Why Believing in Something Bigger Doesn't Make You Gullible | Miguel Sancho

Key Takeaway

Practice “disciplined openness” today: when you encounter a claim that sounds implausible, resist both instant belief and instant dismissal. Ask: What is actually known? What evidence would change my mind? What ordinary explanations remain? This posture preserves scientific standards while making room for genuine uncertainty, curiosity, and learning. You do not need to accept extraordinary claims to benefit from admitting that your current model of reality may be incomplete.

Episode Overview

Dan Harris talks with journalist and producer Miguel Sancho about investigating UFOs, Bigfoot, deep-sea creatures, reincarnation, religion, and other extraordinary claims without abandoning skepticism. Sancho argues for intellectual humility: most sensational claims will fail scrutiny, but reflexive cynicism can also blind us to anomalies, discovery, and the human value of awe.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why Believing in Something Bigger Doesn't Make You Gullible | Miguel Sancho from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

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.

And 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 Soncho, welcome back to the show. Dan, great to see you. honored to be on your show and uh grateful of course to your audience for lending us a little bit of their time. Let's make it worthwhile. Let me just start with your story. So I mean I worked with you.

We started working together like I think the late as and we did a bunch of investigative stories together. We took on self-help fuckeroos and we took on the the church of Scientology. And my memory of you is of somebody who was pretty hard bitten in his skepticism and atheism, etc., etc., but now you're the executive producer of a show called The Proof is Out There, and you've got this new book. So, like, what has happened? Give me your arc. Yeah. So, it would be great if there was some sort of dramatic, you know, Damascus road epiphany and I could kind of complete the uh stereotypical Hollywood arc of the cynical hardened journalism professional who has some transformative experience that uh leads him to embrace every single corner of the woo that's out there.

Uh, I would say this in my in my own defense as a uh as a reconstructed cynic and skeptic that you back when we were doing our stuff and I 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 uh unscrupulous exploiters of people's desire to believe in something bigger uh not only kind of drain people of their money often times, 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 uh straight up hardcore uh scientific materialism as a lens through which to understand our world, our universe and our experiences and the uh nefarious ways in which some of the gullible and credulous uh 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.

I want to come back to that how the desire dare I say need to believe in something bigger is is important but let me just stick with you for a second. Yes, we know I'm infinitely interesting. So let's talk about me. You are 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 uh unscrupulous exploitation of the human propensity toward belief.

And yet, you know, you were, you know, 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 etc etc. So in a nutshell I can tell a condensed version of uh the show and how I kind became intricately involved and interwoven with its uh with its manifestations.

So it was co I'd been working after ABC at A&E and its various other uh networks including the History Channel on the stuff that I usually do which is pretty much documentary style investigative reporting. I had done a series of uh 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 uh like many people facing an extended period of underemployment due to the fact that uh field work itself had been banned for quite some time.

So wonderful people at uh A&E networks and history approached me with this opportunity to this show that was an attempt to as you just said quite articulately to apply journalistic standards, scientific rigor and a healthy healthy dose of skepticism to this immense and growing pipeline of videos that people claim to be documentation of anomalous events that substantiate uh 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 uh down your spectacles, but it is a very diverse, very wellressearched, very fascinating field uh that was entirely worthy of my attention.

Okay. So, let's walk through some of these uh because that that's what that's what happens in your book, which again is called evidence of the extraordinary. Uh, let's start with UFOs. This episode is airing in August, but we're recording it in late June. I just watched uh Disclosure Day with my son. The Steven Spielberg movie about um aliens and the government or quasi governmental organizations attempt to cover up UFOs and um aliens that are held in captivity, etc., etc. And also, there's been like a mainstream treatment of UFOs um in the last there was there were congressional hearings, etc., etc.

So like you've looked at many of the most famous cases of alleged UFO sightings. Where do you come down? Right. So yes, you're absolutely right that we've seen and one of the kind of justifications for the book is this ongoing mainstreaming of many of these topics, none more so than UFOs. to the point that just last week it was announced that the White House is forming a UAP investigative committee that's basically going to do the same exact thing that my show has been doing for 6 years with indeed some of the people who've been on my show.

So, uh there's to the degree that I was involved in this mainstreaming, it's interesting uh to be kind of part of that wave, that movement. Where do I come down on this? Okay, so I have a more nuanced and possibly disappointing take on this than some people who are very committed to the UFO disclosure cause and get upset if one doesn't subscribe and endorse every single tenet of what I refer to in the book as the UFO cannon. So I think many things can be true.

