How Society Shapes the UFO Discussion - Part 1

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While you go about your day getting real-time notifications about their progress. And the most money back guaranteed. Now this is Taxes. Intuit TurboTax. See guarantee details at TurboTax dot com slash guarantees. Only available with TurboTax experts. Real-time updates only in iOS mobile app. Hi everyone and welcome back to That UFO Podcast. Today I'm honoured to be joined by my guest, Dr. Christian Peters. He is the Managing Director of the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Bremen. With a PhD in political science and more than a decade steering one of Europe's leading doctoral programmes, Christian brings deep insight into the academic, policy and research nexus. In addition to his leadership in advancing doctoral education, he engages across topics from religion and politics to higher education strategy. That includes the social scientific fringe of anomalous phenomena. I've been fortunate to hear Dr. Peters speak twice this year. Once at the Sol Symposium and earlier in the year at the University of Durham at their symposium called Grounding the SETI and UAP Debate. Now you might be wondering why someone in Christian's position, leading an international graduate school and working at the crossroads of politics, society and scientific research, is such an important voice in the conversation around anomalies in UAP. The truth is this subject isn't just about sightings or technology. It sits right inside the bigger questions of how societies respond to uncertainty, how institutions adapt to new information and how we make sense of the unknown. Christian's background in political culture, epistemology and research systems give some a rare vantage point on all of that. So what you're about to hear isn't just another UAP discussion. It's a deeper look at how academia, policy and society and society grapple with emerging disruptive topics. And trust me, it's a perspective we don't get often enough, but I think the shifting landscape affords us more people like Dr. Peters speaking up. For me on this one, folks, I had a format that goes almost two hours and the format went completely out the window and the conversation goes all over. I think in the best possible way. I really hope you enjoy it. And I can tell you now, Dr. Peters will be back on the podcast with me really soon because we only scratched the surface in terms of conversation. Enjoy the interview, folks. Christian, welcome to the podcast. Hi, Andy. Really good to have you on. Christian, I've obviously recently saw you speak. I've actually seen you speak twice this year in person. So first off, I attended Durham University back in what March or April it was now as the spring was just starting in the UK. And I was very fortunate to see you speak at the Sol Symposium and really looking forward to getting some of your insights here. You bring a really unique and rare aspect to this conversation that we've not had too much of that social science conversation. I think more and more people are starting to get involved, more and more academics. And that's why I'm really looking forward to having that conversation with you. But first off, I think it's important to learn a little bit about you. I've given the listeners and viewers an introduction before the podcast kicked off around your background and who you are. But let's hear it from yourself. And who is Dr. Christian Peters? Ah, well, he's a science fiction nerd in the first place. That's always good. Always good start. It's a good start, isn't it? You know, you have to win the hearts and then get into the realism of it. I'm a political theorist. So I'm a political scientist at the University of Bremen. And I'm the managing director of one of Germany's leading schools, graduate schools in the social sciences, Biggs. That's the name of it. I did not invent that name. And I would have certainly picked a different one. But, you know, it's a B-I-G with three S's at the end. A lot of S's, yeah. Yeah, there you go. And so I'm in a fortunate position because I have a tenure job at the university and I've been around for quite a long time at this place in Bremen. I'm a research manager, so I'm familiar with the way that science is really working when it comes to funding, when it comes to the needs to communicate, when it comes to the questions of how, you know, how students and people doing the PhD, which is, you know, that's where Biggs is, how they get their careers. And as a political scientist, I've been always hunting for the weirder animals in the field, let's put it that way. I've been not so much a centrist with respect to the topics that have been interesting me. So it's, I did my dissertation, my PhD on political architecture, but not in a, you know, like EU sense, talking about the parliament and institutional architectures. No, I really looked at houses and at parliaments and at buildings and was trying to find whether you could read certain things from those buildings at the way that societies or political entities were thinking about themselves. You know, whether you have, I don't know, huge buildings that are made of concrete that look intransparent versus a parliamentary building that is fully made out of grass and that, you know, kind of communicates transparency. So I've been, you know, I settled at the fringes and especially in political theory and I think that's why I might have an interest in the topic. But to be honest, the topic of UAP, the deep interest predates my social science activities by many years. So I would say that I always had a certain compatibility to the topic and even thinking about my childhood time. I remember that and I unducked that archaeologically