Dr. Hugh Ross is an astrophysicist and founder of Reasons To Believe, an organization dedicated to bridging the gap between scientific and biblical findings. We explore his research and findings that while a significant portion of UFO sightings can be rationally explained, a disturbing minority present phenomena that defy conventional science.
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Recommended Reading
Chapters
00:00 Start
41:52 The Flood Account
1:07:43 Creation and Science in Harmony
1:12:02 Ancient Astronomy and Navigation
1:21:43 The Impact of UFO Encounters
1:26:23 The Occult and UFO Correlations
1:39:08 Belief, Goodness, and Personal Growth
2:02:08 The Power of Prayer and Fasting
2:12:02 The Ubiquity of Phenomena
Transcript
Music:
[0:00] Music
Tyler:
[0:30] You might be the only person in history to be on the 700 Club and the UFO Files.
Tyler:
[0:37] It's not normal. That doesn't happen every day. So, yeah. How did you get on that journey?
Dr. Ross:
[0:42] Well, I got on that journey when I was growing up. I was a nerd as a kid, starting at age seven. I was reading four or five books on astronomy and physics every week. And when I was 16, they made me the director of observations of the Astronomical Society in Vancouver, British Columbia. And I said, hey, we need an exhibit at the Pacific National Exhibition. So I organized this exhibit. They put us right next to the Flying Saucer Club. So what happened is people go by the Flying Saucer Club. Then they come to our booth and say, well, what do you think? And I'd say, well, I think you saw a fireball. or that was the planet Venus early in the morning. And every year they put us right beside the Flying Saucer Club. And so when I went on to the university, they said, hey, you've been an amateur astronomer for many years. You know the night sky and we're going to have you process all the UFO reports we get. So I had no intention of becoming an expert on UFOs. It was strictly by accident and by assignment by all the universities where I attended. But I wound up writing a book on the subject.
Tyler:
[1:55] Yeah. So... How does one become an expert on something that allegedly no one's ever seen? You know, it's odd. It's like being a psychologist in the early 1900s.
Dr. Ross:
[2:07] Well, what happened when I was young is, you know, I thought, hey, all these UFO reports, they're going to have a natural explanation. It's going to be a hoax, military activity. And I was able to explain about 99% of what people thought were UFOs. But when I got into my mid-twenties, I ran into some astronomers that were having encounters with UFOs and I said, oh, this is a different category. And also heard stories about people who actually witness UFOs coming through the atmosphere, crashing into the earth. You go to the crash site, you can actually see a shallow crater. The vegetation is always damaged. It looks like radiation damage. But the interesting thing, no artifacts, no debris, no sonic boom, no heat friction.
Dr. Ross:
[3:01] And also I noted that people reporting these things making sharp right angle turns, what apparently were thousands of miles per hour. And I said, hey, no physical object can do that. But how do you explain the fact that you've got damaged vegetation? And so I said, hey, it looks like we're looking at something that definitely is real, but it's not physical. It violates the laws of physics. And then when I was at the University of Toronto, I took a course from Carl Sagan. And he was extremely dismissive of UFOs, but very excited about the fact that there are intelligent aliens elsewhere that might want to communicate with us. And uh what i realized is his worldview would not tolerate the existence of non-physical reality or his mind would so we had very different views on ufos what's.
Tyler:
[3:57] It like just working in a field where you're not a materialist largely surrounded by materialist thinkers
Dr. Ross:
[4:04] Well, what's interesting in research astrophysics, there are a lot of people who are theists, a lot of people who are committed Christians. So I wasn't alone. It is true the atheists outnumbered the believers, but there were always believers that I had contact with. That was especially true at Caltech. When I was at the University of Toronto, maybe one other believer, but at Caltech there were quite a few. I also had the privilege of leading some of the atheist astrophysicists to become followers of Jesus Christ. So I think the reason why in astronomy, the evidence is just so much more in your face. It's very hard to deny that there has to be something beyond the universe.
Tyler:
[4:50] Yeah, it's one of those things where the more you understand, the more questions you have. And that's how I've always felt that way about any time I even think about space. But even as a little kid watching Michio Kaku on documentaries try to explain some of this stuff, I'm like, there's just so much out there. Every time we get to a point where we think we understand something new, it's a million times more complicated than that. And that never seems to end, right?
Dr. Ross:
[5:17] Well, I noticed that even the very outspoken atheist astrophysicists, they would concede that when we look at the universe, we see it's extraordinarily fine-tuned to make possible the existence of life and especially human beings. And they're also stunned by the space-time theorems, which tell us that space and time at the beginning, implying there has to be an agent beyond space and time that created space and time. So even though they call themselves atheists Really they're functional deists They believe that there has to be a causal agent That made this universe.
Tyler:
[5:55] Sure Yeah It's one of those things where You know Believing in Basically any spiritual tradition at all You have to sort of accept That there's stuff beyond the veil That we don't understand Going on that defies laws of physics Or what we understand to be them and then if you're coming from a different perspective you're just you're like okay well there can't be any miracles but except for this one miracle at the very beginning that we we can't explain like we don't know what happened before that and it's still asking you to believe in a miracle it's just you know they joke about religion in so many ways saying that well you know if the older the story is the more people believe it or something like that like oh if i tell you this came from someone 4,000 years ago that somehow bears more weight than if a guy, you and me, are talking about the same thing right now. And that's used to tar and feather the whole concept. While... I would suppose that if you're never thinking on those grounds, if you're never thinking in terms of like, could this be a possibility if you're only isolating it? I wonder if that would prevent you from even seeing it right in front of you if it happened to you. Does that make sense?
Dr. Ross:
[7:15] It does. And what I find ironic is that they're willing to accept the fact, yes, there's a beginning to the universe that has to come from outside space, time, matter, and energy. And yet they deny the lesser miracles. Sure. If you're going to swallow that big of a miracle, why are you so disturbed about, hey, the origin of life?
Tyler:
[7:38] Right. If you move the miracle back, you know, a few billion years, you can have a miracle because it's so far removed from anything that you can observe. Then, you know, it just takes that much more for a scientist. It seems.
Dr. Ross:
[7:52] Well, my comment is, you know, what bigger miracle could a scientist uncover that come into existence of all physical reality we can measure?
Tyler:
[8:01] I know.
Dr. Ross:
[8:02] Yeah. Yeah. um.
Tyler:
[8:04] So what was your you know you're hanging out with the ufo club people and then one day like what what made you start thinking about ufos like seriously what made you take it seriously the first time
Dr. Ross:
[8:18] Well the first time was uh i was a graduate student university of toronto i was logging about 1500 hours per year of telescope time and i wasn't the only one there were several other astronomers that were also logging that amount of time. But there were two astronomers that would log only three or four hours of time per year. But every time they're on the telescope, they had a UFO encounter. And I said, you know, what gives? We're putting in 1,500 hours, we see nothing. They put in three or four hours, they see it every time. But then I realized there's something different about them than us. They were very deep into the occult, and we were not involved in the occult at all. And that's when I began to say, okay, these UFOs that are truly unexplained by natural phenomena or hoaxes, is it possible this is something that only happens to people that have a deep connection with the occult? And I found that correlation to be consistent literally through the past five decades.
Tyler:
[9:26] So when you said they were into the occult, are we talking, are they doing magic? Are they studying astrology?
Dr. Ross:
[9:36] Involved in seances, things like that. Trying to call up spirits. And what you see in the Bible is that God tells us these angelic beings that mean us harm, they need an invitation.
Tyler:
[9:52] Right.
Dr. Ross:
[9:53] Don't give them an invitation. they can't invade your life but they promise you power they promise you secret information and so people get tempted by that and that was the case with these two astronomers they were trying to come up with some power, I especially saw this when I spoke in the Soviet Union when the communists were still running the show is that there was these departments of physics and they were doing research on occult physics and I found out that was where they were trying to gain some weaponry they could use against the West. And so they said, hey, we can't match the West in technology, but maybe we can match them this way. When I went back after the Soviet Union collapse, I noticed those studies of all-called physics had disappeared, and hence the percentage of Russians experiencing UFO encounters had gone way, way down.
Dr. Ross:
[10:52] But when I was there in 89 and 90, I came with 30 messages I could speak. What was interesting is I was sponsored by the Soviet lab and they said, we'll only let you speak to doctoral level scientists. If we catch you speaking, anybody else will deport you. And they said, they get to pick what you speak on. And they had me come with 30 prepared messages and half of them had to have nothing to do, uh, with faith, uh, at all. Uh, but the audiences more than half the time wanted me to speak on UFOs and extraterrestrials. And, uh, That's when I recognized just how many of my audiences were caught up in this and, you know, why there are so many more Russians having these encounters than Americans do.
Tyler:
[11:42] You know, I just managed to get a copy. It's kind of out of print sometimes, but Psychic Discoveries, Behind the Iron Curtain, where Sheila Ostrander's going really deep into the research behind everything they had going on. And it's sort of a, it's like a famous story, even though it's only for those who go looking for it. But the programs that were competing during the Cold War between us and the Soviet Union was super interesting because they favored natural psychics in their research. They would go out and just get people who were like, I'm a gypsy, I'm a this or that or whatever, I'm a seer, and then just see what happened with them all together. Whereas we were way more calculated with who we chose and how much rigor we put them through. And then when the wall fell and those conversations started to be had between our two sides, it was kind of wild because we had completely different data sets, completely different ways of looking at the same research. Um, yeah, what, what were some of the things that, aside from just UFOs that, that they were doing in the Soviet Union that might've caused, you know, the, the greater.
Dr. Ross:
[13:00] Well, I remember walking into one auditorium and I noted that about a quarter of the people there, uh, were obviously demon possessed.
Tyler:
[13:08] Okay.
Dr. Ross:
[13:09] That they were screaming and yelling and saying terrible, accusing Jesus of horrible, immoral acts. I know people who take the Lord's name in vain, but they stopped short of accusing Jesus of extreme evil acts. These people were screaming and yelling, and I could tell their intent was to prevent me from speaking. And I had to walk out of the auditorium. It was just so loud. And also I noticed some of them were curling up in the fetal position, so there was this fear that they had. So I went back the next day, but I brought another Christian research scientist with me. And I said, I just want you to be at the back and you pray that God will silence the demons. And it worked. They were totally silent. I got to speak. The rest of the people who weren't demon-possessed, they were very intent listening. I really was able to get through to them because they saw, hey, yes, these people have power, but the power is limited. And is limited by the God that created the universe. So I saw phenomenal numbers of people coming to faith in Christ during the visits I made.
Dr. Ross:
[14:22] And Russia during that time. In fact, I remember one event, I spoke and I said, hey, they wanted to know how I became a Christian. So I told them how I became a Christian through studying a Gideon Bible after I became convinced that the universe had a beginning. Then I said, if you'd like to make the same commitment I did, so I told them how they could give their life to Christ. And I said, if you've actually made that commitment, write your name on a piece of paper. And I did not know there was a paper shortage in Russia at that time. They were finding pieces of paper, ripping them into tiny shards, everybody writing their name on it in tiny letters. There was a mountain of these little paper shards on the desk at the front. And people with me estimated at least 90% of the physicists that were there, 700 physicists that day gave their life to Christ. And as they walked out the back, there were two men standing there, and they were handing books to them. And people were crying when they got the books. And so I went to the two men afterwards and said, what gives? They said, these are Russian Gideon Bibles. And do you remember two years ago you spoke at a fundraiser to raise money for Russian Gideon Bibles? These are the Bibles.
Dr. Ross:
[15:48] So, you can imagine the impact that had on me.
Tyler:
[15:54] So, I guess, in what way do you tie together your ideas of cosmogony and the story of the Old and New Testament, essentially?
Dr. Ross:
[16:05] Well, I think what really impressed me when I first went through, and by the way, I was reading the other holy books first. Christianity was kind of the last thing I studied. But as I went through the Old Testament.
Tyler:
[16:16] You can't see them, but I have the stack on the side.
Dr. Ross:
[16:19] There you go.
Tyler:
[16:20] I got everything, just in case. You never know.
