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Meet the Astronomer Tracking UFOs
been sliding into the ocean. So, they found this thing that looked like a crashed UFO or looked like an artificial structure outside the Swedish coast. They found that there it was covered in burned um biological material which is really weird because we don't have volcanic activity in that area. We need the actual physical proof and I don't think any government is willing to release that. But the scientists who had claimed it was just a rock never studied the actual and their There's no paper and no open
data. [music] There's just a claim to the media by those scientists. And I'm just like, this is not a way of analyzing something. So, it there's there are no samples of that object because it was so hard. So, they couldn't get a piece [music] out of it. So, I still think it's something that should be analyzed because it [music] might be possibly the best uh candidate nonhuman artifact that you can Wow. And I really believe that uh we need to seriously
uh study this kind of objects. Yeah, absolutely. I'm here with Dr. Beatatrice Vioale who is a phenomenal astronomer both in a conventional sense. she's conventionally trained, but also uh I think you are a rare kind of very open mind in your field and you found some very interesting things. And so I'm I'm really excited to speak with you because you're kind of on on the frontier. You're the intersection, I think, between scientific rigor and uh this burgeoning field of studying kind of
anomalous phenomena in the air and in space. And so thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. It's my pleasure and it's a true honor. Oh, well, thank you. Uh how did you get into space to begin with? Were you always into space as a kid? Uh actually not. So as a kid I was a very very curious person. Well I am still a very curious person but um and but of course I was very interested in space. So I was very curious about a lot of things and I think already when I was six or seven I had uh written a small
little uh essay about cats in flying saucers. I still like cats as well. when you were six or seven, you wrote something. I had this Yeah, I had that essay. I don't remember how long it was. I I had also painted the cats and the flying saucers there. So, I don't think I changed too much since Oh my god, that's unbelievable. Anyway, I um I simply liked probably this topic uh already since I was very young. I got interested in uh molecular biology and DNA and I actually started
my university studies with a engineering program in molecular biotechnology and then [snorts] I got super bored. How do you get bored of molecular Well, it's like we were all the time I think it was the the particular program I was studying at at the university. We were all the time repeating the central dogma and how a DNA how DNA turns into a protein over and over. And I just started wondering about the mysteries of the universe, galaxies, how are galaxies
gaining the shapes that we see, the spiral form versus the elliptical forms. I wanted to understand all that. Well, I found myself on a PhD program in astronomy and I started studying active galactic nuclei, which are galaxies that have lots of light coming from their centra and uh I tried to see how different types of active galactic nuclei and you could see these different types um by looking at the spectra. Some had broad emission lines, some had narrow and how are they related and I
and I did my PhD on that topic. However, already like in my early years as a PhD student, was it even maybe in my last year as undergraduate student, I had while writing some fable, I had started wondering about if a star could vanish or if an galaxy could vanish. What do you think sparked that question of could a galaxy vanish? Well, I think I was so influenced and fascinated by Halton Arp. Heltonarp's
theory. So Heltonarp was an astronomer who was a super famous astronomer uh for a very long while who s who one day observed he he could see like he found couples of galaxies that were they looked like they were exchanging gas but uh if you looked at their red shifts which are indicators of distance they had completely different red shift which completely uh went against all the idea of the expanding universe and how we interpret red shift. So when he said this all astronomers attacked him.
