Dr. Beatriz Villarroel with Dr. Garry Nolan: UAP Detected in Orbit Before Satellites

Transcript

[Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] Hello everyone and welcome to the Soul Forum, the Soul Foundation's monthly digital meeting devoted to the science, politics, philosophy, and culture surrounding unidentified anomalous phenomena. or UAP, formerly known as UFOs. I'm the co-founder and director of research at the Soul Foundation and I host this monthly meeting so that we can have a serious uh space for uh discussion uh of really the issues of the day surrounding uh the topic.

Um I'm very excited today to have our um uh a colleague and and friend of the soul foundation uh Dr. Batrice uh Vio Royale as our guest. She's an astronomer and the lead scientist uh uh on a project called the vanishing and appearing sources during a century of observations project. Now that's a mouthful but what it means is as an astronomer she uh conducts research on what are called transients uh transient astronomical objects uh sometimes disappearing stars um that appear in uh images gathered uh uh in astronomical surveys. and she's linked this research very interestingly to UAP um in a very ingenious way I've always found um inspiring and and and interesting.

Um she's trying to correlate um uh these vanishing objects with um historical UAP events um and also to you know simply see if there's a difference between uh transients that are natural that might be artificial possibly. So it's a very ingenious line of research. It's one of the reasons that um she has come to work with the soul foundation. She's uh not just a friend of the organization but she's been on uh our advisory board uh since the beginning and she's spoken uh at our uh last two symposia the first of which was at Stanford. She's also going to speak at our next symposium which takes place in Italy um in October of this year 2025.

If you're watching this in uh August, September or October of of this year 2025, the registration is still open and it's an opportunity to see her in person. But anyway, without further ado, we want to bring uh Batri on. Um she is a visiting professor at the Nordic Institute of theoretical Physics at Stockholm University. Again, she's the lead scientist on the Vasco project. Um and she's recently um published in preprints uh three or four articles on her research on transients which um show potentially remarkable results.

Um and you know look we can have a amazing conversation about this because it's it's it's cutting edge research that what everyone thinks of it should should uh be fascinating and it'll generate um even more discussion than it has already. It's it's making headlines right now and uh I and we think it will continue to. So anyway, Betric um welcome and you know sorry to to give a kind of introduction that could could make someone nervous but you know as you know a lot of us think the world of you and your your work. >> So to kick things off I want to ask you um you know how you got into this line of inquiry in astronomy. It's it's it's very unusual.

It's very innovative to want to link um uh you know the potential of UAP or objects that would create techno signatures to the study of transients. Um and and also to look back at very old astronomical data. I think most astronomers don't do that. Um so how did you get into this? >> So it's actually a long story. So I was a PhD student and I was like writing short stories or fables and I was writing this story about a quazar.

Well, it this was well I will not dig into the details. >> Tell us you you were saying you were writing fiction. I was I was enjoying that kind of stuff when I was a student or PhD student and then when I finished it and I killed off my poor quazer and uh well it I mean unintentionally but it it it happened to the poor quazer and I just wondered like can an object just vanish? Can a star vanish? Has anyone ever looked for vanishing objects? And uh it it was just from a fable to just this idea. And in the first one year passed and I didn't know how to check that. Two years passed, I didn't know how to check that.

And on the fourth year of my PhD studies, I finally learned about the US naval observatory catalog, US no catalog. And uh that is from the 50s. And I said, "Oh my god, this is my opportunity to check if any object or any galaxy ever vanished." So it was just a crazy thing that I was like curious about and I wanted to check and then I learned about the concept of failed supernova that some stars could collapse directly into black holes uh without emitting a bright supernova. And I was just excited. Okay, let's go.

Let's go and look for this. So we did a pilot study. So me with two bachelor students, we tried to look for it. We found some kind of candidate and it wasn't fantastic. Other people thought also, oh this could be Dyson spheres if you find things that vanish.

So there was a connection both to like just a fundamental idea. Can something just vanish? And and failed supernova, but also this uh techno signatures research. It was a I mean there is a cross-section between different fields of astronomy. So it was a fun thing and then uh I I met um senior scientists who said okay let's do it in a real way let's actually do it like uh with a whole sample and I kind of thought it was cool and in um 2017 2018 we started thinking about how do we do this with a complete sample and uh we started um well working with crossmatching again the US Naval Observatory catalog to the pan stars to the SDSS and then we came to a moment where I had 150,000 candidates um from the US Naval Observatory catalog that couldn't be found in the modern ones and this was diluted down to like 15% of the sample because it's too big to handle. So we took 15% and that means 24,000 candidates that I had to look through one by one.

Yes, I looked through alone 34,000 candidates like small image cutouts and among these we found 100 transients and these 100 transients appear to um appear like appeared and vanish within one plate exposures you see one star in the 50s that you cannot find again and we published a paper on this we didn't know what it was we were wondering like what something shortlived what could that be and then u after we had published this study I decided to do a follow up and follow up analysis and I discovered that one of these images I had nine of them not one nine things that appeared and vanished and I was like what is this and of course you try to analyze it tried to to understand it in the best way possible and we there arrived at two possible explanations maybe some kind of weird contamination of the plates that all for whatever reason produce star-like objects that all have star-like brightness profiles because we also did diagnostics. We measure the star uh the brightness profiles of the stars or if this may be some kind of um reflections in space from something artificial. However, these images were from before Sputnik one. So then the next paper, our 2022 paper is a suggestion on how to separate between these two cases. Uh where you not only look for multiple objects, but you also look for those that are aligned in order to search for the best pos possible uh candidates to be actually an artifact of something non-human that is in space.

So that's it's just like one question led to the other. That's really quite a uh evolution, you know. It it's it that it started with with fiction or science fiction. Um and it really was just uh you started with a very kind of basic and innocent question about whether an object could vanish and and and you made it to this um uh strange possible discovery of of seeing nine uh transients where where you thought you would see zero or one. But but recently in updating that work, you were challenged uh by a peer reviewer um to yes to we we'll go into that in a second, but a peer reviewer challenged you in a certain way that led you to discover something much more.

And and right now your data is suggesting that you've got um thousands of >> hundreds of thousands >> hundreds or hundreds of thousands a really remarkably high number >> of transients appearing in what's called the um uh in in plates from I think it's called the Palymore uh observatory um uh sky survey uh from the 1950s. And so these are again pre-sputnik era um uh plates which um show that uh there may be something in orbit of the earth at that time. >> Um and and you've got a remarkably uh high uh uh sigma on the results um much much higher than than high confidence data would be. So, so tell us how you you know what what you're seeing in this data >> and Yeah. So this was like um so we we had already found some candidates where we so we we uh looked back at this test that I mentioned where we were looking for align things uh like alignments or things that are in a narrow band because you could have I mean something could be in a narrow band or alignments either because it's kind of uh tumbling in space let's say at when it's in orbit and then sometimes it will have glints or like solar reflections.

or it could be that you have something that is an affirmation. So we were looking for these things and um the paper is focusing however on the solar reflection hypothesis more and um so then the referee said okay but you you really need to prove that it is solar reflections. So if that's true, then you're going going to have a visit or that they vanish in the Earth's shadow. Because of course, if something is in the Earth's shadow, you're not going to get solar reflections there. And if you have gleans due to solar reflections, you're not going to have them there.