Dr. Ross:
[16:25] Well, what really impressed me was how so many places in the Old Testament, it explicitly talked about the characteristics of the universe. And I recognize these are the four fundamental features of what we call the Big Bang creation model. And clearly, this was way beyond the science of the Bible authors. I mean, the fact that they spoke about the universe expanding from the beginning, a space-time beginning, under laws of physics that never change, or one of those laws is a pervasive law of decay. And I thought, wow, this is science way beyond their time, and it's all accurate. And I wanted to make sure I wasn't just reading this in with hindsight because I knew that Big Bang cosmology was correct. I found out that Jewish theologians writing 800, 900, 1,000 years ago, they saw the same things in the Old Testament. Uh so and that's what really caused me to give my life to jesus christ is recognizing that in the old new testament there's well over a hundred places where it had accurately predicted future scientific discoveries i said this book has to be inspired by the one that created the universe.
Tyler:
[17:40] Yeah it's it's a really it's a really interesting book from the outside like if someone that were just had never really interfaced at all with the Bible. They just heard about it. They know, oh, that's that book that all those, you know, Christians and Jewish people or whatever read. And then you came into it as a scholar. It's one of the most fascinating things, like how it's structured, how it became, you know, how it was preserved over time, how it changed over time, all the way up to the, you know, getting into the translations and everything. But something as simple as just realizing that the book of Daniel happens 600 years before
Tyler:
[18:20] Where, you know, we read the book of Daniel and it's supposed to be like second century, when in reality, this is 600 years before that they were talking about what was going to happen in the second century under, you know, a made up King Nebuchadnezzar II. People read it now, not knowing that, take it as history. But that there was a tradition of prophecy of course amongst the ancient hebrews and that's going all the way up to isaiah and elijah and then jesus of nazareth so uh i i personally had that whole journey where it's like i grew up around christianity or the bible very similar to you went off did my science thing and then i kind of like re-centered you know kind of in my later 20s okay there's something more to all this than i'm giving it credit for and i did i just became more open-minded one day somehow and it it made me really take a new look at okay well how should i read this how should i interpret this you know with with how the never-ending layers like an onion you know it just opens up further and further the more you dig into it um so having the chance to you know see how your your story of how the universe came to be and how that aligns with the stories of genesis even in particular i'm wondering you know and also history right Yeah,
Dr. Ross:
[19:35] It's not either or, it's both. And what I notice in the other holy books of the religions of the world, almost all of them try to predict future historical events, but they do not do very well. Almost everything they predict is, you can show, is false. The Bible stands alone, and it doesn't just predict future historical events four or five times. It does it hundreds of times, and it never makes a mistake. And it's predicting events thousands of years ahead of the event. And so again, that was additional confirmation for me. This book is not just inspired by humans thinking what's going to happen in the future. It has to be inspired by the one that actually created time and space.
Tyler:
[20:24] Let's just focus for now on astrophysics, because I'm assuming that's going to take up a lot of your time. Aside from the Big Bang, what were the things you were looking at reading, getting excited about as a kid that would make you interested in space?
Dr. Ross:
[20:45] Well, I was very interested in the stars. I mean, I grew up in a rainy place. Vancouver gets a lot of rain. But when the clouds would break, you'd see the stars. And I was seven years of age. I remember talking to my parents, those stars up there, are they hot? And they said, yes, son, they're hot. Can you tell me why they're hot? They said, no. I went to the Vancouver Public Library and found out why they're hot, told my parents why they were hot. But when I started reading those books, I just got really excited about this. This is like, wow, this is really, really fun. So I began to just saturate myself with that. Got some of my friends in the neighborhood interested in it as well. So it helped that I grew up in a neighborhood filled with nerdy kids. So we're just purging one another.
Tyler:
[21:35] No, I was the only nerdy kid in my neighborhood. So it's a little more isolated. But then, you know, later we got the internet. So then all the nerds could connect all at once.
Dr. Ross:
[21:44] There you go.
Tyler:
[21:45] And at the time, only they knew how to do it. so yeah so i would imagine that you know when was this time frame like when did you grow up roughly well
Dr. Ross:
[21:58] I grew up in the 50s and 60s.
Tyler:
[22:00] Right so you had kind of i guess a lot of comic science fiction was already in play um and then you have oh i'm gonna say the post-atomic age i'm trying to kind of get an idea of what did science look like when you were growing up like what what would it what was the zeitgeist of science during that the zeitgeist
Dr. Ross:
[22:26] Was uh we were convinced the russians were way ahead of us in math and science and so you know the sputnik went up in 58 and it's like hey uh we're losing the science race to the Soviets. And so there was a huge push in the schools to basically advance science. In fact, what happened when I entered high school is that there was a businessman who said, I want the 25 top science students in the city of Vancouver put into a special program. And so there were literally thousands of us that took a nine-hour test to see if we would qualify. I was one of the ones that qualified, so I got into this program where I was just saturated with science lectures from the leading scientists.
Dr. Ross:
[23:18] Uh, they encouraged me to do, I mean, I was already, I already had a telescope that I built. Yeah. So I was already involved in studying T-Tari stars. Uh, so I got encouragement to pursue that. What was most interesting, I think, is when they noted I was so focused on astronomy and physics, they said, we're going to expose you to the other sciences. Cause they knew when I entered university, I'd be really specialized. And so i got educated in all the non-physical sciences which really helps me today because i'm now heading up a team of scientists in multiple disciplines and you know trying to help them basically integrate across the disciplines and all that goes back to when i was in my teens.
Tyler:
[24:05] Sure now we live in a world where we're desperately trying to tie science together with metaphysics it seems like it seems like the the crazier it gets the more we dig into things like quantum mechanics like everyone is shocked as soon as they get into it and it's you get to reconsider everything we have to think about everything goes out the window as soon as you get down to a certain level well
Dr. Ross:
[24:32] What was interesting the university enrolled in 25 000.
Tyler:
[24:35] Students.
Dr. Ross:
[24:36] The freshman physics class was close to 5,000. Everybody wanted to become a physicist in those days because that was kind of the culture. We got to catch up with the Russians. Little did we know how far behind the Russians really were, but the whole focus was that. And I remember entering the class and they said, look, there's over 4,500 of you here. We're only going to pass the best. Every year we're going to fail half of you. So only one out of 16 of you will graduate. That turned out to be true. Only 120 of us got a bachelor's degree in physics and they worked us to death. I remember my fourth year, I had 38 classroom hours a week. It's like, that's unheard of today. But there was such a huge pushback then to try to elevate physics research, that that's what they did. And we were highly motivated. We wanted to work. And so they did. They pumped us out.
Tyler:
[25:38] What do you know about the businessman who paid for this program you were in?
Dr. Ross:
[25:43] Well, his name was Berg, and it was called the Berg Science Seminars, and he did this in several cities in North America because he was concerned that we're falling behind the Russians, so this is how we're going to do it.
Tyler:
[25:55] Was he a science guy himself, or was he just a smart businessman?
Dr. Ross:
[25:59] He was a smart businessman and a patriot.
Tyler:
[26:01] Yeah.
Dr. Ross:
[26:02] But they said, I want to fund this. So, uh, so it was thanks to him. And, you know, what I really appreciated about that is spending, you know, Thursday evening with the 24 other, uh, students. Cause you know, they, they all had exceptional abilities. Um, yeah, I remember one of the, uh, fellows in our group of 25, uh, I was in a chess tournament with him and, uh, he was undefeated. So I said, Duncan, uh, how long have you been playing chess? And he said, well, my dad taught me five weeks ago. And six months later, he was a Canadian national champion. And then he went on. I was in a math class with him. And the professor would literally spend 30 minutes on three blackboards writing on a problem. And he said, all of you got one week to solve this problem. He looked at the board and said, I've already got it solved. So, you know, having to rub shoulders with people like that. But what I found interesting is we all had a special gift in one area, but we needed one another in order to have a complete perspective on science.
Tyler:
[27:17] So at the time, though, walking into university, okay, this is what physics is. What was our level of understanding at that time? Yeah. Versus now?
Dr. Ross:
[27:29] Well, back then, uh, the, there was a lot of different ideas about the universe. I mean, is it a steady state universe? Uh, is an oscillating universe, a big bang universe, a hesitating universe. And so, and at that time, observational cosmology was not a precision science. We knew the age of the earth, of the universe, uh, to only about 50% precision. So it took a while basically to catch up and determine hey it's not steady state it's not oscillating and so today we do know it's a big bang creation event we know these other models don't fit the observations but it literally took 30 years of a hard observational work to make that happen and you know when i was in that venue i said okay uh the real problem is we don't have adequate observations. So that's why I said, I'm going to pursue observational astronomy. But what I love about the University of Toronto, they said, if you're going to do an observational doctoral degree, we're going to have you do a theoretical master's degree, because they wanted to make sure we had a good balance between the theoretical astrophysics and the observational astrophysics.
Tyler:
[28:49] It seems even just in my lifetime, planetary science has kind of been the thing where people are making vast amounts of discovery. Just the number of moons around Jupiter, right, has increased from when I was a kid to now, it's like a hundredfold increase over and over and over again.
Dr. Ross:
[29:09] Well, when I finished my PhD, the only planets we knew about were in our solar system.
Tyler:
[29:15] Sure.
Dr. Ross:
[29:15] Today, we know that there's 7,500 that we not only have discovered, we can measure their physical and orbital characteristics.
Tyler:
[29:24] And they're able to locate these things based on predictions, based on the models that we've created over the last 100 years or so. And that's what's so crazy. It's not like someone sees a planet and they're like, oh, no, we have to go reconsider the laws of physics. It's like because of the laws of physics, I was able to predict that this planet would be here at this time and I could observe it. and that's proof that it exists and yeah that's wild stuff
Dr. Ross:
[29:48] Um well we now know that almost all stars have planets orbiting them there are more planets than there are stars, why.
Tyler:
[29:58] Why is it that our solar system seems abnormal amongst other solar systems a lot of people are bringing this up
Dr. Ross:
[30:04] Lately it really is abnormal yeah i mean where you really see the abnormality is in the gas giant planets and the rocky planets. Our solar system has distant gas giant planets, but the rocky planets are far away from the host star. I mean, we found hundreds of rocky planets orbiting other stars, but they orbit very close.
Tyler:
[30:29] Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ross:
[30:31] And we now know is that the rocky planets in the solar system, number one, they're quite massive. They're not small. They're very dense, which is unusual because you'd expect that the star, the planet, would become less dense the farther away it's from a star. But Earth, for example, is the densest of the four rocky planets in our solar system. It should be less dense, but it's more dense. We now know why. Our solar system had five rocky planets, one collided with the Earth, and that collision made the Earth bigger and denser. But we also know that the Sun has an elemental abundance that's unlike any other star.
Dr. Ross:
[31:18] And what happened was the sun was able to transfer a lot of its angular momentum to its rocky planets, pushing the rocky planets far away, far enough away that you could actually have life on Earth. I mean, if you've got a planet orbiting close to the star, it's going to be tidally locked with a very long rotation period, which is going to eliminate the possibility of life. Earth is barely far enough away to prevent that from happening. I mean, it messed up Venus, it messed up Mercury, but Earth is just far enough away for that not to happen. And so, you know, people talk about planets in the habitable zone, and NASA keeps bragging, hey, we know there's at least 40 billion planets that are in a habitable zone, but they only look at one habitable zone. Whether or not the planet could conceivably have liquid water on its surface for some part of its history. And of course, that's not an adequate requirement for life. It's just one requirement.
Tyler:
[32:21] Sure.
Dr. Ross:
[32:22] So we now know of 14 different habitable, planetary habitable zones. And of those 7,500 planets, there's only one planet that we know of that resides in more than three of the 14 no-inhabitable zones, it's the same one that resides in all 14.
