Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #59, released on 10 June 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (36 minutes). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn Campbell home page: Glenn-Campbell.com. See bottom for notes on this transcript and how it was generated.
I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.
In this issue of my podcast, I'm going to talk about
something completely different—UFOs! I'm going to talk about the relevance
of UFOs to the subject of this podcast: demography and macroeconomics. Spoiler alert!
Guess what? There is not any connection that I can find between UFOs and
demography or macroeconomics, and that's the whole point here. That's why I’ve
picked up the microphone. I want to tell you how much irrelevance UFOs have
to the subjects I’ve been talking about, but I'm going to do it with some
nuance and do it at length, because it's still an amusing topic, even if it's
unrelated to my main topics.
So why am I talking about it right now? First of all, where
am I? I'm in a car on the edge of a cornfield in South Carolina. It's 2am, and I
just woke up and decided I should do a podcast on UFOs in my demography podcast.
There are two things that prompted this: One was a recent news story from
reputable outlets like the New York Times and 60 Minutes indicating that UFOs
are real after all— that there seems to be some solid military evidence of
craft operating in Earth's environment that far exceed anything that humankind
is capable of.
These craft are described as “Tic-Tacs”—oblong white objects without any definition, about the size of a commercial airliner. Military
equipment can get a lock on them, can see them. You have visual evidence and
radar evidence they're real. They can travel at enormous speed in air and in
water. After we've discussed UFOs for decades, now it turns out some of them
might be real.
So that's one thing that prompted this podcast episode. The other
one was that I bought a drone! About three weeks ago, I bought a drone. The drone
technology has finally advanced to the stage where I feel comfortable buying
one knowing that I'm not going to lose it tomorrow, because these drones are
quite sophisticated about coming back home. I've started to explore my
environment with this drone, which is mostly done through the controller. Once your
drone goes up into the air, this thing has a huge range. It can fly for a half
an hour, and it can go up to several miles away from where I am, and it can
plop itself down in some other environment, just like a UFO. Just like an alien.
Something I did a couple of days ago is I saw some cows off
in the distance from where I was sitting, so I launched my drone, and my drone
went over and talked to the cows! And for the first time, I had some response
to my drone. The cows looked up at my drone, and what I did is I came down in
the field about eight feet above the ground, and the cows started to circle
around me, and they looked at me and as they walked toward me, [they] wondered,
what is this thing in their environment? From their perspective, it is a UFO. It
is something that's there. My drone is definitely real. It's not a bird. It's operating
a way that they've never seen before, and it's just fascinating to them.
But it's also far beyond their comprehension. I can never
explain my drone to a cow. It's just impossible. They have no frame of reference
to understand where this craft has come from or why it is there. All they know
is that it is there.
My Ah-Ha! Moment just now is that this is what the UFO phenomena is like to humans. Those Tic-Tac objects seen by military pilots,
they are pretty much like my drone. They have some sort of purpose, but it is
way beyond our little cow brains to understand what that purpose is. It's almost
futile to try, beyond just noting that these things exist.
You could have cows talking to each other and talking about
what this this thing is, and some cows say to the other cows, “Oh, you're crazy!
There's no such thing.” But we know that my drone definitely exists. It came
down, and the cows gathered around, and I kind of responded to them, because as
they're coming to look at me, I'm going down to look at them. So I'm exhibiting
some form of intelligence. It's just [that] my goals in launching my drone and
coming to visit them are beyond their ability to process.
So that is the final conclusion of my UFO investigation: Yes,
they're real, but they're not relevant to our life on Earth—which is the whole
reason I finally got out of UFOs in my own life. I'm speaking to you as someone
who's been into it a lot more than most people have. There was a time in the
1990s when I called myself a UFO researcher, and I got some publicity and some
renowned as a UFO researcher.
