HELLO FUTURE: Inside the Sol Foundation — A Serious Approach to UAP

Speaker 1 (00:08):
UAPs UFOs are there, Aliens? Are they real? It seems
like this buzz around this issue is only growing. And
we just had on the program doctor Peter Scayfish, the
executive director of the Soul Foundation, the preeminent group that
really studies tracks the main center in academia bridging the
gap between the public and private partnership of UAPs, and
he made a fascinating conversation about why presidential authority on
this particular issue is a little bit different, actually, in
some ways a lot a bit different than other issues.
Hello Future, it's me keV. This is a dispatch from
the Digital Frontier. The planet is Earth, the year is
twenty twenty six. My name is Kevin SURREALI get all
of the latest Hello Future episodes on the iHeartMedia app,
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subscribe to our Meet the Future newsletter at MTF dot
tv and engage with our content. Doctor Skafish, Peter, thank
you so much for joining us. Why doesn't President Trump
or President Obama back in that era? Why doesn't the
president have as much authority on the UAP issue as
other issues? And how did it get like that?

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Well, no, I think that they have full authority over it.
This kind of X files idea that the presidents don't
have authority, I don't think that's true. Now, I don't
think they're fully informed of it unless they ask a
lot of questions. They have to make it a priority
for their administration. But no, I think in principle they
have a lot of authority. I'm not saying that everything
is brought to them.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
So why would the president want to just have a disclosure?

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Well, you know you asked that in the previous episode. Look,
as a culture anthropologists, I have some expertise on religion.
It's one of my specialties. And I don't think that
human religion as such can't handle this. It's going to
handle it in all sorts of ways, and human cosmologies
religions are very durable. They can survive all sorts of
historical events, scientific discoveries, and so on. So I think
religion as such can deal with this. Human culture as
such can deal with this when it comes to geopolitics,
when it comes to social stability, and also I think
to a lesser degree, but this is a factor. When
it comes to the economy, you're dealing with a different ballgame. Okay,
because because well especially geopolitics, because clearly the United States
can't be the only among its adversaries, its peers or
its near peers do know about this, and we know
certainly the Soviet Union did. That's known. We had a
lot of Soviet scientists talk publicly to other UAP researchers
starting the nineteen eighties about Soviet Union's program on this
and their efforts on this. So Russia's continued on this,
and there are indications, of course, the China also has
a program, and I think China is probably active in
attempting at least to emulate the performance characteristics of UAP vehicles.
So for some reason, no one has wanted to go
there publicly, and we don't know why that is, but
it changes the balance of power on this issue. But
I think also that anyone who has looked seriously, and
I could say as a scholar and as someone who's
responsible for also, you know, advising on this stuff, I've
looked at it seriously. Anyone who's looked at disclosure seriously
realizes that, you know, be careful what you wish for.
That's an irreversible decision, and once you make it, you
can't go back. You're responsible for the consequences, and it's
very difficult to estimate in advance what the consequences are.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Has there ever been And as you were talking, I
was thinking, Oh my gosh, if I was a Bloomberg
and this story broke, we'd be saying, let's dive into
the Bloomberg terminal and see how the markets are reacting
to President some speech saying that aliens are real and
UAPs the And there would be a market reaction, right,
I mean there, especially when you think of the you know,
you know, I know SpaceX is trying to really get
publicly traded and whatnot, and we're following all of that
report in the newsletter and whatnot. But there would be
a market reaction. There are a lot of space companies
and space industries. I mean, it's going to be like
a one point eight trillion dollar market by twenty thirty two,
and so there would be a market reaction. And I
never ever thought of that until you said economic reaction.
There's an economic reaction to everything? Why market reaction? Yeah?
Has there ever been another issue or a parallel issue
that we can learn from that has been disclosed to
humanity in the course of human existence that we can
learn lessons from.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
It's a tough one because it's tough to draw analogies. Now.
