Michael Shermer: The Only Skeptic on the Alien Task Force

**Michael Shermer** (0:00)
I have a bet with Avi, a thousand bucks by December 31st, 2030 We won't find aliens, he says we will. I hope he wins.

**Brian Keating** (0:06)
You were just named, as I reading this now, just last week to this new White House panel, council on alien and UFO and UAP task force. Okay, now leave aside that, you know, Avi Loeb is a mutual friend of ours. You've been on the Galileo project for a while. There are some characters on this committee alongside, you know, that have legitimate credentials. Dr. Gary Nolan, professor at Stanford. He's another member who, you know, in his spare time, scans the brains of abductees for a biomarker and claims to have evidence of alien, you know, metallurgical isotope ratios that are anomalous. What happened, Michael?
Did they get to use a big bag of Harvard money?

**Michael Shermer** (0:46)
No, there's no money. No, this is all voluntary. There's no money at all. Same thing with the Galileo project. I've been on it since the beginning and I just do it because I'm interested in the topic. I think Avi strikes the right balance between open mindedness and gullibility. Don't be gullible but be open minded but also be skeptical. And their emphasis on data and evidence, not stories, all right? I mean, we just had our first meeting today. Avi started right off. No more stories about people who know people that touch the aliens or whatever. We've all heard these, okay? And no new physics, right? So you'll appreciate this because you're a physicist, right? I mean, it's like people are always talking, this is Avi. People are always telling me about the, you know, the aliens are going to give us new physics. No, there's no new physics. Okay, so forget that. I mean, maybe they do, but, you know, that's just too far off the radar here. But I'm not the enemy. I mean, I have a bet with Avi, thousand bucks, right? By 20, December 31st, 2030 We won't find aliens. He says we will. Okay, I hope he wins. I would like it to be true. The aliens are probably out there somewhere in the cosmos, run the numbers in the Drake equation. And he's like, yeah, okay, they're probably out there. But have they come here? Okay, so I think that's a far less probable proposition. We don't know for sure. Let's see the evidence. Okay, so when Avi puts together this team, it's like, yeah, sure, I'll do it. He described me as the Advocatos Diaboli, that is the Catholic Church's version of the devil's advocate, which they employed to debunk all the miracle claims in the Middle Ages. Everybody had a piece of the True Cross. These were holy relics. Everybody had the blood of this saint and this other person and so on. Okay, they know most of this is just bullshit.
And, they debunked it themselves. The Catholic Church was the primary skeptical debunker of miracle claims. Now, they still hold out, but there was this one, you know, so we're going to give Mother Teresa her sainthood, that kind of thing. But for the most part, they're as skeptical as I am. So that's my job on the team, is really just to be a good skeptic. And of course, any good scientist is a good skeptic. We start with the null hypothesis. That is, your claim about something is not true until you prove otherwise. The burden of proof is not on scientists and skeptics to debunk every particular claim. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. I have a theory of everything. I think Einstein was wrong and Newton was wrong and Hockney was wrong, and here's my theory of everything for physics. Well, you're not going to go, okay, then I guess I have to disprove it, and you're right. No, you're going to say, I don't believe it, but go ahead. Make your case.
And we're having a conference next week and all the top physicists will be there. Why don't you come and present your case for us and we'll judge how well you did. In the same way that all the people that made a claim that they had a miracle cure for COVID, the FDA doesn't just hand out approvals of new drugs. You actually have to present the FDA your evidence. How do you know this actually works? And you can't just say, well, my Aunt Mary had it and she took it and she felt better.
Sorry, that's not evidence. That's not enough to refute the null hypothesis. That is, reject the null hypothesis at some level of statistical significance, as they say. And that's all we're after there.