Based on the transcript provided, here is the cleaned-up version of the conversation with timestamps removed and the names **Shaffer** and **Lewinski** corrected throughout. --- ### **Starcast Podcast Transcript** **Date:** February 22, 2026 **Hosts:** Jay Shaffer and Mike Lewinski **Jay Shaffer:** Welcome back to the Starcast for the week of February 22nd, 2026. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, and with me is my co-host, Mike Lewinski. Howdy, Mike. **Mike Lewinski:** Good morning, Jay. How are you? **Jay Shaffer:** Doing good! So, uh, what's our space weather looking like over the next couple days? **Mike Lewinski:** Well, Jay, we have our first spotless day in four years. Right now there are no sunspots facing the earth. That doesn't mean there are no sunspots. There are just no sunspots visible from Earth. Um, so accordingly, we have a very, very low chance of flares. NOAA forecast is 5% chance of an M-class flare today, a 10% chance of an M-class flare tomorrow, and a 1% chance of an X-class flare. Uh, you know, it got me thinking probably NOAA hedging their bets will never drop below a 1% chance. I don't think they want to get caught saying there is a 0% chance, and then suddenly we get nailed. And with that, however, you know, no sunspots, but there is a very large coronal hole that is sending solar wind directly toward the Earth. So we do have a good chance of a geomagnetic activity. We actually reached a maximum Kp of 5.33 over the last 24 hours, which qualifies as a storm. The forecast today is 30% chance in mid-latitudes of something, and 35% chance tomorrow, and diminishing from, you know, for more severe conditions. If you're at high latitudes, however, you have a 40% chance of severe conditions today, uh, jumping up to 65% chance tomorrow. So no sunspots and a very large coronal hole. And, you know, I would just like to take a second to kind of distinguish these 2 phenomenon. Sunspots are something that humans have known about for a long time. In fact, I learned today that the first record of sunspots was mentioned in the I Ching in China, and that was completed before 800 BC. And then they started to make deliberate observations by 364 BC, and by 28 BC, Chinese astronomers were regularly recording sunspots in the official imperial records. By contrast—and sunspots are, you know, extremely geomagnetically active pairs of holes with opposite polarities, and they're visible. And that's why we've been observing them for some, you know, 2,800 years now. Coronal holes, by contrast, are only visible in X-ray images. And so we did not start to document coronal holes until 1973 with Skylab taking X-ray images. And with coronal holes, rather than an intense geomagnetic condition, you have a much cooler area of plasma that typically is much larger and does not… is not associated with a big, um, geomagnetic disturbance, or it's not geomagnetic, because it's on the sun, solar magnetic. So it's not actually a physical hole. It's just a cool area with open magnetic field lines that guide plasma directly into space. So with that, what's up in the night sky this week, Jay? **Jay Shaffer:** Okay, yeah, I just wanted to say, yeah, that yeah, my time last from last night I I did get a little smudge of Northern lights, you know, fairly early. Well, I just it was just after moonset, so. So I did get just a little smudge there, and so it was kind of nice to see. Anyway, so tomorrow, the waxing crescent moon will slowly pass by the Pleiades star cluster. Uh, so that's the evening of February 23rd, and so get out your binoculars and look toward the Pleiades, or near the moon, or to the moon, and you should be able to see them both in the same field of view. And then, of course, on Tuesday, the 24th, it will be the first quarter moon, and that means that it will set about midnight. So, Mike, what's the latest from the Final Frontier? It feels like space news in Washington are overlapping a little bit more than usual this week. **Mike Lewinski:** You're not kidding, Jay. It actually started with former President Barack Obama on the No Lie podcast with Brian Tyler Cohen during a lightning round, Brian asked him point blank if aliens are real. Obama joked, "They're real, but I haven't seen them." And he even threw in a crack about how they aren't being stashed in some basement at Area 51. Of course, the internet just lost its mind, so he had to jump on Instagram on February 15th to clear the air. He explained he was just leaning into the spirit of the speed round and talking about the statistical likelihood of life out there in such a massive universe. He was very clear, though. During his actual time in the Oval Office, he never saw a shred of evidence of contact. **Jay Shaffer:** Well, I bet that didn't sit well with everybody in DC. **Mike Lewinski:** Definitely not. A few days later, President Trump fired back from Air Force One. He called Obama's comments, quote, "a big mistake," and suggested that he might have accidentally leaked classified info. Trump being Trump joked that he might have to declassify it himself just to get Obama out of trouble. Then he took to Truth Social and actually ordered the