Sarah Scoles, Journalist and Author of “They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers” (#043)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Science, Physics, Natural Sciences

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Science journalist and author Sarah Scoles talks about her new book “They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers”, a study of UFO culture and its critics. What makes people believe intelligent alien life has visited the Earth? Fresh off this week’s news that the Pentagon has declassified and released three videos of UFOs (or UAPs Unidentified Aerial Phenomena as the government prefers to call them), Scoles talks about why some people are more prone to believe than others. And, for an alternate explanation, we refer you to Mick West, a popular skeptic, who analyzed the Nimitz #UFO / #UAP video last year. Show notes and resources are available here. And a worksheet for this episode can be found here. 03:20 How a New York Times article about UFOs led to inspiration. 06:00 Why don’t astronomers see UFOs? 10:30 Confirmation bias for fans of the X-Files. 14:10 Why people believe the government, and even astronomers, are hiding something. 18:10 Could UFO investigations benefit from the scientific peer-review process? 18:35 MUFON is crowdsourcing the search for extraterrestrial life [https://www.mufon.com] 20:30 Why are millionaires & billionaires like Tom DeLonge and Robert Bigelow willing to spend so much money on this pursuit? 29:40 Earth may already host alien life in a shadow biosphere. 31:30 5 questions INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE asks all authors. Sarah Scoles is a freelance science writer, a contributing author at WIRED, and a contributing editor at Popular Science. See her impressive list of bylines here: http://www.sarahscoles.com Sarah previously worked as an associate editor at Astronomy magazine and an educational tour guide at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. In this discussion with Brian Keating, Scoles relates that she never planned to write a second book about space, but research and imagination demanded it. Her first book, 2017’s “Making Contact,” is a biography of Dr. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, who provided inspiration for Carl Sagan’s protagonist in his book “Contact.” Buy Sarah Scoles’ books here: They Are Already Here: https://amzn.to/3fcofXp Making Contact: https://amzn.to/3fc644o Find Brian Keating on Twitter: twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Find the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination on Twitter: twitter.com/imagineUCS Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:14.5	Okay, I'd like to welcome everybody to this episode of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imaginations into the Impossible Podcast.
0:16.5	I am your fearful host, Brian Keating. Joining me today is one of my favorite author, science journalist Sarah Sculls.
0:24.5	Hello, Sarah.
0:26.1	Hi Brian, thanks for having me.
0:28.1	It's great to have you on the Impossible Podcast.
0:31.5	Today we'll be discussing your brand new book, which is your second book I believe, and it is called
0:36.9	They are they are already here about why there is this frequently reported description of flying saucers and why that may be and what that tells us about the state of the world and how people perceive interesting phenomena such as unidentified
0:55.2	flying objects.
0:56.7	So Sarah, I have to say, your last book, Making Contact, was a biography of Jill Tartar and the realm of kind of a investigative
1:06.7	journalism so to speak but also pursuing this ambitious goal of perhaps
1:11.3	hearing and listening to perhaps
1:14.3	extraterrestrial intelligence and now you're writing a book you've written a book
1:18.7	a wonderful book about seeing flying saucers unidentified flying objects in various locations around the world
1:25.8	and my next question for you is what is next for you is it a book about Yeti or Lochness
1:30.8	Monster I don't know I feel or Lochness Monster? What do you have next?
1:34.1	I don't know.
1:34.6	I feel like other other writers kind of have
1:37.1	the cryptids and cryptozoology pretty well covered.
1:41.6	I'm actually I've actually been doing some research into the history of
1:44.7	Doomsday cults lately now that we're in a strange state of the world so I don't
1:49.2	know if that will turn into anything or not but I have a batch of books to read
1:52.4	about it.
	...

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