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[...] ... noted astrophysicist did assure Colbert that he, too, hopes to find proof of alien life someday, and pointed to the recently revealed

By Dennis Perkins www.avclub.com 1-6-18

Pentagon UFO study (the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program) as a more likely place to look for some of that pesky empirical proof that science nerds like Tyson continue to insist upon. And, as ever, Tyson brought along a few actual facts whose more science-based mysteries nonetheless left Colbert with the sense of wonder he keeps inviting Tyson to rekindle....
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“If you really analyze it,” Tyson said, “relative to other things that are legal, there’s no reason for it to ever have been made illegal in the system of laws.”

“That is extremely rational, which I expect from you, and you're absolutely right,” replied host Chuck Nice.

“Alcohol is legal,” Tyson added, “and it can mess you up way more than smoking a few J's.”

“The last time I was like, in a cloud of it? That's how people spoke,” Tyson said.

“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous,” Sagan wrote in an anonymous essay for the 1971 book “Marihuana Reconsidered,” “an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”

Tyson has been more circumspect on the merits of drug use, at least publicly. “I don't count myself among active recreational drug users,” Tyson said in a 2015 Reddit AMA. “For me, the least altered state of awareness I can achieve is the one I seek, because that one is most likely to be closest to reality.”

Tyson's remarks were also similar to ones by President Barack Obama in 2014. “I don’t think [marijuana] is more dangerous than alcohol,” he told the New Yorker. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life.”

‘The more I look at the universe, the more I’m convinced there’s no God’

Neil deGrasse Tyson Looks for Answers

Many scientists are convinced that UFOs exist and we should expend time and billions to find them. What if they’re wrong?

     Neil deGrasse Tyson is America’s most famous astrophysicist and host of the modern remake of the science show “Cosmos.” So it is hardly surprising that he has something to say on the subject of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and little green men.

Last year, Tyson made headlines by joking, I think, to Business Insider, “People ask, ‘If life is teeming across the galaxy, where are they? How come they’re not just walkin’ into the White House or visiting us in Times Square?’ I have some unorthodox thoughts on that matter.” . . .

. . . “A more serious concern I have is, by the way, our hubris forces us to think of ourselves as intelligent. We have a certain intelligence gap between us and other creatures on Earth. You don’t walk by the worm on the street and say, ‘Gee, I wonder what he’s thinking. I’ll somehow have deep insights.’ No, you step on the worm! This is what we do as humans.

“So I wonder if, in fact, we have been observed by aliens and upon close examination of human conduct and human behavior they have concluded that there is no sign of intelligent life on Earth.” . . .
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