Simulcast on KGRA Digital Broadcasting, YouTube, Facebook, Rumble & Twitch – Tuesday, April 16, 2024 @ 7:00 PM EDT (-4GMT)
BIO: Nick Pope is a media commentator and former civil servant. Whilst an employee at the British Government’s Ministry of Defence (MoD), Pope was responsible, among other duties, for investigating UFO phenomena to determine if they had any defence significance. He moved to the United States in January 2012. See more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Pope_(journalist)
Transcript:
All right, I’m here with Nick Pope. Thank you, Nick, for being willing to sit down and talk. Sure. And we really had fun with you up in Shag Harbor this last October. That was a real pleasure to meet you up there and hang out.
And I enjoyed both talks. We’re here at the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference. And I really loved what you had to say up there. And then yesterday, that was a very good talk. I have to say, you must be a man that thinks a lot and really looks into a lot of things in between your very busy schedule. That’s right, yes. I’m always reading. I’m always taking in a vast amount of information. And yes, absolutely, thinking about things, thinking of questions that people maybe haven’t thought to ask, thinking of different… angles to approach this topic from because it’s so multifaceted and and you know just as you think you’ve covered everything you you’ve taken off in a new direction right and I think that’s a good point the questions you know we don’t even know what questions to ask and uh I agree with a lot of the things you said now there You went down kind of the dark side, too, the possibility of the dark side. And also when it comes to disclosure, you think of things why, if the government knows, and I personally don’t think they know everything, but I think they know most likely more than we do. I’m talking about the U.S. government. But there may be a dark side, and that’s maybe the reason we’re not knowing as much as we’d like to. And do you want to hit on some of those ideas? I mean, they’re fascinating. Sure, yes. The title of my presentation, as you know, was A Secret Too Terrible to be Told. And I wonder… Given that there can really be nothing classified about an extraterrestrial presence, if that’s what we’re dealing with, in and of itself, you know, in terms of the literal security manual definitions of what classified information is in terms of causing harm to the national security of the United States. Well, if you say we’re being visited by, call it, let’s use the phrase, non-human intelligence, the David Grush term, that can’t be classified. It must be that there’s something else about it that takes us into new territory. There’s part of the story, part of the back story that does take us into something that’s classified because it would cause damage. Because all the cliches about undermining religion and panicking the streets, they have some validity to them, but that’s not a justification for classification. really, not certainly at the levels that we’ve seen classified briefings in Congress, for example. So it was just a speculative what-if presentation that really said, look, what might that something else be that would take us into dark side territory? Right. And some of the different things, I know you go through the demonic possibility that I mean people like Lou Elizondo said someone above his pay grade I remember when he said that uh mentioned him that he thought there could be a demonic element to this just one of them and also I’ve heard him also say that uh what if something you know what if we aren’t the top thing here, the top intelligence. What if there’s been something here all along? You know, all that stuff fascinates me because we only, you know, I mean, just think of our spectrum alone, but I think we only know just very little about what’s going on around us at all times. Absolutely. I know a lot of people in the UFO community take a very spiritual, New Age approach to this. The space people are coming here. They’re going to save us from nuclear destruction. All of that. I’d love it to be true, but I suspect it isn’t. For all the people that say… there’s a UFO nuclear connection, and who then take the next step and say, well, if we ever press the button, they’ll step in. Well, they didn’t step in at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So this dark side idea appeals to me. I mean, I don’t personally believe in demons, but what’s interesting is that people in both the U.S. and the U.K. government, who are well-placed, highly-placed senior people with power and authority, do believe in demons, and particularly in the U.S., in the sort of fundamentalist Christian arena, where there are people who told Lou Elizondo When when Lou was trying to get more resources and more stakeholder engagement on this said go read your Bible son And I mentioned the specific passage in the book of Ephesians that a lot of this faction who think it’s demonic Hang this on and and it’s the quote that describes Satan as being the prince of the power of the air and and therefore If there’s this faction that thinks it’s demonic or part of it is demonic, they also believe that you shouldn’t really study it or engage with it because that feeds it and gives it energy. Right. I remember that part. Yeah. Yeah. And so what are some of the, if you don’t mind touching on some of the other possibilities of, you know, when you were thinking along these