speaking only not so long ago when I realized that we have a magazine that teenagers would read and you'll probably have that in the UK too and in Scotland. You know, it's like with bands and, you know, how do I plan my first kiss and stuff like that. And I remember there was a story on this young lad who said that he's, and I must have been 10 or 11 at the time, that he's visited each and every night by aliens. And all he did for that is he took like watercolor and drew some sort of a symbol on his chest. And, you know, I would say this was a tablet version of the early alien abduction scenarios because it might have been in the 80s. But I remember that I was so fascinated by this very story. And that is something which I don't understand to this point where this original interest into that came from. Because most people would have probably, you know, brushed it away and had not connected to that. And, you know, what's this weird person doing? But I ended up, of course, you know, getting blue watercolor and painting that on my own chest, hoping that somebody would come, but they never did. So there is an old story about that. But, yeah. I can appreciate that because I remember going into, like, newsagents in Glasgow and you would see all kinds of magazines. And I still love magazines to this day. Obviously, the print age is unfortunately dying away slowly, depending on what you're looking at. But I used to see the Weekly World News quite a lot and I never bought it. But I remember seeing stories like Bat Boy discovered in cave and, you know, aliens abducted me and my babies and I would just remember flicking through them and being fascinated and wondering, is this nonsense? And I was, like, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old. You don't really know. But something just clicks with some people, doesn't it? And I'm sure many people listening and watching this appreciate that aspect. Absolutely. And it's really – and we can start getting serious at this point because I really think that there is a big question behind what actually attracts people so magically to the topic. And I could tell you that at the Sol Symposium, now being a political scientist myself, let me just quickly turn my mobile off, somebody rings me, being, you know, being a social scientist, I was as much fascinated by what happened on stage and, you know, including the fun fact that I was part of that speakers community, which, you know, I'm proud of and I'm happy too because, you know, it gave me the chance to speak to a bigger audience. But at the same time, I was absolutely determined to talk to as many people as I could because there were so many. I mean, there were 400, 500, you might know better. And something that I always do first is literally ask the question, what brings you here? And the stories, some of them are, you know, some of them are stories you might hear on many typical UFO conventions. But a larger part of them dealt about the fact that there was some sort of strange attraction that brings them to the topic and that doesn't let them go. And I wonder if it's, you know, I mean, you know, we could romanticize it and say, well, that's all you will traumatize people that, you know, you have, everyone's in the wild, something pops up about stuff you've seen in your youth and you've made forgotten. But I think it's more than that. I think there is, there is a vibration in the topic because it attaches to so much that, that, that is both ominous and also present in the way that we're living our lives today at the, you know, early 21st century. And it connects to many of the miracles, both, you know, about the UAP topic, but also on the larger context. I think that, you know, AI and UAP have a lot in common and, and there are convergences that, that seem to indicate that. I also met a couple of people who literally told me, you know, I'm expecting very unconventional people to be here in Berlin or in Italy. And that's why I came because I'm fed up with, uh, out of the box explanations for stuff that has been bothering me for a long time. That's reasonable in my opinion. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you're drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more. No more app overload. No more juggling logins. Just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process. So you can focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Absolutely. I think what might be a good way to strip this back before we get into the larger conversation is social science is a phrase that we hear quite often. And I wonder, how do you define it? And what exactly does a social scientist do? It's, we're looking, I mean, social science is a, you know, that's a larger group of sciences that fall into, again, different categories. I, myself, I'm a political scientist. So I'm looking at political systems. I'm looking at institutions. And in my political science field, I'm a political theorist. That means I'm, you know, I would be the equivalent, you know, in a physicist as somebody who is not an experimental physicist, who is not building, you know, strange particle accelerators or stuff like that. But somebody who is just literally sitting in front of a piece of paper and writing all these formulas down. These are theory people, they are designing ways to think about in them, you know, in their case, the physical universe, I think about the political universe. And with that respect, you know, typical questions that do concern me, for example, today, I'm, I'm teaching at the moment a class on a political theory of AI politics, because I'm, you know, I'm seeing that artificial intelligence is going to be so invasive with respect to every, you know, it's a technology that will, that