Dr Jason Lisle Interview

Justin Peters

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Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Justin Peters. I hope that you and your family are doing well today.

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I want to thank you very much for joining me in this program, and I am really looking forward to this.

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It is my special privilege to have Dr. Jason Lyle on the program, and I'm going to be interviewing him about the

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Flat Earth Movement. Yes, that is a thing. And also, here lately in the last several weeks,

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UFOs, believe it or not, have been very much in the news. And so I'm going to ask him about his impressions of that and what might really be going on.

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But just as a brief introduction, Dr. Jason Lyle is a Christian astrophysicist, and he is the founder of the

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Biblical Science Institute. He double majored in physics and astronomy.

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He has both a master's and a PhD in astrophysics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

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He's authored a number of books, Taking Back Astronomy, Stargazer's Guide to the

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Night Sky, The Ultimate Proof of Creation, Discerning Truth, Understanding Genesis, and also my most recent acquisition of one of his books is

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Understanding Faith in an Age of Reason, in which he deals with 400 thereabouts alleged contradictions in the

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Bible, and he explains why they are not, in fact, contradictions. So it's a very, very helpful book.

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So Dr. Lyle, thank you very much for joining us. It's an honor to have you.

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Well, thanks. Happy to be on. Yeah, good deal. Well, Jason, if you would, is it okay, would you prefer to be called

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Dr. Lyle or Jason? Whatever you like. Okay. All right. All right. Well, by the way, dear friends,

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Dr. Lyle came to our church a couple of years ago, Kootenai Community Church, and did a conference for us, and he is, not only is he obviously very intelligent and very well read in his field, but he's just a nice guy.

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He really is. Very down -to -earth, very accessible, very nice guy. So it's a pleasure to have him on. So, Dr.

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Lyle, if you would, give us a little bit about, a little background to yourself, specifically your testimony, how you came to faith in Christ and where you attend church now.

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Okay, I was, fortunately, I was saved when I was very young. I'm grateful for that.

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My parents, it's interesting, because I think my parents were not believers at the time that they got married.

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And when I was on my way, they decided they wanted their son to be raised in a, you know, moral setting.

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So they began attending church, and hey, the Lord saved them. And so then they raised me as a believer, and they taught me to trust in the

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Bible. And even when I was young, six or seven years old, I knew enough of the scriptures to know that I was a wicked sinner, that I deserved death and hell, that Jesus is

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God and also man, and that he paid for my sins on the cross, and if I repented and trusted them, he'd save me.

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And so I asked the Lord to save me at that point, and to be Lord of my life. And I believe that's when

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I was saved. I believe that's when the Lord got ahold of me. And of course, my theology has improved over the years, but that we're sinners, and we need salvation, therefore.

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So I have a very boring testimony, and I'm very grateful for that, because I've been able to avoid a lot of the pitfalls that a lot of people encounter.

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You know, sometimes a lot of people have to hit rock bottom before they get saved, and I'm just grateful I was saved when I was young.

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Yeah, okay. And where do you attend church now, Jason? So I'm here in Colorado Springs, and I attend

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Hope Chapel of Colorado Springs. It's a wonderful church. I'm a member there. I feel privileged.

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It's a small church, but just great people there. And great folks who love the Lord, and have good theology.

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There's good preaching on Sunday mornings, which I appreciate. And in fact, they asked me to fill in last

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Sunday. I preached the sermon there. So it's an honor to occasionally get to do that. So a really good church.

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Hope Chapel of Colorado Springs. I highly recommend it if you're in the area. Okay, excellent. Good deal. And Jason, you are a young earth.

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You believe you take a very literal interpretation of Genesis. As you should.

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So young earth, you don't believe in this theistic evolution, kind of try to compromise the

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Bible with what the prevailing view of science is. Right, and yeah,

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I take the Bible the same way that my Lord and Savior Jesus did. He took Genesis' literal history, and so did the apostles, and Paul refers back to the first man,

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Adam, and so on. So yeah, I take it the same way my Lord does. I take Genesis' literal history. It's written in that style.

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I do have articles and books, even my book Understanding Genesis, which shows that if we're going to get to the author's intention, we really have to take

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Genesis as literal history. There's no doubt that Moses intended it to convey historical truth.

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It's just the way that it's written. So I would reject the idea that it's an allegory or parable or whatever.

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That does not fit the context. Yes, indeed. All right, well, Jason, the two primary issues

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I'd like to talk to you about today, flat earth and the latest kind of interest in UFOs.

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Believe it or not, the flat earth view is a thing. I am just amazed that we're living in a day and age in which information has never been more readily accessible.

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I mean, a quick Google search and you can come up with, I mean, just all kinds of information, photos of earth and planets and all of that kind of stuff.

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And yet there is almost counterintuitively to me a resurgence in the belief that the earth is flat.

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How is this a thing? And are you surprised this is a thing? It is a little surprising.

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It's disappointing to me. It shows an extreme lack of discernment in our society in general, which, frankly, these days,

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I'm no longer surprised. When I first heard about it, I thought, there's no way that people can believe that.

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Do they not have any knowledge of astronomy? Because human beings have known that the world is spherical for thousands of years.

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The Greeks knew that before the time of Christ. When Jesus was in his earthly ministry, people already knew the world was round. The idea that Christopher Columbus was out to prove that, that's a myth.

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People already knew the world was round at the time of Columbus. He just thought it'd be faster to go that way, partly because he underestimated the size of the earth.

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And also because, of course, they didn't know about the Americas at that point. So Columbus wasn't out to prove the world was round.

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He was out to prove that it was faster to go the other way than to go what he thought would be the longer way.

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He was wrong, but I'm glad he made the trip. Yeah, so it comes from a lack of discernment,

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I think. People don't realize the good evidence that there is for a round earth, the fact that the ancients were able to discover that.

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The fact that the Bible teaches that the world was round, it does. The Bible's not an astronomy textbook, but it does reference the roundness of the earth in a couple of places.

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In Job 26 .10, the Bible poetically describes God inscribing a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.

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And that boundary between light and darkness is what we astronomers call the terminator. That's where light stops on the earth.

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That's where evening and morning are happening. And the only way that can be a circle, especially on waters, because the earth's surface is mostly water, 71 % water.

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The only way that can be a circle is if the earth's spherical. Any other shape, it could be a circle maybe at one time, but another time it won't be.

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So that's an example right there of Job knowing something about the spherical nature of the earth.

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And Job, we think, was written around 2000 BC, which is interesting because the secularists at that time were the ones that taught the flat earth.

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It was those that were faithful to God who understood the shape of the earth. Apparently, God had revealed that to them, interestingly.

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Or maybe they figured it out another way. I don't know. But in any case, we knew that the Jews did have some divine insight into these issues.

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It wasn't until around 500 BC that Pythagoras began arguing that the world was roughly spherical in shape.

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And it's usually not considered until the time of Aristotle. So that's what, 100, 150 years, 200 years later, that the world is considered to have been proved to be round.

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And one of the ways that Aristotle proved it was by pointing out that in a lunar eclipse, when the earth is between the sun and the moon, the shadow that the earth casts on the moon is always a circle.

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And it doesn't matter what the orientation is. Now, if the earth were a flat disk, that could only happen at midnight, because that's the only time it would project as a circle, right?

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Any other time, if the moon's lower in the horizon, then that means the earth would be closer.

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It would cast an elliptical shadow. And if it was edge -on, it would cast just a line. And I actually had the opportunity to confirm this just a couple days ago on Wednesday of this past week.

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We had a lunar eclipse. And this particular eclipse happened right around the time of sunrise, just a little before sunrise.

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So the moon is setting in the west. The sun's rising in the east, which means I know I'm between the two, because I can see the moon's there.

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The sun is going to rise over there. So I know I'm in between the two. And also, because of the orientation of the earth, if it were a disk, it would be edge -on, which means the shadow it would have cast would have been a horizontal line.

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And it wasn't. It was a round shadow. And I've got pictures to prove it. So that's just one example of many that we know that the earth is round.

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The way when ships come up over the sea, the mast appears first, and then the rest of the ship, and so on.

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And people knew that in ancient times. And so Aristotle argued that that was a good evidence that the world was round.

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By the time of Eratosthenes, he actually was able to measure the size of the earth pretty accurately, actually, using light and shadows and so on.

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So people have been clever for quite a while, and they've been able to figure that out. And so I think that most people who believe in a flat earth, if not all of them, are not aware of how these things came to be.

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The fact that, one, the Bible teaches the world's round. Two, the scientific evidence for it, how that was discovered, it's not a recent idea.

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The world's been known to be round for a very long time. Yeah. Well, speaking of what the

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Bible says about a round earth, I'm glad you brought that up, because many of the flat earthers, sadly and embarrassingly, profess to base their belief on the

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Bible. They profess to be Christians. They say, oh, well, the Bible speaks of the four corners of the earth, which that doesn't really help their argument any.

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But they use the Bible as their support. So what verses would they use to try to support belief in a flat earth, and why is that erroneous?

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The verses that they use, when you read them, you're like, how does that even remotely support a flat earth?

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The one that you mentioned would be the one that I would think would be the go -to one, because you could argue, well, four corners.

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But that would make it a square. And you know what? Flat earthers don't believe that. They believe it's a disc.

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So they can't use that verse, because if it's a disc, it doesn't literally have corners.

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So that one's not going to work. I've heard them say, well, you know, the Bible talks about the surface of the earth, and the surface is always flat.

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I'm thinking, no, the Hebrew word for surface, panin, it means it's the same as the word for your face.

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My face is not flat. In fact, it's closer to a sphere than it is a flat surface. So that doesn't work.

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And in fact, I dealt with a few of these. I actually wrote up an article a while back on our website, Biblical Science Institute, and I analyzed the first 10 or so biblical proofs of a flat earth.

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And none of them made any sense. The only one that gets even close to it, there's the vision that the king had that Daniel had to interpret.

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Remember that, where there's this, well, there's more than one, but there's one vision where there's a mountain that can be seen from all the earth.

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And so, you know, well, that's a vision, though. That's not meant to be taken as literal narrative.

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Or the other one that they'll try to use is they'll say, well, Jesus, when Satan took him to a tall mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world.

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But in one gospel, it says, in a moment in time, indicating that this was a vision. It wasn't that he was literally seeing all the earth.

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Because they say, well, you know, there's a mountain, therefore, where you can see all the earth. And then my question is, if that's the case, where is this mountain?

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And why can't I see it? Right? Because if there was literally a mountain where you could see everywhere on earth, then everywhere on earth should be able to see that mountain.

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But you can't. In the middle of Kansas, you don't see any mountains. You see nothing. So that doesn't make any sense.

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So, again, there is no verse that says, well, you know, the earth's flat. Or there are verses that talk about, you know, the pillars of the earth, again, in a kind of a poetic way.

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But that doesn't make it flat. That just means it's supported, which, of course, it is. The mantle supports the crust and so on.

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So it has to do with very bad eisegesis, reading into the text based on your presuppositions, rather than exegeting the text and seeing what the text has to say.

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Because there aren't any verses in Scripture that really teach that it's flat. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And if the earth was flat, theoretically, all of us should be able to see

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Mount Everest. Yes. Because it's the tallest point on earth. And I should be able to walk out my front door and see it.

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Right. I don't. Right. And you don't. That's right. Yeah. And isn't it true that the stars that you and I see, the constellations that you and I see gazing upward in the northern hemisphere is not what our friends down in Australia or the tip of Chile would see, correct?

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Right. Right. And some are the same if they're close to the celestial equator. But the North Star, you can't see the

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North Star from once you get significantly below the equator. The North Star is not exactly at the

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North Pole. So you could see it on the equator at certain times. And there's atmospheric refraction.

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But once you get down to Australia, you cannot see the North Star. And the flat earthers will say, well, no, that's because it's too far away now.

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Because they imagine the stars are relatively close to the earth, I suppose. But that won't work because you can see the constellations that would point toward the

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North Star. You get a little bit south of the equator, you can still see the Big Dipper. You can use the two pointer stars on the

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Big Dipper. And you can see that the North Star is below the horizon. And that doesn't work on a flat earth.

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You can't in the current picture of the flat earth. And I should say, that's what I'm doing when

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I refute their view. I'm taking the current most accepted view among flat earthers, which is that the earth is a flat disk.

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And the sun and the moon rotate above that. And the sun casts a shadow, kind of like a cone on the surface of the earth and moves around like that.

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And you can explain some things that way, but not all things, including the positions of the stars. You cannot account for them in that model.

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Yeah. You can't account for the seasons, eclipses, as you were talking about earlier.

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I'm just kind of amazed that we're even having this conversation. Not too infrequently,

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I get emails from people calling me a false teacher because I'm one of those ball earthers, they say.

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You're a ball earther. Well, I guess. Yeah, well, yeah,

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I am. Just as Job was. Yeah, exactly. Well, let's deal with a couple.

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I've watched some of these videos, and you can really go down some rabbit holes with some of these flat earthers, but they're all over YouTube.

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GlobeBusters is a flat earth YouTube channel, and I think it's got almost 63 ,000 subscribers.

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And it's a pretty popular thing. But a couple of their more popular arguments.

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They'll say that if we were truly living on a sphere, and this sphere is rotating, the planet rotates at about 1 ,000 miles per hour.

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Is that correct? At the equator. Yep. At the equator, right. And so they say if that were true, then all of the lakes, rivers, and oceans would be flung off of the planet.

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And they have some experiments that they set up. And they'll take a tennis ball, and they'll dip it in water, and they'll spin the tennis ball, and they'll show it in slow motion.

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And you see the water spinning off of the tennis ball when it rotates really quickly. And they say, well, the tennis ball isn't spinning anywhere near 1 ,000 miles per hour, and it's throwing the water off of it.

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So if we were really rotating that quickly, then everything would just be flung off of the planet into space.

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Is that a valid argument? That's a very bad analogy because it reveals an ignorance of physics.

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The issue is not the velocity. The issue is the acceleration. You see, one of the things that we understand now about physics is that an object in motion tends to remain in motion.

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Object at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. And so a rotation is a change in velocity because you're changing the direction.

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And you're constantly doing that. So when you're doing it with Earth's oceans, for example, how long does it take to completely change the direction of the ocean from this way all the way around to that way?

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It takes about 12 hours. So if they were to do that accurately with their tennis ball, they should put the water on it and take 12 hours to turn it.

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Because it's not the velocity. It's the acceleration. The acceleration is what causes the water to change direction.

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That's the key. But the fact is, in an airplane, I fly quite a bit. If you drop a ball in an airplane, it doesn't go flying back because I'm moving at 600 miles per hour.

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From my vantage point, it goes straight down. Now, somebody watching the plane from outside would watch both me and the ball, and they would say, no, the ball is following a parabolic trajectory.

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But from my standpoint in the plane, it seems to fall straight down as if I weren't moving at all. But I know better. I know that I am moving.

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It's no different on the surface of the Earth. You drop something, it doesn't go flying back. It moves with the Earth because an object in motion tends to stay in motion.

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And so that's true of the lakes and the oceans. That motion is changed because they're accelerated.

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And it's gravity that does that. It's gravity that pulls them around, keeps them fixed to the surface of the Earth. But if they really wanted to do a proper analogy, they should take the tennis ball and turn it so that it makes a half a revolution in 12 hours.

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And they would see the water does not go flying off. Yeah, exactly. All right. One of their other favorite lines of argumentation is the

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Bedford Canal experiment. And I don't have the gentleman's name in front of me, but back in 1838,

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I believe, this man in the United Kingdom, Great Britain, got on the

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Bedford Canal, I suppose, or Bedford River, and he wanted to test whether or not the

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Earth is really a sphere. And so he got one of his friends to get in a boat with a mast sticking up out of the boat and a flag on it.

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I think it was about three feet. The flag was about three feet off the surface of the water. And so he got in the canal with his telescope.

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And this canal is in a straight line, a number of miles long.

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So this fellow rode out six, seven or eight miles. And according to the mathematics of it, if he had really, if the

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Earth was truly spherical after he had gone out six, seven, eight miles, then the curvature of the

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Earth should have completely hidden his little rowboat and the little flag.

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And yet this man with his telescope could still see it, could still see the boat and the flag, even though he was, he should have been hidden by the curvature of the

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Earth. So is that one, is that a valid argument for the

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Flat Earthers? Well, it would be if it weren't for atmosphere. That's a good idea.

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That experiment's a good idea. But we do need to keep in mind that light can be bent. And we know that if you stick your hand underwater, the reason your hand looks like it changes the angle, like it's being bent sharply and you're wondering, how's my bone not broken, is because when light transfers from the water to the air, it changes its direction a little bit.

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Air can do that too. We know this. Look down, if you ever look down a road on a hot summer day and it looks like the road's dancing around, the road's not really dancing around.

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The air is changing the path of the light very slightly. And what will cause that is temperature differences.

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Temperature differences in air will bend light, especially if it has to travel over a distance of a mile or so, it gets bent a little bit.

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So I'm not opposed to the Bedford type experiments. That's a good idea. But the only time where you can be assured that the light is not being bent is if there is no temperature differences between the water and the air.

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So you have to pick the right day to do that experiment. And if you do, it will work.

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It will reveal that at a certain distance, the mast is no longer visible. I've done the equivalent of that experiment myself in Kansas.

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And this was a long time ago. The first time we took a trip, I was a kid, we took a trip out to Colorado. And as we were going through Kansas, I figured from my position in this car, how far ahead in the road can

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I see because of the curvature of the earth? And it's not very far in terms of seeing something that's on the road.

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Now, if something's sticking up, then you can go further, right? But it's something like a mile and a half. It's not very far.

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And sure enough, once cars get beyond a certain distance, you don't see them anymore because the curvature of the earth. So I'm not opposed to that kind of experiment.

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And it will reveal the roundness of the earth if you do it when the temperature is stable. And that's something that Danny Falkner has written about in his book,

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Falling Flat, where he talks about that experiment. But it's temperature differences.

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That's so tricky. That's not an experiment that I would recommend. There are better ones.

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I mean, I live in Colorado. I can go up on top of Pikes Peak and I can see a certain distance to the edge of Colorado, maybe even a little bit into Kansas.

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I can't see Ohio. And it's because of the curvature of the earth. You can only see so far because of the curvature of the earth.

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That experiment is not quite as dependent on temperature differences because the angle is a bit steeper.

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But there are experiments you can do that are not sensitive to temperature. And I have listed some of those in that article that I wrote on the

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Biblical Science Institute website. If you go to our website and do a search for flat earth, you'll find a couple articles.

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And in the second one, I showed some experiments you can do to test the curvature of the earth that do not depend on temperature.

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Okay. Okay. I've not yet read that article, but I'll put a link to it in the description below.

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Thanks. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And in some people,

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I don't mean to mock because some people I think are, for whatever reason, genuinely confused. I had a gentleman that has emailed me a number of times and we've exchanged a few emails and he's really appreciative of my teaching of John MacArthur's.

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He listens to John MacArthur a lot and he writes well, but he thinks the earth is flat.

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And for some reason, he's got a blind spot and he's fallen into this deception.

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Even though I even pointed out to him, speaking with John MacArthur a couple of years ago at the Truth Matters Conference, Jeff Williams, an astronaut,

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Jeff Williams. Do you know him, by the way? I do, yeah. You do? Okay. So I've got an autograph.

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He sent me his book one time and autographed it, but I've had a number of conversations with Jeff and he's just a great guy. Yeah, he is.

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He is. So he's been up in the International Space Station. I think holds the record for the...

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He did. It got broken recently. It got broken. Okay. He was the American who'd spent the most time in space.

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And then that recently, a couple of years ago, got broken by somebody else. But I was with him one month before that got broken.

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I said, how long until that gets broken? He said, next month. Oh, really? Yeah. But in fact,

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I actually had a conversation with him one time when he was on the space station. We Skyped and that was cool because he's floating there.

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So I know he's not faking it. So it was pretty neat. Well, that's the thing.

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And these people would say, speaking of faking it, that it's all faked. The moon landing is faked.

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NASA is fake. The space shuttle, one guy that does Flat Earth videos, he said it's just a big balloon, basically.

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It's like a bouncy house. It's not real. It goes up, but it doesn't go up into space.

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And give us some idea of the magnitude of the deception that NASA and all these other space agencies would have to force upon us to keep a secret like that.

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It just boggles my mind that everything is faked.

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Every person in every space agency would have to be in on this deception, right? Yeah. Jeff Williams, he took me on a personal tour of NASA in Houston.

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And it was one of the highlights of my life. It was a blast. And I got to meet all these wonderful people. These are not demon -possessed charlatans that are out to fool us.

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These are people that are doing good science. NASA is very transparent in terms of you can go and watch.

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I've seen the space shuttle launch. I've seen it go into space. I've seen it go into orbit and cross over the horizon.

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So I mean, I know it's in space. It's in orbit. I've seen it happen. It was a night launch. So at a night launch, you can watch it go all the way into orbit.

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So I've seen that with my own eyes. There's no doubt about that. I've been inside Mission Control. Jeff is one of the advantages of knowing an astronaut.

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Jeff was able to get us. He and a few others of us, he was leading us around there. We got to go inside Mission Control.

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The astronauts were in their downtime. So they said, OK, you can come in and just kind of be quiet.

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And it was really cool. I got to see the old Mission Control where they did the moon landing. So they use a different building now, or at least a different room anyway.

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And the funny thing is, it's not technologically, it wasn't technologically possible to fake it.

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And what I mean by that is, if you look at some of the movies that they've done, where they've tried to put people on the moon, it looks pretty fake.

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It looks pretty fake. And one of the reasons is, it is very hard to simulate one sixth gravity, especially in a large environment.

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Now, they can do it on that plane that there's a plane that they can use to simulate zero g. They can also simulate one sixth g by taking the plane up and then diving.

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But it only lasts like 30 seconds or so. And then they have to come out of it again. To simulate one sixth g on a soundstage, you can't do it.

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If you slow down the camera motion, you can tell it looks like it's slowed down camera motion. I've seen that. There's that old series,

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Space 1999, where that takes place on the moon. And when they're outside, they're fighting or something, and they slow down the camera.

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But you can tell because of the way other things move. You can tell the camera's been slowed down. And we didn't have the technology to fake it back then.

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Now, we're very close to being able to do that now. The movies that come out like today, they're pretty close to being able to, where they can build a complete environment all on computers and simulate one sixth g.

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And it looks pretty real. But back in the 60s, computers were slide rules back then.

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I mean, that was about the extent of it. They had very primitive computers. They couldn't do stuff like that back then. Or people say, let's

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Photoshop. There was no Photoshop back in 69. So when you see the picture of Earthrise, that's what it looked like.

28:51

They didn't have computer technology where they could manipulate that. Today, we can get pretty close. Back then, not possible.

28:59

So the ironic thing is, it's actually easier. In 1960s, it was actually easier to go there than it would be to fake it.

29:07

That's the bottom line. That's ironic. Yeah. I've also heard them say,

29:13

I think it's the Allen radiation belts. Van Allen.

29:18

The Van Allen belts. Van Allen radiation belts. They say that back in the 60s, we didn't have the kind of technology for an astronaut to safely pass through the

29:29

Van Allen radiation belts. It would have killed them. I think some of them say we couldn't even do that today. And they say there's proof that we really didn't go into orbit because the

29:37

Van Allen radiation belts would have killed anybody that tried. Show me the math. It's easy to make these outlandish claims.

29:46

Do you know how much radiation is the Van Allen belts? No. Do you know how much radiation would be lethal?

29:52

Well, no. But I just don't think you could possibly survive the Van Allen belts. Well, it seems to me if you have two unknowns, you can't make any argument at all.

29:58

Now, I happen to know the amount of radiation in the Van Allen belts because that's something that's been measured. It's been studied. And when the astronauts went through the

30:06

Van Allen belts, they did get a little blast of radiation, about the same as you get when you get an x -ray. So if you've ever been x -rayed and you didn't die, that's evidence that you can pass through the

30:16

Van Allen belts. You wouldn't want to spend your life in the Van Allen belt because that would build up over time. But every time

30:22

I go through an airport, I get x -rayed. And it doesn't kill me. You can get a little bit of radiation.

30:28

It doesn't kill you. And we do know the amount of radiation that the Van Allen belts possess. We know the amount of radiation that human beings can tolerate safely.

30:36

Even in low Earth orbit, the astronauts, Jeff Williams was telling me that there are certain places in the orbit where the magnetic field is weak on the

30:44

Earth, and they won't let them do spacewalks when they're in that part of the orbit. And also, there's a lifetime radiation limit where if you're getting close to that, they'll say,

30:54

OK, you can't go up anymore. So that is something that NASA looks into. But they actually, unlike the people who make the claims to the contrary, they actually go through the numbers and say,

31:04

OK, what is the quantity of radiation and how long till that builds up to an amount that would be dangerous?

31:11

So they've done those calculations. UFOs. And I have told you before we started officially recording here that ever since I was a little kid,

31:24

I've always had an interest in astronomy. I've just been absolutely fascinated with the size of the universe, the galaxies.

31:35

I mean, it's just the human mind cannot comprehend. And from time to time,

31:41

I'll talk to people that believe that there might be intelligent life out there somewhere. The universe is so vast, you know, what's to say that God didn't make some other life and put it out there somewhere?

31:52

And I've always told them, and you can flesh this out much better than I, even if there were aliens out there, even if even if there were, which there aren't,

32:05

I believe that theologically and scientifically. But even if there were, they would have no way to get here, right?

32:15

So, all right, walk us through. I sent you a couple of videos that have been on the news lately, interviewing some fighter pilots and showing these recently released video footage of taken from some of these fighter jets about these unusual objects.

32:33

And according to the testimony given, these things are doing things. They are moving at speeds and angles and in ways that we just absolutely cannot explain.

32:47

Pulling it's estimated six, 700 G's, what would be the equivalent to six or 700 G's, which of course,

32:53

I don't think a human could even withstand more than 10 or 11. So, and they say there's no means, apparent means of propulsion.

33:02

There's no wings. Help us here. What do you think might be going on?

33:10

There's so many, so many possibilities that it irritates me when people jump to aliens because first of all,

33:17

I agree. I don't think there are extraterrestrial aliens out there. There's some theological issues there.

33:24

Earth is very special in God's plan. Creation week, God spends five days working the earth.

33:29

He takes one day and makes everything else. All the other planets in the universe are made in one day on day four. Earth's made on day one.

33:35

It's unique. It's special. All the times that God creates life, it's always on the earth, either in the oceans or in the land or in the atmosphere.

33:42

And so, the earth really is special. What about various UFOs? And of course, we get all kinds.

33:49

I used to work in an observatory and we'd get calls in about 90 % of the UFOs that were reported or the planet

33:55

Venus. When Venus is low in the sky because of atmospheric turbulence, sometimes it'll look like it's moving around a little bit or it might go like that and zip, you know, just because of the way the atmosphere perturbs the image.

34:10

And a lot of times you'll get dispersion too. And so, it'll form like a little rainbow. And now, this is physics that I've studied.

34:17

And so, I know why that happens. And when people would call and I'd say, no, ma 'am, that's just the planet Venus. Yes, I know it looks like it's dancing.

34:23

It's because of the earth's atmosphere and so on and so forth. So, a lot of these

34:28

UFOs that people report, and I'll grant they're a UFO to the person because they're unidentified to that person.

34:33

But if I were there, I would be able to tell you what it is. I've spent more time outside looking up than probably anybody else you know.

34:42

And I've never seen anything that didn't have a very logical explanation. I've seen satellites.

34:48

I've seen a satellite re -entry, which was spectacular. And that would startle people because it's very bright and it's slow moving and it disappears at some point.

34:57

I've seen fireballs, which are spectacular. I saw one that was amazing.

35:03

It was bright green in the middle and orange with material falling off. It was spectacular. Just a few weeks ago, a month ago,

35:12

I was doing an event somewhere and staying with a friend.

35:18

And as we pulled in, it was nighttime. He said, Jason, what is that? And I looked up and there was a series of bright spots moving in a straight line.

35:26

Now, I'm sure that would startle a lot of people. But I happen to be kind of a tech geek. And I knew that that was the

35:32

Starlink project that Elon Musk had been launching these satellites because I'd already seen one earlier. And it is spectacular.

35:38

It looks amazing. But if you don't know what it is, to you, it's a UFO. To me, it's the next internet service that I'm going to purchase once it gets online, apparently.

35:47

But right now, I mean, it looks, when they first launched, they formed this streak of beautiful bright lights. It's quite stunning. And anyway, so there's all kinds of stuff like that in space.

35:55

I've seen satellites. I've seen satellites that are in formation. And if you had just a little bit of imagination, you might connect those and it would look like a triangle, you know, stuff like that.

36:05

There's man -made aircraft that are really strange looking. Very short minutes after you called me earlier this week, because I live very close to the

36:15

Air Force Academy, minutes after you called, a B -2 bomber flew over my apartment. And of course, if you've seen a

36:21

B -2 bomber, I mean, they look like something from a sci -fi movie, but they're not. They're a real airplane.

36:27

And it stands to reason that there are some airplanes that the military has not declassified.

36:32

And so if you saw one of those, you might say, well, I've never seen anything like that. Well, no, you haven't. So there's a lot of different possible explanations there.

36:39

The other thing too, if you're looking through glass, I immediately discount anything that you see, anything, because when you're looking through glass, it is very easy to be fooled.

36:53

Because glass, we think of glass, well, it just, all it does is provide a barrier, but it, you know, light just passes straight through it.

36:58

Well, no, light gets bent a little bit by glass and light reflects off of glass. And so I could imagine a scenario, and I've seen scenarios like this, where maybe you're driving at night, or somebody else is driving, and I'm looking out the window, and I'm looking at the stars, because that's what

37:13

I do. And they take a turn, and I'm looking at this bright, fairly bright star, and I'm thinking, that shouldn't be there.

37:19

And then the person turns the car, and that spot immediately moves over, you know, over to here. And then it stops again when they turn, because it was a reflection of Venus.

37:27

And because when the car turns, the angle between Venus and the windshield changes, and so it looks like it's moving.

37:33

You got to be real careful when you're looking through a window, that you're not seeing something that actually is coming from behind you, perhaps relatively close, perhaps

37:41

Venus, but the change of the window causes it to move in a peculiar fashion. So that's just one example.

37:48

It's easy to fool the eyes. And there are lots of different ways to do it. And I think, I would imagine that a lot of these

37:54

UFOs are that. Even fighter jets, they're looking through glass, and one of their instruments, a light from one of their instruments could reflect on that glass, and they could say something, boy, that's moving fast.

38:06

Human beings are terrible at estimating velocity. When we're good at estimating certain other things, distance, if you're within 20 feet or so, you can estimate that because of parallax.

38:17

But whenever there's an automobile accident, and they ask the different witnesses, you know, how fast, oh, those had to be going 50 miles an hour.

38:24

Somebody else say, no, it's about 10 miles an hour. We're terrible at estimating velocity, especially if we don't know the distance to something.

38:31

And so they see this thing out there, and they say, and then it stopped almost instantly, and then went up like that.

38:36

It had to have been moving. Well, if it was a fly, it would have been like that. And then, you know, that's not a problem. They're assuming that they know the distance to it, which we don't necessarily know the distance to it.

38:46

So there's all kinds of possibilities there. And it's often frustrating for me because a lot of times the way it happens with me is somebody will come up to me, and they'll say, my friend saw such and such, and they'll describe it.

38:59

Now, we're so many links away from reality at this point, because I didn't see it.

39:05

The guy who's telling me about it, he didn't see it. His friend allegedly saw it. So we're already trusting two people, which, and perhaps they're trustworthy.

39:12

But, you know, communication, sometimes it breaks down a little bit. There's the telephone effect. And then was this person looking through a window?

39:20

Well, I'm going to immediately discount it then. Were they on medication? There's all kinds of possibilities there.

39:27

But again, most of them are just Venus or very natural, all kinds of natural phenomenon that if you don't know what they are, they look peculiar.

39:34

Atmospheric phenomenon. I'm aware of a lot of them, because again, that's something that I study. It's something I find interesting. There are, you know, there are mock suns, sundogs, parhelia, where they appear to the left and right of the sun.

39:43

Bright spots look like a little rainbow. And if clouds are moving in the right way, they can act strange.

39:49

Or the, what do they call it, the upper tangent arc and so on. And I've seen a lot of these atmospheric phenomena.

39:55

So there's all kinds of stuff out there like that. The ones that are, well, even the videos that I saw, because I watched the videos that you sent me to look at.

40:07

And there's one where it looks pretty good, but it's on a computer screen. I can make anything appear on my computer screen.

40:13

So right there, I don't know that that's original. It could be. But I don't know that. It's one possibility of many, but it looks kind of like a flying saucer.

40:23

Yeah. But you know what, if you overexpose something on a CCD, that's exactly what it'll look like. And I know that because I've taken plenty of pictures of things.

40:30

And if you expose things, it tends to bleed to the other lines. It looks like a little flying saucer. I've taken pictures of stars that look that way because they're overexposed.

40:37

So that's one of the artifacts that appears. So these are just a few of the things that people will think are

40:44

UFOs. And then there is the possibility, of course, that there are actual aircraft that are able to do some pretty spectacular things.

40:52

There was actually a flying saucer that human beings built back in, I think it was 1958 or 59, maybe.

41:00

So late 50s. And it was built up in Canada, I think. But it was for the US military.

41:06

They were going to use it to replace Jeeps and also helicopters. They thought that'd be kind of neat because it's one person flying saucer.

41:13

And it worked. And it doesn't fly very well, but it did work. And then as I was looking that up on the internet earlier today to try and refresh my memory on that,

41:22

I found another article about somebody had built a model flying saucer just because they thought that would be an interesting shape to try.

41:29

And it worked. And this was back in 1932. So my point is, human beings have had the capacity to build flying saucers that work for almost a century now.

41:40

This is old technology. And so it wouldn't surprise me if people were doing that today.

41:45

You can get drones that are shaped like UFOs and say, well, there's no visible means of propulsion. Yeah, they hit the propeller really well.

41:52

And it looks like a flying saucer. And you can purchase these. So there's all kinds of different possibilities out there.

41:59

And I'm not suggesting that any one fits all the situations. I'm suggesting that there are all these different situations and each one has its own explanation.

42:07

Yeah. So with some of these, we don't know exactly what they are, but we know what they're not.

42:14

And it just can't be alien life. It's just impossible. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

42:20

People don't understand the distances involved in space because, I mean, we watch things like Star Trek. And I'm a huge sci -fi fan.

42:26

I love science fiction. But the real universe isn't that way. It's just not that way. The distances involved are enormous.

42:32

And the speed of light is a limiting parameter in terms of getting from there to here. Well, we can develop warp speed.

42:38

No, you can't. Technology allows us to use laws of physics. Technology never allows you to break laws of physics.

42:44

And so the light barrier is not like the sound barrier. The sound barrier is not a physical. There's nothing in the laws of physics that prevents something going faster than sound.

42:52

It just creates vibrations that are difficult to deal with. And so humans eventually figured out how to deal with that. But the speed of light, that's a physical barrier.

43:02

That's not something you can beat. And I have written a book on that topic, on the physics of Einstein, if people want to learn more about that.

43:09

So that limits the—it takes years to get from one star to the next if you wanted to actually go there.

43:16

Now, from your point of view, it wouldn't seem that long because of time dilation. There's some weird effects that kick in due to the physics of Einstein.

43:21

But it's very impractical to go somewhere else. It's more practical to do science when it comes to astronomy outside of our solar system passively by improving telescopes rather than trying to improve engines because it would just take a long time to get there.

43:37

Even the next nearest star— 4 light years away, right? It is. 4 .3 light years away.

43:43

In our solar system, you could put all the planets in our solar system in a box that I think is 6 billion miles on the side.

43:49

Okay, so pretty big. And we visited all the planets in our solar system. People say, well, you know, go to the next star.

43:55

The next star is 4 ,000 solar systems away. You could fit 4 ,000 of our solar systems between our solar system and the next one.

44:04

Space is really big, and people don't appreciate that, I think. So that's an issue. It's very, very impractical.

44:10

Star Trek's fun, but the real universe, it's just not that way. Yeah, I like to watch Star Wars. I'm maybe not probably what you would call a super fan or whatever, but I like it.

44:21

So do I, yeah. Yeah, but you can't really do the castle run in 12 point whatever part 6.

44:28

Right? Yeah. Han Solo, I'm Captain of the

44:34

Millennium Falcon. Chewy here tells me you're looking for passage to the Alderaan system. Yes, indeed.

44:39

If it's a fast ship. Fast ship? You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon? Should I have?

44:46

It's the ship that made the castle run in less than 12 parsecs. Are there other

44:54

Earth -like, I keep hearing Earth -like planets. There's Earth -like planets out there.

45:00

Are there any of those to our knowledge? And if there are, how far away would the closest one be?

45:08

I would say no, there are none that are known. The best we can do is get a planet that's about the same size as the

45:15

Earth. One of the problems is with these other, we now have detected planets orbiting other stars. And people get upset because most of the methods by which we detect them are indirect.

45:26

It's like, show me a photograph. Well, I'm sorry, but a lot of the things that are discovered in physics, you can't photograph a neutrino, but there's good evidence they exist.

45:34

But actually some of these planets we've now photographed. I actually have a time -lapse animation of three or four planets orbiting another star.

45:43

It's so cool. They were taken over periods of time. It's amazing. So we can actually see other planets in other solar systems now.

45:50

Most of them we can't see. They've been detected indirectly. I was able to find one actually using Kepler data a number of years ago.

45:56

That was kind of neat. I was able to find one actually using

46:01

Kepler data a number of years ago. So it was kind of neat. But there's no doubt that there are other planets out there.

46:13

About the best you can do is estimate their size and in some cases, their mass. And if they cross directly in front of their star and you think, well, that would require the system to be edge -on.

46:25

Yes, it does. So only a small fraction would be edge -on. Yes, but there's a lot of systems out there. So if you hunt enough, some of them are edge -on.

46:33

And they've discovered thousands of planets this way. They cross in front of their star and the star's brightness drops by a little bit.

46:38

And it goes back up when the planet is finished crossing. And you can recognize that signature. And that, if you know the size of the star then, it is possible to know the size of the star spectroscopically.

46:48

You can tell what kind of star it is and you can estimate the size. You can then compute the size of the planet. It tells you how big the planet is.

46:54

If you're able to get radial motion from the star, the star wobbles as the planet orbits it. That tells you how much mass the planet has.

47:01

And so that gives you an estimate of the density. But that's it. That's all we know about these extrasolar planets.

47:06

We know, well, we know their period. But in terms of their physical properties, we know how big they are. And in some cases, how massive they are.

47:12

That's it. But we have no idea about, I mean, you can make a guess at temperature, but temperatures trick you because the atmosphere of the planet will change the surface temperature.

47:22

The Earth's a little warmer than it would be if it had no atmosphere because, you know, there is a mild greenhouse effect. People complain about that.

47:28

It's a good thing. You want a small greenhouse effect or the Earth would be very, very cool. So we don't know much about any other properties.

47:36

Do they have liquid water on them? We don't know that. We don't know any of that. So in terms of other planets that we found that are about the size of the

47:42

Earth, most of the ones we've discovered are much bigger than the Earth. And that's because they're easier to find.

47:48

The bigger it is, the easier it is to detect. That's just a selection bias. But in our own solar system, we have a planet that's almost the same size as the

47:57

Earth. Venus. Venus is almost the same size as the Earth. And it's not a place you want to visit because the surface temperature is 900 degrees

48:04

Fahrenheit. So it could melt lead. The atmosphere is toxic and the clouds are made of sulfuric acid type compounds.

48:14

It's just nasty. So, you know, when people talk about Earth -like planets, we found planets that's the same size as the

48:20

Earth. I want you to think Venus because that could very well be what it's like.

48:25

We haven't found anything that's like Earth. And if we did, again, the distance would be enormous because the next nearest star is 4 ,000 solar systems away.

48:36

And we've got, what, four or five spacecraft that are just a little bit outside our solar system.

48:42

The Voyagers, the Pioneers, and New Horizons are just kind of outside at least the planets. So people don't understand how far away these things are.

48:50

Yeah, exactly. And we shot those off, what, in the mid -70s, 76 or? Yeah, yeah.

48:55

The Voyagers, I believe, were 77, I think. Maybe 76, 77. Yeah. And Pioneers were a decade earlier.

49:02

So, yeah. They've been flying for, you know, 45 years and they've just now made it outside of our solar system.

49:10

You got 4 ,000 more of those to go to the next nearest star, the next nearest star, which does not have any

49:17

Earth -like planets around it. Right. I mean, you can't get there from here.

49:24

I mean, even if they were out there, there's no way. Yeah. And our galaxy, the

49:32

Milky Way galaxy, is 100 ,000, roughly 100 ,000 light years in diameter?

49:37

It's probably a little, yeah, around there. Yeah, it's 80 ,000, maybe 100 ,000. Yeah. Yeah. And we don't know how many, do we have any estimate of how many galaxies there are in the known?

49:49

At least 100 billion. At least 100 billion. Yeah. And that comes from images like the Hubble Deep Field, where they count the number in this section of the sky and then extrapolate.

49:59

So there's at least 100 billion in the visible universe. Right. One for each star in our own galaxy, just to put that in perspective.

50:07

The human mind cannot comprehend such enormity. But God calls them all by their names, the

50:13

Bible says. Isn't that the truth? Yeah. Isn't that amazing? What a great God we serve. Amen.

50:20

Amen. Well, Jason, thank you so much for giving us your time today.

50:26

I really - Thanks for having me on. Yeah. I appreciate it. I'm very grateful. Appreciate you.

50:32

Appreciate you being so, you know, just, as I say, you're a nice guy, very down to earth, very accessible.

50:37

Thanks. And you make the complicated simple for folks like us.

50:43

So thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks. And where can people find out more about you and the work that you do, your website and some of your resources?

50:54

Okay. Well, I'm at the Biblical Science Institute, and the website is just biblicalscienceinstitute .com.

51:00

So it's that simple. And then if they want to find out where I'm going, because I do travel quite a bit now that some of the panic has released a little bit.

51:09

Right. If you look down the lower left, you can see where I'm going to be at in the next several months.

51:14

Anyway, we have videos on our website as well. There's a videos tab, lots of articles on the website.

51:21

And that's all free for you to enjoy. If you wanted to contribute to our ministry, there's a partner option.

51:27

You can do that. And that gives you access to our forum where people can chat back and forth and discuss these things.

51:33

I think that's been a blessing to the folks who have enjoyed that particular aspect of our ministry.

51:38

So yeah, biblicalscienceinstitute .com. Check us out there. All right. Good deal.

51:44

Well, thanks again, Jason. And Lord willing, would love to have you back on sometime. Oh, it'd be great. Yeah.

51:50

All right. Okay. Well, dear ones, thank you very much for watching. I hope that this was an encouragement to you and educational as it was for me.

51:59

So thank you very much. And until our next time together, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of his