First of all, you start with the basics that everybody says kind of to avoid the topic but happen to be true. One is from a statistical standpoint, it's almost impossible for us to be the only intelligent civilization that has ever existed in the history of the universe. The second very obvious, very easy thing to agree with is that there is significant documentation of aerial phenomena which our own government has not yet identified. Okay? But it requires a certain concatenation of highly contingent circumstances to get from those two propositions to firm and unshakable belief that there is an alien civilization that exists in the same time that we exist, that has advanced to the point where they have achieved technical mastery to achieve either interstellar or interdimensional travel, and has decided to come to our planet and our space and visit us as regularly as some of the hardcore believer.

viewers think that we've been visited. What we can say is that this show, my show and others have taken very hard looks at several of these videos and determined that while if you have a pie chart in your mind, you know, 70 to 80% of them can indeed be dismissed as either misidentifications or hoaxes, there is that sliver that truly defy uh the most rigorous attempts of the skeptics to debunk them, including some very well credentialed people who have reputations to maintain who have been on our show and have said not every time again but you know once or twice I honestly don't know what this is again it's a leap to go from that to therefore it must be uh an alien spaceship piloted by little green men just to put a fine point on this u because there are other because I want to talk about Bigfoot and other things too but but on on UFOs aka UAPs you Miguel Soncho cannot say or pound the able and argue that um for sure aliens have visited us and maybe uh taken random dudes from Iowa on board their ships and given them anal probes.

Uh you're not going to argue that all of that is for sure true. However, you can point to some of these videos, some of which were recorded, I think, by the US military itself, and say something's going on here, and we don't know what it is. Now, again, many things can be true. It can indeed be the case that some of these unexplained videos are indeed alien craft. Fine. But it can also be the case that some of them are high-tech assets of rival militaries that are intentionally trying to probe some of our air defenses or other technology to gain intel in our capacity.

It can also be the case that a small sliver of these things might be instances in which our own government is intentionally disseminating disinformation to keep us from uh knowing about and getting concerned about uh incursions in our airspace or technological advances of our rival militaries. because yesterday there was this big disclosure about the uh United States uh pilot who claims that he was downed by something called jellyfish uh drones over Iran. So again, we live in an age where the drone has become a cutting edge technology that represents the future of asymmetrical warfare.

We need to accommodate the possibility that some of these UAPs aren't piloted by uh Martians or aliens rather, but possibly by members of the IRGC. A few things before we hear from our sponsors. I don't know if you know this, but I've been writing a newsletter for the last couple of years. I would love for you to come check it out. It's free. You can sign up at danharris.com. Every Monday, I drop into your inbox a little nugget of wisdom and sanity that you can operationalize in your life immediately.

This is an actionable practice that I'm dropping into your data stream that really can color the rest of your day. I put a lot of time and effort into it and I'd love for you to benefit from it. It's also, by the way, the place where you can get updates on the broader 10% Happier Cinematic Universe, including upcoming programming on my app, 10%with Dan Harris, and upcoming IRL events. Again, you can sign up at danharris.com. I'd love to have you reading the newsletter, and we will be right back after this.

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Have you seen You're We're both laughing here, so I I suspect I know where this is going, but have you seen any evidence to suggest that there's there are legitimate open questions about the existence of Bigfoot? Okay, here we go. Are you ready? Yeah. I mean, I can give you small, medium, extra large versions of this uh of this exogesis. In this day and age with literally billions of cell phones and trail cams and LAR scanning every, you know, jungle canopy on Earth, the fact that the best Bigfoot footage we have is the Patterson Gimlin film, which is the famous uh, you know, Patty footage shot in 1967 and now has recently been debunked yet again in a Bigfoot documentary, is a problem for Bigfoot believers.

Let's not pretend that uh that's not a problem, but let's proceed. First of all, the people who study this stuff and devote a fair amount of time to it uh have answers for all of the dismissive questions, and I'm happy to recite them, but the bottom line is yes, it would be great if there were more video, but there's reasons why there isn't video. Um, and there's all sorts of reasons why we can't just assume that a undiscovered species uh can't be discovered or it it doesn't exist now because we're discovering new species all the time.

The second thing I would say is that um believe it or not, there's documented evidence that more and more scientists, people with PhDs, again, people with reputations to risk are endeavoring to study Bigfoot in one way or another. My the closest thing I came to a big epiphany in this entire project was uh I want to say in sometime in the fall of 2022. It's correct in the book. I might get it uh wrong the exact date in this podcast, but when I was at home at breakfast eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, reading the Wall Street Journal, the actual paper subscription that I had at the time, and I flipped it over and just below the fold was this page one story about how legit scientists, meaning anthropologists, primatologists, paleontologists, are going out in the woods and going on Bigfoot hunting expeditions because they think there's a chance that it might exist.

Why? There's a whole thing that we can talk about that involves a kind of paradigm shift in paleontology and anthropology that now is more hospitable to the hypothesis of what is called relicked hominids, meaning other branches of the evolutionary tree that have turned up in places like Flores Island where a a species of early man known as Flores man was discovered in a cave or the Dennisovvens another branch of the evolutionary tree who were discovered in a cave in Russia but not alive. They were their bones were discovered.

Their bones were discovered indeed. So the the the working hypothesis okay is that at one point there was a common ancestor u you know some some relative of giganticus or australopythecus that branched out and migrated and that's how we get the yeti the yahi in Australia and by dent of the uh bearing land crossing the creature we know as bigfoot as or sasquatch that either currently inhabits or at one point did inhabit the Pacific Northwest and other parts of the North American continent. Are you with me?