So it was it was the controversy of what we have today with Avi and Omoa Mua and in [clears throat] the 80s with the non-cossmological red shift or anomalous red shifts as we call them. Yes. So I was fascinated by that thing and I wrote an essay based on these ideas and then somehow I killed off my poor quazar because it was a fable and it vanished in at the end of the story and I started wondering but hey has anyone ever search for galaxies or stars that vanish? Interesting. And so can you explain what
a non-cossmological red shift is? So it would be um so usually when we um um look at galaxies we can see the red shift that and it's a Doppler shift because the uh universe is expanding and it's moving away from us. So uh so it's stretching light and you're moving uh lower down on the uh electromagnetic wave spectrum towards Exactly. So what then happens is that um people use this uh red shift to
calculate the distance to a galaxy. Now the problem would be if you have two interacting galaxies that are completely different red shift, you wouldn't be able to um use that as a distance So I was just curious about that. Why do you think it was so Well, because that would uh question the entire big bank idea. M so it it would completely change all fundaments of uh physics as we know today or cosmology rather. So the verdict on red shifts is still
out but you've moved on and you might you might you might come back at some point when I get really bored. [laughter] So how did you get into cuz I I know you through my own interest in you know UAP unidentified anomalous phenomena. How did you get into even believing that that was possible? So, so I'm going to show you some like uh contradictions in how I were thinking uh when I was younger. So, as an undergraduate student um I was in Sweden
and I one day heard about this fascinating discovery that a team of divers had done uh called the Baltic Sea anomaly. So they found this thing that looked like a crashed UFO or looked like an artificial structure outside the Swedish coast. What did it look like? It looked like a millennial falcon that had just uh crashed into the deep seas. I was super fascinated and I was like, "Oh my god, can there have been aliens coming to visiting on Earth?" Later when
I started working with these searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, which we did through the project by looking for vanishing objects. Mhm. [clears throat] Um that's that's when I started wondering about the UFO question as well which I until then didn't want to touch. And is there any government interest when it comes to this? Well, I don't know about that but I know that they did super interesting uh investigations of it. I think they found that they were it was covered in burned
um biological material which is really weird because we don't have volcanic in that area. Plus, I I don't think they even said it was a crashed UFO. I think their idea is that this is an artificial structure and they don't know what it is, but some kind of artificial structure and and they also saw there is this kind of there's something that looks like it has been sliding into the ocean. Sadly, Fox News went out with saying that this is just a rock, but the scientists who had claimed it was just a rock never studied the actual
samples. And there there's no paper and no open data. There's just a claim to the media by those scientists. And I'm just like, this is not a way of analyzing something. So it there's there are no samples of that object because it was so hard. So they couldn't get a piece out of it. So I still think it's something that should be analyzed because it might be possibly the best uh candidate non-human artifact that you can find. Wow. And I really believe that uh we
need to seriously uh study these kind of objects. Yeah, absolutely. We should go down there and try to gather resources. I mean that's I hope these two guys will get all the support they can to actually study it and research it. So how does looking at vanishing stars then lead you to an interest in UAP or So we were looking for these uh vanishing stars. Mhm. And so now the people uh talk about vanishing stars sometimes in different
ways than I talk about them. So we had um uh so we had access to these cataloges uh like lots of imagery from 1950 and also a catalog called the US uh Navy catalog and then we had uh images of the sky as it looks today. And so we were comparing this images from the early 50s to images as it looks today. And I was hoping to see this perfect sparkling star that you can find in multiple images that one day vanishes. But before you find that, you find lots
of candidates and like things that you see in the 50s that have vanished, but you don't know if it's a beautiful uh star or if it's something else. Uh I had this image where you could see multiple stars appearing and vanishing which is completely crazy because one thing to have one transient but when you have several of them happening in a small space at the same time you really start wondering. So I started studying this phenomenon. I showed it to my colleagues um and we all started investigating it. Uh we had this guy at Grand Telescope
Canaria, one of my friends who actually pointed the world's largest optical telescope, a 10.4 m telescope to the positions of all these nine objects or eight of them or something like that and there was nothing left. We were hoping to see like, you know, we were really hoping to see some kind of counterpart there and you said, "Oh, maybe there were nine lasers or There was nothing like that. And then we started wondering so what can actually cause this thing and there's no
astrophysical explanation. So we started looking at various kind of instrumental explanation and all of them have and this is not a supernova or like you know the heat death of the sun type thing turns into a black hole or nothing dwarf or something. You're not going to get several of them in a small space at the same time. So this just didn't match anything just like perfect anomaly basically. It's not explained by any although today you can have that in the sky because today you have lots of satellites that sometimes are blinking. You have lots of space garbage
and then short reflections just happen due to I mean because you have solar The problem is that that would have this is from 1950 we didn't have any of that technology back then. Yeah. Yeah. So, and that's how I became interested and I got an idea of that one of the ways how one can also search for more such examples by looking for those that are lying along a line or in a narrow band.