It started back in my youth, in my teenage years in the
1970s. I was into science fiction and got into the UFO literature at the time,
which was really pretty thin. There were only a handful of incidents. I read
all of the books that were available at the time, but I realized that as a
teenager, really I got into the UFO thing for the same reason I got into
science fiction: for the escapism. To escape from my dreary life in a small
town, I got into science fiction and UFOs. As I grew up and emerged into the
larger rural world, I discarded them as irrelevant, not important. They could
be real, but they're not important to my real adult life, so I discarded them
for a couple of decades.
I came back to UFOs around 1990 after I'd been reasonably
successful in the software business and had some money and some time. I thought
it would be cool to get back into UFOs again. I didn't see them as any more
relevant than I did in my teenage years, but it was a fascinating mystery to me.
It was like a puzzle to be figured out. I knew that 99% of the UFO claims were
false, were misjudgments in some way by the human brain, but that didn't mean
that there wasn't one percent out there that were real, and that one percent I
saw as, you know, just the fact that any of this, any one instance is real,
ought to be earth shattering.
So I got into it in the 1990s as a an intellectual challenge
because I had time on my hands and I wanted to see if there was any signal in
all of this noise. To cut a long story short, I was attracted to Area 51, which
was supposedly a place where you could see UFOs on demand, on a scheduled basis.
I went to investigate them, and this became my whole cause celebre for the
next five years or so. I became an expert on Area 51, as much as anyone could
be, and I was really much more focused on the human aspects of this very real
place. I got some recognition. I got some fame for it. My 15 minutes of fame
turned into 45 minutes of fame. I got along on a lot of tv shows, which went on
for years, and it became a source of my identity—at least my public identity. That's
how most of the world would know me, as this publicist for Area 51.
But the UFOs themselves I always kept at arm's length. My position
on UFOs has almost always been: “They're just not relevant, [even if] they
could be real.” Certainly, the vast majority of UFO reports are not real. A handful
of them could be real, but even if they are, they're just not relevant to my
life on Earth.
Eventually I exploited everything I could exploit at Area 51.
I learned an awful lot about many human subjects. It was like a graduate level
program on a lot of other things, like law and government and psychology and
media. I learned so much about how media works. But it ran its course, and I
withdrew. I moved on to other things.
And now UFOs are back, and they seem to be real. Some little
sliver of the UFO literature seems to be real, and now what do I do about it?
I can only interpret UFOs in terms of what is important to
me, and what is important to me right now is demographics [and] the demographic
crises that we are facing—crises like not enough babies and not enough quality in
our upbringing of babies, and all of the macroeconomic problems that arise from
not having enough babies, which is the looming monetary crisis that is coming
about—basically because our demographics are tapped out, [and] we don't have
the demographic growth that we used to have.
So how do these Tic-Tacs operating in the Pacific or the Atlantic
Ocean, sighted by military pilots, how is that relevant to any of the problems I'm
talking about—and it just isn't!
I'm like those cows. When this drone arrives, this weird
alien craft arrives in their environment, I'm going to take notice of it. I'm
going to note it down in my little cow brain, but when the object goes away
again, I'm going to go back to munching grass, because that's what cows do. When
there's no article in the New York Times about UFOs, well, I just go back to my
version of munching grass, which is working on the human problems that humans
have created and that only humans can solve.
So let's say that these aliens do have this fantastic
technology that can do all these amazing things. It implies all sorts of
technological advances beyond what we can do… [but it] doesn't have any
relevance [to] our production of babies! It doesn't have any relevance to our
monetary system. I can't even imagine any way that alien creatures could fix
our economy or fix our politics.
Now, aliens could come along and knock out a couple of
dictators. Let's say I had the power of the aliens at my disposal. There's a
few dictators I like to dispose of, but I don't have any illusions that that's
going to fix the problems of humanity. I won't name those dictators but you can
imagine some of the dictators I'd like to remove, just to free their people and
give their people a second chance, but I have no guarantee that by giving
people a second chance, they're not going to create new dictators.
It's just not simple. The aliens just can't come in from
space and zap somebody with a bolt of lightning and fix anything, because
humans have created their own problems, and if the problems are solvable at all,
only humans can solve them. We can't expect anything from aliens.