lines of what they could be? Well, inevitably I was attracted to the idea of simulation theory, the idea that essentially we are living in a construct, that the observable universe is really just a computer program or something like that, a simulation. rather like we see in the Matrix movies, for example. And if that’s the case, the question then arises, well, what are we? Are we like a reality show? Are we an arcade game? Are we a science experiment? And in all of those scenarios, those are things that have a sort of end point. Somebody at the end of the day says, okay, this has gone off track. Let’s pull the plug or game over. Well, are we going to hit that? And is that what the phenomenon is? Or does the phenomenon kind of support that theory? In which case that would be a secret about this that perhaps would be too terrible to be told? How could you tell people that we’re in a simulation? Or alternatively, another possibility, what if we are being farmed, harvested? You listen to the abduction reports, if those are true. We are a resource, and I didn’t say this, I don’t think I said this in my presentation yesterday, but it’s like, imagine us as the product being farmed and harvested for something, whether it’s DNA samples for a hybridization program, whatever it is, some people say our souls, whatever you believe. But it’s like, if that’s true, When a rancher moves the cattle around, he doesn’t consult the cows. So, you know, what if we’re the cows? So those are the sorts of ideas that I unpacked. And then the time travel, I think it’s interesting. I spoke with you after just briefly about I had a scientist on my show a while back, and he said, you know, there has been enough time that the Earth had oxygen, et cetera, to move ahead. There could have been civilizations that moved. there’s no sign of. Now, I don’t know how true that is. I’m not a scientist myself. But you mentioned, what if they’re time travels from the past? And you don’t often hear that. Time travels from the future, like Dr. Michael Masters talks about, or time travelers from the past. Either way is really something to think about and all the paradoxes that could happen. And it would explain some of the things. Absolutely. And time travelers from… When I talk about this, usually I speculate time travelers from the future. I threw in time travelers from the past just because my presentation yesterday was a speculative cover all the bases one. And I thought, why not? Why not throw it in? And one sees all these arguments. Yes, the Earth is about 4.3 million years old. Billion. Billion, pardon me, yes. The ape-human split was somewhere between 5 and 7 million years ago. Anatomically modern humans walked the earth for maybe only 200,000 years. So with a 4.3 billion year old and with even the most mighty buildings collapsing into dust and things after a few thousands of years probably. Yes, who’s to say it’s not possible that previous civilizations have emerged and fallen and been replaced. on a lesser scale, it seems that almost every month we’re finding out lost cities as we use new scientific techniques. We are pushing back the human timeline even. So maybe there are some even bigger discoveries to make. But let’s suppose it’s time travelers from the future. Well, that would explain why many people see apparently essentially humanoid creatures, the Greys, because in this scenario that’s what we evolve into. Yes, right, right. And I’m not sure about, you know, I was just listening to Mark D’Antonio’s presentation. He was talking about the asymmetrical situation like beings and certain beings are like that. But I always think on other planets, there’s so many variables. I mean, a lot of the stars have a binary. I mean, solar systems are binary. And how would that affect gravity? And how would that affect evolving species in different ways? And there’s so many variables on how species can evolve. And yet, you’re right. A lot of what people claim they see is a lot like us. So yes, that might be because it is time travel from the future, but as again I said in my presentation, none of these things are mutually exclusive. So it’s perfectly possible to have a scenario where you would have time travelers from the future, but you would also have extraterrestrials. And I suspect that while in this vast, infinite universe, there might be trillions of civilizations, so a lot of variety. I’m also a fan of a sort of convergent evolution on a universal scale, in that if a design works, it works. So just as we have convergent evolution here on Earth, we may well find that forms that work, just arise through natural processes and again one of the constants I suspect in the universe will be random mutation and natural selection and self-evidently the change that best suits the environment and gives that life form an advantage will be selected for. So actually, we may well find that this is pretty useful. Eyes to see, a mouth, a vocal, voice box and vocal cords to communicate a written language, opposable thumbs to hold things and build things and write things, legs to move around. So we might find in the universe some very, very different life, but we might find some that’s stunningly similar. Yeah, yeah, right. And I’m just going to change gears a little bit here. And how do you think AI is going to affect the ufo world because I’m a little concerned about that right now because I really feel like anyone that sends me a picture now send you a picture sends videos or