Tyler:
[32:45] It's very yeah it's concerning because the more the exponential rate at which we find things like this makes the you know fermi's paradox just seem ridiculous at a certain point where are they why are they not here right now like it right we could conceivably find another planet we haven't noticed in our own solar system like i'm not saying nibiru is real or anything like that but just the concept that with what little we know and how much we find out per day that could happen that we just discovered something like that really close to us uh with intelligent life on it and there's there's really no there's not enough concern you know for how real that possibility is i think a lot of people are kind of and in your case you know observing things and then they feel like chicken little they're crying out like oh my goodness this is Yeah,
Dr. Ross:
[33:43] I'm personally open to that because from a Christian perspective, God could have created life elsewhere. Why would he stop at one planet? So I'm open to the possibility. As an astronomer, it looks like everywhere beyond planet Earth is hostile for advanced life. I'm even skeptical there's a possibility even for primitive life. So uh you know he neil degrasse tyson he's not a theist but he says the universe is out to kill us and his point is once you get past planet earth it's an extremely hostile place for light and uh you know when my peers are trying to find an earth-like planet so far the most earth-like one they found is venus uh no other planet comes anywhere close to venus and matching the earth but no one would ever consider Venus as a place where life can possibly exist. And I remember when astronomers first found planets outside the solar system, that was back in 1995, and they said, we're going to find hundreds of planets just like the planets we see in our solar system, including the Earth. Today, they have yet to find a single one. There's not a single planet that they found outside the solar system that matches any of the eight planets in our solar system.
Tyler:
[35:11] I mean, just Earth alone, you would need to perfectly balance everything that we take for, like all of the ingredients we take for granted that cause life on Earth to flourish the way it does, right? Just the proximity away from the Earth, strong magnetic poles, lots of water, everything, all the ingredients, the 10-degree tilt and the moon that's one-sixth, miraculously one-sixth the size of the planet it's orbiting, that also only faces the direction of the planet and its exact rotation around the planet. The coincidences that line up for things to be really nice here on Earth are astounding. And it even looking at those first few chapters of genesis it that's a long seven days we're talking about a lot goes on in those seven days that kind of get brushed over in the
Tyler:
[36:00] Literal interpretation you know straight from the king james or whatever you're reading right and then it calls into question when we're looking at the history of just the story of creation it doesn't necessarily all have to take place right here on earth because recently you've started to see folks talking about the idea that planets are sort of expelled from their sun and then they drift further and further away i don't know how this adds up at all very rudimentary understanding but and then they drift further and further away and that's why we're seeing sort of a slow expansion even though it's extremely slow but over enough amount of time there are the folks who think that there's a face on mars and that we like at some point jumped over here i don't know i'm not here to say that's true either it's just that the wild different views of the history of life on earth and life within our solar system um so i mean things like the asteroid belt Like, was there probably a planet there at some point? Because there's so many people pouring this theory out into the world, and it just seems to get shut down as soon as the discussion comes up in the science community. And I'm wondering why that is.
Dr. Ross:
[37:15] Well, we're actually now seeing asteroid and comet belts around other stars. We have that technology, but what we notice is about 80% of them do not have asteroid and comet belts at all. 20% have asteroid and comet belts a thousand times bigger than the one that we see in the solar system. And we now understand why we're seeing this population distribution. Namely, that these comets and asteroids affect the movement of the big planets. You were mentioning how they drift. Well, what happens is that, say, when you've got Jupiter and Saturn forming, there's still lots of asteroids and comets around them. that causes Jupiter and Saturn to migrate towards the Sun.
Dr. Ross:
[38:02] But what happened in the case of the solar system is it reached a point where Jupiter was making three orbits around the Sun for every two orbits of Saturn. That set up a resonance which caused Jupiter and Saturn to stop their inward movement and begin to move back. And then once all the asteroids and comets were largely cleared out, they stop moving. But we notice in other planetary systems that that resonance doesn't happen, and the gas giant planets move all the way into the region of the inner planetary system. Actually, they move in closer than Venus is to our star of the sun. And when that happens, it wipes out all the asteroids and comets. And that explains why so many of them don't have them and why their gas giant planets are orbiting so close to the host star.
Dr. Ross:
[39:00] But there are others where that engagement doesn't happen, and so the gas giant planets stay far away, and you've got these huge asteroid and comet belts. Unique to the solar system is that the gas giant planets moved in, stopped, and moved back. And what that did is it gave us five small asteroid and comet belts. But these five are exactly the size and positions they need to be to ensure we have advanced life here on planet Earth. I mean, to give you an example, Earth loses a tiny amount of water to interplanetary space. The tiny amount we lose gets replaced by the tiny amount we gain from comets that engage the Earth, because comets are 85% frozen water. But if we were in a system where we had a thousand times as many comets, the bombardment would make life impossible on the Earth. As it is, we get exactly what we need, no more, no less.
Dr. Ross:
[40:03] And I was mentioning earlier, we've yet to find a planet outside of our solar system like any of the planets in our solar system. That led to a discovery. Every one of the eight planets in our solar system must have exquisitely fine-tuned characteristics to make advanced life possible on the Earth. So it's not just the Earth that's designed for our existence. All of the planets in our solar system are designed for our existence.
Tyler:
[40:33] What does the Bible say that confirms this or predicted this?
Dr. Ross:
[40:38] The Bible doesn't say much about planets at all. So I wouldn't go there with that. But you were mentioning earlier Genesis 1. I mean, that's the first thing I read when I picked up a Bible at age 17. And what I noted was it talks about 10 different creation events. And once you understand that the frame of reference for the creation days is the Spirit of God hovering over the surface of the waters, under the clouds, not above the clouds, everything stated in Genesis 1 is in the correct chronological sequence. And it's all correctly described. And that, again, was an indication to me, hey, this book wasn't just invented by people. The one who actually did all the creation had to have inspired this account because everything is correct and it's way beyond the science of Moses who composed it 3500 years ago.
Tyler:
[41:37] What is the understanding of the deluge? What goes on on earth during that time, in your opinion?
Dr. Ross:
[41:46] Well, that's interesting because I just finished a book on Noah's flood. It'll come out in a couple of months.
Tyler:
[41:53] We'll put it in the show notes if you want to get the pre-order out there. Yeah.
Dr. Ross:
[42:01] People look at the flood account in the Bible and they just say that's impossible. I think the reason they do that is they put too recent a date on it. The genealogies in the Bible do not give you accurate dates. All the genealogies in the Bible have missing generations. But what it does tell us is that after Noah's flood, people still rebelled against God's command to multiply and fill the earth. They remained in one region. And God knew that if he remained in one region, as it says in Genesis 11, we're going to build a city and a tower, be one people, one nation, so he will not be scattered in the face of the earth. God recognized that was a prescription for oppression and that there would be a repeat of the evil that happened before the flood. And so he scattered humanity, forcibly scattered humanity. I call it antitrust legislation.
Dr. Ross:
[42:59] He wanted multiple nations competing with one another for citizens as a way to check oppression by political leaders. But what's interesting today, for the first time, we can date all that. And what I found fascinating, we now have radiometric dating that tells us that humans settled Northern Europe the same time as Southern Europe, the same time as Western Africa, the same time as Japan and Borneo, Indonesia and Australia and those dates all agree they come in at about 42 to 49,000 years ago which means Noah's flood has to predate that and if you predate that there is no genetic challenge to all of humanity coming from eight people on board Noah's ark and people said ancients can't build boats that big well a paper got published just a few months ago where they said we have found remnants of huge ropes in Indonesia that indicates that people living 40,000 years ago in Indonesia were constructing huge boats to be able to go from Indonesia to Australia. So we now know the ancients indeed did have the capability. In Genesis chapter 7.
Tyler:
[44:22] It's very fascinating to take the dates and try to play with them, move them around, and see what different possibilities occur just by reconsidering something as simple as assuming the dates are correct in a book or something.
Dr. Ross:
[44:37] One thing you also get from Genesis 8 is that the flood took a whole year to recede.
Tyler:
[44:43] Sure.
Dr. Ross:
[44:44] And for it to take that long to recede, it had to be during an ice age. You need a huge amount of melting snow and ice to keep the floodwaters around that long.
Tyler:
[44:55] A lot of people think that it was a comet impact at that time that sort of ended the ice age and caused the flood. And then looking at different indigenous accounts all over the world in different places and how they relate to that story. I mean, and a lot of the, you know, Western South America coming from Polynesia, there's a lot of migration at that time. Why? Because sea level was lower and it was much easier to hop across all these islands or even in some cases walk across the land bridge. I mean, we have that also with the Bering Strait.
Dr. Ross:
[45:25] Right, right.
Tyler:
[45:26] You know, and then you're looking at the scarring. People use the term Great Basin all the time and never really think about what that means when they say it. But if you look at satellite image of North America, it's clear there was a huge flood that just ripped through Western Canada and, you know, along the central United States, what we now call the Great Basin. It's a riverbed, a giant one. It's enormous, but it's very clearly what it is. And then.
Dr. Ross:
[45:55] But I make the point that that wasn't Noah's flood. Noah's flood was earlier than that. And that Great Basin flood at that time. I mean, people didn't get to North America until 16,500 years ago. There was a bridge connecting Asia to Alaska, but it wasn't warm enough for human migration until 16,500 years ago. And you actually see that in Genesis chapter 10. It says the world was divided in the days of Pelig. And so would you see in Genesis 11, God scattered humanity throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, and Australia. And later, humans come into North and South America.
Tyler:
[46:41] It is, it is tempting to, you know, try to figure out when was the, were the Americas first settled? Cause like at the time that say Machu Picchu was built, they, at least to the most recent that we can really discuss, they were building on something older than what they had. And the question is like, what, how did it get there? And who were the people that were there? We have, you know, the Clovis people. And the, when I was in school, the theory was everybody who ever lived in America came across the Bering Land Bridge. We know that not to be true simply because of the Polynesian influence, you know, off the coast of South Africa. And so many of the times that you look at the accounts of people coming over from Europe, you know, to visit South America for the first time, they're reporting humongous numbers of people, like extraordinary. Extraordinary uh and then it seems exaggerated but when you account for disease it's like basically you know it only took a couple hundred years to kind of kill off everyone with just disease alone same thing in north america um so i'm wondering at the time that people were scattered about the earth if you're saying that you know noah's flood was prior even to the youngest younger driest impact i mean 16 000 years is still plenty of time for this to happen i'm not contending that at all it's just there were people here kind of before even noah's time
Dr. Ross:
[48:08] Yeah i'm disputing that in the book making the point that uh if you got noah previous to 42 to 49 000 years ago say 60 70 000 years ago sure that's a time when we clearly know north and south america were not inhabited i mean what's interesting they weren't even inhabited by the uh, Neanderthals or Homo erectus, they were limited to Africa, Europe, and Asia. And so we were literally the first bipedals to enter North and South America. And the dates are now well established. The first entry was like 16,000, 17,000 years ago. The Polynesians did come, but they didn't come that early.
Tyler:
[48:54] One of the most interesting holy books is the book of Abraham in the Mormon Bible, the Book of Mormon, so to speak. And there's so many reasons to doubt how this story even came about just simply because Joseph Smith bought some tablets, translated them. They found out later, no, this is like death rites or something like that. It has nothing to do with anything that he said. But then he was like, oh, it was inspired by divine revelation. So whatever. But it tells the story of essentially like the group of people who at the time were scattered about the earth to America. And that's fascinating, even if that was just something that he came up with by intuition. But science seeming to now back up the idea, at least that as far back as you're suggesting, there were people in America. Whereas, you know, not so long ago, we were just claiming it was only Asiatic people coming across the Bering Land Bridge.
Dr. Ross:
[49:56] Yeah, well, they were the first ones to come into North and South America. And because they were using the western coastal route, they literally got to the south tip of South America in only a thousand years. Because that's an easy migration route. And it was these coastal routes that basically explained why humans so simultaneously were able to colonize all of Europe, Africa, and Asia. They took advantage of these coastal migration routes. And I have a little description in my book about why those coastal routes make migration so easy. You've got lots of food by the seashore. You don't have the forest coming all the way down to the ocean. You've got vegetables there. And so it made it easy for people to move quickly.