I'm I'm with you and I think I'm just I'm going to see if I can sum it up. There are serious people who are open to the possibility, but if I'm hearing you correctly, they're open to the possibility that some creature like a Bigfoot or a yeti or a Yahi existed past tense and we might find their bones. But the video from 1967 of an alleged Bigfoot is probably not, you know, like he he or she is probably not out there in the woods right now.

Those two positions can be harmonized. Uh meaning that just because it existed at one point, you don't have to be committed to the idea that it's it is extinct now. Why? Why? because of this interesting phenomena uh called relicked species meaning a species that we all thought was extinct and then bingo it pops up. Example, the prime example is a fish called the kilacanth and people thought that died out hundreds of millions of years ago and then I want to say in the 1930s or 40s, wow, one pops up in the fisherman's net off the coast of South Africa and it happens a lot.

Uh there's birds, mammals, reptiles, fish that scientists are convinced uh died out hundreds of millions of years ago, but nevertheless pop up in the real world. So again, you have the theory that Bigfoot migrated from a original ancestor in Asia, came over here. Yes, it may well have gone extinct, or it still might be out there, but has yet to be discovered. Okay, let me move on to the next uh topic. just checking them all off one by one. This is great. It's like rapid fire.

I mean, it's more fun for me probably because I haven't thought about this stuff at all. You you live in this world. The next thing is something called cryptozoolology. I don't even know what that means. Uh but you cover it in the book. Well, it's the overarching uh study of what are kind of considered legendary creatures, Bigfoot among them. Uh and of course, you know, Bigfoot walks arm-in- arm with the other most famous legendary creature on Earth, the Loch Ness Monster. And quite frankly, whereas I some times, in fact, maybe just a few seconds ago, uh, ventriloquise the arguments of the believers when it comes to sea monsters, uh, now we're talking about things that I actually believe.

Um, that's that's a very easy one for me to uh to get behind. So, you're saying the Loch Ness monster is real? I'm saying I don't know about the Lochess monster, but and again given the uh major exertions that have been made to find the Loch Ness monster over the past uh hundred years, the fact that they haven't found the thing indicates to me that you have to take that into account. That indicates to me that the thing probably isn't there. Okay. But the broader proposition that there are [clears throat] massive sea creatures that we would uh call monsters a few hundred years ago still existing in our oceans today is a very easy hypothesis for me to embrace.

Why? Well, again, because we're always discovering them. The discover a new species of shark pretty much one or two every year uh in my brief lifetime. Uh, probably the most famous is called the mega mouth shark, which is this thing that was pulled up from the anchor of a US Navy vessel uh when I was still a kid. And the thing looks like a cartoon monster with this big huge grin and it's, you know, 20 ft long. And nobody had ever seen it before. Uh there is uh other evidence, okay, scientifically valid that indicates that there are large larger than we know sea creatures swimming in the depths of our oceans today.

That's an easy one. That's a gim. That's a layup. Okay, I I can get down with that. Um, where I start to lose uh my footing though is I was listening to you on a uh some paranormal podcast and the host referenced in passing as if it was like a totally established thing that there might be alien civilizations living at the bottom of our oceans outside of our um visibility visibility. Yes. Any evidence for that? All right. So, how do we get there? No, I I I the point, by the way, for your listeners, the point of this book, okay, is not to convert you to any of this.

It's just to give you the vocabulary so you can have these conversations at your next cocktail party. Uh it's the the quicky kind of, you know, matrix-like upload of every little bit of uh layman's knowledge you need to have to to swim in in this ocean, so to speak, uh intellectually without having to spend six years producing a TV show about it. This stuff is just interesting. And the fact of the matter is some of this stuff may sound ridiculous and some of it actually is ridiculous.

And I know it's harder for you to say that than it is for me because I don't produce the show. But it is also true that there are anomalous things that we cannot explain. So it's it's it's two parts. It's just interesting on its face and there are some areas where we really just can't answer the question. Yeah. But I I'd take it a step further, Dan. First of all, don't you know you're supposed to say the book name of the book seven times at least in order to to sink in with the the viewers?

It's called Evidence of the Extraordinary. We should just say it seven times in a row and we can then have a normal conversation. Um, but yes, this book, Evidence of the Extraordinary, is uh supposed to be kind of tickle your your intellectual curiosity. And by the way, it's a fun book. It's not heavy lifting. It's not like Dan's books. They're not very serious. They're very it's it's light reading. Beach, fine. Bathroom, fine. Um but uh I want to say I am going to say I'm going to insist that yes while some of these ideas and hypotheses are primaache ridiculous guess what every radical theory that has turned out to be true and shift paradigms in the history of science was once considered ridiculous and absurd if not dangerous and worthy of suppression.