DOD to start identifying and releasing all government files on UAPs and extraterrestrials. He basically said that the public interest is just too high to keep it under wraps anymore. So this actually brings us to our main topic today. We're looking at how US presidents have handled the alien question, going all the way back to the Kennedy era. Jay, what does the history book tell us about JFK and UFOs? **Jay Shaffer:** Well, Mike, it's fascinating because for Kennedy, it wasn't necessarily about sci-fi. It was about survival. He was really worried about nuclear war, and just 10 days before he was assassinated in 1963, he sent a memo to the CIA asking for a review of all quote-unquote, high-threat UFO cases. He wasn't looking for Martians, he was terrified that the Soviets might see a UFO, mistake it for his secret U.S. weapon, and then accidentally start a nuclear war. He wanted to cooperate with the USSR just so everybody could tell the difference between a known and an unknown. And during that same time the Air Force was running Project Blue Book, and they've investigated over 12,000 sightings between 1952 and 1969, and most were dismissed as "swamp gas" or weather balloons or other explainable phenomena, but 701 cases remained officially unidentified when they shut it down. **Mike Lewinski:** You know, they had a TV series about Project Blue Book. I remember watching that as a kid. Very ardently. But this didn't stop with the Cold War, right? **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah. And yeah, incidentally, just my dad actually was contributed to Project Blue Book. He was a captain in the Air Force in the 1960s. So that was just an interesting anecdote. But no, it didn't stop with the Cold War. Not at all. Jimmy Carter actually reported seeing a UFO himself in Georgia back in 1969. He campaigned on releasing all the files, but backed off once he was in office, citing national security. And then you had Reagan, who famously told the UN that a global alien threat would probably be the one thing that could finally bring all the nations to set aside their differences and unite. So even… Bill Clinton was proactive. He actually tasked his Associate Attorney General with finding out who killed JFK and if there were aliens in Area 51, just addressing these conspiracy theories. He later said that he didn't find any aliens, but given how big the universe is, he wouldn't be surprised if we were eventually visited. And it's also interesting to note that during the Clinton era was when they made the big announcement about life on Mars, which is subsequently been kind of swept under the carpet or become, you know, less scientifically confirmed. But so, yeah, so that was what happened with Clinton. **Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, it seems like the tone is shifting now. **Jay Shaffer:** Totally. Obama has moved from jokes to admitting on the Late Show that there was a record of objects in the sky we simply cannot explain. And Biden even signed legislation to collect UAP records across the government. We've moved from "is it real" to "what is it?" and "is it a flight safety risk?" So let's take… that takes us to the math… the math and the scientific consensus and what we call the silence. Um, you and I, Mike, you and I often talk about the Drake equation and the Fermi Paradox. How do those scientific frameworks actually mesh with what these presidents are saying? **Mike Lewinski:** You know, it really is a perfect mirror. Jay, the Drake equation is basically a big math problem to estimate how many civilizations are out there. The first parts of the equation, like how many stars have planets, are things we've almost solved. We know now that nearly every star has planets, and about 1 in 5 has a planet where life could exist. The scary part of the math is the L factor, the longevity of a civilization. And modern presidents seem focused on this. When they look at UAPs, they're wondering if another intelligence survived long enough to master technology that we can't even imagine. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, but that leads us to the Fermi paradox, right? And if the math says that they're out there, where is everyone? **Mike Lewinski:** Exactly. You know, in Kennedy's era, we started talking about the Great Filter and the idea that civilizations usually destroy themselves or die out before they reach the stars. Kennedy wanted to make sure that we didn't become our own filter. And nowadays with Obama and Trump acknowledging these unknown objects, the government is hinting that the silence of the universe might not be as absolute as we thought. Maybe they are here and we're just now admitting we can see them. **Jay Shaffer:** I'll have to play devil's advocate for a second, and again, leaning towards science. I saw a post from Neil deGrasse Tyson, who seems to be the primary spokesperson for science these days. Recently, that really grounds this. He points out that we have billions of high-def GPS-enabled cameras in our pockets right now in the form of phones and so every rare weather event or random accident seems to get caught on video instantly. Yet with all these billions