Tyler:
[50:47] Yeah. And I think it's also tempting to think about these as really, really small bands of people. Where we're talking about large like mass migrations in a lot of cases so you look at um so the eddas and it talks about the history or the mythological history anyway of scandinavian peoples northern european germanic tribes and one of the key things it's like odin came from turkey they say that right up front and that's just passed down from generate people just know this they don't even know where turkey is they just know that he came from someplace called that or whatever you know and then at this time it would just be like all of these different tribes are being told like all right you're going here you're going there you're going there that's just how it's going to be spread out you know so that you're never centered in one place one disaster can't take you all out and you can all come up with your own ideas about how to live and see what's the best almost like a game show or something like a competition well
Dr. Ross:
[51:53] This is what gave me credence for what i see in genesis 10 and 11 because there's no other time in human history where you see that aggressive and widespread and simultaneous human migration typically we humans migrate and colonize at a very slow pace but this was literally all over Africa, Australia, Europe, and Asia, all simultaneous. The population just multiplied quickly. And so the simultaneity of it and the aggressiveness of it really gives me reason. When I look at Genesis 10 and 11, it said, this is the hand of God. This wouldn't happen any other way.
Tyler:
[52:33] It's also interesting just the stories that you get in Europe specifically, but all over the Northern Hemisphere of people fighting, whatever it was that was there before they got there. In the Nordic philosophy, it's like they fought the giants or whatever. But this is like human integration with Neanderthal, if I understand correctly.
Dr. Ross:
[52:54] Well, I mean, Neanderthals went extinct about 40,000 to 45,000 years ago. Some say 50,000. We now know their population levels were not very high. The total population probably never exceeded 15,000. So, yes, it's possible that when humans moved into Europe, they may have made contact, but the contact would have been fairly incidental. Humans, because we had the brain we had, the technological capability, we quickly out-competed them. Because they're eating raw food. We were processing our food, cooking our food, and we were wearing clothes. At best, they had an animal cape. So what they found interesting is that you got humans during that great migration living in climate zones 15 degrees colder than what Neanderthals could tolerate. And yet Neanderthals have an anatomy that's designed for living under cold weather conditions. We humans have a very slim body with very little hair. We do well in a hot climate and we do horribly in a cold climate. But what made the difference was we humans could manufacture clothes, sophisticated clothing. So even though our bodies weren't adapted for cold, we had the technology that we could actually live in far colder climate zones than the Neanderthals could.
Tyler:
[54:23] Sure. And manage fires. and yeah there's a lot of factors there yeah but so i mean how do we account for it's a very small amount but we do have allegedly neanderthal dna living in many of us and so i mean even that far back these two groups of you know separately created people interacting with each other
Dr. Ross:
[54:50] Well, yes, there is a genetic case for that, because what they notice is that people living in Europe and Asia have a little more affinity with Neanderthal DNA than sub-Saharan Africans. And the sub-Saharan Africans wouldn't have had contact with the Neanderthals, whereas the Europeans and Asians would. And they also note that there's even a greater affinity when you dig up a bone of a European that's been dead for 40,000 years. They have a little more affinity with Neanderthal DNA than Europeans today. So this is cited as evidence that there was probably a tiny amount of interbreeding that may have occurred. I mean, you've got people today committing bestiality. Evidently, that might have been going on in the past. However, it was at a very small-scale level, and there's still some debate about whether this really is the case. After all, they would have been experiencing the same environmental pressures. What we do know is that that extra DNA similarity, it has zero impact on the anatomy of humans or the behavior of humans. So it's simply impacting that DNA segment that wouldn't have had any impact on, say, what the Bible calls the image of God.
Dr. Ross:
[56:15] And where you really see the differences between Neanderthal DNA and human DNA are the genes that govern our brain structure. That's where the really huge differences are. And the Neanderthal brain, even though it's the same size as the human brain, it's radically different. Their brain is cylindrically shaped. Ours is a globular shape. We have these large parietal and frontal lobes, which enable us to do mathematics and theology and philosophy. They lack those lobes. They had a way better sense of smell than we did, better eyesight. So their brain was basically helping to sense their environment better. But our brain was designed for knowledge and technology. And also, even though the brains are the same size, the human brain has a much higher neuronal density. And it's the neuron density that really is how many neurons you've got in your brain that really determines how functional that brain will be.
Dr. Ross:
[57:19] And the other big difference is Neanderthals have powerful jaws, huge nasal capacities, powerful jaw muscles, because they were basically getting all their food by chewing raw food. We humans have a very slender jaw, and our muscles are not strong in the jaw. They didn't have to be, because we had the brains where we could basically gather food, grind it, roast it, boil it, and eat it. So we were eating soft food from the beginning. And because of the way we process food, we could get a lot more calories. That's the other interesting thing. Neanderthal is bigger than us, but we need way more calories because of the fact that our brain requires so much energy. But we had the means to gather more calories.
Tyler:
[58:12] Yeah. And we also, you know, our babies are basically born helpless. Like, and we're the only species that does that. We just drop out a baby and then it requires another year of your time before it can even walk or put food in its own mouth.
Dr. Ross:
[58:27] Right, right, right.
Tyler:
[58:29] Get it. So from your perspective, though, man was created and also this other thing that's very similar to man, so similar that we could potentially even cross DNA with it. But Deanderthals were not born into the image of God. They don't have the soul spirit of God in the very...
Dr. Ross:
[58:51] What's interesting in a conversation we had with Ian Tattersall, he's a physical anthropologist, He was basically pointing out, notice, these 10 or 12 bipedal primate species that preceded us human beings, they're all in Africa, Asia, and Europe, especially Africa. And when humans moved into Australia, North and South America, notice, they virtually wiped out all the large-bodied bird and mammal species they needed to launch and sustain civilization. That didn't happen in Africa, Asia, or Europe. And he said, he was basically pointing out, notice the sequence of bipedal primate species? You don't see a linear progression in brain size. You don't see a linear progression in bipedal capability. But you do see a linear progression in the capacity of these creatures to hunt large-bodied bird and mammal species. So his point is, because of the sequence of bipedal primates, these animals basically were trained. When you see tall bipedals with weapons in their hands, run away. And so the extinction rate when humans entered Africa of these creatures was only 4.5%. The extinction rate when humans entered Australia was 95%.
Dr. Ross:
[1:00:20] And that's because the animals in Australia had no exposure to five petals wanting to hunt them. And so we humans wiped them out.
Tyler:
[1:00:30] Sure.
Dr. Ross:
[1:00:31] It explains why the aborigines in Australia never got out of the Stone Age. They lacked the animals that they needed.
Tyler:
[1:00:41] How do... So how does it come about that there are all these scattered places where there are people who are, you know, homo sapiens living? And over time, it seems that they seem to create very similar stories of how cosmogony works, but not necessarily like the biblical story. So how do that get lost over time?
Dr. Ross:
[1:01:10] Yeah, something I write about in this book I got on the flood is that in North and South America alone, you have nearly 300 different flood legends. They're not the same as what you see in the Bible, but they're remarkably similar to one another. And if you look in Asia, Europe, and Africa, you've got another 300 flood stories and legends. And so when you actually look at them all together it's clear they're speaking about a single flood event that impacted humanity the other interesting thing is when you compare the story in these legends with Genesis the more distant from the Middle East and the more distant in time the greater the distortion of the story relative to what you see in Genesis, so I basically cite that evidence that this isn't people experiencing different floods at different times. The similarities of the flood stories tell us that humanity experienced a single devastating flood, and when they were scattered, they took the flood story with them. And the flood stories evolved slowly over time.
Tyler:
[1:02:20] That what's what's so fascinating i think about the idea that this happened in you know all over the world all at one time is that you know we we would then recede in population and then regrow and what you were talking about earlier with something like you know a comet replacing the exactly the amount of water that we lose to just drifting off into the into space and what may seem from our perspective like a disaster is really just the answer to the problem we need in the bigger scale so if we you know we've ran out of this much water and we're getting to a point where the population on earth can't be sustained by the amount of water we have or something like that and then just a comet hits lots of people die of course but in the long term the amount of water we need is replenished.
Dr. Ross:
[1:03:18] Yeah, well, the big comet events are quite rare.
Tyler:
[1:03:21] Right.
Dr. Ross:
[1:03:21] You know, where we get our water is from these mini comets because there's lots, I mean, literally every day, 10,000 comets strike the Earth's atmosphere. You never notice it because the water basically, you know, gets obliterated before it hits the ground so there's no collision. It takes a big comet to get through our atmosphere and make an impact. And those do happen but they happen on rare occasions but we get lots of mini comets striking the atmosphere but, What I do find interesting is that we also get some asteroids colliding with the Earth that are super rich in heavy metals. And so there's an asteroid that struck in South Africa that's responsible for 80% of the gold and platinum in circulation. An asteroid that struck in Canada that's responsible for 50% of the nickel in circulation. Now these events only happen like once every 150 to 200 million years, but they do fuel the economy of a civilization today. Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:04:32] So what I noticed that you were like pretty critical of like young earth Christian point of view. Like I think of Ken Ham immediately whenever that word even comes up, you know, with the art park here in Kentucky and all that stuff. But what what has been your position on like how how you've interfaced with that, how you've dealt with that problem and grown to understand it?
Dr. Ross:
[1:04:59] Well, I was not raised in a Christian family or a Christian neighborhood. I became a Christian through reading the Gideon Bible. And right away I recognized these creation days have to be consecutive long periods of time. Because I noticed that there's an evening and morning phrase appended to the first six days, but not the seventh day. And I didn't know what the Hebrew words for evening and morning meant in the original. But I knew at least what they're saying is, this day is a start time and an end time. And the fact that there's no evening morning phrase for the seventh day told me, oh, that's because it's not yet finished.
Dr. Ross:
[1:05:41] And then I saw in Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4, explicit statements that were still in God's seventh day. So that told me these days are long periods of time. The other thing that confirmed it, as I noted in Genesis 1, it said that God created the human male and the human female on the sixth day. But you go to Genesis 2, God creates Adam first, and a lot happens before Eve shows up. I mean, Adam has to go through three careers before he's introduced to Eve. And when he finally does see Eve, first of all, God looks upon Adam and says, he's lonely. I mean, he's been naming all these animals, working the garden, but he's lonely. So he creates this new creature. And when Adam sees this new creature for the first time, the word you see in the original Hebrew coming out of his mouth is hapa'am.
Dr. Ross:
[1:06:38] It's used 20 times in the Old Testament, translated at long last. So that told me day six, likewise, must be a long period of time. And so I never saw a contradiction between the timescales of creation in the Bible and what I saw in my scientific studies. And it took me another nine years after I gave my life to Jesus Christ to even meet somebody who thought these days were 24 hours. that happened when I left the University of Toronto and went to Caltech. And that's when I ran into people who thought that the earth was young. And I said, where did you get that from? And I've actually debated Ken Ham a few times. So you can actually watch some debates I've had with him.
Tyler:
[1:07:24] He's a very frustrating person to watch debate. I've watched, don't get me wrong, but when I see it, it's just, It's like he refuses to go any deeper than just because that's what this book says.
Tyler:
[1:07:39] And then bends around that in an unhealthy way. Like it's so clearly lacking in a cohesive thought process other than just straight to the, it's what the book says.
Dr. Ross:
[1:07:51] Well, what you can watch on YouTube, there was, it was on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and they had six of us there.
Dr. Ross:
[1:07:59] And the moderator said, I don't want any debates. Each of you gets five minutes to share the best scientific evidence for the christian faith sure and because i was the lone phd scientist there i thought well they're going to bring me in last but he had me speak first so i gave you know the best scientific evidence and immediately ken ham jumped on me and i basically said hey this is not a debate you're going to get your five minutes Let's just be calm. But literally for an hour, he wouldn't let me speak. He just kept saying his mantra. The Bible is authoritative. And it says, hey, we both believe that the Bible has authority, that it's the Word of God. Our differences are interpretation, not authority. But you're right. His whole strategy was interrupt, repeatedly interrupt, stop everybody else from speaking. and I felt bad for the other four participants. They were just sitting there. Nobody could get a word in wet edgewise.
Tyler:
[1:09:06] Yeah, I just can't reconcile the, you know, people on dinosaurs thing. I don't know where he gets that information, but yeah, it's fascinating. I enjoy, no matter how crazy it is, just seeing what people think. Like, what do people believe based on evidence or otherwise? And a lot of the time, people don't even think in evidential ways. They just think in intuitive truths.
Tyler:
[1:09:32] And sometimes that's good.
