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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind Listener Mail. My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co host Robert Lamb is not with me today, so I'm going to be reading and responding to some listener messages on my own, but Rob should be back tomorrow with the core episode for Tuesday of this week. We read listener mail every Monday on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And if you'd like to get in touch but you've never done it before, why not give it a try. You can reach us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Any and all types of messages are welcome. If you've got feedback on a recent episode, we love that. If you want to provide a correction or add your thoughts on something we've talked about, if you want to share something random that you think we'd find interesting, if you want to suggest a topic for us to cover in the future, or if you just want to say hi, you can contact us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Okay, the first message I wanted to read and respond to today is about our series on Anomalous image. Y so This was a series of three episodes we did about weird objects in nature or from ancient history that had some kind of illusory resemblance to out of place technology. And we use these examples that we talked about in these episodes as illustrations of why people should think twice before seeing something that looks weird and then thinking that it proves aliens are here. We got a message about these episodes from James. James says, Hey, guys, love the show. Thank you for being so awesome. I love going on the journeys of the mind blowing kind with you. So thank you again for doing all you do About the point you guys are making about the UFO hearings and alien technology at sea. I would like to point out that the person's testifying never state quote alien and go out of their way to make sure they say intelligent non human, not alien. The fact is you're claimed that the distances involved between stars is a valid point when talking about an alien visitation being near impossible. Is a great argument. But what about something that evolved right here on good old planet Earth and is as intelligent as humans or more intelligent. What if they were able to evolve with the ability to travel interdimensionally. We have almost four and a half billion years of Earth's existence. Life started fairly quickly, and thus there has been a lot of time to evolve an intelligent species or multiple. After all, it's only a few million years for us to go from Lucy to I Love Lucy. Right. If they are interdimensionally evolved species from Earth, that would mean they're hiding in the same room, so to speak. That would be way more interesting than alien visitors. In my opinion, let's not rush to judgment based on the alien argument. The military officers who testified don't And besides, it's so naive for us to think we know everything there is to know about physics, biology, or evolutionary processes on this planet. I wonder if you would comment on this side of the argument for the audience members like me who think there is something going on, it's just probably not something we can understand yet. Regards James, Well, thank you so much for the message. James. I want to partially agree with you and then offer some thoughts to the contrary. Now, I just want to assure you that when I offer my disagreements, it's nothing personal. I'm just trying to honestly share my perspective and you can take it or leave it. First of all, I strongly want to agree that we should always be humble about what we don't know and what we can't imagine yet. So you don't want to be one of those people who looks at the pyramids and says, I can't imagine how ancient people with limited technology could have built this. Therefore, where aliens move the blocks with tractor beams, failures of your personal imagination are not proof of impossibility in reality, and this is one reason, as I said in the last Listener Mail episode, I have sort of moved away from saying that alien contact is unlikely because of the distances of travel between stars. I used to be more persuaded by that argument, but I don't really say that so much anymore. Instead, I think we just don't really know what's possible in terms of interstellar travel, so maybe it's better not to use a weakly held assumption about the difficulty of that travel as the premise in an argument. Now, coming to your interdimensional non human intelligence argument, First of all, James, with great respect, I think there's a rhetorical move you're making in this email that might be causing more confusion than illumination, So we'll see what you think about this. You're trying to make the case that there's a significant possibility that non human and intelligences, maybe interdimensional in nature, exist on Earth and are responsible for some UAP sidings or other strange phenomena, And the leverage you're using to get to this conclusion is first of all, that many different types of life forms could be produced by biological evolution. That's true, and second, it would be naive to assume we know everything about nature. I would agree with both of these premises, but I don't think they lead to your conclusion. So I agree there are lots of things we don't know about nature, but the fact that our knowledge of nature is incomplete is not evidence for any particular claim about nature, like the one you're making about interdimensional beings. If it were, it would equally be evidence that Bigfoot's real, that