will enter all of our life areas, it will be in health, it'll be in education, it'll be, you know, in labor, I mean, everybody has stories to tell about AI. And, and of course, at one point, I anticipate that people will say, you know, I mean, I really like you, you know, administrators, you know, the people who are running the communities, but I'm pretty sure that an artificial intelligence will do that much more effective than you do. The distribution of resources, you know, the question, where should energy, energy come to the way you're planning, I don't know, rebuilding of streets. I mean, I literally have the feeling that it must be a horde of apes here in Bremen, who does the street planning, because, you know, typically, you always see the most important streets being blocked at the same time, and that ends up in a total disaster. I mean, you could say, arguably, that that with AI, that'll change, but, but there is a lot of stuff that comes with that. Deep questions that are of a political nature. To give you a good example, if you would, for example, tell AI that you're, you're the one because you're the most efficient cognitive tool that we know, you're the one who will make the decisions where energy is going to go in, also in the case of an emergency, you know, if there is some sort of a power out at the, you know, at the local grid. Now, if this AI would, would be programmed to a certain degree, and, you know, one of the first paradigms of it would be to say, I have to survive, because I make all the decisions. So it's the most important thing is that I survive. And then anything else comes, you could say there could be a problem, if it's preferring itself to an intensive care unit in a hospital. What, when the, when the AI makes the decision to sustain itself, automatically 10 people will die. And that's a political question. That's an ethical question. So this is the stuff that, that a political theorist talks about, the social sciences, when it comes to the UAP, and, and, and, you know, the phenomenon at large, they can talk about, you know, what I did at Seoul, and what we'll probably talk about a little later, you know, now, why is it, why do we see that disclosure, which is a political process, unfolds the way it does? Why are there these permanently repeating limitations that we see? Why are people in different political positions, you know, representing the government or the legislation? Why are they acting the way that they do? And, and, and, you know, with my expertise that I, and my colleagues can bring in, I'm, I'm far not the only one who's doing that. But with the expertise of myself and my colleagues, I think that we can ask a few questions in a more nuanced way, so that people might not be so disappointed by the processes of disclosure that they're witnessing. And, and, and, and apart from that, the last, you know, the last field is just baseline social science. I, I recently talked to a friend of mine, who's a well known anthropologist in the UAP field. And I told him, I would love to see studies, for example, that are looking at the distribution, when we talk about experiences, for example, that are looking at the way that experience with the anomalous is distributed on larger groups, because it's a very, you know, it's a very blunt thought to say that if the phenomenon is something that works like a, a natural phenomenon, that is not connected to people, it just appears, you know, in a random distribution on our skies, you know, it's, it's just working in itself, it's not connected to people, then you would expect some sort of an absolute normal distribution in the way that people are seeing that probably geared around the idea that some people are going more outside. So it will be the people who are running their docks because they will be more exposed to the skies or, you know, or natologists that are permanently looking up to, to see this and that bird, but you would probably see some sort of a, a, a distribution that you can plan something that has always struck me, though, is that probably and you call it if you know, that an ornitologist will have a higher probability of seeing a UFO, you call that the fact that he is an ornitologist is a predictor. So it predicts a higher probability of seeing a UFO, you know, that's the way that social science works. Now, if you do that, I think, and if you would do a study on on who has seen that stuff, one of the strongest predictor would be people who already have seen one. So that is, you know, you have that you hear that very often that experiences, you know, on, on, you know, close encounters of the third kind, very often have a history of having seen stuff before, sometimes even family histories, I mean, there are all these, you know, there are all these social facts around being an experience in a certain way, which I find highly interesting. And because if that's the case, one of the most, you know, obvious conclusions you can make from that is that obviously the phenomenon is not just a random natural phenomenon, or an artificial or alien intelligence that does not care about us, and therefore appears randomly. No, there seems to be, there seems to be some sort of a relationship to the people that see it, to the extent that once you've seen one, it's very probable you're going to see another one. And that is not the case. If you say, I don't know, if you're just walking outside, and you see a lightning strike close to you, then you have a probability, I mean, you can check that box, but you probably are not going to see another lightning strike close to you in all your lifetime again, just probabilistically. And that is stuff that the social sciences also can do just by talking to people, raising data. Yeah. What