So my friend Lash helped me to develop the statistics to [snorts] uh properly see how many do we need at least in a line in order to or or in a narrow band in order to say that um even if you have these kind of transits also their positioning is anomalous that they are kind of not randomly placed but they are um aligned or so and we had two such examples that were statistically significant and one is uh five objects on a narrow
band and it's from the 27th of July 1952. Yeah, my colleague Enrique found these three uh stars, the triple transient and um this one is from the 19th of July 1952 and it's super beautiful. And then my uh colleague Dave Alman who is the manager media manager for Vasco he said do you know what happens on or what happened on 19th of July 1952 no I wasn't around so
he introduced me to the Washington uh that's absolutely amazing I mean cuz in UFO lore not even lore this was a national event it was a it was all over the press it was in you know newspapers saying you know, saucers on the White House lawn. It prompted a call between Truman and Edward J. Rupelt, who was the head of Blue Book at the time. And it was, you had this Washington invasion or DC flyover where there were saucers all over DC at the time. And it was spec, it
was July of 1952, but it was specifically two weekends. It was the 19th and 20th, and it was the 26th and 27th. So, I find that absolutely remarkable. So these are naval records that you're looking at to see. We use this naval observatory catalog initially or I used them initially but later we just went to the directly to the Mount Palmer images. Got it. And so you're seeing images you're seeing this three in a row and then five in a row. In your case the three are just randomly placed and the and the five are along a narrow
Okay. Got it. And and then they just seem to vanish. They weren't in the public observable data like a year later or even a week later. Exactly like you said. That's wild. I mean that's really fascinating. Is there anything that is distinct about them when comparing them to other stars in the images or do they look like garden variety stars? They look like garden variety stars. We will we actually now are reexploring whe whether they look identical to the garden variety stars or if there might be some small tiny
difference because you can expect slight differences if you have short flashes depending on the shorter they are the more they might be concentrated. and um have you seen any vanishing stars since 1952? Have you have you combed through the records since then or? uh we have a lot of single transients but what I actually want to do is to look at more cases of multiple transients. We have we have some more cases when we were looking for these alignments that we just ignored because we were looking for
Can you describe the methodology of project Vasco? What what exactly are you doing? So uh we take images from Mount Palomar from the early 50s and then uh we look at the same positions in uh new images from Pan Stars and Mount Palomar is an observatory in a telescope in California. Exactly. And then we use this uh images from Hawaii and we compare the same spot just 70 years later. And see has something vanished. It was
actually quite fun. uh there was an expert uh in satellites that contacted me when he saw our paper where we're looking for these alignments and I found these uh two particularly interesting cases and he wrote me something like but come on you have just found satellites uh haven't you thought about that and I wrote back did you look at what year these satellites are from they're kind of before Sputnik yeah I think that's kind of hard to
argue with You know, it was quite fun and you can't imagine how often some astronomers actually make that kind of comment like, "Aren't you just having satellite lints?" Do you remember Don Menzel? Do you know that name by any chance? Famous astronomer. That's my favorite arc villain. He kind of is, right? It was all like what what was it like temperature inversion? He was a Harvard astronomer and I think he was also a cryptographer and um kind of deep in the national security state and he would just write
these kind of naysayer debunking books um in the ' 50s and um he would describe all this stuff, you know, light light reflections or, you know, temperature inversions and that sort of thing. But yeah, what what are your thoughts on it? Why is he your favorite villain? I mean, I don't think he he ne necessarily is a villain, but there's some very interesting coincidences around his name that really make me wonder what what are the coincidences? Well, first, I mean, we all know that he was a super famous UFO debunker, if not
the most famous UFO debunker. And he helped the uh US Air Force to debunk the Washington 1952 flap. Y and two or 3 months after he suddenly becomes the director of Harvard Observatory and he destroys one side of the photographic place and and he doesn't ask I understand from the record he doesn't ask the astronomers to select the place no he asked his secretary to go and throw away uh onethird of the plates and there's a woman Dory
Toughlight that has been uh [clears throat] like telling about this story in her memoirs and kind of he started revenging on her later too for as I understood it for that she tried to protect some of the plates. He also threw away a a number of the log books that are keeping the observations and what plates exist. In 1953, Donna Mensel also stopped the astronomers at Harvard to carry out their very famous sky survey where they were monitoring the entire sky since already late 19th