ghosts are real, that fish or psychic and can read our thoughts, That there are planet sized protozoa that fly around the galaxy eating stars, and all kinds of things like that. You can argue for anything by appealing to the fact that we don't know everything. So I think that's not really a very useful observation, that we don't know everything. That's true, but it doesn't really get us anywhere. What we would actually be looking for is good old fashioned evidence, some positive reason to think that non human intelligences exist. So a second thought I had about this type of explanation is that when you move from explanations based in aliens from another planet to explanations based in interdimensional non human intelligences that can slip in and out of our physical reality at will, to me, that kind of brings to mind the analogy of the car, the analogy that Carl Sagan uses of the dragon in his garage. So this is something Sagan writes about in his nineteen ninety five book The Demon Haunted World. And in this analogy, Sagan he says, okay, imagine I come up to you and I say, in all seriousness, there is a fire breathing dragon who lives in my garage. And you say, all right, let's go see it. And then Sagan says, no, no, no, no, well you can't see it. If you look in my garage, you're not going to see anything except some old paint cans. And ladders because it is an invisible dragon. So you might say, oh, well that's okay. Let's spread some flour on the floor and then we can see the dragon's footprints, and Sagan says, well, no, that's not going to work either, because my dragon floats in the air. So you say, well, then let's feel around for it, you know, rub the scales on its belly, and then Sagan says, no, my invisible dragon is made of a different kind of matter, a matter that you can't feel by touching. Maybe it's composed of weakly interacting particles like neutrinos or something, so you could you could pass right through the dragon without knowing it. So then you say, okay, well let's use a neutrino detector or some other kind of highly sensitive equipment, and he says, no, hold on, that won't work either because of X, Y, and Z. So one of the points Sagan is making here is that an object that cannot be reliedly detected by any physical means is indistinguishable from an object that does not exist. But I think one of the secondary points he's making with this analogy is that explanations that are endlessly adaptable, so that they can never be falsified. You know, they constantly shrink away from any new proposed physical test or attempt to detect them that you know, there's always a newly formed excuse that's kind of characteristic of claims that we know from experience turn out to refer to nothing in the real world. And so again with respect, when I hear people say, well, no, they're not aliens from another planet. They're from another dimension into which they can disappear at any moment. So that's what that would explain why they're like hard to detect physically. At that point, my invisible dragon sensor is going off. There's no way to know a belief like this is wrong for sure, but I'm kind of sensing a belief that's retreating further and further from sincere attempts to detect it with clear evidence. Now, I want to be fair to the UFO UAP enthusiast and notice some ways that this analogy does not fit. For one thing, there's a difference in that Carl Sagan's dragon is just him coming up to you and saying there's a dragon there, and UFOs or UAPs there is actual, real documentary evidence or at least what is purported to be real documentary evidence. So it's not just someone saying there are aliens. There are photos of objects and videos of things moving around in the sky, or photos of things at the bottom of the ocean or other just like weird looking things that people say, maybe this is evidence of aliens. So you've got something to work with there. And here's where I would come back to what we talked about in our series where we discussed the idea of low information and low resolution evidence. And if you haven't heard the whole series, i'd recommend going back and listening to the three episodes, starting with the core episode on the Eltanan Antenna if you want to hear us develop this in full. But essentially, we were talking about a correlation that is pretty easily observed regarding UFOs and UAPs, which is that these pieces of evidence, whether you're talking about photos or videos, material or narrative, are almost always characterized by really notable deficits of information. Like if it's a photo or a video, it's hard to tell for sure what you're looking at. You might not be able to judge scale or distance, or color or texture. Details are obscured the picture is generally low resolution, and there are often also deficits in contextual knowledge that you would be able to apply to the image. So maybe you don't know enough about where and when it was taken, circumstances there, or you don't understand the technological mediator of that image. You don't have a deep understanding of how cameras and other types of sensors are imaging systems work, so you're not familiar with artifacts they produce, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And for some reason, in cases where those information deficits are resolved, where there actually is like a really sharp, high quality image or sharp high quality video with a lot more visual context, or maybe you either have the knowledge or you're able to show the image to somebody who has the knowledge about the environment that you're looking at and the equipment you're using