What relevance do they have to the military? Well, the
military is a little bit more interested in UFOs because these things could be
mistaken for adversaries. What if these UFOs reported are not alien craft but
in fact are Russian or Chinese craft? Well, that's something we should be
concerned about. The main thing that the military should be concerned about is
that these aliens—which we have no reason to believe are threatening—are not
mistaken for things that are threatening. So the military does have a stake in
identifying at least whether or not this thing is a threat. Once it is
determined that these things are not threatening, then it's not a military
problem. It might be a scientific issue, but even there, what's more important.
Is it more important to investigate UFOs or to investigate some medical issue
that might actually save lives? You decide.
I don't think aliens are worth too much of my time, but,
like the cows, if an alien flies by me or the New York Times reports on the
aliens, I'm going to look up, and I'm going to at least take some passing
interest.
So I’ve said a lot of other things about Area 51. If you
want a capsule of my Area 51 research: I never saw anything or experienced
anything that I couldn't eventually explain, but there were things that took me
a while to explain. There were lights in the sky that took me a while to
explain [but] I eventually did. There were incredible sounding claims made by
people like Bob Lazar and Bill Uhouse, claiming to have worked with or seen
alien craft.
I take the same agnostic position: I don't know if they're
real or not real, but they're not worth my time to investigate. In the case of
those two people, Bob Lazar [and] Bill Uhouse, these characters are so
unreliable and so sociopathic that it's just not worth my time to investigate—even
if they did hold all the secrets of the universe.
Instead of talking about any specific UFO case, I'd much
rather talk about the philosophy of UFOs—or more broadly the philosophy of the
unknown. The universe is full of unknowns. Imagine talking to a Roman of 2000
years ago. He came from a reasonably sophisticated society, but if you tried to
explain our science and technology to him, he would just be blown away. He would
regard much of it as paranormal, because it's just so far beyond his understanding.
There's plenty of science and technology yet to be
discovered, and in fact it's pretty much a an infinite quest. Science goes on
indefinitely. You can dump as much resources into science and technology as you
have, and there will never be an end to it. Unfortunately, I don't have
infinite patience for these infinite quests, especially personally. Following my
cancer treatment and my near-death experiences over the past couple of years, I’ve
entered what I call the “third half” of my life, and I want to make the most of
the time I have left. One thing I’ve learned about UFOs is they will absorb all
of your time and give you nothing in return, so for me, these kind of quests
just aren't worth the effort. They're not worth my limited time.
And the same applies to paranormal phenomenon, paranormal
research. There could be something. There have been a few inklings over the
years that some psychic phenomena are real. For example, remote viewings seem
to have promise for a while, but the more you study these things, the more they
seem to just slip away.
One thing I can say about both UFOs and psychic phenomena is
that they're not reliable. They don't perform on demand, so you can't really
use them for anything. You might have a psychic hunch that prompts you to turn
your head and look in a certain direction, and that can be useful in itself,
but you can't use those psychic hunches to make substantial personal decisions,
or you're going to get yourself into trouble. You have to rely on the things
you know for sure. Until UFOs and psychic phenomena start becoming reliable, I’ve
got to make my decisions based on concrete things, based on solid reasoning and
evidence that I can verify.
One of the reasons I'm attracted to demography is that there
are a lot of things that you can know for sure. For example, you can know for
sure that there won't be more future adults on the planet than there are
children right now. I also contend that there are things you can know for sure
about macroeconomics—mainly that you can't spend more money than you make. No government
or other entity can consistently spend more money than they make without
something bad happening. You have to pay the piper sometime.
UFOs offer no such certainties. In fact, they yield hardly
any useful information at, all even if you believe in specific cases. Let's say
something weird happens and it is corroborated by a lot of different sources. Where
do you go from there?
If you're a cow and you experience my drone for the first
time—or even multiple times—what do you do with that information? Probably what
you're going to do is you're going to twist it around in such a way that it's
meaningful to you, that makes you the center of the experience. You're probably
going to attribute to my drone some kind of intent that simply wasn't there.
A useful analogy here is the cargo cults of the South Pacific.