century and he stopped them and uh they didn't do this survey between 1953 to 1967 for roughly 15 years. So uh he also had apparently some more later episodes of plate destruction. I that is wild and suddenly you find that his name is famous for the so-called MJ12 majestic and you start wondering of course I mean I can't help it but it's a lot of coincidences because we also see things
on these dates from Mount Palar well the other fascinating thing about Don Menzel is he went on to run the Bureau of Public Standards which you know they're sort of codifying time zones but also a lot of astronomical data as well. And so if anybody were to like manage our reality, it would be somebody in that position. And then I don't know if you know this fact, this is kind of trippy, but he had an understudy, a PhD um at Harvard who studied right under him named Lou Branscom. Lou Bransk gave Edward Condan his clearance back. And Edward Condan
went on to do a hit job on UFOs with the Condan Committee, which killed Blue Book. So it was literally Menzel's like protege giving Condan his clearance so that he could completely kind of put the the Kaibos once and for all on UFOs and kind of kill the field. So he's my favorite arc villain. Yeah, I think he should. Yeah, I think he he's an arch villain. I think [laughter] there's there's something going on there. And we were talking in the car earlier about um Carl Sean who I think is such a fascinating figure because you know we were saying he in
his early diaries he would write all about UFOs. She was clearly sort of fascinated by them. It feels like if you read, you know, pale blue dot or watch he sort of, it seems like this tongue-in-cheek reference to actual, you know, non-human intelligence or extraterrestrial visitation. But then publicly, he just seems to dogmatically flip on the topic and just become this kind of debunker actually right around the time when Jay Allen Heinneck kind of goes in the opposite direction. and he was running blue book an astronomer and he says you know actually I played a part in the cover up and so it's
interesting that that um yeah Carl Sean there seems to be this kind of uh split between his private life and beliefs and and public life on UFOs. So do you know that uh Alan Heinik worked under Mensel at Harvard. So there was this project called operation moonwatch held by Fred Whipple. So Fred Whipple was the PhD student of uh Don Manso and so he created this uh program where they had this station like they were uh they had 12 stations around the
earth with a lot of citizen scientists that were tracking satellites over the sky and um so Alan Heinek was helping Whipple in this program and they actually had 36 UFO report that I think Jacquali found that we now uh like also look through. There are some very interesting things there. So, astronomers and and amateur astronomers have been seeing UFOs forever. It just has been ignored. Do you know who's running the Harvard undersea observatory at the time? Galileo project.
A [laughter] currently maybe, but the guy at the time was Robert Sarbacher. You know those moments in the middle of the day when you feel your energy dipping and you just need something to help you reset? That's when I grab my greens and it's become my favorite way to recharge. Greens is a refreshingly delicious blend of 14 essential greens, adaptogens, antioxidants, and even mushrooms. It's packed with everything your body needs to fill key nutrient gaps and keep you feeling your best without relying on
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to get 20% off. And here comes the fine print. Lucy products are only for adults of legal age. Every order is ageverified. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Thanks so much to Lucy for sponsoring today's episode, who David Grush says went on to basically create UFO secrecy through the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and was very close confidant with Thomas Townsen Brown who's working on anomalous gravity research. And so seems like Harvard was
the epicenter of a lot of this interesting work. It seems so fascinating to have been at Harvard in the 1950s. And actually the same time as Mensel was there, JFK was the on the board of overseers for the astronomer I didn't know that. I found that in Stanton Freriedman's notes. So I'm fascinated. That's amazing. Yeah. I've always wondered how much do you think JFK was maybe privy to the UFO thing because there's this letter. I don't know anything about J.
All this is outside my special specialtity. I'm now wildly speculating. Really speculating. That's what we do on my ship. But [laughter] uh uh there's a letter that was foyed. You know, the Freedom of Information Act was used to request it out of the government in 2005 and it was from JFK to acting director of the CIA John McCone. It was after JFK had fired Allan Dulles and he's asking for data on unknowns because he's worried that the
Russians, the Soviets might view it as a threat if they see the unknowns in their airspace. And I would think it was fake, but it really dovetales with the language that was used in the 1971 salt talks where on record we're saying that we have to coordinate with the Soviets on unknowns in their airspace and our airspace, especially around sensitive military installations so that these things don't provoke war. And if you're thinking about Daytona, that's obviously a really important vector to kind of think about. And so I always ask myself,
you know, this guy John Greenwald, has done a lot of work on this and he's looked into the veracity of this document. And it the verdict's still out. It's it's unclear. And I think there are a lot of reasons to think it might not be real, but it's it's interesting cuz I there were some people in and around the JFK assassination that think that maybe that, you know, it had something to do with his inquiries into UFOs. I don't know. There's a lot of fascinating questions to explore for sure.