whatever we can’t really rely on those anymore with uh I don’t know if you’ve seen some of these things but they’re incredible what they can recreate I mean it’s I’m just wondering what how you feel about as we move forward how we ever going to be able to get anyone to believe anything Well, I think we had the same debate when Photoshop first came in, of course. And then what we found was that various tools were developed to spot fakes and to spot images that had been used previously, for example. So there are sites like Reverse Search or whatever it’s called. So I regard this as rather like an arms race where you have a missile and then you have an anti-missile, and then you have an anti-anti-missile. So yes, I agree with you that AI will be a problem in terms of things like fake videos and photos, but then I suspect other AI tools will be developed to spot things that have been done with AI that might help. And I think, as with all things in life, AI in relation to the UFO community will bring both threats, like the one we’ve discussed, but opportunities. And one of the big opportunities is once we actually have the vast archive of paper databases, whether they’re MUFON databases, whether they’re government databases like the UK Ministry of Defense, whatever it is. Once we have all that digitized, AI will play a huge role in trend analysis, in going through big data, big information, and finding the patterns that human analysts may not have spotted. There’s a lot of people talk about the medical field, that it could really be very progressive in moving forward into possibly cancer research, things like that. incredible tool all the way around. I think, yes. I think it may well play, I think it already is, but a much more profound role in diagnosis. So for example, we have a lot at the moment of sort of telemedicine or online thing where you put in your symptoms and somebody will go off a checklist. Well, I suspect AI will get better and better that and it may be able to do other things like for example I read just the other day about a woman who was capable of smelling people and detecting Parkinson’s disease and it turned out there was there was some really obscure reason why this worked and her hit rate was was way higher than chance alone would have allowed. And so I wonder if there aren’t ways of looking at apparently healthy people. Now I’m not… I don’t like over-diagnosis, and there’s always a danger of people getting so many tests and becoming obsessed with it. But what if AI could be used to look at people’s physical appearance to maybe detect smells, or whether it’s chemical composition of breath, or something in the skin, whatever it might be. So that would be something. But also, of course, running through immense combinations or potential combinations of drugs, chemicals to make new drugs for treatments. So that would be a possibility. I think AI is already and will increasingly change the world. What I touched on yesterday, of course, was the idea that is any of this already sentient or close to becoming sentient? And if life has evolved elsewhere in the universe, which I’m convinced it has, is some of that life Now, has it evolved from biological to post-biological, either through a sort of transhumanism or trans-alienism, if I can call it that, or simply that biological extraterrestrials created AI programs which then effectively evolved and either overthrew or just overtook their biological creators and might first contact be with AI, and if so, maybe they won’t land on the White House lawn, but maybe they’ll reach out a sort of digital tendril into some of our computers and AI systems, in which case that might be detectable. How about that? Great thinking. So getting back to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which I think is definitely a very big possibility of what we are seeing here in some form or another I’m sure I’m sure you hear the argument which I hear have heard constantly since the start of the show they can’t get here from there you know uh it’s too vast you know a distance for even the nearest star and I have always thought well maybe they figured out something we have not yet or something in physics we just haven’t discovered or something like that And I just wanted to hear your take in general when you posed that question. Sure. Well, let’s start with your point. Absolutely. It may be that there are workarounds to the apparent impenetrable barrier of light speed. And those workarounds, of course, might be wormholes. They might be warp drives. People talk a lot about the Alcubierre warp drive, for example. So there may be something like that. But let’s suppose for a moment that there isn’t. It doesn’t matter, because in a universe nearly 14 billion years old, there might be civilizations out there with a billion year head start on us, and if those civilizations let’s just say in our galaxy for the time being, and even in the nearby part of our galaxy, had sent probes. Let’s suppose those probes were no faster than our Pioneer or Voyager probes, which would take… Broadly speaking, had we aimed those at Proxima Centauri, the nearest star aside from our sun, they would take about 70,000 to 75,000 years to get there. But that’s not a long time compared to the sort of time scales that we just discussed in terms of civilization a billion years ahead of us. So if that’s the scenario, without needing to invoke any kind of new physics, like wormholes or warp drive, just taking our own