So that's why the overall posture of the book is to take a step back a little bit from the hardcore skeptical cynical [ __ ] that I was uh when I was working at ABC and try to again be more humble in the face of the unknown, more hospitable to off-the-wall theories because whereas sure 90% of them will be uh either silly or misguided or purile or even dangerous. There's that little sliver that we need in order to actually make progress as a civilization and to improve the world.

And I cite, you know, plenty of examples of cases where, you know, crazy ideas turns out to be actually central to the progress of human civilization. How about this one? Doctors washing their hands before they deliver babies, right? uh Ignas Simovice and the whole germ theory of disease was considered so radical and dangerous that he ended up getting fired, getting locked in a mental institution and uh ultimately beaten to death by the guards of the mental institution. So, uh it would be nice if that hadn't happened.

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So when we talk about, you know, discovery of a new species, scientists and biologists, you know, they go through a very rigorous process before they just declare a new species uh exists. It has to be proven. It has to go through peer-reviewed uh research analysis, all that stuff. So we should still be doing that. The point is though when the first kind of shreds of evidence, the evidence that would either kind of tickle your fancy enough that you decide that a given hypothesis is worthy of more attention and research and resources or so silly that we should just move on and kind of leave it outside with the galashes and umbrellas as we proceed with, you know, serious scientific investigation.

We should be more hospitable to these things. We should not eliminate the possibility of something truly anomalous being the case just because of our own empirical prejudices. So ma maintain your standards, okay? But don't be poo pooing some of the stuff that you normally would think of as kooky. And frankly, you know, there's now all sorts of people uh who think that things such as quantum physics, quantum computing almost necessitate uh a non-materialistic understanding of the universe and reality and require us to think of things as time.

uh not just necessarily moving in one direction, not just present to future, multiple chronologies potentially existing at the same time. All sorts of things that kind of lean towards the potential of a grand unified theory of everything that could explain everything from UFOs to ghosts to psychic powers. And believe me, there's plenty of people who want to do just that. Uh did you want to get back to the cryptoaterrestrial thing, the underwater uh aliens, or did you was that just a little sprinkling and we're going to move on?

No, I I I I do want to come back to uh um underwater aliens, but let me just stay with uh this this line we're talking about between epistemic humility and gullibility. the conversation I've had many times in my own life with my longtime friend and meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein when subjects come up about uh the deep end of the pool the sort of more mystical ends of Buddhism where there are these beliefs not only in reincarnation and enlightenment but also in the existence of superpowers if you become a meditative adept the idea is that you can manipulate the laws of physics and I My knee-jerk reaction to that is to scoff.

And Joseph often gently argues for what uh I believe the poet uh Samuel Collage called the willing suspension of disbelief. That does not mean you believe with no evidence, but that you suspend your disbelief so that you can play with ideas um uh even if ultimately you're going to put them down. How does that land with you? Is that is that does that rhyme with what you were just talking about? Yeah. I mean, it kind of sounds like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too, right?

You you're trying to say that I don't necessarily believe I can levitate if I meditate long enough, but if some people can or if uh they say they can, far be it for me to completely dismiss their claims. And okay, I mean, that's kind of where I am. Uh I would just say that it is a problem. This is a is a classic slippery slope problem that you see everywhere from religion to eupfology, the study of eu UFOs, right? I mean, we can agree, I think, that there are things flying around the sky that we haven't identified.

But many people who are actually much more serious about the topic and I am much more credentialed and frankly much more honorable people because they've served our country in the military take it many steps further to the point that they're saying not only do we have these unidentified things we can't explain need to investigate but they're aliens but the United States has been in an alliance with them and we've reverse engineered their technology and this entire vast uh long enduring conspiracy theory that strikes me is just statistically unlikely because conspiracies are very hard to pull off and maintain.

So yes, it's okay to meditate [clears throat] as much as you want with the hope that someday you'll be able to levitate. And by the way, there was actually a really interesting book about levitation from a Yale professor that came out a few years ago um that studied uh cases of medieval and renaissance levitations in which he kind of came out saying something happened. He wasn't just poo pooing it or dismissing it as superstition. Uh but always let's just keep our critical facilities um at the ready.

Well, I think we're saying and I think Joseph's saying a similar thing, which is, yeah, keep your critical facilities and maintain what the Zen folks called don't know mind. You know, like I ultimately, I don't know, m maybe they haven't found the Loch Ness monster. I don't personally um think uh the animals in there. I I don't personally think one can levitate but at the end of the day I really don't know. So I it is having your cake and eating it too but not in the porative.

Yeah. Oh maybe that's the true lesson of Buddhism that you can have your cake and eat and at least nibble on it too. Uh but I I think it's a wonderful part of being a human that you're able to uh in fact obligated to maintain a sense of empiricism just to kind of cross the street and yet we all have this yearning for there to be something bigger. Uh in the book I reference and somewhat lionize Bla1 Pascal and his concept of the god-shaped hole in his heart uh that we all need to fill.

and whether we're filling it with actual religion and God is traditionally practiced or uh ufology or uh the deep end of the pool of Buddhism or what have you. It is a it is I would submit to everyone uh a positive Darwinian adaptation. It's a good thing we have. It's not something that we should want to outgrow or amputate. Say more about that. Why why not? Because there are folks like my friend Sam Harris who would argue that religion has been a purely if not purely largely negative and noxious force in human affairs.