I'd like to do, Christian, is just find out from you, because obviously you're in an academic position. It's one where many folks in positions like yours and similar don't like to discuss UFOs, UAP, whatever you want to call it, for fear of losing tenure, losing funding, losing their careers, losing any chance of progression. But you're comfortable having these conversations. Was that always the case as you made your way into the career you're in now? Or was there a time and what sort of change then that you decided I'm going to start discussing this and in my day to day job? That's a good question. See, if you look closely at myself and my own career, I'm in a fortunate position because I have a tenure that is based on being the director of the graduate school. So this is something that gives me an enormous freedom because I have that as my baseline. I could, you know, I could kick back. I didn't tell you I'm also a painter. So I'm pretty multifaceted. I've seen your website. Thank you. www.christian-peters.space. I needed to have a domain name with space, as you all might imagine. But go there and look at my art. Some of it has strong relations to the phenomenon. There is one painting. It's called O.T. Lam, L-A-M. And that's Lam. That's the figure that Alastair Crowley allegedly was visited through some sort of a spiritual interaction who claimed to be a either interdimensional or non-extraterrestrial spirit and Crowley communicated with that person. I've been always frightened about Crowley. There's something about Crowley that, you know, I'm a big heavy metal fan too. So there's Ozzy Osbourne and Mr. Crowley, all that stuff and Black Sabbath. But apart from that, I've been fascinated by that. So I needed to ban that Lam figure and I've banned it in a quite disturbing painting. People will see it if they want. So there are many, many of those things. And I guess people know that I might be something like an unconventional thinker. It's accepted at my university to a certain degree. Of course, you have to be careful when you're doing academic science of the UAP. And I, you know, unfortunately, I've never seen one myself. So I wouldn't even say that I'm a believer to the extent of being a scientist who who, who is much safer in, in knowing rather than believing and knowing what, you know, the presupposition to know that that UAP are unconventional by nature is, have strong evidence. Now, you could say, I don't, you know, I, I know that Australia exists, even though I've never been there. And, you know, I don't need to believe in Australia. I'm pretty sure that there is this, there is this spot with, with animals hopping around and a lot of poisonous snakes. But still, it's part of this, of this cosmos with the UAP, I am thinking about that, in a sense, the, the probability for this to be an, an absolute reality, to the extent that I trust in the, in the the unconventional nature of some parts of it, that has to do with analyzing data that does exist. And, and, and it's just to me, I mean, my, my friend, Michael Bullen, who was at Seoul as well, you know, I have to quote him because he, he really formed that, that expression, which I really like when he says that I'm a statistical believer, that means, uh, I am, I'm seeing those numbers of consistent stories. I've seen, I'm, I'm seeing, uh, people risking careers, um, in an environment, uh, you know, talk about Gary Nolan. I mean, it's, it's a big thing. He, he, he's a strong, he has a strong personality. And therefore he, you know, and, and with founding together with Peter founding, founding the Seoul foundation, they, they, uh, they've created platforms that create legitimacy, but, but there was a first moving moment, you know, that has to do with the Diana Pasalka book, where he appears as one of those, uh, proponents and only after that, you know, he starts to come out and, and, uh, there's a lot of risk involved, uh, and, and, you know, you need to be tenured and to be very successful to make that decision, or you're very, you have an high affinity towards risk, which I have, as a matter of fact, I'm, uh, you know, I lost a lot of money on, on Bitcoin. So, uh, sometimes you have to pay on that, uh, on that, uh, issue, but, um, it's, it's a process that I'm seeing where there is an enormous conversion happening at the moment. I think that we're going to, and that's one of the few predictions that I'm making, uh, also as a, as a social scientist, because we're not so good at predictions. Uh, one of the predictions that I make is that within the next seven, you know, five to seven to 10 years, uh, if not something quite, you know, astonishing happens before, uh, probably one of those very good and new, uh, observation tools is going to bring very, very strong evidence for the existence of life outside our solar system, you know, much like, like, you know, these three, TI Atlas, uh, uh, has, you know, has been the third in a row of proving the fact that the objects outside our solar system, um, because we could literally witness them here. So they will prove that. And once that happens, uh, once people realize, okay, life is abundant and that already carries a lot of social, cultural, and arguably religious implications, because then you would think about, and what happens to that life? It's, if it's got enough time to, to develop and blah, blah, blah. So is, is evolution something that, that is abundant in the universe? And, and so different question will be asked. And then the UAP discussion that we are having here, which could be also in other terms be explained as the discussion of SETI at home, because, you know, you're, you're looking for extraterrestrial intelligence and, and I've never understood how you can be, how it can be so rational to look somewhere else, you know, 400 light years away and, and do not think about the option that if they have been around for longer than we have, uh, what looks like, you know, an enormous gulf of, of billions of thousands or a hundred thousands of light years that are unbridgeable might become something like just flying over the Atlantic ocean 300 years ago. That was quite a mission to, you know, to get to the United States today. You can do it in four hours, things are changing with time. And, and, and that brings the convergence closer. And I think that once there, there is something like, uh, the definite proof for, you know, Trappist having a bio atmosphere that can't have developed except for the, you know, through microorganisms, then again, there might be even funding for people like me, which is not yet the case. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you're drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more. No more app overload. No more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process. So you can focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. I want to pick up on the point you've made there about observational tools potentially picking something up. I've said regular listeners or viewers will have heard me say that I think the most realistic way we're going to get any form of public disclosure would be that, for example, the James Webb finds signs of life, whether it's technosignatures or biosignatures, really far away. Really, really far away. And they say, we've found a source of light on another planet. We think it's being produced by a potential civilization technologically, but we can't get there anytime soon. It'd be thousands of years before we can get there. I think just that admission in the next five, you say five, seven, 10 years would be enough to get people going, wow, okay, so if there's something really far away, we're going to send a probe, but none of our lifetimes will that probe reach that planet. However, it just opens up the conversation. If there's something there, is there something elsewhere? And if there's something elsewhere, how close could it be? And if there is something at all, is there something already coming here, visiting here? Has it been here? And for me, that just opens up the tap of water slowly, so it doesn't completely flood the bathroom. And, you know, when you turn the sink on and you've got a small spoon in it and it hits, the water hits a spoon and you get splashed all over with water, it can be too much too quick. But perhaps if you turn the tap on slowly, is that the way you could see this unfolding? I totally agree with that. I mean, that's what many people are saying. That's the so-called drip, drip, drip process of disclosure. Some would say that, you know, that's all staged. Some clever social psychologist has made some survey and saying, you know, what you have to do is you have to control the question of distance and proximity in a successive order. So, you know, it could be the first step would be, oh, obviously, you know, on Trappist IV, there is something in the atmosphere. A year later, the next fancy instrument is going to say, oh, and we've seen those Dyson spheres. It's clearly a Dyson sphere. So there is a Kardashev III civilization that harvests the energy of a whole solar system. I think that's the three. I'm not sure. I think it's the three, the four would be the whole galaxy. So it's a it's a three that that harvests the energy of a solar system. And it can't be anything else. And then that's still, you know, there is a distance that saves us from getting too hectic. The problem, you know, the problem with what many people are fearing about an uncontrollable aspect of disclosure is that, you know, the UAP scenario is one of direct contact, you know, it's one, it's one. I mean, you could, I said that in my whole presentation that that I think that there are different disclosure scenarios with respect to, to, you know, it would make a difference if it's a signal that can be seen and can be taken up by many, you know, scientists all across the world. In that scenario, it would be instantaneous and, and everywhere. The fact that there is something apart from us, but it would still be distant because obviously it's 500 light years away. So, you know, you can still feel safe, maybe in a crooked way, compared to the way that you feel safe about the, you know, impending climate crisis, where you still say, but obviously it's 30 years away from now. So, you know, I'm going to circle around myself for that time, for the time being. So, so it's a question of distance, both temporal and spatial. Um, but the, the, you know, once it happens here, um, and it would be, and again, it could, it would be a different thing that, you know, let's say that a crash craft scenario where, where, uh, somebody is having in the inventory, be it the Chinese or the Russians or the Americans, somebody's having in the inventors, an obvious, uh, physical artifact, a technology, a technological artifact that can be shown, that can be shared, that can be tested, but it's something that can be secluded from the rest of the society. It's probably somewhere either in one of those labs or it's in area 51 or somewhere else that we have in, not the faintest idea of, but it'll be secluded. And then versus, you know, I'm talking about different scenarios of disclosure versus something like, you know, the, the, the, uh, the Phoenix lights revisited, you know, in an environment now where, uh, it's not just 30,000 people seeing that some of them having the awareness of taking, you know, like a, a shitty nineties camera to, you know, the VHS and then take, you know, like, I don't know, I'm not a high quality, the