence that I find.

All right.

So did you think there was anything worthwhile in this episode, Marsh?

Yeah, I did, actually.

I thought Joe did a pretty good job in large parts of this episode.

He'd offered some really good pushback in some places.

There were times when he'd asked James a question about a certain type of evidence and James would say, well, I'll tell you this instead and go and try to go somewhere else.

And Joe would call him back on that and would try and sort of try and stop him deflecting away from tricky questions into other anecdotes.

I thought that was pretty good.

I also thought Joe made a really funny point, a really fun, genuinely funny answer when he was talking about why aren't there aliens everywhere all the time.

And he was saying about how, well, it might be like vacation season where like they can only come now and then because it's really difficult to get here, like trying to go to Australia and how it takes so many hours on a plane.

You just can't always do that.

It's a pain in the ass to get there.

I thought that was quite funny.

I enjoyed that.

He was clearly having fun with it, and I enjoyed that.

It was funny.

Yeah, I like that too.

I, I, I like his cautiousness.

I think that there was some

moments where he even said, like, you know, I think that, do I think that this is true?

Sometimes I do.

Sometimes I don't.

Sometimes I do.

He's a lot more forgiving than, you know, like.

uh than i would than i would like him to be on some things i'd certainly like more pushback and he also seems to apologize sometimes when he does give pushback he gives pushback and then he immediately apologizes i'm just playing devil's advocate i'm just playing devil's advocate which means to me that he maybe he doesn't believe completely he's just trying to do those sort of things and go through the steps of being critical, even though he might not believe it himself.

But that's at least a start, and I'm willing to accept that.

I think his apology.

You're right that it's interesting.

I think his apology might also be because he's not used to doing that on his show.

He's not used to doing the pushback on the show.

So it feels awkward.

It feels counterintuitive for intuitive for him to be doing that because that's not normally what he does on the show.

But he does ask some good questions.

At one point,

he starts to ask a good question, whether the UAPs are a massive psyop to cover up the very advanced American weapons technology.

And it's like, well, that's a good question, but there is a third possibility that it's just misidentified regular stuff.

So it's sort of like it's a false dichotomy.

Is it real or is it a psyop to stop you looking at this incredibly advanced weapon stuff?

It's like, it could be neither of those things.

But questioning whether it's real is still useful.

It could be nothing.

And I don't want to come off as saying that Joe doesn't at sometimes totally credulously believe some of this stuff because it comes off sometimes that he absolutely does.

And he he 100%.

But there are points of pushback which I which surprise me, and I wanted to mention it.

Yeah, yeah, they were great.

Okay, well, that is it for the main portion of our show this week.

Uh, you can check us out on Patreon if you want to get our behind-the-curtain segment where we get a bit more gloves off and pick out some of the things we didn't talk about on this show.

But otherwise, you can join us next week for another piece of the No Rogan experience.

If you love the show, please rate and share it.

If you want to get in touch with us, become a patron, or check out the show notes, go to knowrogan.com.

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