current level, which we know is possible because we’ve done it, then it is absolutely feasible that the galaxy could be full of probes from other civilizations just traveling between the stars at sublight speed. And I suspect that actually, again, without needing to invoke warp drive and wormhole. I suspect that we’ll be able to do something a lot faster than Pioneer and Voyager probes. We might be able to get up to, say, 0.1, 0.2 of light speed, in which case my argument is even more ironclad that there is plenty of time for other civilizations to have evolved and sent probes here. without offending against any of the laws of physics although of course as I always say it’s it’s not the laws of physics it’s the laws of physics as currently understood and our our understanding of the laws of physics is constantly changing and evolving right I had an astrophysicist on the show that I that claims that there’s a possibility of about a billion Earth-like planets in just our galaxy. And that’s something to really ponder, considering how many billions and billions of galaxies there are. So if they have evolved, it just makes me wonder why the pale blue dot, why would they come to see us if there’s that many possibilities of life and possibly intelligent life out there? I just have always pondered, Why would we be visited, or are they visiting every civilization they can find? I suspect they would want to visit every civilization because to truly ancient civilizations in the universe, newly emerging civilizations like ours might be the last interesting thing in the cosmos. Who wouldn’t want to do some anthropology and see how any new civilization is going to develop? And sure, this is another point that I think I made in my presentation. But if not, I’ll make it here anyway. We are unlikely, of course. It’s one of the few good assumptions because of the… the engineering challenges of interstellar travel. It’s one of the few good assumptions that visiting extraterrestrials will have technology orders of magnitude above and beyond anything we have. That being the case, we are not going to have anything to teach them about science, technology, anything like that. But, and this speaks to your why would they come here, all the abstract things, art, literature, poetry, architecture, all those things I think will be unique to civilizations. Every civilization probably goes through a fairly structured phase of discovery and development, not least because some things can really only be invented after you’ve invented something else. So you can’t invent the motor car without having first invented the wheel, as an example. So I suspect that all civilizations go through a phase that they would develop spoken language and then a written language to communicate information and make plans and things like that, that they would discover how to harness and make fire, the wheel, Agriculture, urban societies, flight, the internal combustion engine. I suspect those things are fairly standard across the universe because in a sense they’d have to be for any… You can’t just jump. You can’t just jump. Any civilization coming here must have probably a propulsion system that we haven’t quite figured out yet. But to get into space in the first place, you probably have to go through rockets, and before rockets, flight, before flight. So there’s a sequence. there’s probably only ever been one Van Gogh in the universe. One Mozart, one Bach, one Da Vinci, one David Bowie, one Beatles. So I’m sure a lot of, maybe most civilizations will have music. I was going to just ask you what you thought about that. Because I thought of… Because I do a lot of thinking about this too. What was the equivalent of a first kiss, a first car? Music, what would music be like? And it’s very interesting to ponder all that. I think so, yes. And I think these things, all life obviously wants to preserve its own existence, find a mate, reproduce, food, shelter, all those things. But I think what sets apart a civilization from just a successful life form is organization, but also curiosity, which I think is inextricably linked to intelligence, and creativity. So I suspect that most civilizations in the universe will have music, and obviously they’ll have architecture. I mean, that’s just how you build things, but the styles will be interesting to see for sure. But I think those more abstract things like art, literature, music, poetry, those will be the things that civilizations do in unique ways. And even if a lot of things are standard across the cosmos, we’ll have some new and different things, even to truly ancient civilizations who’ve seen it all before because they won’t have seen this before. Yeah. This is excellent. It’s been really very enjoyable, and thank you. for your time and being here and doing what you do. Well, thank you. And I’ve enjoyed the conversation because it’s taken us to some more interesting places than, frankly, a lot of the fairly standard interviews go. Who knew that we’d finish up talking about whether aliens are going to like the Beatles and what an extraterrestrial version of Van Gogh might be like. But that’s effectively where we’ve landed. Yeah, and I love it. Okay, thank you. Thank you. All right, that’s it. So please jump over to Kevin Day, if you’re watching live, that is. And that should be right up on the YouTube channel or Facebook, et cetera. Thanks so much, everyone. I thought it was a great conversation. And remember to keep your eyes to the sky.