JVC. Yeah. And, and now it would be, you know, just a lot of high definition mobiles if that would happen. And, and so all of these are carrying different signatures, but that thing that you've said is that it would be the most reasonable thing. If you would probably have an orchestrated, uh, you know, acclimatization of the idea of first contact to the larger audience of, you know, whatever society that is dealing with that by, you know, you know, ramping up the scenarios and by bringing proximity over time in, because it's exactly as you said, Andy, once they've seen that, you know, there is just a lot of quite rational follow-up questions. If they are capable, I mean, like in the case of the, you know, the, the Dyson sphere, if they are capable of harvesting the energy of a solar system, what would that mean? Are they technologically ahead a million years of us? When would we get there? You know, understand fusion to the degree that we can work with that. And, and, you know, and it's probably even not their, their, their own home system, because if they do that, then they're taking, you know, the sun away and, and the biology on their planets, and they might have transformed. And there is a billion question that would fall up from them. But one of the most evident ones would be, well, isn't that probable that if they're capable of doing that, they would be also capable of just flying those 400 light years over. Hmm. And we see, we're looking in the past, we're seeing something that happened 400 years ago. As it was, yeah. As it was. So those 400 years have passed, maybe they have sent some spaceship exactly at the moment that we looked at that Dyson sphere that was close, you know, is moving at 99% of, of the speed of light, then we would expect that to be here rather soon. So, so that's what I agree with. Yeah. I like the scenarios. I like talking these through and obviously you're a great person to do this with. So you've got that scenario of drip, drip, drip, five, 10, 15 years. We, the James Webb picked something up. You've got the more severe scenario of a Phoenix lights nowadays, which I still think would lend an air of what did they film? Was it top secret, et cetera, et cetera. How would you see a scenario playing out with the public as it is now where a craft crashes in the middle of times square in New York? Undeniable. We're not filming something in the sky. Something literally falls out the sky. That is clearly not a satellite. A tic tac literally lands bang right in the middle of times square. No one's hurt. Let's, let's play out a nice version of the scenario. However, what do you think the public reaction as to that scenario? I think you could, you could probably, you know, I mean, I'm speculating, you know, everybody understands. And also my dear colleagues at the University of Britain, this is highly speculative. That's a social, that's a sci-fi nerd talking about these things. Disclaimer. Yep. No, no, it's not a disclaimer. I'm not, I'm, I wouldn't be afraid of anything. Uh, uh, I take those questions seriously because if you're, if you would not allow yourself to speculate about that, I mean, what, what idea of science would we follow? Absolutely. People, people are living in a daily awareness of the appearance of a non-human intelligence in their life in the next five years, which is a very clever AI that's going to call you in the morning. Uh, and you would not be aware of that. You haven't spoken to a real person. I mean, you know, that, that's quite non-human intelligence hitting here deeply. So anyway, I'm, uh, uh, the question is, I think at the, you know, at the core of what you're asking is that this would have been different five years ago than it is now. Uh, and I tell you why I think that one of the major crisis that we're going to see in the next 10 to 15 years unfold is that the idea of. A image documentation or any kind of representation of reality through film, through camera, through pictures is going to massively blur. People will be very, very uncertain about what is true or not. So if, if that, you know, if that thing hits times square and it will be on, you know, it'll be on Instagram within seconds by the people who see that and upload that probably an enormously high percentage of the human population will swipe it away because they say, you know, oh, damn it. You know, that's the 15th AI thing that I've seen today. Yeah. Um, which probably would good, would give leverage to some sort of a consort that a concerted action in trying to make that not just such a big discussion as it actually should be. I'm not, I'm, you know, I'm not sure I'm speculating here. Uh, the one thing that I'm sure about is that we're coming closer to something that I tend to, you know, talk to my students about and tell them that this is going, we're going to go into an epistemic crisis. And that has to do with the fact that, uh, it's really hard even now to differentiate between something that is fabricated. And I'm literally now I'm talking about the visual, the visual evidence, you know, that you would see because it's all about images too. Yeah. Because if it, if it wouldn't be around images and if, if oral statements would have the same value as, as, you know, you know, visual evidence, then I would say it would be a shame that we are where we are because we have a lot of witnesses saying a lot of stuff. And that is typically disregarded, uh, to a certain degree in saying that, you know, it's anecdotal or it's, uh, you know, they might be psychotic or stuff that happens when you are not wanting to face data just for what it is, whether it's fabricated or it's a, it's a figment of imagination, but it, it tells something. It is about meaning to a certain degree and it does not