But that's really interesting. I didn't know he was I mean I know he was the Harvard affiliated. I had no idea he was uh at all involved in anything they were doing in the world of astronomy. That's really fascinating and cool. What is the current So you did project Vasco and now you're on to a new project to get more of a smoking gun possibly around these anomalous objects. Can you describe what that project? still have Vasco running and we are going to be looking for more uh signatures of satellites with the Vasco project and like hopefully also
make a new citizen science project where we look for these signatures. Was that the extent of the vanishing stars just the 1952 or you found a lot of vanishing? Um well we found a lot of transients things that appear and vanish. Okay. Okay. So what exactly do you hope to do with exop probe? If you remember with the Vasco project um when we saw this multiple transits there were no satellites in the sky. Today there's loads and loads of space debris. So now what we want to do is that we want to look for uh this kind of signatures of
non-human artifacts uh in orbit around the earth outside the earth's atmosphere. But we also want to remove all this uh contamination from human space debris uh directly when we do our observation so that we get clean data. So to do that we have first we have a method that I cannot discuss how we are removing all this space debris but more importantly or equally importantly is that we are are hoping to build a network of telescopes
and by having multiple uh telescopes you can determine the distance uh to an object and the more telescopes you have the more accurately you can actually determine this distance in three dimensions so that you can actually eventually go pick up the object and bring it down to the earth because that's what I would like to do to bring down an actual ET probe. So that's what exoprobe is about. It's about validating a finding, verifying it, localizing the object and
characterizing the nature of it. Since the 1960s, we have developed new uh way of imaging the skies, new technology for imaging the skies. We don't use photo emotions anymore like was done in the ' 50s. Um, our cameras are much more sensitive. We have also artificial intelligence that can analyze huge amount of data. We can we have we can now digitize the entire sky that wasn't possible in the 60s. All that was
impossible for them that time or extremely difficult. And today you have all the methods you need to look for So now since radio seti has failed, why not going back to the second best idea of those times which is looking for artifacts and probes from advanced And I think that's the route we have to take. And we I also believe that instead of looking for anomalies blindly, we
should look specifically for artificial non-human objects. That's uh how I'm thinking. I think it's a error to do UFO projects too open where you look for anything that doesn't match whatever is natural or earthly. I think we need to be much more concrete with what we are looking for. If we're thinking of metallic orbs, you design a project designed for looking for metallic orbs. That makes so much sense. We were talking earlier and there are certain
projects out there that kind of just use generic, you know, a lot of sensor modality, kind of constant observation, and then just the exclusion principle. And it's like, okay, there are all these objects we do recognize. What lies outside of the scope of what we recognize? and you presented this really interesting kind of model which updated me where it was like no you actually need a hypothesis going in that's actually really good that's good science having an idea of what you're looking for and then whatever signatures you'd expect to see from that thing and
actually looking for that precisely and so I guess the question for you would be in the case of UAP or UFO do you have specific signatures you might be looking yes we are looking for either solar that can be short or it can be streaking or we look for emissions for from uh artificial objects. We simply want to look for these very distinct uh and like one discussion I have in a new manuscript that we put out is that I
don't like the definition of UAP because it it fits almost everything now. It's it's so broad and in that way UFO is more limited object. Yes. But even better is flying saucer. because when you have flying saucer, you directly can see the flying saucer in your head. But when you see it in your imagination, you can imagine how it would look in your data, That that you can directly transfer it to an image in uh in your mind makes it possible to design a scientific
experiment that is very clearly looking for these flying saucers. Now, I'm not saying that you should only look for fine saucers because we know about the metallic orbs and and all these other possible signatures we can look for. But, uh, having it so concrete makes it possible to also not only imagine the experiment but also imagine all the ways how it could fail. And all the limitations uh of your design. While when you when people work with exclusion principle and
look for everything that doesn't fit every I mean that doesn't fit the earthly or the natural you have so many things you have to test. You can always go on forever and say and what will you actually prove from that? You just prove that there's a bunch of stuff outside of what you'd expect but you're sort of you know using process of elimination forever. Exactly. So it's it's a barely falsif falsifiable hypothesis. uh while if you have the flying sorcerer a very concrete hypothesis. So I think um my feeling is
that more science projects have to be working with very concrete hypothesis around uh the UFO question. What are you so when you say you're looking for like light reflections and light emissions? Is that specifically like uh you know in a in a specific light wavelength or is it is it other possible signatures or is it it's just Well, you can look all over the electromagnetic spectrum. I'm going to start in the optical but I think the infrared u might be very very