So you can expect a deficit. So I was thinking, how do I do this? Because now our best candidate actually from the alignment test uh is a a candidate that has a quite unusual alignment. You see five objects in a narrow band and the probability for that for like um uh for that alignment is something like 1 in 10,000. And for a weird coincidence it happened on the Washington DC flap in 1952 27th of July. And for >> and ju just so people understand what you mean.

You mean the uh these were events in 1952, July of 1952 where over two weekends u there were there were many uh UAP sightings um both at the uh taking place uh at the Washington National Airport. Um there were military observations at the time and it really created quite a controversy where the the Air Force had to address it. >> Exactly. And for whatever reason our best candidates were from those dates and actually two different sets but one is an alignment another is a triple transient that was discovered in a high confidence data set very carefully seeded by my colleague and Solano. was start wondering like oh my god is there a coincidence or is there a correlation anyway? So um so I was thinking like how do we test this with Umbra when we just have a handful of candidates because I was always thinking of our candidates like just a handful of them.

But then I thought okay so let me use actually this entire data set and Ricky sent me and we have 106,000 uh like transients there. Many of them we think are just probably plate defects that are like this sample hasn't been visually inspected. So many of them might be just false positives and some of them we believe might be real. Of course, we want to find the real ones. So that's why we're looking for these alignments.

Anyway, so we run this test and try to check how many of them are in the Earth's shadow and we find a remarkable deficit when you just if if you just take the raw data, not raw data, the the raw test and you um look how many are in the shadow and how many you expect in the shadow, you land at an under density that is significant at the 22 sigma level. And that's something I mean it's bigger chance that you get eaten by a black hole tomorrow than that you land on that value by chance. You can also do it much more refined by comparing which plates were actually exposed and at what time and you look at uh the same transients and you still arrive at an almost 8 sigma result which again is extremely low probability to happen by chance. And um and then you start like really wondering like oh my god the so the deficiency we see is like one/ird of the sample seems to be missing in the earth's shadow and that's a big number. >> That's a big number.

>> It's a remarkable number and and so is the probability of of um you know your your provisional conclusions about this being correct. I want to ask one question. It's a very naive question but I think it will be uh helpful not just to me but to many people watching this. >> Explain the significance of uh the fact that um many of these possible transients um disappear when they enter into the earth's umbra or shadow. So these transients that we see that are like um point sources uh they are let's say if you would have an asteroid or I mean the way how we are looking at these uh point sources if you would have an asteroid or something like that if it would be vanishing I mean if something is vanishing between two plates in half an hour it's going to usually leave a streak if you would have asteroids it would be streaks the only thing that we know today that are having the kind of signatures that we see on the sky today are um high orbit satellites and space debris because they are very flat.

They are highly reflective. Imagine a mirror or something really flat in a high orbit. Sometimes these things produce these kind of short flashes of light for let's say half a second and then you see something that looks like a point source. And if it would be at much lower orbit, you're more likely to see the streaking things. And and so that's the significance.

So it kind of indicates that we are looking at something at many objects that are flat and very shiny, >> okay? >> And don't look very natural, >> which of course is someone interested in in UAP. That's that's a that's a very interesting um uh hypothesis or or um you know inference because reported UAP are often uh fairly fairly flat or disc-like and uh in fact they're they're metal and reflective um even in sunlight in the atmosphere. >> Okay. So my my next question uh Batrice is you know and again it's another naive question but it'll just help me and and people listening understand better the research explain to us what a aligned transient is or aligned transients are. Oh well sometimes when you have a satellite or space debris uh now of course depends on the way how you're imaging your stuff and the telescopes and setup but sometimes you can see uh an object well as it orbits you can it's going to be rotating and tumbling and you get flashes that are on a line or on a on an along an arc.

And also of course if you have something information you might also see something that looks like it's in a formation. So these things are in I mean they're good signatures and that one can look for. So if if you want to test the hypothesis of that you have an alien artifact and you and you think that okay I don't know how to separate all these transients I have on the plate from how do I separate between contamination and uh real reflections. Then you can go and look for things that are on a line. for example.

And that's what we try to do. We try to look for things that are on a line or in a narrow band for the possibility of formations as well. Okay. Gotcha. Okay.

Amazing. Again, this is, you know, this stuff is is super super intriguing. Um, you know, in a moment, in a moment, we're going to bring in a a a special guest, so to speak, to to ask some follow-up questions, but I've got I've got one more um which I think is important for people to to hear and and to understand. Now you've drawn multiple interesting correlations kind of there's a a triangle of correlations here between um if I understand it the um the transients uh first um second um uh above ground nuclear tests um taking place um often I think you know very close um in time to the appearance of the transients and then you're also correlating uh both the transients and the nuclear tests with um UAP events. So, so tell us about that.

That's pretty remarkable to me that you you you don't just have correlation between two things, you've got correlation between three things and um in all directions. >> So, the genius behind this work is my colleague Steven Brew who is the first author of the paper. He's at Thunderbolt University. So he has taken samples of u nuclear tests uh and he has taken the vascos samples the same that we won the one that Enriquea sent to me and he has taken samples of UFO sightings from the UFO catalog and he asked the question he was thinking back on the same um um interesting coincidences that we saw when our best cases happened to be during the Washington 1952 flap. and he asked hm could it be so that there is a like temporal correlation uh that explains these coincidences and of course if you also have a temporal correlation it's not going to agree with the notion of that that the entire sample are plate defects because then you wouldn't see those correlations if it's enough with that you have a significant fraction and you would already have interesting correlation perhaps with uh Well, with something uh as nuclear bomb test if there is a physical connection although remember of course always that correlation does not equal to causation.

However, it does not agree with plate defects. This is something that you can say that this defies that again the same way as with the Umbra test also defies the plate defect hypothesis. And so he tested this and he found weak correlations but significant correlations. Um and then you see these correlations between it's around 3 sigma level. I don't remember exactly 2.8 or something but it's around three sigma for the UFOs and nuclear bomb tests.

And this is of course agreeing with the lore and the legend of UFOs and nukes. and he sees the same thing with the transients and the UFOs and the transients and the nukes. So, it's like a triangle of things. So, that was very nice and very fun to see. I thought it exciting.

>> It's remarkable and and we have to remember that, you know, even if it's if we treat it just as data, it's something people can follow up on and it's it opens up scientific research. Now, now that brings me to, I think, a interesting turn in this conversation, which is we're going to be joined now by my co-founder at Soul and uh Soul's chairman of the board, uh Stanford University Medical School professor, entrepreneur, uh inventor, cancer researcher, um uh uh the remarkable Gary Nolan. Um, and this is going to be fun because I mean look, as you both know and as many people listening know, you know, uh, even 10 years ago, but certainly 20 years ago, um, it was unthinkable that we would have, uh, scientists of your caliber, um, not just discussing UAP in public, but actually, um, doing, uh, uh, scientific research according to norms and with proper funding um, into the phenomena and you both do that and um you both are remarkably imaginative scientists, extremely rigorous scientists. So we want to give the audience an opportunity to hear the two of you in dialogue um uh about this research and for you Gary to to ask some more questions of Bri about the data, how she gathered it, how she analyzed it. Well, first I want to ping off of something that you just said a moment ago about uh doing science properly.