Yeah. Well, I'd be happy to talk about that with Sam Harris if we want to talk about God. Sure. To the degree that religion can be criticized for its delterious implementations. Absolutely. No question about that. Uh but you have to weigh the good with the bad, right? Like when Cromwell said, "Paint me warts and all." He meant paint the warts, but also paint the and all. So, yes, a video camera can be used to make kitty porn. It can also be used to make uh an award-winning documentary about Navajo basket weavers or whatever, you know, righteous social justice cause you think uh needs to be documented.

A uh you know, a gun can be used to uh kill Adolf Hitler. It can also be used to shoot up Coline. So the question isn't what is the thing in and of itself. It's a question of how it's applied and what is the you know aggregate utility to the species over the course of millennia. What good has religion done? Well, I would submit to you that in this country at least there's been a very helpful counterbalance to the ravages of uh unchecked capitalism. you know, just again the microcosm of the history of the United States.

Uh we have this economic system that incentivizes and rewards relatively amoral uh self-interested behavior in the marketplace. And it is counterveiled by this Puritan tradition that includes some degree of altruism and self-sacrifice and humanity and concern for your fellow man. And I would also argue that you wouldn't really have, I'm happy to be contradicted, I'm often wrong, but in the way I kind of understand human history at least, you wouldn't really have much of a a civil rights movement or a human rights movement if uh you didn't have uh a a religious tradition from which it sprang and sprouted to the point that you might argue that we now no longer need religion because we have a um an understanding, an architecture of basic respect for human beings that makes uh the divine a uh you know like training wheels that we no longer need to to ride the bicycle.

But I will only tell you that I was meditating quite frequently and I still do it. Not as frequently as I used to, maybe two or three times a week. Uh but I go to church every Sunday and it's really fulfilling for me and there's a reason for that. I think it's because it speaks to and underscores many of the things that I want to improve about myself. It helps me just kind of think, okay, I know I can be a better person. Let's just kind of focus on that at least for, you know, this one time a week and try to assimilate these uh these principles into our daily lives.

There was a I forget where I saw it, but you know, Steven Fry, you probably actually do know Steven Fry personally, but he there was some sort of uh debate he was in. I'm getting foggy on the details, but he had this great parable or example. It's like, imagine yourself walking down the street of a city that you don't know by yourself. It's dark and there's five men walking on the same side of the street straight at you, would you be more or less uh put at ease if you knew that they were coming from a church meeting?

So again, yes, the uh practice of religion has led to jihads. It's led to crusades. It's led to uh the bombing of abortion clinics. It's led to all sorts of things that I would abdure categorically. Uh those are the spectacular things that we would uh uh that attract a disproportionate amount of attention. It's also responsible for a million different small, quiet, silent, and unannounced acts of kindness and compassion and patience and forgiveness. uh on a daily basis without which I would submit the human race would be even more barbaric than it currently is.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean I I agree with you know 75% of what you just said. the area where I and I think it's a just a healthy disagreement. I'm sure many people listening to the show will disagree with me on this that I think the capacities that religion teases out of the human mind, altruism, compassion, kindness, etc., etc., don't have to be connected to metaphysically infused allegorories from the Bronze Age. Um like I I I think we we have these capacities in us. It's how we came the apex predator on the planet.

Our ability to cooperate, collaborate, and communicate. And um I don't know that belief in something we can't prove is a suan naan for that. It's a shame we can't make this more of a bitter disagreement because that's what people like. But if if I'm resigning myself to the fact this is going to be an amicable conversation, I I would agree with you to the extent that I would even say that me personally, and I've said this, you know, in other in other forums, you know, when it comes to Christianity, Catholicism specifically, the religion I practice, whether or not Jesus actually walked on water or turned water into wine or rose from the third day, I get that it's very important to a lot of people to practice the faith.

For me, it's really not. If he did all that stuff, good for Jesus. But what helps me is are the actual gospel, the teachings, the the ministry, the uh the ethical teachings that uh kind of can stand on their own with or without the quote unquote magic. Um, so I guess I'm kind of aligned with Thomas Jefferson on that. you know, the famous Jefferson Bible kind of uh edited out all the miracles and uh divine elements and just basically brought it down to uh the teachings which he apparently believed to be self-evident except for uh did not apply them to uh African-Americans.

Thomas Jefferson was a work in progress, a complicated man. No, no doubt about that. Um, so yes. Are there aliens living under the seabed in the Mariana Trench? So where does this whole thing come from? So the the UFO people have a problem, okay, that they need to solve, which is let's take let's let's work it backwards. Let's agree that the Nimtts Tic Tac or the Omaha USO or any one of these kind of iconic UAPs as they're as they're called these days are indeed the technology possibly piloted by aliens themselves or dispatched by aliens themselves.