This was a real phenomenon that took place during World War II. There were Pacific
islanders who had hardly ever seen an outsider before, and all of that changed
during the war. Soldiers arrived in boats, and they built airfields, and then
the most fantastic UFOs would land on those airfields. Of course, we know what
those UFOs were. They were airplanes involved in the war effort against Japan,
but to the islanders, the planes were something totally alien—as were these
pale skinned aliens in uniforms who operated the planes. So the airfield on
this remote island might have operated for a year or two, and then the aliens
just packed up and left, as swiftly and mysteriously as they arrived.
So if you're one of these islanders left behind, you're left
to wonder, “What just happened?”—and that's where the cargo cults came in. People
began to worship these aliens and worship these craft. They drew moral lessons
from the aliens coming and the aliens departing, and they prayed to the
aliens to come back.
These people [even] built their own planes. You can see them
by googling for "cargo cult". Do a visual image search for "cargo cult", and you
see the planes that these Pacific islanders built. They were built out of jungle
materials, and they certainly wouldn't fly, but they looked like the planes
that these people had seen, looked like the UFOs that these people had seen. The
classic photos that you'll see online are these half-naked islanders sitting
under the wings of the plane they had built, presumably waiting for the aliens
to return.
In essence, they had created a religion from their anomalous
experience, which is probably the way that most religions start. Something weird
happens, and people interpret it in such a way as to serve their own emotional
needs. If UFOs did not exist, we humans would almost certainly invent them, and
we would imbue in them all of our hopes and fears. That's just the way humans
work. They need paranormal beliefs. They need this means of wish fulfillment
that allows them to carry on with their lives.
We as Westerners can look at those cargo cults and laugh,
because we know what those planes are. We know what those alien craft are, and
we know that they have nothing to do with the islanders. But we can laugh only
because we see the big picture the islanders did not see. They just saw little
bits of the picture and they filled in all the rest according to their
emotional needs. When the aliens arrived, it must have been some kind of reward
or punishment for what they had done, and likewise when the aliens left. When the
aliens left it left a hole in their society and they filled it up with this
cargo cult religion.
When a religion is born, certain individuals in the
community are going to set themselves up as priests, because there's a lot of
power in being a spokesman for God, and the rest of the people seem content in
just following these priests. In the case of the cargo cults, priests would
declare their power by wearing the uniforms of the soldiers who ran the
aircraft, and you can see pictures of this on google as well. The highest
priests would have a lot of metals on their chests, so they're reproducing all
the symbols of this alien encounter without any of the underlying understanding.
Now the priests might genuinely believe that they have a
special connection with the aliens, but this is also a golden opportunity for
swindlers and con men. You can gain a lot of power in your community without a
lot of work by just claiming to have a psychic channel to the aliens. Believe it
or not many humans are liars, and some of them are really good at it. Realizing
an opportunity to exploit others, they're quick to take advantage of it.
Other people aren't liars, per se, as much as
confabulators. They fill in the blanks between the actual data and what they
emotionally need to believe. These people are genuine in their belief in the
aliens; they're just twisting things around to serve their own needs.
Most people, however, are simply followers. They look up to
the experts in their community to tell them what to believe, and they're
remarkably gullible in believing both the liars and the confabulators.
Of course, this whole thing has been happening in the UFO
field for years. UFOs offer a big umbrella for all sorts of fantastic claims, only
a tiny fraction of which can possibly be true. The field is a wonderful
opportunity for sociopaths and wishful thinkers and confabulators of all kinds,
because anyone can claim anything and it can't be easily disproved, because
essentially you've suspended all the laws of reason and physics. That's what
makes the UFO field so murky and dismissible: Virtually anything goes. Any genuine
signal that might have been there is quickly overwhelmed by noise.
Science might have made a lot more progress on UFOs if the
claims had been limited to objects identified by military hardware, but
unfortunately UFO claims have come to include everything under the sun. What people
see in UFOs is more a reflection of their own emotional needs than what's
really out there. Conspiracists will see government conspiracies. Spiritualists
will feel they're in psychic communication with the aliens. The hardcore
mechanical people are going to be more interested in the hardware—the flying
saucers or wherever—and they're hardly interested in aliens at all. It all
depends on your personality and what your emotional needs are.
