Back in October, I made a one-day trip down to NYC to film some talking-head segments for a TV show,NASA’s Unexplained Files on the Science Channel. This was actually a follow-on to an earlier recording with the same production company, though that show hasn’t aired yet that I’m aware of. The previous one was very short notice– they had a crew scheduled to film in Albany, but the person they were supposed to interview backed out, and I think they basically Googled for public scientists near Albany. This trip was planned in advance, though it took a huge amount of wrangling to get the schedule.
The first episode with any of my content in it aired last night– episode 2 of season 6, if you’re coming to this much later, “Aliens vs. Stalin at Area 51.” It aired after I went to bed, but I watched it on the DVR this morning, and indeed, I’m in it, as you can see from this cell-phone snapshot of the TV in Chateau Steelypips:
In this particular episode, I’m mostly talking about Mars, and the possible terraforming thereof. This is not because I duped them into thinking I was some kind of Mars expert– they asked about a whole bunch of topics, and that happened to be one. They’ve got me saying that there’s evidence Mars used to be more hospitable, downplaying the idea of melting the polar ice caps with nuclear weapons, and saying something ominous about bringing dormant microbes back to life. When we shot, I think there was a bunch more about the idea of using orbiting mirrors to focus sunlight on the polar caps to melt them, but alas, it didn’t make the show.
I’m identified as “Physicist,” which is wonderfully vague, but they wouldn’t do an institutional affiliation. There’s also some gloriously dramatic lighting, with the background all blurred so you can’t see where I am.
The actual recording was in a townhouse rented from AirBnB in the un-gentrified wilds of Brooklyn. It was unseasonably warm that day– it got up into the 80’s– and the house only had a noisy window-unit air conditioner, which of course was much too loud to be left on while recording. As a nice bonus, there was either a police station or a hospital a few blocks away, so we were regularly interrupted by sirens, and needed to keep all the windows closed. So it was brutally unpleasant by the end of the recording; I’m a little surprised I don’t look sweatier than I do in the clips they aired.
Sometime after this, I ran into Brian Malow, the Science Comedian, who had also recorded clips for the earlier show (not this one, that I know of), and he said something that made me a little nervous that the show would actually turn out to push a weirder point of view than I’d really be comfortable with. Having watched it, though, I’m reasonably happy with it– they do some overly dramatic framing of some of the stories, and suggest some ideas that are frankly kind of wacky, but by the end of each segment, they pretty clearly reject the wacky bits.
The episode title, for example, relates to a claim that the infamous Roswell crash was actually a Soviet psychological warfare operation, using a Nazi flying wing and children mutilated to look like aliens. This even features one of the guys who regularly appears on the “Ancient Aliens” show, which really made me nervous. By the end of that bit, though, they reveal that it was actually the plot of a James Blish story, which was probably relayed to the reporter as a prank. It maybe could’ve been rejected a little more emphatically, but they definitely discarded it, which is a clear improvement over, well, “Ancient Aliens”…
So, anyway: I’m basically happy with how this came out. There’s a pretty good lineup of respectable scientists and writers offering commentary, as well, and it’s nice to be shown in that company. The Mars stuff is a small part of what I talked about when we were recording, so I’m pretty sure there’ll be more of me on TV, but I don’t know exactly when that will be, or what I’ll be talking about.