Dr. Ross:
[1:09:33] It is and uh i you know in this book i did on the flood it's like we need to realize people throughout all of human history had their scientific literature their historical literature and their fantasy literature and so when you read in the ancient literature that they believed that the world was flat with a metal dome over it with water above it with holes in between which let the rain through, that's their fantasy literature. It's not their scientific literature. They knew that the world was spherical. They even knew the diameter of the earth. They knew how far away the sun was and the moon was. They were not stupid. And the analogy I use is, what if archaeologists 2,000 years from now were to rummage through the ruins of Hollywood, find these film canisters, and draw the conclusion that people in the 20th century thought that humans made pets out of dinosaurs and had these little vehicles made out of stone that they ran around in. Is the Flintstones our science literature or is it our fantasy literature?
Tyler:
[1:10:45] It's interesting, though, when the two cross.
Dr. Ross:
[1:10:48] It is.
Tyler:
[1:10:48] There's so much to be said for just the hero's journey occurring over and over again. And that archetype going all the way back to the, you know, the times of the Bible. In so many cases we have, you know, whether some people want to admit it or not, Harry Potter is just a Jesus allegory. So the Lord of the Rings, all that stuff.
Dr. Ross:
[1:11:09] Well, this I use as an argument for why we humans have to be specially created by God. We're the only species that invests an ordinate amount of time in fantasy and storytelling.
Dr. Ross:
[1:11:22] We even do it to our detriment. So what you see in these ancient tribes is that they would invest so heavily in storytelling and fantasy, uh, but we're compelled to do it. And I think it's all part of our whole idea that we have this imagination and that imagination stimulates our technology, but it's also a way we relate to one another. It's also a way to get us thinking, what is there beyond the universe? So it gets into theology, so it's healthy in that respect. But there's no other species that does it. It's unique to us humans.
Tyler:
[1:12:02] We've always been fascinated by the stars. and yes so in your study of how you know people navigated all across it people forget about navigation because not many people are in the navy anymore but yeah like they had to get from place to place all over the world and they did it all with understanding the signs of the heavens to them right it sounds crazy now when people say oh well the signs of the heavens like no they literally mean like the zodiac help them to get where they were going and predict when they should plant their crops and everything. Everything was centered around this and we're completely disconnected from that as a society now.
Dr. Ross:
[1:12:40] Yeah, their astronomy was incredibly advanced. I mean, you think of Stonehenge? Sure. That was actually an observatory. They built these circles of giant stones with roads that extended out for several kilometers. The astronomer would stand several kilometers away, use those stones as gun sights to accurately measure the position of stars and planets so those are their telescopes and we now know there are thousands of stone observatories that the ancients built all over the world.
Tyler:
[1:13:11] Oh yeah the tons and the more that they use lidar on you know the amazon rainforest they're like oh my goodness there's so much here all these roads and geoglyphs and temples it's it's wild and expansive and we're still uncovering stuff under the pyramids of Egypt today that we didn't know about until allegedly didn't know about until a week ago or whatever, but it's, it's very fascinating. But what's your understanding of their tools of astronomy? How do they do things, aside from build hinges?
Dr. Ross:
[1:13:43] Well, they also built transit instruments to measure the positions at midnight. I mean, what I find incredible is that they were very accurately measuring the periods of variable stars. So they were fascinated by the second brightest star in Perseus. They measured its period to five places of the decimal. And in fact, there's a paper that got published in the Astrophysical Journal where we use these ancient Egyptian records of the star Elgal and the period they measured. We compare with the eight decimal place period we have today. There's a difference. And the difference between those two spread by about 4,500 years tells us about the physics of the interior of that star Elgal. If it wasn't for those ancient Egyptian astronomical records, we wouldn't be able to get the detail of what's going on in the interior of that star that we have today. So, yeah, we're mining their astronomical records to make discoveries.
Tyler:
[1:14:51] What are some of the more fascinating groups of people? I guess of all of ancient history, There were different groups that were super good at this or had traditions of being really, really good at this. So people talk about the Mayan calendar. We talk about the Egyptians.
Dr. Ross:
[1:15:08] Right. The Egyptians are at the top of the pile because there was a time in their history where they invested almost a quarter of their gross national product in the study of astronomy. It explains why. I mean, these people were well taken care of. They had unlimited resources to build their equipment, to make these measurements. And they were very precise in the measurements. It explains why, for example, the pyramids were structured with such precision where the shafts actually point to a particular star as you look down the shaft. I mean, that's all thanks to how meticulous they were with their astronomical measurements. But yeah, we astronomers today are envious. I mean, we have to make do with what, 0.025% of the gross national product of our country. They had 25%.
Tyler:
[1:15:57] Sure. Yeah, we're talking about half a percent for NASA, even. Yeah. It's very fascinating. How do you know that they made those investments? Like, at what point in history?
Dr. Ross:
[1:16:11] Well, we can actually uncover the structures that they built. I mean, I was mentioning Stonehenge. That's probably the best preserved stone observatory, but it's not the most sophisticated. I mean, we've now found remnants of stone observatories where the circle is like a kilometer in diameter as opposed to, you know, maybe just 50 meters in diameter for Stonehenge.
Tyler:
[1:16:38] Like Poverty Point in Louisiana, or if you're looking at certain other spots across, like Gigantia off the coast of Italy and Greece, like that, and the temple moves over time, because whatever it is that they're looking at changes position in the sky.
Dr. Ross:
[1:16:55] Yeah, they found these stone observatories in Africa. They found them in the islands of the Mediterranean, all over Europe. We find them in Asia. So, yeah, in North and South America. So, it just shows you. Every human is fascinated by the heavens and astronomy. It's like, it's what happened to me when I was seven. When I first discovered the stars, it's like, it just captures you. And I found that even people who are not interested in science, they do have a fascination about the heavens.
Tyler:
[1:17:29] Do you reckon the gravity or forces from the planets and our solar system or even those outside of it have an effect on us and our personalities and the way that we're shaped?
Dr. Ross:
[1:17:39] No, I wrote an article on why that's all bogus, basically pointing out that astrologers will say the positions of the planets at the time of your birth will determine your personality because of the gravity of the planets. And I basically explain how the gravity exerted by the father in the room and the obstetrician in the room, his orders are magnitude greater than the gravity you get from any of the planets. And moreover, the problem with astrology is they're not even keeping up with precession. So when they say that your constellation is Leo, That was the case 2,000 years ago. Sure. You're no longer in Leo. You're in the next constellation.
Tyler:
[1:18:24] I think that it's extraordinarily interesting. I think astrology in its roots, just like alchemy in its roots, are valuable. And there's a reason why that was kept and passed on for so long. At the same time, the reaching around your back to touch your elbow that some people will do to try to justify their horoscope readings and stuff is concerning. Um, but I try to keep an open mind when I talk to people. So, you know, I don't know. I do understand the concept that, you know, the, the nurse and the father in proximity and mass have more of a gravitational effect on the baby than, you know, whatever's going on out there. But i guess the the real question that i have for those people is not necessarily like well how do you make sense of it now it's just like what about this knowledge of the position and procession of things moving around our celestial body why was that so important that we're still talking about it that's that's the goal and if that's how we get that just like you were talking about kind of mining the ancients for their technology for their their technical ideas about the placements of stars or whatever the same thing could apply to you know occult stuff even i'm not talking about doing witchcraft like summoning the demons or whatever i just you're
Dr. Ross:
[1:19:44] Onto something there because you know astronomy is a science astrology is a religion.
Tyler:
[1:19:49] Sure so
Dr. Ross:
[1:19:51] You know people are looking at this as a way to try to get information they otherwise wouldn't be able to get.
Tyler:
[1:19:56] Sure.
Dr. Ross:
[1:19:57] Uh, you know, the Bible warns us to avoid astrology because the fallen angels will use that to get a grip on your life.
Tyler:
[1:20:04] Hmm.
Tyler:
[1:20:06] That's, that's fascinating. There's a lot of this talk about, you know, consulting with mediums or whatever opens you up to whether it's your intention or not, just like opens you up to other spirits interacting with you in a way that you probably won't want. Exactly. And then allowing the mind to get slowly co-opted into believing I'm seeing the pattern. I mean, it's even from a psychological point of view, it's kind of like the sort of thing that will drive you to madness. Eventually um but i suppose that you could say the same thing about digging into any particular religion even if it's like the one true religion it just it never stops the learning that you can do and the things that you can go back and forth and debate about for till the end of time well
Dr. Ross:
[1:20:54] That's what attracted me about reading the bible it basically exhorted me you have to put a higher priority on truth than you do on power. If your goal is to get power and secret knowledge, you will be led astray. But if your goal is, hey, I want to know what's true. What attracted me about the Bible is that there's repeated exhortations. Everything must be tested. Put it to the test before you believe. Hold fast to that which proves to be good and true. So what I was finding in the other religions was subjectivism. If it feels good, that tells you it's true. As a young scientist, I said, that doesn't cut it. I'm not going to base my life on feelings. It has to be on objective truth.
Tyler:
[1:21:44] So if you apply that to the metaphysical side of things, like angels, demons, spirits, things that can co-opt our mind through, I don't know, using tarot cards or playing with Ouija boards or just simply reading the wrong information or allowing ourselves to be pulled further and further away from that message. You know what how do how do we explain that with physics how do we
Dr. Ross:
[1:22:14] Well there are probably now eight different books that have been written by physicists and astronomers on ufos uaps i'm talking about people who've given us at least a decade of study and they all make the point that when you have a close encounter with a ufo the impact on the human is always deleterious is never beneficial. And what I've noticed is that people that have these experiences, number one, they tend to have it more than once. Most people don't have any encounters at all, but there are some that have them and have them repeatedly. And about the best they're going to come away with is recurring terrifying nightmares. But there are actually cases where people have been injured and killed. So people got scars on their body as a result of these encounters that's another reason why I believe that this phenomenon is real but it's not physical so we're dealing with something beyond our dimensions and the Bible does tell us that God created two distinct species of intelligent life one that's constrained by the laws of physics and these angels who are not.
Tyler:
[1:23:33] It's very fascinating to look at how people who have had these experiences, like when you report, you read the reports, you listen to the reports, and you just kind of put it all on paper and figure out what the cross-references are.
Tyler:
[1:23:48] More and more research, even among the paranormal-type folks recently, has just pointed to this idea that whatever it is, it's definitely not physical, and it can mess with our minds. So I was just talking recently to someone about how if you give someone an EKG when they're having sort of these experiences, especially when it comes to groups of people all together, which you could argue is sort of a ritual and trying to attract the spirits. So you look at Dr. Greer and his like, oh, I want to see the close encounters of the fifth kind stuff. And it doesn't surprise me that people are having experiences that they're seeing things, but they're never certain of what it is that they're actually observing because it's never physically there. Um even in some ufo accounts uh i would think of ingo swan talking about his ufo experience he would he described it as if the the thing that he observed materialized and then dematerialized in front of him so most people think of a saucer that flew from another planet arrived here drifted into our atmosphere or whatever when in reality these things not only can they change directions but they can exist and then not exist within our own reality.
Dr. Ross:
[1:25:09] Right.
Tyler:
[1:25:09] And then the burden of proof is on someone to actually catch this happening. Right. And that's the trick. So you take two different people, um, maybe even three, have them all have one of these shared experiences. And more often than not, they'll each have an experience that's different in some way. Like details will be changed or maybe they, you know, maybe one person saw the Virgin Mary and another person saw Ankar from the star system to the rightmost of Orion's belt or something like that. But regardless, whatever it is that they're interacting with is actively messing with their mind telepathically. Seems to be ubiquitous across every single one of these reports.
Dr. Ross:
[1:25:57] Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is every UFO report is different from every other UFO report, which tells me these are not beings coming here in spaceships. If they were, they would have figured out the assembly line process. We'd see some similarity, but we don't. But the thing I've noticed is that if
Dr. Ross:
[1:26:18] people actually get the occult out of their life, that's the end of their UFO close encounters.
Tyler:
[1:26:24] You think so?
Dr. Ross:
[1:26:25] They bring the occult into their life. They're inviting these things to happen. I've also noticed the statistics. So, for example, parts of the world where you've got a larger percentage of the population involved in the occult, you've got a higher rate of UFO experiences. I even see that here in the U.S. You know, like Alaska and Hawaii have a higher incidence than, say, Iowa does. And, you know, we know that there's fewer people in Iowa involved in the occult than is the case in Alaska and Hawaii.