Attending a UFO conference is a mind-numbing experience,
because unlike a genuine science, there are no standards for truth in the UFO
field. Whatever comes out of people's mouths seems worthy of attention at a UFO
conference. We have all these high priests each peddling their own theories
with absolute certainty—usually with themselves at the center of the cult. Like
any other convention, a UFO conference tends to revolve around these big names
who get star billing and who the UFO believers come to see. So that's how
people work: They come to see their high priests, and the phenomena itself is
kind of lost between the behind all the religious ritual.
Personally, I'm more inclined to believe the military-style
claims, which basically go: “We were out on patrol. We saw this thing. We recorded
it on video, and we got a lock on it in our targeting system. This object
responded to us in some way, and then it took off took off at enormous speed.” That's
a lot like my drone encounter with the cows. That's how the cows would explain
my drone encounter, and that's plausible to me.
I'm less inclined to believe the personal UFO stories. That's
where someone says, “The aliens came and abducted me, and they came and
communicated with me,” like I was some sort of really important person. That just
doesn't hold water for me. It could be true. It's just not something I want to
explore.
It's like the cows [and] my drone. As the operator of the
drone, I'm the intelligence behind it, and I know what I'm thinking. I'm amused
by the cows. I'm willing to play with the cows a little bit, respond to them,
respond to what they do, but I'm not here for any particular cow. I'm not
trying to communicate with any particular cow or appoint any cow my
representative on Earth. Cows are all generic to me, and that's probably how
the aliens see humans. Humans are all generic, and there's no one no human
that's special, that deserves my attention.
So I may be inclined to believe some UFO reports and
disinclined to believe others, but belief for me is not a binary condition. I
don't see things as “true” or “false”. I take a more pragmatic approach. The only
question I ask is, “Is this claim worthy of my time, compared to all the other
things I could be doing with my time.” I don't want to pass judgment on the
claim, and I'm not eager to tell someone that their claim is false. I'm just
wondering what I can do with the claim and whether it's worth any investment of
my own time.
In the case of Area 51, there were quite a few claims that
we could do something about. For example, [Let’s say] someone saw a light in
the sky above a certain military area. Well, at least we could investigate that
area and determine what the humans normally use that area for. If it's for war
games, then that light in the sky probably has something to do with war games.
But these days, I'm not even motivated that much. If someone
tells me they saw [a] light in the sky over Area 51, I'm just not going to even
bother investing in it, because I’ve got my own plan for the rest of my life. There
are things I want to accomplish in non-paranormal fields, and it would take a
huge inducement for me to deviate from that plan.
Now, if I'm driving along a highway and I see an
inexplicable light up in the sky, I'm certainly going to pull over and check it
out, and I'm going to try my best to photograph it, but I'm probably not going
to go out of my way to deliberately hunt for these things. Personally, I’ve got
more important things to do.
I think that's also the position of the military. Once it is
determined that UFOs are not a military threat, it's really not a military
problem anymore. Once you take away that anchor of military utility, any research
program that you start is going to just absorb all your resources and not get
anywhere. I think that's what doomed most of these military projects like Project
Blue Book. It's not that they didn't have enough data. It's that they had too
much data and nothing to do with it—nothing that really indicated a military
threat.
So if I were a military leader—even a military leader who
believed in UFOs—I would ask myself, “What are we doing in this field? This is
not our business. Our business is defending the country, and if the UFOs aren't
a threat to our defense, then it's not our business. It's someone else's
business.
So the one thing you can say about the aliens is that they
are keeping their distance. They seem to be obeying the Prime Directive of Star
Trek, in that they're not intervening in our society in any obvious ways. All the
problems of humanity so far seem to be human-generated problems, and the aliens
have shown no inclination to either hurt us or protect us from ourselves.
They seem to be doing their own thing, and whatever that may
be, I'm inclined to just let them do it.