I've heard a lot of uh people commenting on that there are many more UFOs in the infrared. However, I'm a little bit skeptical because um our eyes are trained with the optical. I mean, we are all the time um judging an object what it is based on optical light. When people look at infrared imagery, they don't have that same experience. So, I think it's much easier to find a UFO simply by the lack of experience. It
doesn't mean that they are more visible in the in the infrared. could just mean that we are worse at identifying objects in the infrared. so you think like cuz one example would be you're familiar with the Nimitz case in 2004 Tic Tac. So that was detected right when a forward-looking infrared new system from Rathon was installed on the Nimttz carrier strike group, you know, system or whatever. And so people hypothesized that that aperture allowed them to see
the UFO. And if UFOs are moving like we think they might move, you'd expect light stretching or light crunching. And so in the light stretching case, you'd get, you know, red shifts and you get you, you know, infrared would be probably better. And then in the light crunching case, if it was moving towards you, you'd see UV. And so, you know, may maybe these are good detection methods. I guess we will discover. have to uh we have to do more infrared surveys and simply search for UFOs in it uh or
search for flying saucers in it like I rather suggest. I I I think there has been also um certain like misdirection like um when people try to answer the question what what are UFOs because you have all these UFO reporting groups that spend lots of time trying to say what are UFOs and they say oh no you know 3% of the time it's birds and 10% of the time is is insects and you know they go on I think it's an irrelevant question
the only question that should matter is like are those that would uh push the edge of science which is for for example uh are there non-human intelligence on our planet that's the relevant question to answer not what are UFOs and and what is all falling into that so if you say is there some non-human technology that we see available that's a relevant question the relevant question is of course also if uh u UFOs
have some kind of um medical effect on Or are they posing an a hazard to pilots or uh to people on the sea? Yeah. These are relevant questions but just the question what a UFO it's too broad. Yeah. Have you ever experienced because you are going out on a limb and even looking into this stuff you you know it's you avibe a few other astronomers of serious pedigree are even
entertaining this do you uh have you experienced any blowback for for what you're doing? Yes, I have so far not come in the form of direct uh complaint on my choice of topic from astronomer colleagues. They have been too busy with attacking me for my choice of collaborator and in 2021 uh when we did this discovery of the nine transients uh I published a paper with my colleague Jeff Marcy. So he had been uh cancelled in a uh sexual
harassment scandal in 2015. And uh but he kept on publishing papers and everything kind of I mean he even if he he retired himself but he still published papers and collaborated with scientists except for that the same week as we um uh got our paper accepted into the journal suddenly the National Academy of Sciences decided to kick him out of the
National Academy of Science. sciences. So he was removed from there and then science and nature published papers about it and everyone said who is still collaborating with Jeff Marcy and we had that paper already accepted and I remember someone like calling me and saying don't make any press release because otherwise you're going to get seriously attacked. That's wild. So and so since then I got kicked out of conferences. They find all kind of ways to like not letting me talk, forgetting
my registration. I was had social media attacks. I had like very like I I'm going to work with this scientist because he's fantastic simply. So, and I like I believe in human rights and that's my thing that I don't understand that people should be like um the idea of that one condemns a person outside of the court. In a in a public court is for me
he was never convicted or no nothing like that. So he was that is for me goes against the human rights. And the second thing is that even if people do something wrong, they still should have a chance for rehabilitation. Why is Jeff Marsy suddenly an exception to all human rights? I just could I I cannot accept that. I I have no idea what he did in 2015 and I didn't know him back then. I got to know him much later. So, not even commenting on, you know, whatever happened then. the timing. For
me, I care about the truth as far as, you know, what people's incentives around, you know, attacking the person. It's like you're okay, go after the person when they did it. If if if you really care about the thing they did, but to go after it right when you publish your paper about these anomalous objects, that seems to be at least motivated by the anomalous objects and trying to cover that up and not like the I cannot answer that question. And there might be a it might have been a coincidence but it's anyway it happened that same time. So I have no idea what
to answer on this but I can say that I had a lot of um uh um a lot of troubles because of my collaboration with Jeff. Well, I'm sorry. And uh but uh I will work with him as long as it's productive, as long as it's fun and helps the science. I will keep working with him and I simply am not going to allow some peer pressure to uh stop me or force me into uh giving up my belief into human rights and that's
something that is important to me. Good for you. Do you think we are close to finding anything? I mean do you have like an intuitive sense for just the overall dynamic of you know finding kind of more of a smoking gun more evidence I think we have to search for more uh we have to um do the best we can with the scientific projects we have to attack the data from all directions and we have to ignore all the setbacks
because I think actually one of the things that the whole bad episode with all these uh troubles with the cancel culture taught me is that one has to develop resistance. One has to develop a resistance on peer pressure and critique and I think it maybe even helped me. Would I if I wouldn't have that experience would I dare to work on UFOs today so is a question I ask myself or did that actually liberate me? In some ways that I say okay they're always going to complain. So,