And so first I want to congratulate Beatatric on this remarkable series of papers uh that she's done. And and frankly the I think very careful way that you presented it by trying to stay away from uh hyperbolic claims. I mean, there's nothing wrong with saying, "Hey, there's an association with UAP." Of course, you're going to be quoted as saying uh in the newspapers that you these were UAP, but I I note in the language that you used, you were incredibly uh diplomatic and careful uh about it. But I want to also point out something that's been happening now for like the last two or three years. Whether it was the paper I published on the council bluffs material with Jacques and Larry Lemi or whether it was Kevin Nuth's papers or whether it was papers in fact frankly from Robert Powell and and others and now you and Avi Lobe uh that those papers are not being criticized by the usual chorus of critics and I think that's first of all for two reasons Because scientifically, such as with your work, it was done correctly.

You make careful uh note of all the methodologies that were used, come up with alternative explanations, self-critique yourself, uh go to peer review, etc. And so in essence, almost what it does in a good way is make the paper boring. uh and so bor not in a negative sense but so boring that they can't be critiqued because the hyperbolic claims don't become a magnet for the trolls and what it does is it places it squarely in the realm of being able to be looked at by other scientists and what I hope that we're doing with the soul foundation is creating an area within which people can have a mature conversation and So, what I'd like to know first is from the let's I'm I'm sure there's critics out there already in the astrophysics field who are uh already ringing the bell. Um besides those who are doing that is there so far any positive feedback that you're getting about where people are at least saying hey this is interesting tell me >> I have received yes this is interesting from some people some astronomers that they're like they're getting curious about it and I think that already makes me like happy because I don't think you can I I think people need to see that this work uh stands the test of time before they um yeah before they accept it. So and I think people are going to want to redo things.

So I hope we can make our samples public soon when the papers are uh published so that everyone can go into it and I'm almost even imagining imagine if you would have a website where you kind of jokingly put the title look for your flying saucers yourself and they can do all these tests with the raw data. They can look at the images. They can look at like do diagnostics because just looking at the images with your eyes is going to fool you because the eyes cannot very often you need diagnostics to tell the difference between a star and a round plate defect or something like that. But imagine a page that does all these diagnostics for you and then it goes in, it does the alignments test, it does the ombra test and then like a little bit like a game you can either arrive at the flying saucers or not. So I'm a little bit playing with that idea.

It would be kind kind of a fun thing to do. >> So that kind of leads to a question of I mean this data presumably is already available. I mean you got a hold of it. Where is it kept or behind what uh permissions uh are it is it kept that you had to overcome to be able to do the analysis that you >> everyone have uh access to the images. you can get the raw images from the SDSCI survey and there's a lot of images there that you can get.

But then uh if you want to get um let's say the SP if you want to have a list of transients, the Spanish virtual observatory has already posted some of the uh transient cataloges. the latest that is a little bit cleaner than the others. uh we still haven't published and we have to do it together with the papers and um so you have of course these raw images and from these raw images you have to create a list of transients and there are different ways of doing this but you're going to have to uh compare images of different epochs and of course it's not enough to only compare two images because then you're going to get after every asteroid especially if you have 50 years of difference you're also going to have different um plate depths. So there's a lot of analysis going into selecting these transients. It's not as like too easy because you also need to look at every dot and try to make diagnostics.

Is this a star or is it a round thing or what is that? And then Ricky Solano has produced a beautiful catalog then where he has been cleaning up this data and done a lot of work with that. So a lot of the data then from what I'm understanding is collected but still offline waiting to be processed from raw data into usable data. some is online. Some of these uh these steps there you can find them because they have been published with the M and Ras and are at the Spanish virtual observatory web page. Got it.

>> And um but the in the latest preprints we have a slightly cleaner sample and that one we still need to make available and I hope we can do it with the once the preprints are published. >> So define clean in a way that hopefully convinces people that it doesn't sound like doctorred. What is what does doctor do mean? >> Uh fixed host played with >> um so you if you have a star let's say uh it's going to have a um PSF shape uh point spread function and you usually want to match your object to to this point spread function and you also have photographic plates that are slightly different than CCDs. So their response and the way how they build uh the luminosity the objects is not the same as on CCDs. So what you need to do is to uh uh basically make sure that your the objects the points you have are matching this PSF that it has this uh point spread point spread function >> and that's how you select your stars.

you have you have the morphology, you have this PSFS and you need to just get rid of rid of all the crap that >> could you define for maybe you already did what a point spread function basically. >> Um so it's basically it's basically a gshion you just look there a dark spot in the middle with a fuzziness going out to the edge. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> So that's what you do.

you match against this caution and that's >> so I noticed in one of the papers that you mentioned that you're starting down the path of using AI to either look for or validate or create classifiers. >> Exactly. We need to somehow be able to clean like clean away plate defects more of them. Some of them are assembling on the edges of the plates and you need to how do you really get rid of all of this and I don't know how to do right now. So, we're talking Steven, we're talking to our AR AI expert friend.

We need to somehow just improve the samples and I don't know yet how you do do that in a way that doesn't skew the data or bias the data. So, >> so one of the things that I was wondering about in terms of the correlations to um the uh nuclear test >> uh sites um and dates is how many dates might not have ever actually been recorded because for instance maybe they were Soviet tests versus Chinese tests. >> That's a good question. I think we are missing out on quite some there. >> Yeah, >> possibly.

>> But you might be able to increase the the values. >> Um, >> here's Would you would you mind if I jump in with ahead question for both of you? Now something we haven't brought up yet uh Batrice is that I believe there's a date in 1956 when the transients disappear >> and that's a date that comes before the end of this particular um astronomical survey. >> So tell us a little bit about this and then after that Gary I'd like to hear your your reaction to that because I think this is this is also a very significant uh feature of the data. So uh there was they were reporting that the UFOs vanished after a certain date and um one stopped seeing them appearing around the nuclear facilities and I think we also don't see the correlation after 56. So um was one of the things that was noted in the paper by Steven.

So >> I don't know, maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe we have too little data, but it's nevertheless interesting. So what kind of let's say atmospheric now I know that doesn't explain why things showed up before as opposed to after but what kind of atmospheric effects might have been created that anybody could imagine uh by nuclear tests themselves that would mimic uh any of this I mean the reflectivity as an example >> um let's say if you have um we were talking about it might be some kind of glowing fireballs or so in the atmosphere. However, they are going to be streaking. If a telescope is tracking the stars and they are going to be seen as streaks, not as point sources.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I'm asking these questions more to provide ammunition for the people who are first of all going to ask those questions perhaps sometimes reasonably and perhaps sometimes just to be annoying so that the audience so armed could have your answer uh as the immediate comeback. >> Yeah, it's the same thing with cosmic rays. people sometimes say okay so it's maybe it's not plate defects but maybe you have cosmic rays because then that could explain uh why you see a correlation with the nuclear tests >> and why you let's say the transients are just some kind of cosmic rays or that got stuck on the plate and of course if you also have nuclear tests you'll have more of it around those dates and of then I wonder why would we see a correlation with UFO events and I also would wonder why does it vanish in the Umbra why does it vanish in the earth shadow, >> right? >> So, I think that's where >> wouldn't you expect in the umbrell shadow is that is that uh redundant? Um would would the moon be capable of creating >> much weaker? >> Much weaker ones.