to document it and so forth. These, for some reason tend to be the cases where oh, yeah, that's not even actually a moving object, that's a camera artifact, or oh this is actually a distant airplane reflecting light in a weird way, or that's a balloon, or it's a seagull or a group of stars, in the night sky, or an insect moving in the foreground, or a natural rock formation that looks like technology, or an animal that looks like technology. It's a sea sponge antenna, it's not a crash UFO. It's a big rock moved by a glacier, probably, etc. Now I would stress that observing this trend does in no way proves that we're alone in the universe. In fact, it doesn't even prove that aliens have never visited Earth. Those are questions with what I would call effectively infinite search spaces, So you can really never answer them in the negative, because you can never rule out the possibility that there's evidence you haven't found yet. The search space for evidence is effectively infinite. But I think this trend should strongly caution us against using any piece of evidence from the low information zone or the low resolution zone as if it were a good reason for thinking non human intelligences are here and flying around in the skies and leaving technology on the ocean floor and stuff like that. We can never rule that out with certainty. It's always possible, But isn't it more likely whatever weird photo or video you're looking at would be more like these other cases where additional information made it clear that they had explanations from within the known range of causes. That said, on the other hand, and as we said in the series, you always want to keep an open mind if the evidence is actually good. You don't close yourself off to say, like, no it. You know, there is a kind of conditioning that I think can happen to a skeptic where you encounter so many claims that all turn out to be false you just kind of assume the pattern will always hold. You can't assume it will always hold. But I do think it's fair to draw analogies from cases you've looked at in the past to similar, you know, reasonably similar cases that you encounter in the present and in the future. But as I said, open minds are good if the evidence is actually good. I just think we're not there yet. So if the recent testimony from the US Congress with the whistleblowers talking about claims of government possession of alien technology and bodies and stuff like that, or sorry to accept your correction, non human intelligences, if that ever goes beyond the hearsay stage, if there's actual meet some kind of physical evidence or first hand eye witness testimony. I'd be interested to see what it is and learn more, but we're not there yet, so for now I reserve judgment and remain skeptical. So thanks again, James for the interesting thoughts and whether or not you agree with me, I hope I at least made my perspective clear. You can write back if you have more questions or thoughts to the contrary. Next message is from Tyler. Tyler is also responding well. Tyler's responding to a previous Listener Male episode, which also had to do with anomalous imagery and explanations based in aliens or non human intelligence. And in this previous list mail, a listener sent us a picture of a McDonald's parking lot I think in Roswell, New Mexico, which included a silver statue of an alien. And this really got me wondering about a true alien intelligence the logic of corporate policy. I was wondering how lenient is McDonald's corporate headquarters about what kinds of art you can put up outside a franchise location. I would have assumed they'd be pretty iron fisted about visual branding issues like that, but Tyler and others got in touch to share information. To the contrary, Tyler says, hey, guys, on today's listener mail, after some speculation on what McDonald's franchisees are allowed to put up for displays, Joe wondered if you could put up a statue of a t rex. I did ask that, Tyler says, the answer is yes, there is a dino themed McDonald's here in Tucson. I guess this would be Tucson, Arizona that, to the best of my memory, was outfitted with Dinah when the first Jurassic Park came out. I think some of the other dinosaurs have been removed since then, but the tyrant king still reigns. And Tyler attached a photo of a McDonald's that looks to be on a street corner. And yeah, right there, beside the drive through lane, there is a huge t rex sculpture with its its mouth is open. It is roaring at the red light that is next to its head. So maybe this t rex is experiencing some vicarious road rage even though he cannot himself drive a car. I'm also noticing there is a metal fence all the way around this animal. I think that could be to prevent kids from climbing on it. But I wonder if there was also a fear of auto collisions, because running into a dinosaur in your prius would be a really good Hall of Fame insurance claim. All right, I'm going to do a couple of messages about weird house cinema. This first one came from longtime correspondent Jim in New Jersey. Jim says, Robert, Joe and JJ I have a Shakespeare movie adaptation suggestion for weird house cinema. Last time we were asking about weird Shakespeare adaptations, Jim says, it is Scotland, Pa, which is a dark comedy adaptation of Macbeth set in the nineteen seventies in Scotland, Pennsylvania. It's currently on Amazon Prime. Scotland, Pa. Is a real village that's about five miles outside the town where I grew up. It's about two miles from where my mom currently lives. I drive through the hamlet every time I visit her. The movie didn't premiere in the