How do they get here? Where do they come from? And you have a number of cosmological uh challenges and challenges of physics that you have to surmount. one is known as the fairmy paradox and that is basically the um supposition uh or I should say the observation the remark uh that's attributed to the great physicist Enrico Fairmy which basically comes down to saying yes we know that statistically the odds are that the universe is indeed populated by other folks like us or maybe not like us but other intelligent civilizations with you But if it is indeed impossible that we're alone and that there are others out there, where the [ __ ] are they?

Why are we not seeing them when we have our radio telescopes looking out there when we have uh a million people looking up at the sky and they're not landing on the uh the lawn of the White House and announcing themselves? That's a that's a bit of a problem. The other question is uh posed by what's sometimes referred to as the capernac uh concept or the the capernac principle which is we're not at the center of the universe right we're not like some huge beacon attracting people so that means if life is evenly distributed and there's huge distances even if there were intelligent life why would they be coming here and how would they get here how would they traverse these gigantic distances and why would they choose choose to come here and if they were to do so, how would they overcome some of Einstein's challenges like traveling faster than the speed of light?

Okay, so there's a number of ways that people kind of solve these problems. One is interdimensionality, right? They're not traveling through space and time as we normally understand it. They're punching in and out of different dimensions. They're kind of toggling into out of a different uh position in our dimension that uh obviously need to move faster than the speed of light. Okay. Another one is that they've been here the entire time. That the distances are not exactly uh that problematic because it's not interstellar travel to begin with.

that there was uh a meteorite or some other origin uh encounter whereby alien life seeded this planet billions of years ago and evolved to the point where there is indeed uh life forms at the bottom of the ocean that do not uh live by things like photosynthesis but rather through things like chemosynthesis. And they have evolved to the point where like in the movie The Abyss, uh they are now able to engage in what's often referred to as transmedium travel, meaning from the water into the air.

And that's what explains a number of these uh UAP videos, which are uh alleged to have documented objects not only flying in the sky, but traveling from the ocean into the air and vice versa. Got you there. Look, he's struck dumb. struck dumb by the by the by the knowledge, by the theory, by the preaching. Uh what I was going to ask is where do you come down on this? Well, again, it's interesting that you ask me because I'm the guy who was just saying 20 minutes ago that I think that uh deep sea life is definitely much more diverse and there's much more down there to discover than we some people think.

So, I believe there are large creatures swimming in the depths of the ocean that we have not uh observed yet entirely. I think we've observed parts of them, but we haven't observed entirely. So, you would think that I'd be ready to embrace the cryptoaterrestrial theory as well. Uh, look, there are again very intelligent, very welltrained, very honorable people who believe this stuff. One of the heroes of my book is this gentleman, Luzando. And I know people crack on Lu Alzando left and right, but he's a good guy and he's uh really been helpful and a good friend to me, and I will not abide the bad mouthing of Lu Alzando.

I don't even know who that is. Well, so good. You're not in a position to badmouth it. No. Um he he's the he's the godfather, the founding father, if you will, of the current UFO renaissance. Um he's the the gentleman who used to work for the Pentagon program called ATIP that uh and he ended up leaking uh the original Pentagon videos. The most famous of which is this nimits tic tac and was behind the publication of the seminal article in the New York Times in 2017 that broke the whole story wide open that uh despite its decades worth of uh poo pooing uh UFOs or UAPs and studying them largely for the purpose of debunking them indeed the Pentagon had been taking them uh seriously to the tunes of millions of dollars in budgetary outlays for quite some time.

And that was the initial uh if you will snowflake that has subsequently snowballed into the state the current affair that we're in now where uh both the Pentagon and the White House are completely open about the fact that they are studying the UAPs and want to know more about them and want us to know more about them which I consider uh a big sign of progress but yet I am not uh fully convinced that there are aliens living at the bottom of the uh bottom of the ocean although I admit that would solve u many of the puzzles that the UAP issue presents us.

Okay, let's move on to the afterlife. You have done some work both on your show and in the book on claims that there may be some evidence for uh a hereafter. What have you found? What do you believe? So, what I found and where where my kind of foundational beliefs came from, which I write about a little bit in the book, back in the '9s, even before I was working at ABC, I was working um in the investigative unit of a syndicated television show, we would call it a tabloid television show called Inside Edition, where I learned many, many great things about how to produce television, how to how to practice journalism, and also learn great many things about the hideous overpopulation of charlatans [clears throat] and frauds out there who are willing to take advantage of people uh who are gullible or credulous or simply can't really cope with some of the harsher realities of life such as uh the premature death of a loved one.

So, I'd gone to Arizona and with a hidden camera to conduct a sting on one of these psychics who for a hefty fee would claim that he could either communicate with or more importantly direct you to the body of a abducted and deceased family member who had never been found. And of course, that's particularly pernitious, not just because it kind of plays on people's desire to communicate with a loved one, but if you're a family with a missing daughter and the police haven't found anything, how can you possibly justify not giving money to a psychic?