>> Not much weaker ones. And and what about is there any way from these plates to pick up polarization of the light? because reflection would often lead to polarization of the >> of the light, right? >> I haven't thought of that, but that's a great question. So, um would need to think more about it. >> I don't think Yeah, >> is there >> I have to think. Yeah, I got to think about I wonder if there's anything in the photographic plates that would allow you I mean >> the photographic plates are are they behind glass >> and would and would the glass lead to are any is are any of the lenses polarized? >> I don't think so >> already.

Yeah. Well, and one one thing here is I I noticed in one of the papers or one of your interviews, Brier, you noted that when the um >> when the plates when there are differences in I believe the depth of the plate that can create um >> yeah, it it creates that's one of the reasons why we might need to use AI. Sometimes you get you you use an automated method and you get something it tells you, oh you got lots of transients on a plate and then you go in and watch and it's actually just a little difference in depth between two images. So one goes deeper than the other and then you collect a lot of transients but they are not transients they are just an error I mean difference in how uh deep the image is or you get a lot of transients sometimes because the astrometry isn't perfect. So you're comparing slightly their offsets in the coordinates.

So there's all these things that sometimes have to be sorted out >> and that are diluting the sample. So >> it's >> what kind of resources meaning money are required now to go back over the data in an automated fashion but also to let's say speed up uh the uh cleaning up of the original data and all of the stuff that you're talking about. I mean >> so and has already done a very beautiful like automated fashion of all these like of the photographic plates u but I guess it would need the AI to help with all these little things like the differences in depth removing scanning defects uh also more efficiently. So if you had all the needed resources to at the very least replicate either the Vasco or the Palomar results uh what would those resources be? I mean how many postto equivalents are required? What kinds of computational resources are needed? uh how much of that for instance could be you know donated by people as time uh as volunteers versus people you would want on staff uh you know >> Gary's asking you I think for your your dream setup as a scientist if you had the the dream budget the dream staff the dream facility dream resources >> okay then I would have two two postocs no one postoc and a PhD student and we would have access to the Vatican. We would also have access to the virtual observatory of Ukraine and we would redo the same experiment but or replicate it with uh these different surveys and we would go and see do we see transients? How many transients do we see? Well, the number is not interesting for diagnostics, but what we would really want to see is if they are aligned transients, if they are groups of transients and most important, do they vanish in the shadow? Do they correlate with nuclear test? We would simply do all these things, all these diagnostics, but with different samples from different observatories.

That's what I would like to do. And maybe one postto and a PhD student would be enough. >> Do any of them look like they're geostationary? Um, I don't know. I think not really. I think they're more on the geocynchronous ones.

>> They just they just show up and then they're and then they're gone. >> Yeah. >> How many observatories have these kinds of plates? >> Um, there are quite a lot. CCL has a complete chain of um like uh different observatories that one can Yeah. That that one can go to their site.

not you can't go to their site but you can um probably contact them and you can get access to the original plates but the original plates is not going to be enough because there's a big process in digitizing them. >> Yeah. So you preferably go to a place that has digitized all the plates, >> right? >> But it it could be even more interesting if you actually if it wouldn't even be us replicating it because I think there is one thing if we replicate it. But let's say if others >> governments would give a little amount of funding to the observatories there that have these plate collections, I think it's enough with €300,000. >> Okay.

If each government >> just gives it to their let's say if the German government gives it to Sundberg observatory and says okay digitize all these plates extract the transients and take a look if you see this um difference of this deficit in the umbra. >> Mhm. >> Because if you would do that and replicate it from different observatories from different countries you would learn so much more about this effect if you can confirm it. And also you would have um I mean you would have much more information about the distribution of these objects what they are. It would be a much more interesting project than if we just replicated with Palomar once more >> right >> or or with a Harvard plates or something.

You would need more of systematic uh effort going into this in replication effort. >> So is any of this Go ahead Peter. I was going to say we have to go to the break soon. So I want to ask you guys both a question about um what I understand the the sigma to be on this. I mean the I know batrice you've told me that that finding that you've got uh I think 22 sigma and some of the results is is it's very intimidating to see that about your own research.

Um >> so I want to ask first a question uh to Gary about that. um you know give for the general public um a a sense of what that would mean if that's if that's accurate or if that holds up over time >> um and and what could be done to kind of um uh further validate that that's accurate. >> Well, I mean 22 sigma is an extraordinary number first of all uh in terms of confidence interval. uh I don't know what it directly translates into what we usually use as a p value uh in biology of uh confidence but you know as a friend of mine uh as we actually we both know uh we all know Jacqu Valle he uh says uh 95% assuredness is enough for a scientist to produce a paper uh but 95% assuredness in the intelligence community assumes that that information has given to you and you really want the other 5% because that's where the real value is. Um so I I think you know if if we could give a sense to the late community what a 22% sigma means.

I mean it essentially means you're going to win at roulette several times in a row at uh Las Vegas where you placed it on a single number. >> Okay. Well well said. I mean, I'll let a statistician give the direct number, but Beatatric, you know, give a layman's term metaphor. >> Well, I usually think of that it's a bigger chance that one gets eaten like a by a black hole tomorrow.

>> Yeah. Yeah, that was a good one. I heard it earlier. >> Yeah. >> Or that I win in in lottery.

>> Yeah. So, so we have to go to our break now um with Merrick Maric Ren comp and the uh soul briefing. So, we'll we'll be back soon. [Music] Hello and welcome to the August 2025 edition of the soul briefing. I'm Maric von Camp.

This month we'll be covering new details on the brazen incursions by unknown objects over Wright Patterson Air Force Base late last year. eyebrow raising UAP focused comments from Vice President JD Vance and Senator Mike Rounds and the introduction of the historic UAP Disclosure Act by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. But we begin this month's briefing with the groundbreaking work of astronomer Dr. Beatatric Varel and her colleagues in a fascinating new paper titled Aligned Multiple Transient Events in the first Palomar Sky Survey. Dr.

Via Roel and Rakose authors analyzed thousands of transients star-like phenomena that appear in presputnik astronomical surveys of the sky when no man-made objects orbited the Earth. Now the key to the astronomers work is that they find with exceptionally high confidence far higher than the five sigma standard generally considered to be the threshold for claiming a statistically significant discovery in astronomy or physics that these transient phenomena are not are not found in the earth's shadow which is also known as the umbra. This intriguing result, if it is confirmed in the peerreview process, is important for two main reasons. First, it largely rules out optical artifacts or defects as explanations for the transients. Imaging defects, for example, would have no reason to avoid the Earth's shadow.

Second, the dir of transients in the Earth's shadow suggests the presence of previously unknown sunlight reflecting objects that due to the optical characteristics of the equipment involved were several hundred kilometers above the Earth. Not only that, Dr. Vorel and her colleagues found several candidate transients that appear aligned. If the transient phenomena are indeed reflections of the sun off of bright shiny objects in the presutnik era, such alignments suggest any number of possibilities to include multiple objects reflecting the sun as they fly in formation, different parts of the same object reflecting the sun, erratic flight dynamics, or a combination of these possibilities. Intriguingly, one of the most statistically significant alignments of transients was captured on July 27th, 1952, which coincides with the second weekend of the well-known and very well doumented July 1952 UAP incidents over Washington DC when multiple radar facilities, pilots, and ground observers all saw objects behaving in perplexing ways.

days over the course of two successive weekends. Now, this work by Dr. Vel and her colleagues is particularly interesting because the earliest US government analyses of UAP dating back to the late 1940s and early 1950s all describe quote metallic or quote light reflecting objects. Not only that, the UAP era formally began in late June 1947 when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold observed a quote bright flash reflecting off of one of nine disclike objects that flew erratically in the vicinity of Mount Reineer in Washington State. Arnold's handdrawn image of one of the objects specifically states very bright when sun reflected end quote.