town, nor was it ever shown there. Scotland, Pennsylvania is about two or maybe three blocks long, and there's definitely no movie theater. The movie is rated R for language, adult content. Heck, it's Shakespeare and brief nudity, so it's not for the kids. From what I remember of Macbeth in high school, the movie follows the plot pretty faithfully, but with some obvious time period, location, and language changes. And there are several dark humor laughs too. Jim in New Jersey but from Pa, well, thank you, Jim. I watched this movie in high school. This came out when I was in high school, and I think I watched it with my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, and we, yeah, I remember, we thought it was really weird. I believe that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth kill Duncan, who is the owner of a drive through restaurant that sells donuts, by dipping him in a deep friar, which is really gross. Uh, and they're oh, oh well. The other thing I remember about it is that McDuff, the hero who comes and kills Macbeth at the end, is played by Christopher Walken, who I think is a police inspector. I do not recall how they handle the burnham Wood dunsinane thing. One last message today. This comes from Pamela. Pamela says Dear Joe and Rob when listening to the Weird House episode on the Maze, you had me at Weird Twist ending. I turned the pod off, and later that evening found the movie on YouTube and watched. I feel qualified to give you a cold watch review of how the movie worked. First of all, I completely forgot it was three D. I was baffled and horrified by the dance sequence in the club, and this is something we talked about in the episode. There is a dance that is quite impressive. I mean, yeah, they're good dancers, but it involved like swinging a female dancer so that it looked extremely dangerously like her head was going to crash into the floor. But she never did. She was all right anyway. Sorry, Pamela goes on, I don't even know what to say about the intermittent testimonials from the aunt, whose name I have already forgotten, except that is a choice, especially since it seemed to be from a room that was not used for any of the other shots in the movie. I think that's right. It's like the predecessor of the confessional in a modern reality show, where they put them in a special place and make them wear the same hair and makeup and outfit so they can edit it into whatever they want later. I must also admit I had to fight to stay awake during parts, and I sincerely hope the dialogue in the book was better than that of the movie. More importantly, though I couldn't tell what the print on the stair was. Oh yeah, at some point in the movie, the monster leaves a strange footprint on the stair, so Pamela says, I actually thought it was a weird large leaf print, and it wasn't until the creature but escaping into the wall that I knew there was a creature at all. Parentheses as a woman, I need to add, how infuriating is the plot device of a woman fainting after seeing something she does not understand or is scary. Yep, yep, Pamela goes on. By the time we see the giant frog and hear the explanation, I was at the sure just want the movie to be overpoint. The only people in this movie I really felt much compassion for or worthy Aunt because Kitty is kind of insufferably wilful, and the frog, who did not get enough screen time. I agree about that with the frog. The movie was way too long for the week payoff at the end in my humble opinion, but I would like to make a case for a much better and far more entertaining movie that Weird House needs to add to the cannon. Nineteen eighty seven's Dolls. It is an almost fairy tale like cautionary tale about being a good person and a respectful guest or else. Filmed in Italy but in English by director Stuart Gordon. Brilliant story of a miserable family that breaks down in a terrible storm outside the house of an elderly couple that makes dolls. Other guests end up trapped there as well. The stop motion animation of the creepy porcelain faced dolls is amazing. Love all the different flavors of the podcast offered cross each week. Thanks for all the hard work. You guys are the best. Pamela. Oh well, thank you, Pamela. Thank you for the kind words, and thank you for sticking it out through the movie to give us your unbiased thoughts. So yeah, I really appreciate you getting in touch. I think that's going to do it for the mail bag today, but we will have more listener mail to feature next Monday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays of each week, that's when we do our core Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes, which are usually about science and culture in some way. On Wednesdays we do a short feature called the Artifact or the Monster Fact. On Fridays we do a series called Weird House Cinema where each Friday we just watch and discuss a strange film can be good or bad, well known or obscure, as long as it is weird. And on Saturdays we run an episode from the Vault, an older episode of the show. If you're not subscribed to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, why not go subscribe now. We are called Stuff to Blow Your Mind. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. If you were in the UK, by the way, we will be called Stuff to Blow your Mind UK, so just the same exact thing. Just look up the Stuff to Blow your Mind UK feed huge thanks to our excellent audio producer jaj J Pousway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or even just to say hi, you can email us at contact at Stuff Too blow Yourmind dot com.

Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind Listener Mail. My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co host Robert Lamb is not with me today, so I'm going to be reading and responding to some listener messages on my own, but Rob should be back tomorrow with the core episode for Tuesday of this week. We read listener mail every Monday on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And if you'd like to get in touch but you've never done it before, why not give it a try. You can reach us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Any and all types of messages are welcome. If you've got feedback on a recent episode, we love that. If you want to provide a correction or add your thoughts on something we've talked about, if you want to share something random that you think we'd find interesting, if you want to suggest a topic for us to cover in the future, or if you just want to say hi, you can contact us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Okay, the first message I wanted to read and respond to today is about our series on Anomalous image. Y so This was a series of three episodes we did about weird objects in nature or from ancient history that had some kind of illusory resemblance to out of place technology. And we use these examples that we talked about in these episodes as illustrations of why people should think twice before seeing something that looks weird and then thinking that it proves aliens are here. We got a message about these episodes from James. James says, Hey, guys, love the show. Thank you for being so awesome. I love going on the journeys of the mind blowing kind with you. So thank you again for doing all you do About the point you guys are making about the UFO hearings and alien technology at sea. I would like to point out that the person's testifying never state quote alien and go out of their way to make sure they say intelligent non human, not alien. The fact is you're claimed that the distances involved between stars is a valid point when talking about an alien visitation being near impossible. Is a great argument. But what about something that evolved right here on good old planet Earth and is as intelligent as humans or more intelligent. What if they were able to evolve with the ability to travel interdimensionally. We have almost four and a half billion years of Earth's existence. Life started fairly quickly, and thus there has been a lot of time to evolve an intelligent species or multiple. After all, it's only a few million years for us to go from Lucy to I Love Lucy. Right. If they are interdimensionally evolved species from Earth, that would mean they're hiding in the same room, so to speak. That would be way more interesting than alien visitors. In my opinion, let's not rush to judgment based on the alien argument. The military officers who testified don't And besides, it's so naive for us to think we know everything there is to know about physics, biology, or evolutionary processes on this planet. I wonder if you would comment on this side of the argument for the audience members like me who think there is something going on, it's just probably not something we can understand yet. Regards James, Well, thank you so much for the message. James. I want to partially agree with you and then offer some thoughts to the contrary. Now, I just want to assure you that when I offer my disagreements, it's nothing personal. I'm just trying to honestly share my perspective and you can take it or leave it. First of all, I strongly want to agree that we should always be humble about what we don't know and what we can't imagine yet. So you don't want to be one of those people who looks at the pyramids and says, I can't imagine how ancient people with limited technology could have built this. Therefore, where aliens move the blocks with tractor beams, failures of your personal imagination are not proof of impossibility in reality, and this is one reason, as I said in the last Listener Mail episode, I have sort of moved away from saying that alien contact is unlikely because of the distances of travel between stars. I used to be more persuaded by that argument, but I don't really say that so much anymore. Instead, I think we just don't really know what's possible in terms of interstellar travel, so maybe it's better not to use a weakly held assumption about the difficulty of that travel as the premise in an argument. Now, coming to your interdimensional non human intelligence argument, First of all, James, with great respect, I think there's a rhetorical move you're making in this email that might be causing more confusion than illumination, So we'll see what you think about this. You're trying to make the case that there's a significant possibility that non human and intelligences, maybe interdimensional in nature, exist on Earth and are responsible for some UAP sidings or other strange phenomena, And the leverage you're using to get to this conclusion is first of all, that many different types of life forms could be produced by biological evolution. That's true, and second, it would be naive to assume we know everything about nature. I would agree with both of these premises, but I don't think they lead to your conclusion. So I agree there are lots of things we don't know about nature, but the fact that our knowledge of nature is incomplete is not evidence for any particular claim about nature, like the one you're making about interdimensional beings. If it were, it would equally be evidence that Bigfoot's real, that ghosts are real, that fish or psychic and can read