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

   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
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