Now, the September 1947 Twining memo, one of the most important documents in UAP history, which ordered the US Air Force's formal investigation of the phenomenon, described the objects observed by many credible witnesses up to that point, first and foremost as having a quote metallic or light reflecting surface end quote. Similarly, a late 1948 Air Force analysis of UAP largely rules out mass hysteria, individuals seeking media attention or media influence as explanations for UAP. Because in one notable example, two trained observers working with the then US Weather Bureau saw quote metallic discs end quote with a quote flat bottom end quote on multiple occasions months before before Kenneth Arnold's widely reported June 1947 sighting. Now, while time constraints do not permit a full accounting of the many, many incidents where credible witnesses reported quote flashes or in another notable instance, the quote bright shiny appearance of sunlight reflecting from aluminum end quote. Suffice it to say that the UAP reported beginning in the late 1940s offer a plausible hypothesis for the brief transient glints identified by Dr.

VRel and her colleagues in those contemporaneous astronomical surveys. It should also be noted that many witnesses described such metallic light reflecting objects exhibiting bizarre erratic flight characteristics such as quote wobbling, oscillating, and flipping. Such observations are also not merely relics of the past. The Navy air crew that observed the well-known gimbal UAP in 2015, which appears to have a disc-like shape in infrared video, reported that the object appeared to engage in a quote wobbly motion after the end of the publicly available video segment. Such erratic flight characteristics and movements from objects with highly reflective metallic surfaces could conceivably account for the frequent aligned flashes observed by Dr.

Via Roel and her colleagues. Now, finally, it should be noted that Dr. VRel has submitted another intriguing paper which finds statistical significance among transient observations, nuclear tests and largecale historical UAP sightings. That paper along with a third paper recently published in the Royal Astronomical Society's journal and which previews the astronomers innovative Earth shadow analysis method is linked in the description below. Now it would be quite the understatement to say that this area of research deserves close attention.

And on that note, I am pleased to announce that Dr. VRel will be the guests on this month's Soul Forum, the Soul Foundation's long form discussion series alongside doctors Peter Scayfish and Gary Nolan. Soul Foundation members enjoy early access to the discussion and may take part in the live Zoom breakout session immediately afterward this Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time. To join the Soul Foundation and this exciting conversation, please look for the link in the description below or visit the soulfoundation.org and click membership.

Newly released FAA documents courtesy of John Greenwald and the blackvault.com provide intriguing details about the incursions of unknown objects over Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio last December. Now, just as a reminder, these flyovers were so brazen that they caused the facility to shut down its airspace, which drew national media coverage. The newly released FAA documents note that the base's control tower tracked up to 17 17 of these unidentified objects on radar in the vicinity of Wright Patterson and that base security forces reported the objects quote turning lights off and flying past them in close proximity. Now, as loyal Soul Briefing viewers may remember, the incidents over Wright Patterson were just one in a series of brazen incursions over sensitive military facilities and assets in recent years. Perhaps the most notable incident occurred in late 2023 when a dozen or more objects flew with complete impunity over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia for nearly 3 weeks.

Now, Langley, it should be noted, is a critical air defense facility that houses the F-22, one of the Air Force's most advanced fighter aircraft. In another incident uncovered through superb freedom of information act worked by researcher Dustin Slaughter of the UAP Register, government contractors and drone specialists at the Avon Park bombing range in Florida observed a quote metallic end quote cylindrical object and that in yet another nod to Dr. VRel's groundbreaking research. Quote, "The sun was reflecting brightly on its left side." End quote. In fact, the primary witness first noticed the object because of quote a bright reflection in the sky that caught my attention end quote.

Now, according to the main witness, one of three to observe the UAP, the object quote, then disappeared in front of our eyes, end quote. Now, from an analytic perspective, the fact that incursions of unknown objects have occurred at Wright Patterson and Langley Air Force bases along with the incident at the Air Force's Avon range is intriguing. Beginning in the late 1970s, noted UAP researcher Leonard Stringfield began documenting allegations from ostensibly credible military and government officials describing retrieved UAP and associated research efforts. One of Stringfield's many sources, a former intelligence official whom he met through his son-in-law, alleged that retrieved craft and quote secret UFO research operations and quote occurred at Wright Patterson and Langley Air Force bases as well as the Avon range. Now, of the hundreds and hundreds of military bases and sites in the United States alone, the correlation between longstanding allegations of secret UAP research activities at specific facilities and some of the most brazen incursions by unknown objects in recent years over those same locations is certainly intriguing to say the least.

Now, it should be noted that Stringfield received high praise from Captain Edward Rupelt, the first director of Project Blue Book two decades earlier in Rupelt's 1956 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Now that book, which details countless perplexing UAP incidents, is a must readad for any student or analyst of the UAP topic. In an August 1st podcast discussion, Vice President JD Vance stated that he is quote obsessed with the UAP topic and with recently released UAP videos in particular. Bance is just the latest Trump administration official to make intriguing comments on the topic following statements from Secretary of State and acting national security adviser Marco Rubio who spoke out several years ago in his capacity as the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But we've also heard from Central Intelligence Agency director John Radcliffe, former National Security Adviser and the current nominee to be the US ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, and from Trump himself, who has described conversations with Air Force pilots who observed round spherical objects that outperformed their fighter jets.

At the same time, Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna of Florida told congressional reporter Matt Lazlo earlier this year that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been quote extremely helpful end quote in Congress's ongoing investigation of the UAP topic. Now, speaking of congressional investigations, Senator Mike Browns of South Dakota, a key player in the Senate on the UAP topic, stated in a July 29th interview that credible government and contractor whistleblowers have described objects that exhibit extraordinary technologies and apparently are capable of extreme performance. This, according to Senator Rounds, includes transmedium travel, which is the ability to seamlessly transition between air and space or air and water. Senator Rounds also described objects capable of achieving extreme speeds and climbing to high altitudes in very short amounts of time. Describing the whistleblowers that have spoken to the Senate behind closed doors, Rounds said, quote, "There is no reason for them to come in and try to tell us stories.

These are folks that are very, very capable. They are brilliant individuals. They fear sometimes that if their whole story got out, they'd lose their jobs." End quote. Now, rounds of statements echo comments from former Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio, who stated that UAP whistleblowers fear reprisals, both professional and to their lives. Now, rounds, who like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, another key congressional figure on the UAP topic, sits on both the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, which in theory at least should be informed of all advanced technologies under development by the United States.

But as Round states in this most recent interview, even after vetting, some of the objects and technologies reported by whistleblowers remain truly perplexing. Rounds importantly, is a key co-sponsor of the UAP Disclosure Act, which as soul briefing viewers will remember is one of the most extraordinary pieces of legislation ever introduced in Congress. And on that note, on July 29th, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer formally reintroduced the UAP Disclosure Act as an amendment to the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which is considered mustpass legislation each year. Senator Rounds, Senator Gillibrand, and Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee all joined Schumer once again in co-sponsoring the legislation. Now, as a brief refresher, the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act suggests that a secret government quote legacy program has retrieved and is attempting to reverse engineer UFOs and quote technologies of unknown origin.