our thoughts, That there are planet sized protozoa that fly around the galaxy eating stars, and all kinds of things like that. You can argue for anything by appealing to the fact that we don't know everything. So I think that's not really a very useful observation, that we don't know everything. That's true, but it doesn't really get us anywhere. What we would actually be looking for is good old fashioned evidence, some positive reason to think that non human intelligences exist. So a second thought I had about this type of explanation is that when you move from explanations based in aliens from another planet to explanations based in interdimensional non human intelligences that can slip in and out of our physical reality at will, to me, that kind of brings to mind the analogy of the car, the analogy that Carl Sagan uses of the dragon in his garage. So this is something Sagan writes about in his nineteen ninety five book The Demon Haunted World. And in this analogy, Sagan he says, okay, imagine I come up to you and I say, in all seriousness, there is a fire breathing dragon who lives in my garage. And you say, all right, let's go see it. And then Sagan says, no, no, no, no, well you can't see it. If you look in my garage, you're not going to see anything except some old paint cans. And ladders because it is an invisible dragon. So you might say, oh, well that's okay. Let's spread some flour on the floor and then we can see the dragon's footprints, and Sagan says, well, no, that's not going to work either, because my dragon floats in the air. So you say, well, then let's feel around for it, you know, rub the scales on its belly, and then Sagan says, no, my invisible dragon is made of a different kind of matter, a matter that you can't feel by touching. Maybe it's composed of weakly interacting particles like neutrinos or something, so you could you could pass right through the dragon without knowing it. So then you say, okay, well let's use a neutrino detector or some other kind of highly sensitive equipment, and he says, no, hold on, that won't work either because of X, Y, and Z. So one of the points Sagan is making here is that an object that cannot be reliedly detected by any physical means is indistinguishable from an object that does not exist. But I think one of the secondary points he's making with this analogy is that explanations that are endlessly adaptable, so that they can never be falsified. You know, they constantly shrink away from any new proposed physical test or attempt to detect them that you know, there's always a newly formed excuse that's kind of characteristic of claims that we know from experience turn out to refer to nothing in the real world. And so again with respect, when I hear people say, well, no, they're not aliens from another planet. They're from another dimension into which they can disappear at any moment. So that's what that would explain why they're like hard to detect physically. At that point, my invisible dragon sensor is going off. There's no way to know a belief like this is wrong for sure, but I'm kind of sensing a belief that's retreating further and further from sincere attempts to detect it with clear evidence. Now, I want to be fair to the UFO UAP enthusiast and notice some ways that this analogy does not fit. For one thing, there's a difference in that Carl Sagan's dragon is just him coming up to you and saying there's a dragon there, and UFOs or UAPs there is actual, real documentary evidence or at least what is purported to be real documentary evidence. So it's not just someone saying there are aliens. There are photos of objects and videos of things moving around in the sky, or photos of things at the bottom of the ocean or other just like weird looking things that people say, maybe this is evidence of aliens. So you've got something to work with there. And here's where I would come back to what we talked about in our series where we discussed the idea of low information and low resolution evidence. And if you haven't heard the whole series, i'd recommend going back and listening to the three episodes, starting with the core episode on the Eltanan Antenna if you want to hear us develop this in full. But essentially, we were talking about a correlation that is pretty easily observed regarding UFOs and UAPs, which is that these pieces of evidence, whether you're talking about photos or videos, material or narrative, are almost always characterized by really notable deficits of information. Like if it's a photo or a video, it's hard to tell for sure what you're looking at. You might not be able to judge scale or distance, or color or texture. Details are obscured the picture is generally low resolution, and there are often also deficits in contextual knowledge that you would be able to apply to the image. So maybe you don't know enough about where and when it was taken, circumstances there, or you don't understand the technological mediator of that image. You don't have a deep understanding of how cameras and other types of sensors are imaging systems work, so you're not familiar with artifacts they produce, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And for some reason, in cases where those information deficits are resolved, where there actually is like a really sharp, high quality image or sharp high quality video with a lot more visual context, or maybe you either have the knowledge or you're able to show the image to somebody who has the knowledge about the environment that you're looking at and the equipment you're using to document it and so forth. These, for some reason