This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations

with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.

Okay, so today's subject is a long time interest of skeptics, mainly because of the

intersection between real science, that is the possibilities of extraterrestrial intelligence

somewhere in the cosmos.

And then pseudoscience, you know, the belief that they've come here, there's no point in searching

the heavens, they're already here.

They may be amongst us today.

You know, the body snatchers, they're actually the reptilions and they look just like us and there's no way to know.

Anyway, so between those two extremes, you know, the real science and the pseudoscience.

And to me, it's always been of interest of the kind of psychology of how science works,

history of science, that you have these two social communities, you know the search

for extraterrestrial intelligence conducted by real physicist and

astronomers and cosmologists and and then you have this other community of people that

are not professional scientists yet believe passionately that, you know, they're out there and they've come here.

And so it's always interesting to look at the kind of the dynamics of these two groups and how they process

information or what they think of as evidence what's legitimate evidence and so

I thought we could get into that today the book is is UFO's, Kim Trails, and Aliens,

Donald Prothro, and Tim Callahan

are the co-authors of this book, Indiana University Press.

And I wrote the forward for it, so I love the book.

It's a great subject and and

...