The eyebrow raising term nonhuman intelligence is formally defined and mentioned over two dozen times in the disclosure act, which would also establish a review panel of nine distinguished experts in various fields to review classified government UAP records for ultimate public disclosure. This is now the third time that Schumer and Rounds have introduced the Disclosure Act. While the House previously stripped the most critical provisions from the legislation, Congressman Eric Berles of Missouri has vowed to introduce companion legislation in the House. Berles has also expressed some optimism that the legislation will pass this year given that Mike Turner of Ohio, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, whose congressional district, oddly enough, includes Wright Patterson Air Force Base and who was widely believed to have blocked the Disclosure Act previously, is no longer in a position of significant authority. At the same time, according to Congressman Burlesen, the current chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rick Crawford of Arkansas, quote, "Seems open to help." End quote.

Schumer in a fantastic July 30th scoop by ace congressional reporter Matt Lazlo also suggested that Turner was a key obstacle to the passage of the Disclosure Act in previous years and that his removal may indeed improve the legislation's chances of passage. Asked by congressional reporter Matt Lazlo about the intent and importance of the UAP Disclosure Act, Schumer in a rare unscripted comment responded, quote, "Got to let people know the truth, whatever it is." End quote. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're we're continuing our uh interview with uh Dr. Betry's uh v Royale and uh uh souls um in Stanford's Gary Nolan is uh with us to uh really at this point now to have a discussion about the significance of the this not just the results but this kind of project for science.

um you know both of you undertake uh research that uh you know to most scientists is extremely uh controversial because it concerns uh UAP or at least the possibility of um artifacts uh not made by human beings. Uh Gary does that in the context of material science currently and batries we've been discussing your work. So I have a you know a a question for both of you which you know as a as a non-scientist as a social scientist or humanist um uh is is raised for me every time I think about your work both of your work is you know how does this get you this kind of research gets you to the heart of what science is because we forget that at the times before paradigm shifts and breakthroughs uh people think scientists are absolutely be crazy for pursuing new hypotheses, new ideas, um, uh, uh, heretical, uh, innovations. >> Go ahead, Beatus, if you'd like. First, >> well, I'm just a very curious person.

I just want to have answers to the things that are that I'm wondering about. So, I guess there is something well, what can we call it? A little bit of a headonist approach I have. uh in science that I just do what is fun. I enjoy exploring certain ideas, certain directions. I move where my curiosity goes.

And it led me in this direction. It led me into uh trying to understand whether they are UFOs and what they are if they are physical objects like flying saucers or not. And that's all I can say for my own sake. It's it's just a discovery and exploration in data for me. So I take it from a couple of different angles.

First kind of the before and after. the before is, you know, when I published the Council Bluff's paper, which I think is frankly a minor paper in terms of whatever it is that we attempted to conclude, um, and how careful we were in the language as opposed to the kind of biology language that I write about in my cancer biology and immunology papers where even though I'm just as careful ful in what I say. I'm more confident in putting forward ideas because I know that they're going to be accepted by the community much more readily. And so I I think we're we're further than we were four years ago when I published the other paper. Um but still not in this confidence realm uh where we can put forward uh speculation that won't be immediately uh attacked.

You know there's skeptical attack versus you know just out outright uh you know malevolent attack. Um, but I think again the good thing about how science is done and I push this idea constantly, you know, don't put the I don't put a conclusion or even the data out there until you've at the very least filtered it or made sure that you found >> sorry >> all of the um negative uh inputs or problems that could be there because you don't want you don't want Twitter to find the obvious problem for you. >> Uh and so I again applaud what uh Beatatrice did and that even though she's only been talking about the transients I think over the last year off and on, I had no sense of the amount of effort that had gone on behind the scenes already to produce the papers uh up to the level of where they are. Uh and so that that speaks to how science is supposed to be done. And I'm sorry to say it's not how the Nazca mummies should have been done.

It's not how the bugs sphere has been done. Uh, and so I just hope that early scientists coming along or starting, even amateur scientists, I don't mean that in a negative sense, uh, realize that there is value to being careful and not running to the internet the moment you think you have something. uh and uh that science while it's not sacred in its rules, it's a process by which uh so much accomplishment has been done by humanity that it is worth making sure when we're coming to a problem like UAP that we apply the same structure to it. Um, and I know I'm speaking to the converted in many ways, but there's a lot of people who don't appreciate that yet and are constantly asking me on various threads or in venues, you know, why haven't you done this? Why haven't you done that? Well, maybe I am doing it, but I'm just not ready to tell you yet. >> Uh, and so, um, >> you know, follow the leaders in how they're doing it.

Um and uh because we've lived in worlds where that's the norm and you know we hope that the next cadre of leaders is going to come forward having seen that it we actually didn't get blown out of the water the moment we stuck our toe in it. >> Yeah. I I must say I've always had like a problem with that some people think that there are questions like the UFO questions that basically can't be tested that they that they believe that no this is so much you know it's so so complicated and they they form very they form almost ideas or hypo that cannot be tested through hypothesis and I'm thinking that if there is such an effect such a big effect that so many people see that you have mass sightings this should be testable And I believe in the scientific method. You form the hypothesis. You uh put forward your test and you go and carry it out and then you analyze the data and see what's the outcome.

Is there try there's of course going to be a lot of trial and error and you might have to refine hypothesis. You might try to try another one. But still I think everything can be tested and I don't um I just don't submit to the idea of that the UFO question is so complicated that you can't try to ex well to test it out in science. >> So I have a question for you. Um can these experiments be done today given all the >> Oh my god.

Yes. That's the trouble. That's a serious trouble. how to do it today. And I wrote another paper where about how we can do it today where we apply the Earth's shadow to filter away all the satellites and all the space debris because >> But do we have do we have to blow up a nuclear bomb to do it? >> Well, I I would prefer not to have to do that.

>> Yeah. >> And and I'm wondering like how can we check it? Maybe we need to search for these objects at 80,000 kilometers height. Maybe we need to go at big altitudes. Maybe a and the Galileo project can all like give us ideas of how to do this much further out. >> How about regional conflicts that are sub uh sub nuclear? Because there's so much in the literary history of stuff showing up over the battlefields of Alexander the Great or uh Chinese warlords, etc.

uh you know are are are some other transients waiting to be correlated to troop movements? >> Well, there is this group from Ukraine from KF Observatory and they had seen UAPs of two two different sorts. I forgot what they call them. Uh I forgot the names. >> I remember >> close to the war zone. And of course we were wondering like is are they watching some secret uh weapons or are they watching actual UAPs? It's super difficult because again it's the same trouble when very often when you do science you have degeneracy between two different interpretations and you need to try to find a way of knowing which is it that is the most >> documentary that I won't go into great length on called uh chimp empire where anthropologists had settled themselves amongst these chimpanzees in a forest for 40 years so that they essentially became invisible.

uh and but they were able then to watch the conflicts and film the conflicts amongst the chimpanzees in real time because the chimpanzees just ignored them. So maybe we're the chimpanzees and we've been so uh attuned to the ignoring these things uh in our environment that we don't see them when they're actually there to watch what they consider to be uh a an interesting human event. Now I'm speculating, but you know the Daily Mail will say tomorrow something different. So, here's a I've got a question for both of you, and I I want to I want to ask this because it it says something about um something very unique I think you guys are both doing. in order to approach scientifically um the possibility or the the reality of of uh the UAP presence, you both are drawing correlations um or looking for correlations between historical events and data left behind in historical events involving uh potential UAP and then data that you can really gather in the normal fashion using uh scientific method and and the instruments you need for your science.