Dr. Ross:
[1:27:01] Equatorial Brazil is a very high rate. And I mentioned Soviet Union. It was very high during the Soviet era, it's lower now. So that's why I'm persuaded there is a correlation. If they're involved in the occult, they're much more likely to have these encounters. If they get the occult out of their life, that's the end of their encounters. Although we need to be aware of the subtlety of these fallen angels.
Dr. Ross:
[1:27:28] They can get to you through a close relative. They can get to you through a sexual partner. I mean, I ran into one young man who said, hey i'm having these experiences but i'm totally clean in the occult but i later found out he was in a sexual relationship with the witch i said hey the bible tells you that when you engage in sexual intercourse you become one with that person so you're literally inviting whatever they have in their life into your life when he broke off that relationship that was the end of his ufo experiences so.
Tyler:
[1:28:05] So what do you think that the experience is? Is it purely sort of spiritual in nature? Is there another intelligence?
Dr. Ross:
[1:28:15] No, I think these people, I mean, and keep in mind, I'm talking about the 1%. Sure. I still feel about 99% of what people report as UFOs are not in this category. But there's residual where we can prove they're real and non-physical. I believe we're dealing in that case with fallen angels. And they have the power to manifest themselves in whatever physical form they want. And then, as you point out, they can materialize and dematerialize at will. So they have powers we don't have. They can come into a realm and exit our realm. And so it explains why we see that they can generate real effects, even though they're not physical entities.
Dr. Ross:
[1:29:01] But the real goal is to deceive humanity and to harm humanity. And so there's a well-documented case where this encounter resulted in the human contactee going into a trance. And while in a trance, this being basically controlled the human to write a book. That book is called the Orontia book. It's the Bible of four different American UFO religions. But what's interesting about the book, a third of its content denies the deity of Jesus Christ. So it kind of tells you these angels are very focused. Two things I've noticed. They really hate the person of Jesus Christ, and they're obsessed with sex.
Dr. Ross:
[1:29:48] So that gives you a good indication of what we're really dealing with.
Tyler:
[1:29:53] Sure, yeah. it it's very scary because i feel like the more secular people are they approach these things you know with a wide-eyed bushy-tailed idea of like oh you know it's a good thing like watching steven greer do the close encounters of the fifth kind thing with people is terrifying if looked through that lens if seeing it as like a you don't know what you're inviting into your life kind of thing. Yes. Yeah. At the same time, I guess it calls into question Do we know that they're all bad? Like, what's to say that they're not interacting with, you know, Michael and Gabriel and all the good guys?
Dr. Ross:
[1:30:38] Well, it's one thing that the UFO researchers who spent a decade or more studying it, they all agree that what we're dealing with is not beneficial. It's harmful. People get hurt. Their animals get hurt. Sure. They get deceived. So, it's not something that's out to benefit you. So the fact that people have been injured, even killed, these terrifying nightmares they have. And I've noticed when I encounter people who have had those experiences, they want out. And that's why I'm able to say, hey, get the occult out of your life and you'll be set free. And when they are, they're just so relieved.
Tyler:
[1:31:22] What are the kinds of things that they're usually doing? We talked about someone just being in a relationship with someone who practices witchcraft.
Dr. Ross:
[1:31:31] Well, the thing I've noticed is that they're pulling a Ouija board, and the Ouija board is trying to call up a spirit, or they're doing a seance, or they're going to a fortune teller, or they're trying to get information that's beyond our human capability. You mentioned astrology. So one thing I put in this book, Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men, I close it off with a chapter. These are all the ways that demons can gain permission to invade your life. So if any of these things are in your life, you need to get rid of it. Or if you have a close relative that has these things, what you need to do is confess to God that what they're involved in is something that displeases him. That will cut the link from your close relative to you. Because yeah, the demons can work through a grandfather or an uncle, but you're only responsible for what you know that they're doing that violates God's commands so just confess that to God agree with them in prayer.
Dr. Ross:
[1:32:32] That is not good. That will cut the link. Make sure there's nothing in your own life, and make sure there's nothing in your place where you live. There was one couple, for example, in the church where I attend that bought a home. And they called me and said, there's spoons floating in one room of the house in midair.
Dr. Ross:
[1:32:54] We think the previous owners must have left some occult articles behind. We can't find it. Can you come over and help us? So I went over to their home and discovered that the temperature in that one room was colder than all the other rooms. I noted that the room had been painted before they bought it. We scraped some of the new paint off, discovered the paint underneath was midnight blue. And I said, that's a color that's often used for seances. We talked to the neighbors and they said, yes. There were teenage boys in there that were holding seances. So I gave us a clue. And then I noticed a faint outline on the wall. It was about a three-foot diameter octagon. I said, we need to find that item. They said, well, we've looked everywhere. So we prayed that God would help us find it. And I said, how about we go into the garage? They said, we've already done that. Went into the garage. And I noticed up in the rafters there was a pile of junk lumber. I said let's pull all that junk lumber down when we did we found an octagonal astrological.
Dr. Ross:
[1:34:04] Prognosticator that perfectly fit was on the wall we destroyed that no more spoons floating in midair in the room temperature went back down to normal everything was fine so it just shows you how subtle it can be there could be some article left behind that you're not even aware of.
Tyler:
[1:34:23] See you don't have any You don't have the thought that the fact that you've researched and talked about this stuff is, in itself, you opening your mind up to the occult.
Dr. Ross:
[1:34:36] Well, as long as I don't have those items around.
Tyler:
[1:34:39] Sure.
Dr. Ross:
[1:34:40] I mean, and what I tell people is that when you're confronted with this demonic influence, deal with it, but don't pursue it. Because there's other ministry that's more important to pursue, but when you're confronted with it, deal with it. So the example was when I was in the Soviet Union and these demon-possessed people were screaming and yelling and preventing me from speaking. I said, okay, I'm going to deal with it. I'm going to bring somebody with me and just have them sit at the back and pray. But it's like I didn't go around the Soviet Union trying to find demon-possessed people. It's like, hey, God put me there to talk to the physicists about the scientific evidence for God. And you know what i thought was wonderful all my lectures were in halls of scientific atheism, so the other amusing thing was the scientists would tell me afterwards we all knew there had to be a god because our government made us attend a two-hour lecture every week on scientific atheism if there really was no god they wouldn't be forcing us to attend all these lectures years.
Tyler:
[1:35:51] Yeah, it's very fascinating to hear the stories of the people who lived during that time, you know, many of them were Orthodox Christians or Jews, you know, who were basically like practicing the religion in secret throughout the duration of the Soviet Union. And even now, currently what's going on with, you know, the conflict in Ukraine and just the religious persecution all across that area, it really throws into question, you know, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in conflicts like this. Because people so desperately want it to be World War II, simple, that that's the bad guy, this is the good guy, win kind of thing. But it's way more complicated than that.
Dr. Ross:
[1:36:34] Yeah, it is.
Tyler:
[1:36:36] Even in, you know, South Africa. All over the world, it seems that, you know, Christianity is being put to a test.
Dr. Ross:
[1:36:42] What you see in the book of Daniel is that Satan and his demons go after the political leaders, the kings, the rulers. Sure. God sends his righteous angels to combat these things. And I kind of look at politics throughout all of human history. It's not rational. It's like, you know, why are you having these top leaders making such stupid decisions that are countered to their best interests? It's because we have supernatural interference.
Tyler:
[1:37:15] Right.
Dr. Ross:
[1:37:16] So politics doesn't make sense. It's irrational. But actually look at that. That actually gives us evidence. There's a good moral God who's opposed by a supernatural evil being. That explains why our politics is just so incredibly irrational, and it's in all nations around the world.
Tyler:
[1:37:36] Sure.
Dr. Ross:
[1:37:37] Don't get too disturbed by how nonsensical our politics is. There's a battle going on, but it's a spiritual battle, not just a physical battle.
Tyler:
[1:37:48] I tend to agree with you. It seems like it's always doing its best to try to make you pick between the lesser of two evils instead of just choosing to do what's right and making it harder and harder to make those decisions. And the more ignorant you keep people, the more likely they are to follow a false prophet or succumb to an idea that's not in their best interest. A lot to do with belief just through observation seems to be if you believe in good then your your life will be better than if you don't believe in good so like any person who's a nihilist like just thinks that it's all screwed up it's all messed up and there's nothing we can do about it and it's the end of the world even if that's in their reality true it's like that thinking that doesn't serve you in any way if you just think that there's an answer you know or there's a way to constantly get better to strive to be better and you do that you will be better your life will be better everything about you know everything that involves you going through the process of voluntary self-sacrifice taking on more responsibility and getting rid of your own bad habits and things that get in the way of you doing that universally makes people happier
Tyler:
[1:39:07] It seems to be good.
Dr. Ross:
[1:39:09] Yeah. You're saying good point.
Tyler:
[1:39:10] Yeah. So, you know, that's something that people end up confronting a lot with their, their, their shrink, their psychologist, their, you know, whatever their doctors just. If you just had the hope and the wherewithal to do what you know is right, you wouldn't have the problems that you have. Even something as simple as smoking or obesity or something like that. It's like, you know, what you're doing isn't good. And you won't stop doing it. And the only thing standing between it getting better and worse is changing what you're doing. So, yeah. From the point of view that, you know, UFO encounters are spiritually related or caused by people interacting with demons. I would tie this all in, too, with what people call ghosts. Or, you know, different traditions around the world are called things different things. You know, describe them in very, like, universally similar ways, but just different names for them or slightly different, like, cultural phenomena surrounding them.
Dr. Ross:
[1:40:15] I think these fallen angels keep pace with our culture and our technology. So I argue that these UFOs have always been with humans. I mean, they can appear as leprechauns. They can appear as fairies. They can appear as blimps in the atmosphere, foo fighters. I find it interesting. They seem to keep pace with our technology. So 150 years ago, they were slow moving, blimp like things in the sky. World War II, they were the Foo Fighters moving to the speed of sound. Now they're moving as fast as our fastest spaceships. And they keep telling their story. When they encounter humans, a hundred years ago, they said, well, we're from the backside of the moon. When people realize, well, that's not credible, they change their story. They said, we're from Venus. And when people realize how hot it is on Venus, they said, Mars. Now they're saying they're from a distant planetary system.
Dr. Ross:
[1:41:14] And then the fact that they're so focused on trying to keep people away from the Christian faith these are all clues of what we're really dealing with and you were mentioning the point too about how we know the benefit of living a moral life, but the problem is none of us can live a perfectly moral life we need help and that's what attracted me about the Christian faith is the promise that if we go to God he will do for us what we can't do for ourselves.
Tyler:
[1:41:46] I was talking on the show recently with a guy named Sean Parker, and he had what you would call like a poltergeist experience, you know? You were talking about people saying that earlier, that things moving around that shouldn't be and all that kind of thing. And, you know, I think, all right, cool, a nice little ghost story. This would be fun. And he starts telling me everything that happened to him. And I'm asking a few questions here, there. What was going on in your life at the time? I'm not saying this guy didn't have an experience with something greater than himself or whatever. You know, something metaphysical seems to have happened around him. But I think in a lot of these cases, what people want is to believe that, oh, well, you know, 200 years ago in this building, there was an old lady and she was, you know, crotchety. And, you know, and then she died unhappily. And now she throws things around when she doesn't like the music we play or whatever. But as i'm asking him you know what's going on when did this all start happening
Tyler:
[1:42:43] Were you the catalyst turns out first of all he's he's living in a music club in sussex so it's like party all the time there's drugs there's alcohol there's tons of promiscuous sex it's a boarding house so they have people sleeping all over the place and he's you know in a complicated relationship with a lady who maybe doesn't have his best interests in mind and i'm like okay i don't know if the poltergeist happened or not but what i do know is that it's most likely you would not have had this poltergeist experience had you been eating correctly had a real job were not engaging in promiscuous sex all the time weren't drinking doing drugs like there's a lot to that could be removed from the situation before you ever get to the point where you're having glasses fly off the walls right around you and one of the things that i told him is like the thing is that you're not haunted like even ghost hunters you know with no religious belief whatsoever would agree when you're interacting with a poltergeist it's you there's a catalyst and it's usually someone who's dabbling in the occult sexually frustrated etc you know The cross-references always line up with this.