You'll try anything and you very easily fall prey to these u I would have to say scumbags is the easiest word that comes to my mind who will take their money, play on your hopes, and deliver absolutely nothing. That's where I was coming from. Well, especially when and when we approach these kinds of topics on the proof is out there. Okay, that's when I'm at my most critical and skeptical. So, what have we seen that have that has indicated anything uh to the contrary? Well, there have been these videos where children in particular that I'm thinking of one particular case where there's video of a little girl whose uncle recently died under tragic circumstances and she is looking straight into the space in front of her uh high chair and having this long conversation with him and her mother is saying, "Who are you talking to?" And she says, "Tim." Tim, that was the gentleman's name.

And this happens frequently enough that the mother started documenting this and came to believe that indeed the child was interacting with uh the spirit of her deceased uncle. Uh now of course there's a skeptical position to occupy there. You can say the child just hasn't really uh developed enough of a mature sense of object permanence and impermanence. But there are people including uh a respected physicist Miyukaku who said that indeed it might be the case that children can perceive and communicate uh things and and layers of reality that go beyond the strictly empirical perceptions that we have as adults.

There's also been a lot of work um done by researchers at the University of Virginia, some of which has been documented on um a Netflix show which was called After Death or something like that. I remember watching it with the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein. I'll drop a link in the show notes uh to this documentary series. And in one of the episodes follows this researcher from UVA, whose name I'm forgetting, and he goes out and and meets some children who claim to remember their past lives, little kids.

And he conducts these quizzes where he sets out like a bunch of pictures in front of them and says, "Okay, which is a picture of your old neighborhood?" And the kid can reliably pick it out. And so there seems to be some suggestive but not dispositive evidence of children remembering past lives. Yeah. So I have not seen this Netflix documentary, but you're talking about the studies out of the University of Virginia. Uh yes, I I referenced those in the book a couple different times. the initial uh kind of groundbreaking scientist in that was a gentleman named uh I want to say Ian Stevenson who documented hundreds of these cases many of which uh seem to have at least on an anecdotal basis very compelling evidence and he focused on children of course because uh children below the age of seven or eight usually haven't learned or developed enough the way where they can read and retain information about somebody else's life whose disease at least enough to pull off an elaborate hoax, right?

So, when you're you're getting dealing with kids, where else would they be getting the information? All right, they're a good group to use. And he'd come up with I want to say something like 1,600 I could be getting it wrong, but I don't think so. Cases that he considered uh somewhat valid. Now, he died and he was also criticized as not, you know, being as rigorous a scientist as perhaps he could have been. But to this day there are people uh who continue to study uh this topic and there are cases that are quite compelling.

We interviewed a woman who was considered one of the kind of iconic cases and her name was Babro Carlin. She was from Scandinavia, I want to say Stockholm, but she uh believed very sincerely that she was the reincarnation of Anne Frank. And she had stories and documentation about being able to, you know, know how to get to Anne Frank's house the first time she visited uh Amsterdam as a child and knowing where some of the furniture and wall hangings have been placed even though they'd been taken down decades ago and and the house had been somewhat rearranged for the tourist purposes.

And it's compelling stuff, but um I've always had a tough time with reincarnation just on the numbers, right? How how do you account for the fact that you know there's you know 8 billion people now and there were only two billion people before. I guess we didn't have to mean that a few billion of us were crickets or dogs or something before um and not humans. But it is really fascinating stuff and again worthy of serious consideration and study in my book. Ancient archaeology. What does it mean?

Everybody's familiar with some of the mysteries that surround, you know, famous locations like Stonehenge or the Nazca lines or the pyramids. And it's a touchy subject, right? Because on the one hand, it's very uh legitimate to wonder how could primitive cultures have pulled off such amazing uh feats of monumentalism. Uh the danger of course and this is a criticism that's frequently and uh fullthroatedly vocalized by many members of the academic community is I can very easily slide into a form of paternalistic uh I'm trying to find a word more gentle than racism but I guess that's the word to use.

The hypothesis being that, you know, how could these naked brown people have been smart enough and ingenious enough to make these impressive things? They could never have done it. It must have been aliens. Uh so that's something to be, you know, that's something to be very careful with as you tiptoe into these uh discussions. One thing we know, however, that mainstream archaeologists uh openly acknowledge is that there are a lot of cases where primitive ancient societies moved massive rocks around that we have no idea exactly how they did.

We can speculate that maybe they use some sort of pulley system or, you know, logs tied together. But it is really interesting that a number of ancient civilizations, some of which we don't even know the names of. We don't know their language. We don't know their culture. We all we know is that there's places with these gigantic rocks and we can't explain exactly how they got there or why they were moved to begin with. But why would uh people who struggled so much just to find a place to eat and not freeze to death devoted so much energy and bandwidth to moving and assembling rocks that weigh you know [clears throat] thousands of pounds uh way beyond the capacities of the vast majority of their technology at the time.