So, Bantries, you're doing this by uh drawing correlations between uh historical uh mass UFO events or um events taking place um with nuclear weapons or in conjunction with nuclear weapons. >> Um and then astronomical data. Gary's doing it with um historical um UAP sightings where materials are allegedly left behind and yet he's examining the materials in a way that would be extremely normal within science. So, you know, maybe both of you could comment on that because I think that's very unusual for scientists to do this outside of uh kind of forensic studies. >> Well, I can start with I'll start with one and then you think of yours, Bea.

So um you know for instance I've been looking at the Ubatuba uh sample and uh I the results that I have with Jacques are radically different than those of Robert Powell. Um and he actually contacted me a couple of weeks ago to let me know. said, "Well, wait a second, Gary. I think I I think you're wrong. I I know X." And so, we've been corresponding back and forth about the difference between my results and his.

And the short answer is we're both right and that we might have actually each received different samples. And so, um, we're actually talking right now about seeing whether or not, uh, it's po well, we're going to try to compare and see what it is and, uh, what the chains of custody are for the samples. Um, and see whether or not there's, uh, at the very least a paper to put out there on them. Um, but there's there's no way X and Y can be true at the same time. Um, but it's it's a positive interaction where we're going we're looking for the truth of the matter and neither of our egos are involved in the outcome.

Except we want the truth. We want to find the truth before the internet trolls do. >> That sounds good. >> Yeah. No, it's good and it's fun.

Yes. >> So, so Bries, maybe you could say a word about this because to me, Betric, one of the things that that struck me about your work when I first encountered you was it I and I've already said it in this interview, but but it was very ingenious of you to look back at these old astronomical plays. It was a simple decision, but you were able to say, "Look, Pri Sputnik, there shouldn't be anything there." Well, this was a chance thing because I was looking for vanishing stars and then one of course discovers that there are multiple uses of these pre-sputnik plates. So, it wasn't I mean uh it came from another work as um initially but then um let me think where it was leading. Um I'm also thinking a little bit about this uh project other projects I have like uh hobby projects where we are like looking at the Baltic Sea anomaly and we also have another case of a possible um crashed UFO and then we also would like to collect samples of course to learn what it is what are these materials and to get them analyzed to know if there's something special about these objects or if they are very mundane things.

Um because there's one thing to watch things on images like astronomers we we watch things on the images and we try to interpret them but we don't touch the objects and another thing to actually go there like Gary gets the uh samples the material anal and does the material analysis and we also would like to uh have that opportunity with our projects. So I I think that's their the real goal not only to think about is like not only to model um or interpret observational signatures but to actually get a part of such an object and have it in your hand to analyze. >> So oh go ahead Gary. >> No it's okay. Well, I I was going to say this is where the two of you in your research very much intersect because you're both interested in in materials uh for this reason.

And that brings us to the what's often the omnipresent question with UAP, which is um uh how does secrecy end up intersecting with scientific research? And both of you, I think, um, have have encountered the fact that the US government has had long-standing um, interest in UAP and does does treat UAP as an intelligence matter. Um, you know, Gary had a surprise visit from uh, intelligence community uh, scientists um, many years ago um, who wanted to speak with him about uh, UAP related research. and Batrice, I think you've had your own encounters with uh people from the intelligence community that have shown a little too much interest in in your research. So So perhaps both of you could say a word about that. >> Well, I mean my story is well recounted.

It was the introduction of me to the medical issues around well ended up being mostly Havana syndrome but uh a host of similar cases. But I think again the positive outcome of all of this has been, you know, I've worked directly and positively now with people from the Senate Intelligence uh committees, the uh House Intelligence Committee, this is even pre-Soul um and uh the FBI who have all come forward in the most positive sense seeking help and advice. So um to the extent that there are you know shadow elements trying to stop stuff the positive aspects of both government and let's call it uh police investigatory uh elements of the government are now stepping forward to at the very least ask for help and have in several cases even military people have offered me personal security if I ever need it um because they recognize the value of people stepping forward like this. Uh so yeah, there's negative, but there's also a fair amount of of of positive. Well, um I I don't know how much I can say about this in um well um but to start with I uh I only work with very transparent data as you and I only work with things that you can uh download from online like this um polymer plates that are publicly available.

I don't have access to any uh sort of secret stuff and everything that like for example the stuff with the work with the Baltic Sea anomal is going to be public when published. Um but yes there is an interest and I have been approached by curious people um that want to know a lot about the science uh I'm working with including this uh the crash retrieval stuff and um I don't have so much to like it I don't have information that they cannot get in public because I don't have any security clearance I will probably never have it because I'm not good at keeping secrets and I have never signed an NDA. So if if someone sends me someone of these guys or girls or if someone when they have been coming to ask me questions, everything I do is public. Everything I do can be uh found in my interviews or uh at the universities like official documentation or uh in my papers especially in my papers because a lot of people ask me questions that are actually in the papers but that they don't read. So there is no like big secrets.

Well, the crash retrieval projects are still like um not uh having any public information about them, but yeah, they're very >> but a necessary condition of doing doing research uh that would be that that sensitive and and that could be that breakthrough. Um, I I want to ask you both uh a question and and you guys should ask each other questions about this too or follow up with each other, but I I want to know I mean what what what do you say to colleagues in academia and the sciences who find your pursuit of uh data pointing to the existence of of UAP or UAP technologies to be puzzling, unjustified, even unscientific? What are you saying to those colleagues? >> Give it time. I mean there's stigma. There are going to be people who try to like discourage you from that. Just give them time.

Everyone need to some time to accept the ideas to think about um these possibilities and to see how this field becomes real slowly step by step. I don't think one can push anyone to believe you or to think like you also one just needs to >> question back to them is how much time do you have and second how much time have you spent actually looking at it >> rather than paring somebody else's conclusion. Uh, and what you very quickly find when challenging them that way, uh, that they admit that they know almost nothing. And then I say, well, have you read the book, for instance, UAP or UFOs in government by Robert Powell and Swords? Have you read anything in this field? Um, do you know what Project Blue Book is and was and what the pros and cons of it are? uh and you know in basically two minutes you can show uh just how ignorant they are of the matter and then I follow up with well I've spent time and read all of those books cover to cover as well as about 200 more. So, it's kind of like you coming to me and telling me cancer is not real.

And then I uh basically take you into a pathology lab and show you thousands and thousands of preserved blocks of human tissue representing cancer. uh and that pretty much in very short order uh shows who's doing science and who's not. So, we all need for those of us who are in positions like B and I uh to have at the ready those kinds of immediate challenges back because they can always ask a question that you can't answer or you'll say, "Well, where's the evidence?" Well, there's lots of evidence. Evidence isn't, you know, evidence is contextualized data. There's enormous amounts of data.