Dr. Ross:
[1:44:10] Well, you mentioned drugs, too. I mean, the Bible warns us, don't give up control over your mind.
Tyler:
[1:44:16] Sure.
Dr. Ross:
[1:44:17] And when you get really drunk or you get onto drugs, you lose control of your mind. That's an invitation for a spirit beating to say, hey, if you don't want control of your mind, I'll take over. So it's not just the occult. sometimes you can be taken over simply by going into drugs and alcohol to an extreme.
Tyler:
[1:44:39] Yeah and i would say a hundred percent with drugs and alcohol in that yeah the addiction cycle it's like if you're trying to compromise someone like let's just say we're you know trying to run another country while we're invading it you know one of the first things that you want to do is sort of make them dependent on you it's the same thing with any abusive relationship if it's like a you know a husband and wife and he's one of those guys that like doesn't want her to work and has to get every financial uh decision passed through him or that kind of thing you do the same thing with groups so something like an addiction where you're going to be in ever and ever more dire need of whatever this thing it is and you have to consistently compromise your morals to obtain what it is that you're looking for. Crack, coke, whatever it is. Yeah, that's a great way to subvert someone and to get someone to do things that you don't want them, that they wouldn't ordinarily do. And slowly just erode away at their spirit until there's nothing left. And I think we've all unfortunately seen what this does to people.
Dr. Ross:
[1:45:49] Well, that can happen with our relationships with abusive people. But these fallen angels, they're using the same strategy.
Tyler:
[1:45:56] Yep. It seems to be very apparent. The Screwtape Letters is a great book for someone who's interested in how- That's
Dr. Ross:
[1:46:04] A great book. I love that one.
Tyler:
[1:46:06] Did you see the nefarious plot movie?
Dr. Ross:
[1:46:11] No, I haven't seen it. No.
Tyler:
[1:46:12] It's really, really good. But it's from the perspective of a psychologist who's been asked to go to a state penitentiary and ascertain whether or not the guy who's about to be put on death row is insane or, you know, not insane. And basically it's like, if he's insane, we can't execute him. But if what he's saying is not a psychological disorder, then we can execute him. And he walks into the room and the prisoner is like, I'm possessed by a demon.
Tyler:
[1:46:46] And manipulating the entire time, he says, before you leave here today, you will have killed three people and i will trick you into doing it and then the guy is like too prideful and he keeps arguing with it he keeps arguing with it and then it's it's very deliberately shows how easy it is to trick someone into acting out of their own best interest if they just simply don't believe that what they're interfacing with is real yeah that was that old saying the the greatest lie that never devil ever told was that he didn't exist yes yeah how do you uh how do you think that the the physics of the objects or non-objects that are moving around the earth and being captured by say radar camera whatever what's going on with that why is it that we can measure some things but not all the way
Dr. Ross:
[1:47:41] Well if we're dealing with the ones that are really non-physical and real what i find interesting is sometimes you do get a radar detection but the human doesn't see it.
Tyler:
[1:47:51] Right or
Dr. Ross:
[1:47:53] You can photograph it but it doesn't show up on radar there are a few cases where it shows up on multiple instruments but not all instruments so that again is an indication you're dealing with something that's non-physical and real. If it shows up on all detection devices and the human sees it, that's usually a clue you're dealing with something that's physical and part of our realm. So this is where researchers get in and say, okay, a pilot reports this thing taking a short right-angle turn that he sees outside of his cockpit, but he wasn't able to triangulate the distance. Is it possible it was a small speck that he was looking at as opposed to a large craft? So, and one of the ways you kind of ferret all that out, okay, let's look at all the detection devices. And is it consistent with say a fleck of paint that came off the aircraft, uh, or, you know, a bit of dust, uh, or is it actually something at a great distance? Uh, so, uh.
Dr. Ross:
[1:48:54] Which basically makes a point, doing UFO research is not an easy thing, but it's with the close encounters that you really can nail things down. So, and Jacques Vallée, he's a French astrophysicist. He's devoted more time to the study of UFOs than anyone on the planet. But he's gone into extensive detail about these close encounters and makes a point. Sometimes a person has a close encounter than an automobile and the automobile shuts down all on its own and after the encounter starts up again or the radio gets interfered with and then it comes back so evidently these angelic beings can interfere with our equipment and they can shut things down they can also turn things on so uh but i find that you know if you actually get a radar blip you get it on infrared but you don't get an optical that's a pretty good clue you're dealing with something that's non-physical but real.
Tyler:
[1:49:59] Friend of mine is uh designing a video game called who are you but it's about a person who has had a ufo encounter and is sort of living with the trauma of no one believes me and my wife's gone and there's no explanation and i'm it's very fascinating because more than anything that the game is not centered around the aliens or anything like that it's he's talking with people who are psychologists and psychiatrists spiritual people whatever who have worked with folks who've gone through this kind of trauma and trying to figure out what the hell happened to them in so many cases and it's it's a little bit concerning because we don't address that now like societally we do not have systems that address these things. Maybe a couple hundred years ago, you were having these sorts of things. You would go talk to your pastor, your priest, your rabbi who would believe you at face value and try to help you navigate what it is that you're really dealing with. Whereas now, it's just like you walk into a counselor, like a family life counselor or something like that, and they're just like, oh, well, clearly you're suffering from some delusions and we need to put you on medicine. You're schizophrenic or something like that.
Dr. Ross:
[1:51:19] Yeah, well, I kind of sympathize with that. I mean, my son's a clinical neuropsychologist. Sure. And his comment is, always look for the physical problem first. But if it's not physical or chemical, then you look for something spiritual that's causing it. So rule out the easy stuff first. But you were mentioning earlier how one of Satan's tactics is to convince you that he doesn't exist. And so what I find predominant here in the United States is this idea, nah, there's nothing supernatural going on. Where when I was in the Soviet Union, everybody believed in the supernatural.
Tyler:
[1:51:57] Still true to this day. Eastern Europe, very, very adept in the occult magic, all that stuff. Astrology, tarot, it's all very much part of the culture.
Dr. Ross:
[1:52:08] Well, I think that's part of Satan's strategy. either gets you convinced that these demons are everywhere and messing up everything and in control of everything, or he gets you believing that there's nothing supernatural going on at all. Sure. So that's why I think it's important to have a balanced view on this.
Tyler:
[1:52:26] What do you think of just demonology as a field of study?
Dr. Ross:
[1:52:32] Well, the all-called demonology UFOs are all part of the same package.
Tyler:
[1:52:39] Right.
Dr. Ross:
[1:52:39] I mean, that's one thing I've noticed is that when I look at the agnostics and atheists that have studied UFOs, they say, we're not sure what this is all about. But one thing we do know, there's a one-to-one correspondence between these close encounters with UFOs and what happens in demonology. And they just stop there. They don't try to define terms. But they do notice this one-to-one correspondence.
Tyler:
[1:53:05] It's very interesting to see different fields of study overlap and you know when two people from completely different disciplines interact and they're like oh my goodness we're we're both looking at the same thing calling it something else right um it and that happens across you know every discipline all the way around it's like if you're a brick mason who'd never spoken to a carpenter you know what what are you doing we should get together we should have we should have lunch talk about business opportunities and everything um but i'm seeing a lot of folks when they're talking about interacting with this phenomenon that they genuinely feel that it's like a good thing that they're interacting with like if if it was something like i don't know the the sighting of mary at fatima and then you're constantly put up to the scrutiny of like okay it could be as extreme as if you're wrong about what it is that you think that you're dealing with that you're you know opening the world up to demons and at the same time it could be a new miraculous revelation that someone's having um so just in your understanding what where did miracles sort of stop being able to account for things
Dr. Ross:
[1:54:19] Well, we're told in John's letter in the New Testament, we're to test the spirits. Not all spirits are good, and we need to put them to the test. And how do you test them? How well does your experience that looks supernatural comport with what you know to be true about the universe and about what the Bible is telling us? Put it to a rigorous test. And if you need help, get other people to help you. Put it to the test. And so, for example, you were mentioning Joseph Smith and the tablets. I think an angel really did visit him, but I don't think it was a righteous angel. I think it was the same angel that visited Muhammad. And what I find interesting is how remarkably similar Islam is to Mormonism. Their doctrines are very similar to one another, but I think it's because they came from the same source.
Dr. Ross:
[1:55:14] But that's an example of where, hey, the problem with Muhammad and Joseph Smith, they didn't appropriately test the spirits that were visiting him to see who they were really dealing with.
Tyler:
[1:55:25] Sure. And, I mean, what about L. Ron Hubbard, even?
Dr. Ross:
[1:55:30] Yes. Well, same thing. I mean, and a way to test this is, okay, they come up with this teaching as a result of this experience. Does that comport with reality? And so the L. Ron Hubbard view of the universe, as an astronomer I can tell you, none of that is true. Just like when Mormons talk about there's a master planet at the center of our galaxy where the equivalent of humans first began. It's like, hey, there's a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. I mean, if you think that's the ultimate heaven, then you need to be concerned just how extremely hot it is at that location. So you were mentioning, that's in Abraham 3. So I once got a letter from Salt Lake City saying, hey, what you wrote about our master plan at Kolob, we're not taking that literally. I said, well, I got the text here of Abraham 3 and the face space that tells me to take it literally. Have you changed your position? And they said, no, we've not changed our position. So yeah. But that's another example of testing the spirits. Sure.
Tyler:
[1:56:42] Yeah, it's fascinating. You hear the stories of King Solomon, and he's a master of this stuff. He could draw down the angels and the demons and put them in a brass vessel or whatever. And then in the end, even he couldn't control it, and it took over his life. And these things were then again released and scattered about the earth. And now we have tales of genies and all kinds of things.
Tyler:
[1:57:07] But yeah it calls into question like you're not supposed to know about this stuff but as you said earlier when you interface with it deal with it appropriately but then don't let that become your whole life or anything but throughout history we do have these powerful people who are usually coming from a standpoint of like i'm on god's side like the emmanuel swedenbergs and agrippas and van helsing from a fictional standpoint type people of the earth who are these people who know everything there is to know about occult knowledge and use that to identify to put things to the test to make sure that we're dealing with the right stuff at the right time and when it does get ugly that it can be dealt with the catholic church you know say what we want about them has a long-standing history of dealing with this problem in particular whereas i think a lot of our protestant american churches kind of pretend like it doesn't exist like i know people who were church going type folks they love god totally 100 in on jesus and then if they even open their mind up to the idea of a ufo or a paranormal experience or whatever they're immediately like kind of cast out they're like we don't want that here um i don't think it's wrong to have questions about it i think It's just more of like, to what degree do you...
Tyler:
[1:58:28] Let it consume your life.
Dr. Ross:
[1:58:31] I look at the church as a spiritual hospital. So you've got people with spiritual issues that are coming in. You need to help them. Don't cast them away. Help them. And so, yeah, I've had that happen in the church where I serve, where demon-possessed people show up, but they're wanting deliverance. And so we need to help them.
Tyler:
[1:58:53] Usually, what are those people like? What are the things that are going on with them?
Dr. Ross:
[1:58:58] Well typically when they approach us there's a there's a terror in their life i can tell they're really frightened and what i've been told by people where the demon has been cast out is they told me hey if you let me know if you let anybody know that i'm here i'm gonna kill you and so that explains why they're you know so afraid to really reveal what's going on in their life. But I've also made it a point, make sure you get permission. Because I remember one young man, we cast the demon out, but it's like he didn't want the demon to leave. And the demon came back, and then he wound up with more than one demon. So, and that's what I noticed in the New Testament, is that Jesus always made sure the person wanted to be delivered.
Tyler:
[1:59:48] What is the process of casting out a demon?
Dr. Ross:
[1:59:54] Well, we would always get together a group of people that would come to the individual, basically surround them. But we would also fast because some of these demons are more powerful than other demons. And Jesus told us some only come out through prayer and fasting. But we just made that routine. But now we've learned a lesson Make sure that they want deliverance Before you do anything.
Tyler:
[2:00:23] Have you ever had, during this process, someone in the group of people who were trying to do the healing get compromised?
Dr. Ross:
[2:00:32] I haven't seen that, but I mean, we're talking a few incidences. Sure. I mean, the church where I serve is near Pasadena. There was decades ago where there was a street in Pasadena that was filled with witchcraft covens. And, you know, one of the women escaped from the coven came to our church. And so we wound up visiting the coven and the people living there did have supernatural powers so we could tell that they were controlled by demons. But then we got a group of people in the church saying, look, we've been there once, we know what we're dealing with, let's just get together and pray and fast that God will take care of this problem. And it was such that even the people reading the meters wouldn't go down that street it was that scary so but after about three months of praying and fasting all those commons were gone they all left what's.
Tyler:
[2:01:34] Physically going on with us when we pray and fast
Dr. Ross:
[2:01:39] Well, the way I've organized meetings of prayer and fasting in our church, I make the point, the reason we're going to fast is in order to focus all of our attention on the prayer that we're focusing on. We're not going to be diverted by what we're eating. And you can fast from different things. But the whole point of fasting is to set yourself free to really focus on the problem you're dealing with. And I actually ask God, to what degree do you want me involved?
Dr. Ross:
[2:02:09] I remember one case, I'm not sure there were any demons involved, but there was a pornographic bookstore that came into a neighborhood near a church. And then we noticed that ladies of the night were showing up there. So I got a group of people over to my apartment. This is when I was single. And we just said, let's just pray and fast. We had a 24-hour fast that God would take care of this place.
Dr. Ross:
[2:02:38] But during the fasting time, we said, you know, maybe God wants us to be more involved. So during those 24 hours, we said, okay, if nothing happens, the next time we have a day of prayer and fasting, we're going to pray on the street. Not in my apartment. We're actually going to go to the street where this bookstore is, and we're going to pray on the street, but we're not going to talk to people. And I said, if that doesn't work, we'll have another day of prayer and fasting, where we're going to start talking to the customers that go into that store and to the ladies that are sitting around there.
Dr. Ross:
[2:03:14] Well, I think God was just testing us to see how committed we are to take care of this problem because it only took one day of prayer and fasting for the whole thing to be resolved.
Dr. Ross:
[2:03:25] But what we notice is he wanted to see how committed we were to take steps 2, 3, and 4 if necessary.
Tyler:
[2:03:34] It's very uh it's very fascinating just the just research has been done on the power of prayer and how it seems that for good or bad if you get a bunch of people together with directing their intentions at something it has an effect um this
Dr. Ross:
[2:03:55] Even shows up in the scientific literature where they've done double-blind studies. And what they've noticed is if you just have random people from different religions praying, you don't see a statistical effect.
Tyler:
[2:04:08] Really?
Dr. Ross:
[2:04:08] If you get people together who are Christians, who believe in the power of prayer, and they're praying for people in the hospital that they've never met, and they don't know their condition, and the people in the hospital don't know they're being prayed for, you do see a statistical difference. The people prayed for recover faster they're instilled with more hope than people who are not prayed for.
Tyler:
[2:04:35] Have you seen any cases of folks who uh claim to be in contact with some non-human intelligence and the types of things that are you know that it tells them a lot of a lot of people who are psychics mediums and whatnot don't themselves claim i am magical they think that they're being fed information by some greater intelligence yes
Dr. Ross:
[2:05:00] No that's quite common yeah but recognize I say, you know, I got help. And so, you know, you get fortune tellers who are basically calling upon this demonic creature to give them the information that their client needs. So, and that's the danger of going to a fortune teller. Not all of them have contact with a fallen angel, but the ones that do, that's where you're going to get into trouble.
Tyler:
[2:05:26] Sure. do you think that do you think that um that mode of communication like inside of your brain through consciousness um does that have any effect on your understanding of how physics work at all like how is it that we're able to do that well even even through mass prayer you know what i'm saying like the the ability for us to put intention into the universe through our consciousness. What does that mean for us?
Dr. Ross:
[2:05:59] Well, what we see in Genesis chapter 1, God uses the word create three times. First for the physical universe, then for the animals he creates that are soulish, namely endowed with emotions, mind, and will, and last of all for us human beings. Making the point, we humans are not just physical entities. We're spiritual entities. And when our physical body dies, we continue to exist. Our spirit will leave our body and so you got the evidence in your death experiences.
Dr. Ross:
[2:06:35] It tells us in the Bible that eternity is written on the heart of every human being we all have this sense that our consciousness is going to proceed past this brief life we have here on earth and so not all the answers are going to be physics and the space-time theorems tell us there is a realm beyond the physical universe And so this is something I think severely challenges materialism. I mean, I've written books on the fact that you can't explain the origin of life from a materialistic perspective, or the origin of human beings, or even the fossil record. There has to be something more going on. And I've noticed too in reading the research papers by paleontologists who are strict materialists, they admit that they can't make their materialistic models work. So and so they're kind of stuck they also make the point the more we learn about the fossil record the more impossible it is to explain it from a materialistic perspective sure and.
Tyler:
[2:07:38] The devil put dinosaur here and all that
Dr. Ross:
[2:07:40] Yeah um no.
Tyler:
[2:07:43] It's it's it's The more I look into, I'm a video game designer by trade, right? So the more I think about how we can manipulate the world in which even our most rudimentary video game characters live in.
Tyler:
[2:08:01] I could open up a game that I'm working on right now, write a few lines of code, and then dramatically change the color of the sky, or the history of that world, or what this person is even going to do or think or say. Before they do something. I could change the laws of physics so that gravity is upside down if I want to. And the thing is that not assuming consciousness of any of these things in a game, but just for the sake of doing so, the world around them can completely change and they will not notice and not question it and it will just be their new reality. And to what degree in the world that we live in could something feasibly do that, right? We have people talk about the Mandela effect or whatever, but if something that exists outside of just three dimensions and a linear experience of time, if they wanted to change something for us, we would never know that they changed something. If they went back and changed history or put something there, a dinosaur bone or evidence of a flood that never happened, whatever it happens to be, we are kind of powerless to know the difference.
Tyler:
[2:09:15] Um so it calls into question how much of what we are seeing and measuring can we really say is finite you know is is static in the way that we observe it like the speed is the speed of light even actually constant
Dr. Ross:
[2:09:30] Well i'm a physicist and it's like we can test these things you mentioned speed of light every time we look at the spectrum of a star or galaxy we're measuring the velocity of light right as the same everywhere in the entire universe the velocity of light has never changed and for obvious reasons too you change the velocity of light you've got a problem with e equals mc squared sure so make the velocity of light a little bit faster and you're going to make the heat coming out of the sun the square uh greater and so if the velocity of light ever changed, there'd be no life in the universe. So just the fact that you and I are talking to one another is proof that the velocity of light has not changed. But we actually have hard measurements that prove the velocity of light has not changed.
Tyler:
[2:10:24] But if I were designing the video game that you live in, I could just change that one day, and then you would just have to accept that that's what it is now, and you would never know that it was anything different before.
Dr. Ross:
[2:10:38] Well, that's your fantasy literature, and that's what video games are all about, right? Fantasy. Sure. But then there are people who actually seriously speculate maybe the universe in which we live is a sophisticated hologram. Sure. Kind of like that movie series with the red pill and the, what is it? The Matrix. The Matrix, right. However, you know, I enjoyed watching that, but I had to suspend my physics to watch it. Sure. We got measurements to prove this is utterly impossible. But I'm just going to suspend all that and enjoy the movie, kind of like we do with a video game. But that's something about us humans. we can actually go from our physical reality into a fantasy world uh you know we tell stories to our children about fairies etc so and what's i find interesting even little children know that the story i'm telling them is a fantasy even though i don't explicitly tell them that they can quickly figure out okay this is not reality but this is an interesting story.
Tyler:
[2:11:49] But the thing that makes the story about a fairy interesting is that when someone's describing a fairy, they're just describing a thousand-year-old version of a UFO encounter in most cases. It's the same phenomenon from what we can tell.
Dr. Ross:
[2:12:03] Yeah, you can put it in that context.
Tyler:
[2:12:06] It just seems to be so ubiquitous to claim otherwise. Even going into Ezekiel's encounters in the Old Testament with angels and his description of that seems to be a very similar sort of thing. And whether or not it was God who was showing them that or an angel who was showing them that, they were seeing something. They were having some kind of thing that was so important to them that they wrote it down. And it's the same thing with fairy stories or legends or myths. I think that we have a point to this stuff. we talked earlier about the roots of astronomy being in astrology, just, just simply people being fascinated enough to think about that. And then the important stuff getting passed down over time.
Dr. Ross:
[2:12:49] Well, for example, Thutmose the third wrote about a UFO encounter he had. Sure. That was 3000 years ago.
Tyler:
[2:12:56] Nuremberg.
Dr. Ross:
[2:12:57] Yeah.
Tyler:
[2:12:58] Yeah. All kinds of stuff like that.
Dr. Ross:
[2:13:00] Yeah. So it's always been with us.
Tyler:
[2:13:04] What do you think people should be doing to protect themselves and to keep their mind from going too crazy as they think about this kind of stuff?
Dr. Ross:
[2:13:13] Well, you need to focus on what is true. I mean, what I love about Christianity, it's the two-books doctrine, how God reveals himself through two faithful books, the book of nature and the book of scripture. And therefore, we can use one to corroborate the other. This is the whole principle of testing. So how do I know that the Bible is true? I can test about what I know to be true in my study of nature, my study of science. How do I know I'm properly interpreting?
Dr. Ross:
[2:13:47] I can use the book of Scripture as a check against that. And also the Bible makes it clear the way I live is going to affect the way I think. So if I'm living an immoral life, it's going to darken my mind, and I'm not going to be able to see reality as clearly as otherwise. But if I begin to go to God and say, look, I'm a moral failure. I need your help to live the life that you want me to live. Please send the Holy Spirit into me. Forgive me of all my sins. Suddenly your thinking clarifies. That's something I noticed when I was 19 years of age and gave my life to Christ. I noticed my ability to think and perform in my studies in physics dramatically improved from that point onward. Because now I was committed to allow God to work within me to help me live a progressively more and more moral life. And that began to change the way I think. And it really helped me to discern what's true and what's not true.
Tyler:
[2:14:53] That's very interesting. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. Just simply acknowledging that you're not in control is the first step to anything. I mean, even with Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics or whatever it is, right uh pornographic materials addiction whatever they're calling that these days you know sex addiction all of it it just really comes down to like you gotta you gotta like change your whole paradigm your whole mindset the idea that you're worshiping something that you're putting on a pedestal higher than whatever your interpretation of god would be so like as soon as you start paying attention to not the right thing it's like if you're climbing mount everest and instead of Focusing on getting to the top, you're walking off every trail along the way, investigating every little thing on the way up there, and you get confused and you get lost. You never make it to the top.
Dr. Ross:
[2:15:48] Right.
Tyler:
[2:15:49] Yeah. Well, thank you so much for answering all my questions.
Dr. Ross:
[2:15:53] It was really nice. You're very welcome. Yeah. Yeah. You're a good interviewer, so thank you.
Tyler:
[2:15:57] I appreciate it. Where can people find you and get your books?
Dr. Ross:
[2:16:01] Well, our website is reasons.org. I've written 23 books on science and faith. So they can find them on Amazon or wherever and I have social media people are welcome to ask me questions on Facebook and Twitter and a lot of my debates are on YouTube so you can check that out sure.
Tyler:
[2:16:20] I'll make sure I get as much as I can at least into the article that will go out with this episode and
Dr. Ross:
[2:16:26] Well thank you yeah.
Tyler:
[2:16:27] Maybe after the Noah book comes out we can do this again
Dr. Ross:
[2:16:29] That'd be great okay thank you sir you're welcome.
Tyler:
[2:16:36] Thank you very much to Dr. Ross for coming on the show. Yeah, he's always posted crazy stuff on X. Videos of planets that they've discovered or whatever. Make sure that you tell all your friends how much you like this show. It's the best way to support. There's other ways to do so. All of that you can find over at inthecute.com. As well as show notes and transcripts of all the episodes that we've made recently. Um, you know, sign up to get those sent directly to your mailbox when they come out if you're interested. Uh, what else? Nope, not a whole lot else. I love you. God love you. Stay in the keep.
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[2:17:26] Music