happen without a reason. And that's why I want people to take experience of data serious. I want that. It's a scientific process that needs to take place. I'm not qualifying anything about Xperia data's a priori. I want to see that data. I want to hear what they say. And I want really good programs to run over that data, analyze that, you know, put that into networks and, and try to find out patterns by the help of, of generative AI stuff that we don't see, you know, likelihoods, uh, and, and, and there is so much in that. And that bothers me. It bothers me that, uh, that still also maybe in the social media environment, uh, a lot of the discussion around the reality of the UAP has to do with, you know, the UAP beating either a technological tool, uh, something that you can measure, you know, it's, there is a lot of discussion about signals, physical signals and, and, uh, or it's, you know, it's part of the natural history, you know, it could be some sort of a weird weather phenomenon. Uh, but, but when, you know, when armchair skeptics are talking about witnesses and experiences and, and, and, you know, even the whistleblowers, the first reaction is, you know, it's against the people. They, they will ask, uh, you know, what they probably did to Grush. I mean, I don't know what Grush has seen or hasn't seen and what he witnessed or didn't witness, but what I definitely have seen is that the discussion on his testifying in front of the Congress has quite quickly turned into a discussion about his mental capabilities. So, you know, and, and that happened so quickly. And that was really surprising about, to me, it looked like an, either it was, you know, it's, it's a, a reflex that people do have, or it's something that is a trained figure of the legitimizing certain stories. And, and, and that bothers me, I must say. Just, just before we get into the experiencer data side of things, there's a lot to talk about there. Just a thought on, on AI, could you have brought it up a couple of times? Right now we're in this really weird place with AI where just on social media, there is a whole load of bots. You make, you make the example, even of videos being faked or images being faked, anything posted online. I saw earlier on an algorithm just brought up some, I don't like flying. So before I went to the Sol Symposium, I was watching videos of pilots. One of them's a German guy. It's called Mentor Pilots is the, the, the guy. And he talks through stuff about planes. Also a guy called Airplane Facts with Max. People might know him. Have you ever heard of him? No. He is basically an airplane mechanic who basically will say this right here on an airplane is like a compressor flap. This does this. And then he compares it to something in Lord of the Rings. That's his thing because he's like a Lord of the Rings obsessive. So it was quite, it was quite funny, but I learned a lot about turbulence and how planes, you know, all that kind of stuff just for me. However, now my Facebook algorithm is constantly showing me videos of plane crashes, these huge aviation disasters, right? So I can watch those now that I'm back home and safe. However, earlier on today, a light aircraft has crashed somewhere and it was India or somewhere like that. And all the comments underneath were a mix of this is AI. This is fake. No, it's real. And people can't even tell now what's real, what's fake, what's not. As they're almost an argument, perhaps not with the visual side of things, but you get a lot of bots commenting now on posts and you can generally tell, for example, again, here's my Facebook history, folks. I've got a border terrier as a dog, lovely little dogs. They are like the best dogs, right? And the page we're on, we keep getting posts where someone will say, well, I say someone, I'm using the language already. And I think this is going to be my point. It will say, I lost our four-year-old border terrier today. He was so sweet. And then it's a generic AI picture of a border terrier, but the poster has no name. There's no profile and you can tell it's a bot. Are we in the early stages of right now we're very dismissive and everyone jumps on and says, it's a bot, get rid of this, block it, scam, that we're going to get to a point where actually bots, as hated as they are now on social media, you'll end up interacting with them in a way that you just start to treat it as another form of sentience, if you want to call it that, if that's the right language, that you just, you know, you have that conversation. For me, you know, I don't have bots by the thousands downloading this podcast, but if there comes a point where different bots and servers and systems are listening to podcasts, is there any difference in a download from a bot because it's being listened to and it's using the data? Is that any different from Dr. Christian Peters downloading my podcast and listening to it and, you know, processing the data because it's going to get so good that bots to humans, what's the difference? That is all for part one. Part two will be out in the next couple of days. You can listen to this episode already in full, ad-free and with no sponsors for less than the price of a coffee. If you head on over to Patreon or Apple, you can subscribe to the podcast for less than the price of a coffee or take up the two weeks free trial that are available on those platforms. You can head on over to Spotify and search That UFO Podcast Premium and get access to this episode in full, no adverts, no sponsorships and also with some extra bonus content as well. Thanks for listening, folks. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you're drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. 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