some of my favorite people have been like unreasonably cancelled and it's weirdly freeing because they're just like when you get crucified like that, you're just like what whatever. Especially when it's like completely unwarranted and and and unreasonable. Uh you kind of like let go and just, you know, and then you're really you're kind of free. You're not bounded by like needing to be liked or validated, which most most people are. So, that I think that happened to me. I just say, "Okay, I'm going to do the science I love to do. I love to work on
this topic. I don't care if anyone now uh thinks that I'm touching forbidden land or that I'm saying something that I shouldn't be saying. I know some people are uncomfortable with that. I have the European Crash Retrieval Initiative as a hobby project in my free time." What is that? The European Crash Retrieval Initiative. It's a private uh citizen uh driven crash retrieval team. How do you go looking for crashers? Well, we actually are how can I get involved? So, um, so we have a small database run
by Vasco where we take in, uh, all the tips and suggestions for possible crash retrievals in Europe. We only stay inside Europe because of the uh, it's easier from a legal point of view to And are the databases just like colle crowdsourced from people saying like online I saw a thing crash and that that sort of thing? Yeah, we hope we have u gotten lots of suggestions for cold cases. Uh but we hope to also get some hot case where someone says, "Hey, I saw
a UFO crash yesterday. Can you come That's what we are hoping to get. Do you have any recent cold cases? We are working on a cold case that I cannot go into details on, but it's super cool, super scary. I want to go. [laughter] That sounds amazing. But uh I I can't comment further on that. But there are some really interesting cases. Yes. is there a correlation with where the crashes occur? Are they around specific sites or I cannot answer any questions
about that? I I I I have I'm I'm I cannot comment more on Okay. Is it like it's like a private group or It's a private group. So uh it's uh led by Thomas Pinder and Alex Tal in Sweden. So they are the uh project leaders. Are you guys is there like a desire to commercialize this stuff? We we are trying to actually to stay as uh independent as possible so that we cannot get under pressure in any way. So [clears throat] so far we are not funded. We are just putting our own
private money into uh if there's something fun that we find. We are looking into some interesting cases and we have something particularly interesting right now. I cannot comment on it. Um I hope that we will learn more in the coming year uh while working on that. And the idea is simply that we don't want to wait for governments to open up about materials or UFOs. I simply believe that this is a question everyone can work with. I believe that
the only thing you need is some um some activity that one starts collecting inquiring about potential potential UFO crashes and try to see is there anyone who willing to share material or willing to share uh knowledge of such a crash. Um I suspect that there must be quite a number of such crashes in Europe also and not only uh those that one discusses um those that I want discussed regarding United
States. So where is the information and what can we learn about all this? Is the methodology like scraping the internet for like people writing about this stuff? Well, uh we are doing some active uh investigations of course also looking ourselves for these um places but also hoping that someone will just uh inform us about something that is new because it's sometimes maybe easier to go to a newly crushed UFO than to try to
find it 50 years after. Fascinating. Do you have a hypothesis as to, you know, per our conversation earlier, do you have a hypothesis as to what you'll find in the form of a crashed UFO? Well, it would be nice to find a flying saucer. [laughter] Do you believe most of them are flying saucers or do you think there are, you know, this um Michael Shallon, this journalist, just testified in front of Congress, put out this 12-page report, uh, Immaculate Constellation, this program that seemed to be some unagnowledged special access program in the US. And in it there are like there's
a taxonomy. There are like different descriptions of crafts. You have flying saucers, you have orbs, you have jellyfish is actually mentioned in this document. Do you believe in kind of a variety of things or do you think the flying saucer is the main thing or what do you think? Well, my guess is that there would be a variety of things. Um, but I first would like to get confirmed a single object before I could even speculate further uh we need the actual physical proof and I don't think any government is willing
to release that. Why do you think you know like at least not now? one, if I were playing devil's advocate and acting skeptical, I would say if you really have crashes going on everywhere, they're not just around military installations, then like why don't we have a smoking gun yet? Like if you have plenty of UFO crashes in Europe and other places in remote areas, why don't you have some like Inuit tribe or something just come upon a crashed UFO and then like you
know some anthropologist is visiting and then they see the crash UFO or like I don't know random explorers or travelers or whatever like not we don't have one case of like somebody you know having like at least a larger craft Gary Nolan has in his possession because they were mailed to Jacqu Valle and he did mass spectrometry on them these objects from an Uba tuba crash in Brazil and you know from from Roswell you have bits and pieces of you know possible stuff but you don't have like the larger objects that you might expect. Well, my guess is
that um if I'm going to um think about a counter reply to that is that we have been so much as a society uh marinated in skepticism and we have been uh let's say if you now would see something that is metallic and a flying saucer like maybe you'll think this is some waste from industrial waste that is lying there. you will find probably 1,000 ways of dismissing that.