tend to be the cases where oh, yeah, that's not even actually a moving object, that's a camera artifact, or oh this is actually a distant airplane reflecting light in a weird way, or that's a balloon, or it's a seagull or a group of stars, in the night sky, or an insect moving in the foreground, or a natural rock formation that looks like technology, or an animal that looks like technology. It's a sea sponge antenna, it's not a crash UFO. It's a big rock moved by a glacier, probably, etc. Now I would stress that observing this trend does in no way proves that we're alone in the universe. In fact, it doesn't even prove that aliens have never visited Earth. Those are questions with what I would call effectively infinite search spaces, So you can really never answer them in the negative, because you can never rule out the possibility that there's evidence you haven't found yet. The search space for evidence is effectively infinite. But I think this trend should strongly caution us against using any piece of evidence from the low information zone or the low resolution zone as if it were a good reason for thinking non human intelligences are here and flying around in the skies and leaving technology on the ocean floor and stuff like that. We can never rule that out with certainty. It's always possible, But isn't it more likely whatever weird photo or video you're looking at would be more like these other cases where additional information made it clear that they had explanations from within the known range of causes. That said, on the other hand, and as we said in the series, you always want to keep an open mind if the evidence is actually good. You don't close yourself off to say, like, no it. You know, there is a kind of conditioning that I think can happen to a skeptic where you encounter so many claims that all turn out to be false you just kind of assume the pattern will always hold. You can't assume it will always hold. But I do think it's fair to draw analogies from cases you've looked at in the past to similar, you know, reasonably similar cases that you encounter in the present and in the future. But as I said, open minds are good if the evidence is actually good. I just think we're not there yet. So if the recent testimony from the US Congress with the whistleblowers talking about claims of government possession of alien technology and bodies and stuff like that, or sorry to accept your correction, non human intelligences, if that ever goes beyond the hearsay stage, if there's actual meet some kind of physical evidence or first hand eye witness testimony. I'd be interested to see what it is and learn more, but we're not there yet, so for now I reserve judgment and remain skeptical. So thanks again, James for the interesting thoughts and whether or not you agree with me, I hope I at least made my perspective clear. You can write back if you have more questions or thoughts to the contrary. Next message is from Tyler. Tyler is also responding well. Tyler's responding to a previous Listener Male episode, which also had to do with anomalous imagery and explanations based in aliens or non human intelligence. And in this previous list mail, a listener sent us a picture of a McDonald's parking lot I think in Roswell, New Mexico, which included a silver statue of an alien. And this really got me wondering about a true alien intelligence the logic of corporate policy. I was wondering how lenient is McDonald's corporate headquarters about what kinds of art you can put up outside a franchise location. I would have assumed they'd be pretty iron fisted about visual branding issues like that, but Tyler and others got in touch to share information. To the contrary, Tyler says, hey, guys, on today's listener mail, after some speculation on what McDonald's franchisees are allowed to put up for displays, Joe wondered if you could put up a statue of a t rex. I did ask that, Tyler says, the answer is yes, there is a dino themed McDonald's here in Tucson. I guess this would be Tucson, Arizona that, to the best of my memory, was outfitted with Dinah when the first Jurassic Park came out. I think some of the other dinosaurs have been removed since then, but the tyrant king still reigns. And Tyler attached a photo of a McDonald's that looks to be on a street corner. And yeah, right there, beside the drive through lane, there is a huge t rex sculpture with its its mouth is open. It is roaring at the red light that is next to its head. So maybe this t rex is experiencing some vicarious road rage even though he cannot himself drive a car. I'm also noticing there is a metal fence all the way around this animal. I think that could be to prevent kids from climbing on it. But I wonder if there was also a fear of auto collisions, because running into a dinosaur in your prius would be a really good Hall of Fame insurance claim. All right, I'm going to do a couple of messages about weird house cinema. This first one came from longtime correspondent Jim in New Jersey. Jim says, Robert, Joe and JJ I have a Shakespeare movie adaptation suggestion for weird house cinema. Last time we were asking about weird Shakespeare adaptations, Jim says, it is Scotland, Pa, which is a dark comedy adaptation of Macbeth set in the nineteen seventies in Scotland, Pennsylvania. It's currently on Amazon Prime. Scotland, Pa. Is a real village that's about five miles outside the town where I grew up. It's about two miles from where my mom currently lives. I drive through the hamlet every time I visit her. The movie didn't premiere in the town, nor was it ever shown there. Scotland, Pennsylvania