Over the last seven episodes, we’ve established that the Pentagon has admitted that UFOs are real, that they are operating with impunity in our airspace, and that we don’t know what they are. We’ve talked through some of the most common explanations for what the UFO phenomenon might be, considering everything from secret human technology to future humans and from extraterrestrials to ultraterrestrials.

We’ve also met some — though certainly not all of the main players in the current disclosure movement. Although we’ve covered a lot of ground, when it comes to understanding the full scope of the UFO phenomenon and its implications for humankind, we’ve barely scratched the surface.

In this episode, we’ll begin to tackle some of the most fundamental questions raised by the UFO phenomenon — starting with the question of whether the UFO phenomenon may have had an influence on our ancestors in the distant past. For many, this line of questioning brings to mind Ancient Aliens, and the ancient astronaut theory, but there are other equally startling and profound possibilities that are suggested by the evidence as well — including the idea that the story of human civilization is far longer and far more dazzling that we ever imagined.

But before we can begin to truly tackle these questions, we need to spend some time talking about the epistemology of archeology — what do we know, what can we know, and how sure are we that the established narrative of human history is correct?

We’ll do a quick intro to epistemology, discuss some of the verification challenges that exist within archeology, explore the limits of our current dating techniques and the unique challenges that we encounter in attempting to date megalithic structures.

We’ll also look at the academia and the peer review system to identify the ways that the most innovative and potentially impactful ideas can be systematically rejected and marginalized.

And finally, we’ll talk about the difference between science and pseudoscience, and establish a simple framework that we can use to tell the difference between the two.