The Evidence for Aliens, the Afterlife, Bigfoot, Sea Monsters, and More | Miguel Sancho

**Dan Harris** (0:03)
Hello, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. We talk a lot on this show about the value of having an open mind, about intellectual humility. But how open-minded should you be when it comes to things like Bigfoot or UFOs or the afterlife? Today, we're talking to an experienced journalist, a hardened skeptic, my old friend, Miguel Sancho, we used to work together at ABC News where he helped to run the legendary news magazine show 2020 Miguel has gone on to become the executive producer of a show called The Proof Is Out There, which is on the History Channel. He's got a new book, which is called Evidence of the Extraordinary. We're going to talk about how Miguel has gone from, as I said, a hardened skeptic to somebody who is a little bit more open-minded, Miguel Sancho.
Welcome back to the show.

**Miguel Sancho** (0:54)
Dan, great to see you. Honored to be on your show and grateful, of course, to your audience for lending us a little bit of their time.
Let's make it worthwhile.

**Dan Harris** (1:03)
Let me just start with your story.
I worked with you, we started working together, I think, the late aughts and we did a bunch of investigative stories together. We took on self-help and we took on the Church of Scientology. My memory of you is of somebody who was pretty hard-bitten in his skepticism and atheism, et cetera, et cetera. But now, you're the executive producer of a show called The Proof Is Out There and you've got this new book. So what has happened? Give me your arc.

**Miguel Sancho** (1:35)
Yeah. So it would be great if there was some sort of dramatic, Damascus Road epiphany and I could complete the stereotypical Hollywood arc of the cynical hardened journalism professional who has some transformative experience that leads him to embrace every single corner of the woo.
That's out there. I would say this in my own defense as a reconstructed cynic and skeptic that back when we were doing our stuff, and I thought it actually was not just worthwhile, but some of the most important work I've ever done in my career. We weren't necessarily cracking on any particular belief per se, but rather the degree to which certain charlatans and unscrupulous exploiters of people's desire to believe in something bigger, not only kind of drain people of their money oftentimes, but also their autonomy and their identity and their grasp on reality. So I like to kind of separate the two questions about whether or not there is something more than straight up hardcore scientific materialism as a lens through which to understand our world, our universe and our experiences, and the nefarious ways in which some of the gullible and credulous are taken advantage of. Because fundamentally, I do conclude in this book that the desire and the need, if you will, to believe in something bigger is not something that we should shun or be embarrassed about or try to evolve beyond, but something that is in fact crucial to the process of evolution and progress itself.

**Dan Harris** (3:12)
I want to come back to that, how the desire, dare I say, needed to believe in something bigger is important. But let me just stick with you for a second.

**Miguel Sancho** (3:24)
Yes, we know I'm infinitely interesting, so let's talk about me.

**Dan Harris** (3:27)
Me, me, me.
You're interesting to me. This may be a local concern because you're one of my friends, but I take your point that you and I in our roles at ABC News as investigative journalists, we weren't taking on belief itself, we were taking on unscrupulous exploitation of the human propensity toward belief. And yet, you were, I think by your own description, pretty skeptical about all sorts of claims and now you executive produce a show that is taking a journalistic look at the paranormal. Talk about that and has it shifted your view on things that often have been like reflexively rejected by the mainstream like UFOs, et cetera, et cetera.

**Miguel Sancho** (4:10)
So in a nutshell, I can tell a condensed version of the show and how I became intricately involved and interwoven with its manifestations. So it was COVID, I'd been working after ABC at A&E and its various other networks, including the History Channel, on the stuff that I usually do, which is pretty much documentary style investigative reporting. I'd done a series of specials with them.
And I had other stuff in the works.
Some rather, as I recall, some rather hardcore stuff about like American Prisons was the show I was working on when COVID hit and shut everything down. And I was, like many people, facing an extended period of underemployment due to the fact that field work itself had been banned for quite some time. So wonderful people at A&E Networks and History approached me with this opportunity to show that was an attempt to, as you just said, quite articulately, to apply journalistic standards, scientific rigor, and a healthy dose of skepticism to this immense and growing pipeline of videos that people claim to be documentation of anomalous events that substantiate claims in the supernatural or paranormal or what have you. And my first reaction was, thank you for the opportunity. My second reaction was, are you sure I'm the right guy for this? Because there are plenty of people who have spent decades producing TV shows in this genre, in this space. I was not one of them. But they said again, no, we want somebody with your background because that's the lens through which we're going to be approaching this content in this space. So it turned out to be a very felicitous marriage. And it was a wonderful opportunity because in addition to remaining employed, I was able to learn a heck of a lot. There's a lot to learn in this space. It's not just campfire stories or superstitions or folklore that you can kind of ethnographically sneer at down your spectacles, but it is a very diverse, very well researched, very fascinating field that was entirely worthy of my attention.