is about two or maybe three blocks long, and there's definitely no movie theater. The movie is rated R for language, adult content. Heck, it's Shakespeare and brief nudity, so it's not for the kids. From what I remember of Macbeth in high school, the movie follows the plot pretty faithfully, but with some obvious time period, location, and language changes. And there are several dark humor laughs too. Jim in New Jersey but from Pa, well, thank you, Jim. I watched this movie in high school. This came out when I was in high school, and I think I watched it with my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, and we, yeah, I remember, we thought it was really weird. I believe that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth kill Duncan, who is the owner of a drive through restaurant that sells donuts, by dipping him in a deep friar, which is really gross. Uh, and they're oh, oh well. The other thing I remember about it is that McDuff, the hero who comes and kills Macbeth at the end, is played by Christopher Walken, who I think is a police inspector. I do not recall how they handle the burnham Wood dunsinane thing. One last message today. This comes from Pamela. Pamela says Dear Joe and Rob when listening to the Weird House episode on the Maze, you had me at Weird Twist ending. I turned the pod off, and later that evening found the movie on YouTube and watched. I feel qualified to give you a cold watch review of how the movie worked. First of all, I completely forgot it was three D. I was baffled and horrified by the dance sequence in the club, and this is something we talked about in the episode. There is a dance that is quite impressive. I mean, yeah, they're good dancers, but it involved like swinging a female dancer so that it looked extremely dangerously like her head was going to crash into the floor. But she never did. She was all right anyway. Sorry, Pamela goes on, I don't even know what to say about the intermittent testimonials from the aunt, whose name I have already forgotten, except that is a choice, especially since it seemed to be from a room that was not used for any of the other shots in the movie. I think that's right. It's like the predecessor of the confessional in a modern reality show, where they put them in a special place and make them wear the same hair and makeup and outfit so they can edit it into whatever they want later. I must also admit I had to fight to stay awake during parts, and I sincerely hope the dialogue in the book was better than that of the movie. More importantly, though I couldn't tell what the print on the stair was. Oh yeah, at some point in the movie, the monster leaves a strange footprint on the stair, so Pamela says, I actually thought it was a weird large leaf print, and it wasn't until the creature but escaping into the wall that I knew there was a creature at all. Parentheses as a woman, I need to add, how infuriating is the plot device of a woman fainting after seeing something she does not understand or is scary. Yep, yep, Pamela goes on. By the time we see the giant frog and hear the explanation, I was at the sure just want the movie to be overpoint. The only people in this movie I really felt much compassion for or worthy Aunt because Kitty is kind of insufferably wilful, and the frog, who did not get enough screen time. I agree about that with the frog. The movie was way too long for the week payoff at the end in my humble opinion, but I would like to make a case for a much better and far more entertaining movie that Weird House needs to add to the cannon. Nineteen eighty seven's Dolls. It is an almost fairy tale like cautionary tale about being a good person and a respectful guest or else. Filmed in Italy but in English by director Stuart Gordon. Brilliant story of a miserable family that breaks down in a terrible storm outside the house of an elderly couple that makes dolls. Other guests end up trapped there as well. The stop motion animation of the creepy porcelain faced dolls is amazing. Love all the different flavors of the podcast offered cross each week. Thanks for all the hard work. You guys are the best. Pamela. Oh well, thank you, Pamela. Thank you for the kind words, and thank you for sticking it out through the movie to give us your unbiased thoughts. So yeah, I really appreciate you getting in touch. I think that's going to do it for the mail bag today, but we will have more listener mail to feature next Monday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays of each week, that's when we do our core Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes, which are usually about science and culture in some way. On Wednesdays we do a short feature called the Artifact or the Monster Fact. On Fridays we do a series called Weird House Cinema where each Friday we just watch and discuss a strange film can be good or bad, well known or obscure, as long as it is weird. And on Saturdays we run an episode from the Vault, an older episode of the show. If you're not subscribed to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, why not go subscribe now. We are called Stuff to Blow Your Mind. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. If you were in the UK, by the way, we will be called Stuff to Blow your Mind UK, so just the same exact thing. Just look up the Stuff to Blow your Mind UK feed huge thanks to our excellent audio producer jaj J Pousway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or even just to say hi, you can email us at contact at Stuff Too blow Yourmind dot com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.