One of them. One of the issues where secrecy transparency,
but also how human populations deal on mass with the
prospect of existential risk is nuclear weapons. This is not
very well known, and I learned it in the course
of thinking about UAP secrecy. After the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, you had pretty fullsome disclosures of the existence
of the Manhattan Project, but also of how initial nuclear
weaponry worked. They released a lot of scientific information then,
and it was done I mean right after the bombings,
I believe in nineteen forty five or nineteen forty six,
And this was something Truman wanted to have happen, and
that I believe a number of Manhattan Project scientists felt
was okay, simply so that there was an understanding the
signs behind this, the technology, and there was a feeling
that the scientific community shouldn't be kept in the dark
about this. And they also released a certain amount of
information about how the Manhattan Project had done its work,
where they had done it, and so on. And so
there's a lesson there about how you could do this
with government, because what's happened here is that this is
it was put to me once and I had this
literally said to me by someone who knows this is
the most classified subject in the United States government. Okay,
So when you have that kind of situation where you're
taking over classification and kind of you know, decades long
classification of sensitive information, when you're taking it to its
highest degree, it's really tough to go back on that.
It is possible to let out a certain amount of
information to the public, make making sure the Congress knows,
and so on. And it's also possible to look and
to your broader point, to the Cold War and up
through really the end of the nineteen eighties and see
how people dealt with the threat of the bomb. They
did deal with it. You know, people got on with
the arts, culture, scientific work, intellectual work, everything that human
beings need to be a bit relaxed to do and
to have a free time to do in a certain
amount of political freedom to do those things flourish still
despite the fact that annihilation could have happened at any moment.
I think there's a lesson there about the fact that
human beings can get on in difficult situations.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
I also feel like we've been making so many discoveries
over the last one hundred years about space. Every time
we discover a planet in our Solar System, we don't
even have a public I mean, maybe hopefully there is,
we don't even have I would argue we have a
map Quest version of a map of the Solar System,
but we don't have a Google map version of the
Solar System, which I think is crazy. When I was
a kid, I was taught there were nine planets and
an asteroid belt. I didn't realize that these planets have
dozens some have hundreds of moons, and that there are
millions of asteroids, so that there are millions, millions of
objects just in our own neighborhood. And then when you
think of it in the Milky Way galaxy, and then
when you even zoom out and there's billions of galaxies.
I mean, our vast understanding of just how big the
universe is. I almost feel like blink and you'll miss it.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
Mean would it even be a big deal. I think
one of my one of it I thought was a
huge story was this was NASA finding at the end
of last year pre biosignatures on Mars. That is, like
the first building block autograph of there could be or
could have been fossils on Mars that had at one
point in life. We're not even getting them back to
planet Earth. I mean that truly could be such a
major sign that there's other things happening in our ess.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
And the astrobiologists are racing right now quickly, and somebody's
going to get to the finish line where you've got
such a strong biosignature on a habitable planet that is,
you know, within thirty or forty light years, that kind
of thing. I mean, they're going to start to get
that stuff. Some of them are also looking for technosign
I mean, and that is you know, when they if
they can identify artificial objects or for instance, artificial lighting
on another planet, that changes the game too. But again
to go back to your question about you know, can
people deal with learning that. In fact, the US government
and other governments have known very well that there are
vehicles here in technologies here operating the atmosphere undersea in
space that human beings didn't manufacture. Yeah, they can in general,
but it's very different to know theoretically that that's true,
or that it's at a distance, than learn that it's
right here right now. No one can really estimate the
numbers of vehicles, present frequency of there, let's say, passing
through or by the Earth, whether they have local infrastructure,
which I would say stands to reason, and these things
are not. You know, they are probably most of them
originate from nearby. It's a big deal.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
Do you mean by that local infrastructure in our solar system?