And if someone would actually say there seems to be a flying saucer in the garden, you will again think that this is some kind of military project and you shouldn't go to check it out not to get into trouble. I think we have ways of uh and coming up with counterarguments so so effectively that we wouldn't be able to recognize a flying saucer if it even just lied in front of us. That's what I think that there is some sort of programming as well that has been
What drives you on a deeper level? Do you hope we do make contact? And if so, how do you how would what would the best form of that contact look like? Absolutely. I really hope we make contact with a benign, kind, and nice civilization. I don't know how likely it is to find such a civilization, but uh imagine if we find out that we are in touch, how much could we learn as species? How much could we learn from them? What could we learn? What are all the discoveries that we don't have to
make but that we could learn about from them directly? I think it's it would be an amazing opportunity for humanity to actually progress. Amen. Is there anything on molecular biology which you studied before or just life in general or religion or anything that you've rethought because of your current contemporary interest from an astronomical perspective in UAP? That's a very good question.
I must say that I don't know the answer to it, but I'm definitely open about the idea that another civilization might have been interacting with us for thousands or tens of thousands of years or longer and that they could have brought some influence already into well our development. I'm open for that. I want to know if it's that way or not. I want clear answers. I want clear
answers with uh if there are any UFOs or flying saucers that can be seen in astronomical data. I want uh simple binary answers to whether there are um non-human artificial objects on the earth or in our oceans or buried underground. And I want to know of course if there is some non-human biologics that has been um caught or by the humans that or by the
military because all these questions can change our understanding of our place in the universe, my place in the universe and I would like to get answers within our lifetime. I think this is the most pressing and important question. I'm with you. It's almost like a governor has been placed on fundamental physics and religion, our our understanding of ourselves and the universe we live in. And that governor hopefully will come off. I have a weird feeling it will in our lifetime which is like wild. I mean maybe I'm wrong, right? Like Stanton Friedman
unfortunately would have been wrong. Like I don't think things shifted that much in the last 50 to 70 years, but maybe maybe now things are speeding up. It kind of feels like they are. It feels that way to me too. Uh I just want to know and I hope that we will get a positive answer soon either through the disclosure process uh for the political movement behind or through uh if that is the case.
I just don't know what will be the implications but I guess we will learn. We'll find out. Well Dr. V Royale I appreciate you spending uh time with me. This was uh really remarkable to just learn about all the stuff you're doing. How can you know is there are you looking for more funding? Is that like something that you're always sort of open to or like what how can people help you uh you know in your in your efforts? Well, there are several ways that they can help us. Uh one is with the Exopro project. We are always looking for more
support to set up more telescopes in uh uh in New Mexico where we have our telescope. I think I didn't um where in New Mexico. So, so, uh, the Exopro project that I'm having now, we're um setting up, uh, a network of telescopes because that will allow us to, um, to, uh, look for such a signature from an extraterrestrial probe or non-human artifact, but also confirm it via multiple telescope. And once you can see
it in at least two telescopes, you can also get the distance to such an object if it's outside the atmosphere where we are looking. So we're looking outside the atmospheres with exop probe. But uh in order to localize it well you need to have at least two that are well and of course for every additional telescope there is a running cost coming in and also the cost of the telescope itself. So this is one way that one can be supporting us. Another thing that I would hope to do in Europe is that we
would like to have at some point a uh completely dedicated to um non-human artifacts and how to search for them in space, in the atmosphere, underwater, underground, underground. And also these are things that are difficult to organize. we would where we always can uh will appreciate some kind of practical support uh to organize it if you have a hole in Europe that we could use for free for the audience and so on.
So there's lots of ways one can help. Awesome. Well audience help Dr. Buriel if you can if any of that applies to you. I really appreciate that was awesome. That was fantastic. Yeah.
Machine captions of public videos by American Alchemy (Jesse Michels); rights remain with the creator; provided for research and citation.