Uh it's just whether or not it meets the uh reproducibility test. Uh so um for me reproducibility is materials or medical damage. For B reproducibility is you know do I see the same thing on a photographic plate on day one versus day two and or from multiple observatories. >> Yeah. Um and so that's reproducible science that again once you've stepped into that realm there is no argument to be had.

The data is is indisputable. what it means is interpretable. And as long as you stay on the comfortable side of that line for the audience, you can keep them with you. I mean, I might have my own personal beliefs that's on the other side of that line, but my personal beliefs are different than my scientific conclusions. And getting that across to people often takes a bit of a longer conversation, but you can have that first conversation where you basically get people to admit that they know nothing uh about the matter that they're attempting to appide upon uh and therefore they might as well just go to a Facebook forum and spew their guts there uh and their opinions because it would have as much value.

Beatrice, any further thoughts about that? >> Well, I agree with Gary. I agree with Gary. It's like my my scientific conclusion from this this work we've been working we've been doing now is that we see something that shouldn't be there in these images from the early 1950s. Something that happens to look like something very flat and very reflective and in high orbits probably. And that's my scientific point of view.

And if you ask you about my personal, I'm going to say I think it's artificial and it's not ours. >> Right? >> So, >> I mean, look at what AI is going through right now with the more recent U meteor coming through our solar system >> where it appears to have an internal light source. >> And there's lots of natural reasons why it could have that. um which he goes through. Uh but because one or two lines of his opinion say that well it could be a nuclear reactor or an artificial energy source, that's all anybody focuses on.

And so therefore dismisses all of the other more uh prosaic answers that he's even very comfortable with. And so, um, you know, I I think sometimes holding back the speculation of what it might be, even if the question is on the table and you believe that it's true, is better to get it into the public realm first as an accepted paper, and then speculate after it's been published. >> That's true. That's true. I I'm very bad with holding back anything, I think.

So, >> um, but yes, it's true. It could be easier sometimes because people want to poke holes on arguments. They don't want to read what you say. They want to don't want to read what you write. They will not read when you listen among an explanation.

They will go and try to attack the more interesting explanation. So >> yeah, >> you you guys have both shown um I think immense uh courage in uh engaging in dialogue and and debate with your colleagues and and doing research really at the edge or beyond the edge. Um and you you've also both shown and I really believe this is true um remarkable imagination in how you've you've approached the questions that interest you. So it it may not seem this way even to yourselves, but I think there are younger generations of people going into the sciences and um uh starting out in science right now um who are probably looking to both of you as as um you know possible models or even inspirations for their work. So what would you say to them? Uh I'm really asking you know for like this is a fundamental question.

What would you say to both of them that science is um or what would both of you say science is? What what what betric is is science? >> For me it's expl datadriven exploration. That's what science is to me. But of course there's you can if you're a you think differently. So but I'm this is at least my personal point of view of it. It's a um you just you just want to explore and the unknown terror I mean the the unknown domains that you can't get I mean get answers to in any books when the books don't give you the answers then you have to go and check it yourself somehow so >> yeah I think where hard science and theorists overlap is that you know the hard scientists will collect the data often with uh a preset understanding of what they think the answer might be and the theorist is there to either explain the data as it's collected or explain the outlier.

Um and where you know astrophysics and where I think uh for instance Avi has a lot of problems with astrophysicists is they come up with uh magical theorems that are inherently untestable. Um, and so I mean in retrospect looking at my path or through science, it's always been the either the unmet need that drives for me the creation of an instrument that lets me collect more data until I get to the point where the data doesn't make sense. And then it's that data off the curve which then redirects my interest. And I think this is where Be is at right now. You know, this data off the curve is redirecting her interests into understanding what it might mean.

>> Um >> yeah, that's how my whole career path has been that you you find these weird things you don't understand and you try to form a hypothesis how to test it and and it just goes on like that. >> So you're actually a theorist. I know that's a dirty word amongst material scientists, but >> you know I I am sitting at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. >> Oh, okay. All right.

Okay. Good. All right. >> Okay. So, as we kind of wind down, I want to ask both of you, I mean, where where where do both of you hope that um the public UAP conversation goes in the next years? Um, and what do you want to see happen both with um, uh, governments with respect to UAP, but also um, what do you want to see science do with UAP? I would like to see that governments actually support uh UAP science and that they u um really like help at every I mean in every country there should be at least a couple or five or 10 scientists that work with trying to understand what are UAPs and if they uh are important for national security questions and this needs to be civilian science.

scientists. So I hope this will happen. I also hope that there will be some transparency from every government regarding the UAP question. Uh so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel because to me it feels like when we when we set up our projects to search for UAPs in the today's guys it feels like we are reinventing the wheel the military do do these things much better than us. They have had much more funding.

They are 30 years ahead. So, I think we need transparency and a little bit of help to be able to catch up even if we might not be able to catch up. But, >> yeah, I think I think kind of back to the casino model, um, we're placing bets and there was a huge fight back in the '9s in biology at least between what was considered basic science versus translational science. Um and it was actually Paul Berg I think who uh who was a Nobel Prize winner at Stanford in the biochemistry department who coined the term from bench to bedside which bridged that gap between the basic researchers who just thought that basic data collection was important as opposed to the translational researchers who felt like hey we needed to pay back the the citizenry for the taxes they paid that gave us the money to do our academic elite biology science in the form of drugs or therapies or diagnostics that would help. And so, you know, that transition happened in the '9s, uh, the bench to bedside and and but plenty of bets had been placed on the table already for what would be opportune directions in science to go.

Um, and I think that we are at a stage in UAP research where there's enough clear evidence, which is not proof, evidence that there's something interesting here and it's really then up to uh the younger generation to pick up that mantle and run with it. Um because there's stuff that even I know of but I don't have the time to go after that I know could create a new career in material science for people alone. Just material science alone. Um you know place those bets on the on the roulette table. That's where we're at.

>> Okay. Great answers from both of you and uh thank you to both of you for uh joining. Gary, thanks for uh you know off you know offering your insights and asking so many great questions at Berries and Berries thank you on you know on behalf of everybody involved in in the conversation for doing such uh ingenious research and for sharing your thoughts about it so >> and congratulations for making such as flash it's fantastic >> thanks we will try to make all this data available for everyone so that also more people can have fun with it and discover the flying saucers I don't want to be the only one with an onlogical shock. >> So, >> right. >> Okay.

Well said. Thank you both. >> Thanks. >> Byebye. >> Okay.

So, thank you for joining the Soul Forum. Again, it's uh the Soul Foundation's monthly digital meeting devoted to the uh science uh philosophy, politics, and culture of UAP. Um consider joining the Soul Foundation as a member. that gives you access, early access to um broadcasts of uh these meetings as well as to Zoom breakout rooms that uh take place after them. Um and keep in mind that both um uh Gary and Batrice will be speaking at our annual symposium which takes place in Bavano, Italy, north of Milan in uh late October of 2025.

Registration is open. So uh uh go ahead and register if you're interested. If you're hearing this in August, September, October of 2025, um it's a unique event, um uh people who are into the subject from academia, uh government, the private sector, technology, um really all professional fields or who are just enthusiastic about the subject, love the meeting. Um it's a great place to engage people like Gary and Beatatrice in person and to hear them speak in person. And it's also a one-of-a-kind opportunity to network with people who are interested in the field and who are serious about it.

So, uh please consider uh registering and membership with Zol Foundation. Um thanks for listening. [Music]