Speaker 2 (10:25):
Well, it could be on the planet, it could be
nearby in space, it could be on another plane in
the Solar system. Sure, because most of these things are
fifteen twenty thirty forty feet in diameter tops. If you
look at witness reporting, including with sensors, these are not
big things. People see much larger vehicles that appear to
be carriers, and that is something you know, I've talked
to people have witnessed them, and that's certainly there in
the data and the literature on this. But my own
view of this is that you have to have at
least bigger carry your vehicles, and probably some kind of
local infrastructure if you're going to do something like this,
like if you're going to be regularly around.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
US media and movies and sci fi, which I'm a
huge consumer of. They kind of have conditioned us that
when I think of an alien, I think of a
little green Martian. But I'm also assuming that they're somehow
relative to a human being understanding of what a body
looks like or what a vehicle looks like in a UAP,
and what if our concept of size UAPs? Do you
get the question that I'm.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
Sure that's a really good question. I mean, one of
my specialties as an anthropologist is to think about the
differences between human ways of thinking and you know, we
could say culture, but at a deeper level, like when
humans have very different cosmologies, do they translate? Okay, so
our own modern cosmology, which tells us that the sciences
define reality correctly, that we're autonomous beings, that we all
seek freedom, that we have free will, and that is
generally pretty secular, even for a lot of you know,
Catholics or Protestants. We have a very secular idea of reality, right,
you know, God is not that present. We don't think
supernatural beings are interacting with us. You know, we think
history is made by human beings. Okay, that is one
framework and that may go for in which human beings
think that that may go away someday to be replaced
by something else, whether or not it's more insightful. We
think that we've reached the ultimate, you know, way of
thinking and accurate perception of reality. But you know, so
did people in the Middle Ages, so did the Greeks,
so did medieval Chinese, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, you know,
we're dealing with a very local perspective on reality in
the universe.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
Moment. Hearing you talk like that, I mean, we really
are thinking through the dimension of our current time, and yeah,
there are.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
Well that's that's the thing is so just we can
already find vast differences in how human beings have thought.
It's not all the same. The differences are radical. So
just extrapolate out if you're dealing with other biological beings
that are products of evolution, they're going to think very
differently from us, and some of their thinking will be
different because, I mean, they could not have the same
bodily proportions as us. They could have different kinds of
lifespans or relationships to time, very very different baseline cultural
frameworks because they evolved in radically different environments with different
kinds of challenges, and then had very different historical trajectories.
You can't assume that an anthropomorphic perspective is going to
give you the goods on what they are, who they are,
how they think. And so when it comes to UAP vehicles, okay,
are we actually understand what we're seeing? Are they adapted
to our environment in a particular way that would give
us so illusions about who and what they are and
even the beings themselves, because people do see what we're
classically in the Cold War called occupants of these vehicles.
That is a fundamental part of the UAP phenomenon, is
the so called occupants. Sometimes the vehicles land. That's not
made up. The witnesses see that, and I can say
I'm absolutely sure there's a part of the intelligence community
that knows that. And sometimes we see bipedal beings with
dorsal a symmetry, faces, eyes, mouths, get out of the vehicles,
get back into them. Sometimes they interact with human witnesses.
That's a common enough report. We have thousands or tens
of thousands of those reports. But the question is, and
this is the big this for me is the question
that drives my own research, not just a question that
drives the Soul Foundation, is what are people seeing? Are
those in fact aliens in this sci fi sense, biological
beings a lot like us. A lot of biologists, including
my co founder Gary Nolan, would tell you it's improbable,
to the point that we shouldn't even be considering it,
that you would see beings just like us. Okay, in
the sense of having the same kind of physical form
as us. On the other hand, there's some evidence that
that might be what you're dealing with. There's also the hypothesis, which,
by the way, a lot of people coming out of
the intelligence community take very very seriously, to the point
that you have to ask whether they know something about it,
which is that you're dealing with these are technologies designed
to operate the vehicles and maybe interact in our environment
that you're not dealing with the real makers of the UAP.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah, like a robos an alien's robot. For lack of
better analogy, I want to talk about one of those
incidences in part three of our interview. Doctor Peter Skipefish,
Executive director of the Soul Foundation, Thanks so much for
showing up to meet the future,