Bill Maher on Why Alien Disclosure Would Get Ugly Fast

Transcript

I think it's just simply we are we are not alone and a US president stepping to the microphone and making that clear for the entire human population. It just would have so many huge costs >> and is and it's your belief I think and many others that the reason this really hasn't happened is because it would scare people. >> No, no, I I think there's a lot of reasons like we go into a lot of reasons in the film but those reasons have sort of changed over time. I think originally it was simply if you put yourself in the shoes of military and intelligence officials in the 40s and you realize this is real, you you got to find out a lot of answers to your own questions before you make it known, right? And then I think they found out that this was happening in adversarial nations too. And then it became like a cold war dynamic of we got to keep this secret cuz we don't want our enemies to know what we know and don't know.

And one of the ways they kept it secret is they created the stigma around this topic. That's revealed in my film. One of the senior CIA officials in my film says that elements of the intelligence community, including the CIA, created the stigma around this early on, late 40s, early 50s to get people thinking it's crazy. If you look into this, it's a it's a kind of a genius way to get people to avoid, you know, asking questions, right, and looking into it. And then that gets into the culture and it gets compounded over the years.

Then the stigma gets created. Then the stigma became a reason for people not to want to speak up about it because no one wanted their reputation ruined. >> But would there not be panic? >> I think there I think at one point people early on I think in the 40s and 50s there was a general feeling amongst military intelligence people that knew about this that we need to we need to learn a lot more about this before we tell the world there's a situation that we don't know anything about and we can't protect you from and cause panic. Right. But I I think it's naive to think that in 2026 people are going to be jumping out of buildings if they find out of uh that that we're not alone in the universe.

>> They're jumping out of buildings. But I can't imagine a lot of rednecks wouldn't be like we got to kill these [ __ ] now while we got them in our sights. While we got the we got the muscle, we got the the armaments. We got everything we need. We got to kill these people.

We don't I can't believe there wouldn't be that faction in America. >> Look, there'll be all over the world. >> There'll be a lot of mixed responses, but ultimately the reality of it is one of the big learnings from making this film is that we are in a race with adversarial nations, most notably China, to crack this technology. And we have a better chance of winning that race. technology UAP technology the technology at play like so the film reveals that that >> you mean reverse engineering their craft >> yeah so the film reveals that >> do we have their craft >> yeah so yeah so number of the intelligence officials in the film reveal that there's a deeply hidden crash retrieval program in the US there's also China some of them have crashed >> so they're not perfect >> yeah yeah and we've retrieved some of that technology >> they're aliens they're not [ __ ] gods right >> yeah I mean That's That's just the fact.

>> Yeah. I mean, they're dealing with >> because I've heard people say, "Well, if if they're so if they're so advanced, how come they keep crashing their vehicles?" Well, I don't think they keep crashing their vehicles. I think, you know, >> well, all technology has some kind of like >> either flaw or vulnerability, right? And so one of the things that [snorts] people in my film talk about is in the early days of our atomic atomic weapons program um we realized an unintended consequence of testing was it could cause some of these UAP that we didn't know were there to crash. So there's been all these learnings over over over time of what crash. I'm sure there are some one reason why they have been monitoring us for so long is cuz they don't know about this planet and they're finding out.

They're gathering information. I mean, if I don't know if you >> or they've been here long before us >> or they have been here long before us, but if it's the reverse, if they they're just discovering us and were alarmed because they got the little beep on their phone that said, "Nope, they went nuclear. Okay, we got to get down there and see what's going on." I mean like in War of the Worlds, which is what I go by. That's my Bible. No, I'm kidding because when is Scientology ever led us astray scientifically, but you know that is sort of based that is the Scientolo I mean I could see why Tom Cruz was attracted to do that movie other than the fact that it's an awesome movie and Spielberg directed it.

But it is about the because I think in Scientology they believe that stuff was buried underground and then came up and that's what happens in War of the Worlds. But as you remember in War of the Worlds this there's no real ending to it. Uh the aliens are totally kicking our ass and then they just die and Morgan Freeman does the voice over and everyone is like okay. >> That's also what happens at the end of Crystal Skull. Indiana Jones Crystal Skull.

They find the UFO that was buried underneath the pyramid. rises up at the end of the movie >> and dies. >> No, it just rises. It comes. Okay.

Rises >> because it roar the world. They just die because they got a virus. >> Yeah. >> So, it's really co I'm if they had just worn the masks, I'm always saying to everybody, let's go back to wearing masks. I'm kidding.

Of course. >> Well, like going back to the the thing that concerned everyone I interviewed was that if we as a nation don't take this more seriously and make it a real national priority, then we could wake up one day and find out that that China beat us in this race and the consequences could be huge. >> So what what what does that mean? China would be allied with the >> No, no, no. So aliens. So, a number of the officials in the film reveal that our country and Russia and China all have these hidden programs that are retrieving crashed UAP and trying to reverse engineer them.

And it's a technology race. They refer to it as the Manhattan Project on steroids. And so the idea is, you know, here we have this stigma that originally was created to keep people from looking into this and now it's kind of backfiring and that we're in a technology race now and the majority of scientists in our country don't even know this is real. They don't know it's a valid area of inquiry. >> That that you get to something that I found so fascinating in the movie, which is the idea that a lot of what we know about all of this phenomenon is compartmentalized.

Yeah. like the CIA knows this and the energy department knows this and the defense department knows this and they don't necessarily share the information and we got to I mean to me this is a little like the Epstein files except not under underage girls little green men. Okay. [laughter] Uh like we want the files out. We want you to collate all the files cuz we saw with the Epstein thing it was a [ __ ] show.

It came out drip by drab. some of it was real. Then suddenly we got a million more. And you know, >> I mean, honestly, >> I feel like that's what's going on with this. Except again, not underage girls, little green men.

And if we could just get all these agencies to share, cuz you are all on the same team, guys. We're all in the American government. Share. And then and then because that has to happen, I think, before they release it to the people. >> Yeah.

But the better the honestly the better analogy is the 9/11 situation. Intelligence the intelligence community wasn't sharing information in the most effective way and there was intelligence gaps and then this horrible intelligence failure happened and and this attack happened and and and we all dealt with consequences and then what h what happened after that? Everyone said, "Oh, this has to be course corrected." So we formed the director of national intelligence position as as an answer to that, right? and their sole job is to coordinate the intelligence community so information is actually shared. Right? All we all we did was create a giant new ridiculously large uh unobservable in many ways bureaucracy.