That is a profound, deep, abiding, nettlesome question of both mainstream archaeology and there's examples of it all over the world, some of which we've uh touched on in the course of the show. I just like what considering that does to my mind. Puts you in a position of awe like of genuine not knowing. And even if the least interesting explanation is true, which is that they figured it out, that's just incredible. and we still don't know how or why. And so that that's just a very pleasing mind state to inhabit, which is why people love thinking about this stuff.

And the past is a trip. Uh it doesn't even have to be the remote past. I mean, I'm still boggled by the idea that people once practiced journalism without cell phones. And I'm, by the way, and I'm old enough to have lived, you know, uh a good chunk of my life before the smartphone. It just feels like a foreign planet. And it's amazing how much stuff was actually accomplished. And that's why I kind of end the book saying that even if there are aliens and we're not alone and all the uh most uh baroley kooky hypotheses are true, we should still feel good enough about ourselves as a species to take a little bit of a bow.

I mean, we've done some amazing things that we should be proud of. And you know, we haven't yet found another species out there that's, you know, figured out the history of the universe, the history of evolution, the human body, invented the computer, developed AI, penicellin is a biggie. Come on. And uh at the very least I think we should again be very happy with ourselves as humans and acknowledge that the reason a lot of that progress was made was explicitly because somebody had a crazy idea that they stuck with.

You've heard the theory. I know. I'm sure that the reason why we haven't had confirmed alien visitors is that all the advanced extraterrestrial civilizations uh developed AI which killed them. It is again a big assumption not only that an alien civilization would evolve long enough to you know be able to master interstellar travel or interdimensional travel but to not annihilate itself. I mean, you know, we've only, you know, been in possession of nuclear weapons for uh less than a century, and that's been a major concern um from the get-go.

So, and one thing we also know from the study of our own planet is that civilizations have a wonderful propensity for collapsing and wiping themselves out. Now, you know, you get the Curtzswhile types who believe in the singularity and think the AI is going to um you know, kind of lead to a form of transhumanism and space itself is going to attain consciousness. So maybe it's a question less of uh you know collapsing and going extinct as to evolving into some higher state of existence where our bodies themselves just become husks which we outgrow.

That might be nice, you know, uh but I'm not convinced it's going to happen next week. Two questions I ask at the end of every interview. Uh, first, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we haven't? We haven't talked about Scientology, Dan. It's been years. I don't feel like getting sued. Well, I'm here to tell you I you know, the Scientologists have kind of won. Look, the there was a time when the fundamental uh principles of Scientology with have to which have to do with UFOs and extraterrestrials and and all the their kind of core beliefs were considered so disruptive that they needed to be kept secret.

Nobody could know about them. Well, now pretty much everybody knows about it, but they must be laughing double time because now the Pentagon and the White House and mainstream America is talking about aliens and things like the Panspermia thesis and it doesn't all align with uh the teachings of Elron Hubard, which is probably disqualifying. But in terms of the larger discourse regarding aliens, you know, if anything, mainstream society has taken a step towards Scientology, not away from it. My problem, you know, if I were advising the Scientologists, which I've tried to do several times to no avail, is uh their their big mistake was making their bet noir, their number one enemy psychiatry.

I would advise them, I always say this, I would advise them to make their number one enemy golf. cuz there's lots of affluent people who have tried golf and hate golf and want nothing more than to turn their back on golf and find something else fulfilling. And if I were to start a religion today, that's what I would do is um base it on an abiding bitter antagonism towards the sport of golf. Tom Cruz, if you're listening, um reach out. Yeah. Take a number, get in line.

Final question. This is almost redundant at this point, but can you remind everybody of the name of your book and um maybe also your past book, which you also came on this show to discuss and and the show that you executive produced. Can you just plug everything you got, please? Yes. So, my book published by Simon and Schustster in May of 2026 is called Evidence of the Extraordinary: Discoveries from the series The Proof is Out There. And it is about uh you know my and my team's uh diligent efforts to try to apply rigorous journalistic and scientific standards to the investigation of paranormal phenomena.

My earlier book, which was called More Than You Can Handle, a rare disease, a family in crisis, and the breakthrough medicine that cured the incurable, is about my own families and my son's personal journeys as we tried to diagnose and treat and ultimately cure this crushingly rare and lethal uh primary immune deficiency that he was born with. That set us on a whole journey that brought us through u the miracles of uh modern medicine right to the edge of science and belief and empirical data and its border between faith and hope and potentially the divine.

So that's how that book is uh framed and there are certain parallels between that and my approach to um the current endeavors to study the paranormal. Miguel, great job with this. Great to talk to you. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.

DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go. Remember to sign up for my new app which is called 10%withan harris. You can sign up over at danh harris.com. On the app you'll find a growing library of meditations from worldclass teachers. Adree access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads. Exclusive live stream events, which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week.

Robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers, and with one another. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace.