09.16.19. Life Beyond: SETI and Animal Anomalies

On this edition of the program, news of a mysterious rash of earthquakes in a small Southern town has many locales wondering what might be rumbling below. However, it has Micah asking whether anybody in the affected area has been looking up… we also touch on a recent confirmation provided by the U.S. Navy to researcher John Greenewald about unusual objects depicted in three pieces of footage its fighter pilots obtained… and which apparently were never meant to be released to the public.

Then Micah recaps his recent trip to the Marion, North Carolina Sasquatch festival, where a variety of local art, crafts, and colorful characters were all on display, in tribute to America’s most famous (and reclusive) hairy biped. We cover some of the events, as well as the claims by the research community present at the event, before shifting our attention over to the subject of “alien big cats”, involving sightings of large, black cats in various parts of the Americas. In fact, Micah was recently treated to a remarkable story by a man who shared not only one, but two sightings of large black cats resembling melanistic jaguars or cougars in parts of rural Western North Carolina. Could there really be exotic looking large cats that range further north into parts of the United States?

Then in hour two, after touching on the exciting discovery of a new interstellar object that may have entered our solar system, Dr. Brian Keating of the Simons Observatory joins us to discuss his passion for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which he explains as being not merely the search for aliens, but the quest to find evidence of their techno-signatures, which may help astronomers finally prove that sophisticated alien technologies may exist in our universe. In addition to his views on the SETI program, Dr. Keating also gives us his views on the so-called “Sagan Effect”, many problems with science and the peer review process, and an update on the forthcoming Nobel Prize season, a topic covered in his book Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor.

Below are links to stories discussed on this week’s program: