UFOs & Theology / Paradoxes of Light Travel

About the show

In the first half, Dr. Ray Boeche, theologian and founder of the Fortean Research Center, joined George Knapp to discuss why he's concluded that there's no inherent conflict between the spiritual and scientific realms. For Boeche, science generally attempts to answer the technical questions of how things in the universe work; theology and religion, on the other hand, are interested in why the universe is the way it is. The spiritual approach typically leads back to a few central questions: where we came from, why we're here, how we should live, and where we go when we die.

But ultimately, religion and science are both a quest for truth, Boeche argued, and should be understood and respected accordingly; neither paradigm should be seen as a threat to the other. In his view, Christian scripture doesn't preclude the possibility of extraterrestrial life, so it makes sense to investigate it. Christianity itself, in fact, is the best tool we have in understanding high strangeness.

Boeche related his work advocating for government transparency in UFO disclosure, and rejects the notion, held by some Christians, that investigating UAP invites contact with demonic forces. He's "cautiously encouraged" by the progress that's been made in government disclosure, he said, but there needs to be better whistleblower protection and more explicit public statements by officials where UFOs are concerned.

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In the second half, Dr. Robert Nemiroff, Professor of Physics at Michigan Technological University, shared how light's speed creates simple but mind-expanding paradoxes. Investigations and theories about the nature of light go back to ancient times, Nemiroff said, but it wasn't until the seventeenth century that we understood that light travels at a defined speed. This discovery opened the door to a great many other scientific discoveries, notably Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Nemiroff offered a few examples of how, theoretically at least, experimenting with the speed of light could yield incredible results. If you stood at a mirror far enough away, for a long enough time, for instance, you would see yourself years in the past in your reflection. In addition, to see one's reflection objectively at all, one would have to see it without the distortions caused by all the re-illuminations occurring as the light travels through the air. And thanks to a concept called retrocausality, it could be demonstrated that past events become theoretically correlated with future events. Strangely, Nemiroff claimed, there are actually even things that would theoretically move faster than the speed of light under certain conditions, including shadows and laser spots.