of sensors and, you know, millions of uploads every day, we still don't have one crystal clear, indisputable photo of an alien craft. For Tyson, the blurry smudge is the ultimate proof that we have *not* been visited. If these things are buzzing around as often as the reports say, someone should have some really nice high definition 4K video of it by now. **Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, it's a fair point, and we're in this weird tension between the high level government admissions and the lack of any civilian hard evidence. And, you know, I will say that part of my ongoing project of making full night time lapses almost every single night when the weather permits is to see if I can document this. You know, the San Luis Valley is reputed to be a UFO hotspot, and here, you know, for the better part of a decade, I've been doing full night time lapses, often all sky versions. And are there lights that… you know, could be satellites or it could be something other than a satellite? Sure. But, you know, a tiny point of light moving across the sky is not the kind of proof that anybody is really looking for. And when people make claims of encounters, of course, it's always the cigar shaped or the saucer shaped or the triangle shaped object hovering above me. You know, and I don't see anything like that. And the longer I go with night after night after year after year of nothing extraordinary—nothing that I can't explain—I become less and less of a mind that anybody is, you know, here, checking us out. And if they are here checking us out, they're doing an excellent job of hiding themselves. And I think maybe that's the last point that I'd just like to raise in this discussion is, you know, when we talk about the Fermi paradox and why aren't we seeing signals is, you know, I think the Three-Body Problem has introduced us to the Dark Forest hypothesis that basically as civilizations become sophisticated enough to start sending transmissions, they realize that they may live in a hostile universe and that attracting attention of other civilizations could, in fact, provoke their doom. And so we may be in a position of lots of advanced civilizations who have chosen radio silence because it seems like the only way to preserve themselves. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, and um, you know, and you and I were both kind of the resident skeptics in the San Luis Valley and the Taos area. And, you know, there's a Facebook group, the Taos Sky Watchers, and regularly there's a post about "what the heck is this that I captured on my phone," and a blurry smudge, of course, with no time or direction of where their sighting was. And I spend a lot of time with both my time lapsers going through anything that might not be explained that I see, and also going back through all my cameras, all sky cameras, to kind of discount or try to explain any of these encounters that some of these people post online. And then, uh, to your point about the Dark Forest… it's always been in my mind that if I were an alien civilization, or if I'm exploring space, number one, because of the speed limit of the universe as we know it so far, the only way that you could really explore the universe—unless you were an immortal—is to have a long timeline, and that would mean that you would send out a probe, a robot. And so, time doesn't really matter to a robot. And so if I were to want to go to Alpha Centauri and try to find a planet with life on it, I wouldn't try to go there as a human being. I would send a robot. And so, uh, that brings me to my thought that, you know, if there were alien craft, they would be robotic, and they wouldn't have little green men in them. And then secondly, it always seems to me that if I were an alien culture and like you said, the dark woods and wanted to investigate something, I wouldn't be driving around in the night sky with my lights on bright. And so, you know, there could be an argument that, well, maybe they are smart enough that they look like aircraft, you know? But, uh, both you and I are on the same page. You know, when we put out our time lapses and our cameras at night, we're partially keeping our eye out. And so we may be that person that gets the high resolution 4K video. **Mike Lewinski:** True enough. You know, and when you talk about the sky watchers, I'm reminded of that quote that we don't see things as they are. We see things as we are. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, and, you know, it's a matter of perception. So I want to thank all of our listeners for checking out this podcast. Please be sure to comment, like and subscribe. Let us know that you're out there. And we'd like to hear more about what you'd like to hear about. So, uh, you can also check out our websites, wildernessvagabonds.com for Mike, and Skylapser.com for me. And you can also check out Mike's time lapses and videos on the Mike Lewinski YouTube channel, and mine on the Skylapser YouTube channel. Our intro music is Fanfare for Space by Kevin MacLeod from the YouTube Audio Library. From the Deep Sage 9 Observatory, this is Jay Shaffer, and… Mike Lewinski wishing you all clear skies.